Linked with The RealNews.com, and its newest McClellan’s testimony matter.
Aijaz Ahmad is a well-known Marxist literary theorist and political commentator based in India. Born in the state of Uttar Pradesh, India just before it gained independence from British rule, Aijaz Ahmad along with his parents migrated to Pakistan following partition. After his education he worked in various universities in US and Canada. At present Aijaz Ahmed is Professorial Fellow at the Centre of Contemporary Studies, Nehru Memorial Museum and Library, New Delhi and is visiting Professor of Political Science at York University, Toronto. He also works as an editorial consultant with the Indian newsmagazine Frontline and as a senior news analist for The Real News Network, … (or theREALnews network) … (full text).
He says: … “The first option, I think, the time is gone for, actually, negotiations with the Taliban. The time to negotiate with the Taliban was when they were weak, that is to say, soon after the invasion, when they were in disarray. Today they control virtually as much territory as the Karzai government does. Secondly, I think the resistance from the Karzai government and many other of those tribal forces will be far too great for a real settlement with the Taliban, because the structure of power in Afghanistan has changed completely. Now drug lords are inside the government, outside the government, and so on, and a stable government in Afghanistan of that kind is actually not in their favor. I think that time is gone. So far as the other option, the pincer movement, is concerned, that is what actually a part of the Pakistani establishment is willing to do” … (full interview text).
Find this 4 Videos Reactions to Imperialism and Neoliberalism, November 16, 2007, Toronto:
- Part one: Introduction by Leo Panitch, 11.11 min;
- part two: Aijaz Ahmad, 18.30 min;
- part three: Sabah Alnasseri, 17.33 min;
- part four: Q+A with Sabah Alnasseri and Aijaz Ahmad, 10.06 min.
Read: ISLAM, ISLAMISMS AND THE WEST, 37 pages.
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Aijaz Ahmad - India
His book: In Theory, Nations, Classes, Literature, by Aijaz Ahmad, 368 pages, 1994.
… The Cuban revolution was one of the key events in the political formation of my generation, just as the overthrow of the Allende government in 1973 was in its negative impact a decisive moment in the history of the global Marxist left. The more recent Latin American developments have been seen in India as both a certain return to what one might call “the Cuban moment,” but also the rise of a very different kind of left. My own writings on Latin America have been designed strictly for an Indian readership and try to grapple with just what this new left, in all its variations, is … (full text).
Video: US troops in Pakistan, 8.47 min.
… THE hastily confected judicial assassination of Saddam Hussein, the last President of independent Iraq, was part of an extraordinary three-month-long offensive that United States President George W. Bush has mounted on all fronts, domestic and international, since mid-October 2006. That offensive has now culminated in the invasion of Somalia by the Ethiopian proxy of the U.S., massive U.S. bombings of Somali territory by huge U.S. cargo planes that have been turned into gunships, and the “invitation” by the puppet regime, which the Ethiopian proxy has imposed on Somalia, to the U.S. to send its troops to this newly occupied country. A “new” Eastern Africa is now as much a U.S. objective as is a “new” West Asia. An integrated offensive from the Caspian Sea to the Mombasa Bay, so to speak … (full text).
Lineages of the Present: Ideology and Politics in Contemporary South Asia, 366 pages, 2000.
… Culture is not reducible to those processes that Marxist political economy studies for its own purposes, but culture is embedded in those processes. The so-called “mass culture” today is quite inseparable from processes of mass production, marketing, profiteering, systems of mass communication, etc. Every social practice and all material production involves signification, but neither communication nor fashion nor any other of those things that Cultural Studies takes as its specific object of study is merely or even mainly a signifying practice. Nor can the relation between cultural production and its basis in economic and political processes be read off anecdotally or epiphenominally; it has to be studied rigorously and structurally. You can’t just throw in a bit of economics here, a bit of technology there; you have to be able to locate individual facts in a complex historical process, and for that you need very considerable theoretical preparedness. In its beginnings Cultural Studies was quite aware of all this, and some have sought to remain true to those very prosaic origins. In the main, though, Cultural Studies has itself become one of those many styles of consumer capitalism that it sets out to study … (full text).
Carter says Israel has 150 nukes - Aijaz Ahmad: Why is corporate media marginalizing a former president, May 30, 2008.
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