First Post for a New Fall Season: An Irony for our Times

"Islam's borders are bloody and so are its innards."

-Samuel Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order


Contemporary critical scholarship has brought more than enough evidence/analysis to fundamentally reject Huntington's racist apologism for post- Cold War neocolonialism. In an ironic twist to his controversial 1993 thesis on championing U.S and European capital interests, two events took place tonight which once again call this "waspy" Harvard neocon to light.


Tonight at 11:08pm EDT Troy Anthony Davis, a black male from Savannah who by any objective measure was wrongfully convicted of murder, was put to death by the The Georgia Board of Pardons and Paroles. 

Additional info please see Amnesty International Coverage

plus see the Atlanta IWW Solidarity Statement 

Just hours later, after responding to intense pressure from President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the Iranian Judiciary released two Cal Berkley activists who had been imprisoned on suspicion of spying, in another political move, this time by Iran in which two lives were spared. 

Additional Info at Democracy Now!

These two white college graduates can now rejoin their families and enter into a world where they will come to be considered expert witnessed on Iran's politics. The latter observation is in no way dismissive of their innocence or judgmental of their intensions, but rather illustrative of contemporary white privilege. The truth is that Troy Davis was put to death either to make someone's life in Georgia a bit easier or to let the Supreme Court Justices in D.C get their beauty sleep.



On Samuel Huntington's thesis:

"A reductive and vulgar notion," an illustration "of the purest invidious racism, a sort of parody of Hitlerian science directed today against Arabs and Muslims"

-Professor Edward Said

"For these reasons we have been forced to the solution outlined by Professor Huntington: to crush the people’s war, we must eliminate the people."

-Professor Noam Chomsky

Despite these powerful sentiments from two respectable critical thinkers, we must ask ourselves these questions: Do we even still need the academic criticism to recognize the farce that is Huntington's thesis? Of course you'll undoubtably read it against Fukuyama in any intro IR/PSCI class at Middlebury. What a spectrum. Has it really stooped to this? Can a cursory reading of corporate media headlines provide the obvious insight that you may not even get with your education at Middlebury? Disagree? Fire away in the comments...