Tariq Ali: the street fighting man
By Andrew Langille
Lance Writer
October 10, 2007
 Not everyone gets to have a Rolling Stones song written about him. But famed English historian Tariq Ali can say he served as the inspiration for Mick and the boys’ politically charged Street Fighting Man.
Tariq Ali is a prolific writer, journalist, activist, and book publisher – whose career has spanned five decades. Born in Lahore, Pakistan in 1943 on the cusp of civil unrest to communist parents, he entered into an politically charged lifestyle at a young age – eventually become the head of the students’ union at a major university in Pakistan where he organized protests against the then military government.
After a warning from an uncle, who was the head of military intelligence, Ali’s parents did what any good parents would do. They sent him off to Oxford to read politics, history, and economics where he quickly became a central figure in the 1960s England anti-Vietnam war movement, debated such luminaries as Henry Kissinger, and dined with Marlon Brando—all before the age of 30.
While his youth was marked with radicalism, Ali evolved into a sophisticated commentator on politics and social issues. He has authored dozens of books on a variety of issues both in the realm of fiction and non-fiction, mostly focusing on the topics of Islam, imperialism, and socialism. His best-known works are the Clash of Fundamentalisms, a direct rebuke of Samuel Huntington’s thesis the Clash of the Civilizations, and Bush in Babylon.
Ali was in town recently as part of the Humanities Research Group’s Distinguished Speakers Series. Ali spoke on two separate occasions: one was a colloquium on the current political situation in Latin America concerning the rise of Hugo Chavez and other left-wing political leaders, the other concerned the broad issue of mid-east politics.
 His most current book, Pirates of the Caribbean: Axis of Hope, looks at the wave of change that is sweeping Latin America and reversing decades of American interventionism on the continent as well as offering a glimpse at the emerging resistance to what he terms the Washington Consensus—a descriptor of neo-liberal policies employed by Western institutions such as the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, which generally seeks to reduce the role of the state and open up countries for foreign investment. He advances the idea that the leadership of Hugo Chavez in Venezuela, Evo Morales in Bolivia, and Fidel Castro in Cuba offers a distinct alternative to the neo-liberal policies that have dominated Latin America for decades.
“What is interesting about what is going on in South America as a whole is that the left has won victories in Bolivia, Venezuela, and Ecuador,” said Ali in an interview with The Lance, “but the whole of the continent is in ferment and one reason for that is that this is the continent that the United States first attempted [a free market economy] after the victory in Chile in 1973 with the coup against Salvador Allende. The Chicago Boys went in and implemented neo-liberal economics. This is the continent that has been the guinea pig for this economic experiment than other parts of the world, even the United States itself.”
Ali is referring to the group of young Chilean economists trained at the University of Chicago under Milton Friedman, who is widely regarded as the father of neo-liberal economics. The Chicago Boys moved to Chile and worked under the military dictator Augusto Pinochet to decentralize the economy and create a free market.
In Axis of Hope, Ali contrasts Chavez’s push for a Bolivarian Revolution with the American paranoia surrounding the recent political developments in Latin America. Chavez’s Bolivarianism resurrects the struggle for independence led by Venezuelan general Simon Bolivar in the 19th century. Ali highlights how there have been three attempted coups against Chavez in Venezuela by the oligarchy since he became President and that assassination remains a constant threat. He also highlighted the recent federal election in Mexico and the tainted results that weren’t reported in the Western media – he believes that the United States feared a victory by left-wing Presidential candidate Lopez Obrador.
 According to Ali, a central pillar of this paradigm shift in Latin America is the result of social movements. “You have the emergence of giant social movements from below and these social movements then propelled the creation of new style of political parties which said enough is enough. Every single case you can see, whether it is Venezuela, Bolivia, Ecuador, it shows that the pattern is the same,” says Ali.
Ali believes the rise of socio-political movements in Latin America presents a true alternative to old-style political parties and is the result of the anger towards the current political systems in the West. He views this as a crisis of traditional politics in which the key idea of credibility doesn’t exist. “People are uneasy, the are no political structures left to express grievances.”
The Washington Consensus and American intervention was the basis for Ali’s speaking engagement in Windsor. War, Religion, and Politics: Mid-Point in the Mid-East, the catch-all title for his keynote address, began with the idea that the United States is trying to remake the world in its own image. Touching on the current situation in Iraq and the 16 years following the first war, Ali asked what America has to show for its endeavors given the presence of mercenaries, the exodus of refugees, and the tenuous federal system that hangs in the balance. And he believes the current situation in Palestine must be resolved in order to establish long-term stability in the region.
“Iraq has been a total disaster and Afghanistan is on the verge of becoming that,” comments Ali on the long-term implications surrounding the recent U.S. led invasions. “So if you have two big foreign policy disasters for the United States, it must force a re-think and it also weakens them globally, ideologically, politically, and militarily. People say this is all talk and bluff – they couldn’t even occupy Iraq with an unpopular government, they had a chance in Afghanistan where the Taliban were hated by much of it’s own people and they’ve blown that too. So for God’s sake stay away.”
Ali believes Iran is the real winner coming out of the volatility in the Middle East. He advanced the idea that was tacit Iranian support for the dual invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq – Iran has gained an immense amount of power through the instability and is now in control of large parts of Iraq. As a result, the U.S. is getting very nervous now that Iran has become, “a very major player.”
 Any thoughts the U.S. has about invading Iran should be quelled because, “It would be an act of total war and that’s how it will be seen by the Iranians. The Pentagon will try to move heaven and earth to stop it. Without Iranian support the United States could of never have taken Iraq or Afghanistan. They had an agreement with the Iranians behind the scenes. Iran has become a major player because of what the United States did in Iraq and if they were to invade Iran the Iranians would open up a war on three fronts, possibly four. It would be complete gloves off, they would tell their people – ‘go for them.’”
When all is said and done, Ali feels that history will not be kind to the notion of capitalism. “The twentieth century’s last year will be remembered for the fall of capitalism and the collapse of an idea that had dominated most of that century, dominated the politics and formed the attitudes of a large part of the world. That experiment that went badly wrong and collapsed I think will come up again in Latin America. Why did it collapse and why did it go wrong? These are discussions that will go on and I see how many times has capitalism collapsed and been revived – but capitalism has been rotten to the core.”
On the 21st century he surmises, “the early years of the twenty-first century will be essentially be seen by historians as an attempt by the United States to assert military power to preserve global hegemony in the face of a massive rise of China as the new workshop of the world and I think by the end of this century it will be seen as China’s century. Because it is the first time that the economies of the United States and the Western countries are being over taken by the Far East block of China, Japan, Korea, and Taiwan. They are strong economies and were these countries to create a union, which the United States is determined to prevent, there is no doubt they would be the major economic block in the world today.”
Regardless of what history has in store for the U.S., Ali’s ideas and criticisms have been indelibly etched in annals of economics. Whether or not his views are accepted he’ll always be known as the Street Fighting Man.
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