This is a key point in South African history that doesn't get enough attention from historians.

[From Donkeyshott and Xuitlacoche]

The action that precipitated the 90 day detention rule and the clampdown in South Africa by the Apartheid government was the Paarl rising. Tony Hall broke the story of the P.A.C. involvement in the riot, the assumption of Potlako Leballo to the leadership of the P.A.C. replacing Sobukwe and P.A.C. plans for an uprising.

The story appeared on the front page of the Star newspaper on March 25 1963 (while his wife Eve Hall was still in Pretoria jail). Subsequently Tony Hall was banned from publication after a court case followed in which he was required to reveal his sources but refused.

Tony Hall comments on how he got the story:

"I took the call asking for a reporter to go and interview Leballo at his invitation. I went - and came back with this huge scoop."

The Star

Johannesburg Monday March 25 1963

DRAMATIC CLAIMS BY P.A.C. LEADER

------------------

Poqo rising this year, he says

From a staff reporter (Tony Hall)

Maseru, Monday.

[Picture of Leballo and Zacarias Molete and the caption: Potlako "P.K." Leballo (left) who claims to have assumed the leadership of the P.A.C., photographed yesterday outside his Maseru offices with one of his Lieutenants, Zacharias Molete. In the background is the Maseru Cathedral]

Potlako ("P. K.") LEBALLO, leader of the banned Pan African Congress - found by justice Snyman to be the same organisation as Poqo - claims more than 150,000 members.

He says an uprising will be launched "this year - our revolutionary council is discussing the time and the manner in which positive action will be launched. It is imminent."

Leballo said in an interview in his Maseru office yesterday that Mr. Justice Snyman was correct in finding that the P.A.C. and Poqo were synonymous.
But there had never been an organisation called Poqo. The word had been part of an Africanist slogan since the 1950s, and had become the byword of the underground P.A.C. since 1961.
There are indications that Leballo, official deputy leader of the P.A.C. is assuming full control. He said "Sobukwe is in jail. He knows nothing about our plans and activities."

Banishment
___________

Leballo went to Basutoland after being banished to Zululand . He served a two-year jail term after Sharpville.
Leballo and his lieutenants spoke with assurance yesterday of the organisations size and militancy. He indicated that there had been internal differences and lack of control - "because some centres think the leadership has been talking too long, especially in localities where conditions are bad."
Some cell leaders had not been strong enough to control members.

1,000 cells
_________

The "P.A.C. Poqo" organisation is strongest in the Cape with 64,000 members. The Free State is the smallest with 12,000.
The organisation is divided into 1,000 strong cells split up into smaller groups.
The killings at Paarl and Bashee Bridge were carried out by "angry and provoked" cell groups - in the face of opposition from P.A.C. leaders.
He prevented similar outbreaks in Welcom and at Kentai, in the Transkei.
He will give the signal for the revolt. All groups will be told at the same hour to attain certain objectives by violence, but until then, political killings will not have been approved or directed by the P.A.C. leadership.
He directs activities from the office of the African Agency in Maseru, but headquarters are "right in Johannesburg where the police will never find them."
He makes trips into South Africa for consultations with local leaders. He was in Johannesburg last month.

Sabotage
________

Leballo denied the P.A.C. received financial support from outside, particularly from Ghana. He said: "Whites, Liberals or Communists, had nothing to do with the outbreaks in the Transkei. In all P.A.C. publications Liberalism, Communism and the policy of the African National Congress were attacked.
"Umkhonto we Sizwe" (Spear of the Nation) and sabotage "have nothing to do with us. Those who embark on sabotage have not got the following for mass action. What are the use of these isolated explosions?"

Last -minute bid to avert Paarl riot - Leballo

From a staff reporter

THE CHAIRMAN of the Western Cape region of the Pan-African Congress went to Paarl on the eve of the riot there last year in an attempt to stop the killings, said "P.K." Leballo, leader of the P.A.C., in an interview here yesterday.

Leballo said the mood of PAC elements before the Paarl massacre was so fierce that they killed their local vice-chairman who tried to restrain them.
The chairman of the Western Cape Region "could not prevail on the Paarl element, and he sent a telegram to e while I was abroad at the end of last year. I was already in Cairo and I only found the telegram when I returned to Dar-es-Salaam - too late.

DISTURBANCES

A student who was expelled from Wilberforce Institution after the recent disturbances came to see him in Maseru. He tried to restrain the boy from action, but was told that the temper at the school was "too high."
Leballo said he received a Transkei delegation who said they intended to avenge the sentence of death on the tribesmen who killed the headman. He opposed the plan, but received a telegram that the group would go over the chairman's head. That was just before Bashee Bridge
He recently had to restrain a group of blanketed "Russians" in Welcome from violent action.
Leballo said his deputies said the mood is now so fierce because "we have captured the youth. They are our greatest pillar."
They accepted the ban on the P.A.C. because they could work on a more militant basis and could protect public servants and teachers who were members.
Leballo said it was becoming increasingly difficult to control local groups.

WITCHCRAFT

Leballo denied that witchcraft was practiced in the P.A.C. - Poqo organisation.
"Most Africans have tribal markings or traces of them from their youth. The oath of allegiance is simply the P.A.C. oath which members have sworn from the first."
Intimidation is also against policy.
"The thing is that our membership is very sensitive to 'sell outs' and informers. We forbid enforced recruitment because that way we get unreliable elements."

URGENT NOTE IN SPEECH

By the political reporter

A NOTE OF URGENCY was apparent in ministerial speeches at the week-end following the interim report on the Paarl riots.
Dr. Verwoerd and three senior ministers stressed the perils facing the country.
Dr. Verwoerd said South Africa was experiencing difficulties because of her "numerous enemies."
The minister of foreign affairs, Mr. Louw, said the outlook was darker than people thought. He said the country was, in the fullest sense of the word involved in a cold war.

NATIONALISM

The minister of defence Mr. Fouche, said the country was not "panicky or terrified" but calm because it was prepared. The Citizen force would help the police to defend local areas.
The minister of finance, Dr. Donges, spoke of Black Nationalism threatening South Africa.
These speeches were made against a background of preparation for possible trouble.
Local authorities and police services are taking security measures and at one large educational institution men have been told to be ready to defend women's residences.
Home guards have been formed in many towns, including those in the Transkei.
[...]
There are signs of increase police activity.
Comm.. Gen P. H. Grobbelaar has siad the defence force is preparing to act speedily in colaboration with the police.
Commandos and Citizen Force units can be mobilised almost immediately to help the police in the small towns.

The British Establishment F***s us over.

The British establishment once f****d over the whole world, but now they are relegated to f**** over the British people and piggy-backing on the murderous US imperial adventure.

I am furious. Cadbury is being taken over by Kraft and the news media sees it as something natural and normal. They focus on "keeping jobs in Britain". The bullshit excuses begin on the BBC Radio 4 Today programme just after their uncritical little vignette on Prince William visiting Australia. The Today programme talks about the takeover of a emblematically British company as if it were an inevitable and natural event.

In no way does our establishment sees itself as British. It has no loyalty whatsoever to people simply because they happen to be living on these British Isles. The establishment's flim-flam disguise of Britishness is so absolutely pathetic it is stunning. Cue the flowing hypocrisy in all British media outlets.

But think of it. These parasites are the dregs of a colonial empire. In the past,  in every far flung place (from South Africa to Montenegro, from Australia to Alberta, from New Delhi to Hong Kong and Buenos Aires) representatives of the British empire manipulated, repressed, murdered, exploited and violated every human right so that they could extract wealth.

How naive it would be of us to expect that these same people: these pirate-killers, these duplicitous two-faced racist ethnocidal sneak-thiefs, could ever have developed any sense of loyalty to their own host population in Britain.

Why should we be surprised when the British establishment in 2010, relegated for over half a century to being small sucker fish attached to the Great White USA, should allow every and any British company to be bought up by foreign nationals? It's no skin off their nose that control over the British economy moves across the Atlantic. BP is controlled by the Americans, so is BAE. and there is hardly any a important UK profit making company that isn't in the hands of foreign interests.

Let's face it, any member of the establishment - even someone on its fringes - will have a share portfolio, will have a pension that depends on the fortunes of unethical companies. They will profit when the companies their shares depend on reap benefits from international conflict, from the exploitation of cheap labour in Asia, the sale of British owned companies, or the destruction of the planet's ecosystem. Our establishment is a comprador elite that has no loyalty to anyone except itself. It's changed from being an imperial elite to being a comprador elite.

The British establishment is the most disloyal, vile, unpatriotic, selfish, self interested, dissembling bunch of smooth talking con men and spivs that has ever been spawned to walk the face of this planet. They are pathologically dedicated to seeking their own profit at the expense of everything and everyone else. British interests mean nothing at all to them.

The British establishment is an excrescence left over by an evil empire. It is the nastiest most parasitical group of people imagineable and they have created a culture of self justification that expresses itself in part through the through the BBC, through Mark Thompson through the Today programme and through James Naughtie.

Che Guevara (Whose photo?)


To give you a little background TQM...

I saw a copy of Che's African diaries about three years ago and was asked to translate them, [In fact I still have them in the original Spanish and intend to read them in their unedited form] but that offer soon faded away. At the time I said I would be honoured to translate the diaries. I am not so sure now. Che's language was dense and circular and confusing in its references, alluding to conversations and events that he didn't specify or detail. If Che was writing for posterity, there was absolutely no sign of it in the Spanish he used. Pure stodge. And he did go through a period of being quite obese.

And then, a few days ago I was chatting to one of the former senior leaders of the African revolutionary and anti-colonial movements and he enlightened me somewhat. He said that he had respected Che's ideas to some extent, but didn't like Che as a person.

According to him, Che had been a latecomer to the Cuban revolution, and without much of a background in Cuban politics. He just got onto the boat with Fidel in order to help swell the numbers. From then on Che was under the impression that all you had to do to start a revolution anywhere in the world was to (figuratively) jump off a boat and start shooting guns into the air. Of course everyone would rally to your standard.

This was a simple minded political philosophy indeed and it was a philosophy that would lead to Che's death in Bolivia on October 9th, 1967, almost exactly 40 years ago.

When the Granma arrived on the coast of Cuba in July, Cubans rallied to the revolutionary cause and what Che did not understand is that this was the result of 30 years of political agitation and preparation by the trade unions and the opposition. Che was under the false impression that the people instantly supported Fidel because they had been swept away in a romance of bullets and uniforms and that, on seeing these brave gun-toting role models, their indignation at the injustices they faced would suddenly find its true revolutionary outlet. He was Argentinian, after all, so what did he understand about Cuban politics? He drew his erroneous conclusions.

The African leader in question told me that Che, and Che's group in Africa, were incredibly arrogant and dismissive about the tactics used by the African freedom fighters. Once, after the African revolutionaries announced that a Portugese plane had been shot down, the Cubans refused to believe it. They refused to believe the Africans were capable of such military feats: "Impossible" they said.

Che and his grouping ordered/asked African revolutionary leaders to go and lead revolutions and anti-colonial struggles in countries that were not their own. And they were politely refused.
So Che was a fantasist who appeals strongly other revolutionary fantasists, to people who like the "poetry" of violent revolution. Che was arrogant and mistaken in his outlook and I quite understand how the African leader in question might say:

- "Well, I respected his ideas to some extent, but didn't like him as a person."

On the other hand, perhaps the Cuban intervention in Angola was partly inspired by Che's romantic internationalism and so there was a silver lining to his weapons fetish and his dark romance of bullets turning into flowers. The Cubans played a crucial part in rolling the South Africans out of Angola and Namibia and, finally, in helping to tumble the regime out of power in South Africa.



Dom commented:

Domza

"When the Granma arrived on the coast of Cuba in July, Cubans rallied to the revolutionary cause".

Well there was actually a massacre, and only a handful made it to the mountains (Sierra Maestra). Years of difficulties followed.

Concerning the Cuban interventions in Africa, there is a new and wonderful film called "Cuba, an African Oddyssey" directed by Jihan el-Tahri made for the BBC.

Phil

But the people did rally to Fidel's cause.

Do you agree with Che's philosophy of exporting revolution?

I don't.

Domza

I think that a phrase like "Che's philosophy of exporting revolution" does not come anywhere close to describing the 26-plus-year history of Cuba's military interventions in Africa, or their consequences. I am not an expert but I had some lucky breaks and I was amazed by what I found out. Among other things, I was fortunate to meet Jorge Risquet and he sent me a his own book, signed for me by himself, called "El segundo frente del Che en el Congo. Historia del batallon Patricio Lumumba". I wish you could translate it for me!

I stashed a couple of things, for example this one here:

http://amadlandawonye.wikispaces.com/Excerpts+in+memory+of+our+Cuban+comrades

There are a lot of things one could say. Che went to the Congo under orders and left under orders. The Cubans learnt very well from that and from the second column (Risquet's) and from Guinea-Bissau; and then they went all the way, as you say, to Namibia and to February, 1990. Jihan al Tahri's film is very subtle about the contrast between the Cubans and the Soviets, and very clear on the final confrontation between the Cubans and the Boers, in which Risquet was once again involved.

Somewhere in the story there is a US tribute to the Cubans along the lines that their African interventions were "one of the most astonishing feats of military projection in history" or words to that effect. I am sure that is correct.

Let me take the opportunity of offering you the thing I am working on at the moment, here: http://amadlandawonye.wikispaces.com/Plug-in+City

Just one more small thing about Che Guevara. I don't think there is anything in the fact that he was Argentinian and not Cuban. There is a long history of Latin American internationalism, even including British internationalists, as mentioned in the interview James Tweedie did with Jeronimo Carrera, stashed here:

http://amadlandawonye.wikispaces.com/Venezuelan+Communist+Jeronimo+Carrera+interviewed+in+Morning+Star

I think what is more to the point is that Che was a white settler child very much like a white South African or Kenyan white settler child. I find that this is a good way for me to understand and appreciate him and to sympathise with him.

Fidel's relationship with Che was very important to Fidel. Fidel's father was a landowner and farmer. Fidel grew up simply, and close to workers, but was not himself poor.

Enrique Orta of the Cuban Embassy here in South Africa gave me a postcard of Fidel as a young man, after the revolution, playing baseball, with a group including black players. Liber Puente Baro, also of the Embassy, later saw the picture on my office wall. Liber explained to me that before the revolution, baseball was an exclusively white sport in Cuba! I had no idea of something like that.

I have come to regard the struggles in Latin America and in Africa as more similar than different, and because of that, to see my own position as a white, or perhaps a creole, in a different way - i.e. as part of a much larger history and tradition.

Now for our younger viewers

A long time ago I went on holiday to Cuba. I took this shot (once again I have had to take a photo of a paper photo) just off a market square in Havana - I believe they were local prostitutes, but I was unaware at the time, I just loved their expressions, their style, the woman's tough eyes. Hard eyes.

As I said before I am not a political animal, so have no wish to comment on the last posting, but I do remember from my experiences in Cuba (as a holiday maker) the fear of speaking about Castro amongst the ordinary folk, also that the market square had lots of booksellers, but all of the books were about Castro or Che. I also recall being told by our hotel bar man that Coca Cola was imported through Spain, in order to avoid the embargo on American goods (how true this is, who knows). At the time, from my limited experience of the country, it seemed like the stereotypes were not based on myth.

Of course I remember the beauty, the friendliness of the people, the elegance of the old (incongruous) American cars, the run down palaces along the coast/port in Havana, the fanatastic graveyard (main one, can't remember the name - but I think the architect that designed it died just as it was completed and he was the first to be buried there). And of course the feeling of being in a country where history was alive, if that makes any sense. There was so much to admire.

• Ours was never a struggle about replacing the white with a black elite!

King Kong - I hope that you don't mind me uploading something silly, but hopefully it will make you smile, a New Year smile.

This morning I pulled up the blind in our loft and wow, what beautiful light I witnessed. I ran downstairs for my camera. Back in the loft, I pulled the window down and focused. Snap. One shot, lovely frost on the rooftops, caramel skies, church spire blah blah....as I took the second shot (8.00am) a man appeared on the loft roof of a neighbours house. At first I wondered if he was a burglar....I snapped away as King Kong surveyed the roof (he was later joined by his co-worker) - unfortunately a 21st century Fay Wray or Tim Curry did not appear straddling the spire, but it was still a wonderful sight. I hope that you agree.

Happy New Year!

TQB

                              Else Steinhardt.





Should people be defined by their victimhood? 

By Phil Hall

Fraulein Else is the name of the novella Arthur Schnitzler wrote in 1924. It was a forerunner of Joyce's stream of consciousness writing and it incorporated some of the pschosexual ideas of Freud. It's about a young girl of 19 who lives in Vienna and is cornered into stripping for a roue by her mother. The father is having financial problems and the man will help the girl's father if she obliges by undressing in front of the rich man.

There are some parallels with Else Steinhardt, my great aunt. Else was roughly the same age as the character in the novella at the time it was published, and she probably moved in the same circles as Schnitzler, as a young opera singer. Moreover,though Else's face lacked classical proportions, she was beautiful, attractive, flirtatious and overtly sexual. In the pictures Else is arch. She licks ice creams, sits on men's laps and embraces the naked statues. In other pictures she is dressed in loose, flowing clothing or swimwear or "hot pants" and there is an open and self-aware expression on her face.

Richard Steinhardt, her brother, dedicates a picture of them both, taken in the '20s to her with the words (in English):   "To the prettiest girl I know." Certainly not to "the most chaste girl I know".

Else's father was an important journalist, the foreign editor of the Neue Freie Presse, but he was also profligate, like the father in Fraulein Else. And even if there was no explicit connection linking the fictional fraulein with the real one, (though there may have been), then the story of the novella must have echoed within within Else's circle. Coincidence.

 In going through the family letters and photographs I realise how little the tragedy at the end of Else's life should define her. The rapist doesn't shouldn't be allowed to define the life of the person they rape. The victim's life should not be defined by the Hutu mass murderer and Else should not be defined by Auschwitz. That's letting the devil create meaning. And when we look for meaning in his devilish work of mayhem in destruction we do not find it. Instead of looking at the rich lives cut short, the murderer sucks at our attention. But why did you do that father, mother, teacher bully, robber? Poor you. Poor perpetrator that must have been so disturbed and they turn with their crime our attention to their psychological make up. So that we worry about Demyanuk and Schicklegruber's motives and forget about the rich lives and the potential of the people they killed, the murdered Kafkas, Einsteins, Wittgensteins and Hanna Arendts.

But Arendt is right about the banality of evil. Look about you. There is bound to be a psychopath near you who would happily join in in with mass murder. Some embittered and unfeeling zombie shell of a human, blaming their desolation on another race, another culture, another sex, another species. These people are less real. They are scripted. They are common. They are the least interesting. Schicklegruber the tramp, mumbling about Germanness. Pregnant with hate. The world is full of these unrealised people, these Schicklegrubers. When I contacted the Prague Jewish museum about Else's mother, my great grandmother, I was maudlin and the letter I got in reply was salutary. It was an admonition. The story of the Prague Ghetto is not the story of the Nazi persecution, we had a thriving community here. And this is the point. The story of the people of Gaza is not merely their suffering, it's their humanity in spite of their suffering and when people become refugees and make a life elsewhere, if they can, they leave their suffering behind them. They don't allow their persecutors to create meaning out of their persecution.

But, increasingly,  I can imagine Else, in the amazing interwar period in Red Vienna, thoughtful, often post-coital, a woman feeling free for once. Feeling free of a tyrannical father, a father nostalgic for the Hapsburg empire, free of history and racial identity - flourishing.  The mystery of sexuality that we all explore, that Else explored, finding life enhancing meaning deep inside it, as we all find meaning in it.

And that and friendship and laughter and triviality and sadness and all the rest was at the heart of Else's life. Her best friend and cousin Paula, her doting little brother Richard, her intellectual brother Arthur and their circle of friends in Vienna. The love of her mom and the regretful love of her father - his bubble of pomposity popped and left behind the man and his life. He died in the Prague Ghetto on 8th March 1941.

Else had the opera.

She wanted to become an opera singer and she did (actually she sang operettas) and she had support and help to do so and by the time the Nazis banned all Jewish actors and singers and directors from the stage, though she was not celebrated, Else had built up quite an impressive repertoire.

Her last performance in Vienna was in 1937 in an Operetta by Strauss. She kept her cuttings and her calling cards and photos - I have them here -   and her repertoire typed up, which she took to Paris in 1938 to give to theatre directors there, in order to find work.

And I'll type it up as it is on paper, to celebrate her. Copy from the paper, yellower now, with the faded d's.

Repertoire: Else Steinhardt

__________________________

Opernsoubrette, Lyrische Sangerin u. Operettensangerin.

Boheme: Mimi, Musette
                                  
Butterfly: Butterfly
Caveliere rustieana: Lola
Carmen: Mieaela, Frasquitta
Don Juan:  Zerline
Figaros Hochzeit: Cherubin,Suzanne
Freischutz: Annehen
Hansel und Gretel: Gretel
Lustige Weiber: Frau Fluth
Oberon: Oberon
Tiefland: Nuri
Unhold Ohneseele: Prinzessen (Rimsky Korsakow)
Verkaufte Braut: Marie
Waffenschmidt: Marie
Werther: Sophie
Zauberflaute: Pamina: 1. Knabe


Land des Laeheins: Lisa
Graf V. Laeheins: Angele
Eva: Eva
Friearike: Friearike (?)
Paganini: A...." Elisa
Fleaedermaus: Rosalinae: Aaele
Fruhlingsluft: Emilie
Geschiedene Frau: Jana
Im weissen Rossl: Josepha Vogelhuber
Berzen im Sehnee: Margaret
Fortunios Liea: Marie
Die sehone Galathe: Galathe
Abentenei in Tunis: Marion
Die Goldene Mule: Ketlerein

The last two items were handwritten, and I had trouble reading the handwriting, so I could have transcribed them incorrectly.


[And, if I may remark: The people who tried to erase Else and others will not succeed if we can help it. A little example: Google "Weiner Sängerin" (Viennese Singer) and this ARS NOTORIA article comes in 1st place. Keep this in mind and perhaps there is somone who you may decide should be celebrated too, and get top billing on Google through ARS NOTORIA. Just be careful to choose the right title for your blog as this is what the search engines pick up. 


Is there a poet, an artist, a revolutionary that you feel you would like to celebrate? Write about them on ARS NOTORIA.]

I am not really a political animal, more a political inanimate. But reading some of the contributions to this blog, I know many of you are, your passion is apparent and whether I agree or not with what is being said at times, I like the idea it is being said.

So, I thought I would offer up this image (if only to banish Bob Dylan and his backlit hair) - I went to the rally on false pretenses,kind of. I had enrolled on a part time evening photography course, for beginners. After a few weeks we were asked to put some of what we had learned into practice, I thought I would test myself (and my skills) to the full by attending the demonstration with only my 35mm SLR for protection (there was talk of organised trouble).

I was at the Embankment in London as the crowd gathered. All of a sudden I was in a scrum in amongst the seasoned photojournalist all desperate to get the perfect protester shot. I was petrified. The police were on one side, the protesters on the other and we were in the middle as both sides closed in on us, ready to clash, keen to clash. I snapped away in panic and got this shot. I love it, but I remember thinking at the time that there was an element of collusion - the protester staring at me posed, cooly, unruffled by the commotion about him - he was a professional, a photogenic one at that.

I didn't go to Hyde Park afterwards when things really kicked off, I had the shot I wanted.

TQB

For those of you wishing to know more about the day, here is a link to a blog-

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/libertycentral/2009/jul/21/criminal-justice-bill-protests

It's very hot here and we could us more rain. There are many people praying in various languages, some are having long serious discussions but Gabrielle's chooks are doing well. Sorry to sound like I am speaking in code but for some reason that no-one can quite work out, the Australian Government has decided to introduce some kind of mandatory internet filter and not tell anyone else what it is they are filtering out. This has caused a kind of quandry among agrarian socialists. Just as well I'm not one.

The big names of Australian literature continue their strange game of whispering to each other whilst desperately trying to control their public image as they did in the old days. Maximum fun at Christmas time, messing with their legacies.

I continue to enjoy Ars Notoria greatly, the wit and erudition, the way debates are conducted and so forth, all greatly instructional and Australia's most windely read poet on the internet says thankyou! More beer!

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.

It is not as easy at it looks.
Photo Copyright:The Quiet Busker.

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.

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.europa.eu
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.gov.cy
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

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.




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.

Xan Rice, Mail & Guardian, Johannesburg, 20 November 2009

Western Sahara's most prominent human rights activist has gone on a hunger strike at an airport in the Canary Islands after being expelled from her home country by Moroccan authorities.

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.

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?

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.

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

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 US site was titled ‘Why I Won’t Read Your Fucking Screenplay.’ Tough guy. I wonder how his Christmas cards read.

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…

• Basic Communism
• National Democratic Revolution

• Karl Marx’s Capital, Volume 1
• Lenin’s “The State and Revolution”

• No Woman, No Revolution
• Development: Urban/Rural, Local/Provincial

• Anti-Imperialism, Peace, and Socialism
• Philosophy, Religion, and Revolution

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