Pakistan kay Asal Dushman

zhohaq

Minister (2k+ posts)
Pakistans Native Oreintalists

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http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2050547


This article should be read by anyone who follows Pakistan politics via its English press. In 61 years we havent yet decolonized. Our country is in control of a small westernised self hating cadre of native Brown sahibs. Be it the Beauracracy, Politicions Journalist, Media moguls, or the Army.
Beholden to the west and with contempt of their country men they are responsible for Pakistan follies but have the gall to shift the blame to the victims. Its either Pakistanis arent "Enlighted" enough there religion far too "fanatical" there culture lacking in "democratic norms". Not there perfidous greed and there partaking in one Neo colonial scheme or the next.
A real Eye opener.

I am extracting some of the Highlights, but would encourage everyone to read the entire paper.
As a result, in August 1947, when they handed power to Pakistan’s na-tive elites – consisting of big landlords, military officers and bureaucrats – the British had few worries that their departure risked compromising their economic or cultural interests in their former colony. These elites did not disappoint their erstwhile or new masters. Within a few years of gaining formal independence, they had firmly strapped the new country to the wheels of the neocolonial order. Since 1958, Pakistan has been ruled alter-nately by increasingly corrupt landlords and military generals, with the mili-tary generally playing the role of the senior partner because of its closer ties to the US establishment. Without effective resistance from intellectuals, workers, peasants or students, these neocolonial hirelings progressively re-duced Pakistan to a condition of vassalage so complete that – by the 1990s – civilian and military leaders could not gain power without the blessings of Washington. Indeed, these elites have sunk so low – because of their de-pendence on Western powers for aid and hiding their stolen assets – that they grovel even before the oil-rich potentates of the Persian Gulf whose own survival depends on serving US-Israeli interests in the Middle East.


This is not a cri de coeur - only a diagnosis of Pakistan’s shame and ig-nominy. Fools have imagined that they can end this misery by appeals to Western conscience; many years ago, Aim Cezair reminded us that the West “uses its principles only for trickery and deceit.”3 Pakistanis alone can end their humiliation: only they can overthrow the system that has castrated them for more than six decades. Pakistan was born gagged and bound, de-livered into the control of the very classes that had been the chief collabora-tors and chief beneficiaries of colonial rule. These neocolonial hirelings have served themselves and their Western masters quite well. Between themselves, the two local contracting parties of the neocolonial enterprise – the military and the party of the landlords – have taken turns running the country into the ground. When the people have appeared to get sick of one these parties, it has transferred power to its twin, which offers itself as just the medicine that will cure the country’s sickness. The party of the land-lords regales the people with the wonders of democracy; the military party rescues the people with homilies about the corruption of the landlords. This game of friendly musical chairs has gone on now for six and a half decades.

On Internal Surveillance and the bug of patriotism
Why haven’t more Pakistanis seen through this deception and why haven’t they acted upon this knowledge to end this game of musical chairs?
It would be foolish to expect neocolonial managerial classes to produce an internal enemy, one that aspires to overthrow the system. Such an out-come is imaginable, but improbable. The leaders of the two neocolonial factions work closely with Western intelligence agencies to ensure that no one from their ranks, bitten by the bug of patriotism, manages to rise to leadership positions in the civilian or military spheres. If the system of sur-veillance fails, and a patriot rises to the leadership of one of the two parties, the United States can use a variety of means to eliminate that threat. In Pa-kistan, this internal threat to the system has never surfaced: at least, not yet.

On Pakistan's Wretched:
In the 1950s, when most Asians and Africans were struggling to over-throw their colonial masters, convinced that the approaching independence would give them the power to direct their own destinies, Frantz Fanon was more skeptical. In The Wretched of the Earth, he presciently sounded the alarm about the treachery latent in the ‘national bourgeoisie’ poised to step into the shoes of the white colonials and white settlers in Africa.

About this un-derdeveloped bourgeoisie, he writes, “its mission has nothing to do with transforming the nation; it consists, prosaically, of being the transmission line between the nation and a capitalism, rampant though camouflaged, which today puts on the mask of neocolonialism.” “Because it is bereft of ideas,” Fanon continues, “because it lives to itself and cuts itself off from the people, undermined by its hereditary incapacity to think in terms of all the problems of the nation as seen from point of view of the whole of that nation, the national middle class will have nothing better to do than to take on the role of manager for Western enterprise, and it will in practice set up its country as the brothel of Europe.”7 Although Fanon did not have Paki-stan in mind when he was writing these words, no truer words could have been written about the brown Sahibs who have managed the neocolonial enterprise in Pakistan.

On Pakistan Intellectual Whores:
More lamentable is the failure of Pakistan’s intellectual classes – barring a few distinguished exceptions – to lead the people out of despondency. Unable to escape the West’s intellectual hegemony, mesmerized by intellec-tual fashions emanating from Paris, London and New York, Pakistan’s in-tellectual classes have become increasingly alienated from their own people. Very few Pakistanis pursue doctoral work in history, the social sciences or humanities; and if they do, their research is directed to issues that are cur-rently important in Washington or London. Far too many Pakistanis with PhDs in economics end up working for the IMF or World Bank. As a re-sult, few Pakistani academics of any standing – inside Pakistan or in the diaspora – bring a radical perspective to their work. As a result, Pakistanis have produced little authentic scholarship in the recent decades. They have failed to educate, lead and guide a people who cannot act correctly because they lack a proper understanding of their historical condition. They have failed to connect them to their best traditions of scholarship, governance and tolerance. As they remain divorced from their own traditions, they can-not learn from the West without being dazzled by it. Since they have not developed a deep critique the failings of Western modernity, they have done little to shape an Islamic modernity that offers models of change that do
not alienate Muslims them from their history. Read the op-eds in Pakistan’s English language dailies – and you will be struck by how disconnected they are from any tradition of scholarship, either Western or their own.

Blame the Victims:
Ironically, the enormous success of Edward Said’s Orientalism, his devastat-ing critique of the West’s hegemonic discourse on the ‘Orient,’ has deflect-ed attention from the recrudescence of a native Orientalism in many of the former colonies in the last few decades. Its victory in Pakistan is nearly complete, where the Orientalist brigade has been led by the publishers, edi-tors and columnists of the country’s leading English language dailies and magazines.

Anxious to serve their Western masters and their local under-lings, these native Orientalists as well as others of their ilk, dwell obsessively on the failings of Pakistan’s non-elite, non-Westernized and non-English speaking classes. Following a curiously inverted analysis of power, they blame Pakistan’s malaise on its dispossessed classes. It is the rump that rules the Pakistani dog. All of Pakistan’s problems – these native Oriental-ists argue disingenuously – stem from the backwardness of Pakistan’s Mus-lim population: their ‘fanaticism,’ ‘obscurantist’ outlook, and ‘irrational’ opposition to the Pakistani elite’s unconditional embrace of America’s so-called war against terror.
Considering their Orientalist proclivities, some of Pakistan’s ‘eminent’ journalists and social scientists likely feel more at home in US think tanks, advising their American colleagues and policy makers on how best to ‘civilize’ (read: neutralize) the Pakistanis.
In the euphoria of Edward Said’s success, left intellectuals have nearly forgotten that the West’s underlings in the former colonies – the successors to Macaulay’s brown sahibs – have been producing their own indigenous Orientalism. I refer here to the coarser but more pernicious Orientalism of Muslims writers and journalists who reflexively espouse Western values, and, conversely, denigrate their own. A few of these native Orientalists are deracinated souls who, troubled by the backwardness of their societies, but, unable to understand its historical causes, castigate their own religion and culture for failing to catch up with the West. In Pakistan, they blame the country’s problems on Islam, on the ‘fanatic’ religious classes, and trace these failures back to the ‘obscurantism’ of its medieval theologians who –
they claim – opposed rationalism as well as the natural sciences. However, most of these native Orientalists are opportunists, Western lackeys, or wannabee lackeys, eager to serve the corrupt elites who have been tearing down their own societies for the benefit of Western powers.

Call it the status Quo, Brown sahib, native oreintalists, Macaulacky children or Gharabzaday. These are by far Pakistan worst enemies. The amount of pain suffering they have caused this country could not be caused even by a foreign occuptation. They have hijacked terms like Modrenity, Democracy, Freedom, Moderation and have twosted them to become meaningless.
Sometime they call us Human Cachroaches, Obscurantist, Hypernational jingiost , impractcal but themselves are morally and intellectually bankrupt. For the same dollars they peddled Jehad for America and now for the same dollars peddle the War agsint terror.
They can be only chalenged us and us alone. They will try to sudue any attempt at reform or genuine change. Discredit or copt any threat. And slowly and surely will chip away at the roots of nationhood. Once defeated in thought we will easy pickings for the transnational interest and Neocolonial designs.

Also discussed is DAWN and Daily time opeds. Pakistan History and the capitulations of its ruling class.
http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2050547
Do read it a real Eye opener.
 
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indigo

Siasat.pk - Blogger
Feudalism is biggest enemy of democracy... and as long their is feudalism there is no true democracy.... Truth is our Muslim brothers are on love with feudal culture at the moment....
 

zhohaq

Minister (2k+ posts)
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Above: Najam Sethi, Irfan Hussain, Saroop Ijaz,Khalid Ahmed, Nadeem Farooq Parracha,Bina Sarwar,Murtaza Razvi,Nusrat Javed, Fasi Zaka,Jugnu Mohsin, Farhat Taj Anderson, Kamran Shafi, Asad Munir, Gen.Talat Masood,Dr Farukh Saleem etc


A few days back, I received a ‘Dear friends’ email from Mr. Najam Sethi, formerly editor-in-chief of Daily Times, Pakistan, announcing that he, to-gether with several of his colleagues, had resigned from their positions in the newspaper. Mr. Sethi thanked his ‘friends’ for their “support and en-couragement…in making Daily Times a ‘new voice for a new Pakistan.’”


I am not sure why Mr. Sethi had chosen me for this dubious honor. Certainly, I did not deserve it. I could not count myself among his friends nor had I in any way given “support and encouragement” to the mission that Daily Times had chosen for itself in Pakistan’s media and politics.


Contrary to its slogan, it was scarcely ever the mission of Daily Times to be a ‘new voice for a new Pakistan.’ On the contrary, this newspaper had dredged its voice from the colonial past; it had only altered its pitch and delivery to serve the interests of new imperial masters. Several of its regular columnists aspire to the office of the native informers of the colonial era. They are native Orientalists, local apologists of neocolonialism, who see their own world (if it is theirs in any meaningful sense) through filters creat-ed for them by their intellectual mentors, the Western Orientalists.

Over the last decade and a half, despite its declared status as a nuclear power, Pakistan’s leading political parties and the military generals have se-cretly – and sometimes openly – competed with each other to better serve the interests of the United States. During these years, moreover, Pakistan’s media – especially its English segment – has spawned a new breed of apol-ogists, eagerly supporting Islamabad’s embrace of Washington’s neoliberal agenda. More damnably, they have persistently made the case for Pakistan’s humiliating surrender to Neoconservative designs against the Islamicate.



To return to the Daily Times, surely some Pakistani – moved by the instinct for collective self-preservation – could have produced at least one damning monograph documenting the methods that this new flagship of native Ori-entalism has employed to support General Musharraf’s corrupt dictatorship and his decision to use the military to fight the Afghan resistance. Regrettably, you are unlikely to find even a few articles that shine the spotlight on the unabashed advocacy of American and Zionist interests by several media outlets in Pakistan. Unmistakably, several regular op-ed writers at the two prominent English dailies – Daily Times and Dawn – have led this pack of sycophants.

The Daily Times was launched in April 2002, simultaneously from La-hore and Karachi, just a few months after the United States had invaded and occupied Afghanistan. Was this timing a mere coincidence? Or was the launching of an aggressively pro-American and pro-Zionist newspaper, led by a team of mostly US-trained editors and columnists, an imperative of the new geopolitics created by the Pakistan government’s mercenary embrace of United States’ global war against terrorism?

Coincidence or not, the Daily Times has served its masters with verve. Its pages have carried many editorials and op-eds justifying Pakistan’s in-duction into the US led war against Afghanistan. The editors and column-ists at Daily Times have regularly excoriated Pakistanis – who have opposed their country’s surrender to American demands – as nave sentimentalists unaware of the tough demands of realpolitik. Endlessly, they have argued that Pakistan – despite its population of 175 million, a half-million-man army, and an arsenal of nuclear weapons – can save itself only through ea-ger prostration before the demands of foreign powers. They have argued that Pakistan could not occupy a middle ground: if it did not capitulate to US demands it faced certain destruction from bombers and missiles. The humiliation and disastrous consequences of this capitulation have been sinking, slowly but surely, into the national psyche of Pakistanis. Since Oc-tober 2001, ordinary Pakistanis have begun to see through the treachery of their rulers, as the country so visibly completed its descent into neocolonial bondage.


In the wake of the US invasion of Iraq in March 2003, General Musharraf’s government openly began broaching the need for recognizing Israel. No Pakistani government before this had so openly made the case for recognizing Israel; they knew that they would face strong opposition from the country’s religious classes.

However, General Musharraf and his American patrons may have reasoned that the time was ripe for such a move. If Pakistan’s corrupt elites could get away with the surrender of Paki-stan’s sovereignty – over its airspace, airbases, and highways – without sparking serious popular protests, why not take advantage of this passivity and establish diplomatic ties with Israel? The somnolent Pakistanis would hardly notice. Moreover, as a matter of policy consistency, how could Paki-stan identify so completely with the war aims of the United States and not have diplomatic relations with its closest ally, Israel?

Predictably, the native Orientalists at the Daily Times and Dawn were leading the charge, arguing that Pakistan could advance its national interests by recognizing Israel. Their rationale was derisible in its navet. Grateful for Pakistan’s recognition – the brown Sahibs argued – the powerful Zion-ist lobby would neutralize the Indian lobby’s machinations against Pakistan in the Congress and State Department. General Musharraf argued that if the PLO could recognize Israel, should Pakistan take the position of being more royalist than the king? Pakistanis were not persuaded. If the PLO had capitulated, should Pakistan follow their example? On this issue, over-whelmingly Pakistanis acted as if they were the voice of the Islamicate. The religious parties mobilized street protests forcing the General to back down; it was a small but symbolic victory for Pakistanis.


When resistance against US occupation of Afghanistan gained momen-tum, the United States blamed this on the madrasas in Pakistan; since some of the leadership of the Afghan resistance had attended these madrasas.8 Once again the writers at Daily Times were making the US case for ‘reform-ing’ Islam and Pakistan. Shut down the madrasas, they demanded Pakistan mount military operations against the Pakistanis in FATA who were sup-porting the Afghan resistance. Repeated US and Pakistani bombings of the resistance groups in FATA, which has killed thousands of civilians, called forth new Taliban factions that have been attacking military and civilian targets in Pakistan. With barely concealed glee, the writers at Daily Times applauded when the Pakistan military carried America’s war deeper into its own towns and villages in northwestern Pakistan.


In 2007, when the lawyers in Pakistan took to the streets to demand the restoration of the Chief Justice sacked by the military dictator, the Daily Times did not support their call to uphold the supremacy of the country’s constitution. The sight of well-heeled lawyers taking to the streets, braving police baton charges, threats to their lives, and arrests was a proud moment in Pakistan’s history. None of this impressed the columnists at the Daily Times. Instead, they persisted in defending the sacking of the Chief Justice; they were making the case for a ‘gradual transition’ to civilian rule in Paki-stan. A civilian government, they were afraid – mistakenly, for sure – might not be as compliant to US pressures as Pakistan’s military rulers.


When elections became unavoidable, the United States and Pakistan’s generals worked out a plan to bring to power the pro-American Benazir Bhutto, the exiled corrupt leader of the Pakistan People’s Party, who had for years been trying to persuade the US government that she would make a more effective US partner than the military. At US prodding, President Musharraf passed an ordinance withdrawing all criminal cases against the leadership of the PPP. With luck, the US plan succeeded. The openly pro-American PPP followed General Musharraf into power.


Space allows us to list only a few egregious examples of the Orientalist mindset on display in the pages of the Daily Times. As the paper’s resident Orientalist, Khaled Ahmad, for several years surveyed the foibles and follies of Pakistan’s Urdu media, in a column mischievously titled, ‘Nuggets from the Urdu Press.” He scolded the benighted Urdu writers for their navet, emotionalism, and foolish advocacy of national interests that collided with realpolitik (read: US-Zionist interests). Another op-ed writer distinguished himself by writing his endlessly clever political commentaries in the racy street lingo of the United States. Did this make him a darling of the Ameri-can staff at the US embassy in Islamabad?


Consider one more ‘exhibit’ that captures Daily Time’s servile mentality. In a regular column, oddly titled, ‘Purple Patch,’ the newspaper ladles out wisdom to its readers in the form of article-length passages lifted from vari-ous ‘great’ writers, who are always of Western provenance. Presumably, the editors at Daily Times still believe with Lord Macaulay, their long-dead spir-itual mentor, that “a single shelf of a good European library was worth the whole native literature of India and Arabia.”9


Will the departure of Mr. Sethi and his acolytes make a difference? I doubt if the owners of Daily Times will have difficulty finding their replace-ments, voices equally shrill in their advocacy of American interests. More than at any other time, growing numbers of Pakistanis have been grooming themselves for service to the Empire that rules from Washington, as their predecessors once eagerly sought to serve the British Raj. This groveling by Pakistan’s elites will only change when the people act to change the incen-tives on offer to these soulless servants of Empire. But this will only hap-pen when the people of Pakistan can put these mercenaries in the dock, charge them for their crimes against the people and the state, and force them to disgorge the loot they have stowed away in Western banks.


All this will take hard work. Some Pakistanis insist that this hard work is underway. It daily gains momentum, and, at some point, history will catch up with the craven and corrupt elites who have bartered the vital interests of Pakistan and the Islamicate for personal profit. When this ‘near enemy’ has been dislodged from the governing institutions of Pakistan, the ‘far en-emy’ too will recede into the mists of history. Al-Qaida had got it all wrong. Drive out the foreign accomplices inside your country: and freedom will be yours. No foreign power will dare to invade or occupy Pakistan once the local underlings have been driven out.

http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.c...act_id=2050547
 
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hans

Banned
Strange! MQM stand against Nawabs, landlords and Fedural lords..... yet MQM get bashed by the same people who inherently vote for landlords.

Deep down we sure love our Landlords, Some do enjoy kissing native Brown sahibs feet.
 

zhohaq

Minister (2k+ posts)
Strange! MQM stand against Nawabs, landlords and Fedural lords..... yet MQM get bashed by the same people who inherently vote for landlords.

Deep down we sure love our Landlords, Some do enjoy kissing native Brown sahibs feet.

You may have missed the point.

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