Compassion and anti-compassion

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.

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.

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, 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 must be blood deficient because I’m vegan, and so there must 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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?

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.

Politics: aphorism

Two effects of propaganda: to deceive the stupid and to demoralise the intelligent.

Police don't want me to visit my gran

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.

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."

"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.

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?

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."

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.

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.

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.

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.