tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-89989815064022639912024-03-19T08:36:14.028+00:00Sour Mango PowderMangohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14109551463817639247noreply@blogger.comBlogger18125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8998981506402263991.post-23981342603808040352011-03-02T13:21:00.006+00:002011-03-02T20:41:17.677+00:00Waking up is hard to doI've hesitated for a couple of weeks about writing this. I'm reluctant to say much about a subject on which I'm not an expert and of which I have no first-hand experience. On the other hand, I do have a lot of first-hand experience of Western mass media propaganda techniques, having been subjected to them all my life, so that's what I'm mostly writing about. I finally decided to put something on virtual paper when my initial suspicions started turning out to be correct.<br /><br />I was deeply suspicious from the start of the media coverage of the popular uprisings in North Africa. Western media are not well known for their sympathy for protest or support for Third World democracy - unless it suits their particular purposes. The liberal press in particular were overwhelmingly effusive in their support for the protests in Egypt and other North African nation-states. What is it about this phenomenon that leads the media to spin it in this particular way, rather than, for example, describing the protesters as rebels or insurgents, describing the violence as a morally intractable conflict rather than a clear case of one group being oppressed by another, or ignoring the protests and ensuing human rights abuses altogether? All of these tactics have been used in other situations which were broadly morally equivalent and of comparable importance.<br /><br />It is also important to remember the medium-term historical background. Since the period of decolonisation, the Western powers have consistently supported violent repressive states and actively and violently undermined Third World democratic movements. The US in particular, as has frequently been stated by people like Chomsky, have consistently used proxy or direct violence to undermine any decolonising nation-state that tries to set up a welfare system or to keep the profits of resource exploitation. Despite this, we have seen in the past fortnight commentary in the liberal press explicitly expressing complete faith in the US government's commitment to grassroots democracy and ruminating about the benevolent superpower's options about how best to facilitate it in this case.<br /><br />This is nauseating hypocrisy bordering on outright historical lying. But what is it all about? My interpretation right from the start has been that the media are building the propaganda foundations for a Western-corporate military occupation of the whole of North Africa based on the golden opportunity provided by the uprisings. The first stage has been to continually and prominently report and support the uprisings - and who could disagree with that? The sympathy created among the liberal readership can now be steered in the direction of military occupation.<br /><br />The next step was taken last week when the UN called for a no-fly zone in Libya. Very well - who could question the benevolence of protecting the population from airborne violence? But no-fly zones have to be enforced. There was a curious silence about who would do this. At the same time NATO issued the predictably sinister (and self-contradictory) denial that it was considering military force - a way of introducing the possibility into the argument, in fact more or less equivalent to a statement that it does intend to use military force. Now the US government has announced that they are considering it, which was not much of a surprise.<br /><br />Corporations like mercenary contractor Blackwater, arms dealers, Halliburton - who are siphoning off billions from the Iraq 'reconstruction' - and resource extraction interests must be salivating over the disorder in North Africa and the opportunities it presents them: arms sales, mercenary 'security' contracting, rebuilding of infrastructure once the military have destroyed it, multinational corporate control of resources, privatisation of public services... it is a historic moment of opportunity which they are unlikely to have overlooked.<br /><br />Perhaps equally important, the alternative is too dangerous to contemplate - a politically moderate, integrated North African economic (and military?) region with nationalised industries and some kind of welfare state systems. Such an outcome would create an undesirable counterweight of stability to the US and their allies' apparent determination to reduce everything to the use of violent force - with which they have so far presumed they can conquer at will. Not only that, it would force Israel to do what is in the interests not only of Palestinians in the occupied territories but also of Israelis: retreat to its legally established borders and integrate peacefully into the region, thereby negating its strategic value to the US as a stick to stir up the Middle East.<br /><br />It is utterly naive to think that these obvious conclusions have not occurred to the US strategic planners and military-industrial complex. The horrible example of the 20-year devastation of Iraq, one of the greatest and most cynical crimes in human history, should prove this beyond any doubt. But the question of whether the public in the UK will be lied and smarmed into supporting military occupation in North Africa depends on whether they are self-reliant enough to see how the propaganda system works and where it is currently leading. I still remember people expressing support for, or at least equivocation over, the invasion of Iraq on the grounds of 'human rights'. Unless they have selectively forgotten this, I hope they now realise that they were wrong, and how and why they were led to such a preposterous position.<br /><br />More importantly I hope that they will draw the necessary conclusion from their disastrous mistake - that the liberal media, far from being an objective source of information about reality, are an increasingly sophisticated propaganda machine that is playing a major role in taking the world in an extremely dangerous direction. And, finally, I hope that enough people are prepared this time to take the necessary (relatively minor) risks to themselves to engage in <span style="font-style: italic;">effective</span> rather than merely symbolic resistance to another imperial war.Mangohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14109551463817639247noreply@blogger.com5tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8998981506402263991.post-53839500528094349442010-08-31T19:19:00.004+01:002010-09-01T22:25:44.590+01:00Oh, I do like to Sieg beside the seaside...I honestly never thought I'd see fascists marching through the streets of Brighton.<br /><br />Because of my family background I was brought up with a strong awareness of the history of Nazism. Unlike some people from European Jewish backgrounds, including members of my family, my response to this was not to retreat into paranoid Jewish nationalism but to draw some more general conclusions about history, politics and especially the relationship of the individual to the state. That was the earliest motivation that eventually led me to become an anarchist - a political position that I believe results logically from a combination of the desire to attain personal integrity, the principle of non-harm, and a certain amount of historical and political knowledge. Though my political life has taken various turns, I have always had at the back of my mind a watchfulness for the return of far-right politics in the UK. As I have said in other posts, I have been concerned for many years about the increasing authoritarianism and conformism of mainstream politics. Recently, however, it appears that certain people - perhaps just a few cynical individuals - are trying to bring far-right politics back into the British political spectrum.<br /><br />I came back early from visiting my family to oppose the so-called English Nationalist Alliance march in Brighton. As far as I can tell, they are the aspiring paramilitary English Defence League with a racist authoritarian political programme. They claim to have chosen Brighton because of what they call 'anti-English' activities in the area - an apparently nonsensical statement that actually refers to the relatively healthy radical political scene here. So essentially they had called a march against me and all my friends.<br /><br />I got back to Brighton late on the night before the fascist march, so I didn't have much idea what was going on in opposition to it. I turned up in the general area of the fascist meeting point, Brighton station, and tried to wait inconspicuously, hoping that enough others would have the sense to do the same thing. I bumped into a couple of people but still had no idea how many were around. We waited in a small group. I didn't want to go anywhere near the station after a good friend of mine was arrested during the last nationalist march in Brighton just for showing up in the street.<br /><br />After about an hour I saw a large crowd move down Queens Rd (leading south from the station) and turn east into North St. I wasn't quite sure what was going on at first but worked out this was the UAF-led main body of the anti-fascist demo, being compliantly herded away from the fascists by the police and led into a crowd pen they had set up in Victoria Gardens, which I'd had a look at earlier. One of my friends decided to join them and later sent us a message saying it was 'totally shit'. Useless bastards. There must have been hundreds of them. All they had to do was stand still in the right place and the fascist march would have been blocked.<br /><br />Once they had passed, we carried on up Queens Rd. I was relieved to see that a group of perhaps 30-40 militant anti-fascists and Brighton anarchists were still on Queens Rd. It was reassuring to see that at least a small amount of solidarity still exists on this planet. I presumed at that point that the police would be herding the UAF crowd into their pen, and then do the same with the fascists.<br /><br />Word came from two independent sources that the police were planning to redirect the fascist march down Trafalgar St, leading east immediately outside the station. Most of us moved down to Trafalgar St to try and block them, but I understand that another group separated from the anti-fascist bloc at this point and tried to block the fascists at other places. We assembled on Trafalgar St just in front of the tunnel and waited.<br /><br />A line of police came down the tunnel and stood in front of us, followed by three dog handlers with snarling dogs. I went up and challenged one of the police with how utterly despicable it was to use dogs against the people of his own city to force a fascist demonstration through the streets. He looked quite shaken but didn't say anything, presumably having been briefed not to talk to us. Three or four police horses came up the road behind us, walked round us and lined up with the line of foot police. I'm quite scared of batons (and if you want to know why I'll show you the scars), very scared of horses and extremely scared of dogs. It was fairly obvious at this point that the police were going to try and push us down the road to get the fascist march through. After some more tense waiting, the police moved towards us and started pushing. I asked the policeman who was shoving me if he was aware that he had no legal power to assault me and was comitting a criminal offence. He didn't have much to say except 'You've been asked to get back.' The pushing became more aggressive as we passively resisted. They started going for the throat. I was grabbed and shoved several times by the throat.<br /><br />Later I asked myself what it is that can make a human being grab and shove someone by the throat who is offering absolutely no physical threat to them.<br /><br />Further down the road, as we continued to passively resist, they started pushing people onto the ground - including a woman of probably about 7 stone, pushed by a vicious sadist who must have been at least 16 stone and was clearly enjoying himself - and striking people in the legs and back with their knees. I got a painful bruise just above the tendon of my right biceps femoris. Police officers also attempted to use arm and neck locks to force me to comply. I didn't hear any batons coming out, but one woman showed me a bruise later that looked like a baton strike. Some of the militant anti-fascists tried to create barricades from large bins but didn't manage to block the road. The horses came forward to scatter us and we ended up at the bottom of Trafalgar St, on the pavement heading towards the pens in Victoria gardens. The last thing I wanted was to stand in a police pen all day, so I nipped across the road with a few others.<br /><br />This was not the worst violence I've seen from Sussex police, but it was particularly frustrating that they were attacking us on behalf of Nazi skinheads.<br /><br />Arriving at Victoria gardens I finally got a sight of some of the fascists. (Quote of the day: 'Have you seen the fascists?' 'I think they're behind that bus'). They truly are the dregs of humanity. 30 or so bleary-eyed skinheads were standing around in their oversized police pen, occasionally chanting football slogans, surrounded by a jeering crowd of Brighton residents. One prominent individual, who looked like a zombie that should have stopped taking amphetamines 20 years ago, was carrying an Israeli flag - apparently the far right have suddenly switched from antisemitism to pro-Zionism to try and make common cause against Islam, the enemy of the day. I asked corpse-face about this and he told me to 'fuck off'. More work needed on EDL public relations, perhaps. I was reminded once more that this is a political movement (or pseudo-movement) with practically no ideological basis, consisting of gutter kneejerk reactions and mindless nationalist slogans. The basic premise - that radical Islam is taking over the UK - is so preposterous that no-one could seriously believe it. Conclusion - there is something else behind it. The sight of a few fat, cynical veterans in the crowd confirmed this. They must have been there before Islam became the new official enemy. Do they have a strategy or do they just enjoy it?<br /><br />Anyway, all good things must come to an end, and it came to time for the police to babysit the delicate little Nazis back to the station and home to bed. They were followed up the hill by the swelling crowd of Brightonians who, disgusted by the presence of these bigoted scum in our sophisticated laid-back town, gathered to give them a royal send-off, gleefully jeering as they were quick-marched back to whatever London overspill arsehole town they were recruited from.Mangohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14109551463817639247noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8998981506402263991.post-3224322766792028682010-06-07T21:28:00.003+01:002010-06-08T18:38:54.261+01:00Killing with the PenLast week I attended an appeal hearing at the Immigration Tribunal in London. I have some experience of criminal courts and their strange inhabitants, but nothing had prepared me for this. A friend who was present described it as "Kafka's <span style="font-style: italic;">The Trial</span> remade by David Lynch."<br /><br />The interior design is somewhere between that of a magistrate's court and a dole office, the feeling of frazzled and routine desperation perhaps closer to the latter. After the usual token bag search, which I presume is done in order to make us believe that it is necessary, I take the lift together with two suited wonks whom I suspect are from the Home Office. They have the inane look about them of the yapping adolescent dogs of contemporary political power. Keen to take the opportunity to wind them up, I say loudly to my friend, "I hope they don't kill him. It's not very nice when they kill your friends." With hindsight I would like to have added, "especially on a nice day like this," which it was. I like to put things into perspective, particularly for the education of flabby, vacuous little murderers.<br /><br />The second floor, where the tribunals are held, is full of stressed-out migrants and bustling lawyers from both sides. There are three queues in some incomprehensible system at the reception desk. I stand at the middle one, which seems to be labelled "Reception" and am told with an impatient sigh to move to the left one. I say I am here as a member of the public to watch the case of Mr _ _. The minor apparatchik rolls his eyes and says sarcastically, "Who's Mr _ _?" as if to point out how ridiculous it is for me to expect him to remember one foreign name from the long list of foreign names on whom the State would be making life or death judgements that day. I keep my temper and he tells me to look at the lists.<br /><br />A sign next to the lists informs us loudly that "this service is provided free of charge at point of delivery." They're doing you a favour by allowing you the chance to prove, according to their rules, that you deserve to live. A very civilised, British twist on the totalitarian gesture of sending someone a bill for the bullets that killed a member of their family.<br /><br />In the court room I greet the "appellant", a young man, my friend and tui na patient. He is almost speechless with anxiety after months in a situation equivalent to death row. He has been tortured in his country of origin, both by the police and by a powerful, murderous political faction, because of his work in an organisation campaigning against human rights abuses. If he is forced to return, he is almost certain to be arrested and tortured, and likely to be killed. After the trauma of violent persecution and a gruelling journey to Europe and the UK, he is now being subjected to a bureaucratic process that keeps him in a state of constant tension and fear.<br /><br />The court is small with a low ceiling, like a small lecture room. There is a raised desk for the judge at the other end from where we sit on a row of mix-and-match chairs. The royal coat of arms behind the judge's desk, unlike the large full-colour version in criminal courts, is small and metallic grey - hideously appropriate for the cruel bludgeoning of humanity that takes place in these rooms.<br /><br />We have to wait nearly an hour for the judge to arrive. By the time the clerk comes in, the translator has got bored and wandered off. The clerk goes off to find the translator, the translator comes back in, sees that the clerk isn't there, wanders out again, the clerk comes back in, leaves again and finally returns with the judge, who sends him out again to find the translator.<br /><br />The judge is blind. Of course I know that this does not disqualify someone from being a legal expert, but there is something bitterly surreal about seeing the judge led into the court one step at a time by the clerk. More disturbingly, there seem to be long gaps in his mental processes during which he apparently forgets where he is and what is going on. He interrupts people in mid-sentence with tangential questions. He appears not to listen to what people say. He cuts off an important witness before the witness has made his point, and the witness has to press on with a crucial explanation of why people from a particular organisation are at risk of being killed. He has a tantrum after some trivial mathematical confusion.<br /><br />I am shocked by the perfunctory nature of this hearing. My experience has been of criminal courts with their priority on oral testimony, which is gone through in great detail, often for days or weeks. This hearing, with hundreds of pages of evidence, and with the stakes infinitely higher than in any criminal case, lasts no more than half an hour.<br /><br />The judge asks, "What do you fear if you return to [country of origin]?" My friend, the "appellant", replies, "Death." The judge asks, "Is there anything else?"<br /><br />Later I will imagine a literary continuation of this exchange: "Death? Isn't that a little metaphysical? You'll have to come up with something a bit more substantial than that. I mean, death, it's rather mysterious, isn't it? Are you really able to give a definition of this 'death'?"<br /><br />Then suddenly the hearing is over. The judge moves straight into the next case. The "appellant" may hear the decision in about three weeks, maybe longer. He says, "In [country of origin] they kill you with bullets. Here they kill you with the pen."Mangohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14109551463817639247noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8998981506402263991.post-43646377904010521062010-05-06T09:28:00.003+01:002010-05-06T10:31:20.680+01:00Vote Capitalist!I would like to say that it seems unnecessary to set out an anarchist position on voting, as the standard arguments are well rehearsed, but it often happens that the excitement of the spectacle overtakes even those who have taken care to maintain a position of thorough integrity. In spite of my own deep cynicism, I awoke this morning with a visceral feeling of excitement. I wasn't sure at first what it was, then I remembered the great national spectacle that was to take place today. The frantic atmosphere of ritual participation had affected me at a physiological level. Fortunately I have developed at least a rudimentary awareness of the connection between my bodily sensations and thoughts, so I did not become unreflectively involved in the thought-complex that could have been generated from the intrusive feeling in my abdomen.<br /><br />Participation in the voting spectacle is one of the great shibboleths of bourgeois conformity. It involves a wilful vacuity and a vicious pigheaded bloodymindedness that remind me of the state of mind of people who make a point of giving to charity or voice their support for, or equivocation over, the latest imperial war in the name of universal values. I have found that expressing my refusal to participate often results in a look of shocked and hurt betrayal from electoral enthusiasts. It reminds me of the period of hypnotised mania leading up to the election of Obama. Someone asked me what I thought of him and I said I thought he was a politician. The response was a great onslaught of whining naivety in which I was accused of taking away her hope. I can only reflect that I was right, and that disillusionment from hope in politicians can only be beneficial.<br /><br />It pleases me to believe that what the electoral spectacle enthusiasts call apathy is actually a healthy cynicism and a quite correct realisation that the whole thing is totally illusory. It's a filthy business and I will not disturb my mental balance by getting involved with the corrupt way of thinking that it entails - wouldn't it be just a little bit better if...? The act of voting is an acceptance of the entire pre-formed mindstate of the war machine. Conscious withdrawal of oneself from it, like withdrawal from the mental poisons of the television and newspapers, is a great step towards a self-sufficient engagement with reality and a step away from sacrificing one's independence of thought to the illusory and deadly security of the mass.Mangohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14109551463817639247noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8998981506402263991.post-63727004938067805942010-03-03T10:08:00.003+00:002010-03-03T10:28:34.024+00:00Minority Rights for Meat-eaters!I believe it is time for the oppressed minority of meat-eaters to stand up for ourselves. Already in the forward-thinking USA, known worldwide for its protection of minorities (look what they've done for the Negroes and Indians), it is illegal to criticise the meat industry. Meat-eaters, as neither an ethnic nor a religious minority, find it difficult to gain recognition as the dietary minority that we are.<br /><br />Being in perhaps a 1% minority in this country, the chances are that on average 99% of people a meat-eater meets will be raving, shouting, bomb-wielding vegans who snatch burgers out of their hands, hold them down and force-feed them organic beansprouts and curly kale. The overwhelming vegan majority, on the other hand, can largely take their lifestyle for granted as nearly everyone else is doing the same thing. To be a meat-eater in this country is to be forced to continually justify our way of life to nearly everyone we talk to.<br /><br />Walking down any high street, the meat-eater is constantly bombarded by advertisements for the vegan lifestyle. Nearly every bus stop has a poster for Kentucky Fried Chickpeas or McTofu, while an endless series of pubs and restaurants parade their discriminatingly meat- and dairy-free menus. In this world where every high street has two or three independent wholefood shops selling organic fruit, veg, grains, beans, nuts and seeds, the meat-eater has to painstakingly seek out specialist supermarket suppliers to obtain a juicy piece of reconstituted factory-farmed carcass byproducts bound with synthetic fillers, laced with antibiotics, and sterilised with ammonia. The vegan lobby has overwhelming political power: the tempeh industry alone is worth hundreds of pounds a week, and contributed ten pounds last year to the Vegan Society.<br /><br />We demand that meat-eaters be recognised as a dietary minority, and that acts of non-consumption of animal products, or incitement to non-consumption of animal products, should be recognised as hate crimes against us.Mangohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14109551463817639247noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8998981506402263991.post-17834103353870093932010-01-22T11:30:00.005+00:002010-01-22T18:16:30.076+00:00John Zerzan at the CowleyLast Sunday I attended a talk and discussion with the well-known anarcho-primitivist theorist, John Zerzan, at the Cowley Club. The event had been much talked about before and was well attended. I was expecting an interesting debate as he has many fans in the anarchist scene but there are also others who are strongly critical of anarcho-primitivism.<br /><br />I ended up sitting with John over lunch before the talk. I had the impression of a relaxed, friendly, open-minded and down to earth character. Much of the table conversation was taken up by an episode of a long-running debate between me and another Brighton anarcho character who like many others is strangely defensive of the absolute superiority of corporate medicine, in the patronising scoffing manner that often accompanies naive materialist beliefs. During this exchange, which was enthusiastic, John seemed to observe us with amused interest.<br /><br />The first part of the talk was somewhat rambling. There didn't seem to be much of a theme to it. John didn't really get going until the questions started. I found it admirable that in general he did not give the impression of defending a stereotyped position, which allowed him to disarm some of the questioners who were doing that. Some points he answered with anthropological or political arguments; at other times he answered, "Yes, that's a good point," or just, "I don't know." However, after the talk I still had a similar feeling about anarcho-primitivism to before: that there is much strength in its critique, but that it is weaker as a positive theoretical position - indeed I sometimes feel that way about anarchism in general. In his essays and in this talk, John is very clear and quite plausible in tracing the roots of oppression and hierarchy to very early specialisation of labour, and crucially agriculture, but when expressing a positive position he tends to resort to slogans like, "Get rid of the lot."<br /><br />I found it wryly amusing to observe people asking questions from their entrenched positions, especially the leftist ones and the anarcho-primitivists who were more attached to John's position than he was, and being effectively disarmed by his more open, questioning attitude. But there was some ambivalence about this, perhaps because of his need to maintain a political stance against the risk of degenerating from an activist to an intellectual: it seems inconsistent to express a flexible, exploratory position at one moment and then to define oneself as anarcho-primitivist, taking on the whole baggage of dogmas and sub-sub-cultural shibboleths. He seems to be caught between these two conflicting postures.<br /><br />I was struck by the question of the value of taking up theoretical positions in general. What exactly does it mean to give one's assent to a particular theoretical proposition, especially when with these theoretical questions we are taking a certain critical perspective on discursive thought? To me, it's a bit like ticking an imaginary box in front of some sentence or other. From a certain perspective there is a self-contained circularity to discursive thought and the formation of theoretical positions, and some people do seem to get over-excited about it, as we saw at this event. Unfortunately in political activist culture there is a certain taboo around discussion - or, more importantly, around realisation - of mental faculties other than discursive thought, perhaps due to an assumed historical association of discursive thought with liberation from religious dogma. I suspect that the aggressive and surprising defence of corporate medicine I mentioned above is also in part connected with this questionable historical accident, and the equally questionable exclusive equation of corporate science with reason.<br /><br />While I'm here, I might as well record something that struck me after that pre-lecture argument. Medical knowledge based on statistics (ignoring for now the essential corruption of the system that produces the knowledge) treats the body-mind relationship as a black box. What's going on inside the box is taboo. Subjectivity is regarded as meaningless. The variety of medicine that I practice, on the other hand, requires one to look inside the box. And what one finds inside the box is the truth of one's own subjective being. Facing one's own subjective reality may be a daunting experience - we see all our faults, our weakness and falsehood. It's not surprising that some people will go to almost any effort to avoid looking inside the box, even denying their own self-consciousness. Perseverance, however, yields a type of certainty which cannot be proved or disproved or explained intersubjectively but to which the piecemeal adolescent sneering of corporate statistical knowledge is pathetically illusory. There's no point in trying to argue about what's in the box with someone who refuses to look inside, but it does little harm to state my case here. The corporate medicine hardliners can sneer as much as they like.Mangohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14109551463817639247noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8998981506402263991.post-22835674664285769822010-01-07T12:55:00.005+00:002010-01-07T13:26:59.308+00:00Sledging on the Town MoorThere is a curious feature in the middle of Newcastle - a very large, open, rough field of about 3x3km called the Town Moor. I believe that it has been protected from development because the Freemen of the City have the right to graze cattle on it. Nelson Mandela, incidentally, is an honorary Freeman of Newcastle, though I'm not sure that he grazes any cattle on the Moor. The Town Moor hosts the famous annual gathering of travelling fairs called the Hoppings. It is augmented with some trees planted in the 1970s and a couple of artificial hills made from colliery spoil. The hills give reasonable views over the city, which is otherwise fairly flat. <a href="http://maps.google.co.uk/maps?f=q&source=s_q&hl=en&geocode=&q=newcastle+town+moor&sll=54.987858,-1.624947&sspn=0.045503,0.154324&ie=UTF8&hq=Town+Moor&hnear=Town+Moor,+United+Kingdom&t=h&ll=54.990025,-1.62941&spn=0.0455,0.154324&z=13">Satellite map</a>.<br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgSZNehu5kLS-dunyltLBVVXY0tOH-LrQvIt9DnTURmz9cVxNy3Z3T7CkHccY5bFigtZ28DbWzGSF_aEBVDyJe92G9KL0CAKWvfoiLPUgbOh6w7eewUcANHHgeeIlI1FqPRJ1VrXEw8iLE/s1600-h/town+moor.jpeg"><img style="margin: 0px auto 10px; display: block; text-align: center; cursor: pointer; width: 438px; height: 328px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgSZNehu5kLS-dunyltLBVVXY0tOH-LrQvIt9DnTURmz9cVxNy3Z3T7CkHccY5bFigtZ28DbWzGSF_aEBVDyJe92G9KL0CAKWvfoiLPUgbOh6w7eewUcANHHgeeIlI1FqPRJ1VrXEw8iLE/s400/town+moor.jpeg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5423973143435219554" border="0" /></a><br />Throughout my years in the city, I often used the Moor as a running and cycle track and as a pleasant and direct route to visit friends in Fenham. The most exciting activity was in snowy winters, when the larger of the two hills makes a long, fast sledging run. The view below is the gentle side slope, not the steeper face used for sledging:<br /><br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiMXdQJ-HKKUXT39xaL11Ji3HAOSUjD7u7fFvr_uENhEfM_M8ZfGJeoJrJ9SeanruDY_oTkZp-OQDNjXRn2RF95RqhBpIb0KrLOceCvId01KJiTnesafR4X2FqpnnkBpXZ8NriQwPfHTMM/s1600-h/town+moor+snow.jpg"><img style="margin: 0px auto 10px; display: block; text-align: center; cursor: pointer; width: 400px; height: 338px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiMXdQJ-HKKUXT39xaL11Ji3HAOSUjD7u7fFvr_uENhEfM_M8ZfGJeoJrJ9SeanruDY_oTkZp-OQDNjXRn2RF95RqhBpIb0KrLOceCvId01KJiTnesafR4X2FqpnnkBpXZ8NriQwPfHTMM/s400/town+moor+snow.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5423975594470615570" border="0" /></a><br />This is a good view, from the Chronicle:<br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiduRyaS0P_DegAjWS1ldXX0YVLoeAODLTXa-gvBUGY8P3e6xCK1X4R1btO7ysirD1dsfDnONRyCrQNjELOocUt7f-cj8Tya8Bf9nXCM5_oBbnQzmqmP-P9XDYUkHg9NFc1dIXKlSv2QIQ/s1600-h/town+moor+snow+4.jpg"><img style="margin: 0px auto 10px; display: block; text-align: center; cursor: pointer; width: 461px; height: 300px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiduRyaS0P_DegAjWS1ldXX0YVLoeAODLTXa-gvBUGY8P3e6xCK1X4R1btO7ysirD1dsfDnONRyCrQNjELOocUt7f-cj8Tya8Bf9nXCM5_oBbnQzmqmP-P9XDYUkHg9NFc1dIXKlSv2QIQ/s400/town+moor+snow+4.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5423988416183252210" border="0" /></a><br /><br />Sledging on the Moor is a vigorously enjoyable and quite unique experience. The run is exciting enough to attract a contingent of adults as well as children and their families. There's always a fun and friendly atmosphere at this spontaneous gathering, with accents from all parts of the city and beyond, and vehicles ranging from plastic bags to traditional wooden sleds. After the first day's use, the snow tends to be well packed down and frozen over, making it very fast. At night the hill is sufficiently lit from the city's lights for the fun to continue. I recommend sledging belly-down, head-first, steering with the hands, on the second night of freezing. Using the feet for steering creates too much friction and, if going feet-first, a blinding spray of snow. It's quite a thrill skimming down at high speed, steering with subtle hand pressure, marginally avoiding the trail of people who inexplicably walk right up the middle of the fastest sledge run. You need intense concentration to steer around them, and to stop before the rocks and fence at the bottom. Despite all the hazards and the usual trail of wrecked sledges, I have only heard of one serious injury, a broken leg many years ago.<br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgxYFHoOv4bRyCb46jbU09YBHZplY2IhfRv5ZfMc_Pd5J20q6brEkKjnR4Bse9WsBOFlmt6BZEXl4VRV5wYRI3n7SWH3fiCvTjlBSHNkousBxk7NuUMdenMffFoBTKU2cvLg4nqq7Ca0NE/s1600-h/town+moor+snow+3.jpg"><img style="margin: 0px auto 10px; display: block; text-align: center; cursor: pointer; width: 300px; height: 180px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgxYFHoOv4bRyCb46jbU09YBHZplY2IhfRv5ZfMc_Pd5J20q6brEkKjnR4Bse9WsBOFlmt6BZEXl4VRV5wYRI3n7SWH3fiCvTjlBSHNkousBxk7NuUMdenMffFoBTKU2cvLg4nqq7Ca0NE/s400/town+moor+snow+3.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5423984282268067954" border="0" /></a><br /><a href="http://www.newcastle.gov.uk/core.nsf/a/townmoor">Newcastle Council information</a>.<br />Interesting pictures of <a href="http://www.nfa.dept.shef.ac.uk/history/miscellaneous_articles/article14.html">the Hoppings, 1938</a>.Mangohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14109551463817639247noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8998981506402263991.post-70986867197947592052009-10-12T21:34:00.005+01:002009-10-16T12:35:20.889+01:00Fash on show: Manchester EDL Rally and Counter-DemoA disturbing and confusing day, the first time I have seen a fascist rally. This lot take political irrationalism to its utmost - it's not so much believing an irrational ideology as having no ideology at all. The theoretical basis of the English Defence League is barely sufficient to produce a few pathetic slogans - "Engerland, Engerland, Engerland," "EDL! EDL!" and once, "We want our country back!", a little surreal in the middle of an ordinary shopping day in the centre of Manchester. Looking at their website it is immediately clear that their ideology is so flimsy and preposterous that no-one could possibly believe it after a moment's thought.<br /><br />This leads me to suspect that the whole thing is a cleverly constructed media campaign by a few fairly intelligent, though not very wise, leaders. The aim seems to be to create a discourse in the media of a confrontation between Muslims and white supremacists, by a series of carefully manipulated media stunts in various cities. I presume the leaders hope that by doing this, the media constructed discourse will become a nightmarish reality in which they will have the chance to take power. The strategy closely follows that of Hitler and Goebbels in the early days in Berlin - a small bunch of despised cranks creating publicity for themselves by causing confrontation on the streets.<br /><br />The mainstream media functions by creating pseudo-concepts within its own discourse and repeating them until they become established as background facts, upon which further discourse can then be constructed. The pseudo-concept of Islamic fundamentalism or extremism is one of the clearest examples. A totally meaningless phrase, not least because any belief system is fundamental and extreme when seen from a certain perspective, it has been repeated daily for the past few years until everyone seems to tacitly agree that it exists, which then allows endless discussion on what to do about it, from the liberals who carefully make a distinction between nice Muslims and naughty Muslims, to the likes of the EDL, who use the pseudo-concept as a pretext to try and create racial tension on the streets. The point is that whatever position someone takes within the discourse, they still implicity reinforce the pseudo-concept. So the aim of the EDL leadership appears to be to create another pseudo-concept within the discourse - a concept of escalating racial confrontation.<br /><br />The fascists on the streets of Manchester - a disturbingly large number of them teenagers - didn't seem to know what they were trying to do or what they believed in. A friend told me that one of them said he was marching against women being raped. Very few seemed to be aware of the existence of left-wing political organisations - the 'Reds' of traditional fascist demonology. In the fluid and confusing situations of the day, I frequently had the strange experience of rubbing shoulders with small groups of swaggering skinheads. Rather than immediately jumping on me or even insulting me as one of the 'Reds', there was a strange ambiguous stand-off, a kind of awkward politeness. Even when I jumped a railing to avoid some over-excited riot police and found myself alone in front of a large crowd of EDL supporters, all that happened was a couple of those nearest to me half-heartedly shouted 'Scum!' as I made a dignified exit. Earlier, a small group of EDL youths were being forcibly de-masked by mounted police. Remonstrating with the police, they seemed to look at me in appeal against the unfairness of it. Far from recognising me as a deadly enemy in front of whom they were being humiliated, they apparently had not the slightest idea of what I was doing there.<br /><br />It was unfortunate that the police interfered with the anti-fascists' ethical duty to physically prevent the fascists from marching. Because of the police, what would have been an overwhelming anti-fascist victory was turned into a frustrating stand-off where the main bulk of both sides was contained in police cordons in Piccadilly Gardens, leaving small mobile groups wandering around aimlessly. At one point a large group of fascists rampaged pointlessly up and down the street for a bit until they were dispersed. Anti-fascist groups outside the cordons were too small to be effective. However, at some point fairly early in the afternoon, there was a confusing incident that appeared to be, possibly, a half-hearted attempt by the EDL to have a march. The police had to use vans and dogs to move the surrounded EDL supporters through the jeering anti-fascist crowd, bringing them a couple of hundred yards down the main street and then back to Piccadilly Gardens. It wasn't at all clear whether the police or the EDL knew what they were trying to do.<br /><br />Although it was not possible to physically block the fascist march, there was a certain satisfaction in seeing them surrounded by hundreds of people expressing their contempt in no uncertain terms. The hardened NF veterans may easily dismiss it as the expected behaviour of the Reds, but maybe some of the new recruits will have to wonder why everyone hates them so much wherever they go; though having seen the intellectual quality of the far Right's new generation it's difficult to imagine them thinking at all.<br /><br />It did make me idly wonder where the cynical grizzled recruiting-sergeants find their baton fodder. Perhaps a little feverish after little sleep and seven hours on the streets, I imagined them wandering Britain's urban wastelands with large nets, searching for bands of swaggering dysfunctional feral teenagers, herding them into vans and driving to various cities where they open the van doors and stand well back, possibly after a bit of drilling on the way - "Engerland, Engerland... Enger... um... how does it go?"Mangohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14109551463817639247noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8998981506402263991.post-56059411519035217152009-09-17T12:40:00.008+01:002009-09-17T13:22:59.652+01:00Kingley Vale<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgmw49tqMBYrsddnJmgscn2OdZDTwTzY7pryGRuyg6gRWqbMN93W-3Duaw0Ku-H2OPrca43kUmGKqD0-uGoube8NzlErw5s49uIlrJ8GCbhzIITxo9bxweJVDgWpw1rjDf1NUNWzLOtt2c/s1600-h/View_from_Bow_Hill.jpg"><img style="margin: 0px auto 10px; display: block; text-align: center; cursor: pointer; width: 400px; height: 300px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgmw49tqMBYrsddnJmgscn2OdZDTwTzY7pryGRuyg6gRWqbMN93W-3Duaw0Ku-H2OPrca43kUmGKqD0-uGoube8NzlErw5s49uIlrJ8GCbhzIITxo9bxweJVDgWpw1rjDf1NUNWzLOtt2c/s400/View_from_Bow_Hill.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5382401003090344770" border="0" /></a><br />Kingley Vale, north of Chichester, has been one of my favourite places since I moved to Brighton. I have spent the night up there several times, one summer solstice keeping vigil with the movements of the moon and stars. Recently I went for the first time in a couple of years.<br /><br />I took the train to Chichester, which has shockingly increased to £10 each way. There is a bus, but it takes several hours. I arrived mid afternoon and walked up the Centurion Way cycle track from the centre of Chichester. The beginning of the track is slightly difficult to find and would benefit from some more signage, but once on it I was safely away from traffic and supplied with plentiful juicy blackberries. I had a pleasant conversation with a local chap on his walk home from work. From the top of the cycle track I took a slightly different route from usual, taking the bridleway along the east edge of the beginning of the Kingley Vale environs, rather than walking along the road to the car park at West Stoke. There is little to choose between the two routes and the entire area smelt strongly of anaerobically fermenting slurry.<br /><br />Crossing the boundary into the Kingley Vale nature reserve, there seemed to be a subtle but palpable change in the air quality and the nature of the landscape. I felt a sense of relief, nourished by the healthy greenery, and remembered just how beautiful this little enclave is. The sun was descending as I made my way through the woodland paths into the start of the ancient yew tree grove. I had a quick break for one of my home-made energy bars before the difficult climb through the woods to the hilltop at Devil's Humps.<br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg0olMg2p2UAQuZXlRI0PcV9TebBYsl2RqmygduM1Ngf9y3WU3xWYuuVHg0um82naFdbEzwniiSVG8VxWO72wqHmH7UXjpBfe_GNnsG_jtSw-iOVFf3zxO4edpsvZvsOEvPNej1aNPb5Wk/s1600-h/tumulus.jpg"><img style="margin: 0px auto 10px; display: block; text-align: center; cursor: pointer; width: 521px; height: 390px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg0olMg2p2UAQuZXlRI0PcV9TebBYsl2RqmygduM1Ngf9y3WU3xWYuuVHg0um82naFdbEzwniiSVG8VxWO72wqHmH7UXjpBfe_GNnsG_jtSw-iOVFf3zxO4edpsvZvsOEvPNej1aNPb5Wk/s400/tumulus.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5382403392571940754" border="0" /></a>The Devil seems to have been particularly active in Sussex, leaving humps, jumps and dykes all over the landscape. The Humps are a set of three tumuli on the high South Downs at Kingley Vale, disappointingly not laid out on the pattern of Orion's belt. They are fairly large and collapsed at the top, presumably where they have been raided at some point in the past. I am informed that round barrows like these are Bronze Age in origin, while long barrows, also appearing at Kingly Vale, are Neolithic. That's about the limit of my historical knowledge on the matter. The view from the top of the tumuli extends spectacularly in three directions, over Portsmouth and the Isle of Wight to the South, and across to the North Downs in the North. The woods behind the tumulus in the above photo are where I rough camped that night among the ancient yew trees.<br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgPs5h64xioMoV7sqfvJLJuPOExFUbb5dz6GXJhiZV4_Y7QjGR8lKSQPjAjaC7nwUPl0JHR6qNnoV-jEvZTzIqwOx-YcKAHbOFceGUNLoB_3kbhtMdxS9q2dRIqALy6lR52jZJOEctKnK0/s1600-h/Yew_Tree_Kingley_Vale.jpg"><img style="margin: 0px auto 10px; display: block; text-align: center; cursor: pointer; width: 400px; height: 300px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgPs5h64xioMoV7sqfvJLJuPOExFUbb5dz6GXJhiZV4_Y7QjGR8lKSQPjAjaC7nwUPl0JHR6qNnoV-jEvZTzIqwOx-YcKAHbOFceGUNLoB_3kbhtMdxS9q2dRIqALy6lR52jZJOEctKnK0/s400/Yew_Tree_Kingley_Vale.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5382408786450626306" border="0" /></a><br /><br />I went to bed early but got up later to look at the stars, reading my star chart by the light of my mobile phone as my head torch had failed. I took my camping mat and lay on my back in the dip at the top of a tumulus. I am beginning to try and learn my way around the constellations. The stars in almost half the sky were not visible due to the light of the moon, so I could not find Ursa Major, which was the starting point for the first beginners' star chart in my book. I recognised Orion, and a very bright object I guessed was Venus. Even without knowing the constellations, it was fascinating to look at the celestial objects. I probably spent about an hour there.<br /><br />I got up early, after a night of the strange deep dreams I often experience in the yew forest. I had planned to walk down to the coast but vacillated about my route when I realised the one I had chosen was too long for me to enjoyably walk with a full pack. I spent a slightly frustrating day walking through second-rate scenery, frequently changing my mind about where I was going. I soon realised that Kingley Vale was by far the prettiest place in the area and I wouldn't find anywhere better. My mood was improved by frequent foraged meals of plums, blackberries and yew berries (yes, just spit out the seeds). Finally I headed towards the coast, attracted by a National Trust area marked on the map at Bosham Quay. The tidal areas were quite interesting, including a great crop of marsh samphire which I joyfully sampled. However the coastal track to Bosham Quay was closed by the tide. I decided to head back to Chichester via the Roman palace at Fishbourne, which I did not actually visit as it turned out you have to pay to see it. Next time I think I'll just spend the day at Kingley Vale.Mangohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14109551463817639247noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8998981506402263991.post-10881247008334083572009-09-14T23:28:00.007+01:002009-09-17T12:38:44.313+01:00Zeitgeist 2: Technocratic utopianism<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEisfFWLPyZTsPT9z8RhbVdlO74CdINiyEVzwn5kiMlMkQp6-FnkMsKnUaw7slRN6VoNnv8KFiC93PTa8EjWcDokPfh0fTS9ojC8wj1ER2BtOIuk64F7-QIYMj488qXpLkKQtcYjCgAes2k/s1600-h/venus-project21.jpg"><img style="margin: 0pt 0pt 10px 10px; float: right; cursor: pointer; width: 320px; height: 176px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEisfFWLPyZTsPT9z8RhbVdlO74CdINiyEVzwn5kiMlMkQp6-FnkMsKnUaw7slRN6VoNnv8KFiC93PTa8EjWcDokPfh0fTS9ojC8wj1ER2BtOIuk64F7-QIYMj488qXpLkKQtcYjCgAes2k/s320/venus-project21.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5382399400559934850" border="0" /></a><br />In a slightly desperate search for a new perspective on things, I recently watched <span style="font-style: italic;">Zeitgeist 2: Addendum</span>. I had little objection to the first half of the film, mainly devoted to a further explanation of the fractional reserve banking system and its far-reaching implications. However it might have been useful to set this in the context of the longer term history of capitalism and imperialism in general. From the anarchist point of view that I hold, power is more important than money and has preceded it historically. So, while I agree that the mathematical instruments of financial speculation are a basic mechanism of power today, it would be useful to see the current speculative economy in historical perspective against other forms of power and oppression. There were occasional dark hints about 'the bankers' and their long-term plans, reminding us that we are on the territory of conspiracy culture. Not that I have any definite opinion on whether there is a great millenia-old conspiracy or not - how would I know? - but perhaps it should have been made clear what exactly the narrator was talking about. It was gratifying to see a film coming from conspiracy territory talk about the workings of the IMF, World Bank and 'economic hitmen' - topics that are often too tediously mundane for serious conspiracy heads in comparison to the intergalactic drama of Sirius, Draco et al.<br /><br />At about the halfway point, the narrator states that the mechanism of fractional reserve banking is only a symptom of a deeper problem. My ears pricked up at this, but the diagnosis of the deeper problem seemed to be a slightly facile statement that stupid forms of religion are stupid. Amongst the quantity of Krishnamurti footage, I did not see a clear distinction made between the naive propositional beliefs supposedly required from followers of mass organised religions (a stereotyping of religious 'believers' questionable in itself) and a genuine spirituality in which the higher faculties of human consciousness are developed and explored. This argument seemed to be a form of crude rationalism in which the only way to understand the world is to question one's conception of it in a discursive way. Of course rational questioning of received beliefs is necessary, but this must include questioning the received belief in materialist rationalism, and in my opinion the recovery of the human faculty for non-discursive spiritual knowledge is one of the most essential tasks in building a sane and compassionate society that can live in at least relative harmony with nature. I understand that the dogmas, repressions and persecutions inflicted by the Catholic Church and other such political organisations have given a bad name to any mention of non-discursive knowledge, but that is no reason to replace them with rationalist dogmas which are arguably even more harmful in their effects, not least because rationalist dogmas are presented as anti-dogmas.<br /><br />This leads me to my main point, which is that the second half of the film consists almost entirely of an advert for a naive technocratic utopian future. The argument, very similar to that of Marx, is that technology is essentially or potentially liberating but has been used as a tool of enslavement through the creation of artificial scarcity, and so in a high-tech society free from the profit motive, technology could finally free human beings from earning our bread with the sweat of our brows (or someone else's brows). A series of sci-fi animations are shown of space-age cities with efficient rapid transit systems and other impressive looking devices.<br /><br />There are many obvious problems with this vision of the future apart from its crass, wide-eyed naivety. Firstly, if we look at the history of technology, especially industrial technology, we can see that in fact it has almost invariably been used to enslave people under the claim of liberating us. It seems highly dubious to claim that a phenomenon, in this case high technology, is essentially or potentially different from what it has actually been in almost all cases. E.P. Thompson provides documentary evidence in <span style="font-style: italic;">The Making of the English Working Class</span> that the introduction of weaving machines - a crucial first step in the early development of industrial capitalism - was done for conscious and explicit reasons of social control. The introduction of machines allowed capitalists to bind the previously relatively independent hand-loom weavers into a regular factory timetable, to reduce wages and striking power by reducing the level of skill required, and to bring in lower-paid children and women. The number of hours worked by weavers increased, their earnings decreased, and the imposed discipline of the factory system allowed the factory-owning class greater control over the workers' culture. Far from being irrationally obstinate or Romantic stick-in-the-muds, the heroic direct-action revolutionaries of the Luddite uprising understood all of this, which explains both why they enjoyed such strong support from their own communities, and why machine-breaking was punishable by death. Now it seems odd to theorise a difference between what these weaving machines meant in actual historical fact, and what they could have meant in their ahistorical essence. This is not an odd example but an absolutely fundamental historical step in the development of capitalism. Nowadays, some critical thinkers celebrate the function of the Internet in spreading their ideas. This is to miss the fact that the enormous majority of electronic communication is <span style="font-style: italic;">within</span> corporations. Whatever power it gives to us, it gives exponentially greater power to our enemies. We might also reflect on the sad circumstance that we can communicate electronically with someone hundreds of miles away, but are often unable to talk face-to-face with our own neighbours.<br /><br />Secondly, all current high technology is dependent on the exploitation of natural resources through violence against ecosystems and indigenous people. Perhaps it is true, as the narrator claims, that technocrats have the know-how to make intercontinental maglev trains run at 400 mph, or to produce all the energy we need from solar power. Impressive and convenient as such marvels would be, they are all dependent on supplies of minerals torn from the Earth at the expense of the unfortunate people who live in mineral-rich but economically powerless parts of the world. Versions of high-tech devices that do not depend on rare mineral inputs are pure fantasy. What will the post-capitalist technocrats do if indigenous people object to their ecosystems being destroyed to mine rare minerals for the hyper-gadgets this film claims are so important for human freedom? How do people who live in low-tech societies in relative harmony with nature fit into the utopian vision? Will they have to be strongly persuaded of the benefits of the global technocracy, as they are now being persuaded of the benefits of global capitalism?<br /><br />The focus on heroic high-tech solutions to our problems also obscures the many problems that cannot be solved by technology. The narrator speculates that robots will be able to carry out surgery. Perhaps. But heroic technological interventions are far from the only aspect of health and illness. Drugs and surgery may be able to save people from critical illness in certain cases; they cannot make us healthy. Only low-tech or no-tech approaches such as wholefoods, mental relaxation, exercise and holistic disciplines like the internal martial arts can lead to vibrant health. The heroic high-tech approach also seems to downgrade the crucially important art of food production. Will food in the techno-utopia be produced by machines? This is demonstrably inefficient and ecologically destructive. The high-tech standardisation, mechanisation, processing and transportation of food has been disastrous in many ways, and not just because of the profit motive. The only way to produce fresh, nutritious food in relative harmony with nature is by hand on a small local scale, using crop varieties locally adapted for micro-variations in conditions, saving seed, and growing mostly for consumption not exchange. Or will an army of small organic food growing serfs be left in the shadows at the fringes of space-age megacities as the spinning flying disks and supersonic maglev trains zoom over them?<br /><br />Finally, high-tech inevitably means centralisation. Mind-boggling hyper-gadgets cannot be made without enormous investment - whether of money or of time, effort and organisation - in materials, equipment and specialist skills. The large scale and complication of the infrastructure needed to produce such items would be beyond the reach of any community small enough to make decisions at the face-to-face level. In a technocratic world, it is inevitable that some people will have more knowledge and therefore more control over the technology than others. It is inconceivable that everyone can be an engineer, metallurgist, materials scientist, and so on, all at the same time. A technocratic elite would inevitably have more power because they would control the technology. Even the most exciting and inclusive space-age domed megacities would have to be planned and that means telling people where they must live. Who's doing the telling? What if the people don't want to move? In my opinion, political freedom requires economic self-sufficiency. I and my friends cannot build a maglev train but we can grow food on an allotment or build a house from locally available low-tech materials, given the necessary skills, which are relatively simple. The skills of self-sufficiency at the community level provide independence from centralised economic structures, whether those structures involve money or not. A striking life experience for me was staying in a beautiful 250-year old house in Southern France that was built by a peasant family from the natural materials to hand - rocks, earth, rough-finished timber, straw and hay. To me, those are the kinds of skills and values that will allow humanity to build a future in which we no longer destroy ourselves by destroying nature, and they would not be promoted by submitting ourselves to the expertise of a technocratic elite on whom we would depend for our survival. To me, an ecological future must be low-tech, decentralised, largely self-sufficient at the community level, and based on a recovery of non-discursive spiritual knowledge - what we might call the technology of consciousness.Mangohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14109551463817639247noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8998981506402263991.post-84433939782387402602009-06-22T19:12:00.004+01:002009-06-22T19:38:25.924+01:00Impossible PlaygroundWalking with my friend Jo through a park in East London, we came across a children's playground. We have a habit of playing on playgrounds, which started one night at the Level in Brighton a few years ago. A couple of weeks previously we had found an excellent wooden play apparatus in a park in Hackney, which included a very difficult wobbly bridge and some chain walkways that reminded me of the marvellous and terrifying high-level polyprop walkways of tree protest sites (comment of fellow protester as I'm trying to work out how to remove dead trees from the path of a walkway: "Why don't you hang off the walkway and cut them?" My reply: "Why don't <span style="font-style: italic;">you</span> hang off the walkway and cut them?". I then discovered that if you try to saw something while hanging in space, the friction from the saw is greater than the friction in the rope, so you just swing unless you apply opposing force holding the tree with the other hand - quite strenuous). Sharing the obstacle course with some small children, we were gleefully shown how a wobbly bridge is a lot less wobbly if you weigh 1/3 as much as me and scamper unhesitatingly across it.<br /><br />This time the children would not have been gleeful. The first thing I noticed approaching the playground was what I called the 'Dali slide'. It was roughly the shape of a slide, but almost vertical and made only from two paralell steel tubes. Was it a slide? Was it for climbing up? I made the most of it by trying to climb up feet first. The grip was slippy on the shoes and uncomfortable on the hands. On another side of this structure was a roughly rectangular steel tube frame, again almost vertical, slightly folded about 1/3 of the way from the bottom edge, with a swivelling hinge at the top and bottom. The result was that when you try to climb up, it swivels round and you fall off. Frustrating, uncomfortable and perlexing.<br /><br />The final bizarre challenge was the monkey bars. Again steel tube, surely too wide for children's hands, and for some reason arranged in an arch shape so that for the first half of the climb, each bar is higher up than the one before it. This required repeatedly lifting one's entire bodyweight on one arm in a dynamic fashion, a feat attainable by an average gibbon but certainly not by an average, untrained <span style="font-style: italic;">homo sapiens</span> (our self-awarded title <span style="font-style: italic;">sapiens</span>, meaning 'wise', proved to be sadly over-optimistic by this odd structure) who is not a professional circus performer. Jo, a trapeze artist, was unable to conquer the challenge.<br /><br />I could only conclude that the playground was built for a little-known naturalised population of gibbons or other brachiators, or that it was designed by some perverse and sadistic bureaucrat to induce a sense of despair, bewilderment and failure in the local youth.Mangohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14109551463817639247noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8998981506402263991.post-79036986472840549392009-05-11T17:22:00.004+01:002009-05-12T10:41:30.740+01:00A lovely day outYesterday I went for a walk near Seven Sisters Country Park, just east of Seaford, East Sussex. With my friend Sophie, I got the bus to the stop outside the Golden Galleon pub (whose slogan could be "not that great but in the right place") at the Cuckmere Estuary. We walked to Litlington, mostly on the South Downs Way, where I had been told I could find wild garlic (not found around Brighton probably because of the dry chalky soil). I didn't find any wild garlic but it was a lovely walk. We stopped in a meadow just before Litlington for lunch. Then we decided to continue to the Long Man of Wilmington, a giant chalk figure on the South Downs escarpment. It is ancient in origin (thought by some researchers to date back to Neolithic times) and was almost lost, visible only as a different shade of grass in certain lights, until it was restored and made permanent in recent times. The restorers may have got one of the feet wrong, giving it the 'walk like an Egyptian' look. Some people think the giant is holding two staves or spears; some think he is opening a gateway to the Otherworld. We found it slightly elusive (which may seem unusual for an enormous chalk figure, but in keeping with the nature of archetypal symbols) and walked right past it a couple of times, as it's not really visible from above unless you walk right out over the steep slope, until some friendly local walkers told us how to find it.<br /><br />Out of much plant and animal life, I particularly noticed the following interesting species. They're not excitingly rare but also not species that a city dweller sees in town from day to day, and each rather charming.<br /><br />Cowslip<br />Early Purple Orchid<br />Grey Heron<br />Jackdaw (interesting as I learned more about distinguishing the British corvid species today)<br />Yellowhammer (my favourite of the day).<br /><br />I don't mention skylarks in my list because, although they are wonderful, I see and hear them frequently in the excellent semi-wild areas around Brighton race course.<br /><br />Another enchanting phenomenon was seeing sycamore seed cases (flurrying around like snow at this time of year) apparently floating and spinning in mid-air, stuck to single strands of spider silk that were streaming out from a line of alders.<br /><br />CORRECTION: thanks to Sophie for finding out that they were actually elm seeds floating on spider silk attached to a line of elms. With the elm so scarce in England, how much more sad that so many of those thousands of seeds fall on concrete and tarmac.<br /><br />Quote: "<span style="font-family:Verdana;font-size:85%;">One of the most prolific of deciduous trees in Britain before the onset of Dutch Elm disease. It grows in hedgerows and sends up many suckers to form lines of trees. The tree can be identified by its rough surfaced dark green leaves which have one side longer at the base. Until the number of elms crashed after Dutch Elm Disease, the English Elm supported a greater variety of wildlife than any other British tree species."</span>Mangohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14109551463817639247noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8998981506402263991.post-20920794133917644832009-04-21T22:32:00.005+01:002009-04-21T23:39:55.144+01:00What's new?There has been a considerable outbreak of middle-class hypocrisy in the aftermath of the demonstrations in London at the G20 conference. The word 'kettle' has entered the public vocabulary and suddenly the pundits are commenting on the phenomenon as if it only started two weeks ago.<br /><br />As far as I know, this particular tactic for collectively punishing a group of people who are committing the offence of expressing themselves politically in public was developed for Mayday 2000 in Trafalgar Square in response to the unqualified anarchist victory against the City of London Police on June 18th 1999 (a solidly grassroots protest that preceded the more celebrated Seattle event by which time more compromised and authoritarian organisations were involved). Obviously I'm not saying that Mayday 2000 was the first time mass police violence has been used against protesters. But I think it was the first occurrence on a large scale of the tactic of holding a crowd in a cordon for several hours as the main form of punishment. Please correct me if I'm wrong. It was terrifying as we were being forced into the middle of Trafalgar Square by several ranks of fully kitted up cops <span style="font-style: italic;">with no idea why or what was going to happen</span>. Having grown up during the miners' strike seeing images of horse baton charges into crowds, I feared that we would be driven into the square and mercilessly beaten. This time, however, it was punishment by boredom and sheer overwhelming sour-faced ugliness.<br /><br />The tactic quickly became standard and almost every demonstration of any significant size I attended was treated in this way. A particularly unpleasant feature of this standard procedure is that anyone who decides they'd rather leave than stand in a police cordon for several hours is viciously shoved or thrown back into the crowd. I have seen a police briefing document where it is specifically stated that this is <span style="font-style: italic;">not </span>to be done! I have been assaulted in this way countless times. The main aims of the police are: to surround the demonstration with yellow-jacketed thugs so that no passers-by can see what it is about; to demoralise and intimidate the protesters, making the experience so thoroughly unpleasant that only the truly dedicated would put themselves through it; and to control the location of the event so that it can be prevented from reaching its target, i.e. to protect the state or corporate target audience from public criticism.<br /><br />Since 2000, to attend a demonstration (apart from a few state-approved Democracy exercises) is to be pretty certain of being filmed, searched, questioned, ordered, pushed around, insulted, glared at, and possibly struck, pepper sprayed, punched, batoned, manhandled, and locked up. What has depressed and frustrated me most about this situation is not the behaviour of the State - after all it is the function of the State to repress people - but the fact that no-one seemed to give a flying shit except for a handful of despised and ignored anarchists.<br /><br />I know that this time the police killed someone. I know a lot of the media attention comes from that. But it was only a matter of time. Similar assaults on unthreatening people to force them to comply are a standard feature of the policing of protest. And media attention is not focused only on the killing but on other assaults that fortunately had less tragic consequences.<br /><br />So what's changed? In the words of a close friend: "More middle-class people are involved in the environmental movement." How long will the press attention last? Another friend: "As long as the economic downturn lasts."<br /><br />Of course it is shocking that people have been subjected to mass assaults by police officers for daring to express themselves politically. Of course the liberal press should be shocked by it. But, as with anal sex, we politely ignore the slight smell, in this case of hypocrisy. Where were the liberal press when the police broke my hand last year to force me to comply with their orders? Where were they 3 years ago when an 80-year old man was pushed to the ground for playfully stepping off a kerb and his daughter arrested for trying to help him? Where were they when I was wrestled to the ground, arms wrenched behind my back, dragged headfirst into a Land Rover with my hat pulled down over my face and locked up for hours for giving out leaflets in the street? My point is that long ago we reached the shocking situation where these kind of things are normal experiences for people who attend protests. It is extremely frustrating to see frivolous columnists jumping on the protest bandwagon when for the past 10 years there has been a total blackout in the national press on the repression of protest. It is bitterly ironic that people I know who have not been involved and would never listen to a word I said are now discussing these issues in shocked tones because they have read about it in the press. Yes, it's good that these things are coming out. But the sinister silence about the past 10 years of repression has the effect of invalidating the experiences of people who have been on the receiving end of it for a long time, and it makes me sceptical of the motivations for the sudden change of tune.<br /><br />A most despicable hypocrisy of the liberal press is that they have participated to the utmost in the demonisation and repression of the animal rights movement. Every national newspaper without exception has printed only police propaganda against animals rights campaigns. They have cheered and smeared when campaigners receive 8 or 10 year prison sentences in political show trials. They have participated fully in building the propaganda climate for the arrests and show trials to take place, by constructing a background of lies and distortions from press releases provided by police propaganda organisation NETCU. Everything that the otherwise uninformed member of the public thinks they know about the animal rights movement comes from NETCU via the press. The background was successfully set for the terrifying repression of AR campaigns using specially drafted laws and mind-bendingly dubious legal arguments.<br /><br />The other side of this phenomenon is the dilution of ultra-radical movements by middle-class personnel and ideas. The continual bleating about 'peaceful protest' is a case in point. Who decided that protest should be peaceful? Did I miss the debate about that? Do individuals not have a moral right (and a legal right, for that matter, if you care about that) to defend themselves if attacked? If I am trying to walk along the street and a group of people block my path, brandishing weapons, and strike at me if I try to walk past them, is that not a clear case for self-defence? Maybe there are some people who claim not to believe in the use of violence, even in self-defence. But I'm afraid that playing the Simon Says game with the police does not count as radical pacifism. It's an axiom of pacifism that giving in to violence is an act of violence. Thus, submitting to a stop and search or agreeing to 'move over there' <span style="font-style: italic;">because it's more convenient</span> is an act of violence. Being jokey-matey with armed agents of state repression who will beat you with a metal bar if you step out of line is an act of violence. For that matter, so is walking around with a pocket full of documents with pictures of the monarch on them. In my experience, the rare few who do practice radical pacifist techniques of absolute non-compliance tend to be criticised as 'violent' (or negatively as 'not peaceful') by the same sanctimonious people who claim the pacifist ground for themselves. I am aware that these issues are being negotiated to some extent especially around the Climate Camps but I fear the agenda is being set by compromised middle-class ideas, always appearing as the 'voice of reason', which is why I tend to feel extremely alienated from such movements.<br /><br />It will be interesting to see how the police behave at the forthcoming Mayday Carnival protest against the EDO MBM arms factory in Brighton, after all the national publicity about police repression. I've noticed they are already preparing the ground in the local press for another bout of repressive violence. As I have maintained, we are moving towards a new and perplexing form of totalitarian state and a short-lived series of newspaper headlines will not make much difference unless a lot more people draw some fundamental conclusions from it about the nature of state-corporate power.Mangohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14109551463817639247noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8998981506402263991.post-20252167928662025742009-04-08T23:23:00.000+01:002009-04-08T23:55:12.345+01:00It's worse than we thought: Conversation overheard on London Underground"I bought a bottle of wine but I took it back to the shop because it was too expensive."<br />"I'm surprised they let you take it back. You could be a terrorist and have injected it with something."<br />"Nah, terrorists wouldn't buy a bottle of wine, <span style="font-style: italic;">it's against their religion.</span>"Mangohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14109551463817639247noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8998981506402263991.post-27854505585772209362008-07-16T10:55:00.000+01:002008-07-21T12:40:28.841+01:00Response to Rob Hopkins<span style="font-size:12;"> <!--[endif]--><o:p></o:p></span><span style="font-size:12;"><span style="font-style: italic;">This is a response to Rob Hopkins of Transition Network's response (deep breath) to a booklet called Rocky Road to a Real Transition published by Trapese Collective. Rob's article can be found on his <a href="http://transitionculture.org/2008/05/15/the-rocky-road-to-a-real-transition-by-paul-chatterton-and-alice-cutler-a-review/">blog</a>. The Trapese booklet is <a href="http://sparror.cubecinema.com/stuffit/trapese/">here</a>.</span><br /><br /><br /><br />First they came for the migrants, and I did not speak out because it’s a very complex issue and we are a small island and we can’t just let anybody in, although I don’t agree with the detention centres, but they don’t talk about those in the Guardian very much, and it’s not an environmental issue.<o:p></o:p></span> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:12;"><!--[if !supportEmptyParas]--><!--[endif]--> Then they came for the anti-vivisection activists, and I did not speak out because if I started thinking about all that stuff I’d probably have to become vegan and that would be too much hassle and I like cheese, and medicines do save lives and those animal rights activists are a bit dodgy and intense and scruffy-looking, certainly not smart polite people like me.<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:12;"><!--[if !supportEmptyParas]--><!--[endif]--> Then they came for the Muslims, and I did not speak out because it’s an oppressive monotheistic patriarchal religion and maybe some of them actually are terrorists, otherwise why would there be so much on telly about terrorism? And I don’t know how to cook those funny vegetables they sell in Whitechapel market.<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:12;"><!--[if !supportEmptyParas]--><!--[endif]--> Then they came for the anarchists, and I did not speak out because all that confrontational activism is so outdated and if you think too much about the negative then you just give energy to it and if you don’t want to get battered and arrested then you shouldn’t go on demonstrations in the first place – what do you expect if you don’t do what you’re told?<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:12;"><!--[if !supportEmptyParas]--> <!--[endif]--><o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:12;"><!--[if !supportEmptyParas]--> <!--[endif]--><o:p></o:p><br /></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:12;">Rob, although I do not agree with everything in the Trapese booklet, I found some of your response to it chilling in its refusal of solidarity. I’m not suggesting that the Transition Network should engage in activist tactics, and I do agree with you that what we might call the positive and negative aspects of all this are two sides of the same project. However I do believe that this discussion has revealed some serious flaws in the way the Transition Network is conceived and organised.<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:12;"><!--[if !supportEmptyParas]--><!--[endif]--> Anyone who is thinking about how we will live in the future needs to take into account all important factors about how that future will look. Clearly climate change and peak oil are two of the most important and will totally change the way the human species lives for the rest of our (possibly short) future. But in my analysis there is a third factor, which is at least equally important and is fundamentally connected to the other two. That factor is the ever accelerating rise of global imperialism and fascism. The US / corporate imperial war is already directly affecting the lives of vast numbers of people. If you were living in Iraq now, you would not be waiting for the apocalypse. You would be living in it.<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:12;"><!--[if !supportEmptyParas]--><!--[endif]--> Now, fascism. That’s not a word I use lightly, but with some historical knowledge of what classical fascism is.<span style=""> </span>Three of my grandparents and other family members were survivors of Nazi extermination (their parents did not survive), so I have always considered it my duty to understand this phenomenon, to be aware of oppression, and to watch out for the warning signs. Of course today’s fascism is not in the same form as that of Nazism or of Spain and Italy around the mid-20<sup>th</sup> century. The techniques of control have become more sophisticated in some ways, at least in the wealthy regions of the world. In much of the world it’s exactly the same old fascism. Look what happens to trade union members in South America or environmental activists in Nigeria. Look what’s happening in Colombia. And these local third-world fascisms are absolutely connected to the global empire. But in North America and Europe, another, more sophisticated fascism is rapidly appearing, based on overwhelming mass mind control rather than ubiquitous overt violence (although that balance is shifting). The mind control techniques of the mass media work in various ways. One is through unsophisticated knee-jerk reactions like the racist ‘immigration’ agenda; another is through sophisticated knee-jerk reactions like the dizzy New Age peace-police refusal to recognise the existence of oppression and struggle.<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:12;"><!--[if !supportEmptyParas]--> <!--[endif]--><o:p></o:p>Here are some of the basic ideological concepts of classical fascism, drawn from the Italian version: expansionist militarism; nationalism, often with explicit or implicit racism; conformism; nationalist class collaboration; and corporatism – the ‘union of state and corporate power’ (Mussolini), all of which are now dominant ideologies of Western governments, often so dominant that they are implicit. The liberal rule of law has already been fundamentally undermined. A few pointers to watch out for are: a change in the balance of the relationship between the state and the individual so that it is no longer a question of what you’re not allowed to do but of what you are allowed to do; attacks on habeas corpus; movement away from the rule of law towards executive government; more political laws; creation of a national security agenda; hysterical myth-making about a sinister national threat; emergency powers that allow suspension of the constitution; a cultural hardening of conformity, intolerance and self-policing. All of these things have already happened. The minimal state theory of classical liberalism has effectively been abandoned for an escalating authoritarianism built on terrorism hysteria painstakingly constructed by the state / corporate media. It’s an absolutely classic manoeuvre. I’m not making prophetic predictions for the future here. All of these things have already happened. The reason hardly anyone has noticed is that most people are already so hypnotised and obedient that they are doing what the state wants them to do anyway.<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:12;"><!--[if !supportEmptyParas]--> <!--[endif]--><o:p></o:p>Now, Rob and his followers: you may not personally value the relative freedoms of political dissent allowed under the liberal model of government, because you (conveniently) choose tactics that do not bring you into conflict with the state. But you should be alarmed at what is happening to those who do choose to follow their moral convictions even when it involves personal risk. Even if, secure in your New Age corporate motivational-management clichés, you do not feel solidarity (a lack of compassion despicable in itself) for those you consider deluded by outdated paradigms of struggle, you may consider us a political barometer which is giving you some serious warning signs. If you want to know what direction things are going, look at what happens to animal rights activists. They are getting years in prison just for attending demonstrations. Yes, yes, I know going on demonstrations is so 1970s and no doubt they have unresolved issues about their parents, but surely that doesn’t mean you can just look on smugly and allow them to be viciously repressed by the state. Ah, but the state doesn’t exist. That’s alright then.<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:12;"><!--[if !supportEmptyParas]--><!--[endif]--> Isn’t it ironic, by the way, that it always seems to be anarchists who end up trying to defend the liberal rule of law against the (former) liberals?<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:12;"><!--[if !supportEmptyParas]--><!--[endif]--> The state clearly does exist. It has armed, coercive institutions with clearly identifiable personnel and buildings. Certainly it requires the hypnotised obedience of masses of people in order to continue existing, but it still exists. If you only behave within the boundaries it sets, you may not notice that it exists. You can decorate your prison cell very nicely, and you can even philosophise it away if you like. But if you follow through the logic of certain ethical principles, you will find that the state violently prevents your actions. Or is that just because I want to fuck my mother, Louis? The chilling logic of the smug New Age refusal of solidarity is that the Transition Town movement would be quite happy for all the Muslims, anarchists and other scum to be wiped off the face of the earth because that won’t interfere with its project at all and they were so troublesome and wrongheaded anyway. And it would be quite happy to function as a sector of a future fascist government. I don’t see anything in TT ideology that rules out collaborating with an authoritarian government, or with a racist-nationalist government for that matter.<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:12;"><!--[if !supportEmptyParas]--><!--[endif]--> There are different kinds of police. There are the hard police who wear uniforms, carry weapons, beat protestors, protect vivisectors and arms dealers, enforce deportations, illegally evict squats, harass homeless people and so on (maybe you don’t believe they exist but I think there are photographs that will prove it). Then there are the soft police who ideologically support and defend them in various ways. One of those ways is to philosophically finesse your way out of recognising the existence of oppression so you end up in a ‘love the oppressor, hate the oppressed’ mentality, with the help of a few sickly catchphrases pressed into service from a vicious and fanatical perversion of personal spirituality corrupted to serve the interests of greed and vanity (i.e. New Age management-speak). I prefer the hard police. At least I know where I stand with them.<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:12;"><!--[if !supportEmptyParas]--><!--[endif]--> Of course the slide into violent authoritarianism is not inevitable. But it can only be avoided by mass resistance against it. And that resistance can only begin when the existence of the problem is recognised. Ignoring it will not make it go away, just as ignoring the warnings of ecological catastrophe in the 1950s and 60s did not make it go away.<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:12;"><!--[if !supportEmptyParas]--><!--[endif]--> W.H. Auden, by the way, went to Spain in the 1930s to aid the Republican struggle against fascism. He also stood up against nationalism and other oppressive beliefs in his poetry. So I’m afraid you can’t rope him in. And the Zapatistas? Dear me. The Zapatistas are Marxists. Their entire philosophy is based on struggle. Yes, of course all they want is to live peacefully in their autonomous communities – that’s what we all want. But they have had to fight a guerrilla war against the Mexican army to get there! Try telling them that the state doesn’t exist! (I can see it now. Subcommandante Marcos in a positive thinking seminar: “So do you realise that when your family were slaughtered in front of your eyes by a right-wing paramilitary death squad trained, funded and armed by the Mexican and US governments, it wasn’t state oppression but a manifestation of your negative thoughts?”)<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:12;"><!--[if !supportEmptyParas]--><!--[endif]--><span style=""></span>But how about this: what if, after a few more years of escalating repression and conformity, the non-existent state decides that <i style="">all</i> environmental campaigners are a threat to the corporate conquest of the world? What if they’re not too happy about people organising themselves autonomously in any way whatsoever (going back only to the mid-19<sup>th</sup> century, there were times when <i style="">all</i> public assembly was banned)? What if Rob Hopkins becomes an enemy of the state? What will you do then? Transition Camp X-Ray?<o:p></o:p></span></p>Mangohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14109551463817639247noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8998981506402263991.post-33612358944777770222008-04-29T19:54:00.000+01:002008-04-29T19:55:21.579+01:00Compassion and anti-compassion<p class="MsoNormal">I am studying Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM) at a college in London. I was aware before I started that there is a certain amount of prejudice against vegetarianism and veganism in TCM circles, but I was not prepared for the depth, aggression and overwhelming irrationality of the prejudice.</p> <p class="MsoNormal"><!--[if !supportEmptyParas]--> <!--[endif]--><o:p></o:p></p> <p class="MsoNormal">From my experience of treatment at the college’s student clinic, it appears that the nutritional knowledge of the practitioners consists of two statements, which are applied in a blind, absolute fashion: 1. Eat meat; 2. Don’t eat raw food. On the basis of these six words of nutritional information, practitioners are giving advice from a position of assumed authority to people who have come to them for help and compassion. </p> <p class="MsoNormal"><!--[if !supportEmptyParas]--> <!--[endif]--><o:p></o:p></p> <p class="MsoNormal">There is a concept in TCM called ‘blood deficiency’, which describes a certain conditions of the body’s bioenergetic systems. This concept is used as a weapon to attack vegetarians. Every practitioner I have seen so far, except one,<span style=""> </span>has been desperately trying to diagnose me with ‘blood deficiency’, although according to my research I do not have any of the clinical signs of the blood deficiency pattern. The most extreme example of this was when one of them, after having examined my tongue and written ‘slightly purple, swollen, wet, toothmarked’, all of which is true and would indicate a condition of qi stagnation and qi deficiency, which I consider correct, noticed in my notes that I am vegan, asked to look at my tongue again, and wrote ‘pale-ish’, which would in some circumstances (although not those of a wet, swollen tongue) indicate blood deficiency. She had convinced herself that I <i style="">must</i> be blood deficient because I’m vegan, and so there <i style="">must</i> be some signs of blood deficiency, even though there weren’t. This is irrational in the extreme and indicates the strength of her emotional reaction against veganism, which she was repressing, or disguising with non-existent theory. It’s also important to reflect that knowing I was vegan told her almost nothing about my dietary habits. I could be living on sugar and white bread like her, or I could be eating a carefully considered wholefood diet, which in fact is the case. Whether a person eats meat or not is hardly the most significant factor in their diet, from a nutritional point of view. A meat-eater could have a similar diet to me with the addition of a small amount of meat (although in my experience it is very rare) or they could be living on pork pies; a vegan could be eating a high-quality wholefood diet or they could be living on refined vegan foods. In the case of this particular practitioner, who I can probably safely assume lives on toxic waste like almost all the rest, I had to give in to her ignorant assertions to avoid an argument. I was forced into the position where I had to accept her supposed authority even though she was obviously wrong, or assert myself and be regarded as aggressive. For a person who is supposed to be professionally tuning into my energetic nature and treating me with profound respect and compassion, this was hardly a good performance. The interview, and equally the eventual treatment, were more of an assault than a healing experience.</p> <p class="MsoNormal"><!--[if !supportEmptyParas]--> <!--[endif]--><o:p></o:p></p> <p class="MsoNormal">Whenever someone asks a vegan about protein, or, God forbid, calcium (a piece of nutritional wisdom I believe originates with a TV advert for Kraft Cheese Slices), they are unknowingly revealing that they know absolutely nothing about nutrition. This is entirely innocent in day-to-day conversation as it is based on a simple lack of knowledge which can easily be corrected with information. However, when it comes from someone who is claiming to have nutritional knowledge, to be giving nutritional advice and to be in a position of authority and trust, it becomes somewhat sinister. Another practitioner asked me whether I was getting enough protein in my diet. I replied that protein is not really an issue as almost all wholefoods contain protein. She insisted that she was correct, and again I had to back down. Again she was using assumed authority against me, and again on the basis of no knowledge whatsoever, whether of nutritional theory or of what I actually eat. There is no way she could have believed that she did have nutritional knowledge. She was not behaving rationally, but was insisting that she was rational. Again this was simply a prejudiced reaction against veganism. She was on a power trip, attacking me because I have different values to her. I’m not against her because of her values. I accept that some people have conservative and conformist values. The problem here was that she was not asserting her conformist values openly but was disguising them under a claim to authoritative knowledge that she did not have.</p> <p class="MsoNormal"><!--[if !supportEmptyParas]--> <!--[endif]--><o:p></o:p></p> <p class="MsoNormal">In other circumstances, I have received expressions of naked fear and hate from practitioners. One asked me if I was vegan for ‘health reasons’ (clearly praying I would say yes so she could still regard me as a human being because I would have the same bigoted values as herself, though deluded by faulty nutritional theories that contradict TCM culture’s 6-word theory). When I said I was vegan for ethical reasons she looked at me like I’d slapped her in the face, puckering her lips in that characteristic dog’s arse expression that certain extremely small-minded people make when they realise that they are forced to share their world with a person they regard as filthy scum who should be killed and probably will be when this country gets the strong leadership it needs.</p> <p class="MsoNormal"><!--[if !supportEmptyParas]--> <!--[endif]--><o:p></o:p></p> <p class="MsoNormal">Yet another very unpleasant reaction I have experienced (usually from the more experienced practitioners this time) is a horrible, sickly, patronising mock-sympathy. The poor boy has been so deluded, but we can help him. In a way this is a nastier attack than any of the others, as it is disguising hate as compassion, or rather as pity, which is a very different thing.</p> <p class="MsoNormal"><!--[if !supportEmptyParas]--> <!--[endif]--><o:p></o:p></p> <p class="MsoNormal">I accept that most people are not driven to change their behaviour by compassion for animals. This is not the problem. They have their values and hopefully we can discuss these issues at a philosophical level. The point where I find it unacceptable is when someone is actively opposed to veganism in an aggressive and irrational way because it reveals to them that there are people around who have a very different value system to them. I suppose they perceive that as a threat. Someone who has lived their entire life exposed only to mainstream, conformist values may get a shock when they realise that there are a few people around who do not share those values at any level. It’s rather different for someone who has values that differ significantly from the mainstream. We are constantly forced to face up to people who have opposing values to ourselves, because we are in a small minority, and because mainstream values are constantly reinforced by the mass media and advertising until they become implicit. Non-mainstream values have to be made explicit, whereas mainstream values are assumed as default. This means that non-mainstream values are much more open to attack than those which are ‘normal’. Veganism, for example, almost always has to be justified in some way, whereas meat eating does not because meat-eaters very rarely have to say “I’m a meat-eater”. In the same way, people who believe in mainstream political values very rarely have to say explicitly, “I believe in nationalism, Western technocratic supremacism, militarism, authoritarian government,” and so on, because those values are implicitly built into almost all discourse in the mass media.</p> <p class="MsoNormal"><!--[if !supportEmptyParas]--> <!--[endif]--><o:p></o:p></p> <p class="MsoNormal">Not only do these so-called healers have a deep, hate-driven, irrational prejudice against veganism, but they also abuse their position of assumed authority and trust to make political attacks on vegans and vegetarians. I have seen this on many occasions. I believe that the relationship of healer to healed is a sacred contract that must involve profound respect on the part of the healer, and a desire to deeply understand the person who is being healed. You do not understand me by dismissing my deeply experienced ethical and spiritual principles as a silly error or an offence against patriotic values. Perhaps it would do you good to realise that there are people who consider deeply the ethical consequences of every action, maybe even of every word and thought, and to ask yourselves why you have such an extreme irrational response to the existence of such people. It would do you good to have your hardened conservative beliefs thrown into contrast. I am forced by these experiences to question your motivation as healers. Is it compassion or is it money and power?</p> <p class="MsoNormal"><!--[if !supportEmptyParas]--> <!--[endif]--><o:p></o:p></p> <p class="MsoNormal">This has been an angry piece of writing. I can only say that my anger comes from frustrated compassion, but the power-seeking healer’s pity comes from hate.</p>Mangohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14109551463817639247noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8998981506402263991.post-47801456679748243052008-01-19T19:33:00.000+00:002008-01-19T19:34:56.564+00:00Politics: aphorism<div class="entry_text">Two effects of propaganda: to deceive the stupid and to demoralise the intelligent.</div>Mangohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14109551463817639247noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8998981506402263991.post-22220676354484782732008-01-19T19:29:00.000+00:002008-01-19T19:31:23.207+00:00Police don't want me to visit my gran<div class="entry_text">I'm staying in my dad's flat in Bethnal Green at weekends. Yesterday I went to visit my gran in Redbridge, a simple few stops on the Central Line.<br /><br />Now, last time I tried to visit my gran was after I had been at the Gatwick Camp for Climate Action for a few days, mostly helping with the cooking. I thought that by staying on site and cooking food I could avoid the usual hassle from the police. I've had so much unpleasantness and violence from police over the past few years that I can't really stand it any more. My nerves are wrecked. Unfortunately I had to leave the site to visit my gran. I was searched once on the way out. I knew the stop and search was illegal as there were no objective grounds to reasonably believe I was carrying any illegal items. But I decided to give in to it - which is a big ethical compromise for me - because I knew I would be arrested otherwise and my gran would get worried. The police on the gate did a superficial check on my bag and let me go. I didn't bother to get a receipt because I just wanted to get away. Foolish. Walking into the centre of the village towards the railway station, I started feeling a bit warm as the sun came out and stopped at the end of the road to change my boots for sandals. As I was doing this, a young woman came along, pointing a video camera at me, and asked me some questions about the climate camp. I was quite happy to talk to her about it. Afterwards she told me she worked for the film company that made the McLibel film. She continued towards the camp and I finished changing my shoes. I was just fastening my boots onto my rucksack when a Metropolitan police officer came up to me. Another officer was with him. I was sitting on a low wooden railing. Standing over me, he asked me what I was doing. I told him I was changing my shoes. "Oh!" he said sarcastically, "so you're changing your shoes, are you?" as if this was an extremely unlikely thing for someone to be doing, and I was obviously up to something highly dodgy that involved sitting on a low wooden railing and attaching hiking boots to a rucksack. I was already feeling nervous at this point after many experiences of police lawlessness and aggression. "Yes, I'm changing my shoes," I said, "it' got warm when the sun came out. These are the boots I took off and here are the sandals I put on."<br /><br />"Oh! I see!" he spat, with a sarcastic sneer. I felt rather exasperated as I had told him what I was doing although it was none of his business. "Well I'm going to have a look in your bag," he stated. No explanation, no attempt at politeness. Being involved in political activism I was automatically defined as scum with no legal rights, not even worth being polite to, a non-citizen. It's almost always like that these days. "What for?" I asked. I have a legal right to know what legal power the police are using to detain me, and their objective grounds for using that power. "Take your hands out of your pockets when you're talking to me!" he ordered. "No, why should I?" I said, "You can't just order me around like that." He grabbed hold of my right wrist. "Please don't assault me." I said. He and his colleague grabbed my arms, twisted them straight, lifted me to my feet and pushed me towards a tree.<br /><br />By great fortune, at this point the film-maker came back along the street. I shouted to her to come over and film me. A third police officer turned up and made a show of patting me down, taking the opportunity to push his hand up my bum and fiddle about with my waistband. On the video it looks like the start of a uniform fetish gay porn film - "These two bobbies thought it was an ordinary night on the beat til they saw what Manog had stashed in his pants..." Actually it was extremely disturbing. I knew they had total power over me and could do whatever they wanted. They already knew they were acting illegally by detaining me in the first place, so what's to stop them. What could I do - call the police?<br /><br />It is this understanding of the lawlessness of the state that makes me feel alienated from most people. We are brought up with some kind of vague idea that the state is basically benevolent and that the occasional error will be sorted out and justice will be done. As an activist I have come face to face with this naked, gleeful evil and violence over and over again and I am thoroughly disillusioned of the idea that the state is there to protect us and that there is always some authority we can appeal to to get justice. Actually the police are above the law, they know it and they revel in it. But this does not disturb me unduly. That is the nature of states and governments. That is what they do. What really upsets me is that the relative and limited freedoms of the liberal state have been rapidly dismantled over the past ten years and that hardly anyone seems to know or care. "So what if you don't have the right to protest. Why would you want to do that anyway? If you don't want to get pushed around by the police, don't go on demonstrations."<br /><br />There is a nihilist, selfish philosophy that has given up on the idea of social responsibility or of taking any interest at all in what's going on in the wider world, or indeed in the deeper self. Fair enough. If someone believes that, then that is their belief system, and I can argue against it at the philosophical level. But it is a very dangerous fallacy to jump from this opinion to a further belief that the destruction of the right to political expression does not matter, just because someone does not choose to exercise that right. The loss of liberal freedoms and the undermining of liberal ideology by racism and fear propaganda is extremely dangerous and worrying. Any perception of the patterns of 20th century history will reveal warning signs of incipient totalitarianism, and I must say that a few lights are flashing on my totalitarian-ometer these days. Of course we are not there yet, and history will not repeat itself in the same form. The propaganda system is infinitely more sophisticated, producing not only a violent and nonsensical belief system like the old totalitarianisms, but a whole mindset, personality types, a late-capitalist structure of consciousness - or better, unconsciousness. States and corporations in the rich world have almost totally succeeded in making people do what they are told without the crude violence of Hitler and Stalin. Of course the violence continues on an unprecedented scale outside the borders of the rich nation-states. But within their borders, the imperial world war is just one of many phenomena that can be used to create the basic psychic splits of mass consciousness - the split between what is known and what is admitted to everyday thought and discourse, or alternatively the split between what is known and the individual's actions in the world.<br /><br />So, after the Climate Camp, I ended up being a good 2 hours late for my gran. I was feeling pretty shaken after being pushed around and insulted by three big men carrying weapons who are effectively immune from prosecution. Of course I couldn't expect any sympathy from my gran. She's a convinced Daily Mail reader and a fanatical Zionist, like most of my relatives apart from my immediate family. She feels threatened by Arabs and squirrels. I've tried to tell her about the Daily Mail's anti-semitism and their support for Moseley and the British Union of Fascists in the 1930s, and I've tried to point out that the hate propaganda against Muslims now is exactly the same as the hate propaganda against Jews when she was growing up in Nazi Germany, but she thinks it's all different now: it wasn't true that time, but this time it is. I find this infuriating. And, she believes, if anyone gets pushed around by the police it must be their own fault. This is the logic: Britain is a democracy; therefore the police do not repress political activity; therefore anyone who is repressed by the police must have been doing something a bit dodgy; therefore the police do not repress political activity; therefore Britain is a democracy. How on earth can I think about trying to extricate an 86-year old from a mind trap like that? It's totally impossible. Anything I tell her that does not fit in with her bigoted world view, she will not accept. A few years ago I had the mind-boggling experience of her telling me that my eyewitness report of a riot could not be true because she had read about it in the newspaper. This is an intelligent woman and a close relative. Not only that, she is a refugee from Nazism and saw her own parents taken away to be killed by a modern nation-state ruled by an elected government.<br /><br />Ironically, it is her experiences and those of others of my relatives who escaped the Nazis, and my thinking about my great-grandparents and others who were murdered in the death camps, that first informed my political thoughts and convinced me of the duty of every individual to keep a careful watch on the actions of the state and to take responsibility for their own actions. At what point does a person say 'no'? When they are routinely carrying out illegal stop and searches to intimidate demonstrators? When they are ordered to attack a group of people sitting down in a road with batons and pepper spray? When they arrest people who are suspected of no criminal offence and lock them up for years in conditions worse than prison, with no clear legal status? When the army sends them into an imperial war to massacre civilians? Or when one day in the future they find themselves bulldozing corpses into a pit in England's green and pleasant land? Once this process begins it is very difficult to draw the line.<br /><br />So, yesterday I was stopped and searched by the British Transport Police Counter-Terrorism unit in Bethnal Green Tube station. According to them (I haven't checked the law yet) Section 44 of the Prevention of Terrorism Act gives them a permanent stop and search power on London Transport. They stopped me because they "have to be seen to stop a cross-section of people" - i.e. I was the token white guy in an Asian area, so that they don't look like the racists they are. I don't suppose they will be doing stop and searches at stations in rich white areas like Hampstead or Kensington. Most people seeing this authoritarian pantomime will assume that because they're doing it, it must be necessary, which justifies them doing it (Muslims will probably not believe this as they know what's going on better than anyone, having been at the sharp end for so many years, but they're mostly too scared to speak out about it). So the security state tautologically justifies itself. If there are terrorist attacks, it justifies security. If there are no terrorist attacks, it justifies security because it proves that it works. Does anyone remember the ricin plot? How could anyone forget after the weeks of hysterical newspaper headlines? But where were the weeks of headlines when it turned out to be a load of old nonsense made up by the security services, no-one was charged, and the various supposedly suspicious substances were various harmless household products? Where were the weeks of hysterical headlines when a white racist was arrested with a massive stash of explosives and a rocket launcher in his house, and where were the earnest newspaper editorials agonising about the contradictions of white culture and encouraging white community leaders to watch out for extremism? In the mass media in general, and almost everywhere in London, there is a contant bombardment of panic and suspicion. The posters read, "Be suspicious..." this is terribly damaging to the social fabric. I feel that we are on the brink of a social catastrophe that will see the Western nation-states descend into a storm of totalitarian killing. Given the hypnotised and self-alienated depths to which mass culture has descended, it may be too late to stop it. My worst nightmare may be coming true in my lifetime.</div> <div class="clear"> </div>Mangohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14109551463817639247noreply@blogger.com2