Over the last year or so I have been collecting autograph stories from friends, family and work colleagues (Phil has submitted a story as has Camraman.It has been a very pleasureable experience listening to/reading the 50 tales I have received.
Of course, I am having no luck with publishers or agents and I receive rejection letters on a regular basis. But, the project was fun to do, so I cling on to that thought as I tear open the envelopes.
Here is a story about Bob Dylan, it is one of my favourites, I hope you like it.
Dylan
I owned everything by Dylan and last saw him in 1967 at Manchester Free Trade Hall. Now I had the chance to see him again and if I was lucky, meet him.
I was a policeman in my early twenties, I think it was 1976, when Dylan played three or four nights at Earls Court. Dylan was on form around this time having released Desire and Street Legal. I was based at Notting Hill Police Station but for big concerts or demos worked with other policemen from all over London in what were called “Serials”, these were units of about 20 to 30 policemen.
I had worked at Earls Court a few times and seen Elton John, The Rolling and Queen all play there. But Dylan was different, I wanted to try and get to him.
I managed to catch bits of Dylan’s concert in the first two days but I was mostly involved in traffic duty and crowd patrol. The crowds were so bad in Warwick Road just opposite the venue, that I didn’t get an opportunity to see too much of the concert. But on the fourth night I managed to swap duties with another colleague who knew how much I loved Dylan.
I knew the venue quite well and had access to most areas so after the concert I went to see if I could catch a glimpse of Dylan backstage. When I got there I found lots of fans gathered around the stage door. Not having a valid reason to push through them all and worried that I might be caught by my Guvnor I decided to wait and see if the great man emerged.
After a short while a roadie came out to where we were gathered and people handed him various items for Dylan to sign. As fans handed him scraps of paper and programmes I realised the only thing I had on me was my police pocket book. I handed it over (I think I folded it over to a blank page in the middle). The man walked off towards a room where we could see Dylan sitting at a long table. He gave Dylan the bundle of bits and pieces to sign and Dylan signed the lot. (People say Dylan is aloof and doesn’t like to engage with his fans, but I never really believed that so it was nice to see him doing his bit for his fans).
I got my pocketbook back, looked at the signature and felt thrilled. I quickly put it in my pocket and rushed back to where I should have been stationed.
About 6 months later I was in Knightsbridge Crown Court (which is no longer there) giving evidence in a case that involved a drink driver I had arrested. The man had been too drunk to breathalyse and under section 15 (or 16) I was able to arrest him without breathalysing him. He also had an offensive weapon in his car, I think it was a sword. (NB Back then drink driving cases these went to Crown Court).
I was questioned by the Prosecution and the case was clear cut. Grasping at straws the solicitor for the defendant looked at my statement and then asked to see my pocket book (which was quite an unusual request in such cases). He pointed out that there was a page missing and he wanted to know why. I was shocked, I nearly said I didn’t know why it was missing and then I remembered. The Dylan autograph!
The judge (or the Recorder) sniggered when I explained why the page was missing. The judge decided that I couldn’t have made it all up and accepted my explanation, he said the matter was now left up to me and my superior officer to discuss.
The verdict: Guilty.
(Extract from the unlikely to be published - You can't sign a coconut by The Quiet Busker)
Pythagoras understood and promulgated the reality and power of truths that seemed independent of physical reality. A small demonstration of this mathematical power was the aqueduct Polycrates had Eupalinos build through a mountain to supply water to the town.
Plato, a neo-Pythagorean of sorts, took these ideas and speculated on the existence of intelligible four dimensional forms.
Asynchronically speaking, Baudrillard, showed how language and human culture can remove us from the contemplation of nature and how human created simulacra soon replace what pristine and real. He explains how humans hollow out reality, reform it and assign their own functions to it.
But Freud has offered us the unconscious and started psychiatry, (very unfashionable in these days of brain science). The unconscious manifests itself in the iconography of dreams and through our concealed or transformed drives and intentions - through Thanatos and Eros In a way the unconscious is the last battleground, the last refuge and the last route of escape from the manufactured prison that is our current "reality".
Human culture in the UK in 2009 is claustrophobic, aliernating, isolating and egocentric. It is disconnected. Egocentric in the meaning of the old Russian proverb that goes like this: an egoist is someone who has fallen down a well and in whatever direction he shouts his own voice echoes back, distorted in different ways.
Miyazaki takes these dreams and fleshes them out so that we can actually look at them in his animation.
Joyce shows how the unconscious flows like a river under consciousness and he exposes the unconscious joins in our conscious thought.
Jung harks back to Plato and invests these unconscious images with universal significance. They are, in fact intelligible universal forms. Jung's ideas of archetypes are Platos.
Then Giordano Bruno takes it further. He says that if we can apprehend these forms and be mindful of them, then we are actually back to the stage the natural philosophers were at around 600BCE and in a position to understand something deep and real about our existence. In fact, that the language of these symbols was a way to get tin in touch with the Logos.
The Logos here is understood as a metaphor. In other words the Logos is the product of a huge chain of cause and effect. Our faith in this method is similar to the scientists assumption of the Principle of Sufficient Reason when they build something like the Large Hadron Collider and seek for Higgs-Boson particles.
But this is not abstract in the least. Shakespeare demonstrates this through his plays. Take the character of Iago for example. "I am not what I am." Black is white, white is black. Iago is omnipresent. Look around you. There will be a couple of Iagos about. Hanna Arendt is right.
Dreams are important and so is Joycean awareness - Desmond Swords at work - but the route to freedom and to living a life outside the simulated reality of modern life is by the construction of bridges between the unconscious and the conscious. By doing this we help make the distinction between what is real and what is fabricated, clear, because what is real has a meaning in itself, in the same way that a "Higgs-Boson" particle might. Werner Herzog and Alan Moore are two of the best architect-builders of some of these bridges.
Two of the easiest routes to the unconscious are sex and death. The battleground for freedom takes place in the unconscious. People who live by fabricating our reality, the spiritual sons of Bernays, are now very excited by the new possibilities for manipulating human behaviour, are dedicated to the trivialisation and defilement of the unconscious in a million ways. Hollywood horror, and Call of Duty 2 is a good example.
Heidegger understood being and he understood that being becomes aware of itself through language. The biggest bridge between being and reality and our awareness of it is poetry and language. It is the articulation of the unconscious that gives us freedom and authenticity and independence from the alienating simulated lives we are supposed to lead.
Proust shows this power. His book the remembrance of things past is a brilliant articulation of being and makes us aware of being. Proust wanted to know all the details about making brown wholemeal toast step by step. And food writing can articulate the experience of eating in such a way that that Madeleine dipped in herb tea will live forever in the logos.
Hofstader echoes this in ideas about figure and ground and how language itself can bootstrap the putative soul into greatness.
Plato, a neo-Pythagorean of sorts, took these ideas and speculated on the existence of intelligible four dimensional forms.
Asynchronically speaking, Baudrillard, showed how language and human culture can remove us from the contemplation of nature and how human created simulacra soon replace what pristine and real. He explains how humans hollow out reality, reform it and assign their own functions to it.
But Freud has offered us the unconscious and started psychiatry, (very unfashionable in these days of brain science). The unconscious manifests itself in the iconography of dreams and through our concealed or transformed drives and intentions - through Thanatos and Eros In a way the unconscious is the last battleground, the last refuge and the last route of escape from the manufactured prison that is our current "reality".
Human culture in the UK in 2009 is claustrophobic, aliernating, isolating and egocentric. It is disconnected. Egocentric in the meaning of the old Russian proverb that goes like this: an egoist is someone who has fallen down a well and in whatever direction he shouts his own voice echoes back, distorted in different ways.
Miyazaki takes these dreams and fleshes them out so that we can actually look at them in his animation.
Joyce shows how the unconscious flows like a river under consciousness and he exposes the unconscious joins in our conscious thought.
Jung harks back to Plato and invests these unconscious images with universal significance. They are, in fact intelligible universal forms. Jung's ideas of archetypes are Platos.
Then Giordano Bruno takes it further. He says that if we can apprehend these forms and be mindful of them, then we are actually back to the stage the natural philosophers were at around 600BCE and in a position to understand something deep and real about our existence. In fact, that the language of these symbols was a way to get tin in touch with the Logos.
The Logos here is understood as a metaphor. In other words the Logos is the product of a huge chain of cause and effect. Our faith in this method is similar to the scientists assumption of the Principle of Sufficient Reason when they build something like the Large Hadron Collider and seek for Higgs-Boson particles.
But this is not abstract in the least. Shakespeare demonstrates this through his plays. Take the character of Iago for example. "I am not what I am." Black is white, white is black. Iago is omnipresent. Look around you. There will be a couple of Iagos about. Hanna Arendt is right.
Dreams are important and so is Joycean awareness - Desmond Swords at work - but the route to freedom and to living a life outside the simulated reality of modern life is by the construction of bridges between the unconscious and the conscious. By doing this we help make the distinction between what is real and what is fabricated, clear, because what is real has a meaning in itself, in the same way that a "Higgs-Boson" particle might. Werner Herzog and Alan Moore are two of the best architect-builders of some of these bridges.
Two of the easiest routes to the unconscious are sex and death. The battleground for freedom takes place in the unconscious. People who live by fabricating our reality, the spiritual sons of Bernays, are now very excited by the new possibilities for manipulating human behaviour, are dedicated to the trivialisation and defilement of the unconscious in a million ways. Hollywood horror, and Call of Duty 2 is a good example.
Heidegger understood being and he understood that being becomes aware of itself through language. The biggest bridge between being and reality and our awareness of it is poetry and language. It is the articulation of the unconscious that gives us freedom and authenticity and independence from the alienating simulated lives we are supposed to lead.
Proust shows this power. His book the remembrance of things past is a brilliant articulation of being and makes us aware of being. Proust wanted to know all the details about making brown wholemeal toast step by step. And food writing can articulate the experience of eating in such a way that that Madeleine dipped in herb tea will live forever in the logos.
Hofstader echoes this in ideas about figure and ground and how language itself can bootstrap the putative soul into greatness.
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It is not as easy at it looks.
Photo Copyright:The Quiet Busker.
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Maoists to declare autonomous states
Baburam Bhattarai
Maoist Vice Chairman Baburam Bhattarai, who heads the party’s United National People’s Movement, announced the decision on Thursday evening after a meeting of the party’s central office bearers and regional and ethnic fronts.
The Maoists are in the midst of their third phase protests since Nov. 22 demanding ‘restoration of civilian supremacy’ — correction of President Dr. Ram Baran Yadav’s move reinstating the then Army chief Rookmangud Katawal.
As per the third-phase protest schedule, Maoist regional and ethnic fronts will hold massive protests in their respective regions from Dec. 11-18.
While questions have been raised against the Maoists’ proposed autonomous states declaration, the international community is also apprehensive whether the announcement is a Maoist strategy to run a ‘parallel government’. However, the Maoists dismiss the apprehension and maintain that declaration of autonomous states is only ‘symbolic’. Bhattarai also said the declaration doesn’t breach the Comprehensive Peace Agreement and is in line with the spirit of the peace deal.
During its second phase of nationwide protests, the UCPN (Maoist) had withdrawn the programme of declaring autonomous states. However, in Dhankuta, Maoist activists led by Gopal Kirati had seized
The Maoists have warned they will be forced to launch stern protests if the government fails to address their demands by Dec. 22, when the third phase of protests officially concludes with a three-day general strike nationwide. The party has said it will continue to boycott public programmes attended by the president, the prime minister and other ministers, and demonstrate with black flags.
Regarding formation of a high-level political mechanism to find a way out of the ongoing deadlock, Bhattarai said, “Discussions are going on. We want an agreement through a package deal for which the other parties need to be flexible.”
AUTONOMY DECLARATION SCHEDULE:
| Limbuwan | Dhankuta | Dec. 11 |
| Kochila | Biratnagar | Dec. 11 |
| Seti-Mahakali | Dipayal | Dec. 13 |
| Tharuwan | Nepalgunj | Dec. 13 |
| Kirat | Diktel | Dec. 14 |
| Sherpa | Solu-Salleri | Dec. 14 |
| Bheri-Karnali | Jumla | Dec. 15 |
| Bhote-Lama | Simikot | Dec. 15 |
| Newa | | Dec. 16 |
| Tamsaling | Timle-Kavre | Dec. 16 |
| Magarat | Palpa-Tansen | Dec. 17 |
| Tamuwan | Pokhara | Dec. 17 |
| Madhes | Janakpur | Dec. 18 |
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Truely the Taleban could have arranged as many bombings and terrorists acts as they liked in the UK. There are many Pashtun young men and women in cities in the UK who still have large extended families back in Afghanistan and who could be forced into doing something they should not. But guess what. So far there have been no attacks by Afghans on British soil. Why? It is a mystery.
News comes from Afghanistan and the recent UN report that the Taleban and the drug trade are intertwined and that now the Taleban, who are mainly Pashtun, are officially in command of an international drug cartel.
News comes from Afghanistan that Taleban drug lords go to Dubai to live high on the hog and gamble and sleep with women and luxuriate in all the that the freedom to consume has to offer, while their footsoldiers, peasant fighters, are deluded and told that they are fighting a patriotic religious war.
And though they are told they are fighting a religious war what really matters to them in trhe end, according to captured Taleban fighters, is, we hear, that Taleban footsoldiers are paid $400 to $500 a month. A substantial part of what these footsoldiers do is protect the drugs and arms trade.
Now ask yourself this question. What would those poor peasants live on if they didn't get paid drug money from the Taleban cartels? They would have to scratch a poor living from the blasted soil. What could earn them an equivalent income to drugs and arms? Nothing. Not even the "saffron" that US intelligence has put forward in a half baked attempt at implanting a substitute crop.
Increasingly, what the US and British troops are facing in Afghanistan is a war against a drig cartel that hides behind a a fundamentalsit Islamic ideology, just as in the end, Sendero Luminoso was a drug cartel that hid behind Maoism.
The real cause of the problem is not an ideological insurgency now, but it is a fight against a mafia, an expanding and powerful international drug cartel.
Look at Mexico's war against the drug cartels. Britain and the US and other western countries are disparaging about the Mexican governments possibility for success. According to them the Mexican government is being unrealistic and too heavy handed in its fight against the narcos in Mexico. But is that not exactly what NATO faces Afghanistan, with the additional, but increasingly flimsy ideological trappings.
The reason why a fight against a cartel is very hard to win is because, naturally, the Livelihood of millions of Afghans is at stake. Remove the drug trade and you impoverish not only the Pashtuns, but everyone who benefits from the trade indirectly. Money will cease to circulate through what is already the shambles of an economy. The reason why you can't win a war against the cartels is that if you win, you consign people to abject poverty.
This is the reason why all Obama's drones and all Obama's men will never put Afghanistan's state together again.
What has been very interesting has been the criticism of the Karzai government for corruption. Corruption itself is a bad word, but in this instance, corruption has become an embarrassing euphemism for narco-politics.
Yes, it is true that the Taleban cartel have diversified to some extent. They are also running guns from north to south in addition to the drugs they run from south to north. They are involved in other criminal activities as well. But primarily they are a drug cartel.
Logically, if the Taleban really were out and out extremists with a desire to do damage and provoke an even bigger "clash of civillisations" they could have done so easily. They could have damaged London and many other British, European and American cities. But they haven't.
A territorial army man, 6 foot 6, a man of great moral fibre, got back a few months ago from Afghan where he was training the Afghan police. (There but for the Grace of God). He is going out with one of my neices. In fact, he was very reluctant to talk. But what I read into what he was saying is that drug taking in the British army and other armies, and especially in the US army, is an increasingly serious problem in Afghan at the moment.
For a lot of bored soldiers, there is nothing much to do there except take drugs. The British, American and European way of life doesn't stigmatise drug taking really, and so, apparently, some of the squaddies are at it.
But there is another problem that will make the war agaisnt the Taleban almost unwinnable and that is the problem faced by any force that fights against a mafia. Omerta, yes, but in addition to omerta, the propensity to corruption in the occupying forces themselves.
This is the way it is in Mexico. The closer you are to the fight against the Cartels, the more offers you get that you really can't refuse.
If we take the view that the conflict in Afghanistan is becoming, increasingly, a conflict against the Pashtun, Taleban drug cartels posing as Muslim fundementalists or using Muslim fundamentalism, then we need to reframe the way we see western countries should view Afghanistan.
Afghanistan is a dirt poor and broken country. The only way to get rid of the Taleban cartel is not by attacking them with guns, tanks, drones and planes: People will always risk death to feed their families.
Only when Afghanistan has an infrastructure, when it has developed enough to be able to generate alternative sources of income will the problem begin to fade. We don't face the real possibility of terrorist attacks from the Taleban, we simply face the prospect of a glut in the heroin market.
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Anandi Sharan has supplied a list of people to petition. If you have read her previous blog then the essence of it goes like this:
"Boycott America's ineffectual measures at Copenhagen: The way to do this is to rush through, for purely procedural reasons, a meaningless 1 page document at the main Conference of the Parties – the CoP15, and then move on to the Meeting of the Parties to the Kyoto Protocol – the CoP/MoP5.
"We must write to our leaders and tell them to finish the CoP15 in one day flat, and avoid American filibustering, thereby freeing up the next ten days of negotiations for the CoP/MoP5 - the forum that can deliver real results."
I trust Anandi's judgement utterly. She is one of the most perceptive people I know, if not the most perceptive person - a true Cassandra. Anandi was working against climate change and relating it to poverty alleviation in the 90s when everyone else was still talking about El Nino and the hole in the ozone layer. She has won international prizes in the fight against climate change and we should listen to her.
See her blog below for the full explanation of what we can do to help fight climate change.
People to Petition:
European Community Artur Runge Metzger artur.runge-metzger@ec.
Russia Alexander Bedritsky bedr@mecom.ru
Japan Kenichi Kobayashi climate.focal.point@mofa.jp
Guinea Bissau Alexandre Cabral tucabral2@yahoo.com.br
Malaysia Shahril Faizal Abdul Jani faizal@nre.gov.my
Algeria Kamel Djemouai kdjemouai@yahoo.fr
Amjad Abdulla abdulla.amjad@gmail.com
Angola Lucas Marcolino Miranda lcs_miranda@yahoo.com
Antigua John Ashe jashe@abgov.org
Argentina Nazareno Castillo Marin ncastillo@ambiente.gov.ar
Armenia Aram Gabrielyan aram@nature.am
Azerbaijan Isa Aliyev aliyev@iglim.baku.az
Bahamas Philip Weech philipweech@bahamas.gov.bs
Barbados Lionel Weekes becklesp@gob.bb
Belize Carlos Fuller cfuller@btl.net
Benin Ibila Djibril idjibril@yahoo.fr
Benjamin Karmorh Jr benkamorh@yahoo.com
Bhutan Tshering Tashi ttashi@nec.gov.bt
Bolivia Juan Pablo Ramos Morales jprbol@gmail.com
Botswana Phetolo Phage pphage@gov.bw
Brazil Leandro Waldvogel leandro.mre@gmail.com
Burkina Faso Bobodo Blaise Sawadogo bbobodo@yahoo.fr
Burundi Odette Kayites okayitesi125@yahoo.fr
Cambodia Mok Mareth cceap@online.com.kh
Cameroun Joseph Armathé Amougou joearmathe@yahoo.fr
Central African Republic Aline Malibangar malibangaraline@hotmail.fr
Chad Moussa Tchitchaou moussatchit@yahoo.fr
China Qingtai Yu tfs5@mfa.gov.cn
Colombia Adriana Mejia Hernández pmdirect@minrelext.gov.co
Comoros Hachime Abdérémane hachimea@yahoo.fr
Congo Pierre Oyo ninonoyo@yahoo.fr
Cook Islands MoFA secfa@foraffairs.gov.ck
Costa Rica William Alpízar Zúñiga walpizar@imn.ac.cr
Cote D’Ivoire Kadio Ahossane kahossane@yahoo.com
Cuba Jorge Luis Fernández Chamero chamero@citma.cu
Cyprus Nicos Georgiades ngeorgiades@environment.moa.
Democratic Republic of the Congo Aimé Mbuyi Kalombo mbuyikalombo@gmail.com
Djibouti M Elmi Obsieh Waiss adouale@yahoo.fr
Dominica Lloyd Pascal mykuch3@yahoo.com
Dominican Republic Ernesto Reyna Alcantara sga@medioambiente.gov.do
Ecuador Luis Edmundo Cáceres Silva lcaceres@ambiente.gov.ec
Ecuatorial Guinea Deogracias Ikaka Nzamio ikakanzamio@yahoo.fr
Egypt El-Sayed Sabry Mansour Nasr drnasr5@hotmail.com
El Salvador Ana Cecilia Carranza Choto ccarranza@marn.gob.sv
Eritrea Mogos Woldeyohannes Bairu depenvdg@eol.com.er
Ethiopia Kidane Asefa kidaneasefa@gmail.com
Evans Davie Njewa njewae@yahoo.com
Micronesia Andrew Yatilman andrewy@mail.fm
Fiji Cama Tuiloma camatuiloma@connect.com.fj
FYRMacedonia Teodora Obradovik-Grncarovska t.grncarovska@moepp.gov.mk
Gambia Pa Ousman Jarju pajarju@yahoo.co.uk
Georgia Grigol Lazriev lazriev@caucasus.net
Ghana William Kojo Agyemang-Bonsu wkabonsu@gmail.com
Grenada Jocelyn Paul jfplyn@yahoo.com
Guyana Gitanjali Chandarpal gitanjalic81@yahoo.com
Guinea Joseph Sylla joesylla2002@yahoo.fr
Haiti Moise Fils Jean-Pierre moisejp8@hotmail.com
Hussein Ahmad Suleiman Badarin honida99@yahoo.com
India Rajani Ranjan Rashmi rr.rashmi@nic.in
Indonesia Agus Purnomo agus.purnomo@cbn.net.id
Iran Mahmoud Babaei m.babaei@mfa.gov.ir
Jamaica Sylvia McGill wxservice.dir@cwjamaica.com
Jordan Faris Mohamad Al-Junaidi faljunidi@yahoo.com
Kanat Baigarin kbaigarin@climate.kz
Kazakhstan Bulat Bekniyazov info@climate.kz
Kenya Suzanne Tapapul Lekoyiet slekoyiet@nema.go.ke
Kuwait Ali Abbas Haider d.g@epa.org.kw
Kyrgystan Arstanbek Davletkeldiev min-eco@elcat.kg
Lao Khampadith Khammounheuang khampadith@gmail.com
Lebanon Youssef Naddaf y.naddaf@moe.gov.lb
Lesotho Bruno T. Sekoli bsekoli@hotmail.com
Lian Kok Fei drlian@nre.gov.my
Liberia Ben Turtur Donnie benturturdonnie@yahoo.com
Libya Abdulhakim El-Waer aelwaer@environment.org.ly
Madagaskar Michel Omer Laivao laivao2002@yahoo.fr
Malawai Aloysius M. Kamperewera kamphatso@gmail.com
Maldives Mohamed Aslam mohamed.aslam@mhte.gov.mv
Mali Mama Konaté konatmama29@gmail.com
Malta Marie Briguglio marie.briguglio@mepa.org.mt
Marilia Telma António Manjate telmanjate@yahoo.com.br
Marshall islands MOFA mofapol@ntamar.net
Masao Nakayama fsmun@fsmgov.org
Mauritania Sidi Mohamed Ould Sidibola Ould Wafi wafi@environnement.gov.mr
Mauritius Sateeaved Seebaluck sseebaluck@mail.gov.mu
Mexico María del Socorro Flores Liera focalpointmexico@sre.gob.mx
Mirza Castro mosiris_castro@yahoo.com
Mohamed Shareef mohamed.shareef@mhte.gov.mv
Mongolia Ts. Banzragch uts_banzai@yahoo.com
Montenegro Biljana Djurovic biljanadjurovic@yahoo.com
Morocco Mohamed Nbou nboudrm@yahoo.com
Mozambique Luciano de Castro l.castro@micoa.gov.mz
Namibia Teofilus Mutangeni Nghitila tnghitila@yahoo.com
Nepal Purushottam Ghimire purughimire@yahoo.com
Nicaragua Martha Elena Ruiz de Rodrigue mruiz@marena.gob.ni
Niger Saley Hassane hassanesaley@hotmail.com
Nigeria Helen Esuene piccdm@yahoo.com
Niue Sionetasi Pulehetoa sionetasi.pulehetoa@mail.gov.nu
Oman Zuhaira Ali Dawood zuhaira39@hotmail.com
Omar Ramírez Tejada o.ramirez@cambioclimatico.gob.do
Pakistan Jawed Ali Khan jawedalikhan@hotmail.com
Palau Ngedikes Olai Uludong Polloi opolloi@gmail.com
Panama Eduardo Enrique Reyes Guerrero e.reyes@anam.gob.pa
Paraguay Lilian Portillo lilianportillopy@gmail.com
Peru Vanessa Vereau Ladd vvereau@minam.gob.pe
Philippines UNIO unio.dfa@gmail.com
Qatar Abdulhadi Nasser Al-Marri anmarri@moe.gov.qa
Rep of Korea Byung-Seok Yoo bsyoo72@gmail.com
Rep of Moldova Valeriu Cazac valeriucazac@hotmail.com
Rickardo Ward wardr@gob.bb
Rwanda Dusabeyezu Sébastien dusabeseba@yahoo.fr
Saint Kitts June Hughes <ccodoe@sisterisles.kn
Saint Vincent Edmund Jackson <edmund_jackson2000@yahoo.com
Samoa Aiono Mose Pouvi Sua <mfat@mfat.gov.ws
Sao Tome Adérito Manuel Fernandes Santana <aderitosantana@hotmail.com
Senegal Cheikh Ndiaye Sylla denv@orange.sn
Seychelles Will Agricole w.agricole@pps.gov.sc
Shulamit Nezer shulin@sviva.gov.il
Sierra Leone Denis Sombi Lansana denislansana@yahoo.com
Solomon Islands Rence Sore psmecm@pmc.gov.sb
South Africa Judith Combrink jcombrink@deat.gov.za
Sri Lanka Senarath Mudalige Don Peter Anura Jayatilake eeconga@yahoo.com
Sudan Saadeldin Ibrahim Mohammed Izzeldin hcenr2005@yahoo.com
Suriname Joyce Amarello-Williams arbeid@sr.net
Swaziland Emmanuel Dumisani Dlamini ed_dlamini@yahoo.com
Syria Haitham Nashawati hnashawati1@yahoo.com
Tajikistan Begmurod Mahmadaliev office@meteo.tj
Thailand ONEP thai_ccc@onep.go.th
Theophile Chabi Worou theo_worou@yahoo.fr
Timor Leste Adao Soares Barbosa adaosoaresbarbosa@yahoo.com
Togo Komi Tomyeba kotomyeba@yahoo.fr
Tonga Asipeli Palaki a_palaki@yahoo.com
Tunisia Imed Fadhel i.fadhel@yahoo.fr
Uganda Philip Gwage pgwage@gmail.com
Uruguay Luis Alberto Santos Michetti lusa19@yahoo.com
Uzbekistan Victor Chub uzhymet@meteo.uz
Venezuela Ilenia Medina unidadmedioambiente@gmail.com
Victor Ayodeji Fodeke vicfodeke@gmail.com
Vietnam Nguyen Khac Hieu nkhieu@monre.gov.vn
Vincent Kasulu Seya Makonga kaseyamak@yahoo.fr
Wei Su suwei@ndrc.gov.cn
Yadir Salazar Mejía yadir.salazar@cancilleria.gov.co
Yemen Anwar Abdulaziz Noaman anwar.noaman@gmail.com
Zambia Kenneth Dalison Nkowani kapalakonje2@yahoo.com
Zimbabwe Margaret Mukahanana-Sangarwe mmukahanana58@yahoo.com
"Boycott America's ineffectual measures at Copenhagen: The way to do this is to rush through, for purely procedural reasons, a meaningless 1 page document at the main Conference of the Parties – the CoP15, and then move on to the Meeting of the Parties to the Kyoto Protocol – the CoP/MoP5.
"We must write to our leaders and tell them to finish the CoP15 in one day flat, and avoid American filibustering, thereby freeing up the next ten days of negotiations for the CoP/MoP5 - the forum that can deliver real results."
I trust Anandi's judgement utterly. She is one of the most perceptive people I know, if not the most perceptive person - a true Cassandra. Anandi was working against climate change and relating it to poverty alleviation in the 90s when everyone else was still talking about El Nino and the hole in the ozone layer. She has won international prizes in the fight against climate change and we should listen to her.
See her blog below for the full explanation of what we can do to help fight climate change.
People to Petition:
European Community Artur Runge Metzger artur.runge-metzger@ec.
Russia Alexander Bedritsky bedr@mecom.ru
Japan Kenichi Kobayashi climate.focal.point@mofa.jp
Guinea Bissau Alexandre Cabral tucabral2@yahoo.com.br
Malaysia Shahril Faizal Abdul Jani faizal@nre.gov.my
Algeria Kamel Djemouai kdjemouai@yahoo.fr
Amjad Abdulla abdulla.amjad@gmail.com
Angola Lucas Marcolino Miranda lcs_miranda@yahoo.com
Antigua John Ashe jashe@abgov.org
Argentina Nazareno Castillo Marin ncastillo@ambiente.gov.ar
Armenia Aram Gabrielyan aram@nature.am
Azerbaijan Isa Aliyev aliyev@iglim.baku.az
Bahamas Philip Weech philipweech@bahamas.gov.bs
Barbados Lionel Weekes becklesp@gob.bb
Belize Carlos Fuller cfuller@btl.net
Benin Ibila Djibril idjibril@yahoo.fr
Benjamin Karmorh Jr benkamorh@yahoo.com
Bhutan Tshering Tashi ttashi@nec.gov.bt
Bolivia Juan Pablo Ramos Morales jprbol@gmail.com
Botswana Phetolo Phage pphage@gov.bw
Brazil Leandro Waldvogel leandro.mre@gmail.com
Burkina Faso Bobodo Blaise Sawadogo bbobodo@yahoo.fr
Burundi Odette Kayites okayitesi125@yahoo.fr
Cambodia Mok Mareth cceap@online.com.kh
Cameroun Joseph Armathé Amougou joearmathe@yahoo.fr
Central African Republic Aline Malibangar malibangaraline@hotmail.fr
Chad Moussa Tchitchaou moussatchit@yahoo.fr
China Qingtai Yu tfs5@mfa.gov.cn
Colombia Adriana Mejia Hernández pmdirect@minrelext.gov.co
Comoros Hachime Abdérémane hachimea@yahoo.fr
Congo Pierre Oyo ninonoyo@yahoo.fr
Cook Islands MoFA secfa@foraffairs.gov.ck
Costa Rica William Alpízar Zúñiga walpizar@imn.ac.cr
Cote D’Ivoire Kadio Ahossane kahossane@yahoo.com
Cuba Jorge Luis Fernández Chamero chamero@citma.cu
Cyprus Nicos Georgiades ngeorgiades@environment.moa.
Democratic Republic of the Congo Aimé Mbuyi Kalombo mbuyikalombo@gmail.com
Djibouti M Elmi Obsieh Waiss adouale@yahoo.fr
Dominica Lloyd Pascal mykuch3@yahoo.com
Dominican Republic Ernesto Reyna Alcantara sga@medioambiente.gov.do
Ecuador Luis Edmundo Cáceres Silva lcaceres@ambiente.gov.ec
Ecuatorial Guinea Deogracias Ikaka Nzamio ikakanzamio@yahoo.fr
Egypt El-Sayed Sabry Mansour Nasr drnasr5@hotmail.com
El Salvador Ana Cecilia Carranza Choto ccarranza@marn.gob.sv
Eritrea Mogos Woldeyohannes Bairu depenvdg@eol.com.er
Ethiopia Kidane Asefa kidaneasefa@gmail.com
Evans Davie Njewa njewae@yahoo.com
Micronesia Andrew Yatilman andrewy@mail.fm
Fiji Cama Tuiloma camatuiloma@connect.com.fj
FYRMacedonia Teodora Obradovik-Grncarovska t.grncarovska@moepp.gov.mk
Gambia Pa Ousman Jarju pajarju@yahoo.co.uk
Georgia Grigol Lazriev lazriev@caucasus.net
Ghana William Kojo Agyemang-Bonsu wkabonsu@gmail.com
Grenada Jocelyn Paul jfplyn@yahoo.com
Guyana Gitanjali Chandarpal gitanjalic81@yahoo.com
Guinea Joseph Sylla joesylla2002@yahoo.fr
Haiti Moise Fils Jean-Pierre moisejp8@hotmail.com
Hussein Ahmad Suleiman Badarin honida99@yahoo.com
India Rajani Ranjan Rashmi rr.rashmi@nic.in
Indonesia Agus Purnomo agus.purnomo@cbn.net.id
Iran Mahmoud Babaei m.babaei@mfa.gov.ir
Jamaica Sylvia McGill wxservice.dir@cwjamaica.com
Jordan Faris Mohamad Al-Junaidi faljunidi@yahoo.com
Kanat Baigarin kbaigarin@climate.kz
Kazakhstan Bulat Bekniyazov info@climate.kz
Kenya Suzanne Tapapul Lekoyiet slekoyiet@nema.go.ke
Kuwait Ali Abbas Haider d.g@epa.org.kw
Kyrgystan Arstanbek Davletkeldiev min-eco@elcat.kg
Lao Khampadith Khammounheuang khampadith@gmail.com
Lebanon Youssef Naddaf y.naddaf@moe.gov.lb
Lesotho Bruno T. Sekoli bsekoli@hotmail.com
Lian Kok Fei drlian@nre.gov.my
Liberia Ben Turtur Donnie benturturdonnie@yahoo.com
Libya Abdulhakim El-Waer aelwaer@environment.org.ly
Madagaskar Michel Omer Laivao laivao2002@yahoo.fr
Malawai Aloysius M. Kamperewera kamphatso@gmail.com
Maldives Mohamed Aslam mohamed.aslam@mhte.gov.mv
Mali Mama Konaté konatmama29@gmail.com
Malta Marie Briguglio marie.briguglio@mepa.org.mt
Marilia Telma António Manjate telmanjate@yahoo.com.br
Marshall islands MOFA mofapol@ntamar.net
Masao Nakayama fsmun@fsmgov.org
Mauritania Sidi Mohamed Ould Sidibola Ould Wafi wafi@environnement.gov.mr
Mauritius Sateeaved Seebaluck sseebaluck@mail.gov.mu
Mexico María del Socorro Flores Liera focalpointmexico@sre.gob.mx
Mirza Castro mosiris_castro@yahoo.com
Mohamed Shareef mohamed.shareef@mhte.gov.mv
Mongolia Ts. Banzragch uts_banzai@yahoo.com
Montenegro Biljana Djurovic biljanadjurovic@yahoo.com
Morocco Mohamed Nbou nboudrm@yahoo.com
Mozambique Luciano de Castro l.castro@micoa.gov.mz
Namibia Teofilus Mutangeni Nghitila tnghitila@yahoo.com
Nepal Purushottam Ghimire purughimire@yahoo.com
Nicaragua Martha Elena Ruiz de Rodrigue mruiz@marena.gob.ni
Niger Saley Hassane hassanesaley@hotmail.com
Nigeria Helen Esuene piccdm@yahoo.com
Niue Sionetasi Pulehetoa sionetasi.pulehetoa@mail.gov.nu
Oman Zuhaira Ali Dawood zuhaira39@hotmail.com
Omar Ramírez Tejada o.ramirez@cambioclimatico.gob.do
Pakistan Jawed Ali Khan jawedalikhan@hotmail.com
Palau Ngedikes Olai Uludong Polloi opolloi@gmail.com
Panama Eduardo Enrique Reyes Guerrero e.reyes@anam.gob.pa
Paraguay Lilian Portillo lilianportillopy@gmail.com
Peru Vanessa Vereau Ladd vvereau@minam.gob.pe
Philippines UNIO unio.dfa@gmail.com
Qatar Abdulhadi Nasser Al-Marri anmarri@moe.gov.qa
Rep of Korea Byung-Seok Yoo bsyoo72@gmail.com
Rep of Moldova Valeriu Cazac valeriucazac@hotmail.com
Rickardo Ward wardr@gob.bb
Rwanda Dusabeyezu Sébastien dusabeseba@yahoo.fr
Saint Kitts June Hughes <ccodoe@sisterisles.kn
Saint Vincent Edmund Jackson <edmund_jackson2000@yahoo.com
Samoa Aiono Mose Pouvi Sua <mfat@mfat.gov.ws
Sao Tome Adérito Manuel Fernandes Santana <aderitosantana@hotmail.com
Senegal Cheikh Ndiaye Sylla denv@orange.sn
Seychelles Will Agricole w.agricole@pps.gov.sc
Shulamit Nezer shulin@sviva.gov.il
Sierra Leone Denis Sombi Lansana denislansana@yahoo.com
Solomon Islands Rence Sore psmecm@pmc.gov.sb
South Africa Judith Combrink jcombrink@deat.gov.za
Sri Lanka Senarath Mudalige Don Peter Anura Jayatilake eeconga@yahoo.com
Sudan Saadeldin Ibrahim Mohammed Izzeldin hcenr2005@yahoo.com
Suriname Joyce Amarello-Williams arbeid@sr.net
Swaziland Emmanuel Dumisani Dlamini ed_dlamini@yahoo.com
Syria Haitham Nashawati hnashawati1@yahoo.com
Tajikistan Begmurod Mahmadaliev office@meteo.tj
Thailand ONEP thai_ccc@onep.go.th
Theophile Chabi Worou theo_worou@yahoo.fr
Timor Leste Adao Soares Barbosa adaosoaresbarbosa@yahoo.com
Togo Komi Tomyeba kotomyeba@yahoo.fr
Tonga Asipeli Palaki a_palaki@yahoo.com
Tunisia Imed Fadhel i.fadhel@yahoo.fr
Uganda Philip Gwage pgwage@gmail.com
Uruguay Luis Alberto Santos Michetti lusa19@yahoo.com
Uzbekistan Victor Chub uzhymet@meteo.uz
Venezuela Ilenia Medina unidadmedioambiente@gmail.com
Victor Ayodeji Fodeke vicfodeke@gmail.com
Vietnam Nguyen Khac Hieu nkhieu@monre.gov.vn
Vincent Kasulu Seya Makonga kaseyamak@yahoo.fr
Wei Su suwei@ndrc.gov.cn
Yadir Salazar Mejía yadir.salazar@cancilleria.gov.co
Yemen Anwar Abdulaziz Noaman anwar.noaman@gmail.com
Zambia Kenneth Dalison Nkowani kapalakonje2@yahoo.com
Zimbabwe Margaret Mukahanana-Sangarwe mmukahanana58@yahoo.com
These guys are the real deal
A couple of months ago, I did a story that reminds me of why I got into photography in the first place....(editorial photography is getting increasingly difficult to maintain as a career - its fast becoming the preserve of the "gentleman" photographer).
A little-known band called Staff Benda Bilili from Kinshasa were making waves in the international music scene, having just won a big music prize.
So what, you might think, but this group of people have a different story to most "rock n roll" bands...they come from the most deprived areas in one of the most deprived, war-torn pats of the world, and if that wasn't hard-core enough, the core members are disabled from polio, that means they can only get about in wheelchairs or crutches.
Only a little while ago they were living on the streets or more specifically, in the grounds of Kinshasa Zoo, living on their wits and talent.
Staff Benda Bilili - which means "look beyond appearances" in the Lingala language, are the funkiest band you will hear, often sliding out of their wheelchairs to breakdance or body popping on their crutches.
The Drummer works an intricate beat on a plastic beer crate,and a nineteen year-old plucks on his home-made string instrument consisting of a piece of wire strung tightly from an old can, dropping to the floor, playing it like Jimi Hendrix would... and during their raucause, hypnotic gigs in the dusty bars of backstreet Kinshasa, the small crowd lap it up.
Whilst most bands have stylists and teams of marketing men behind them, trying to foster reputations of rebelliousness, and globe-trotting, hard-core lifesyles; these guys, mostly in their thirties and forties, do it for real.
Theyr'e not phased or particularily impressed by their new-found fame, and think nothing of touring Europe, (which they are doing right now), America and Japan - a world away from the squalor of back home. They have an energy, and a devil-may-care way thats amazing and totally different to this day and age of corporate ambition.
.
By Anandi Sharan
New technology interventions to create and reinforce sustainable systems, new ownership patterns to make community ownership of natural resources legally enforceable, natural resource conservation done by communities overruling government and oligopolies, equal rights for all species…. It was never going to be easy to deliver on the Rio earth summit treaties.
The climate convention was especially treacherous, because no one wanted it in the first place: we wanted an energy convention which would create national quotas of fossil fuel use, not a climate convention where we had nothing to say at all because WE DID NOT CAUSE THE PROBLEM. But that would have meant …well, equity, and that has been the sticking point all along.
The only way the UNFCCC process has been kept going for 18 years has been by nearly succumbing and then at the last minute always sidelining the USA. And indeed this is going to be the determining factor in Copenhagen too. The USA forced us all to adopt a Bali Action Plan (BAP) in 2007 which was, according to America, a plan for laying down targets and time tables for everyone.
This was an interpretation of the BAP which no one else – except perhaps Canada – went along with though, because enshrined in the text of the Convention agreed 15 years previously is the principle of “common and differentiated responsibility”, i.e. equity. Annex 1 countries, including the USA, are supposed under the Convention to reduce emissions, but developing countries are supposed to reduce emissions only provided the Annex 1countries pay us.
Today we are hostage to American senators who are in the pay of – well, of the companies and institutions that defend the American Way of Life. Democracy in America is not suited to the politics of the twenty first century, but sadly Obama has not acted on this simple truth which he no doubt knows himself too. He could have decided to forget about Congress and put through new rules under the American Clean Air Act, bolstered by the endangerment finding of the courts that greenhouse gases are damaging to human health.
But he did not, boasting in deeds if not words that he would have enough political charisma to push through an Act, and that rules are cowardly whilst Acts are glorious. Now he has neither, and is revealed as a miserable coward.
The campaign in the next 12 days has to be to write to Prime Ministers, Presidents and Kings and Queens attending the fifteenth Conference of the Parties to the Convention at Copenhagen – the CoP15 and CoP/MoP5 - , asking them to boycott America. The way to do this is to rush through for purely procedural reasons a meaningless 1 page document at the main Conference of the Parties – the CoP15, and then move on to the Meeting of the Parties to the Kyoto Protocol – the CoP/MoP5.
All the signatories of the Kyoto Protocol want to continue with its arrangements and want a second commitment period with legally binding arrangements. The Kyoto Protocol is a decent enough set of rules for ensuring polluters reduce emissions and act on their financial commitments to us by paying us to switch to renewable energy. The deeper the QELROs accepted by the developed countries - the quantified emissions limitation and reduction obligations, the greater the incentive to buy carbon credits from us, the block of G77 and China who DID NOT CAUSE THE PROBLEM, but are willing to do as much as possible about it provided we are paid to do it. Buying carbon credits is the financial mechanism we need. In an ideal world the rich would thus say, right, we cut by 200 % against 1990 levels by 2020.
_______________________________________________
The campaign in the next 12 days has to be to write to Prime Ministers, Presidents and Kings and Queens ... asking them to boycott America.
________________________________________________
This means they cut 100% at home, and another 100% by paying us to install renewable energy systems in the billions so that everyone is the world has clean electricity and no one needs to use coal or non-renewable biomass anymore. In this way we would have an energy convention of sorts after all and climate change may just be slowed down or even reversed. But at the moment it is unlikely we can all agree on 200% cuts for Annex 1 countries against 1990 by 2020 at the CoP/MoP5. But Annex 1 could just agree to let’s say 90% cuts by 2020 - 45% to be done as domestic cuts and 45% to be achieved by paying us to do CDM projects.
The point is, the EU-27, and most of the other Annex 1 countries except the USA, and of course G77 and China, have experience of cooperating and want to go on with the Kyoto Protocol - except Canada - having had five years of the Kyoto Protocol arrangements, and having learnt a lot together. America is unwilling to catch up, unwilling to sign the Kyoto Protocol, and unwilling to make deep cuts – Obama is going to commit to 4% cuts against 1990 levels by 2020, thus dragging down other developed countries on what China calls “a race to the bottom” – but only nearly.
We must write to our leaders and tell them to finish the CoP15 in one day flat, and avoid American filibustering, thereby freeing up the next ten days of negotiations for the CoP/MoP5 - the forum that can deliver real results.
P.S. Stavros Dimas, the environment commissioner of the European Union, called on the trade bloc on Monday to pledge to cut greenhouse gas emissions by 30 percent from 1990 levels to demonstrate leadership. 45% domestically and 45% through CDM would be better. We are on track to use up the entire 1000 Gt CO2e budget for this century before the next commitment period ends in 2020 unless we cut emissions by 8% annually globally.
Does anybody here know anything more about this story, please?
Western Sahara's 'Gandhi' begins hunger strike
Western Sahara's most prominent human rights activist has gone on a hunger strike at an airport in the
Haidar was detained at the airport in Western Sahara's administrative capital, El Aaiún, on her return from the
Haidar told the Guardian by telephone that
Haidar has wide experience of incarceration. In 1987, aged 20, she "disappeared" and was tortured by the Moroccan secret police for more than three years for advocating independence. In 2005 she was jailed for seven months after being beaten by a Moroccan policeman during a demonstration protesting against the Moroccan occupation.
The Spanish foreign ministry said it could not allow Haidar to return to El Aaiún because she had no passport. The Moroccan government, which considers
The conflict ended in 1991, with both parties agreeing to a United Nations-sponsored referendum on self-determination -- including an option for independence -- for the Sahrawi people. But
In recent years
Seven other Sahrawi activists being held by
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Not that my political odyssey is necessarily important. But Phil solicited my participation in this blog, which I am grateful for, and I was moved by his last post to respond. I didn't know that Phil was from South Africa, and I didn't know that Phil was 50. That's part of what's great about the internet (the "blogosphere"): like the dog in the New Yorker cartoon says, "On the internet, nobody knows you're a dog." I had been thinking I was dealing with some English Bright Young Things, frankly, not that there's anything wrong with that. Me, I'm 51, American, resident of Puerto Rico for the past 13 years with the Puerto Rican in-laws to prove it. As every reader of this blog undoubtedly thinks they know, we Americans are given to unintentionally embarrassing bouts of self-revelation. When among the English I always suppress the pop auto-psychoanalysis that passes for bonding among my people.
But now Phil has told us about growing up with leftist parents in apartheid South Africa, by way of explaining himself. (It used to be that white Americans were embarrassed to identify themselves with white South Africans, nowadays I guess it's the reverse.) For Phil, the issue that defined his political identity, according to him, was apartheid. Hard to see how that could not be the case. For me, the issue was the war in Indochina, otherwise known as the Vietnam War. In 1968 I was 10 years old (like Phil). My oldest sister was graduating from high school and off to the University of California at Santa Cruz. We were raised in the American Society of Friends (Quakers), the denomination chosen by my very WASPy father and my apostate Irish Catholic mother (my father has Quaker ancestors). I remember sitting in the meeting listening to the arguments, and the scandal when some young people raised the Viet Cong flag over the old stone meetinghouse in Rochester, New York.
That year, 1968, my father voted for the Democratic nominee, Hubert Humphrey. My mother, outraged by LBJ's escalation of the war, voted for Eugene McCarthy, the anti-war third party candidate. Nixon won the election by less than one percent of the vote. This was my basic lesson in United States politics. You see, the difference between the USSR and the USA was that in the USSR there was one party, and in the USA, two. One, two: see, two is better! But on the reasoning that if the Democrats won, maybe one less person would be killed, very many of us in the US just try to get behind the Democratic candidate. I turned 18 in 1976 and cast my first vote for president for the winner, Jimmy Carter.
It would be another 16 years before I voted for the winner again. But I have rarely wobbled from my role as a Democratic Party loyalist. In 1988 I had agreed to be a precinct captain for Michael Dukakis. This was in Boulder, Colorado. We had our little meeting of five people in a back bedroom of the caucus house; I would have much preferred participating in the living room discussion of the thirty or so Jesse Jackson supporters. (For more on my history as a voter in the US click here.)
But I get ahead of myself. I was saying that the war in Vietnam was my defining political issue. I was in junior high 1970-1972, the years of "Vietnamization," the Nixon administration's strategy of pulling out US troops and relying instead, not on the South Vietnamese forces, who plainly had no belly for the fight, but rather on aerial bombardment of North Vietnam (and, illegally, Cambodia and Laos). The doctrine of massive firepower has its roots in the American Civil War, when the North used its superior industrial base to beat the South into submission, and matured during World Wars I and II, when the US was able to dominate the world through sheer productive power. In the case of an anti-insurgency struggle in Southeast Asia, these tactics were insane: more tonnage of bombs was dropped on Indochina than all the tonnage, of both sides combined, in all of the theatres of WWII.
And I knew it. I was walking around the halls of Brighton High, a public (in the American sense) school of over 5,000 mostly fairly affluent students, and hardly anyone, it seemed, was aware of what was (still) happening in Vietnam. Not my mother. She was all too vocally aware. Bombs dropping on women and children and village people. The US to blame. This experience seared me. My memory is of living in a community where most people were simply unaware of what was being done in their name.
And so it was that with the end of the 70s came the Reagan-era wars in Central America. I was a member of CISPES, the Committee in Solidarity with the People of El Salvador. I followed Mark Danner's heroic reporting from El Salvador and Guatemala. Finally in 1984-1985, during a year-long trip overland from Colorado to Bolivia, I spent a month as a "sandalista" in Nicaragua. We helped to bring in the cotton harvest from Alphonse Robello's plantations on the Nicoya Peninsula, which juts into the Gulf of Fonseca on the Pacific coast. Robello had been an original member of the Sandinista Front, but had fallen out with the Ortegas and fled to Miami. The migrant workers from El Salvador couldn't take the ferry across the Gulf because of the wars. This was during the period that an American helicopter had been shot down on the Honduran border and Reagan was talking about a possible invasion. Some young boys took me out to the cliffs near the farm one night to see the lights of the battleship New Jersey which would come in close at night to freak out the Nicaraguans. We could also see the lights from the Isla del Tigre, a "contra" stronghold in the Gulf that was a staging area for attacks along the border.
Later other, sometimes more prosaic, issues came to the fore, gay rights (where the US has unaccountably done very well compared to most, leading to my participation in many marches, rtallies etc: an interesting topic for another time), the amazing anti-nuclear movement, and today health care. Another old story: in the election of 1980 George H. W. Bush was running for the Republican nomination against Ronald Reagan. Running right, he suggested that a nuclear war was winnable. When he flew into the conservative bastion of Sarasota, Florida, we were ready with quite a spunky demonstration. My sign said "Ban the Bomb." My friend Adam's said "George Orwell Junior Anti-Sex League for Bush." A man at the rally took in my sign and said "Get a job." I laughed and maybe he did too. The next issue of William Buckley's magazine The National Review ran a column on us, quoting both of our signs: bliss! Later we Friends would post bail for Guatemalan Army deserters imprisoned by the Immigration and Naturalization Service in the US, knowing that they would flee (repatriation meant death in the days of Rios Montt).
Since then there has been a lot more. I came to the University of Puerto Rico in 1996 for a job, nothing more. (It was the study of the Spanish language that took me on my first trip to Cuba for five weeks in 1998.) But if one is reasonably aware, reasonably active, there are the local issues as well as the international ones. As Phil says in his post, an important part of life is engagement. Because I have written and spoken on the mental lives of non-human animals, I was asked by some supporters of the animal shelter here to be a judge at the "Mutt Show": ranking dogs on prettiest eyes, most coquettish walk, looks most like owner, etc. Fine. Where opportunity for doing good emerges, one takes it. The bottom line, I decided a long time ago (maybe with some guidance from Bertrand Russell), is this: one is active, in speech and deeds, in the effort to make the world a better place, until one dies. That is a necessary component of a well-realized life. I do not believe that that will ever change.
But now Phil has told us about growing up with leftist parents in apartheid South Africa, by way of explaining himself. (It used to be that white Americans were embarrassed to identify themselves with white South Africans, nowadays I guess it's the reverse.) For Phil, the issue that defined his political identity, according to him, was apartheid. Hard to see how that could not be the case. For me, the issue was the war in Indochina, otherwise known as the Vietnam War. In 1968 I was 10 years old (like Phil). My oldest sister was graduating from high school and off to the University of California at Santa Cruz. We were raised in the American Society of Friends (Quakers), the denomination chosen by my very WASPy father and my apostate Irish Catholic mother (my father has Quaker ancestors). I remember sitting in the meeting listening to the arguments, and the scandal when some young people raised the Viet Cong flag over the old stone meetinghouse in Rochester, New York.
That year, 1968, my father voted for the Democratic nominee, Hubert Humphrey. My mother, outraged by LBJ's escalation of the war, voted for Eugene McCarthy, the anti-war third party candidate. Nixon won the election by less than one percent of the vote. This was my basic lesson in United States politics. You see, the difference between the USSR and the USA was that in the USSR there was one party, and in the USA, two. One, two: see, two is better! But on the reasoning that if the Democrats won, maybe one less person would be killed, very many of us in the US just try to get behind the Democratic candidate. I turned 18 in 1976 and cast my first vote for president for the winner, Jimmy Carter.
It would be another 16 years before I voted for the winner again. But I have rarely wobbled from my role as a Democratic Party loyalist. In 1988 I had agreed to be a precinct captain for Michael Dukakis. This was in Boulder, Colorado. We had our little meeting of five people in a back bedroom of the caucus house; I would have much preferred participating in the living room discussion of the thirty or so Jesse Jackson supporters. (For more on my history as a voter in the US click here.)
But I get ahead of myself. I was saying that the war in Vietnam was my defining political issue. I was in junior high 1970-1972, the years of "Vietnamization," the Nixon administration's strategy of pulling out US troops and relying instead, not on the South Vietnamese forces, who plainly had no belly for the fight, but rather on aerial bombardment of North Vietnam (and, illegally, Cambodia and Laos). The doctrine of massive firepower has its roots in the American Civil War, when the North used its superior industrial base to beat the South into submission, and matured during World Wars I and II, when the US was able to dominate the world through sheer productive power. In the case of an anti-insurgency struggle in Southeast Asia, these tactics were insane: more tonnage of bombs was dropped on Indochina than all the tonnage, of both sides combined, in all of the theatres of WWII.
And I knew it. I was walking around the halls of Brighton High, a public (in the American sense) school of over 5,000 mostly fairly affluent students, and hardly anyone, it seemed, was aware of what was (still) happening in Vietnam. Not my mother. She was all too vocally aware. Bombs dropping on women and children and village people. The US to blame. This experience seared me. My memory is of living in a community where most people were simply unaware of what was being done in their name.
And so it was that with the end of the 70s came the Reagan-era wars in Central America. I was a member of CISPES, the Committee in Solidarity with the People of El Salvador. I followed Mark Danner's heroic reporting from El Salvador and Guatemala. Finally in 1984-1985, during a year-long trip overland from Colorado to Bolivia, I spent a month as a "sandalista" in Nicaragua. We helped to bring in the cotton harvest from Alphonse Robello's plantations on the Nicoya Peninsula, which juts into the Gulf of Fonseca on the Pacific coast. Robello had been an original member of the Sandinista Front, but had fallen out with the Ortegas and fled to Miami. The migrant workers from El Salvador couldn't take the ferry across the Gulf because of the wars. This was during the period that an American helicopter had been shot down on the Honduran border and Reagan was talking about a possible invasion. Some young boys took me out to the cliffs near the farm one night to see the lights of the battleship New Jersey which would come in close at night to freak out the Nicaraguans. We could also see the lights from the Isla del Tigre, a "contra" stronghold in the Gulf that was a staging area for attacks along the border.
Later other, sometimes more prosaic, issues came to the fore, gay rights (where the US has unaccountably done very well compared to most, leading to my participation in many marches, rtallies etc: an interesting topic for another time), the amazing anti-nuclear movement, and today health care. Another old story: in the election of 1980 George H. W. Bush was running for the Republican nomination against Ronald Reagan. Running right, he suggested that a nuclear war was winnable. When he flew into the conservative bastion of Sarasota, Florida, we were ready with quite a spunky demonstration. My sign said "Ban the Bomb." My friend Adam's said "George Orwell Junior Anti-Sex League for Bush." A man at the rally took in my sign and said "Get a job." I laughed and maybe he did too. The next issue of William Buckley's magazine The National Review ran a column on us, quoting both of our signs: bliss! Later we Friends would post bail for Guatemalan Army deserters imprisoned by the Immigration and Naturalization Service in the US, knowing that they would flee (repatriation meant death in the days of Rios Montt).
Since then there has been a lot more. I came to the University of Puerto Rico in 1996 for a job, nothing more. (It was the study of the Spanish language that took me on my first trip to Cuba for five weeks in 1998.) But if one is reasonably aware, reasonably active, there are the local issues as well as the international ones. As Phil says in his post, an important part of life is engagement. Because I have written and spoken on the mental lives of non-human animals, I was asked by some supporters of the animal shelter here to be a judge at the "Mutt Show": ranking dogs on prettiest eyes, most coquettish walk, looks most like owner, etc. Fine. Where opportunity for doing good emerges, one takes it. The bottom line, I decided a long time ago (maybe with some guidance from Bertrand Russell), is this: one is active, in speech and deeds, in the effort to make the world a better place, until one dies. That is a necessary component of a well-realized life. I do not believe that that will ever change.
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Tell me this. What really constitutes effective political activism in the second decade of the 21st century? And how many of you, like me, have been made to feel like political dilettantes, have been discounted and sidelined in one way or another over the years because you haven't used your views and political activity to leverage yourself into an influential position in some organisation or other?
This is the "subject" speaking now. (This is Camraman's hateful "I") Personally, if you examined my life you would see that I obviously did not aim at financial reward, but at some form of rewarding and socially useful work. I don't expect approval for this. What do I care for approval or disapproval.
Whatever the curious mix of my personal politics, I have, in a way, held fast to my bedrock values. Many of us still do. We work for little in socially useful occupations and we do our best for society, but then then, somehow, we are told by some smart arse or other, that we are not doing enough. That we are onlookers and not actors. That we should be out there acting in the world - as if what we are doing were not acting.
In my case, my political viewpoint is that of, literally, a fellow traveller. My identity was defined by the Apartheid regime. Whether or not I actually fought and struggled as much as my parents did or as much as other people my age did against the injustices in South Africa, nevertheless that struggle absorbed my consciousness and moulded me and made great claims on my intellectual and emotional life over many decades. All my life I have been a political activist in one way or another since the age of 12. And from the moment I was born I have lived with the consequences of my parent's political activism. And where is my South African passport at the end of it all, by the way?
One example: I was driven to confront my Communist roots when I lived, studied and worked in the Soviet Union. I marched and demonstrated and argued and started societies and become a student leader and challenged lecturers and teachers, and worked as a union recruiter and wrote articles.
I followed my parents around the world when I was a child and a teenager because they were political exiles. Does that mean that my brothers and I were not political exiles? The fact that our education was fragmented into 13 schools and that we moved house 26 times and lived on three continents is not unrelated to our identity as the children of South African exiles. But do we qualify?
But at the age of 50, despite all I have said and done and the all the work I have done, I am still made to feel like a political dilettante by people younger than my self, people more adept at gestural politics, (the ones that play at Bolshevism, the ones that pose outside international conferences), and it infuriates me. Well I too have grafted in all kinds of ghettos. Millions of us have and do.
In addition to teaching my students useful skills, I teach my students, (and I have many students, and I have had many students), that capitalism and capitalists must be controlled by society. That democracy is vital and that democracy means that the state must be representative. And that for the representative state to be democratic it must be powerful.
The state must control, own and administer all the resources and natural monopolies of a country and regulate the hell out of the financial sector and the private sector in general to ensure that society and people come out on top.
I tell them that the national state, allied to other national states, must be powerful enough to terrorise the huge international corporations into toeing the line. I insist to them that public servants must have an incorruptible vocation of service, in the way that the best religious people have a vocation of service.
This also means we need to have huge, powerful and politically influential trade unions. That we must build on campaigning traditions of direct action. That consumer groups and community groups should also be powerful and fully represented. All of this in order to support the state and counter-balance the corporate lobbyists.
Adam Smith and the "social entrepreneurs" and Fukuyama and the whole host of those bought out brains, those intellectual prostitutes, can go screw themselves. Admit it. A society where the profit motive dominates is a sick incontinent and cruel society, however many Nobel prizes you give to the economists people that say it isn't. That's the sort of thing I tell my students.
I believe in institutional good practice and I believe that good institutions are at the core of any civilised society and that if you have good institutions in your country then you are a lucky, lucky people and that you should treasure them and protect them. The BBC is one such institution, the British civil service is another.
I think that if your society hasn't developed a certain level of culture and governance then you are pissing in the wind when you demand too much of it. The first step in building a fair and just society is to build up viable institutions: a functioning legislature, an effective civil service, a fair and well resourced education system, a fair and resourced health system and an honest government.
I believe in the primacy of healthy communities as the basis of society and I don't believe in the nuclear family. The nuclear family simply doesn't work. Emphasis on the nuclear family atomises societies and makes people more and more self-centred. The nuclear family is easy to manipulate. Shamans and artists aside, we were always meant to live in large supportive extended networks.
So my question is this. What constitutes real and useful political activism in the second decade of the 21st century.
I am not talking about political posing, or gestural politics or reactionary identity and single issue politics or shallow "green" politics or fetishistic direct action seeking the adrenalin thrill of violence and the chase, or any of that other crap.
What else could I do to remove the label of dilettante?
This is the "subject" speaking now. (This is Camraman's hateful "I") Personally, if you examined my life you would see that I obviously did not aim at financial reward, but at some form of rewarding and socially useful work. I don't expect approval for this. What do I care for approval or disapproval.
Whatever the curious mix of my personal politics, I have, in a way, held fast to my bedrock values. Many of us still do. We work for little in socially useful occupations and we do our best for society, but then then, somehow, we are told by some smart arse or other, that we are not doing enough. That we are onlookers and not actors. That we should be out there acting in the world - as if what we are doing were not acting.
In my case, my political viewpoint is that of, literally, a fellow traveller. My identity was defined by the Apartheid regime. Whether or not I actually fought and struggled as much as my parents did or as much as other people my age did against the injustices in South Africa, nevertheless that struggle absorbed my consciousness and moulded me and made great claims on my intellectual and emotional life over many decades. All my life I have been a political activist in one way or another since the age of 12. And from the moment I was born I have lived with the consequences of my parent's political activism. And where is my South African passport at the end of it all, by the way?
One example: I was driven to confront my Communist roots when I lived, studied and worked in the Soviet Union. I marched and demonstrated and argued and started societies and become a student leader and challenged lecturers and teachers, and worked as a union recruiter and wrote articles.
I followed my parents around the world when I was a child and a teenager because they were political exiles. Does that mean that my brothers and I were not political exiles? The fact that our education was fragmented into 13 schools and that we moved house 26 times and lived on three continents is not unrelated to our identity as the children of South African exiles. But do we qualify?
But at the age of 50, despite all I have said and done and the all the work I have done, I am still made to feel like a political dilettante by people younger than my self, people more adept at gestural politics, (the ones that play at Bolshevism, the ones that pose outside international conferences), and it infuriates me. Well I too have grafted in all kinds of ghettos. Millions of us have and do.
In addition to teaching my students useful skills, I teach my students, (and I have many students, and I have had many students), that capitalism and capitalists must be controlled by society. That democracy is vital and that democracy means that the state must be representative. And that for the representative state to be democratic it must be powerful.
The state must control, own and administer all the resources and natural monopolies of a country and regulate the hell out of the financial sector and the private sector in general to ensure that society and people come out on top.
I tell them that the national state, allied to other national states, must be powerful enough to terrorise the huge international corporations into toeing the line. I insist to them that public servants must have an incorruptible vocation of service, in the way that the best religious people have a vocation of service.
This also means we need to have huge, powerful and politically influential trade unions. That we must build on campaigning traditions of direct action. That consumer groups and community groups should also be powerful and fully represented. All of this in order to support the state and counter-balance the corporate lobbyists.
Adam Smith and the "social entrepreneurs" and Fukuyama and the whole host of those bought out brains, those intellectual prostitutes, can go screw themselves. Admit it. A society where the profit motive dominates is a sick incontinent and cruel society, however many Nobel prizes you give to the economists people that say it isn't. That's the sort of thing I tell my students.
I believe in institutional good practice and I believe that good institutions are at the core of any civilised society and that if you have good institutions in your country then you are a lucky, lucky people and that you should treasure them and protect them. The BBC is one such institution, the British civil service is another.
I think that if your society hasn't developed a certain level of culture and governance then you are pissing in the wind when you demand too much of it. The first step in building a fair and just society is to build up viable institutions: a functioning legislature, an effective civil service, a fair and well resourced education system, a fair and resourced health system and an honest government.
I believe in the primacy of healthy communities as the basis of society and I don't believe in the nuclear family. The nuclear family simply doesn't work. Emphasis on the nuclear family atomises societies and makes people more and more self-centred. The nuclear family is easy to manipulate. Shamans and artists aside, we were always meant to live in large supportive extended networks.
So my question is this. What constitutes real and useful political activism in the second decade of the 21st century.
I am not talking about political posing, or gestural politics or reactionary identity and single issue politics or shallow "green" politics or fetishistic direct action seeking the adrenalin thrill of violence and the chase, or any of that other crap.
What else could I do to remove the label of dilettante?
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Dear Comrade Artists,
Please forgive me for taking the liberty of rearranging your wonderful strip so as to try to find out, experimentally, whether one can make it come up bigger in Blogger.
What I have found is that it goes out on e-mail from the blog at the same size as it appears on the blog.
You can get a decent look at it if you click on the image, and the same applies with the e-mail that comes back. But that's about all.
So far in my investigations, there seems to be no way to make the available space that Blogger allows you, any wider. I have gained a little in legibility by changing the shape (because the available opening is nearer to square, or at least "portrait" rather than "landscape") like this:
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Comrades,
Firstly, sorry for the group mail!
The reason: a nasty white supremacist organisation called Storm Front has set up a series of fake black-on-white hate sites.
The idea behind the sites is to radicalize room-temperature white racists by making outrageous pronouncements in blackface. The sites are a kind of reductio ad absurdum of the racist's view of the “black” population and, as such, are pretty effective… they tell people what they think they already know and amplify the pseudo-cathartic sensation with lo-fi collages of black “perps” juxtaposed with their photogenic (often blond) victims. The comment threads are ripe and greasy-hot with n-word-flinging. It becomes a kind of Klannish Reality Television when actual friends and families of murdered Aryan maidens jump in and vent on the Strawman 'Blacks'.
Might I request that if you have the time you chip in and call the bluff of these white supremacist clowns -- having a little too much success these days, are they not? -- preferably using some of your splendid wit? If you could forward this on to fellow anti-Nazis, or if those of you with blogs could send up the Bat-signal, that would be great.
Sean
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Common culture is surely made up of millions and millions of "I's"? Gazing at another persons navel, is that preferable? The self portraits of Van Gogh, Egon Schiele, Rembrandt, Frieda Kahlo, Picasso, Freud all navel nothingness? All the Beatles songs with an "I" in the title?(there are tons of them - i am not a fan of them by the way)............."
On one thing I do agree - magazine and newspaper articles written about the idiot "I" columnists - money for old navel rope. "Today I cleared out my loft, it was such a mess, my cleaner had to dust me down after I spent an hour up there looking at my old school books, did you know in 1979 I got a B in English, I remember I had written an essay on myself....." Something like this regularly appears in The Guardian magazine, dreadful stuff, the hateful "I" was never more hateful.
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How appealing - amidst Maurice Bloch's fine exegesis and balanced Guardian obituary of Claude-Levi Strauss were the following words on his notion of cultural transmission:
"There is also another, even more fundamental, way in which his thought seeks to rejoin that of the mythology of the Amerindians as he understands it to be. Myths have no authors. Their creation occurs imperceptibly in the process of transmission or transformation over hundreds of years and across hundreds of miles. The individual subject, the self-obsessed innovator or artist so dear to much western philosophy, had, therefore, no place for Lévi-Strauss, and indeed repelled him. He saw the glorification of individual creativity as an illusion. As he wrote in Tristes Tropiques: "the I is hateful". This perspective is particularly evident in his study of Amerindian art. This art did not involve the great individualistic self-displays of western art that he abhorred. The Amerindian artist, by contrast, tried to reproduce what others had done and, if he was innovating, he was unaware of the fact. Throughout Lévi-Strauss's work there is a clear aesthetic preference for a creativity that is distributed throughout a population and that does not wear its emotions on its sleeve".
Well put – and what a felicitous phrase: “the I is hateful”. It verbalises the distinction between communal culture – narratives that can be shared and understood – and the compulsion to proclaim one’s own pre-occupations. The creative arc seems to have reached the opposite shore – the subjective as subject…indeed, even the term “creative” emphasises a fashioning of something new rather than a re-making of something shared.
Thinking of European equivalents of Levi-Strauss’ peoples – the cave-painters of Lascaux and Altamira, for example. Not communicating universal myths, perhaps, but many hands working to formalise and fix their place in the scheme, to understand their relations to the world and to each other – this is where we are, this is what we did....How valuable or useful would have been the maverick Cro-Magnon, the Nijinsky of the Neanderthals, standing in the corner of the cave drawing pictures of themselves? Or to take the myth culture that L-S wrote about – creation myths expressed as dreams, dreams taken as communing with the past and the future…how valuable would be an Amerindividual contributing last night’s dream about landing the biggest fish?
So, how did we get here? Whence sprang the urge to share one’s innermost feelings? The Romantics? Or before them the poets of courtly love –but even these might be thought of as dealing with the universals. How has that managed to descend to the self as subject – albeit critically acclaimed -– what Rolling Stone refers to as “the personal explorations of the best singer-songwriters” - bedsit music?. The process reduces further: newspaper columns concerning themselves solely with the columnist, studded with the perpendicular pronoun – I, I, I – what some refer to as the confessional, but in many cases doesn’t rise above the banal...no names mentioned here, but random examples from the English Independent and Guardian: Conkers, my secret weapon in the war on spiders; I drink a bottle of wine a day, but don’t call me an alcoholic; the ping-pong table is a tall as me.
To paraphrase Pope we seem to have moved away from the proper study of Man being Mankind. The ancients, and Levi Stubbs, must have it correct – surely it is more profitable to concentrate on someone else’s navel than to gaze at one’s own?
Camraman
"There is also another, even more fundamental, way in which his thought seeks to rejoin that of the mythology of the Amerindians as he understands it to be. Myths have no authors. Their creation occurs imperceptibly in the process of transmission or transformation over hundreds of years and across hundreds of miles. The individual subject, the self-obsessed innovator or artist so dear to much western philosophy, had, therefore, no place for Lévi-Strauss, and indeed repelled him. He saw the glorification of individual creativity as an illusion. As he wrote in Tristes Tropiques: "the I is hateful". This perspective is particularly evident in his study of Amerindian art. This art did not involve the great individualistic self-displays of western art that he abhorred. The Amerindian artist, by contrast, tried to reproduce what others had done and, if he was innovating, he was unaware of the fact. Throughout Lévi-Strauss's work there is a clear aesthetic preference for a creativity that is distributed throughout a population and that does not wear its emotions on its sleeve".
Well put – and what a felicitous phrase: “the I is hateful”. It verbalises the distinction between communal culture – narratives that can be shared and understood – and the compulsion to proclaim one’s own pre-occupations. The creative arc seems to have reached the opposite shore – the subjective as subject…indeed, even the term “creative” emphasises a fashioning of something new rather than a re-making of something shared.
Thinking of European equivalents of Levi-Strauss’ peoples – the cave-painters of Lascaux and Altamira, for example. Not communicating universal myths, perhaps, but many hands working to formalise and fix their place in the scheme, to understand their relations to the world and to each other – this is where we are, this is what we did....How valuable or useful would have been the maverick Cro-Magnon, the Nijinsky of the Neanderthals, standing in the corner of the cave drawing pictures of themselves? Or to take the myth culture that L-S wrote about – creation myths expressed as dreams, dreams taken as communing with the past and the future…how valuable would be an Amerindividual contributing last night’s dream about landing the biggest fish?
So, how did we get here? Whence sprang the urge to share one’s innermost feelings? The Romantics? Or before them the poets of courtly love –but even these might be thought of as dealing with the universals. How has that managed to descend to the self as subject – albeit critically acclaimed -– what Rolling Stone refers to as “the personal explorations of the best singer-songwriters” - bedsit music?. The process reduces further: newspaper columns concerning themselves solely with the columnist, studded with the perpendicular pronoun – I, I, I – what some refer to as the confessional, but in many cases doesn’t rise above the banal...no names mentioned here, but random examples from the English Independent and Guardian: Conkers, my secret weapon in the war on spiders; I drink a bottle of wine a day, but don’t call me an alcoholic; the ping-pong table is a tall as me.
To paraphrase Pope we seem to have moved away from the proper study of Man being Mankind. The ancients, and Levi Stubbs, must have it correct – surely it is more profitable to concentrate on someone else’s navel than to gaze at one’s own?
Camraman
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Ron Press passed away on 28 October 2009. This article was found, during a Google search, at http://www.hartford-hwp.com/archives/10/013.html.
New tools for Marxists
By Ron E. Press, 3 December 1994
Editor's note: This manuscript, reprinted here with permission, was received December 3, 1994. It was first published in Forum for Marxism, Science, and Philosophy (c/o Mike Taylor 92 Bowyer Drive Slough SL1 5EQ United Kingdom). I am placing the document here because it applies its conceptual tools to the situation in South Africa
Political Science
The intertwining of science and society has been a subject of study of many great minds.(1) Marxism was however the first generalized attempt in the light of the scientific revolution of the 18th century, to look at the whole of human experiences as a unified system of thinking, without the invocation of an all knowing extra terrestrial being. Within its parameters were placed the physical sciences, mathematics, the social sciences, economics, politics, etc. and the acceptance that the result would always be imperfect and incomplete. (2) Lenin in Materialism and Emperio-criticism laid the foundation of this integration of science and politics. Science has undergone a revolution since that time but few Marxists have tried to re-posit Lenin's great work into the modern era. I believe modern science has a contribution to make to our understanding of present day socioeconomic forces.
Unfortunately as with all previous summations of human experience, the sum was codified and turned into a rigid dogma. Marxism specifically contained within itself its incompleteness and changeability. But in vain, the mighty while claiming to be practitioners of Marxism patently failed to acknowledge their inability to accept change. One reason was that the sciences which were and are the powerhouse of rational thinking, had not yet developed the tools to deal with the problems of uncertainty, complexity and chaos.
Mathematics, physics, chemistry, biology, economics, were still rigorously tied to the concepts of the study of carefully separated and isolated systems. If there was a problem the first thing to do was to study it in isolation. It was further regarded as a major success if the problem could be described in terms of numbers and mathematical formulas. While agreeing that the reintegration of the segment into the whole was essential it was generally considered to be too difficult or complex. For example Chinese medicine which specifically considers the whole person, was and still is ignored or down graded (added to that it is practised by foreigners).
Because there were no scientific tools with which to grasp complexity socialists and humanists did the best they could. If there was no exceptional leader or Guru they set up a committee. If one was in power one had a much more powerful central committee and because that was too large and complex there was a smaller politburo or cabinet. I submit that we are still on the same treadmill and it is no longer good enough. We need to grasp the new developments in the study of complexity, chaos theory, and non-linear mathematics. We must not set up more and bigger committees. Central government structures must be subservient to and act at the behest of the organizations of the people and no longer try to know it all and control.
It is time to stand back and with the latest tools developed by humankind to take a new look at forms of organisation.
New Tools
Information and Computation
Computations
Complex systems involve the storage and movement of vast quantities of information. Computers in the last decade have advanced so that they can store and access information with speed and sophistication. This ability is merely an extension of the library at Alexandria
Complex questions such as predicting the weather have been possible in theory for decades. However the calculations take so long by ordinary numerical methods that the answers were but predictions of history past. With computers it is now possible to perform these tasks timeous and with increasing, but incomplete, accuracy. The resultant predictions depend critically on the initial parameters, the so called butterfly effect. Meteorologists are on a never ending merry-go-round in their search for more accurate predictions. (3, 4)
Economists are in an even more difficult position. The old Soviet Union organised industrial production by trying to regulate supply and demand with the use of statistics. As the economy grew so the data grew and computers were brought in to assist. (5) History has shown this command economy was too complex to be subject to centralised control. This of course is likewise the case in the so called market economies where computer models have proved to have a very limited predictive success. (6)
Are economies like the weather actually incomputable? There is a considerable part of the economy which is unknown to the statisticians, the so called “black” economy, thus the initial parameters are in their nature inaccurate. Further economies are subject to the ability of people to learn as well as to their whims and emotions. The GATT talks are yet another illustration of unrestrained futility. There is no chance that the worlds economy or even the trade side of it can be understood or directed by any committee let alone one set up in such an unrepresentative manner.
Politics has likewise proved to be like the weather: not only unpredictable but small insignificant actions often cause major storms and changes. There are numerous examples which can be presented but I will confine myself mostly to some from South Africa
The real qualitative difference computers have made is the extra dimension given to the mathematician over and above their ability to manipulate data. The computer has given us a tool with which to investigate complexity. These are systems that are intractable without the use of computers. There are so many multiple choices that it would appear that there is no possibility of a non chaotic outcome. I refer to games theory, emergence and the insights these give into evolution, genetics, and similar problems. (8)
Marxists must recognise that change is not controllable or directable but emerges from the complexity of society. It is up to the politicians, the Marxists, to interpret and understand these changes. We are not the directors but the detectors of change.
Information theory
Modern information theory has given rise to ideas such as information bandwidth and entropy, i.e. how much information can be carried by a transmission line, how reliable or incorruptible the system is, how quickly is the information transmitted. In socio-political terms materials and people must be included in the discussion of such exchanges. (9)
These advances in theory and even more importantly in practice are vital for the understanding of present day politics and socio-economics. Ideas like “can a revolution succeed in one country” were more viable in 1917 than today. “Not in my back yard” was a reasonable request a few years ago but not now when we live in each others back yards. The global village or global economy are directly related to the modern facility for the transmission of information and materials. In the mathematics of politics the separation of variables becomes more and more non-viable, the poor cannot be considered separate from the rich. Solutions to problems based on a narrow set of factors prove to be relatively valueless. The present history of South Africa
Censorship, restricted access to the media, banning of political parties, trade restrictions, the hoarding of grain stocks, etc. are examples of a narrowing of the information or exchange bandwidth. The use of disinformation organisations and agencies, bans on immigration and unfair trade practices (GATT), are examples on the deliberate corruption of transmission. There is the added danger of a secret network being developed which distorts and eventually even subverts the main system. (Computer viruses, Secret services etc.) (11)
The release of Nelson Mandela together with the un-banning of the numerous organisations of the people dramatically increased the information bandwidth of politics in South Africa
Chaos Theory and The structure of Complexity
Many systems have been found to be organised into fundamentally similar structures. The universe consists of relatively dense centres of matter, galaxies, which exchange energy/matter in the form of radiation, between them. Stars, of which galaxies are composed, exchange radiation and matter between them. The same pattern is seen with for example living matter. Genes hold the species coding which by the exchange of information carried by messenger proteins allows the reproduction of new genes. Cells are enclosed systems which are alive and stable and constantly exchange materials with their environment. The animal's organs consist of networks of cells just as the animal itself is a set of interacting organs.
Groups of people form clubs or associations. Interacting groups of people make up communities. Communities form countries. The interaction between them is in the form of the exchange of information and goods.
A computer program similarly consists of a set of numbers which constitute the instruction set (i.e. the node) and the electronic system which carries the information in the form of numbers from node to node. But more of this later.
The motif in all these cases can be expressed as a structure of nodes and exchanges. The nodes are stable though not static. The channels of exchange connect the nodes in complex sometimes ever changing patterns.
Additions to the structural picture
Arising out of the theories of the structure and origins of the universe, is the suggestion that a very large percentage of the mass of the universe is as yet unaccounted for. (12)
The weakest force, gravity, is in the end one of the most influential and important of all.
The biochemical processes which define and constitute the life of the human body make up but a small proportion of the mass of the body which is mainly water.
In fact large percentages of any system at the first cursory glance take a back seat in its operation. But on closer examination are non the less very important.
Like wise the “Silent Majority” in the end have a major influence on the operations of society. The CPSU disregarded their own silent majority with disastrous consequences.
Nodal distributions
Nodes are seldom distributed uniformly and this indicates that certain groups of nodes carry extra weight. In galaxies there is usually a definable centre around which the stars revolve. Similarly our sun is the most important body in the solar system. Neurons are distributed throughout the body but those concentrated in the brain pay a major part in the operation of the organism. The CPU is the heart of the personal computer although there is much electronics besides. So in society there are many organisations but central government structures are a major player.
Sequential changes
Quite complex systems such as the shape of a fern or the flocking of birds, have been shown to derive from very simple initial parameters. This has been shown to be very similar to the reasons for the popularity of a pop song, or in some cases the collapse of a political party. It is consistent with the effect experienced when slight deviations from generally accepted norms go uncorrected, for example the “deviations” of a Mao or a Stalin. The progression of Gatsha Buthelezi from being a supporter of the ANC to being one of its main opponents is a case in point. (13)
There is however another form of emergence which arises spontaneously from an initial system which has a seemingly infinite set of possible outcomes. The primordial soup from which an infinite number of possible chemical compounds and biological systems could arise gave birth to the limited set of organisms alive on our planet today.
If we regard successive changes in terms of some sort of progress then perhaps we believe in a benevolent God. Or perhaps we believe in evolution where successive changes adapt a species to better cope with its environment.
Perhaps the past is handed on to the future with our genes.
The concept of successive change or emergence is tied up with entropy, the arrow of time, and the self organisation of complex systems.(14, 15,16)
Stasis Chaos and self organisation
Picture a dam across the Vaal river in South Africa
A small leak develops in the dam wall. This will lead to catastrophic failure and devastation. The system will later settle down to a new stable equilibrium.
This picture is extremely common in the workings of nature. Ice is a stable structure with each water molecule in a “fixed” space. Stasis or order dominates. Melt the ice and there is fluid water. It cannot stand on its own feet, so to say, its molecules are in chaotic disorder and all stability is gone. Very interesting structures arise however when a liquid/solid is held just at the melting point.
Consider Yugoslavia Yugoslavia
The socio-economic system of the world was in relative stable order prior to the first world war. The war created chaos and disorder especially in the then Empire of the Tzar. Out of this chaos, out of the interface between the stability of Capitalism and the Chaos of famine and war came the first socialist system. In particular the Soviet form of organisation as recognised by Lenin came into being. The `Soviet' system was not invented or created by the communists but emerged from the system itself at a time when the system itself bordered on chaos.
The interface between stasis and chaos is the birth place of the new.
Crisis is the birth place of opportunity. Stability and order is the precursor of chaos.
Computer Simulations
There have been a number of computer simulations of complex systems. They have demonstrated a number of phenomena which mirror various aspects of political life. The instruction set (which is set up to be self modifying) can be considered to be the node and the running of the program is the exchanges being set in motion.
A number of remarkable things were observed in various simulations for example. In one example numbers were sorted by a short instruction set. The original instruction set reproduced itself. A new instruction set evolved which could sort the numbers much more efficiently. This grew rapidly in number. A completely different instruction set then appeared. This grew at the expense of the number sorting set, it was in fact a parasite. The number of the sorting instruction set decreased but the combination of the parasite set and the sorting set proved to be even more efficient at sorting numbers.
In another simulation the instruction set grew rapidly in number. Then it suddenly collapsed to be replaced with a chaotic period of apparently unproductive activity. This was replaced by an sudden blossoming of an even more vigorous species. In looking back into the computer's activity during this time it was found that the seeds of the vigorous species could be found within the developments during the period of chaos.
These and other simulations showed patterns remarkably similar to those found in evolution, economic activity, and the organisation of society. They are recognisably “Marxist” concepts.
Theory and struggle
For example the standard Marxist idea that society passes in a linear manner from primitive communism via class struggle to the ultimate victory when the working class replaces capitalism with a classless society is an unattainable myth. Especially when a classless society was taken to mean the establishment of order and stability, in fact stasis. The theories outlined above indicate that stasis means the inevitable sudden crossover into chaos and collapse. Progress (more satisfactorily the direction of times arrow) is much more like the weather, summer follows winter but there are summery days in winter and wintry days in summer and sometimes the rains fail to come at all.
Strange attractor
Consider a simple two dimensional system (i) where point (a) represents a mode of production based on a free for all with the devil take the hindmost and (b) represents a mode of production where the welfare of all its citizens is its major consideration. In classical terms (a) is represented by the private ownership of the means of production and (b) by their social ownership. The ball will roll to point (a) and then on to point (b). This is an extreme simplification of classical Marxist thinking. It is consistent with the simplistic terminology of 'capitalism' and 'socialism'. (I will use the term socialist in its broadest definition, 'The general advancement of the whole population - not individual enrichment'.)
Consider the more complex three dimensional system (ii). A ball released at point (c) will roll down to the depression (a) but may well not stay there but perform a complex set of manoeuvres before it ends up circling point (b). this sort of picture is more in line with the perspectives of modern mathematics and strange attractors. As an aside, the pattern of path of the attractor is repetitive but never exactly so. This encapsulates the phrase that 'history repeats itself'.
The life of society can perhaps be considered to be a multi-dimensional system where (a) represents “Capitalism” and (b) represents “Socialism.” The dimensions could be perhaps, housing, health, jobs, leisure, and so on. Then society could be expected to move from (a) to (b). The precise definition of either points would be impossible, and society would never be found at either point but would pass from the vicinity of (a) to the vicinity of (b). The terms Capitalism and Socialism become more meaningful and much broader. They do however represent two different types of society, they are distinctly different species. Lenin in State and Revolution continued the work of Engels and Marx in outlining the parameters which form the basis for the definition of systems indicated by points (a) and (b). It is interesting that they did not define the form or structure which socialism will have. Lenin recognised these new structure when they emerged. He initiated the slogan “all power to the soviets”.
There can be little quarrel with the pattern of society passing from primitive communism through slavery.... to capitalism and thence to some better system. Times' (17) arrow is inherent in our understanding of the universe. The idea of the motion of such a complex system such as society being described in terms of strange attractors rather than simple mechanical motion is inviting. As also is the description of society in terms of a multi- dimensional space where an exact definition is accepted to be impossible and where any definition contains multiple facets, private property, the market, co-operatives, ....and so on. Modern capitalism itself contains aspects of slavery, socialism, co-operation and antagonisms etc.
This is the pattern indicated by history and exemplified by the computer models.
But humankind is not a mindless computer. We can think and by understanding the laws of nature can help avoid disasters and create a better life for all.
The organisational form of society must be such that it does not become a straightjacket. We must accept a form of organisation which operates at the edge of order and chaos. Only in this way will we avoid the violent destructive swings of, peace and calm (in essence stagnation) on the one hand, and armed violent chaos on the other.
Some Suggestions
Dictatorships take it upon themselves to organise society for the good of the dictatorship. They impose stasis. “Socialism” under the guidance of the CPSU imposed stasis for the good of the people. In the beginnings of building socialism in the Soviet Union the Party acted as the exchange system between the nodes (for example the Soviets the trade unions etc.). It however became not an instrument for exchanges but for bureaucratic control. Without free exchange the system relapsed into stasis. With modern methods of communication and transport a future governmental structure must encourage, not stifle, free exchanges between the nodes of the new society. The central government whilst remaining the major concentration of nodes must still be but part of the system.
The greater the bandwidth and the greater the speed of communication between nodes of society the greater the possibilities of necessary changes being accommodated and stasis being avoided. The human brain is the bodies most sensitive organ designed to react to and counter danger and instigate action when appropriate. It is however in the nature of the total organisation that the brain cannot control or dictate to the various neural systems in the rest of the body. Mind is very limited in it's power over matter.
Modern capitalism controls the organisational forms of society so that capital will profit but it has learnt to allow a certain degree of anarchy, which in essence acts as a stabiliser.
Socialism by definition is there for the benefit of the people. It is a species different from capitalism. What benefits the people must however be determined by the people and not subsumed by the leadership of political parties even if they are elected. The Congress of the People in South Africa South Africa
Since the demise of “Socialism” in the Soviet Union the various Communist, Green, Socialist,... parties and other organisations such as Green Peace, CND, .....are looking for and in serious need of a definition , in the broadest terms of the point (b). The Sao Paulo Forum is a major step in this redefinition. This and other such forums are essential for the world in general since with the tremendous bandwidth of present day communications almost all problems immediately become global problems.
The organisation of socialism must therefore be synonymous with the organisation of the people. A socialist government must encourage and assist any organisation which is based on the principle of sharing and mutual assistance. A proliferation of organizations based on these ideals can only strengthen socialism and democracy.
The organizations of society, trade unions, Co-ops, factories, corporations, political parties, banks......, are the nodes of society, the exchanges are of information, goods, personnel, money, culture....... The State must be the orchestrator the organiser of organizations.
In South Africa South Africa
The future state to be democratic must include in its ambit not only organizations which are friendly to socialism, but any organisation which represents a significant sector of society. The CODESA system is clearly a pattern to be followed. It tries to embrace all opinions which can be persuaded by “sufficient consensus” to remain in the process of bringing peace and democracy to South Africa South Africa
I see no impossibility for education to be run by a “CODESA” of those in the education sector. Or for health to be structured in a similar manner. Various Forums, economic, housing, education, are already in place or being constituted. The demand is already there. The regime barely goes so far as to accept these structures as advisory bodies. We must constitute them as policy making bodies. They are the nodes of society the socialist/democratic state must facilitate the exchangesbetween them and itself. It should be constituted as a central node composed of representatives from and answerable to these nodes of society.
The Reconstruction Pact being discussed by COSATU, the ANC, SACP, SANCO etc., including those of the employers, and others, is an example of this new organisational structure evolving in South Africa
To some it might be construed as encouraging anarchy, or the advocacy of permanent revolution. But if there is a lesson to be drawn from the study of complexity it is that a complex system given a very “simple” goal (in our case the well being of humankind) develops its own best methods of operation and organisation. Solutions emerge from the system itself. Imposition of solutions by committees or wise men (I use the term advisedly) are incapable of any but makeshift temporary periods of stability followed by periods of violent chaos.
On the tentative steps taken by the people of South Africa
Time's arrow in South Africa
In the Soviet Union the “Soviet” i.e. committee system was destroyed by restricting the bandwidth of communication, and making one node all powerful. Once again the chaos interface in South Africa
Bibliographic notes
(1) Bernal J. D., (1954), Science in History, Watts .
(2) Various, (1971), Development of revolutionary theory by the CPSU, Progress publishers Moscow
(3) Gleick. J., (1988), Chaos: making of a new science, Heinemann.
(4) Waldrop M. M., (1992), Complexity, Viking.
(5) Anchishkin A. I., (1972), Soviet Planning: Principles and Techniques, Progress Publishers Moscow
(6) Ruelle D., (1991), Chance and Chaos, Princeton Univ.
(7) Brooks & Brickhill, (1980), Whirlwind before the storm, International Defence and Aid Fund.
(8) Lewin R., (1993), Complexity, Dent
(9) Various, (1968), Philosophical Problems of Elementary-Particle Physics, Progress Publishers Moscow
(10) Theoharis A. G. & Cox J. S., (1988), The Boss, Temple Univ. Press Philadelphia.
(11) Molapo B., (1988), “Theory and Practice; S. A. and the Colonial Question,” African Communist, Nos. 113 & 114.
(12) Chown M., (1993), Afterglow of Creation, Arrow ; 152.
(13) Mzala, (1988), Gatsha Buthelezi, Zed Books.
(14) Penrose R., (1989), The Emperor's New Mind, Vintage.
(15) Haldane J. B. S., (1929), Rationalists Annual.
(16) Oparin A. I., (1938), The Origin of Life, New York (first appeared in 1924 in the Soviet Union ).
(17) Coveney,The Arrow of Time; Highfield; W. H .Allen.
(18) Various, (1977), ANC Speaks, Documents Published by the African National Congress.
(19) Central Committee, (1993), The African Communist, A reconstruction Pact, 25
(20) Papers & Resolutions, COSATU Congress 10-12 Sept 1993, the Path to Reconstruction.
(21) “Will the ANC sell-out the workers?,” The African Communist, third quarter 1993. See also, “Making people-driven development work," The African Communist, second quarter, 1994.
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Last week I was walking through Grosvenor Square with my sister and my two children on the way to the Royal Academy of Arts to see the Anish Kapoor exhibition when i spotted a huge Golden Eagle in the sky. It appeared to be flying through the autumn leaves. I took my camera from my pocket and immediately started to play with the perspectives - I liked the idea of making the Eagle appear as if it was flying through the thick shock of orange, brown and blonde half dead leaves.
I was having fun, (but no success) when I heard a voice, "Excuse me sir".
I looked up to see an armed policeman popping his head over the hedge in front of the embassy.
"Oh no, don't tell me I can't take a picture of the Eagle?" I said, my good mood had now scarpered.
The policeman was friendly, he smiled and said no, I could take photographs of the Eagle but that i mustn't take pictures of the ground floor area. I didn't argue (I would have in my younger days) as he was polite and he spoke softly.
My son was fascinated and quickly asked me why?
I tried to explain to him why i thought the policeman had made the request without going into too much detail (because I wasn't 100% sure myself) - we left the Square, our moods flattened by the guardians of the Eagle.
We made our way to the Anish Kapoor exhibition. One of the exhibits was of a cannon that fired a mixture of red wax and oil at the internal walls of the gallery every 20 minutes. The walls were splattered with the blood red substance, chunks of red haunches of the stuff spilled from the doorway. The audience was gripped.
When we left the building we took another look at The Tree and the Eye by Mr Kapoor in the courtyard, it brought the smiles back to our faces.
The Quiet Busker.
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This is the last of the ten parts of the Communist University Generic Course called “Philosophy, Religion, and Revolution”, and the fourth to be posted on Ars Notoria.
The question of the collective human subject has been most concisely and forcefully expressed in this series by Cyril Smith in the section of “The Communist Manifesto after 150 Years” called “The Subject of History”.
The first linked item to this final part is “Postmodernism & Hindu Nationalism” by Meera Nanda [pictured]. This work is given because it shows how several pathological, anti-human strands of philosophy can play out in concert, mutually reinforcing and amplifying each other.
In the case of India
The Indian case is not altogether different to what was, and could again be, the situation in South Africa, where under President Thabo Mbeki we had Postmodernism (bourgeois “normality” following the liberation struggle); pseudo-science around HIV/AIDS (Virodene, African potato, beetroot et cetera); Africanism; and again, reactionary feminism.
What is common to all of these aspects, whether in India or in South Africa India the promise was Swaraj and in South Africa Independence
Revolutionary organs of people’s power were dismantled in each case. Golden Calfs were raised up in substitution for the slogans of popular power. The substitutes were the slogans of bourgeois nationalism and of national mystique.
Postmodernism is the hopeless, degenerate philosophy of the hopeless, degenerate thing called Imperialism. The fight for full freedom in a world dominated by Imperialism is unavoidably a fight against Postmodernism. It is a revolutionary necessity. The purpose of this CU Generic Course called “Philosophy, Religion, and Revolution” has been to arm the communists for this battle. Above all what is needed is devotion to and priority for the human Subject. Power, to the People!
Epilogue
This Communist University
The dialectic of the individual and the collective was most succinctly expressed by Karl Marx and Frederick Engels in the following famous words, which we have quoted more than once before, from the Communist Manifesto of 1848:
“… the free development of each is the condition for the free development of all.”
The Communist University
In its Freirean educational practice, the Communist University Communist University
When education succeeds, and the working class is restored to its full humanity as a Subject of History, then why would any of these insecure and furtive options (Influence, Guiding, Command and Control) be required? None of them will be required.
Hence we say as Communist University
This message is simple, and the Freirean method of carrying it out is clear. For now, the best illustration of the idea of education as the substance of political practice is Cuba
In addition, and to make the same point in a different way, we are going to conclude with an example and a warning of the manner in which a previous revolutionary upsurge faced the problem of the revolutionary Historical Subject, and failed to solve it, with disastrous consequences.
The All-Union Communist Party (Bolsheviks), Short Course (a.k.a. simply “Short Course”) was an attempt to create, from the history of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union up to 1937, a totalised theory, free of error, for the Soviet Union itself and for the world communist movement as a whole. We came across it while studying Christopher Caudwell through Helena Sheehan, and finding material on J D Bernal and J B S Haldane on Sheehan’s web site. This material mentions the Short Course and the failure of these two otherwise outstandingly independent-minded communist scientists to oppose it.
The physical torture and elimination of comrades in the Soviet Union were shrouded in secrecy and obscurity, and even the “show trials” that took place were to the Western communist observer problematic because of the confessions of the accused. Yet the CPSU of the day did have to “lay out its stall” in public, as all political organisations are forced to do. The CPSU did so in the form of the All-Union Communist Party (Bolsheviks), Short Course, and this document gave their game away completely, to anyone with eyes to see.
The Marxists Internet Archive in 2008 put up the All-Union Communist Party (Bolsheviks), Short Course in full for all to read. In addition it has Khrushchev’s 1956 speech to the 20th Congress of the CPSU, denouncing both Stalin and the Short Course. An extract from that speech pertaining to the Short Course is linked below. [Image: Nikita Krushchev with Fidel Castro].
With the Short Course, the core reversal or perversion of the CPSU in the Stalin period is laid bare. For a quick grasp of this inversion of communism see the work’s Conclusion. Interrogate it with the Fundamental Question of Philosophy, with which we began this 10-part course: How stands the relation between Subject and Object? In the Short Course, the Subject of History is not educated, but is “guided”. Herein lies the whole disaster.
It is a practical certainty that the leadership of our South African Revolution will again at some point make the same error of attempting to demolish the popular Subject. Under President Mbeki, that is what happened. It is bound to be the case that another such revolutionary crisis will arrive, perhaps soon. This Communist University course, and the whole of the Communist University
Click on these links:
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As I am eating, I turn on the television on and the news is about my homeland and the war going on there. The war is between the Sri Lankan Army and The Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE). There is video of artillery firing, of people leaving their houses and looking for refuge. The people live and hide under trees and by the side of the road.
Now the time is 07:15. I need to get the tube. I buy a weekly travelcard and step onto the Central line train. I am reading the Metro and there is more news about wars in many different countries. There is also a table showing which countries have the most child soldiers. Sri Lanka is in 18th place. I think about my friend Joe, who became as a member of the Tamil Tigers.
My friend Joe. When he was 11 yeas old, he joined up with the LTTE and got full military training in six months. He lead other child soldiers into battle against the army. On a few occasions he returned to base. He was very popular and perhaps some people in the LTTE did not like him doing so well at that age.
Somebody informed on him. They told the army what he had planned. Joe was barely 12 when he was captured. He tried to to kill himself by swallowing a cynide capsule he wore on a chain around his neck, but the soldiers managed to shoot him in the hands before he could do so.
They captured him instead of killing him in order to get more information about the LTTE. I don’t know exactly how they tortured Joe, but my mother has told me that the army torturers hammer nails into peoples’ heads. They rip out their finger nails. They use electric shocks and they tie people up to big blocks of ice and kick them and beat them with lathis.
I suddenly see where am I. I have gone past two stations. I get off at the next station and and then change platforms. I am taking the train to Bank. I pick up the paper and, again, start thinking about my friend and what eventually happened to him.
After the torture they didn't give him any treatment for the bullet holes in his hands. But once I saw him. I saw as he went past in an army van. They were talking him somewhere. I told his parents that he was still alive, but I haven’t seen him since. Two years later he was released because of his youth, but now he is unwell.
I feel badly about being a refugee and when I think about my friends and all the other people who are refugees, including my family and my friends, and all the people who speak my mother tongue, that's when I realise we have all been affected by war.
I didn't like the LTTE after the 2002, because they overreacted to government and army oppression and they did some bad things. But I didn't want them to lose either.
Above all, I don't like one thing that the LTTE did. They took children and forced them to fight for them. My cousin was forced to join, even though she was a girl. She was only seventeen when they took her. Her father passed away because of an accident before she could see him again. Her mother and two sisters were very unhappy and suffered a lot because of this. She was given military training and they cut her hair so that she could be easily identified as an LTTE fighter and wouldn't leave them.
Her family gave the Tigers lots of money. My cousin is now in jail because she was a soldier. I hope she will come out soon and will be happy with her family in future.
Rajah Sevageganesan
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At the risk of seeming digitally provincial, I’m going to illustrate my point with an example from a recent Guardian blog. Michel Ruse, who is apparently a philosopher, suggested that, whilst disagreeing with creationists on all points, and agreeing with Dawkins et al on both their science and philosophy, it might be wiser and more humane (humanist, even) not to vilify the religious as cretinous and incapable of reason. Which seems reasonable, to me.
According to many below-the-line responses he is a ‘half-baked’ atheist, ‘one of the more strident and shrill New Apologists’ and, apparently, “needs to get a pair’. And that’s just from the first twenty comments. A recent article by a screenwriter at a
I’m going to sound like a maiden aunt dismayed by an unsporting bridge play and can perhaps be accused of needing to ‘get a pair’ myself (although, before you offer, I’m fine for socks, thanks), but I find that, after a couple of years of participating in online comment and blogging, my teeth still go on edge whenever, on whichever side of a debate I stand, the language of debate declines into abuse, macho posturing (from men and women), intricate pedantry, deliberate misreading and a general noise of inelegant, unconstructive and self-aggrandising yelling. The Internet has given the world (or that part of it which can get online) a new collective voice but, as Caliban says: "You taught me language, and my profit on't / Is I know how to curse.’
I like swearing. A well-placed swear can enliven, colour and enhance communication, can build camaraderie. This isn’t about swearing. Rather, I’m beginning to get the feeling that the internet - which offers globally-expanding vision and a historically-unparalleled opportunity to explore new ideas and experiences different from one’s own – has become, for many, nothing more than a crude amplifier for their own opinions and an opportunity to mug and harangue anyone with whom they disagree.
For a while I followed a blog called Speak Your Branes, which critiques and satirises the most bigoted comments from the BBC’s Have Your Say forum. SYB is, of course, as sneering as it is politically motivated but, hey, they’re my politics and there was some good satire, but I had to stop. The Have Your Say comments were so ignorant, so hate-filled that the humorous frame evaporated and all I was left with was the feeling that these were the thoughts churning in the minds of my fellow bus passengers, the queue at Lidl, the people wandering in and out of Parliament. The internet has cracked the shell of our collective id so that we can hear its snarling and bleating, from clueless Daily Mail patriots to high-minded GU science commentators.
With previously unimaginable freedom to speak, why do so many choose to use this voice to address strangers with such naked contempt? I have read comments that have made me so angry I’ve lost sleep over what I perceive as the wrongness, the injustice or ignorance of what’s said. And once or twice I’ve lost my temper and responded in spirit. I’ve always regretted it; largely because, in anger, I never communicate well the thing I wish to say. Rarely, if ever, have I seen online an admission of an opinion changed, an insight admitted, or a compromise agreed, in the wake of one of these brawls. Only the technology, it seems to me, has evolved. As ever, near-miraculous invention speeds ahead of the human reptile cord.
And if you don’t agree you know what you can do…
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Once again I (The Quiet Busker) feel the urge to inject humour and simplicity into proceedings for the less cerebral (I might be alone here) amongst the readers and contributors. It is a kind of CBT for me.
This shot was taken near Heathrow, in Feltham. The chair and sofa looked as if they had been ejected (rejected?) by a passing plane - there was no sign of any working class/middle class passengers in the vicinity though, I checked thoroughly - under every discarded PC, TV, bundle of Informer newspapers, abandoned fridges, mattresses, formica shelves......
I hope this raises a slight smile. TQB.
PS - Can I just say how much I love Andy Hall's photographs. There, I said it.
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More Marx, less Marxism, anyone? The following is the latest (Johannesburg) CU blog.
Cyril Smith, late in life, and following the fall of the Soviet Union , felt himself free enough to challenge the principle Shibboleths of Marxism, including the word “Marxism” itself. Students may think that here and there, Smith did not quite succeed in resolving all his issues. For example, he approves Marx's aim of “development of communist consciousness on a mass scale” but disapproves, in another place, of what he considers to be Lenin’s determination to do the same thing “from outside” (This CU course will continue to examine that particular question). But otherwise, Cyril Smith succeeds admirably to hit and to knock down his targets, which are the dead wood and the rotten branches of 165 years and more of “theory”; and he does us a great service thereby.
We may quickly get close to the heart of the matter by first looking at Smith’s talk on “The Communist Manifesto After 150 Years” (linked below), and in particular at the section headed “The Subject of History”. In this section, the daily practice of communists (“to educate, organise and mobilise”) comes together with the most profound depths of philosophy. It begins:
“Marx's problem was to discover the possibility for humanity, individually and collectively, to take conscious charge of its own life, and to find this possibility within bourgeois society. Communism would mean that humans would cease to be prisoners of their social relations, and begin purposively to make their own history. In other words, we should cease to be mere objects and start to live as subjects.”
It is not unreasonable, nor is it an exaggeration, to say that this is the whole matter of Marx, Lenin, communism and the entire work of all the communists that have ever been. Therefore this section is suggested as the main reading and discussion text for this part, and the matter will be taken up again in the next part. Use the section on “The Subject of History” for discussion, because it is sufficient, but do also read the entire document, for the light that it sheds upon the Communist Manifesto of 1848.
Soon afterwards, in “Hegel, Economics, and Marx's Capital” (linked below) Smith took on Marx’s premier work, “Capital”, and showed how generations of Marxists have got it very wrong. In particular, Smith shows us how “Capital” is not about “economics” or about what even Great Lenin mistakenly called “Marx’s Economic Doctrine”, but is really what it says it is: “A Critique of Political Economy”. Equally mistaken, Smith shows, is the vulgar conception of the relation between Hegel’s work and Marx’s, and here Smith could have drawn support from E. V. Ilyenkov’s[Image, above] “The Dialectics of the Abstract and the Concrete in Marx’s Capital”, published in the Soviet Union in 1960. No doubt, Smith is not the first to rediscover the real Marx, and he will not have been the last. Apart from giving us a very good reminder to pay proper attention to what we are reading, Smith is also validating the CU policy of reading the original work more than the commentators and the analysts (see, e.g., the CU Generic Course on Capital, Volume 1)
Smith is very effective in dealing with the dead phrase with a zombie existence, “dialectical materialism”, never used by Marx, invented by Kautsky and Plekhanov, and used as a brand by Stalin. The third linked item is Chapter 2, “How the Marxists Buried Marx” (linked below), from Cyril Smith’s “Marx at the Millennium”, published in 1998. On the third page of that chapter, Smith wrote:
“… it is appropriate to begin with one of the most widely circulated philosophical statements of the twentieth century. It starts like this:
“Dialectical materialism is the outlook of the Marxist-Leninist party. It is called dialectical materialism because its approach to the phenomena of nature, its method of apprehending them is dialectical, while its interpretation of the phenomena of nature, its conception of these phenomena, its theory, is materialistic.
“Historical materialism is the extension of the principles of dialectical materialism to the study of social life, an application of the principles of dialectical materialism to the phenomena of the life of society, to the study of society and of its history.”
“This stuff appeared in 1939. In my view, its method, standpoint, dogmatic style and conclusions are all utterly opposed to everything that Marx stood for.”
The author was J. V. Stalin. A little later Smith writes (and he could have been writing about “Dialego”):
“Let us bring ourselves to look briefly at the way the Stalinist catechism of 1939 hitched up a highly mechanised materialism with something called ‘dialectics’. On the one hand, ‘Nature, being, the material world, is primary, and mind, thought, is secondary.’ What does this word ‘primary’ mean? Does it mean ‘first in time’ or ‘first in importance’? Or does it mean that matter ‘causes’ changes in ‘mind’? Nobody can tell, and precisely this ambiguity conferred mysterious power.”
Smith shows how even Lenin had been fooled by the catch-phrase:
“In the preface to his 1908 book Materialism and Empirio-Criticism, Lenin declared: ‘Marx and Engels scores of times termed their philosophical views dialectical materialism.’ He was so sure about this, that he felt no need to give any references.
“In fact, there is not one! Marx never employed the phrase in any of his writings. The term ‘dialectical materialism’ was introduced in 1891 by Plekhanov, in an article in Kautsky’s Neue Zeit. He thought wrongly, I believe — that he was merely adapting it from Engels’s usage in Anti-Duhring and Ludwig Feuerbach.”
Cyril Smith has done a good job. There are plenty of comrades who still cling to the thoughtless formula, “dialectical materialism”, and they give support and solidarity to each other. Smith can help those others who would wish to liberate themselves from the dead hands of Plekhanov, Kautsky and Stalin.
Cyril Smith also does not spare Trotsky, with whom he appears to have had some sympathy. The most serious deficiency he finds in Trotsky, however, is not any of Trotsky’s sins of omission or dissembling, but Trotsky’s lack of philosophy, and his failure to get any of his followers to make up his own deficiency. While Lenin made great progress in philosophy, Trotsky failed altogether, writes Smith.
What Smith is saying is that in the last analysis, it was the inability to overcome the Philistine, Stalin, through full command of philosophy, which led to the degradation of the Russian Revolution and its eventual reversal. Philosophy is the keystone. Without it, the other stones are bound to fall. Smith says of the Trotskyists:
“But they never had the theoretical resources to penetrate to its philosophical core. The best they could do was to show that Stalinist policies and distortions were contrary to the decisions of Lenin’s party and the teachings of ‘Marxism’.”The Trotskyists were trapped within the same hall of mirrors that they had helped Stalin to construct.
The practical work of philosophy is, crucially, to weed out, or clip off, the words, dead of meaning, that encumber and trip us in our work; or otherwise, if possible, to restore their freshness. Some of those words in our present time might be: “hegemony”, “accumulation”, and “elements of socialism”.
The fourth linked item is about “Marxism”, whether there ever was such a thing, and if so, whether Marx was a “Marxist”.
The full Cyril Smith archive on MIA can be found here.
Click on these links:
The Communist Manifesto after 150 years, 1998, Smith (8285 words)
How The Marxists Buried Marx, 1998, Smith (13629 words)
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This was the second blog in the CU philosophy series, of which I will blog the sixth in a couple of hours from now athttp://domza.blogspot.com/. I got good feedback from this one, including from a professor who said it was useful and asked me who had written it. Cheek!
Don't worry, I'm not going to blog 'em all and hog this blog. Maybe one or two more from the CU, over time.
The picture is supposed to be of a youngish G W F Hegel.
This series on “Philosophy, Religion, and Revolution” is bound to come up against Frederick Engels, and it might as well do so early. So the main linked item below, known as “On Dialectics”, is a preface to Engel’s polemical work against Herr Eugen Dühring, known as “Anti-Dühring”.
Among other things, we are gong to be saying that philosophy is indispensible to politics, and that weakness in philosophy will have, and in the past did have, disastrous effects upon political work. It turns out that although Karl Marx had a doctorate in philosophy and was reliable, and did inform all his works with philosophy, yet it was Engels who wrote didactically (that is, he preached) about philosophy, and principally in the work known as “Anti-Dühring”. This is the work that contains the notorious “tools of analysis” that encourage people to have the illusion that they have a simple set of keys to the kingdom of knowledge. This CU course will leave those “tools” aside, deliberately; but we are forced to spend some time with the book in general, because it has been so influential.
The book is an argument against a person who was of very little consequence in history. Without wishing to be cruel, one could say that Dühring was a nobody. At least, he was thoroughly ordinary, only extraordinarily muddle-headed. In the book, Engels spends a tedious amount of time explaining Düring’s errors. Engels is then obliged to express a fully-elaborated alternative world outlook, being unable to rely upon any of Dühring’s work. Hence “Anti-Dühring” appears as and became known as a compendium, and was recognised as such by Lenin, among others.
Engels spends the first page of this preface with Dühring, before breaking away with the remark that “theoretical thought is a historical product”. Then he begins to expound dialectics, investigated, as he claims, prior to his and Marx’s work, only by Hegel [Image, above] and by Aristotle. Dialectics “alone offers the analogue for, and thereby the method of explaining, the evolutionary processes occurring in nature, inter-connections in general, and transitions from one field of investigation to another,” says Engels.
The claim that Engels is making for dialectics is that it, and only it, can embrace the entirety of human thought through history, as well as the entirety of human understanding in the present. Because of dialectics, because of Aristotle, Hegel, Marx and Engels, all of this becomes possible and at the same time, therefore, unavoidable.
This recognition of unity in human history, experience, and understanding is simultaneously a great breakthrough and a pillar of our age, but also a contested, and to some extent unabsorbed idea. It would make racism impossible, for example; yet racism survives. There remain opposing schools of philosophy, and the irrational, anti-human and reactionary system called “post-modernism” has in recent decades become the mental currency of Imperialism.
To illustrate the continuity of philosophical thought and development the CU gives you a chronicle and a diagram of philosophical thought that may serve as a framework for further studies (“Philosophers”, linked). This is followed by a longer document, written by Anthony Blunt, that describes the Italian Renaissance (rebirth) through the life and work of Leon Battista Alberti. The Renaissance is significant as the link between the ancient Greek and Roman worlds and modern world. It drew also upon Arab, Indian and Chinese culture. This piece of writing can help show how in historical actuality that the unity of historical thought that Hegel later theorised had in fact been created.
The Italian Renaissance, based as it was on reason and the understanding that humans can develop human culture, not absolutely limited by the extent of the knowledge of the ancients, or by any other limitation, offers a pure and developed form of humanism. The Italian Renaissance was later overcome by its own internal reactionary forces, but humanism did not sleep as long as it had after the fall of the Roman Empire . It quickly rose again in Northern Europe , led by the work of Baruch Spinoza, among others. A very short piece of Spinoza’s writing is given at the end of the Anthony Blunt document.
Finally, but not for the first time in the new CU Generic Courses, we link to Engels’ “Socialism, Utopian and Scientific”, extracted by Engels from his larger work, “Anti-Dühring”, which helps to place thought in a historical framework. For example, dealing with the period subsequent to the Renaissance and immediately prior to the French Revolution that is often referred to as “The Enlightenment”, Engels writes:
“We know today that this kingdom of reason was nothing more than the idealized kingdom of the bourgeoisie; that this eternal Right found its realization in bourgeois justice; that this equality reduced itself to bourgeois equality before the law; that bourgeois property was proclaimed as one of the essential rights of man; and that the government of reason, the Contrat Social [Social Contract] of Rousseau, came into being, and only could come into being, as a democratic bourgeois republic. The great thinkers of the 18th century could, no more than their predecessors, go beyond the limits imposed upon them by their epoch.”
Here is the limitation imposed upon the Subject by the objective circumstances. This is humanism. Humanism says that humans build humanity (see also the quote from Spinoza referred to above) within the given material world and history. Nowhere does Engels say that humanity is an accidental combination of atoms and molecules.
Yet, by chastising the great Hegel with the same kind of roughness as he treats the nonentity Dühring, Engels sowed the seeds of others’ subsequent and greater errors, by elevating the dichotomy of “idealism and materialism” to a master-narrative of philosophy, which it is not, and leading finally towards that absurdity which we will continue to expose, that says that humanity is reducible to matter.
Communists have relied too heavily upon Engels to teach them philosophy. As a result they have magnified Engels’ otherwise unremarkable mistakes to monstrous proportions. The main one of these is the denigration of “idealism” and the perverse worship of “materialism”. Whereas it is the free-willing human Subject which was at the centre of Marx’s work, and which must be at the centre of any communist’s work.
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Hiya Phil, and Ars Notoria,
The link you have given for “Dominic Tweedie” on the right-hand side of Ars Notoria goes to one part of the CU mash-up, but which is not the most lively part.
The CU blog is at http://domza.blogspot.com/. It might be a better link to give.
Each blog post causes the CU blog to shoot an e-mail to a Google Group, which is at http://groups.google.com/group/Communist-University/, from where it fans out to a couple or three thousand e-mail subscribers.
The Communist University
Then there is a funky library of documents (the former CU "CD") at: http://cu.domza.net/. That is the one you have linked to. It’s useful, but it’s not dynamic.
The whole ensemble, as it was and basically still is, can be seen in a downloadable diagram on the amadlandawonye site. I thought I was hell-on clever when I did this until I realised that lots of people were doing stuff like that and it even had a name, mash-up.
My e-mail address is dominic.tweedie@gmail.com
A lot of the material I use comes from http://www.marxists.org/, which is a veritable treasure trove.
There is a Communist University page on the SACP web site, of which the home page is http://www.sacp.org.za/.
Here are the “consoles” of the eight newly re-edited CU Generic Courses:
Asikhulume!
Domza, VC
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This (below) was the first of a new (Johannesburg) Communist University Generic Course called “Philosophy, Religion, and Revolution.” I was rushing to finish the course last week (struggling after nearly three days of no service from Telkom) when I got Phil Hall's invitation. I only got back to Phil's message today. What a surprise to find a cartoon featuring Oscar Wilde! I had used "The Soul of Man Under Socialism", as you can see here or if you go to my original blog, plus an image of Oscar, the one on the left here.
I can't explain all about the Communist University (CU) now. Suffice it to say that I have been blogging each part of the "Generic Courses" prior to compiling them for publication on the SACP web site. I use the blog as a test bed. I am still blogging this Philosophy course. I blogged the fifth part (of ten) today. Follow the rest at domza.blogspot.com.
In the Progress Publishers (Moscow) Dictionary of Philosophy (1984 English edition) the Fundamental Question of Philosophy is given as: “the question of the relationship of consciousness to being, of thought to matter and nature, examined on two planes, first, what is primary – spirit or nature, matter or consciousness – and second, how is knowledge of the world related to the world itself, or to put it differently, does consciousness correspond to being, is it capable of truthfully reflecting the world?”
The Communist University
We take it from Caudwell that freedom is the good that contains all good, and we take it from Marx and Engels in the Communist Manifesto that the free development of each is the precondition for the free development of all. We will contrast this view with the contradictory view, which is that matter can be held as primary, and that human consciousness can be treated as derivative of the material that contains it.
Thus the principal dialectic of this set will proceed, without dogma and without closure.
Oscar Wilde, perhaps with assistance from the Communist Manifesto, saw that only from the free development of each could come the free development of all, and that the purpose of Socialism is therefore Individualism. Oscar Wilde’s “The Soul of Man Under Socialism” (linked below) is a very good text to discuss, if people are ready for discussion. It is not necessary to read the whole sixteen pages (but it is rewarding to do so).
Karl Marx, writing 37 years earlier than Wilde, expresses very similar sentiments in relation to the Germans, as Wilde does in relation to the English; and even though he writes of the abolition of religion, yet Marx with words that have forever since been famous, expressed in his “Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right” (linked) his tender and sympathetic understanding of “the heart of a heartless world”.
The eleven Theses on Feuerbach (linked) are equally well-known, especially the last one. Any one of these theses would be adequate on its own as a topic for discussion in a study circle.
So far, the works given here tend to lie easily on the side of priority for freedom and for free will in the philosophy of communism. Part 1 of Karl Marx’s “The German Ideology” (linked) is sub-titled “Opposition of the Materialist and Idealist Outlook”, and it might therefore be expected to weigh on the other side of the scales. It might be thought that those who are inclined to define humanity in terms of the properties of certain peculiar movements of atoms and molecules would find comfort here.
Is this the case? Does Marx support or advance in any way the reduction of all humanity and human history to a non-human, molecular, chemical or nuclear source? Or is Marx merely saying that the human Subject is only comprehensible within a material, objective world? In other words that the relationship of mind and matter is just that: a relationship. In other words again, simply that one is inconceivable without the other, and no more than that? We will return to these questions.
Note
The amount of reading that is given is far too much for a weekly study circle. The material is given as optional extra reading, and also because of the nature of the topic: philosophy. As the Theses on Feuerbach demonstrate, it is possible to be as concise in philosophy as, for example, the Freedom Charter is in politics. But such examples are rare. Most of the suitable writings are longer. In addition, the reading of philosophy is difficult, because it constantly presents unfamiliar and revolutionary ideas, which may take effort, over time, to absorb.
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During my lunchtimes I walk, for miles. One day I noticed an odd scene, a plane flying into some dead flowers, the flowers dwarfed the plane, the plane looked feeble, then the plane hit the flowers. Environmental terrorism I guess.
A friend who knows about my fear of looking a little less intellectually able on this blog, suggested I call my section :Now for younger viewers.....I like the idea.....
(By way of preface, I'm Anderson Brown, recruited by Phil to be the "house philosopher." It may be that after a while Ars Notoria will evolve into a coherent set of writers - hopefully individually coherent as well of course - such that we can be seen to have a "house philosophy," but such things evolve naturally. In the meantime, I will sometimes let go with some abstruse philosophy, sometimes with political musings (I only rant by prearrangement) or something else. Discussions will emerge but meanwhile this is "What I'm Thinking About Right Now," served up once a week here on Ars Notoria.)
Hillary Clinton is in Pakistan, and yesterday she faced a group of local people from an area heavily attacked by "predator drones," unmanned aircraft that have been heavily used to hit targets in Waziristan, allegedly an Al-Qaeda stronghold and the site of an ongoing Pakistani military operation. All of the comments from the locals reported in the article are along the same lines: the presence of the Americans, and the civilian casualties from the drone attacks, are alienating the population.
Specifically, one woman asked Clinton if she considered drone attacks and the suicide bombing that killed more than 100 people in Peshawar this week to both be acts of terrorism. "No, I do not," Clinton replied. This gets to the definition of the word "terrorism." As the name of a political-military tactic, Clinton is right: "terrorism" in this sense is defined by two features: 1) the use of deliberate attacks on civilians ("non-combatants") in order to foment political destabilization and 2) the resort to such attacks in lieu of the ability shared by established states to finance, organize and apply conventional military power. Speaking strictly in this way, if civilian deaths are a consequence ("collateral damage") of a military attack, but not its intention, then such attacks are not acts of terrorism as they were not intended to cause these deaths. Staying strict, the bombing of cities in World War II, although intended, among other aims, to beat societies into submission by deliberately targeting civilians, were not the resort of otherwise powerless combatants but rather one option out of many available to established states, and thus were not terrorism under our definition.
This last point is important because the basic defense of terrorism as a morally justified activity is that it is a justified resort of parties to political violence who do not have any other means of projecting force. Thus one might hold that aerial bombing intended to (using the word in its idiomatic sense) terrorize civilians by states is not morally justified as states have alternatives, whereas a subject people, say, may not and thus might legitimately resort to terrorism.
My view? I think that the issue here is violence itself. The woman who questioned Clinton was making a rhetorical point: your blowing up innocents is not morally superior to anyone else blowing up innocents. Waving the bloody shirt of "terrorism" does not change this. Notice that that cuts both ways. This is the insight of pacifism: the only (even possibly) moral question is, who will break the cycle? Who is willing to renounce violence altogether? This is a different point than the point that the Americans' use of force in Pakistan and elsewhere does not appear to be achieving American ends (that is, it's a bad strategy). It's a much deeper point. The ultimate moral point and the situational strategic point come together in a very worn adage: "Live by the sword, die by the sword."
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[Scroll down to read a new addition to this post which first appeared on http://acacciatura.wordpress.com/]
By wordnerd7
adj. 1. Failing to do what law or duty requires.
2. Overdue in payment: a delinquent account.
[Latin dēlinquēns, dēlinquent-, present participle of dēlinquere, to offend : dē-, de- + linquere, to leave, abandon; see leikw- in Indo-European roots.]
… Yes, I know. . . I know. The long gap between posts – if nothing else – proves that nearly all shades of that word apply to the writer of this blog. But whereas most people wander from their accustomed haunts when the days are long and the weather balmy, some of us put off going away until the wind picks up, the thermostat drops, and we can maximise our chances of surreal experiences. I’ve been busy haggling over steamer trunks, mules and camels, and calculating how many tents I’ll need.
I’ve been recalled to duty at this site by @ISA, also known as Philip Hall, who has just launched an experiment in collaborative blogging. If Phil had consulted me beforehand about timing – never mind that there’s no reason why he should have done — I’d have explained that I couldn’t accept either his invitation or his ‘all hands on deck’ summons over at Ars Notoria, or certainly not in the immediate future.
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I wish the new site every success. Its launch has dovetailed tidily with reflections over the last few days on what I’ve learnt from running acciaccature — one year old next month, when I might not have access to a computer or even a net-capable mobile telephone. Moments before I had Phil’s birth announcement, and looking for attractive trunk-lining, I came across this paragraph in an excellent travelogue by Rebecca Solnit in last October’s issue of Harper’s Magazine:
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Iceland is the only part of Europe that never begat monarchs or a hereditary aristocracy […] Iceland’s national parliament, or Althing—the word for “assembly” being, in Icelandic, thing—was formed in 930 a.d., about sixty years after the first settlers came over from Norway. They met at a site whose name, Thingvellir, “the plain of the thing,” still commemorates this ancient annual gathering, which was a combined parliamentary session, court review, and country fair.
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Aha, I thought, re-reading that – a nation founded in the spirit of collaborative blogging, which Phil’s charter demonstrates to perfection. I dearly hope that Ars Notoria can avoid the obvious pitfalls of all such idealistic enterprises, never depicted more splendidly than by Orwell’s hypocritical, self-righteous oinks ‘more equal’ than the other beasts in Animal Farm.
About Icelandic government, though, what Solnit mentions as its most glaring flaw puzzled me at first. That, it seems, is cowardice – lily-livered citizen-governors – on which she quotes Svanur Kristjánsson, an Icelandic professor of political science:
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“You can run into your prime minister at the store,” he said. “You know the minister, the president—you can make an appointment with the president.” But at the same time, there is “an incredible lack of civic courage” within the governing class, “a lack of people standing up and telling the truth,”
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The idea seemed less surprising after I remembered the striking ratio in this very spot between the swarms of clicks, indicating reader interest, and the low comment count, for posts critical of The Guardian — taking it to task not just for silencing dissenting voices but far, far worse.
Whether or not Icelandic cowardice has any application at Ars Notoria - I’d guess none, if it turns out to be just a friendly chat forum, or one where bloggers with strange hobbies embrace fellow-hobbyists — countries could supply the best fast metaphors for what collaborative blogs should and shouldn’t aim at being.
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Since most of the bloggers I know and love best are almost militantly independent, I suspect that we’re most like nations made up of hardy and idiosyncratic mountain peoples when we attempt to blog together. Think of Switzerland, a country of only seven and a half million inhabitants splintered into twenty-six cantons speaking either wholly different languages or different dialects of the same language, and operating something like fractal micro-Switzerlands with their own laws.
Well, … perhaps not Switzerland, as after the 19th century its tribes, acting collectively, seem to have acquired a mysterious gift for attracting peace to themselves – or certainly for keeping out of international disputes.
Afghanistan would be its opposite, since that’s a mountainous nation that you might suppose to have a magical knack for magnetising conflict.
Collaborative blogging – in my experiences to date, starting with Desmond Swords’ heroic blogger-nation, Lit-Lovers’ Forum, in 2007 – is rather more like Afghanistan.
When I can help with Ars Notoria (and if Phil’s invitation still stands) I almost certainly will – though that won’t be for several weeks. Why the note of hesitation? Since Phil has some connection never quite spelt out with administrators at The Guardian, I confess that I’ve been wondering whether we aren’t being invited to act, unpaid, as laboratory mice for an experiment in moderation-free blogging whose most constructive and productive features will simply be copied by that newspaper.
I have trouble completely believing my suggestion myself – since Phil, unlike GNM, is as far as possible from a hypocrite or, as the subject has been mentioned, coward. I’m more deeply in his debt than anyone else’s for posting notices of this site’s existence in other places, and he has been unstinting with every form of encouragement. But for family-related reasons he has openly explained, he feels bound by respect and affection to certain editors at that newspaper.
I don’t envy him his complicated tight rope act, supporting both us and them. If I’m right in my guess … and I could be wholly mistaken … and if the policy-makers and online publishing strategists at The Guardian make the apology they owe a few of us for outrageous mistreatment; if they can be modest enough to ask for our help in trying out new kinds of blogging platforms; if they compensate us in some way for our effort, I’ll sign on. Who would doubt that that’s the right way forward for any newspaper serious about thriving in the ethersphere?
21 October 2009
… Racing to put up this post two days ago, I forgot to mention one conclusion from watching several recent attempts at joint blogging – or setting up blog-zines. It’s that they are most likely to thrive and carry on when the bloggers choose a common theme, or specialise in a subject or few. . . I’m sure we can all agree that shared ideals and a common vision have a lot to do with the U.S. being more successful, so far, than other New World countries. (As delightful as they are, who can say what Canada or Brazil stand for?)
I have actually thought of an umbrella theme for those of us who met blogging on the arts site of a certain newspaper – one that would fit all of us to a ‘t’, accommodating the huge variations in our styles, and appealing equally to both genders and all points in-between. It has nothing to do with any protest or campaign, but would celebrate something we have in common. (No, not our ferocious independence.)
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But it’s an idea that could well be hugely attractive to blogging czars on newspaper and magazine sites – not least because it would put stars in the eyes of their advertising managers. I’m afraid that it would be stolen in an instant and, since I’m one blogger who – unlike some of our comrades -- _does_ need to think hard about ways of ‘monetising clicks’, down the road, I’ve been hoping that one of us can find a bright and honourable investor with a good reputation in some branch of the arts who would (i) get my drift in a flash; (ii) scrupulously refrain from trying to dominate the setting of our mutually agreed – extremely broad – guidelines for content and style; (iii) treat any preliminary discussions of the collaboration (some time after early November) as strictly confidential. . . The scheme could be set up as a not-for-profit venture, but – to be perfectly blunt about it -- I’d have to be paid.
This isn’t just my decision. The din from the people closest to me complaining about work being given away for free has grown deafening, and – speaking for many a comrade, I don’t doubt – my blogging days could soon be behind me unless this lovely medium can make some contribution to keeping wolves from the door.
Now, I realise that I might very well be whistling in the wind, … but then that can be good for the lungs, they say.
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When Phil invited me to contribute to this blog I told him I had nothing to offer, that intellectually (and you will probably agree after reading what i have to blog) I was not up to it, I write songs that no one listens to and take photographs that no one looks at, what could I offer? I guess i am preparing for the bright eyes amongst you to lower your expectations, a cheap trick, but an honest one. I said I would give it a go because, I suppose I was flattered.
But what to write? I know Phil is political, a passionate man, a man of many interests, I didn't want to let him down - so, Phil if you are reading this (which I know you will be at some stage) - apologies for lowering the tone.
So, here goes - Yesterday someone said something that made me think in a way I have never thought before. It was so simple. He said that when he and his girlfriend decided to have children they wondered what surname to give their children. They didn't believe in marriage and all its connotations, nor did they like double barreled names (which name would get dropped?). So, like in days of old, they considered changing their name to one that reflected their occupations or where they lived.
I won't say what they chose, but somehow it was a perfect choice. It seemed right. It suited them, and even though I have never met their children, I bet it suits their children. It also made me think of the freedom of such a move. History smacked into the past and left there, a clean slate, no associations, a freshness, a newness, a sense of starting again, a cancelling out of all that has gone before, a clean break, an invention, a rebirth, how refreshing and liberating. A new family. A new future. An end to ancient family feuds.
But what about the past? Family history? Did it hurt those who believed the continuation of the family name was important, that their place, that their ink/digital existence had been threatened by a new and tiny family tree (a seedling). Did it seem disloyal? A slight? A stab in the back?
So reader, what if you decided to change your name? Now. Right now. Change it to suit your occupation, or the place you live? Joseph Journalist? Anthony Twickenham? Andrew Doncaster? Thomas Teddington? Philip New Malden? Lawrence Lawyer? Colin Weatherman? Brian Banker? Janice Insurance? Sue Southampton? William Wimbledon? Roger Public-Relations? Julie Animator? Bernard Biddulph? Nick Racist? John Plasterer? Bob (middle name - the) Builder? Mick Richmond? David Inverness? Simon Welder? Eric Programmer? Alan Administrator? Sharon Marketing? Bob Artist? Daisy Social Worker? Danni X-Factor? Tracy Counsellor?
Try it. How does it make you feel? Does it suit you? If you adopted it, what effect would it have on you? On your future? On your confidence? Your ambition? How people perceived you?
If you are doing a job that you love, that fits, that is right, and you live in a place that you feel secure and happy with, then why not change your name? Go on, give it a go....
Yours, Billy Blog.
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The dog is dogged in chasing pigeons, his three-legged ziggedy zag a Sack Posset perfection of tongue-waggling slobberised smiling. When I was a youngster the jacaranda’s purple bruise signalled the arrival of November, exam time and a momentary sobriety. Now, because of all the boojwah cattle cars farting fumes they have bloomed and it is just October.
So here am I, in the park, with pepperment tea and a notebook, this one here where these words are, scrawling a strange sensation, like a singularity in my centre with the dog an electron planet wildly rotating sending silly birds whirring. I want to give the pigeons names but my sense of humour is so strangely inward, exclusive to various recluses, I would most probably get sued.
I must start submitting actual poems to magazines again instead of parodies in assumed names. I mean, I must stop pretending that I have submitted parodies to every Australian Literary journal (a hoax hoax) and start actually attempting to contribute to our (ahem) vibrant and honourable literary culture again. First of all though, I must brush these crushed purple blooms from my stolen heffalump pyjamas, gather that mad beast in and see if I can persuade Huehuecoyotle to remain still enough to sketch.
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Why blog on ARS NOTORIA?
I have set up this website, ARS NOTORIA, (the notable art) as an opportunity for like-minded people like you to jot down your thoughts and share them with us on what I hope will be a high profile blog.
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ARS NOTORIA is conceived as an outlet: a way for you to get things off your chest, shake those bees out of your bonnet and scratch that itch. The idea is that you do so in a companionable blogging environment, one that that is less structured - freer.
Every article you care to write or photograph or picture you care to post will appear on its own page and you are pretty much guaranteed that people will read with interest what you produce and take time to look at what you post.
Personal blogs are OK, but what we long for, if we can admit it, are easy-going, loose knit communities: blogging hubs where we can share ideas and pop in and out as frequently, or as seldom, as we like.
You will be able to moderate and delete any of the comments made on any blog you care to post. You can blog under a pseudonym if you like. You are trusted implicitly and there are no limits. Neither are there limits on the topic or the subjects or the media you use or the number of blogs you decide to write.
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If you like you may repost something you have already published elsewhere on ARS NOTORIA. Perhaps, you will get a worthwhile response.
And as for punctuation, grammar and spelling; well that's up to you.
Phil Hall - ISA
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