Timothy Burke first talks about the London School of Economics, which awarded Gaddafi a PhD:
One of the basic roles of the London School of Economics and some of its most immediate peer institutions in the contemporary global economy is to grant technocratic credentials to the well-connected children of authoritarian functionaries…
What LSE faculty should have seen in Gaddafi’s dissertation is another mode of mimicry, a kind of neoliberal pantomime. It should have reminded them of how little in the end any of the white papers and policy summits and good-governance roadshows do to actually change the regimes which are the most odious examples of bad governance, and how easy it is to tailor a certain kind of earnest social science into some new clothes for the emperor.
He then turns to Saif Gaddafi’s Mohammed Saeed al-Sahhaf, Benjamin Barber:
I can find some sympathy in the case of Saif Gaddafi’s teachers for David Held, but it’s hard to feel the same for Benjamin Barber. Rather than begging for a more reflective, contemplative understanding of the human heart, Barber is doubling down… Saif Gaddafi’s choices have uncloaked some of Barber’s choices, that he’s been acting as an auxiliary member of the regime, a lobbyist, a geopolitical launderer. So he talks of tragedies to come in Libya in order to not have to have an accounting of the mountain of tragedy beneath his own feet.
February 27th, 2011 at 12:32PM
Dear Professor Barber:
Here’s a bit of folk wisdom that you’ve apparently missed: If you die down with dogs, you’ll get up with fleas.
No wonder you’re scratching furiously.
February 27th, 2011 at 12:32PM
oops–I can’t spell. “if you LIE down with dogs…”
February 27th, 2011 at 12:56PM
Calugg,
Actually “die down” kind of works too.
February 27th, 2011 at 3:34PM
[…] London School of Economics has come in for well-deserved heat (for example, here, here, here, here, here, and here) for its consorting with the Gaddafy clan, awarding Muammar’s son Saif a […]
April 6th, 2011 at 11:55PM
Can you guys go to Wikipedia and edit Benjamin Barbers page to add this information I have tried and his underlings keep on deleating references to Benjamin and Gadaffi
http://www.wikipedia.org