MOS MINORUM

Pode haver um capitalismo "democrático"?

2012-02-14T22:31:00.002Z

Um texto importante de Wolfgang Streeck, Director do Max-Planck-Institut für Gesellschaftsforschung (Instituto Max Planck para o Estudo das Sociedades), publicado no não menos importante New Left Review. Constituíu a 'Palestra Max Weber' proferida no Instituto Universitário Europeu de Florença em 2011:

THE CRISES OF DEMOCRATIC CAPITALISM
The collapse of the American financial system that occurred in 2008 has since turned into an economic and political crisis of global dimensions. [1] How should this world-shaking event be conceptualized? Mainstream economics has tended to conceive society as governed by a general tendency toward equilibrium, where crises and change are no more than temporary deviations from the steady state of a normally well-integrated system. A sociologist, however, is under no such compunction. Rather than construe our present affliction as a one-off disturbance to a fundamental condition of stability, I will consider the ‘Great Recession’ [2] and the subsequent near-collapse of public finances as a manifestation of a basic underlying tension in the political-economic configuration of advanced-capitalist societies; a tension which makes disequilibrium and instability the rule rather than the exception, and which has found expression in a historical succession of disturbances within the socio-economic order. More specifically, I will argue that the present crisis can only be fully understood in terms of the ongoing, inherently conflictual transformation of the social formation we call ‘democratic capitalism’.
Democratic capitalism was fully established only after the Second World War and then only in the ‘Western’ parts of the world, North America and Western Europe. There it functioned extraordinarily well for the next two decades—so well, in fact, that this period of uninterrupted economic growth still dominates our ideas and expectations of what modern capitalism is, or could and should be. This is in spite of the fact that, in the light of the turbulence that followed, the quarter century immediately after the war should be recognizable as truly exceptional. Indeed I suggest that it is not the trente glorieuses but the series of crises which followed that represents the normal condition of democratic capitalism—a condition ruled by an endemic conflict between capitalist markets and democratic politics, which forcefully reasserted itself when high economic growth came to an end in the 1970s. In what follows I will first discuss the nature of that conflict and then turn to the sequence of political-economic disturbances that it produced, which both preceded and shaped the present global crisis.
I. MARKETS VERSUS VOTERS?
Suspicions that capitalism and democracy may not sit easily together are far from new. From the nineteenth century and well into the twentieth, the bourgeoisie and the political Right expressed fears that majority rule, inevitably implying the rule of the poor over the rich, would ultimately do away with private property and free markets. The rising working class and the political Left, for their part, warned that capitalists might ally themselves with the forces of reaction to abolish democracy, in order to protect themselves from being governed by a permanent majority dedicated to economic and social redistribution. I will not discuss the relative merits of the two positions, although history suggests that, at least in the industrialized world, the Left had more reason to fear the Right overthrowing democracy, in order to save capitalism, than the Right had to fear the Left abolishing capitalism for the sake of democracy. However that may be, in the years immediately after the Second World War there was a widely shared assumption that for capitalism to be compatible with democracy, it would have to be subjected to extensive political control—for example, nationalization of key firms and sectors, or workers’ ‘co-determination’, as in Germany—in order to protect democracy itself from being restrained in the name of free markets. While Keynes and, to some extent, Kalecki and Polanyi carried the day, Hayek withdrew into temporary exile.
Since then, however, mainstream economics has become obsessed with the ‘irresponsibility’ of opportunistic politicians who cater to an economically uneducated electorate by interfering with otherwise efficient markets, in pursuit of objectives—such as full employment and social justice—that truly free markets would in the long run deliver anyway, but must fail to deliver when distorted by politics. Economic crises, according to standard theories of ‘public choice’, essentially stem from market-distorting political interventions for social objectives. [3] In this view, the right kind of intervention sets markets free from political interference; the wrong, market-distorting kind derives from an excess of democracy; more precisely, from democracy being carried over by irresponsible politicians into the economy, where it has no business. Not many today would go as far as Hayek, who in his later years advocated abolishing democracy as we know it in defence of economic freedom and civil liberty. Still, the cantus firmus of current neo-institutionalist economic theory is thoroughly Hayekian. To work properly, capitalism requires a rule-bound economic policy, with protection of markets and property rights constitutionally enshrined against discretionary political interference; independent regulatory authorities; central banks, firmly protected from electoral pressures; and international institutions, such as the European Commission or the European Court of Justice, that do not have to worry about popular re-election. Such theories studiously avoid the crucial question of how to get there from here, however; very likely because they have no answer, or at least none that can be made public.
There are various ways to conceptualize the underlying causes of the friction between capitalism and democracy. For present purposes, I will characterize democratic capitalism as a political economy ruled by two conflicting principles, or regimes, of resource allocation: one operating according to marginal productivity, or what is revealed as merit by a ‘free play of market forces’, and the other based on social need or entitlement, as certified by the collective choices of democratic politics. Under democratic capitalism, governments are theoretically required to honour both principles simultaneously, although substantively the two almost never align. In practice they may for a time neglect one in favour of the other, until they are punished by the consequences: governments that fail to attend to democratic claims for protection and redistribution risk losing their majority, while those that disregard the claims for compensation from the owners of productive resources, as expressed in the language of marginal productivity, cause economic dysfunctions that will become increasingly unsustainable and thereby also undermine political support.
In the liberal utopia of standard economic theory, the tension in democratic capitalism between its two principles of allocation is overcome by turning the theory into what Marx would have called a material force. In this view, economics as ‘scientific knowledge’ teaches citizens and politicians that true justice is market justice, under which everybody is rewarded according to their contribution, rather than their needs redefined as rights. To the extent that economic theory became accepted as a social theory, it would ‘come true’ in the sense of being performative—thus revealing its essentially rhetorical nature as an instrument of social construction by persuasion. In the real world, however, it did not prove so easy to talk people out of their ‘irrational’ beliefs in social and political rights, as distinct from the law of the market and the right of property. To date, non-market notions of social justice have resisted efforts at economic rationalization, forceful as the latter may have become in the leaden age of advancing neoliberalism. People stubbornly refused to give up on the idea of a moral economy under which they have rights that take precedence over the outcomes of market exchanges. [4] In fact where they have a chance—as they inevitably do in a working democracy—they tend in one way or another to insist on the primacy of the social over the economic; on social commitments and obligations being protected from market pressures for ‘flexibility’; and on society honouring human expectations of a life outside the dictatorship of ever-fluctuating ‘market signals’. This is arguably what Polanyi described as a ‘counter-movement’ against the commodification of labour in The Great Transformation.
For the economic mainstream, disorders like inflation, public deficits and excessive private or public debt result from insufficient knowledge of the laws governing the economy as a wealth-creation machine, or from disregard of such laws in selfish pursuit of political power. By contrast, theories of political economy—to the extent that they take the political seriously and are not just functionalist efficiency theories—recognize market allocation as just one type of political-economic regime, governed by the interests of those owning scarce productive resources and thus in a strong market position. An alternative regime, political allocation, is preferred by those with little economic weight but potentially extensive political power. From this perspective, standard economics is basically the theoretical exaltation of a political-economic social order serving those well-endowed with market power, in that it equates their interests with the general interest. It represents the distributional claims of the owners of productive capital as technical imperatives of good, in the sense of scientifically sound, economic management. For political economy, mainstream economics’ account of dysfunctions in the economy as being the result of a cleavage between traditionalist principles of moral economy and rational-modern principles amounts to a tendentious misrepresentation, for it hides the fact that the ‘economic’ economy is also a moral economy, for those with commanding powers in the market.
In the language of mainstream economics, crises appear as punishment for governments failing to respect the natural laws that are the true governors of the economy. By contrast, a theory of political economy worth its name perceives crises as manifestations of the ‘Kaleckian reactions’ of the owners of productive resources to democratic politics penetrating into their exclusive domain, trying to prevent them from exploiting their market power to the fullest and thereby violating their expectations of being justly rewarded for their astute risk-taking. [5] Standard economic theory treats social structure and the distribution of interests and power vested in it as exogenous, holding them constant and thereby making them both invisible and, for the purposes of economic ‘science’, naturally given. The only politics such a theory can envisage involves opportunistic or, at best, incompetent attempts to bend economic laws. Good economic policy is non-political by definition. The problem is that this view is not shared by the many for whom politics is a much-needed recourse against markets, whose unfettered operation interferes with what they happen to feel is right. Unless they are somehow persuaded to adopt neoclassical economics as a self-evident model of what social life is and should be, their political demands as democratically expressed will differ from the prescriptions of standard economic theory. The implication is that while an economy, if sufficiently conceptually disembedded, may be modelled as tending toward equilibrium, a political economy may not, unless it is devoid of democracy and run by a Platonic dictatorship of economist-kings. Capitalist politics, as will be seen, has done its best to lead us out of the desert of corrupt democratic opportunism into the promised land of self-regulating markets. Up to now, however, democratic resistance continues, and with it the dislocations in our market economies to which it continuously gives rise.
2. POST-WAR SETTLEMENTS
Post-war democratic capitalism underwent its first crisis in the decade following the late 1960s, when inflation began to rise rapidly throughout the Western world as declining economic growth made it difficult to sustain the political-economic peace formula between capital and labour that had ended domestic strife after the devastations of the Second World War. Essentially that formula entailed the organized working classes accepting capitalist markets and property rights in exchange for political democracy, which enabled them to achieve social security and a steadily rising standard of living. More than two decades of uninterrupted growth resulted in deeply rooted popular perceptions of continuous economic progress as a right of democratic citizenship—perceptions that translated into political expectations, which governments felt constrained to honour but were less and less able to, as growth began to slow.
The structure of the post-war settlement between labour and capital was fundamentally the same across the otherwise widely different countries where democratic capitalism had come to be instituted. It included an expanding welfare state, the right of workers to free collective bargaining and a political guarantee of full employment, underwritten by governments making extensive use of the Keynesian economic toolkit. When growth began to falter in the late 1960s, however, this combination became difficult to maintain. While free collective bargaining enabled workers through their unions to act on what had become firmly ingrained expectations of regular yearly wage increases, governments’ commitment to full employment, together with a growing welfare state, protected unions from potential employment losses caused by wage settlements in excess of productivity growth. Government policy thus leveraged the bargaining power of trade unions beyond what a free labour market would have sustained. In the late 1960s this found expression in a worldwide wave of labour militancy, fuelled by a strong sense of political entitlement to a rising standard of living and unchecked by fear of unemployment.
In subsequent years governments all over the Western world faced the question of how to make trade unions moderate their members’ wage demands without having to rescind the Keynesian promise of full employment. In countries where the institutional structure of the collective-bargaining system was not conducive to the negotiation of tripartite ‘social pacts’, most governments remained convinced throughout the 1970s that allowing unemployment to rise in order to contain real wage increases was too risky for their own survival, if not for the stability of capitalist democracy as such. Their only way out was an accommodating monetary policy which, while allowing free collective bargaining and full employment to continue to coexist, did so at the expense of raising the rate of inflation to levels that accelerated over time.
In its early stages, inflation was not much of a problem for workers represented by strong trade unions and politically powerful enough to achieve de facto wage indexation. Inflation comes primarily at the expense of creditors and holders of financial assets, groups that do not as a rule include workers, or at least did not do so in the 1960s and 1970s. This is why inflation can be described as a monetary reflection of distributional conflict between a working class, demanding both employment security and a higher share in their country’s income, and a capitalist class striving to maximize the return on its capital. As the two sides act on mutually incompatible ideas of what is theirs by right, one emphasizing the entitlements of citizenship and the other those of property and market power, inflation may also be considered an expression of anomie in a society which, for structural reasons, cannot agree on common criteria of social justice. It was in this sense that the British sociologist, John Goldthorpe, suggested in the late 1970s that high inflation was ineradicable in a democratic-capitalist market economy that allowed workers and citizens to correct market outcomes through collective political action. [6]
For governments facing conflicting demands from workers and capital in a world of declining growth rates, an accommodating monetary policy was a convenient ersatz method for avoiding zero-sum social conflict. In the immediate post-war years, economic growth had provided governments struggling with incompatible concepts of economic justice with additional goods and services by which to defuse class antagonisms. Now governments had to make do with additional money, as yet uncovered by the real economy, as a way of pulling forward future resources into present consumption and distribution. This mode of conflict pacification, effective as it at first was, could not continue indefinitely. As Hayek never tired of pointing out, accelerating inflation is bound to give rise to ultimately unmanageable economic distortions in relative prices, in the relation between contingent and fixed incomes, and in what economists refer to as ‘economic incentives’. In the end, by calling forth Kaleckian reactions from increasingly suspicious capital owners, inflation will produce unemployment, punishing the very workers whose interests it may initially have served. At this point at the latest, governments under democratic capitalism will come under pressure to cease accommodating redistributive wage settlements and restore monetary discipline.
3. LOW INFLATION, HIGHER UNEMPLOYMENT

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Inflation was conquered after 1979 (Figure 1) when Paul Volcker, newly appointed by President Carter as chairman of the Federal Reserve Bank, raised interest rates to an unprecedented height, causing unemployment to jump to levels not seen since the Great Depression. The Volcker ‘putsch’ was sealed when President Reagan, said to have initially been afraid of the political fallout of Volcker’s aggressive disinflation policies, was re-elected in 1984. Thatcher, who had followed the American lead, had won a second term in 1983, also in spite of high unemployment and rapid de-industrialization caused, among other things, by a restrictive monetary policy. In both the us and the uk, disinflation was accompanied by determined attacks on trade unions by governments and employers, epitomized by Reagan’s victory over the Air Traffic Controllers and Thatcher’s breaking of the National Union of Mineworkers. In subsequent years, inflation rates throughout the capitalist world remained continuously low, while unemployment went more or less steadily up (Figure 2, below). In parallel, unionization declined almost everywhere, and strikes became so infrequent that some countries ceased to keep strike statistics (Figure 3, below).

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The neoliberal era began with Anglo-American governments casting aside the received wisdom of post-war democratic capitalism, which held that unemployment would undermine political support, not just for the government of the day but also for democratic capitalism itself. The experiments conducted by Reagan and Thatcher on their electorates were observed with great attention by policy-makers worldwide. Those who may have hoped that the end of inflation would mean an end to economic disorder were soon to be disappointed, however. As inflation receded, public debt began to increase, and not entirely unexpectedly. [7] Rising public debt in the 1980s had many causes. Stagnant growth had made taxpayers more averse than ever to taxation; and with the end of inflation, automatic tax increases through what was called ‘bracket creep’ also came to an end. The same held for the continuous devaluation of public debt through weakening national currencies, a process that had first complemented economic growth, and then increasingly substituted for it, reducing a country’s accumulated debt relative to its nominal income. On the expenditure side, rising unemployment, caused by monetary stabilization, required rising expenditures on social assistance. Also the various social entitlements created in the 1970s in return for trade-union wage moderation—as it were, deferred wages from the neo-corporatist era—began to mature and become due, increasingly burdening public finances.
With inflation no longer available for closing the gap between the demands of citizens and those of ‘the markets’, the burden of securing social peace fell on the state. Public debt turned out, for a while, to be a convenient functional equivalent of inflation. As with inflation, public debt made it possible to introduce resources into the distributional conflicts of the time that had not yet in fact been produced, enabling governments to draw on future resources in addition to those already on hand. As the struggle between market and social distribution moved from the labour market to the political arena, electoral pressure replaced trade-union demands. Instead of inflating the currency, governments began to borrow on an increasing scale to accommodate demands for benefits and services as a citizen’s right, together with competing claims for incomes to reflect the judgement of the market and thereby help maximize the profitable use of productive resources. Low inflation was helpful in this, since it assured creditors that government bonds would keep their value over the long haul; so were the low interest rates that followed when inflation had been stamped out.
Just like inflation, however, accumulation of public debt cannot go on forever. Economists had long warned of public deficit spending ‘crowding out’ private investment, causing high interest rates and low growth; but they were never able to specify where exactly the critical threshold was. In practice, it turned out to be possible, at least for a while, to keep interest rates low by deregulating financial markets while containing inflation through continued union-busting. [8] Still, the us in particular, with its exceptionally low national savings rate, was soon selling its government bonds not just to citizens but also to foreign investors, including sovereign wealth funds of various sorts. [9] Moreover, as debt burdens rose, a growing share of public spending had to be devoted to debt service, even with interest rates remaining low. Above all, there had to be a point, although apparently unknowable beforehand, at which creditors, foreign and domestic alike, would begin to worry about getting their money back. By then at the latest, pressures would begin to mount from ‘financial markets’ for consolidation of public budgets and a return to fiscal discipline.
4. DEREGULATION AND PRIVATE DEBT
The 1992 presidential election in the United States was dominated by the question of the two deficits: that of the Federal Government and that of the country as a whole, in foreign trade. The victory of Bill Clinton, who had campaigned above all on the ‘double deficit’, set off worldwide attempts at fiscal consolidation, aggressively promoted under American leadership by international organizations such as the oecd and the imf. Initially the Clinton administration seems to have envisaged closing the public deficit by accelerated economic growth brought about by social reform, such as increased public investment in education. [10] But once the Democrats lost their Congressional majority in the 1994 midterm elections, Clinton turned to a policy of austerity involving deep cuts in public spending and changes in social policy which, in the words of the President, were to put an end to ‘welfare as we know it’. From 1998 to 2000, the us Federal Government for the first time in decades was running a budget surplus.
This is not to say, however, that the Clinton administration had somehow found a way of pacifying a democratic-capitalist political economy without recourse to additional, yet-to-be-produced economic resources. The Clinton strategy of social-conflict management drew heavily on the deregulation of the financial sector that had already started under Reagan and was now driven further than ever before. [11] Rapidly rising income inequality, caused by continuing de-unionization and sharp cuts in social spending, as well as the reduction in aggregate demand caused by fiscal consolidation, were counterbalanced by unprecedented new opportunities for citizens and firms to indebt themselves. The felicitous term, ‘privatized Keynesianism’, was coined to describe what was, in effect, the replacement of public with private debt. [12] Instead of the government borrowing money to fund equal access to decent housing, or the formation of marketable work skills, it was now individual citizens who, under a debt regime of extreme generosity, were allowed, and sometimes compelled, to take out loans at their own risk with which to pay for their education or their advancement to a less destitute urban neighbourhood.
The Clinton policy of fiscal consolidation and economic revitalization through financial deregulation had many beneficiaries. The rich were spared higher taxes, while those among them wise enough to move their interests into the financial sector made huge profits on the ever-more complicated ‘financial services’ which they now had an almost unlimited license to sell. But the poor also prospered, at least some of them and for a while. Subprime mortgages became a substitute, however illusory in the end, for the social policy that was simultaneously being scrapped, as well as for the wage increases that were no longer forthcoming at the lower end of a ‘flexibilized’ labour market. For African-Americans in particular, owning a home was not just the ‘American dream’ come true but also a much-needed substitute for the old-age pensions that many were unable to earn in the labour markets of the day and which they had no reason to expect from a government pledged to permanent austerity.
For a time, home ownership offered the middle class and even some of the poor an attractive opportunity to participate in the speculative craze that was making the rich so much richer in the 1990s and early 2000s— treacherous as that opportunity would later turn out to have been. As house prices escalated under rising demand from people who would, in normal circumstances, never have been able to buy a home, it became common practice to use the new financial instruments to extract part or all of one’s home equity to finance the—rapidly rising—costs of the next generation’s college education, or simply for personal consumption to offset stagnant or declining wages. Nor was it uncommon for home owners to use their new credit to buy a second or third dwelling, in the hope of cashing in on what was somehow expected to be an open-ended increase in the value of real estate. In this way, unlike the era of public debt when future resources were procured for present use by government borrowing, now such resources were made available by a myriad of individuals selling, in liberalized financial markets, commitments to pay a significant share of their expected future earnings to creditors, who in return provided them with the instant power to purchase whatever they liked.
Financial liberalization thus compensated for an era of fiscal consolidation and public austerity. Individual debt replaced public debt, and individual demand, constructed for high fees by a rapidly growing money-making industry, took the place of state-governed collective demand in supporting employment and profits in construction and other sectors (Figure 4). These dynamics accelerated after 2001, when the Federal Reserve switched to very low interest rates to prevent an economic slump and the return of high unemployment this implied. In addition to unprecedented profits in the financial sector, privatized Keynesianism sustained a booming economy that became the envy not least of European labour movements. In fact, Alan Greenspan’s policy of easy money supporting the rapidly growing indebtedness of American society was held up as a model by European trade-union leaders, who noted with great excitement that, unlike the European Central Bank, the Federal Reserve was bound by law not just to provide monetary stability but also high levels of employment. All of this, of course, ended in 2008 when the international credit pyramid on which the prosperity of the late 1990s and early 2000s had rested suddenly collapsed.

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5. SOVEREIGN INDEBTEDNESS
With the crash of privatized Keynesianism in 2008, the crisis of postwar democratic capitalism entered its fourth and latest stage, after the successive eras of inflation, public deficits and private indebtedness (Figure 5). [13] With the global financial system poised to disintegrate, nation-states sought to restore economic confidence by socializing the bad loans licensed in compensation for fiscal consolidation. Together with the fiscal expansion necessary to prevent a breakdown of the ‘real economy’, this resulted in a dramatic new increase in public deficits and public debt—a development that, it may be noted, was not at all due to frivolous overspending by opportunistic politicians or misconceived public institutions, as implied by theories of ‘public choice’ and the large institutional-economics literature produced in the 1990s under the auspices of, among others, the World Bank and the imf. [14]

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The quantum leap in public indebtedness after 2008, which completely undid whatever fiscal consolidation might have been achieved in the preceding decade, reflected the fact that no democratic state dared to impose on its society another economic crisis of the dimension of the Great Depression of the 1930s, as punishment for the excesses of a deregulated financial sector. Once again, political power was deployed to make future resources available for securing present social peace, in that states more or less voluntarily took upon themselves a significant share of the new debt originally created in the private sector, so as to reassure private-sector creditors. But while this effectively shored up the financial industry’s money factories, quickly reinstating their extraordinary profits, salaries and bonuses, it could not prevent rising suspicions on the part of the same ‘financial markets’ that, in the process of rescuing them, national governments might have over-extended themselves. Even with the global economic crisis far from over, creditors began vociferously to demand a return to sound money through fiscal austerity, in search for reassurance that their vastly increased investment in government debt would not be lost.
In the three years since 2008, distributional conflict under democratic capitalism has turned into a complicated tug-of-war between global financial investors and sovereign nation-states. Where in the past workers struggled with employers, citizens with finance ministers, and private debtors with private banks, it is now financial institutions wrestling with the very states that they had only recently blackmailed into saving them. But the underlying configuration of power and interests is far more complex and still awaits systematic exploration. For example, since the crisis financial markets have returned to charging different states widely varying interest rates, thereby differentiating the pressure they apply on governments to make their citizens acquiesce in unprecedented spending cuts—in line, again, with a basically unmodified market logic of distribution. Given the amount of debt carried by most states today, even minor increases in the rate of interest on government bonds can cause fiscal disaster. [15] At the same time, markets must avoid pushing states into declaring sovereign bankruptcy, always an option for governments if market pressures become too strong. This is why other states have to be found that are willing to bail out those most at risk, in order to protect themselves from a general increase in interest rates on government bonds that the first default would cause. A similar type of ‘solidarity’ between states in the interest of investors is fostered where sovereign default would hit banks located outside the defaulting country, which might force the banks’ home countries once again to nationalize huge amounts of bad debt in order to stabilize their economies.
There are still more ways in which the tension in democratic capitalism between demands for social rights and the workings of free markets expresses itself today. Some governments, including the Obama administration, have attempted to generate renewed economic growth through even more debt—in the hope that future consolidation policies will be assisted by a growth dividend. Others may be secretly hoping for a return to inflation, melting down accumulated debt by softly expropriating creditors—which would, like economic growth, mitigate the political tensions to be expected from austerity. At the same time, financial markets may be looking forward to a promising fight against political interference, once and for all reinstating market discipline and putting an end to all political attempts to subvert it.
Further complications arise from the fact that financial markets need government debt for safe investment; pressing too hard for balanced budgets may deprive them of highly desirable investment opportunities. The middle classes of the advanced-capitalist countries have put a good part of their savings into government bonds, while many workers are now heavily invested in supplementary pensions. Balanced budgets would likely involve states having to take from their middle classes, in the form of higher taxes, what these classes now save and invest, among other things in public debt. Not only would citizens no longer collect interest, but they would also cease to be able to pass their savings on to their children. However, while this should make them interested in states being, if not debt-free, then reliably able to fulfil their obligations to their creditors, it may also mean that they have to pay for their government’s liquidity in the form of deep cuts in public benefits and services on which they also in part depend.
However complicated the cross-cutting cleavages in the emerging international politics of public debt, the price for financial stabilization is likely to be paid by those other than the owners of money, or at least of real money. For example, public-pension reform will be accelerated by fiscal pressures; and to the extent that governments default anywhere in the world, private pensions will be hit as well. The average citizen will pay—for the consolidation of public finances, the bankruptcy of foreign states, the rising rates of interest on the public debt and, if necessary, for another rescue of national and international banks—with his or her private savings, cuts in public entitlements, reduced public services and higher taxation.
6. SEQUENTIAL DISPLACEMENTS
In the four decades since the end of post-war growth, the epicentre of the tectonic tension within democratic capitalism has migrated from one institutional location to the next, giving rise to a sequence of different but systematically related economic disturbances. In the 1970s the conflict between democratic claims for social justice and capitalist demands for distribution by marginal productivity, or ‘economic justice’, played itself out primarily in national labour markets, where trade-union wage pressure under politically guaranteed full employment caused accelerating inflation. When what was, in effect, redistribution by debasement of the currency became economically unsustainable, forcing governments to put an end to it at high political risk, the conflict re-emerged in the electoral arena. Here it gave rise to growing disparity between public spending and public revenues and, as a consequence, to rapidly rising public debt, in response to voter demands for benefits and services in excess of what a democratic-capitalist economy could be made to hand over to its ‘tax state’. [16]
When efforts to rein in public debt became unavoidable, however, they had to be accompanied for the sake of social peace by financial deregulation, easing access to private credit, as an alternative route to accommodating normatively and politically powerful demands of citizens for security and prosperity. This, too, lasted not much longer than a decade until the global economy almost faltered under the burden of unrealistic promises of future payment for present consumption and investment, licensed by governments in compensation for fiscal austerity. Since then, the clash between popular ideas of social justice and economic insistence on market justice has once again changed sites, re-emerging this time in international capital markets and the complex contests currently taking place between financial institutions and electorates, governments, states and international organizations. Now the issue is how far states can go in imposing the property rights and profit expectations of the markets on their citizens, while avoiding having to declare bankruptcy and protecting what may still remain of their democratic legitimacy.
Toleration of inflation, acceptance of public debt and deregulation of private credit were no more than temporary stopgaps for governments confronted with an apparently irrepressible conflict between the two contradictory principles of allocation under democratic capitalism: social rights on the one hand and marginal productivity, as evaluated by the market, on the other. Each of the three worked for a while, but then began to cause more problems than they solved, indicating that a lasting reconciliation between social and economic stability in capitalist democracies is a utopian project. All that governments were able to achieve in dealing with the crises of their day was to move them to new arenas, where they reappeared in new forms. There is no reason to believe that this process—the successive manifestation of democratic capitalism’s contradictions, in ever new varieties of economic disorder—should have ended.
7. POLITICAL DISORDER
At this point, it seems clear that the political manageability of democratic capitalism has sharply declined in recent years, more in some countries than in others, but also overall, in the emerging global political-economic system. As a result the risks seem to be growing, both for democracy and for the economy. Since the Great Depression policy-makers have rarely, if ever, been faced with as much uncertainty as today. One example among many is that the markets expect not just fiscal consolidation but also, and at the same time, a reasonable prospect of future economic growth. How the two may be combined is not at all clear. Although the risk premium on Irish government debt fell when the country pledged itself to aggressive deficit reduction, a few weeks later it rose again, allegedly because the country’s consolidation programme appeared so strict that it would make economic recovery impossible. [17] Moreover, there is a widely shared conviction that the next bubble is already building somewhere in a world that is more than ever flooded with cheap money. Subprime mortgages may no longer offer themselves for investment, at least not for the time being. But there are the markets for raw materials, or the new internet economy. Nothing prevents financial firms from using the surplus of money provided by the central banks to enter whatever appear to be the new growth sectors, on behalf of their favourite clients and, of course, themselves. After all, with regulatory reform in the financial sector having failed in almost all respects, capital requirements are little higher than they were, and the banks that were too big to fail in 2008 can count on being so also in 2012 or 2013. This leaves them with the same capacity for blackmailing the public that they were able to deploy so skilfully three years ago. But now the public bailout of private capitalism on the model of 2008 may be impossible to repeat, if only because public finances are already stretched to the limit.
Yet democracy is as much at risk as the economy in the current crisis, if not more. Not only has the ‘system integration’ of contemporary societies—that is, the efficient functioning of their capitalist economies—become precarious, but so has their ‘social integration’. [18] With the arrival of a new age of austerity, the capacity of national states to mediate between the rights of citizens and the requirements of capital accumulation has been severely affected. Governments everywhere face stronger resistance to tax increases, particularly in highly indebted countries where fresh public money will have to be spent for many years to pay for goods that have long been consumed. Moreover, with ever-tighter global interdependence, it is no longer possible to pretend that the tensions between economy and society, between capitalism and democracy, can be handled inside national political communities. No government today can govern without paying close attention to international constraints and obligations, including those of the financial markets forcing the state to impose sacrifices on its population. The crises and contradictions of democratic capitalism have finally become internationalized, playing themselves out not just within states but also between them, in combinations and permutations as yet unexplored.
As we now read almost every day in the papers, ‘the markets’ have begun to dictate in unprecedented ways what presumably sovereign and democratic states may still do for their citizens and what they must refuse them. The same Manhattan-based ratings agencies that were instrumental in bringing about the disaster of the global money industry are now threatening to downgrade the bonds of states that accepted a previously unimaginable level of new debt to rescue that industry and the capitalist economy as a whole. Politics still contains and distorts markets, but only, it seems, at a level far remote from the daily experience and organizational capacities of normal people: the us, armed to the teeth not just with aircraft carriers but also with an unlimited supply of credit cards, still gets China to buy its mounting debt. All others have to listen to what ‘the markets’ tell them. As a result citizens increasingly perceive their governments, not as their agents, but as those of other states or of international organizations, such as the imf or the European Union, immeasurably more insulated from electoral pressure than was the traditional nation-state. In countries like Greece and Ireland, anything resembling democracy will be effectively suspended for many years; in order to behave ‘responsibly’, as defined by international markets and institutions, national governments will have to impose strict austerity, at the price of becoming increasingly unresponsive to their citizens. [19]
Democracy is not just being pre-empted in those countries that are currently under attack by ‘the markets’. Germany, which is still doing relatively well economically, has committed itself to decades of public-expenditure cuts. In addition, the German government will again have to get its citizens to provide liquidity to countries at risk of defaulting, not just to save German banks but also to stabilize the common European currency and prevent a general increase in the rate of interest on public debt, as is likely to occur in the case of the first country collapsing. The high political cost of this can be measured in the progressive decay of the Merkel government’s electoral capital, resulting in a series of defeats in major regional elections over the past year. Populist rhetoric to the effect that perhaps creditors should also pay a share of the costs, as vented by the Chancellor in early 2010, was quickly abandoned when ‘the markets’ expressed shock by slightly raising the rate of interest on new public debt. Now the talk is about the need to shift, in the words of the German Finance Minister, from old-fashioned ‘government’, which is no longer up to the new challenges of globalization, to ‘governance’, meaning in particular a lasting curtailment of the budgetary authority of the Bundestag. [20]
The political expectations that democratic states are now facing from their new principals may be impossible to meet. International markets and institutions require that not just governments but also citizens credibly commit themselves to fiscal consolidation. Political parties that oppose austerity must be resoundingly defeated in national elections, and both government and opposition must be publicly pledged to ‘sound finance’, or else the cost of debt service will rise. Elections in which voters have no effective choice, however, may be perceived by them as inauthentic, which may cause all sorts of political disorder, from declining turnout to a rise of populist parties to riots in the streets.
One factor here is that the arenas of distributional conflict have become ever more remote from popular politics. The national labour markets of the 1970s, with the manifold opportunities they offered for corporatist political mobilization and inter-class coalitions, or the politics of public spending in the 1980s, were not necessarily beyond the grasp or the strategic reach of the ‘man in the street’. Since then, the battlefields on which the contradictions of democratic capitalism are fought out have become ever more complex, making it exceedingly difficult for anyone outside the political and financial elites to recognize the underlying interests and identify their own. [21] While this may generate apathy at the mass level and thereby make life easier for the elites, there is no relying on it, in a world in which blind compliance with financial investors is propounded as the only rational and responsible behaviour. To those who refuse to be talked out of other social rationalities and responsibilities, such a world may appear simply absurd—at which point the only rational and responsible conduct would be to throw as many wrenches as possible into the works of haute finance. Where democracy as we know it is effectively suspended, as it already is in countries like Greece, Ireland and Portugal, street riots and popular insurrection may be the last remaining mode of political expression for those devoid of market power. Should we hope in the name of democracy that we will soon have the opportunity to observe a few more examples?
Social science can do little, if anything, to help resolve the structural tensions and contradictions underlying the economic and social disorders of the day. What it can do, however, is bring them to light and identify the historical continuities in which present crises can be fully understood. It also can—and must—point out the drama of democratic states being turned into debt-collecting agencies on behalf of a global oligarchy of investors, compared to which C. Wright Mills’s ‘power elite’ appears a shining example of liberal pluralism. [22] More than ever, economic power seems today to have become political power, while citizens appear to be almost entirely stripped of their democratic defences and their capacity to impress upon the political economy interests and demands that are incommensurable with those of capital owners. In fact, looking back at the democratic-capitalist crisis sequence since the 1970s, there seems a real possibility of a new, if temporary, settlement of social conflict in advanced capitalism, this time entirely in favour of the propertied classes now firmly entrenched in their politically unassailable stronghold, the international financial industry.

[1] This paper was given as the 2011 Max Weber Lecture at the European University Institute, Florence. I am grateful to Daniel Mertens for his research assistance.
[2] For the term ‘Great Recession’, see Carmen Reinhart and Kenneth Rogoff, This Time Is Different: Eight Centuries of Financial Folly, Princeton 2009.
[3] The classic statement is James Buchanan and Gordon Tullock, The Calculus of Consent: Logical Foundations of Constitutional Democracy, Ann Arbor, mi 1962.
[4] See Edward Thompson, ‘The Moral Economy of the English Crowd in the Eighteenth Century’, Past & Present, vol. 50, no. 1, 1971; and James Scott, The Moral Economy of the Peasant: Rebellion and Subsistence in Southeast Asia, New Haven, ct 1976. The exact content of such rights obviously varies between different social and historical locations.
[5] In a seminal essay, Michał Kalecki identified the ‘confidence’ of investors as a crucial factor determining economic performance: ‘Political Aspects of Full Employment’, Political Quarterly, vol. 14, no. 4, 1943. Investor confidence, according to Kalecki, depends on the extent to which current profit expectations of capital owners are reliably sanctioned by the distribution of political power and the policies to which it gives rise. Economic dysfunctions—unemployment in Kalecki’s case—ensue when business sees its profit expectations threatened by political interference. ‘Wrong’ policies in this sense result in a loss of business confidence, which in turn may result in what would amount to an investment strike of capital owners. Kalecki’s perspective makes it possible to model a capitalist economy as an interactive game, as distinguished from a natural or machine-like mechanism. In this perspective, the point at which capitalists react adversely to non-market allocation by withdrawing investment need not be seen as fixed and mathematically predictable but may be negotiable. For example, it may be set by a historically changeable level of aspiration or by strategic calculation. This is why predictions based on universalistic, i.e., historically and culturally indifferent, economic models so often fail: they assume fixed parameters where in reality these are socially determined.
[6] John Goldthorpe, ‘The Current Inflation: Towards a Sociological Account’, in Fred Hirsch and Goldthorpe, eds, The Political Economy of Inflation, Cambridge, ma 1978.
[7] Already in the 1950s Anthony Downs had noted that in a democracy the demands from citizens for public services tended to exceed the supply of resources available to government; see for example, ‘Why the Government Budget Is Too Small in a Democracy’, World Politics, vol. 12, no. 4, 1960. See also James O’Connor, ‘The Fiscal Crisis of the State’, Socialist Revolution, vol. 1, nos 1 and 2, 1970.
[8] Greta Krippner, Capitalizing on Crisis: The Political Origins of the Rise of Finance, Cambridge, ma 2011.
[9] David Spiro, The Hidden Hand of American Hegemony: Petrodollar Recycling and International Markets, Ithaca, ny 1999.
[10] Robert Reich, Locked in the Cabinet, New York 1997.
[11] Joseph Stiglitz, The Roaring Nineties: A New History of the World’s Most Prosperous Decade, New York 2003.
[12] Colin Crouch, ‘Privatised Keynesianism: An Unacknowledged Policy Regime’, British Journal of Politics and International Relations, vol. 11, no. 3, 2009.
[13] The diagram shows the development in the lead capitalist country, the United States, where the four stages unfold in ideal-typical fashion. For other countries it is necessary to make allowances reflecting their particular circumstances, including their position in the global political economy. In Germany, for example, public debt already began to rise sharply in the 1970s. This corresponds to the fact that German inflation was low long before Volcker, due to the independence of the Bundesbank and the monetarist policies it adopted as early as 1974; Fritz Scharpf, Crisis and Choice in European Social Democracy, Ithaca, ny 1991.
[14] For a representative collection see James Poterba and Jürgen von Hagen, eds, Institutions, Politics and Fiscal Policy, Chicago 1999.
[15] For a state with public debt equalling 100 per cent of gdp, an increase by 2 percentage points in the average rate of interest it has to pay to its creditors would raise its yearly deficit by the same amount. A current budget deficit of 4 per cent of gdp would as a result increase by half.
[16] Joseph Schumpeter, ‘The Crisis of the Tax State’ [1918], in Richard Swedberg, ed., The Economics and Sociology of Capitalism, Princeton, nj 1991.
[17] In other words, not even ‘the markets’ are willing to put their money on the supply-side mantra according to which growth is stimulated by cuts in public spending. On the other hand, who can say how much new debt is enough, and how much too much, for a country to outgrow its old debt.
[18] The concepts were laid out by David Lockwood in ‘Social Integration and System Integration’, in George Zollschan and Walter Hirsch, eds, Explorations in Social Change, London 1964.
[19] Peter Mair, ‘Representative versus Responsible Government’, Max Planck Institute for the Study of Societies Working Paper 09/8, Cologne 2009.
[20] According to Wolfgang Schäuble: ‘We need new forms of international governance, global governance and European governance.’ Financial Times, 5 December 2010. Schäuble acknowledged that if the German parliament was asked to forfeit its jurisdiction over the budget immediately, ‘you would not get a Yes vote’—‘[but] if you would give us some months to work on this, and if you give us the hope that other member states will agree as well, I would see a chance.’ Schäuble was, fittingly, speaking as winner of the ft competition for European finance minister of the year.
[21] For example, political appeals for redistributive ‘solidarity’ are now directed at entire nations asked by international organizations to support other entire nations, such as Slovenia being urged to help Ireland, Greece and Portugal. This hides the fact that those being supported by this sort of ‘international solidarity’ are not the people in the streets but the banks, domestic and foreign, that would otherwise have to accept losses, or lower profits. It also neglects differences in national income. While Germans are on average richer than Greeks (although some Greeks are much richer than almost all Germans), Slovenians are on average much poorer than the Irish, who have statistically a higher per capita income than nearly all Euro countries, including Germany. Essentially the new conflict alignment translates class conflicts into international conflicts, pitting against each other nations that are each subject to the same financial market pressures for public austerity. Ordinary people are told to demand ‘sacrifices’ from other ordinary people, who happen to be citizens of other states, rather than from those who have long resumed collecting their ‘bonuses’.
[22] C. Wright Mills, The Power Elite, Oxford 1956.

Marx revisitado na crise do séc. XXI

2012-01-11T10:04:00.000Z

Documentário imperdível. Com Žižek, Rancière, Sloterdijk, Negri, inter alia.

"Marx Reloaded" is a cultural documentary that examines the relevance of German socialist and philosopher Karl Marx's ideas for understanding the global economic and financial crisis of 2008—09. The crisis triggered the deepest global recession in 70 years and prompted the US government to spend more than 1 trillion dollars in order to rescue its banking system from collapse. Today the full implications of the crisis in Europe and around the world still remain unclear. Nevertheless, should we accept the crisis as an unfortunate side-effect of the free market? Or is there another explanation as to why it happened and its likely effects on our society, our economy and our whole way of life?

Today a new generation of philosophers, artists and political activists are returning to Marx's ideas in order to try to make sense of the crisis and to consider whether a world without or beyond capitalism is possible. Is the severity of the ongoing recession a sign that the capitalist system's days are numbered? Ironically, 20 years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, could it be that communism might provide the solution to the growing economic and environmental challenges facing the planet?

Written and directed by Jason Barker – himself an experienced writer, lecturer, translator and doctor of philosophy – "Marx Reloaded" comprises interviews with leading thinkers on Marxism, including those at the forefront of a popular revival in Marxist and communist ideas. The film also includes interviews with leading skeptics of this revival as well as light-hearted animation sequences which follow Marx's adventures through the matrix of his own ideas.

Interviews with leading experts include: Norbert Bolz, Micha Brumlik, John Gray, Michael Hardt, Antonio Negri, Nina Power, Jacques Rancière, Peter Sloterdijk, Alberto Toscano, Slavoj Zizek.

Sloterdijk, lapidar

2012-01-10T17:18:00.001Z

Peter Sloterdijk, autor de Crítica da Razão Cínica, aborda o tema "Ni Société, ni religion". Fundamental para a compreensão de uma modernidade que não se deseja pós-moderna.

A longa noite da luta

2012-01-10T17:13:00.003Z

Jacques Rancière, magistral:

12M e 15M

2011-05-31T12:30:00.001+01:00

Será que os da dita 'Geração à Rasca' já ouviram falar do movimento autonomista (de Negri et alii?). Uni-vos, precários. Pensem, teorizem, reflictam. Agir não é vir para a rua gritar ao som de palhaços como o Jel.
A causa é justa, mas a massa encefálica é fraca...

Giorgio Agamben, a ontologia do Estado e a essência da 'soberania'

2011-05-31T12:10:00.000+01:00

Leitura fundamental: aqui e aqui.

Acabar com uma ilusão

2011-05-17T16:20:00.002+01:00

Toni Negri - Il n'y a pas d'évolution - Conférence por www-colline-fr

Zizek e o capitalismo chinês

2011-05-17T15:55:00.003+01:00

De um blogue a seguir atentamente. Sobre o que pensa o Pensador -- não o Mário Crespo -- do momento -- e que será mais do que o "deste" momento histórico -- sobre um aspecto assaz "curioso": Slavoj Zizek: Zizek e a China.

Antonio Negri

2011-05-17T15:36:00.002+01:00

Excelente documentário sobre um dos mais brilhantes e corajosos intelectuais vivos:

(Over the years, few intellectuals have experienced as much admiration and hatred as Antonio Negri. His international best-selling book, Empire, a critical analysis of the new global economy coauthored with Michael Hardt, was hailed as a new manifesto for the 21st century, and turned Negri into a leading spokesperson for the international anti-globalization movement. Antonio Negri: A Revolt that Never Ends profiles the controversial life and times of this important moral and political philosopher, militant, prisoner, refugee, and so-called “enemy of the state.” It traces his roots in the radical left-wing movements in Italy during the 60s and 70s, illustrated through incredible archival footage of strikes, factory occupations, terrorist actions, violent street confrontations, and government trials of dissidents. During these tumultuous decades Negri spent ten years in prison and fourteen years in Parisian exile, where he contributed to philosophical debates with authors such as Gilles Deleuze. The film features interviews with Negri (conducted following his April 2003 release from confinement), public speaking appearances, plus commentary from his coauthor Michael Hardt, and Italian and French colleagues. Antonio Negri explores this visionary theoretician’s lifelong political struggle, now being expressed in works of contemporary relevance such as Empire and its sequel, Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire, a powerful intellectual project in protest of the new global order.)

Tragédia, farsa, realidade...

2011-05-17T15:09:00.000+01:00

(Anti-)aggiornamento (PT)

2011-05-16T17:08:00.001+01:00

Já decorreram seis meses desde a minha última entrada.
O silêncio nem sempre é de ouro, mas permite, ou concita, uma maior abertura à contemplação e à maturação. Assim se espera.
As coisas neste país transformaram-se de forma indizível, para (o) pior, e são meramente confirmativas de que tudo irá, por força das "coisas", permanecer inalterado. O mundo ultrapassa-nos. Nós ultrapassamos o -- ou ultrapassamo-nos ao -- mundo.
É mister dizer. Intervir. Pronunciar o verbo que antecede o agir com norte.
Outrora escrevera apenas em inglês, por razões de proximidade ao meu "público" diminuto e aos temas de natureza transcultural que abordava.
Embora não querendo abandonar as metas que determinaram a criação deste blogue, sinto-me obrigado a mudar de agulhas em pleno trânsito, para que possa dedicar alguma atenção a áreas da maior premência: as brutais crises que ora afectam Portugal e a Europa.
Encontramo-nos numa encruzilhada decisiva e cada ser pensante tem o dever de tentar reflectir sobre o mar de mutações que a todos ameaça afogar.
É inteiramente natural que, face ao enunciado, comece a redigir este blogue tembém em português. Sempre que pertinente, todavia, publicarei versões bilíngues de futuros textos.

(Anti-)aggiornamento (EN)

2011-05-16T15:03:00.001+01:00

It has been nearly six months since my last post.
Silence is not always golden, but is does render one more open to contemplation and inner growth. Hopefully.
Things have undergone untold transformations in my country, for the worse (and worst), only to confirm that everything shall, per force, remain the same. The world is too much for us. We are too much for the world.
It is time to speak up. To intervene. To propound the verb that must precede coherent action.
Heretofore, I have written solely in English, for reasons of proximity, both to my diminutive "audience" and to topics of a cross-cultural nature.
While not wishing to abandon the aims that led to the creation of this blog, I feel obligated to switch lanes in mid-traffic, to delve into other areas of concern: the enormous crises which are affecting Portugal and Europe. We are at a decisive crossroads, and each and every thinking person has the duty to (attempt to) reflect on the sea of change that is drowning us all.
It is only natural, as such, to begin blogging also in Portuguese. Whenever pertinent, however, I shall present bilingual versions of future posts originally written in that language.

No choice

2011-01-02T16:35:00.004Z

2011. Another year. A step forward or one more wasted moment in a time without momentum?

Let's be frank. Things are going to get much worse before they can become any better.

Europe is at a crossroads, dangling over a financial abyss and a political crevasse.

China is moving, leaps and bounds, through uncertain paths towards 'greatness'.

The US is torn between a progressive, but timid, leadership, and the constraints of a feckless population and the incredible greed of corporate America.

The rest of the world tags along, amidst sweat shops, growing inequality and emulations of the worst that capitalism has to offer.

Since the tribulations of 2008, we have been living on borrowed time, borrowed money, borrowed hope.

We are feeling the full force of the foreseen -- and the unforeseen -- ramifications of the sub-prime crash, a veritable whirlpool which has pulled in sovereign finances, government expenditure, private debts and global confidence.

Less income, higher taxes, lower social benefits, more unemployment and greater hardship. In a word: more poverty. In an age of plenty, the poor get poorer, the middle class is impoverished and the well-to-do become richer.

We know how all this happened. We understand the direct and efficient causes, as Aristotle would say. But we do not fully grasp the depths of the root problem: capitalism in and by itself, as a system where markets are kept unregulated to satisfy the non-productive generation of wealth.
Speculative capitalism plainly counteracts the positive features of the keynesian model of socialised market economies. The real 'third way', the blending and trading-off between the State and free enterprise, has all but been replaced by the 'invisible hand' of market 'forces'.
This development, brought along by the bullish 1990's and early 2000's, reenacts, as if by déjà vu, the errors of the 1890's, 1920's, 1970's and 1980's.
When will we learn to avoid the same mistakes?
When will we see that a model that breathes on cyclical crises, and has become totally dematerialised in a financial Alice in Wonderland, is alienated from the palpable world, from the production of real value?
When will we recognize that capitalism, in its current stage of 'evolution', encourages the multiplication of parasitic investment and the accruing of profit beyond the 'realities' of the 'real' economy?
We should stop being complacent and all-accepting of the 'inevitabilities' of the status quo.
We must do something, each and every one of us, to start a movement for change. Transforming social and economic systems in a peaceful and democratic fashion is the ideal rite of passage for a truly civilised epoch.
Are we up to the challenge of belonging to such a brave new world?
We have no choice. As the Orator pointed out: "Cuiusvis hominis est errare, nullius nisi insipientis in errore perseverare." (Anyone can err, but only the fool persists in his fault.)
I shall return to this issue shortly.
Meanwhile, happy new year!

The sequel to Agamben's Homo Sacer:

2010-11-24T14:03:00.000Z

Mandatory reading, by one of the world's most important thinkers:

Solomon's House: Utopia

2010-11-24T00:07:00.000Z

Francis Bacon, New Atlantis (1627):

"God bless thee, my son; I will give thee the greatest jewel I have. For I will impart unto thee, for the love of God and men, a relation of the true state of Salomon's House. Son, to make you know the true state of Salomon's House, I will keep this order. First, I will set forth unto you the end of our foundation. Secondly, the preparations and instruments we have for our works. Thirdly, the several employments and functions whereto our fellows are assigned. And fourthly, the ordinances and rites which we observe.
"The end of our foundation is the knowledge of causes, and secret motions of things; and the enlarging of the bounds of human empire, to the effecting of all things possible.
"The preparations and instruments are these: We have large and deep caves of several depths; the deepest are sunk 600 fathoms; and some of them are digged and made under great hills and mountains; so that if you reckon together the depth of the hill and the depth of the cave, they are, some of them, above three miles deep. For we find that the depth of a hill and the depth of a cave from the flat are the same thing; both remote alike from the sun and heaven's beams, and from the open air. These caves we call the lower region. And we use them for all coagulations, indurations, refrigerations, and conservations of bodies. We use them likewise for the imitation of natural mines and the producing also of new artificial metals, by compositions and materials which we use and lay there for many years. We use them also sometimes (which may seem strange) for curing of some diseases, and for prolongation of life, in some hermits that choose to live there, well accommodated of all things necessary, and indeed live very long; by whom also we learn many things.
"We have burials in several earths, where we put divers cements, as the Chinese do their porcelain. But we have them in greater variety, and some of them more fine. We also have great variety of composts and soils, for the making of the earth fruitful.
"We have high towers, the highest about half a mile in height, and some of them likewise set upon high mountains, so that the vantage of the hill with the tower is in the highest of them three miles at least. And these places we call the upper region, account the air between the high places and the low as a middle region. We use these towers, according to their several heights and situations, for insulation, refrigeration, conservation, and for the view of divers meteors -- as winds, rain, snow, hail, and some of the fiery meteors also. And upon them in some places are dwellings of hermits, whom we visit sometimes and instruct what to observe.
"We have great lakes, both salt and fresh, whereof we have use for the fish and fowl. We use them also for burials of some natural bodies, for we find a difference in things buried in earth, or in air below the earth, and things buried in water. We have also pools, of which some do strain fresh water out of salt, and others by art do turn fresh water into salt. We have also some rocks in the midst of the sea, and some bays upon the shore for some works, wherein are required the air and vapor of the sea. We have likewise violent streams and cataracts, which serve us for many motions; and likewise engines for multiplying and enforcing of winds to set also on divers motions.
"We have also a number of artificial wells and fountains, made in imitation of the natural sources and baths, as tincted upon vitriol, sulphur, steel, brass, lead, nitre, and other minerals; and again, we have little wells for infusions of many things, where the waters take the virtue quicker and better than in vessels or basins. And among them we have a water, which we call water of paradise, being by that we do it made very sovereign for health and prolongation of life.
"We have also great and spacious houses, where we imitate and demonstrate meteors -- as snow, hail, rain, some artificial rains of bodies and not of water, thunders, lightnings; also generations of bodies in air -- as frogs, flies, and divers others.
"We have also certain chambers, which we call chambers of health, where we qualify the air as we think good and proper for the cure of divers diseases and preservation of health.
"We have also fair and large baths, of several mixtures, for the cure of diseases, and the restoring of man's body from arefaction; and others for the confirming of it in strength of sinews, vital parts, and the very juice and substance of the body.
"We have also large and various orchards and gardens, wherein we do not so much respect beauty as variety of ground and soil, proper for divers trees and herbs, and some very spacious, where trees and berries are set, whereof we make divers kinds of drinks, beside the vineyards. In these we practise likewise all conclusions of grafting, and inoculating, as well of wild-trees as fruit-trees, which produceth many effects. And we make by art, in the same orchards and gardens, trees and flowers, to come earlier or later than their seasons, and to come up and bear more speedily than by their natural course they do. We make them also by art greater much than their nature; and their fruit greater and sweeter, and of differing taste, smell, color, and figure, from their nature. And many of them we so order as that they become of medicinal use.
"We have also means to make divers plants rise by mixtures of earths without seeds, and likewise to make divers new plants, differing from the vulgar, and to make one tree or plant turn into another.
"We have also parks, and enclosures of all sorts, of beasts and birds; which we use not only for view or rareness, but likewise for dissections and trials, that thereby may take light what may be wrought upon the body of man. Wherein we find many strange effects: as continuing life in them, though divers parts, which you account vital, be perished and taken forth; resuscitating of some that seem dead in appearance, and the like. We try also all poisons, and other medicines upon them, as well of chirurgery as physic. By art likewise we make them greater or smaller than their kind is, and contrariwise dwarf them and stay their growth; we make them more fruitful and bearing than their kind is, and contrariwise barren and not generative. Also we make them differ in color, shape, activity, many ways. We find means to make commixtures and copulations of divers kinds, which have produced many new kinds, and them not barren, as the general opinion is. We make a number of kinds of serpents, worms, flies, fishes of putrefaction, whereof some are advanced (in effect) to be perfect creatures, like beasts or birds, and have sexes, and do propagate. Neither do we this by chance, but we know beforehand of what matter and commixture, what kind of those creatures will arise.
"We have also particular pools where we make trials upon fishes, as we have said before of beasts and birds.
"We have also places for breed and generation of those kinds of worms and flies which are of special use; such as are with you your silkworms and bees.
"I will not hold you long with recounting of our brewhouses, bake-houses, and kitchens, where are made divers drinks, breads, and meats, rare and of special effects. Wines we have of grapes, and drinks of other juice, of fruits, of grains, and of roots, and of mixtures with honey, sugar, manna, and fruits dried and decocted; also of the tears or wounding of trees and of the pulp of canes. And these drinks are of several ages, some to the age or last of forty years. We have drinks also brewed with several herbs and roots and spices; yea, with several fleshes and white meats; whereof some of the drinks are such as they are in effect meat and drink both, so that divers, especially in age, do desire to live with them with little or no meat or bread. And above all we strive to have drinks of extreme thin parts, to insinuate into the body, and yet without all biting, sharpness, or fretting; insomuch as some of them put upon the back of your hand, will with a little stay pass through to the palm, and yet taste mild to the mouth. We have also waters, which we ripen in that fashion, as they become nourishing, so that they are indeed excellent drinks, and many will use no other. Bread we have of several grains, roots, and kernels; yea, and some of flesh, and fish, dried; with divers kinds of leavings and seasonings; so that some do extremely move appetites, some do nourish so as divers do live of them, without any other meat, who live very long. So for meats, we have some of them so beaten, and made tender, and mortified, yet without all corrupting, as a weak heat of the stomach will turn them into good chilus, as well as a strong heat would meat otherwise prepared. We have some meats also and bread, and drinks, which, taken by men, enable them to fast long after; and some other, that used make the very flesh of men's bodies sensibly more hard and tough, and their strength far greater than otherwise it would be.
"We have dispensatories or shops of medicines; wherein you may easily think, if we have such variety of plants, and living creatures, more than you have in Europe (for we know what you have), the simples, drugs, and ingredients of medicines, must likewise be in so much the greater variety. We have them likewise of divers ages, and long fermentations. And for their preparations, we have not only all manner of exquisite distillations, and separations, and especially by gentle heats, and percolations through divers strainers, yea, and substances; but also exact forms of composition, whereby they incorporate almost as they were natural simples.
"We have also divers mechanical arts, which you have not; and stuffs made by them, as papers, linen, silks, tissues, dainty works of feathers of wonderful lustre, excellent dyes, and many others, and shops likewise as well for such as are not brought into vulgar use among us, as for those that are. For you must know, that of the things before recited, many of them are grown into use throughout the kingdom, but yet, if they did flow from our invention, we have of them also for patterns and principals.
"We have also furnaces of great diversities, and that keep great diversity of heats; fierce and quick, strong and constant, soft and mild, blown, quiet, dry, moist, and the like. But above all we have heats, in imitation of the sun's and heavenly bodies' heats, that pass divers inequalities, and as it were orbs, progresses, and returns whereby we produce admirable effects. Besides, we have heats of dungs, and of bellies and maws of living creatures and of their bloods and bodies, and of hays and herbs laid up moist, of lime unquenched, and such like. Instruments also which generate heat only by motion. And farther, places for strong insulations; and, again, places under the earth, which by nature or art yield heat. These divers heats we use as the nature of the operation which we intend requireth.
"We have also perspective houses, where we make demonstrations of all lights and radiations and of all colors; and out of things uncolored and transparent we can represent unto you all several colors, not in rainbows, as it is in gems and prisms, but of themselves single. We represent also all multiplications of light, which we carry to great distance, and make so sharp as to discern small points and lines. Also all colorations of light: all delusions and deceits of the sight, in figures, magnitudes, motions, colors; all demonstrations of shadows. We find also divers means, yet unknown to you, of producing of light, originally from divers bodies. We procure means of seeing objects afar off, as in the heaven and remote places; and represent things near as afar off, and things afar off as near; making feigned distances. We have also helps for the sight far above spectacles and glasses in use; we have also glasses and means to see small and minute bodies, perfectly and distinctly; as the shapes and colors of small flies and worms, grains, and flaws in gems which cannot otherwise be seen, observations in urine and blood not otherwise to be seen. We make artificial rainbows, halos, and circles about light. We represent also all manner of reflections, refractions, and multiplications of visual beams of objects.
"We have also precious stones, of all kinds, many of them of great beauty and to you unknown, crystals likewise, and glasses of divers kind; and among them some of metals vitrificated, and other materials, besides those of which you make glass. Also a number of fossils and imperfect minerals, which you have not. Likewise loadstones of prodigious virtue, and other rare stones, both natural and artificial.
"We have also sound-houses, where we practise and demonstrate all sounds and their generation. We have harmony which you have not, of quarter-sounds and lesser slides of sounds. Divers instruments of music likewise to you unknown, some sweeter than any you have; with bells and rings that are dainty and sweet. We represent small sounds as great and deep, likewise great sounds extenuate and sharp; we make divers tremblings and warblings of sounds, which in their original are entire. We represent and imitate all articulate sounds and letters, and the voices and notes of beasts and birds. We have certain helps which, set to the ear, do further the hearing greatly; we have also divers strange and artificial echoes, reflecting the voice many times, and, as it were, tossing it; and some that give back the voice louder than it came, some shriller and some deeper; yea, some rendering the voice, differing in the letters or articulate sound from that they receive. We have all means to convey sounds in trunks and pipes, in strange lines and distances.
"We have also perfume-houses, wherewith we join also practices of taste. We multiply smells which may seem strange: we imitate smells, making all smells to breathe out of other mixtures than those that give them. We make divers imitations of taste likewise, so that they will deceive any man's taste. And in this house we contain also a confiture-house, where we make all sweatmeats, dry and moist, and divers pleasant wines, milks, broths, and salads, far in greater variety than you have.
"We have also engine-houses, where are prepared engines and instruments for all sorts of motions. There we imitate and practise to make swifter motions than any you have, either out of your muskets or any engine that you have; and to make them and multiply them more easily and with small force, by wheels and other means, and to make them stronger and more violent than yours are, exceeding your greatest cannons and basilisks. We represent also ordnance and instruments of war and engines of all kinds; and likewise new mixtures and compositions of gunpowder, wild-fires burning in water and unquenchable, also fire-works of all variety, both for pleasure and use. We imitate also flights of birds; we have some degrees of flying in the air. We have ships and boats for going under water and brooking of seas, also swimming-girdles and supporters. We have divers curious clocks and other like motions of return, and some perpetual motions. We imitate also motions of living creatures by images of men, beasts, birds, fishes, and serpents; we have also a great number of other various motions, strange for equality, fineness, and subtilty.
"We have also a mathematical-house, where are represented all instruments, as well of geometry as astronomy, exquisitely made.
"We have also houses of deceits of the senses, where we represent all manner of feats of juggling, false apparitions, impostures and illusions, and their fallacies. And surely you will easily believe that we, that have so many things truly natural which induce admiration, could in a world of particulars deceive the senses if we would disguise those things, and labor to make them more miraculous. But we do hate all impostures and lies, insomuch as we have severely forbidden it to all our fellows, under pain of ignominy and fines, that they do not show any natural work or thing adorned or swelling, but only pure as it is, and without all affectation of strangeness.
"These are, my son, the riches of Salomon's House.
"For the several employments and offices of our fellows, we have twelve that sail into foreign countries under the names of other nations (for our own we conceal), who bring us the books and abstracts, and patterns of experiments of all other parts. These we call merchants of light.
"We have three that collect the experiments which are in all books. These we call depredators.
"We have three that collect the experiments of all mechanical arts, and also of liberal sciences, and also of practices which are not brought into arts. These we call mystery-men.
"We have three that try new experiments, such as themselves think good. These we call pioneers or miners.
"We have three that draw the experiments of the former four into titles and tables, to give the better light for the drawing of observations and axioms out of them. These we call compilers. We have three that bend themselves, looking into the experiments of their fellows, and cast about how to draw out of them things of use and practice for man's life and knowledge, as well for works as for plain demonstration of causes, means of natural divinations, and the easy and clear discovery of the virtues and parts of bodies. These we call dowry-men or benefactors.
"Then after divers meetings and consults of our whole number, to consider of the former labors and collections, we have three that take care out of them to direct new experiments, of a higher light, more penetrating into nature than the former. These we call lamps.
"We have three others that do execute the experiments so directed, and report them. These we call inoculators.
"Lastly, we have three that raise the former discoveries by experiments into greater observations, axioms, and aphorisms. These we call interpreters of nature.
"We have also, as you must think, novices and apprentices, that the succession of the former employed men do not fail; besides a great number of servants and attendants, men and women. And this we do also: we have consultations, which of the inventions and experiences which we have discovered shall be published, and which not; and take all an oath of secrecy for the concealing of those which we think fit to keep secret; though some of those we do reveal sometime to the State, and some not.
"For our ordinances and rites we have two very long and fair galleries. In one of these we place patterns and samples of all manner of the more rare and excellent inventions; in the other we place the statues of all principal inventors. There we have the statue of your Columbus, that discovered the West Indies, also the inventor of ships, your monk that was the inventor of ordnance and of gunpowder, the inventor of music, the inventor of letters, the inventor of printing, the inventor of observations of astronomy, the inventor of works in metal, the inventor of glass, the inventor of silk of the worm, the inventor of wine, the inventor of corn and bread, the inventor of sugars; and all these by more certain tradition than you have. Then we have divers inventors of our own, of excellent works; which, since you have not seen) it were too long to make descriptions of them; and besides, in the right understanding of those descriptions you might easily err. For upon every invention of value we erect a statue to the inventor, and give him a liberal and honorable reward. These statues are some of brass, some of marble and touchstone, some of cedar and other special woods gilt and adorned; some of iron, some of silver, some of gold.
"We have certain hymns and services, which we say daily, of laud and thanks to God for His marvellous works. And forms of prayers, imploring His aid and blessing for the illumination of our labors; and turning them into good and holy uses.
"Lastly, we have circuits or visits, of divers principal cities of the kingdom; where as it cometh to pass we do publish such new profitable inventions as we think good. And we do also declare natural divinations of diseases, plagues, swarms of hurtful creatures, scarcity, tempest, earthquakes, great inundations, comets, temperature of the year, and divers other things; and we give counsel thereupon, what the people shall do for the prevention and remedy of them."
And when he had said this he stood up, and I, as I had been taught, knelt down; and he laid his right hand upon my head, and said: "God bless thee, my son, and God bless this relation which I have made. I give thee leave to publish it, for the good of other nations; for we here are in God's bosom, a land unknown." And so he left me; having assigned a value of about 2,000 ducats for a bounty to me and my fellows. For they give great largesses, where they come, upon all occasions."
[The manuscript ends here]

Die Toten mahnen uns

2010-11-13T11:26:00.000Z

Memorial to Rosa Luxemburg

Too much?

2010-11-13T11:08:00.001Z

The film at the centre of a storm in Germany (the clip below might sicken the unprepared):

The question is: are the gory details necessary to enlighten us to the horrors of the Holocaust? Does the struggle against revisionism and negationism require such awful scenes, such "realism"?

Failure

2010-10-18T20:46:00.003+01:00

"Every fascism is an index of a failed revolution." (Walter Benjamin).

Maybe every crisis of capitalism is an index of a failed Left, inasmuch as the economic system that it opposes (?) is a failed one.

Zizek speaks the truth (again)

2010-10-18T20:11:00.000+01:00

Simply magnificent!

Bigmouth strikes again

2010-10-10T16:47:00.001+01:00

God's Bigmouths
Men like Bishop Eddie Long are fouling the legacy of the civil rights movement.

By Christopher Hitchens
Posted on Slate.com Monday, Sept. 27, 2010, at 11:10 AM

Passing through Union Station in Washington, D.C., last week, I made my usual nod to the statue of A. Phillip Randolph. You can miss it if you are not looking for it, and it has been allowed to suffer defacement. (The sculpted pair of reading glasses held in the great man's hand was snapped off some years ago and was never replaced.) Randolph built a powerful trade union for black railroad workers and proposed the first march on Washington when Franklin Roosevelt was president. His role in the later civil rights movement was germinal and dynamic. But you never hear his name anymore, and it is not taught to schoolchildren. Nor is the name of Bayard Rustin, a charismatic black intellectual and pioneer of gay rights, who organized the March on Washington in 1963. Along with many other secular democratic heroes, Randolph and Rustin have been airbrushed from history. The easiest way to gain instant acceptance as a black "leader" these days is to shove the word Reverend in front of your name.
Or, if you are really greedy and ambitious, the word Bishop. Bishop Eddie Long of the New Birth Missionary Baptist Church in Georgia preaches that Bayard Rustin was a vile sinner who suffered from the curable "disease" of homosexuality. I have a rule of thumb for such clerics and have never known it to fail: Set your watch and sit back, and pretty soon they will be found sprawling lustily on the floor of the men's room. It may be a bit early to claim the scalp of Eddie Long for this collection, but I doubt I shall have to withdraw. Here, after all, is what his friend the Rev. Timothy McDonald III, of the First Iconium Baptist Church (no less!), has to say: "This is the issue: how can you be against homosexuality and you are allegedly participating in it? That is the epitome of hypocrisy." Cynicism and naivete seem to coexist happily in this statement. The Rev. McDonald does not quite seem to believe the rather unimpressive denials issued by his richly draped brother in Christ. And he talks as if fevered denunciation of homosexuality has never before been an early warning of repressed desire.
One of his alleged partners in depravity may have been on the borderline of the age of consent, but otherwise I can't make myself care about whether the self-anointed Bish was rogering his flock. What concerns me isn't even the laughable obviousness of his cupidity: the jewels and gold chains and limos and bodyguards. This is all a familiar part of the tawdry business of "Churchianity" now finding loopholes for the rich and venal at a well-upholstered religious establishment somewhere near you. No, what offends me is that Long was able to get four presidents of the United States to attend his opulent circus for the funeral of Coretta Scott King in 2006. What a steep and awful decline from the mule cart that carried her husband's coffin in 1968. And the decline can be measured out in dog collars, from the Rev. Jesse Jackson all the way down to the Rev. Al Sharpton and the venomous Rev. Jeremiah Wright.
Many other charlatans have benefited from the clerical racket, and the most notorious of them—Jerry Falwell, Ted Haggard, Jim Bakker, Jimmy Swaggart—have been white. But there is something especially horrible about the way in which the black pulpit gets a sort of free pass, almost as if white society has assured itself that black Americans just love them some preaching. In this fog of ethnic condescension, it is much easier for mountebanks and demagogues to get away with it.
It is not amazing to me that the Bish is still standing and getting moist applause from the pews after the testimony of his boys brigade of LongFellows. (What the hell is that name, if not a giveaway?) It is amazing that he is still around after the ceaseless exposure of his personal finances. What I should like to know is this: How much of that funding and expenditure has been tax-deductible or written off as "charitable"? In a time of widespread discussion of the spread of the tax burden, why is it never proposed that the vast sums raised by the churches be subject to the scrutiny of the IRS? And still another question: In 2006, Long's church received about $1 million of U.S. taxpayers' money from the "faith-based initiative" of the George W. Bush administration. It was suggested at the time that this might be a quid pro quo for the Bish's militant stand against gay marriage and other homosexual abominations. If so, it would make my follow-up question even more amusing: How did Long and his young friends, "bonded" as they were in strong male "covenants," actually spend our cash?
To those young friends, then, "Thank you all very much for coming out"—as Sen. Larry Craig actually did say at the opening of his own post-men's-room press conference. The day can't be far off when Long follows the traditional script and starts to yowl for prayer and repentance. And this would all be the greatest fun if it didn't also involve the degradation of the King family and the steady erosion of the real memory of the civil rights movement, which is not safe when left in the keeping of God's bigmouths and tree-shakers.

The power of 'radical' thought

2010-09-21T23:24:00.006+01:00

A brief overview of a genius:

Slavoj Žižek: interview
The Marxist provocateur and bestselling philosopher on communism, poststructural theory and his reluctance to play poster boy for the fashionable European left

The Observer, Sunday 27 June 2010
The large lecture hall of the French Institute in Barcelona is full to overflowing. People line the walls, sit in the aisles and stand three-deep at the back. There are a few middle-aged, smartly dressed people in attendance as well as a handful of old leftists with long hair and caps, but the majority of the audience are young and stylishly dishevelled, the kind of people one would expect to see at a Hot Chip or Vampire Weekend gig.
They have gathered here to listen to a 61-year-old Slovenian philosopher called Slavoj Žižek, whose critique of global capitalism now stretches to more than 50 books translated into more than 20 languages. Žižek describes himself as "a complicated communist" and, as if to complicate things further, he deploys the psychoanalytical theories of the late French thinker Jacques Lacan to illustrate the ways in which capitalist ideology works on the collective imagination. "I don't give clear answers to even the simplest, most direct questions," Žižek says. "I like to complicate issues. I hate simple narratives. I suspect them. This is my automatic reaction."
Žižek's book titles reflect his playful and often self-contradictory theoretical thrust. They include: The Ticklish Subject, which deals with "the spectre of the Cartesian subject in western thought"; The Plague of Fantasies, which analyses the ways in which "audiovisual media clouds the ability to reason and understand the world"; and the wonderfully titled Did Somebody Say Totalitarianism?, a fierce critique of "the liberal-democratic consensus".
He seems drawn to taking unfashionable stances that make him unpopular with traditionalists of whatever political hue. A recent book, In Defence of Lost Causes, argued that, in philosophical-political terms, Heidegger's fascist sympathies and Foucault's support of the Iranian revolution were "right steps in the wrong direction". Rebecca Mead, writing in the New Yorker, dubbed him "the Marx Brother" and described his approach thus: "His favoured form of argument is paradox, and his favoured mode of delivery is a kind of vaudevillian overstatement, buttressed by the appearance of utter conviction." That just about nails it – except that it overlooks the seriousness of Žižek's thinking and the way he has managed to bring dialectics into the mainstream.
"Slavoj is unique in that he operates between two different and, for the most part, exclusive, places," says the film-maker Sophie Fiennes, who directed him in The Pervert's Guide to the Cinema, a documentary that is as provocative as its title suggests, but in a strictly intellectual way. "He has been incredibly successful in taking theory out of the ivory tower of academia and into the world. He challenges the current fear of words like 'ideology' and, correctly in my view, sees this fear as a product of our information culture. It is also, he argues, a fear of what real, deep political thinking might generate in terms of unrest and discontent."
Žižek, though, is also a political provocateur and an absurdist prankster. For one of his books, he wrote a (rejected) fictional autobiographical blurb: "In his free time, Žižek likes to surf the internet for child pornography and teach his small son how to pull the legs off spiders."
As an avowed atheist, he sees no contradiction in arguing, as he did in The Fragile Absolute: Or Why is the Christian Legacy Worth Fighting For?, for a world in which Christians and Marxists unite against "the contemporary onslaught of vapid spirituality". This kind of thing does not sit well with traditional analytical philosophers. Neither does his tendency to roam freely through high and low culture, illuminating the Lacanian undercurrents in Hitchcock as well as Hegel, Leibniz and David Lynch. (In his new book, Living in the End Times, there is a serious, and seriously funny, essay on Kung Fu Panda, the recent DreamWorks animation, which Žižek insists is "a somewhat naive, but nonetheless basically accurate, illustration of an important aspect of Lacanian theory.")
Despite, or perhaps because of, his iconoclasm, his tendency to contradict himself, and his general political incorrectness – which may, one suspects, be more mischievous than heartfelt – Žižek is to today what Jacques Derrida was to the 80s: the thinker of choice for Europe's young intellectual vanguard. This fills him with dismay. Unlike Derrida, though, he is determinedly left wing, if not in the traditional sense.
"I am what you might call abstractly anti-capitalist," he says. "For instance, I am suspicious of the old leftists who focus all their hatred on the United States. What about Chinese neo-colonialism? Why are the left silent about that? When I say this, it annoys them, of course. Good! My instinct as a philosopher is that we are effectively approaching a multicentric world, which means we need to ask new, and for the traditional left, unpleasant questions."
Unlike the dapper Derrida, Žižek is a sight for sore eyes: pale to the point of sallow, bearded, overweight and effortlessly eccentric. In the 2005 documentary, Žižek!, he gives director Astra Taylor a tour of his kitchen, opening drawers and cupboards containing not cutlery and china, but his socks, underpants, trousers and shirts. His day-to-day style – if that is not too extravagant a word – consists of several dull variations on the proletarian outfit of ill-fitting T-shirt, baggy jeans, free airline socks – "Lufthansa are the best" – and lumpen footwear surely sold exclusively by a Slovenian shoeshop that has somehow missed the collapse of the Soviet bloc. (A Slovenian friend claims she recently saw him striding though Ljubljana in a T-shirt bearing the slogan "I Am Beautiful"; it's difficult to imagine any other philosopher doing that.)
When he speaks, or writes, Žižek comes alive and his thoughts flow out in what seem like uncontrollably tangential torrents. His message, at least what one can decipher of it from his scattergun approach, is both politically pessimistic and philosophically elusive.
"If you ask me if I am an optimist, I would have to say no. I am not one of those old-fashioned communists who says, with that old tragi-comic Marxist satisfaction, at least history is on our side. No. If anything, the train of history is hurtling towards a precipice. The task of the leftist thinker today is, to quote Walter Benjamin, not to ride the train of history, but to pull the brake."
In the jam-packed auditorium of the French Institute in Barcelona, Žižek speaks for more than two-and-a-half hours without once pulling the brake. His central thesis, also explored in his new book, Living in the End Times, is that "the global capitalist system is approaching an apocalyptic zero point." Žižek, though, regards the idea of a central thesis in much the same way that the great jazz saxophonist John Coltrane regarded a melody – as something to riff off, extemporise on, and return to only when all associated sub-themes have been exhausted. This approach has its problems, not least the sense that a single Žižek riff could perhaps more profitably be extended into an entire lecture that might be both deeper and more illuminating. Tonight, for instance, he barely addresses the reason why he resolutely believes in communism despite its shredded reputation.
"I don't see any continuity with old-style communism in my approach. So why do I then call it communism?" he says when I ask him about it later. "As to its contents, though, the problem is always the same. It's the enclosure of the commons. Marx was talking about land and property when he wrote about this, but today intellectual property is our commons, information is our commons. Something that Marx could not have predicted is taking place today: we are witnessing a strange regression to the same kind of enclosure of the commons, and people having to pay rent to people like Bill Gates for intellectual property."
He seems a slave to the speed of his thoughts, his motor-mouth delivery barely keeping pace with the frenetic motion of his overcrowded mind. Silence, even a pause for breath, seems to make him intensely uncomfortable. So, too, does the company of strangers. "I avoid other people if I can. The ultimate nightmare for me is a party in my honour in the United States. Having to mix and talk, to strangers, maybe 20 or 30 people who want to have a debate or, even worse, polite conversation. My God, I hate this above all, but it is the nature of my tragic life."
To witness Žižek in full flight is a wonderful and at times alarming experience, part philosophical tightrope-walk, part performance-art marathon, part intellectual roller-coaster ride. Most startling of all are the nervous tics that accompany his every utterance: the constant wiping of his beard and lips, the incessant dabbing of his furrowed brow, the closed eyes, clenched fists and the strange gutteral noises that punctuate his speech. Then, there's his lisp and his odd mispronunciations – in Barcelona, he kept using the term "a dollar cent", which I assumed was an example of fiscal insider jargon until I realised he actually meant "adolescent".
In my notebook, I map out the contours of his lecture in a series of headings. He begins with the fall of the Berlin Wall and the inevitable, in his view, rebirth of some kind of post-digital global communism, before touching on the writings of his beloved Hegel via the thoughts of Pascal. Suddenly though, in the first of many conceptual swerves, he is comparing the fall of communism to the end of the silent movie era which leads him into a riff on ideology as represented by "the disembodied voice" in Chaplin's City Lights and Hitchcock's Psycho. From there, we learn how the scene in Fight Club where Brad Pitt's character punches himself in the face is a metaphor for revolution – "Before you beat the bosses, you must first beat yourself."
By this point, the faithful are enthralled, the curious baffled and the traditionalists utterly bemused. Žižek, though, is just warming up. On and on he roams, through the French and Haitian revolutions, the Iraq war, Rumsfeld's famous speech about "known unknowns". (What about the "unknown knowns?", asks Žižek. "This is exactly how capitalist ideology works; you follow an illusion without even knowing it.") He cites the myth of Santa Claus as a supreme example of ideological indoctrination, dismisses Hollywood's love of the Dalai Lama and "all this vague, insipid Buddhist bullshit". He tells us how cynicism has become western culture's current default mode, what Christianity can teach communism, and why God is essentially a narcissist. He touches on biogenics by way of the inevitable Richard Dawkins – "This kind of extreme atheism misses the point of religion entirely" – and illustrates how science has lost its monopoly on truth. Eventually he realises there is a limit to the collective power of the audience's concentration, and he ends, as he began, with the communist revolution, informing us that the next one will succeed only if it embraces the essentially Christian, conservative social etiquette of politeness and deference. About 155 minutes after he started, he suddenly stops, drenched in sweat and bathed in applause. On cue, an old Trotskyist stands up and takes him to task for betraying the cause….
"I hate these civilised debates followed by the questions from the audience," he tells me the next morning. "So I keep going to subvert this boring ritual, but always there will be one old unreconstructed leftist who will stand up and accuse me of being a Stalinist. This," he says, sighing, "is how it goes."
The son of Slovenian communists, Žižek was born on 21 March 1949 in what was then Yugoslavia. His father was a state economist, his mother an accountant for a state-run business. I ask him if, growing up by the sea in Portorož, he had a happy childhood. "No. You could say, in a vulgar Freudian way, that I am the unhappy child who escapes into books. Even as a child, I was most happy being alone. This has not changed."
As a teenager, living in the capital Ljubljana, he read voraciously and, he says, "did pretty well at high school though I completely ignored the curriculum". At 15, he wanted to be a "movie director" but soon realised that his love of theory surpassed even his passion for film. At university in the 1960s, he was seduced by the new wave of French post-structuralist theorists – Derrida, Michel Foucault, Julia Kristeva and, above all, Jacques Lacan. His postgraduate thesis was initially rejected for being too critical of Marx, and even though he amended it, he was deemed unfit to teach philosophy. "It is very ironic how professors who attacked me for not being a Marxist have now turned nationalist and attack me for being a Marxist. But, really, I don't care."
In the 1970s, Žižek made a living by translating works of philosophy and, at one point, took himself off to France for four years. He also did four years' national service in the Yugoslavian army. He has no bitterness about that. "My formative experience was Yugoslav self-management socialism," he says, "but Slovenia had communist rule without an official philosophy so it was superficially better than anywhere else."
In 1978, he finally landed a job at what he calls" a marginal research institute". It was, he says, "a kind of banishment but also a wonderful post. Just pure research." He made contacts with philosophy institutions in France and the US, which stood him in good stead when he finally published his breakthrough book, 1989's The Sublime Object of Ideology. "Without the communist oppression," he says, quite seriously, "I am absolutely sure I would now be a local stupid professor of philosophy in Ljubljana."
In 1990, he baffled his leftist friends and supporters by standing for election as a Liberal Democratic party candidate. He came fifth. "Politics is my tragedy," he tells me dolefully. "It shadows me."
When not travelling or teaching in America or Europe – he has held posts at Columbia, Princeton and is international director of humanities at Birkbeck College, London – Žižek lives alone in Ljubljana in a small apartment full of books, DVDs, classical music CDs – "I am a committed Wagnerian and, this will shock you, I even like Elgar." Depending on whom you believe, he has been married and divorced two or three times. He is not saying. On April Fool's day, 2005, he famously wed a 27-year-old former lingerie model and Lacanian scholar from Argentina. He has two sons, one in his early 30s, the other nine years old. When I leave him, he heads off to find an iPad as a present for his youngest child. "I am a hypocritical communist, no?"
In the flesh, Žižek is, if anything, more demonic and unhealthy-looking than his photographs, his matted hair and greying beard surrounding a face that looks like it's never seen sunlight. He suffers from diabetes, a condition not helped by his nomadic lifestyle and manic disposition. "I have exploited you," he says by way of greeting, "in order to have a few hours free from the duties these Spanish leftists expect me to perform."
He seems both eager and uncomfortable and ushers me quickly upstairs to the apartment that is his temporary home. As a cleaner flits about, I ask him if he is surprised at his popularity, particularly among the young.
"My God, I am the last person to know the answer to these questions," he says, looking genuinely dismayed. "But, really, I am now thinking there is so much pressure on me to perform. I am getting really bored with it. I am a thinker, but people all the time want this kind of shitty political interventions: the books, the talks, the discussions and so forth." He sighs and closes his eyes and seems to deflate before my eyes. "I will tell you my problem openly and for this my publisher will hate me. All the talk and the writing about politics, this is not where my heart is. No. I have been sidetracked. I really mean this."
He opens a copy of Living in the End Times, and finds the contents page. "I will tell you the truth now," he says, pointing to the first chapter, then the second. "Bullshit. Some more bullshit. Blah, blah, blah." He flicks furiously through the pages. "Chapter 3, where I try to read Marx anew, is maybe OK. I like this part where I analyse Kafka's last story and here where I use the community of outcasts in the TV series Heroes as a model for the communist collective. But, this section, the Architectural Parallax, this is pure bluff. Also the part where I analyse Avatar, the movie, that is also pure bluff. When I wrote it, I had not even seen the film, but I am a good Hegelian. If you have a good theory, forget about the reality."
Why, then, given that he does not like most of his books and does not have any enthusiasm for the lecture circuit, does he not call a stop to the Žižek show? "I am doing that right now!" he shouts. "I am writing a mega-book about Hegel with regard to Plato, Kant and maybe Heidegger. Already, this Hegel book is 700 pages. It is a true work of love. This is my true life's work. Even Lacan is just a tool for me to read Hegel. For me, always it is Hegel, Hegel, Hegel," he says, sighing again. "But people just want the shitty politics."
Reviewing In Defence of Lost Causes, the British Marxist critic Terry Eagleton concluded that it was "a frenetic, eclectic parody of intellectual scholarship, by one so assured in his grasp of the finer points of Kafka or John le Carré that he can afford to ham it up a little." Only time will tell if Žižek is serious about becoming utterly serious, but if he devotes the rest of his brilliant, brainy, slightly bonkers, utterly singular life to Hegel, and Hegel alone, it will be a great gain for pure philosophy and a great loss to radical, risk-taking political theory.
"He is very much a thinker for our turbulent, high speed, information-led lives," says Sophie Fiennes, "precisely because he insists on the freedom to stop and think hard about who you are as an individual in this fragmented society. We need a radical hip priest and Slavoj is that in many ways." The very thought, I suspect, would have him quaking in his proletarian boots – and free airline socks.
Living in the End Times is published on 5 July by Verso, £20. To order a copy for a special price go to observer.co.uk/bookshop or call 0330 333 6847. Žižek appears at the London literature festival, Southbank Centre, London SE1 on 5 July, 7.30pm.
Slavoj ŽiŽek Life in brief
1949 Born in Ljubljana, Slovenia (at that time part of Yugoslavia), to atheist communist parents. Spends his childhood in the seaside town of Portorož, developing an interest in philosophy and popular culture in its relatively free cultural environment. In his teens the family returns to Ljubljana.
1967 Studies philosophy and sociology at the university of Ljubljana, completing his PhD on German idealism by 1981. Writes for Slovenian dissident political and philosophical journals. Becomes renowned for playing devil's advocate with outrageous and colourful theories that combine Lacanian theory with Marxism, and for using popular culture to illustrate complex philosophical theory.
1981-1985 Moves to Paris to study under Lacanian psychoanalyst Jacques-Alain Miller. Writes for French and other European intellectual journals (by this point he is multilingual).
1989 His first English-language book, The Sublime Object of Ideology, launches his international reputation as a cultural and critical theorist. Other popular works follow such as For They Know Not What They Do and The Ticklish Subject follow in the 90s.
2000s Starts to realise his ambition of being involved in film-making, with documentaries about himself – The Reality of the Virtual and Žižek! – and, with Sophie Fiennes, The Pervert's Guide to Cinema. Octavia Morris

Video (5min 37sec), 'Things cannot go on the way they are'

No pasarán!(?) - the Left today

2010-09-16T16:24:00.013+01:00

Thanks to the dissemination of silly Fukuyama's equally silly central thesis, we are all fed up with, and take for granted, the notion of the 'end of ideologies' -- capitalism excepted, bereft of its 'ideological trappings', at the very least up to the crisis of 2008.
Another worn-out cliché is the need to reinvent capitalism and the inevitability of profound reforms to the present European model of the social or welfare State.

A commonly-held standpoint of political and economic observers entertains the idea that all and any changes must be inward-looking and self-serving, to preserve the essence of capitalism as the 'lesser of all economic evils', just as representative democracy is -- rightly -- purported to be the 'lesser of all political evils'.

Whichever paths capitalism might take, the widespread conviction -- an intuitive, irrational and desired one -- is that such economic system and its right-wing superstructure shall successfully adapt and evolve, until the next cyclical crises force further transformations down the road.

An unforgiving dialectic? Certainly not a harmful genetic mutation of an organism perceived as autopoietic, or self-contained, rather the confirmation, most feel, of capitalism's destiny as the 'chosen' system, the one deemed to be the best and fittest through Darwinian natural-historical selection.

The outlook for the Left is far from promising.

The traditional working class has either disappeared or has become the recipient of sporadic crumbs fallen from the table of capitalism, a mirage in a desert with few oases. Those in the middle class just want to keep on spending beyond their means and only dream of becoming rich. Whereas the wealthy do not care one bit about the rest of society.

Conditions for social mobilization against rapidly increasing unfairness and inequality are lacking, and without active resistance it is difficult to foresee any erosion of the edifice of injustice, the veritable 21st century counterpart of the 'pyramid of exploitation', a symbol of the Industrial Age.

The examples of contemporary political struggle -- such as the anti-globalization movement and others, mostly restricted to single issues -- are still in their infancy, most being insufficient and some alas misguided or misdirected. Let us not forget that the Green movement had to wait for over 30 years before its message of environmental awareness became accepted.

A new political -- and ideological -- project is sorely needed. One that is truly progressive, libertarian and free from accommodations, stripped of complacency and immune to hybrid or 'third' ways. A project which aims to destroy capitalism insofar as to -- perhaps even -- 'save it from itself', in a fashion not dissimilar to that famous incident during the Vietnam War, when a Viet Cong village was 'destroyed in order to be saved'.

I am not stating anything new.

What project might this be? The current mainstream Left has no idea, nor does it seem to want to have one, a situation aggravated by the silent majority's refusal to contemplate changes to the status quo.

There is nothing innovative in this assertion either.

Unfortunately, as most serious political critics -- Noam Chomsky* comes to mind immediately, as the doyen of 'radical' thinkers who forgo momentary intellectual dalliances and genuinely attempt to create a systemic discourse within a coherent worldview and in the context of a hitherto untested alternative paradigm -- are generally ignored and frowned upon, we are rewarded with a panoply of so-called, or self-labeled, Left-leaning 'experts' and political 'commentators', who excel at pseudo-analysis and at what I might call 'mitigation theory': proposing austerity measures as necessary palliatives to the recurrent 'ailments' of capitalism, in their minds an otherwise healthy system.

Action has been replaced by illusion, and the future is being postponed, inasmuch as the will to think of, and to achieve, a better tomorrow is being thwarted. The politics of progress are more often than not completely subdued by the politics -- and policies -- of 'realism'.

I believe that unqualified respect is something that only those with the courage to act upon their convictions should be entitled to, those who practice what they say, who follow their utterances with deeds. If one does not possess such courage, or the capacity to act in accordance, then one should refrain from communicating grandiloquently in the public sphere.

Enough, I say, of talking heads and opinion makers elevated to positions of influence by the masses, wrongly convinced, poor folk, that they are listening to people with an iota of social conscience and the desire to lessen suffering.

Earnest resignation by the humble in the face of a tough reality is preferable to the self-righteous indignation of those who falsely claim to know how to effect change.

We may still console ourselves with the fact that the West enjoys a relatively free and democratic form of capitalism.

I hope that the unfathomable future does not follow a route in emulation of the Russian or East Asian forms of authoritarian capitalism.
In any event, we must theorize about new ways to confront capitalism. New revolutionary politics (of the non-violent persuasion, I should stress) are required.

*I do not mean to exclude other progressive public intellectuals. My apologies to, inter alia, Naomi Klein.

About the title: 'No pasarán!' ("They shall not go forward!") was coined by Dolores Ibárruri, 'La Pasionaria', a heroic figure of the Spanish Left. It was a powerful rallying cry of the Republicans during the Siege of Madrid by the Fascist forces of Franco.

A 'new' Left?

2010-09-14T20:40:00.002+01:00

Naomi Klein, author of The Shock Doctrine, on the rebuilding of the Left:

When is enough really enough?

2010-09-14T13:54:00.000+01:00

Christopher Hitchens, lucid as ever:

"A Call for Earthly Justice
Holding the Catholic Church accountable for its crimes.
By Christopher Hitchens
Posted to Slate, Monday, Sept. 13, 2010, at 11:16 AM ET

Reading Diarmaid MacCulloch's extraordinary and limpid new work Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years (a history informed by a general, if Anglican, sympathy for its subject), I came across the following passage from Cardinal John Henry Newman's classic statement of belief, his Apologia Pro Vita Sua:
The Catholic Church holds it better for the Sun and Moon to drop from Heaven, for the earth to fail, and for all the many millions on it to die from starvation in extremest agony … than that one soul, I will not say, should be lost, but should commit one single venial sin, should tell one wilful untruth, or should steal one poor farthing without excuse.
In a few days, Joseph Ratzinger will make one of the most portentous voyages of his papacy, landing in Britain to announce the beatification of the author of those remarkable words. I am not writing about Catholic dogma today, and in any case do not have the space to discuss the hysterical, totalitarian fanaticism of Newman's statement, coming as it does from a learned man celebrated for his relative "moderation." I thought I would simply ask how the church would emerge if anything remotely like Newman's criterion were to be applied to it.
As we have recently been forcibly reminded, the Roman Catholic Church holds it better for the cries of raped and violated children to be ignored, and for the excuses and alibis of their rapists and torturers indulged, and for a host of dirty and wilful untruths to be manufactured wholesale, and for the funds raised ostensibly for the poor to be paid out in hush money and shameful bribery, rather than that one tiny indignity or inconvenience be visited on the robed majesty of a man-made church or any limit set to its self-proclaimed right to be judge in its own cause.
Earlier this year, as Roman Catholic authorities from Ireland to Germany to Australia to Belgium to the United States were being confronted with the fallout of decades of sexual assault and subsequent denial, I asked a simple question in print. Why was this not considered a matter for the police and the courts? Why were we asking the church to "put its own house in order," an expression that was the exact definition of the problem to begin with? Why had almost no offending priest or bishop faced justice, and even then usually after a long period of protection from the church's own "courts"? I followed this up with a telephone call to Geoffrey Robertson, a British barrister with a second-to-none record in international human rights cases. (If it matters, the last time we had both cooperated was in a campaign against the British Act of Succession, an archaic piece of legislation that explicitly discriminates against Catholics.) This was one of the best dimes I have ever dropped. After a group of generous humanists and atheists agreed to pay his extremely modest fee, Robertson produced a detailed legal brief against the papacy and has made it widely available for the use of all interested or aggrieved parties. Titled The Case of the Pope: Vatican Accountability for Human Rights Abuse, it has just been published in the United Kingdom by Penguin Books. (It will be available in the United States in October.)
As if almost timed to coincide with its publication, and with the impending arrival of Ratzinger on British soil, the recent disclosures of the putrid state of the church in Belgium have thrown the whole scandal into an even sharper relief. Consider: The now-resigned bishop of Bruges, Roger Vangheluwe, stands revealed by his own eventual confession as being guilty of incest as well as rape, having regularly "abused" his male nephew between the ages of 5 and 18. The man's superior as head of the Belgian church, Cardinal Godfried Danneels, has been caught on tape urging the victim to keep quiet. A subsequent official report, commissioned by the country's secular authorities, has established that this level of morality was the rule throughout the hierarchy, with the church taking it upon itself to "forgive" the rapists and to lean upon their victims. Very belatedly, a few months ago, the Belgian police finally rose from their notorious torpor and raided some ecclesiastical offices in search of evidence that was being concealed. Joseph Ratzinger, who had not thus far found a voice in which to mention the doings of his Belgian underlings, promptly emitted a squeal of protest — at the intervention of the law.
Robertson's brief begins with a meticulous summary of the systematic fashion in which child-rape was covered up by collusion between local Catholic authorities and the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith in Rome, an office that under the last pope was run by Ratzinger himself. (So flagrant was this obstruction of justice that many senior Catholic apologists have now started to blame the deceased pontiff in an effort to excuse his deputy and successor, all the while continuing to put forward Pope John Paul II as a candidate for sainthood!) The brief continues with a close examination of the Vatican's claim to be a state, and its related claim that statehood confers legal immunity on the pope, even in gross cases of abuse of human rights. Without undue difficulty, Robertson shows both claims to be laughably void and based, furthermore, on a history of disgraceful collaboration with dictatorship and sheltering of wanted criminals.
Cardinal Newman himself was rather dubious about the late-19^th-century proclamation of papal infallibility. He also asked to be buried in the same grave as his lifelong companion, Ambrose St. John. The Catholic authorities have now rudely disinterred the bodies, finding nothing that had survived decay or could serve as a relic. This is grotesque enough, but not as grotesque as the air of persecuted innocence that they wear when confronted with their obscene offenses. Now at last there is a careful guide to legal redress, which can be taken up either by a victim or by a prosecutor and used to bring a man-made outfit, and its chief executive, within the rule of law. The sun and moon don't need to fall and the species doesn't have to die in agony in order to expiate this sin—a little application of simple earthly justice is all that is required. Will it really continue to be withheld?".

Sarkozy and the Roma people (II)

2010-09-04T09:21:00.001+01:00

Come here for an in-depth analysis, by the French daily Libération, of the host of issues surrounding the deportation of the Roma from France.

Sarkozy and the Roma people (I)

2010-09-04T09:14:00.001+01:00

From The New Republic:

What Can France Teach Us About Botched Immigration Policies?
David A. Bell
September 3, 2010 | 12:00 am

On both sides of the Atlantic, it has been an uncomfortable summer for immigrant groups. Here in the United States there have been the quarrels over the "Ground Zero Mosque," “anchor babies,” and Arizona ’s new illegal immigrant bill (not to mention yet more calls for the deportation of our “Muslim” president to his “native” Kenya by the surprisingly large proportion of the Republican Party that seems to have taken up permanent residence on Planet Zorg). Meanwhile, French President Nicolas Sarkozy, faced with removal from office by the voters in 2012, has continued to push legislation outlawing the wearing of the burqa in public and acted to expel several hundred Roma to Romania and Bulgaria. This last move in particular has earned him widespread criticism from the media, and widespread support from the French public.
Sarkozy’s actions and France’s continuing struggles with the immigration issue have gotten relatively little coverage in the United States. They are worth taking a closer look at, however, because they starkly illustrate many of the issues that arise from the world-wide movement of populations—issues that the United States will be confronting more and more over the coming decades.
In its attitudes toward foreigners and “immigrant-origin populations” (i.e. both immigrants and the children and grandchildren of immigrants), the French government is increasingly trying to establish French “values” as a basis for policy. For instance, earlier this summer, Interior Minister Brice Hortefeux ordered the deportation of Egyptian Islamist imam Ali Ibrahim El Soudany, claiming that he “despised the values of our society,” and that his message of religious hatred “had nothing to do with religious liberty.” The ban on the burqa is similarly justified by reference not only to human rights, but more nebulously to values such as the importance of face-to-face contact. In this shift, France has followed the lead of countries like the Netherlands, where would-be citizens must now watch a film that shows two men kissing, and a topless woman on a beach, so as to understand Dutch “values.”
This all raises the obvious problem of how national “values” can possibly be defined. Sixty years ago, by most present-day definitions, a large majority of the French (like a large majority in most countries on earth) held homophobic and bigoted attitudes. So should national values depend on shifting majority opinion? If not, who decides their content? Perhaps Sarkozy’s new “Ministry of Immigration, Integration and National Identity”? Moreover, if the values of “the French” can be so neatly packaged, why can the same not be done with other groups, whose values might be judged fundamentally antithetical to “French” ones? What of “Muslim” values, for instance?
Meanwhile, the expulsion of the Roma illustrates the tensions between the politics of immigration and citizenship on the one hand, and the realities of population movements on the other. Sarkozy, in an Arizonan vein, describes the people expelled as threats to public order who, as foreigners, had no right to stay on French soil. Yet, in practice, like most Western countries, France has many categories of resident foreigners (legal immigrants, temporary workers, asylum-seekers, citizens of other EU countries, etc.) who enjoy a wide variety of rights. The Roma expelled this summer are mostly citizens of EU member states Bulgaria and Romania, and, while France had the right to expel them, under EU law, the Roma had the right to re-enter the country the day after their expulsion.
The point, in both cases, is that nationality is not a single, rigidly bounded thing, defined by a particular set of values or a single legal rule. French officials, of all people, should have no trouble understanding this point. In recent years, they have repeatedly changed French nationality law (introducing complex special provisions, for instance, for children born on French soil to foreign parents). And, during the long history of the French overseas empire, their predecessors created a bewildering variety of categories of what amounted to partial or quasi-citizenship, so as to distinguish certain groups under French rule (e.g. Algerian Muslims) from others, and to limit their rights and movement.
Yet, in politics, the temptation is always to divide the world neatly into two parts: “citizens” and “non-citizens,” “us” and “them.” This is hardly, by itself, a bad thing. Democracy requires a clearly bounded community of citizens. And, arguably, elite civil servants in France, with their concern for the construction of a complex, technocratic European super-state, have only fueled populist anger by giving this point too little importance in past years and equating all opposition (including the 2005 referendum vote against the proposed European Constitution) with xenophobia.
Pushing too hard in the other direction, however, quickly devolves into sheer demagoguery. Modern nations are not hermetically walled, ideologically and ethnically homogenous little city states. The complexities of population movements and cultural diversity have to be respected. And Nicolas Sarkozy would do well to remember that strife over “immigrant-origin populations” does not only, or even principally, arise because of conflicts over “values” or an ambiguous legal status. It arises when these groups are actively made to feel alien and unwelcome. Some American politicians could use a refresher on this point as well.

David A. Bell, a contributing editor to The New Republic, teaches history at Princeton.

Finkelstein on Gaza

2010-09-04T09:02:00.001+01:00

From Counterfire.org:

Norman Finkelstein, This Time We Went Too Far

Written by Alistair Cartwright

Published just over a year after Israel’s 2008 attack on Gaza and drawing on a wealth of evidence Finkelstein's book is first and foremost a stunning indictment of that attack.

Norman Finkelstein, This Time We Went Too Far (OR Books 2010), 208pp

Norman Finkelstein is an academic who has written and spoken widely on the Israel-Palestine conflict. Along with Noam Chomsky he has been one of America’s most outspoken critics of Israel. Published just over a year after Israel’s 2008/9 attack on Gaza this book is first and foremost a stunning indictment of that attack. Finkelstein presents a mass of evidence drawn from reports by human rights organisations, soldiers’ testimonies, statements from Israeli officials, news reports, UN documents and in particular the Goldstone report.

Altogether the effect is an onslaught of undeniable condemnation. In this respect This Time We Went Too Far does two things: it blasts away any remaining shred of apology for Israel, and it condenses, out of the evidence, a powerful lament for a great human tragedy. The titles of the two chapters which contain the bulk of the indictment testify to the first part: Whitewash and Of Human Shields and Hasbara (the Hebrew word for propaganda). A quotation from Gandhi at the end of the book indicates the second: ‘Massacre of innocent people is a serious matter. It is not a thing to be easily forgotten. It is our duty to cherish their memory’.

The balance sheet of operation ‘Cast Lead’ is one of massive, disproportionate destruction:
‘On the basis of extensive field research, nongovernmental organisations put the total number of Palestinians killed at nearly 1400, of whom up to four-fifths were civilians and 350 children. On the other side, total Israeli casualties amounted to ten combatants (four killed by friendly fire) and three civilians… Israel destroyed or damaged 58,000 homes… 280 schools and kindergartens,… 1,500 factories and workshops…’

There was no real resistance; Israeli soldiers’ experiences ranged from boredom and casual sadism to surprise at the extraordinary firepower deployed, uncommon even to members of the IDF: ‘IDF testimonies recalled ‘the hatred and the joy’ , and ‘fun’ and ‘delight’ of killing Palestinians.’ Another soldier said: ‘there was a point where D-9s were razing areas. It was amazing. At first you go in and see lots of houses. A week later, after razing, you see the horizon further away, almost to the sea’.

Individual atrocities were widespread, and Finkelstein is able to document that Palestinian civilians, ‘including women and children, were shot at short range when posing no threat to the lives of the Israeli soldiers’. The destruction was deliberately intended, with the design of the operation coming from the highest levels. Finkelstein quotes an exchange between a BBC reporter observing that Israel ‘imposed 100 times more casualties on Gaza in three weeks than they did on you’ and Interior Minister Sheerit responding: ‘that’s the idea of the operation, what do you think?’. Just after the ceasefire Israeli Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni ‘bragged that “Israel demonstrated real hooliganism during the course of the recent operation, which I demanded”.’

This exhaustive factual account is the core of the book but, as Finkelstein acknowledges, it isn’t enough in itself. Finkelstein wishes the book to be more than a ‘lament’, since he sees the attack on Gaza as a turning point in world public opinion, such that ‘the prospects have never been more propitious for galvanising the public not just to mourn but also to act.’

The rest of the book, sandwiched around his account of the attack itself, is dedicated to explaining the strategic logic behind Cast Lead and the tensions leading up to it. Finkelstein offers a picture of the recent shift in public opinion, the growing movement for Palestinian solidarity, and gives advice on how to continue and extend these developments. Within this agenda there are three main touchstones around which Finkelstein orientates his arguments: 1. international law; 2. liberal Jewish opinion, particularly in the US; and 3. the idea that the scale of destruction unleashed by Cast Lead effectively shocked people into action. While all three are important aspects of the forces at play, raising them up to the point where they become the principal bases of the Palestinian cause, as Finkelstein seems to do, is problematic.

Finkelstein is not uncritical of international law. At one point he goes as far as saying that ‘in a rational world the locution “laws of war” would make as much sense as “etiquette of cannibals”.’ Yet he still places a somewhat disproportionate emphasis on the importance of UN resolutions, international legal bodies like the ICJ and most of all the Goldstone report. He criticises US and Israeli exceptionalism in the face of international law but never quite makes the essential point. The US and Israel go unchecked in their disregard for the rules because international law has a certain degree of US dominance built into it. This itself flows from the dynamics of imperialism. International law is not a neutral field, a simple set of rules, but an institution that has formed within an imperialist system.

US dominance can effectively neutralise international law, and just as easily manipulate it. To take an example from the book, Finkelstein recounts how the US and Israel were able to put pressure on the Palestinian Authority (PA) over its support of the Goldstone Report’s recommendations: ‘Acting on direct instruction from President Mahmoud Abbas, the PA representative on the UN Human Rights Council (UNHRC) effectively acquiesced in killing consideration of the Goldstone Report’. The PA had to reverse its stance later, but this episode underlines the fact that the reasons to cite international law are essentially tactical. International law is a contested space that includes a strong bias towards the US and other imperial powers.

It is certainly worth trying to make use of international law in the right circumstances, but only with a clear understanding of its limitations. The danger is that far from serving to unify people as Finkelstein intends, reliance on the processes of international law could have a profound demobilising effect. The recent UNHRC resolution endorsing the Goldstone Report is a small victory on the way to something bigger, but we should still expect the US to block action on it at the Security Council. And of course just because we support the findings and recommendations of the Goldstone report doesn’t mean we shouldn’t wholeheartedly oppose UN sanctions on Iran or the UN-supported occupation of Iraq.

International law (or universal human values) is not the only reason Finkelstein puts such high store in the Goldstone report. He sees in Goldstone a welcome return to a ‘classical’ Jewish liberalism that ends an era of ‘blanket Jewish support for Israel’. Moreover, ‘because of Goldstone’s credentials, Israel could not credibly play its usual cards – ‘anti-Semite’, ‘self-hating Jew’, ‘Holocaust denier’. . . In effect his persona neutralised the ideological weapons Israel has honed over many years to ward off criticism.’ For Finkelstein the wider shift in Jewish opinion makes the prospects of the Palestinian cause and a ‘just and lasting resolution’ of the whole conflict better now than they ever have been.

The shifts in Jewish opinion with regard to Israel, particularly in America, that Finkelstein documents are revealing and important. But in describing liberal Jewish opinion as the key to any movement for a just peace (presumably a movement for solidarity with the people of Palestine) Finkelstein confuses cause and effect. The turning of the tide within this particular section of international public opinion is symptomatic of a much larger movement. Broadly speaking this is the global antiwar movement. The Palestinian cause now has a higher profile because the issue of Palestine has been swept up in the war on terror. The corresponding shift in public opinion is due largely to the way in which this political connection has been made and reinforced by the movement against the war.

An implication of Finkelstein’s title, ‘this time we went too far’, well reflected in the text, is that what was decisive about Israel’s attack on Gaza was simply the level of destruction. The massive destruction of Cast Lead made it an event from which people couldn’t turn their eyes. However, one only has to look at comparable violent moments in Israel’s history, like the war on Lebanon in 1982, to see that the widespread outrage surrounding Cast Lead involved other factors apart from the level and nature of the violence itself. Significantly in 1982 the largest protests against that war were in Israel itself, with one protest bringing hundreds of thousands of Israelis out onto the streets of Tel Aviv. While international solidarity campaigns like the PSC here in the UK were founded around the events of 1982 they did not yet have the mass appeal they have now.

In effect Finkelstein recognises this when he notes that ‘it is not so much that Israel’s behaviour is worse than it was before, but rather that the record of that behaviour has finally caught up with it’. But why did the record catch up now? The global protests around Gaza in 2008/9 were part of a chain of decisive moments from the Jenin massacre in 2002 to the second war on Lebanon in 2006. Israel’s repression of the second Intifada was swept up in the discourse of the war on terror due to the clear support of the Bush administration. The fate of the Palestinians became visibly tied to US intentions for the whole of the Middle East, including its plans to attack Iraq. Palestine became a cause of common struggle for a large number of those opposing the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. The global antiwar movement has been a rising sea lifting the Palestinian cause.

Viriathus

2010-08-30T02:30:00.004+01:00

Viriathus is considered the first Portuguese national hero.

He was the leader of the Celtiberian tribe of the Lusitani in their struggle against the invading Romans during the second half of the 2nd century BCE.

The prefix luso refers to Lusitania, the Roman province named after the vanquished people of Viriathus and mainly located in present-day Portugal.
The Portuguese are still know as lusitanos. The epic poem Os Lusíadas ("The Lusiads"), by Camões, tells the story of the Portuguese nation.

Below is an excerpt from historian Theodor Mommsen's seminal work Roemische Geschichte, Viertes Buch: Die Revolution (translation by William Purdie Dickson, "The History of Rome, Book IV: The Revolution", available at http://www.gutenberg.org/etext/10704; the original text in German is available at http://www.gutenberg.org/etext/3063).

The dates are in A.U.C. or Ab Urbe condita: "from the foundation of the city" of Rome in 753 BCE.

"Lusitanian War
But more serious events occurred in 600. The Lusitanians, under the leadership of a chief called Punicus, invaded the Roman territory, defeated the two Roman governors who had united to oppose them, and slew agreat number of their troops. The Vettones (between the Tagus and the Upper Douro) were thereby induced tomake common cause with the Lusitanians; and these, thus reinforced, were enabled to extend their excursionsas far as the Mediterranean, and to pillage even the territory of the Bastulo-Phoenicians not far from the Roman capital New Carthage (Cartagena). The Romans at home took the matter seriously enough to resolveon sending a consul to Spain, a step which had not been taken since 559; and, in order to accelerate the despatch of aid, they even made the new consuls enter on office two months and a half before the legal time. For this reason the day for the consuls entering on office was shifted from the 15th of March to the 1st of January; and thus was established the beginning of the year, which we still make use of at the present day. But, before the consul Quintus Fulvius Nobilior with his army arrived, a very serious encounter took place onthe right bank of the Tagus between the praetor Lucius Mummius, governor of Further Spain, and the Lusitanians, now led after the fall of Punicus by his successor Caesarus (601). Fortune was at first favourable to the Romans; the Lusitanian army was broken and their camp was taken. But the Romans, partly already fatigued by their march and partly broken up in the disorder of the pursuit, were at length completely beatenby their already vanquished antagonists, and lost their own camp in addition to that of the enemy, as well as 9000 dead.

Celtiberian War
The flame of war now blazed up far and wide. The Lusitanians on the left bank of the Tagus, led by Caucaenus, threw themselves on the Celtici subject to the Romans (in Alentejo), and took away their town Conistorgis. The Lusitanians sent the standards taken from Mummius to the Celtiberians at once as anannouncement of victory and as a warning; and among these, too, there was no want of ferment. Two small Celtiberian tribes in the neighbourhood of the powerful Arevacae (about the sources of the Douro and Tagus), the Belli and the Titthi, had resolved to settle together in Segeda, one of their towns. While they were occupied in building the walls, the Romans ordered them to desist, because the Sempronian regulations prohibited the subject communities from founding towns at their own discretion; and they at the same time required the contribution of money and men which was due by treaty but for a considerable period had notbeen demanded. The Spaniards refused to obey either command, alleging that they were engaged merely inenlarging, not in founding, a city, and that the contribution had not been merely suspended, but remitted bythe Romans. Thereupon Nobilior appeared in Hither Spain with an army of nearly 30,000 men, including some Numidian horsemen and ten elephants. The walls of the new town of Segeda still stood unfinished: most of the inhabitants submitted. But the most resolute men fled with their wives and children to the powerful Arevacae, and summoned these to make common cause with them against the Romans. The Arevacae, emboldened by the victory of the Lusitanians over Mummius, consented, and chose Carus, one of the Segedan refugees, as their general. On the third day after his election the valiant leader had fallen, but the Roman armywas defeated and nearly 6000 Roman burgesses were slain; the 23rd day of August, the festival of the Volcanalia, was thenceforth held in sad remembrance by the Romans. The fall of their general, however, induced the Arevacae to retreat into their strongest town Numantia (Guarray, a Spanish league to the north of Soria on the Douro), whither Nobilior followed them. Under the walls of the town a second engagement tookplace, in which the Romans at first by means of their elephants drove the Spaniards back into the town; but while doing so they were thrown into confusion in consequence of one of the animals being wounded, and sustained a second defeat at the hands of the enemy again issuing from the walls. This and other misfortunes--such as the destruction of a corps of Roman cavalry despatched to call forth the contingents--imparted to the affairs of the Romans in the Hither province so unfavourable an aspect that the fortress of Ocilis, where the Romans had their chest and their stores, passed over to the enemy, and the Arevacae were in a position tothink, although without success, of dictating peace to the Romans. These disadvantages, however, were insome measure counterbalanced by the successes which Mummius achieved in the southern province. Weakened though his army was by the disaster which it had suffered, he yet succeeded with it in defeating the Lusitanians who had imprudently dispersed themselves on the right bank of the Tagus; and passing over to theleft bank, where the Lusitanians had overrun the whole Roman territory, and had even made a foray into Africa, he cleared the southern province of the enemy.

Marcellus
To the northern province in the following year (602) the senate sent considerable reinforcements and a new commander-in-chief in the place of the incapable Nobilior, the consul Marcus Claudius Marcellus, who had already, when praetor in 586, distinguished himself in Spain, and had since that time given proof of his talentsas a general in two consulships. His skilful leadership, and still more his clemency, speedily changed theposition of affairs: Ocilis at once surrendered to him; and even the Arevacae, confirmed by Marcellus in thehope that peace would be granted to them on payment of a moderate fine, concluded an armistice and sent envoys to Rome. Marcellus could thus proceed to the southern province, where the Vettones and Lusitanians had professed submission to the praetor Marcus Atilius so long as he remained within their bounds, but afterhis departure had immediately revolted afresh and chastised the allies of Rome. The arrival of the consul restored tranquillity, and, while he spent the winter in Corduba, hostilities were suspended throughout the peninsula. Meanwhile the question of peace with the Arevacae was discussed at Rome. It is a significant indication of the relations subsisting among the Spaniards themselves, that the emissaries of the Roman party subsisting among the Arevacae were the chief occasion of the rejection of the proposals of peace at Rome, by representing that, if the Romans were not willing to sacrifice the Spaniards friendly to their interests, they hadno alternative save either to send a consul with a corresponding army every year to the peninsula or to makean emphatic example now. In consequence of this, the ambassadors of the Arevacae were dismissed without a decisive answer, and it was resolved that the war should be prosecuted with vigour. Marcellus accordingly was asserted, from his unwillingness to leave to his successor, who was to be expected soon, the glory of terminating the war, or, as is perhaps more probable, from his believing like Gracchus that a humane treatment of the Spaniards was the first thing requisite for a lasting peace--the Roman general after holding asecret conference with the most influential men of the Arevacae concluded a treaty under the walls of Numantia, by which the Arevacae surrendered to the Romans at discretion, but were reinstated in their formerrights according to treaty on their undertaking to pay money and furnish hostages.

Lucullus
When the new commander-in-chief, the consul Lucius Lucullus, arrived at head-quarters, he found the war which he had come to conduct already terminated by a formally concluded peace, and his hopes of bringing home honour and more especially money from Spain were apparently frustrated. But there was a means of surmounting this difficulty. Lucullus of his own accord attacked the western neighbours of the Arevacae, theVaccaei, a Celtiberian nation still independent which was living on the best understanding with the Romans. The question of the Spaniards as to what fault they had committed was answered by a sudden attack on thetown of Cauca (Coca, eight Spanish leagues to the west of Segovia); and, while the terrified town believed that it had purchased a capitulation by heavy sacrifices of money, Roman troops marched in and enslaved or slaughtered the inhabitants without any pretext at all. After this heroic feat, which is said to have cost the livesof some 20,000 defenceless men, the army proceeded on its march. Far and wide the villages and townships were abandoned or, as in the case of the strong Intercatia and Pallantia (Palencia) the capital of the Vaccaei, closed their gates against the Roman army. Covetousness was caught in its own net; there was no community that would venture to conclude a capitulation with the perfidious commander, and the general flight of the inhabitants not only rendered booty scarce, but made it almost impossible for him to remain for any length oftime in these inhospitable regions. In front of Intercatia, Scipio Aemilianus, an esteemed military tribune, theson of the victor of Pydna and the adopted grandson of the victor of Zama, succeeded, by pledging his word ofhonour when that of the general no longer availed, in inducing the inhabitants to conclude an agreement byvirtue of which the Roman army departed on receiving a supply of cattle and clothing. But the siege of Pallantia had to be raised for want of provisions, and the Roman army in its retreat was pursued by the Vaccaei as far as the Douro. Lucullus thereupon proceeded to the southern province, where in the same yearthe praetor, Servius Sulpicius Galba, had allowed himself to be defeated by the Lusitanians. They spent thewinter not far from each other-- Lucullus in the territory of the Turdetani, Galba at Conistorgis-- And in thefollowing year (604) jointly attacked the Lusitanians. Lucullus gained some advantages over them near the straits of Gades. Galba performed a greater achievement, for he concluded a treaty with three Lusitanian tribes on the right bank of the Tagus and promised to transfer them to better settlements; whereupon the barbarians, who to the number of 7000 came to him for the sake of the expected lands, were separated into three divisions, disarmed, and partly carried off into slavery, partly massacred. War has hardly ever been wagedwith so much perfidy, cruelty, and avarice as by these two generals; who yet by means of their criminally acquired treasures escaped the one from condemnation, and the other even from impeachment. The veteran Cato in his eighty-fifth year, a few months before his death, attempted to bring Galba to account before the burgesses; but the weeping children of the general, and the gold which he had brought home with him, provedto the Roman people his innocence.

Variathus
It was not so much the inglorious successes which Lucullus and Galba had attained in Spain, as the outbreak of the fourth Macedonian and of the third Carthaginian war in 605, which induced the Romans again to leave Spanish affairs in the first instance to the ordinary governors. Accordingly the Lusitanians, exasperated ratherthan humbled by the perfidy of Galba, immediately overran afresh the rich territory of the Turdetani. The Roman governor Gaius Vetilius (607-8?) marched against them, and not only defeated them, but drove thewhole host towards a hill where it seemed lost irretrievably. The capitulation was virtually concluded, when Viriathus--a man of humble origin, who formerly, when a youth, had bravely defended his flock from wild beasts and robbers and was now in more serious conflicts a dreaded guerilla chief, and who was one of the few that had accidentally escaped from the perfidious onslaught of Galba--warned his countrymen against relying on the Roman word of honour, and promised them deliverance if they would follow him. His language and his example produced a deep effect: the army entrusted him with the supreme command. Viriathus gave orders tothe mass of his men to proceed in detached parties, by different routes, to the appointed rendezvous; hehimself formed the best mounted and most trustworthy into a corps of 1000 horse, with which he covered thedeparture of his men. The Romans, who wanted light cavalry, did not venture to disperse for the pursuit underthe eyes of the enemy's horsemen. After Viriathus and his band had for two whole days held in check theentire Roman army he suddenly disappeared during the night and hastened to the general rendezvous. The Roman general followed him, but fell into an adroitly-laid ambush, in which he lost the half of his army andwas himself captured and slain; with difficulty the rest of the troops escaped to the colony of Carteia on theStraits. In all haste 5000 men of the Spanish militia were despatched from the Ebro to reinforce the defeated Romans; but Viriathus destroyed the corps while still on its march, and commanded so absolutely the whole interior of Carpetania that the Romans did not even venture to seek him there. Viriathus, now recognized aslord and king of all the Lusitanians, knew how to combine the full dignity of his princely position with the homely habits of a shepherd. No badge distinguished him from the common soldier: he rose from the richly adorned marriage-table of his father-in-law, the prince Astolpa in Roman Spain, without having touched the golden plate and the sumptuous fare, lifted his bride on horseback, and rode back with her to his mountains. He never took more of the spoil than the share which he allotted to each of his comrades. The soldier recognized the general simply by his tall figure, by his striking sallies of wit, and above all by the fact that hesurpassed every one of his men in temperance as well as in toil, sleeping always in full armour and fighting infront of all in battle. It seemed as if in that thoroughly prosaic age one of the Homeric heroes had reappeared: the name of Viriathus resounded far and wide through Spain; and the brave nation conceived that in him it hadat length found the man who was destined to break the fetters of alien domination.

His Successors
Extraordinary successes in northern and in southern Spain marked the next years of his generalship. After destroying the vanguard of the praetor Gaius Plautius (608-9), Viriathus had the skill to lure him over to theright bank of the Tagus, and there to defeat him so emphatically that the Roman general went into winter quarters in the middle of summer--on which account he was afterwards charged before the people with havingdisgraced the Roman community, and was compelled to live in exile. In like manner the army of the governor-- apparently of the Hither province--Claudius Unimanus was destroyed, that of Gaius Negidius was vanquished, and the level country was pillaged far and wide. Trophies of victory, decorated with the insigniaof the Roman governors and the arms of the legions, were erected on the Spanish mountains; people at Rome heard with shame and consternation of the victories of the barbarian king. The conduct of the Spanish war was now committed to a trustworthy officer, the consul Quintus Fabius Maximus Aemilianus, the second son ofthe victor of Pydna (609). But the Romans no longer ventured to send the experienced veterans, who bad justreturned from Macedonia and Asia, forth anew tothe detested Spanish war; the two legions, which Maximus brought with him, were new levies and scarcely more to be trusted than the old utterly demoralized Spanish army. After the first conflicts had again issued favourably for the Lusitanians, the prudent general kept together his troops for the remainder of the year in the camp at Urso (Osuna, south-east from Seville) without accepting the enemy's offer of battle, and only took the field afresh in the following year (610), after histroops had by petty warfare become qualified for fighting; he was then enabled to maintain the superiority, and after successful feats of arms went into winter quarters at Corduba. But when the cowardly and incapable praetor Quinctius took the command in room of Maximus, the Romans again suffered defeat after defeat, and their general in the middle of summer shut himself up in Corduba, while the bands of Viriathus overran the southern province (611). His successor, Quintus Fabius Maximus Servilianus, the adopted brother of Maximus Aemilianus, sent to the peninsula with two fresh legions and ten elephants, endeavoured to penetrate into the Lusitanian country, but after a series of indecisive conflicts and an assault on the Roman camp, which was with difficulty repulsed, troops after the wont of Spanish insurrectionary armies suddenly melted away, he was obliged to return to Lusitania (612). Next year (613) Servilianus resumed the offensive, traversed the districts on the Baetis and Anas, and then advancing into Lusitania occupied a number of townships. A large number of the insurgents fell into his hands; the leaders--of whom there were about 500--were executed; those who had gone over from Roman territory to the enemy had their hands cut off; the remaining mass were sold into slavery. But on this occasion also the Spanish war proved true to its fickle and capricious character. After all these successes the Roman army was attacked by Viriathus while it was besieging Erisane, defeated, and driven to a rock where itwas wholly in the power of the enemy. Viriathus, however, was content, like the Samnite general formerly at the Caudine passes, to conclude a peace with Servilianus, in which the community of the Lusitanians was recognized as sovereign and Viriathus acknowledged as its king. The power of the Romans had not risen more than the national sense of honour had sunk; in the capital men were glad to be rid of the irksome war, and the senate and people ratified the treaty. But Quintus Servilius Caepio, the full brother of Servilianus and his successor in office, was far from satisfied with this complaisance; and the senate was weak enough at first to authorize the consul to undertake secret machinations against Viriathus, and then to view at least with indulgence the open breach of his pledged word for which there was no palliation. So Caepio invaded Lusitania, and traversed the land as far as the territories of the Vettones and Callaeci; Viriathus declined aconflict with the superior force, and by dexterous movements evaded his antagonist (614). But when in the ensuing year (615) Caepio renewed the attack, and in addition the army, which had in The meantime become available in the northern province, made its appearance under Marcus Popillius in Lusitania, Viriathus sued for peace on any terms. He was required to give up to the Romans all who had passed over to him from the Roman territory, amongst whom was his own father-in-law; he did so, and the Romans ordered them to be executed or to have their hands cut off. But this was not sufficient; the Romans were not in the habit of announcing to the vanquished all at once their destined fate.

His Death
One behest after another was issued to the Lusitanians, each successive demand more intolerable than its predecessors; and at length they were required even to surrender their arms. Then Viriathus recollected thefate of his countrymen whom Galba had caused to be disarmed, and grasped his sword afresh. But it was toolate. His wavering had sown the seeds of treachery among those who were immediately around him; three ofhis confidants, Audas, Ditalco, and Minucius from Urso, despairing of the possibility of renewed victory, procured from the king permission once more to enter into negotiations for peace with Caepio, and employedit for the purpose of selling the life of the Lusitanian hero to the foreigners in return for the assurance of personal amnesty and further rewards. On their return to the camp they assured the king of the favourable issue of their negotiations, and in the following night stabbed him while asleep in his tent. The Lusitanians honoured the illustrious chief by an unparalleled funeral solemnity at which two hundred pairs of champions fought in the funeral games; and still more highly by the fact, that they did not renounce the struggle, but nominated Tautamus as their commander- in-chief in room of the fallen hero. The plan projected by the latter for wresting Saguntum from the Romans was sufficiently bold; but the new general possessed neither the wise moderation nor the military skill of his predecessor. The expedition utterly broke down, and the army on its return was attacked in crossing the Baetis and compelled to surrender unconditionally. Thus was Lusitania subdued, far more by treachery and assassination on the part of foreigners and natives than by honourable war."

Privacy in this day and age

2010-08-29T07:37:00.003+01:00

From the 21 August 2010 edition of The Guardian:

Does technology pose a threat to our private life?
By Jemima Kiss

This week Google's Eric Schmidt suggested we may need to invent new identities to escape embarrassing online pasts – while Facebook launched a tool to share users' locations. So does technology pose a threat to private life?
Facebook Places harnesses the GPS function of the latest smartphones to enable users to track each other down. Photograph: Anthony Devlin/PA

Are you in a relationship? What are your political views? And where did you go for breakfast this morning? What would once have been details of our lives known only by those we know and trust, many of us now willingly display online.
From the surveillance entertainment of Big Brother to CCTV and celebrity magazines, the boundaries of what is regarded as appropriate to put in the public domain are shifting dramatically. But nothing is challenging our notion of privacy more than social networking, with 26 million of us using Facebook to share the minutiae of our lives every month in the UK alone.
Facebook has proved irresistible to many because we are lured into joining by friends and family. Browsing, reading, comparing and nosing is instinctive, impulsive and reflects our tendencies offline, our "social graph", as Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg likes to call it. Having executed the social networking business idea better than its rivals – MySpace, Bebo, Friendster and Hi5 have been left for dust – Facebook has seen astonishing growth, from a Harvard dorm project in 2003 to a global phenomenon that had 500 million monthly users by July this year. That's already one in 13 people on Earth, and Zuckerberg recently predicted it was "almost a guarantee" that his site would reach 1 billion users, with growth in relatively untapped markets such as Russia, Japan and Korea "doubling every six months".
On Thursday, Facebook unveiled its latest gambit in the battle to remain top of the social networking heap with a move into geolocation services, which harness the GPS functionality of increasingly powerful mobile smartphones. Facebook Places will launch first in the US and later in the UK, allowing users, if they choose, to share their location with friends on the site by checking into public venues. Sensitive to intense public scrutiny of its privacy controls, Facebook was careful to make the service opt-in but every geolocation service – including Google's Latitude, Gowalla and Foursquare – has prompted renewed debate about the protection of personal details online.
"This is a seminal moment where we're seeing new thinking and new practice starting to emerge around the issue of privacy," says Stephen Balkam, chief executive of the Family Online Safety Institute and member of Facebook's safety advisory board. "The battle lines are being drawn between generations. Facebook is headed by someone who hasn't hit 30 yet, but has very different perceptions and assumptions about what is private and what is not. We need to recognise that with social networking, geolocation and digital technology, the privacy bar is being reset."
Facebook has come under significant pressure to make its site safer for users. Incidents of serious crimes facilitated by the internet such as the murder of British teenager Ashleigh Hall by Peter Chapman earlier this year, are tragic but rare. More common is the embarrassment from a compromising tagged photo of a drunken night out.
The rapid pace of development by technology companies often throws up new cultural and ethical challenges. Google's Street View has frequently been challenged by privacy campaigners who question whether the logistical and commercial benefits of making every property in every street visible on the web are worth the sacrifice of the individual's right to privacy. Facebook users first raised their pitchforks in 2006 when the site introduced a news feed for each user, summarising their friends' activity. More recently it came under pressure to simplify its privacy controls with some high-profile commentators and groups – organised on Facebook pages, naturally – encouraging others to remove their profiles. It responded in May with simplified privacy settings.
Richard, now Lord, Allan is a former Liberal Democrat MP and Facebook's European policy director. "The internet is here to stay as a ubiquitous way for every individual citizen to capture and share information. The challenge is how you manage that increasing flow of information and that's where Facebook is at the bleeding edge, allowing people to navigate that world. Expressions of concern and criticisms are really of that direction of travel, rather than any particular product, like Facebook."
Allan thinks it is an exaggeration to characterise privacy as a natural state of man, citing societies before mass transport where a large community would know every intimate detail of each other's lives. The modern sense of privacy came much later, with modern transport and cities. "Notably with new technology, you end up with a utopian viewpoint and a dystopian viewpoint, but a lot of things those dystopians feared did not come true. To say you're 'living in Facebook rather than the real world' is a complete misreading of what's happening. The reason it is so compelling is because it is so connected to the real world. With every wave of technology we need to get used to it."
Our personal information can broadly be categorised as trivial data such as music preferences, behavioural information about our activity and connections, and confidential information including credit card numbers. But even seemingly innocuous information can be used against us, says security expert Rik Ferguson of Trend Micro. "In isolation, much of this data may be trivial but from a hacker's perspective, any information is good information," he says. "Use search engines to discover the extent of your online footprint and tailor it. Keep tabs on yourself before anyone else does."
Balkam describes the internet's two biggest privacy problems as reputational damage – inadvertently posting drunken photos that your boss might see, for example – and physical safety, the latter being the issue for women particularly wary of location tools. Burglary is another concern, when users of location services announce they are out of the house; in February three developers built PleaseRobMe.com to raise awareness about the implications of broadcasting location to a public audience.
Currently location games such as Foursquare, where users check in at public venues to earn points and prizes, tend to have a small, enthusiastic and largely trustworthy group of dedicated users comprised of so-called "early adopters". For them, this period of intensive invention and opportunity is a golden age. Christian Payne – who describes himself as a "social technologist" – abandoned a career as a photographer in early 2008 when he had a "car crash epiphany". Within minutes of tweeting a video of his crashed Land Rover, he had an offer of help from a local crane operator, his AA membership number sent to him and a call from BT asking for the serial number of the telegraph pole he'd crashed into. He worries that spirit of helpfulness will dilute as social media becomes more commercialised, and its users more sceptical.
"We'll never see it like we do now – more nefarious people will come later," he says. "But it would be more risky for me not to take the chance of building meaningful connections with acquaintances who then become friends when one of you needs some help."
Payne seems to put a lot of intimate information into the world, but still skillfully manages to keep his personal life, and that of his partner and son, almost completely private. It's up to the user to decide what they want to keep private, he says, though he's uncomfortable with the idea that he is unknowingly creating a public persona for himself. "I'd hope I'm doing this naturally and not thinking about it. But then asking me that is like taking me out of the play I'm acting in as myself – and asking me to direct it."
Online privacy is intrinsically linked to identity. Author Peggy Orenstein wrote in the New York Times recently that her reflexive compulsion to tweet a pleasant moment with her daughter had also spoilt the moment, and mused that our online personas are elaborate constructs that we, knowingly or unknowingly, craft into an identity we want the world to see. The internet has provided a platform that seems to challenge us to present a single identity to the world, yet we struggle to balance the profiles we share with family, friends and work colleagues.
Stories of employers sacking staff for drunken Facebook photos will be replaced by an acceptance that drunken university pictures are the norm, says Dr Joss Wright, Fresnel research fellow at the Oxford Internet Institute. He hopes sites will develop more intuitive ways to share information with the appropriate people; when his grandmother joined Facebook it "severely curtailed" what he could share with his friends.
"I'd like to believe people will learn how to guard their privacy, but we're more likely to see societal shifts in what is seen as acceptable for privacy," Wright adds. "Privacy has tended to be something quite intrinsic, and there hasn't been a mechanism for privacy violation in general society until the arrival of the internet. The rise of Facebook and Foursquare show we don't really understand privacy or what it means to preserve it, and don't have an ability to understand the consequences of violating it either."
Regulators struggle to keep up with the pace of technology and enforcement of what rules there are is weak, meaning the onus for education should be on the services themselves, says Wright, who doesn't think they are closely scrutinised enough. Though sites like Facebook have a duty of care, "the economics are against that, because their entire business model is built around getting us to share as much information as possible".
But there are upsides, too. Sharing personal information is beneficial in giving insights into different aspects of society. "If you can see the details of people's lives, when you can see someone's actual persona, it's harder to be biased and bigoted," said Wright. "But a balance has to be struck between the amount we share for the positive and negative."
Eric Schmidt, Google chief executive, recently reiterated his suggestion that internet users may one day be able to change their identities in order to distance themselves from personal information shared so freely in their formative years. "I don't believe society understands what happens when everything is available, knowable and recorded by everyone all the time," he told the Wall Street Journal.
Zuckerberg takes a different tack. "You have one identity. The days of you having a different image for your work friends or co-workers and for the other people you know are probably coming to an end pretty quickly … Having two identities for yourself is an example of a lack of integrity," he was quoted as saying in David Kirkpatrick's book, The Facebook Effect.
Part of Facebook's success has been to demand people's real identities. In that way, it represents the maturation of the internet where the previous norm had been a wisecrack pseudonym and a world of "trolling", where faceless, nameless commenters could easily post abusive messages and attack each other. The improvement in the quality of communication and debate online is in no small part down to the trend towards using real identities. However, anonymity still has its role in whistleblowing sites such as Wikileaks, or in debates where a contributor to a discussion on rape, for example, deserves protection.
If you think the current internet landscape is frightening, don't think too much about what's coming next. Already served with targeted ads based on keywords in our Google email, or picked out by our age and interests on Facebook, the future is more personalised still. "Sites will get much better at filtering information and predicting our behaviour, serving us what we want to buy and finding new ways to share information, like location. Three years ago, people wouldn't even have dreamed of sharing their location," says Wright. While the sensitivities and sensibilities of managing our online data still need to be clarified, there will be benefits in personalisation, which promises more meaningful, relevant advertising for consumers and consequently, for advertisers, far more effective bang for their buck.
So what next? Three years ago, rival social networking site MySpace seemed invincible. Could Facebook still lose its edge? Anything is possible.
Balkam recently suggested Facebook recruit a philosopher to help interpret some of the demanding and unprecedented ethical and sociological challenges it faces.
"No company in the world has ever attracted 500 million users, and they are having to come to terms, at lightning speed, with what is good and what is abhorrent behaviour. Aristotle and Plato struggled with that – and the average age at Facebook is 28."
Where the Twitterati draw the line
Zoe Margolis, blogger
While I'm very active on social networking sites such as Twitter and Facebook, I have so far avoided all the location-based tools on my phone. Primarily, this is because I do not want to publicly announce where I am - I wish to protect my privacy and safety - but also because I don't want to bombard people with incessant, dull, information; I've unfollowed people on Twitter and Facebook due to their too-frequent (and, might I say, very annoying) Foursquare updates being fed through to their timelines.I can see the point of location tools – they're an easy way to connect people who might otherwise be unaware of their proximity to their friends – but given the amount of information we already share using social networking sites, it almost seems like overload to add yet another method of input, and it's pretty much redundant if not all of your friends/social circle are using the same tool.
I have some major concerns with Facebook Places though and believe it is a huge threat to people's privacy. It is already live in users' settings(though the feature has not yet been rolled out in the UK) and while there is the option of limiting the location info to friends only, they have to de-select the automatically enabled "Include me in 'People Here Now' after I check in" box in order to opt out of their location being included on a public list for all to see.
In addition to this, people's friends can "check' " them into locations, so even if someone has limited the information about themselves that they are sharing, there might still be a breach of their privacy from others.
Most of my friends on Facebook have never heard of Foursquare or Gowalla, let alone used a location-based tool on their mobile phones; I assume the majority of people who use Facebook are similar. Given this, it concerns me that Facebook Places appears to be lacking transparency about privacy. The ability to change the settings to ensure personal information is protected seems more geared to the tech-savvy, than the lay-person; I fear many people will discover their privacy has been breached only after the event.
Privacy on any social networking site or location-sharing tool should start off being intact: 100% protection, with the chance to opt-in to less privacy, should you wish to share information with others. Facebook seems to take the opposite view, making the default position little/no privacy with the need to opt-out; I won't be using Facebook Places any time soon.

David Nobbs
I don't believe total privacy is possible so I never telling anybody anything on line that I wouldn't be happy for the nation to know (if it was interested!).
I think some people are so hungry for celebrity they're happy not to have a private life at all. I'm very careful with my tweets. People can never be quite sure whether they're true or false, and I never reveal when I'm going to be away.
Sorry this is so short but I'm off to Portugal now for five months. Only joking.

Max Tundra, musician
I probably spend too much time online, sharing details about my life with anyone who has the remotest interest in my music. I don't like the idea of letting people know exactly where I am right this second, but as my fans tend to be fairly sane and unstalkerish, I feel comfortable letting them know what I'm up to in a general sense.
I don't use Foursquare or any applications which might reveal my geographical co-ordinates, although I am often easily locatable, as I play advertised concerts. I did, however, recently delete my personal Facebook profile, as that seemed to be a cluster of unnecessarily pertinent information about my life and the people I share it with, as well as being a colossal waste of time which could be better spent telling people on Twitter that I prefer the Henry vacuum cleaner to the Dyson.

Graham Linehan, comedy writer:
I always hated Facebook because it made me very uncertain about what I was and wasn't sharing with the world. The privacy settings were, famously, a bit of a maze, and seemed subject to sudden changes that you hadn't agreed to. I felt like one day I might open up the site to see a picture of myself in bed asleep with my wife, like in Hidden'.
Twitter is different because it forces you to be very selective with what you choose to share, and so forces social media back to a more private place. I personally don't tweet much stuff about my home life, because I don't want to accidentally tweet something stupid like "Holiday starts tomorrow!" along with a geotag to my home address. So my tweets are generally links to things I find funny or interesting, and my home life only gets a look-in when something truly interesting or funny happens.
Once I made a mistake and posted my home number while trying to send a direct (private) message to someone and we had to change it, but that was a valuable lesson to learn early on, because now I'm a lot more careful with what I put out there. It wasn't too much of a problem, though. We only got two or three callers who hung up as soon as my wife said "Hello, Dreambeds". I asked her who Dreambeds were and she said "Dunno. I suppose they sell beds."
I think people should start to claw back as much privacy as they can. Services such as Twitter show that it's possible to share selectively. Sharing selectively should be the default setting on every social network service. Which, again, is why you won't see me on Facebook any time soon.

John Prescott, politician
Twitter has been a revelation. In the past if I needed to get message out I'd have to convince a paper to publish it. Now I can tweet my thoughts and, if interesting, it'll get pick up. My Milburn tweet was running on rolling news within 10 minutes.
I share a lot of content like my blogs and vlogs along with links to stories and virals from others I like. Twitter is also great to run campaigns and organise tweetups.
We did the first pastiche of the Cameron airbrushed posters, which then inspired MyDavidCameron.com. Suddenly hundreds of thousands of people were doing their own versions. It destroyed Ashcroft's poster campaign and cost nothing.
And when the founder of the National Bullying Helpline said people were bullied in No10, someone tweeted me a link to the industrial tribunal which proved she was accused of bullying herself! It killed the story within 24 hours.
I've found Twitter to be a fantastic way to communicate, learn from others and show the real me, not the distorted view peddled by the media.
But I'm not convinced about geolocation applications. You have to have some privacy.

Suzanne Moore, journalist
Don't mistake personal information for honesty. Personas are created and people play as well as tweet their hearts out. If you don't want to bare your soul you don't have to, but the dividing line between public and private is now generational, one that neither mainstream culture nor government appears to understand.
I don't much care what people think of me and was wondering who some guy on MasterChef was the other day on Twitter and wondering if I had slept with him. Turns out I hadn't which was a relief. And a joke!

No saint at all

2010-08-29T06:54:00.001+01:00

Hitchens on Teresa again, writing in Slate:

Mommie Dearest

The pope beatifies Mother Teresa, a fanatic, a fundamentalist, and a fraud.

By Christopher Hitchens

I think it was Macaulay who said that the Roman Catholic Church deserved great credit for, and owed its longevity to, its ability to handle and contain fanaticism. This rather oblique compliment belongs to a more serious age. What is so striking about the "beatification" of the woman who styled herself "Mother" Teresa is the abject surrender, on the part of the church, to the forces of showbiz, superstition, and populism.

It's the sheer tawdriness that strikes the eye first of all. It used to be that a person could not even be nominated for "beatification," the first step to "sainthood," until five years after his or her death. This was to guard against local or popular enthusiasm in the promotion of dubious characters. The pope nominated MT a year after her death in 1997. It also used to be that an apparatus of inquiry was set in train, including the scrutiny of an advocatus diaboli or "devil's advocate," to test any extraordinary claims. The pope has abolished this office and has created more instant saints than all his predecessors combined as far back as the 16^th century.

As for the "miracle" that had to be attested, what can one say? Surely any respectable Catholic cringes with shame at the obviousness of the fakery. A Bengali woman named Monica Besra claims that a beam of light emerged from a picture of MT, which she happened to have in her home, and relieved her of a cancerous tumor. Her physician, Dr. Ranjan Mustafi, says that she didn't have a cancerous tumor in the first place and that the tubercular cyst she did have was cured by a course of prescription medicine. Was he interviewed by the Vatican's investigators? No. (As it happens, I myself was interviewed by them but only in the most perfunctory way. The procedure still does demand a show of consultation with doubters, and a show of consultation was what, in this case, it got.)

According to an uncontradicted report in the Italian paper L'Eco di Bergamo, the Vatican's secretary of state sent a letter to senior cardinals in June, asking on behalf of the pope whether they favored making MT a saint right away. The pope's clear intention has been to speed the process up in order to perform the ceremony in his own lifetime. The response was in the negative, according to Father Brian Kolodiejchuk, the Canadian priest who has acted as postulator or advocate for the "canonization." But the damage, to such integrity as the process possesses, has already been done.

During the deliberations over the Second Vatican Council, under the stewardship of Pope John XXIII, MT was to the fore in opposing all suggestions of reform. What was needed, she maintained, was more work and more faith, not doctrinal revision. Her position was ultra-reactionary and fundamentalist even in orthodox Catholic terms. Believers are indeed enjoined to abhor and eschew abortion, but they are not required to affirm that abortion is "the greatest destroyer of peace," as MT fantastically asserted to a dumbfounded audience when receiving the Nobel Peace Prize*. Believers are likewise enjoined to abhor and eschew divorce, but they are not required to insist that a ban on divorce and remarriage be a part of the state constitution, as MT demanded in a referendum in Ireland (which her side narrowly lost) in 1996. Later in that same year, she told Ladies Home Journal that she was pleased by the divorce of her friend Princess Diana, because the marriage had so obviously been an unhappy one …

This returns us to the medieval corruption of the church, which sold indulgences to the rich while preaching hellfire and continence to the poor. MT was not a friend of the poor. She was a friend of poverty. She said that suffering was a gift from God. She spent her life opposing the only known cure for poverty, which is the empowerment of women and the emancipation of them from a livestock version of compulsory reproduction. And she was a friend to the worst of the rich, taking misappropriated money from the atrocious Duvalier family in Haiti (whose rule she praised in return) and from Charles Keating of the Lincoln Savings and Loan. Where did that money, and all the other donations, go? The primitive hospice in Calcutta was as run down when she died as it always had been—she preferred California clinics when she got sick herself—and her order always refused to publish any audit. But we have her own claim that she opened 500 convents in more than a hundred countries, all bearing the name of her own order. Excuse me, but this is modesty and humility?

The rich world has a poor conscience, and many people liked to alleviate their own unease by sending money to a woman who seemed like an activist for "the poorest of the poor." People do not like to admit that they have been gulled or conned, so a vested interest in the myth was permitted to arise, and a lazy media never bothered to ask any follow-up questions. Many volunteers who went to Calcutta came back abruptly disillusioned by the stern ideology and poverty-loving practice of the "Missionaries of Charity," but they had no audience for their story. George Orwell's admonition in his essay on Gandhi—that saints should always be presumed guilty until proved innocent—was drowned in a Niagara of soft-hearted, soft-headed, and uninquiring propaganda.

One of the curses of India, as of other poor countries, is the quack medicine man, who fleeces the sufferer by promises of miraculous healing. Sunday was a great day for these parasites, who saw their crummy methods endorsed by his holiness and given a more or less free ride in the international press. Forgotten were the elementary rules of logic, that extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence and that what can be asserted without evidence can also be dismissed without evidence. More than that, we witnessed the elevation and consecration of extreme dogmatism, blinkered faith, and the cult of a mediocre human personality. Many more people are poor and sick because of the life of MT: Even more will be poor and sick if her example is followed. She was a fanatic, a fundamentalist, and a fraud, and a church that officially protects those who violate the innocent has given us another clear sign of where it truly stands on moral and ethical questions.

Correction, Oct. 21, 2003: This piece originally claimed that in her Nobel Peace Prize lecture, Mother Teresa called abortion and contraception the greatest threats to world peace. In that speech Mother Teresa did call abortion "the greatest destroyer of peace." But she did not much discuss contraception, except to praise "natural" family planning.(Return to corrected sentence.)

Hell's angel

2010-08-29T06:03:00.000+01:00

The truth about Mother Teresa and the hypocrisy surrounding her 'saintliness'.
A great documentary by the unbeatable Christopher Hitchens:

Catilinaria

2010-08-29T02:15:00.005+01:00

Listen to readings of the beginning of Cicero's First Catilinarian oration here (an audio plug-in may be required) or here. Below is the original text with English translation:

"Quo usque tandem abutere, Catilina, patientia nostra? quam diu etiam furor iste tuus nos eludet? quem ad finem sese effrenata iactabit audacia? Nihilne te nocturnum praesidium Palati, nihil urbis vigiliae, nihil timor populi, nihil concursus bonorum omnium, nihil hic munitissimus habendi senatus locus, nihil horum ora voltusque moverunt? Patere tua consilia non sentis, constrictam iam horum omnium scientia teneri coniurationem tuam non vides? Quid proxima, quid superiore nocte egeris, ubi fueris, quos convocaveris, quid consilii ceperis, quem nostrum ignorare arbitraris?

O tempora, o mores! Senatus haec intellegit. Consul videt; hic tamen vivit. Vivit? immo vero etiam in senatum venit, fit publici consilii particeps, notat et designat oculis ad caedem unum quemque nostrum. Nos autem fortes viri satis facere rei publicae videmur, si istius furorem ac tela vitemus. Ad mortem te, Catilina, duci iussu consulis iam pridem oportebat, in te conferri pestem, quam tu in nos [omnes iam diu] machinaris."

When, O Catiline, do you mean to cease abusing our patience? How long is that madness of yours still to mock us? When is there to be an end of that unbridled audacity of yours, swaggering about as it does now? Do not the night guards placed on the Palatine Hill -- do not the watches posted throughout the city—does not the alarm of the people, and the union of all good men -- does not the precaution taken of assembling the senate in this most defensible place -- do not the looks and countenances of this venerable body here present, have any effect upon you? Do you not feel that your plans are detected? Do you not see that your conspiracy is already arrested and rendered powerless by the knowledge which every one here possesses of it? What is there that you did last night, what the night before -- where is it that you were -- who was there that you summoned to meet you -- what design was there which was adopted by you, with which you think that any one of us is unacquainted?

Shame on the age and on its principles! The senate is aware of these things; the consul sees them; and yet this man lives. Lives! aye, he comes even into the senate. He takes a part in the public deliberations; he is watching and marking down and checking off for slaughter every individual among us. And we, gallant men that we are, think that we are doing our duty to the republic if we keep out of the way of his frenzied attacks.

Latin is beautiful. Such a succinct, melodious and powerful language.
If only the members of the Reichstag had remembered these words in 1933 before granting full powers to corporal Hitler...

There are real minorities and 'minorities'...

2010-08-27T05:33:00.002+01:00

Unbelievable inaccuracies in a report by an otherwise credible and well respected NGO, wherein the Azoreans and the Madeirans (i.e. the inhabitants of the Atlantic archipelagos of Portugal) are classified as 'minority groups'.

See the full text and my comment here.

St. Bartholomew's Massacre

2010-08-24T15:16:00.002+01:00

Today, 438 years ago, the Huguenots (French Protestants) were massacred on the Feast of Bartholomew the Apostle, by order of Catherine de Médicis.

Giacomo Meyerbeer's opera Les Huguenots is loosely based on that event.

Below is an aria sung by the unforgettable Joan Sutherland, in the role of Marguerite de Valois (the wife of Henri of Navarre, the future King Henri IV of France):

Malacca

2010-08-24T14:52:00.002+01:00

On this date, exactly 499 years ago, the great Afonso de Albuquerque, Viceroy of Portuguese India, conquered Malacca and destroyed the power of that Sultanate.

In modern Melaka and in the Straits region there still is a small Eurasian community stemming from the Portuguese presence, which lasted for just over a hundred years. They are known as the Kristang (Malay for 'Christian', from the Portuguese 'cristão') people.

Today, 1600 years ago

2010-08-24T12:55:00.001+01:00

Barbarians at the gates.
A date to remember:
BBC News - 24 August 410: the date it all went wrong for Rome?

On the Catholic Church and Ireland

2010-08-22T15:36:00.000+01:00

No comments are necessary:

The Pope in the UK

2010-08-22T15:24:00.000+01:00

"I'm an atheist but this anti-Catholic rhetoric is making me nervous": a sober view by a (too) 'moderate' atheist.

The writer's arguments are lucid, but his conclusion is wrong.

He contends that "It is the structure of the church that should be challenged, not the beliefs of Catholics.". I dare say that both should be challenged.

Read and weep

2010-08-18T16:06:00.000+01:00

Mindset List for the Class of 2014.

"Beloit, Wis. – Born when Ross Perot was warning about a giant sucking sound and Bill Clinton was apologizing for pain in his marriage, members of this fall’s entering college class of 2014 have emerged as a post-email generation for whom the digital world is routine and technology is just too slow.

Each August since 1998, Beloit College has released the Beloit College Mindset List. It provides a look at the cultural touchstones that shape the lives of students entering college this fall. The creation of Beloit’s Keefer Professor of the Humanities Tom McBride and former Public Affairs Director Ron Nief, it was originally created as a reminder to faculty to be aware of dated references, and quickly became a catalog of the rapidly changing worldview of each new generation. The Mindset List website at www.beloit.edu/mindset, the Mediasite webcast and its Facebook page receive more than 400,000 hits annually.

The class of 2014 has never found Korean-made cars unusual on the Interstate and five hundred cable channels, of which they will watch a handful, have always been the norm. Since "digital" has always been in the cultural DNA, they've never written in cursive and with cell phones to tell them the time, there is no need for a wrist watch. Dirty Harry (who’s that?) is to them a great Hollywood director. The America they have inherited is one of soaring American trade and budget deficits; Russia has presumably never aimed nukes at the United States and China has always posed an economic threat.

Nonetheless, they plan to enjoy college. The males among them are likely to be a minority. They will be armed with iPhones and BlackBerries, on which making a phone call will be only one of many, many functions they will perform. They will now be awash with a computerized technology that will not distinguish information and knowledge. So it will be up to their professors to help them. A generation accustomed to instant access will need to acquire the patience of scholarship. They will discover how to research information in books and journals and not just on-line. Their professors, who might be tempted to think that they are hip enough and therefore ready and relevant to teach the new generation, might remember that Kurt Cobain is now on the classic oldies station. The college class of 2014 reminds us, once again, that a generation comes and goes in the blink of our eyes, which are, like the rest of us, getting older and older.

The Beloit College Mindset List for the Class of 2014

Most students entering college for the first time this fall—the Class of 2014—were born in 1992.

For these students, Benny Hill, Sam Kinison, Sam Walton, Bert Parks and Tony Perkins have always been dead.

1. Few in the class know how to write in cursive.

2. Email is just too slow, and they seldom if ever use snail mail.

3. “Go West, Young College Grad” has always implied “and don’t stop until you get to Asia…and learn Chinese along the way.”

4. Al Gore has always been animated.

5. Los Angelenos have always been trying to get along.

6. Buffy has always been meeting her obligations to hunt down Lothos and the other blood-suckers at Hemery High.

7. “Caramel macchiato” and “venti half-caf vanilla latte” have always been street corner lingo.

8. With increasing numbers of ramps, Braille signs, and handicapped parking spaces, the world has always been trying harder to accommodate people with disabilities.

9. Had it remained operational, the villainous computer HAL could be their college classmate this fall, but they have a better chance of running into Miley Cyrus’s folks on Parents’ Weekend.

10. A quarter of the class has at least one immigrant parent, and the immigration debate is not a big priority…unless it involves “real” aliens from another planet.

11. John McEnroe has never played professional tennis.

12. Clint Eastwood is better known as a sensitive director than as Dirty Harry.

13. Parents and teachers feared that Beavis and Butt-head might be the voice of a lost generation.

14. Doctor Kevorkian has never been licensed to practice medicine.

15. Colorful lapel ribbons have always been worn to indicate support for a cause.

16. Korean cars have always been a staple on American highways.

17. Trading Chocolate the Moose for Patti the Platypus helped build their Beanie Baby collection.

18. Fergie is a pop singer, not a princess.

19. They never twisted the coiled handset wire aimlessly around their wrists while chatting on the phone.

20. DNA fingerprinting and maps of the human genome have always existed.

21. Woody Allen, whose heart has wanted what it wanted, has always been with Soon-Yi Previn.

22. Cross-burning has always been deemed protected speech.

23. Leasing has always allowed the folks to upgrade their tastes in cars.

24. “Cop Killer” by rapper Ice-T has never been available on a recording.

25. Leno and Letterman have always been trading insults on opposing networks.

26. Unless they found one in their grandparents’ closet, they have never seen a carousel of Kodachrome slides.

27. Computers have never lacked a CD-ROM disk drive.

28. They’ve never recognized that pointing to their wrists was a request for the time of day.

29. Reggie Jackson has always been enshrined in Cooperstown.

30. “Viewer Discretion” has always been an available warning on TV shows.

31. The first computer they probably touched was an Apple II; it is now in a museum.

32. Czechoslovakia has never existed.

33. Second-hand smoke has always been an official carcinogen.

34. “Assisted Living” has always been replacing nursing homes, while Hospice has always been an alternative to hospitals.

35. Once they got through security, going to the airport has always resembled going to the mall.

36. Adhesive strips have always been available in varying skin tones.

37. Whatever their parents may have thought about the year they were born, Queen Elizabeth declared it an “Annus Horribilis.”

38. Bud Selig has always been the Commissioner of Major League Baseball.

39. Pizza jockeys from Domino’s have never killed themselves to get your pizza there in under 30 minutes.

40. There have always been HIV positive athletes in the Olympics.

41. American companies have always done business in Vietnam.

42. Potato has always ended in an “e” in New Jersey per vice presidential edict.

43. Russians and Americans have always been living together in space.

44. The dominance of television news by the three networks passed while they were still in their cribs.

45. They have always had a chance to do community service with local and federal programs to earn money for college.

46. Nirvana is on the classic oldies station.

47. Children have always been trying to divorce their parents.

48. Someone has always gotten married in space.

49. While they were babbling in strollers, there was already a female Poet Laureate of the United States.

50. Toothpaste tubes have always stood up on their caps.

51. Food has always been irradiated.

52. There have always been women priests in the Anglican Church.

53. J.R. Ewing has always been dead and gone. Hasn’t he?

54. The historic bridge at Mostar in Bosnia has always been a copy.

55. Rock bands have always played at presidential inaugural parties.

56. They may have assumed that parents’ complaints about Black Monday had to do with punk rockers from L.A., not Wall Street.

57. A purple dinosaur has always supplanted Barney Google and Barney Fife.

58. Beethoven has always been a dog.

59. By the time their folks might have noticed Coca Cola’s new Tab Clear, it was gone.

60. Walmart has never sold handguns over the counter in the lower 48.

61. Presidential appointees have always been required to be more precise about paying their nannies’ withholding tax, or else.

62. Having hundreds of cable channels but nothing to watch has always been routine.

63. Their parents’ favorite TV sitcoms have always been showing up as movies.

64. The U.S, Canada, and Mexico have always agreed to trade freely.

65. They first met Michelangelo when he was just a computer virus.

66. Galileo is forgiven and welcome back into the Roman Catholic Church.

67. Ruth Bader Ginsburg has always sat on the Supreme Court.

68. They have never worried about a Russian missile strike on the U.S.

69. The Post Office has always been going broke.

70. The artist formerly known as Snoop Doggy Dogg has always been rapping.

71. The nation has never approved of the job Congress is doing.

72. One way or another, “It’s the economy, stupid” and always has been.

73. Silicone-gel breast implants have always been regulated.

74. They’ve always been able to blast off with the Sci-Fi Channel.

75. Honda has always been a major competitor on Memorial Day at Indianapolis."

Assange on TED

2010-08-17T16:38:00.006+01:00

View this important interview given by WikiLeaks' Julian Assange:

A blog to read

2010-08-17T12:49:00.002+01:00

For those who read Chinese, I highly recommend following Susana Chou's blog.

Ms. Chou is the former President of the Macau Legislative Assembly. She writes very well and her criticisms are scathing (and always spot on). Come to: 曹其真記事簿.

More from The Wire

2010-08-17T12:42:00.002+01:00

Same language advisory:

The best from The Wire

2010-08-17T12:35:00.002+01:00

The language is very dirty, but some of the quotes convey deep truths; the rest are just great entertainment. From the best television series ever made:

Hitchens and courage

2010-08-12T13:43:00.000+01:00

Christopher Hitchens at his best.

Žižek interview

2010-08-08T17:16:00.004+01:00

I can't get enough of Žižek! He has become one of a handful of (living) philosophers to follow extensively and in depth, alongside Giorgio Agamben, Jürgen Habermas and -- in a more specific domain -- Joseph Raz.

Žižek's style and approach have even earned him the quasi-sobriquet "Elvis of cultural theory" (thanks to the simplistic New York Times). As a public intellectual and iconoclast, he may one day be as important -- though probably not as militant and admired -- as Noam Chomsky.

Here is an interview given on 15 October 2009 to Democracy Now!, where he addresses a range of current topics:

Žižek on atheism

2010-08-08T16:48:00.002+01:00

An Op-Ed piece by Žižek published in the 13 March 2006 edition of The New York Times, on an issue far from unheard of in this blog:

Atheism is a legacy worth fighting for

LONDON — For centuries, we have been told that without religion we are no more than egotistic animals fighting for our share, our only morality that of a pack of wolves; only religion, it is said, can elevate us to a higher spiritual level. Today, when religion is emerging as the wellspring of murderous violence around the world, assurances that Christian or Muslim or Hindu fundamentalists are only abusing and perverting the noble spiritual messages of their creeds ring increasingly hollow. What about restoring the dignity of atheism, one of Europe's greatest legacies and perhaps our only chance for peace?
More than a century ago, in "The Brothers Karamazov" and other works, Dostoyevsky warned against the dangers of godless moral nihilism, arguing in essence that if God doesn't exist, then everything is permitted. The French philosopher André Glucksmann even applied Dostoyevsky's critique of godless nihilism to 9/11, as the title of his book, "Dostoyevsky in Manhattan," suggests.
This argument couldn't have been more wrong: The lesson of today's terrorism is that if God exists, then everything, including blowing up thousands of innocent bystanders, is permitted - at least to those who claim to act directly on behalf of God, since, clearly, a direct link to God justifies the violation of any merely human constraints and considerations. In short, fundamentalists have become no different than the "godless" Stalinist Communists, to whom everything was permitted, since they perceived themselves as direct instruments of their divinity, the Historical Necessity of Progress Toward Communism.
Fundamentalists do what they perceive as good deeds in order to fulfill God's will and to earn salvation; atheists do them simply because it is the right thing to do. Is this also not our most elementary experience of morality? When I do a good deed, I do so not with an eye toward gaining God's favor; I do it because if I did not, I could not look at myself in the mirror. A moral deed is by definition its own reward. David Hume made this point poignantly when he wrote that the only way to show true respect for God is to act morally while ignoring God's existence.
Two years ago, Europeans were debating whether the preamble of the European Constitution should mention Christianity. As usual, a compromise was worked out, a reference in general terms to the "religious inheritance" of Europe. But where was modern Europe's most precious legacy, that of atheism? What makes modern Europe unique is that it is the first and only civilization in which atheism is a fully legitimate option, not an obstacle to any public post.
Atheism is a European legacy worth fighting for, not least because it creates a safe public space for believers. Consider the debate that raged in Ljubljana, the capital of Slovenia, my home country, as the constitutional controversy simmered: should Muslims (mostly immigrant workers from the old Yugoslav republics) be allowed to build a mosque? While conservatives opposed the mosque for cultural, political and even architectural reasons, the liberal weekly journal Mladina was consistently outspoken in its support for the mosque, in keeping with its concern for the rights of those from other former Yugoslav republics.
Not surprisingly, given its liberal attitudes, Mladina was also one of the few Slovenian publications to reprint the caricatures of Muhammad. And, conversely, those who displayed the greatest "understanding" for the violent Muslim protests those cartoons caused were also the ones who regularly expressed their concern for the fate of Christianity in Europe.
These weird alliances confront Europe's Muslims with a difficult choice: The only political force that does not reduce them to second-class citizens and allows them the space to express their religious identity are the "godless" atheist liberals, while those closest to their religious social practice, their Christian mirror-image, are their greatest political enemies.
The paradox is that Muslims' only real allies are not those who first published the caricatures for shock value, but those who, in support of the ideal of freedom of expression, reprinted them.
While a true atheist has no need to bolster his own stance by provoking believers with blasphemy, he also refuses to reduce the problem of the Muhammad caricatures to one of respect for other's beliefs. Respect for other's beliefs as the highest value can mean only one of two things: Either we treat the other in a patronizing way and avoid hurting him in order not to ruin his illusions, or we adopt the relativist stance of multiple "regimes of truth," disqualifying as violent imposition any clear insistence on truth.
What about submitting Islam - together with all other religions - to a respectful, but for that reason no less ruthless, critical analysis? This, and only this, is the way to show a true respect for Muslims: to treat them as adults responsible for their beliefs.
Slavoj Zizek, the international director of the Birkbeck Institute for the Humanities, is the author, most recently, of "The Parallax View."

La Terreur/The Terror

2010-08-08T13:14:00.007+01:00

From the Marxists.org's Robespierre Archive:

"Robespierre February 1794
On the Principles of Political Morality
Source: Modern History SourceBook, Paul Halsall August 1997;
First Published : M. Robespierre, Report upon the Principles of Political Morality Which Are to Form the Basis of the Administration of the Interior Concerns of the Republic (Philadelphia, 1794).
Citizens, Representatives of the People:
Some time since we laid before you the principles of our exterior political system, we now come to develop the principles of political morality which are to govern the interior. After having long pursued the path which chance pointed out, carried away in a manner by the efforts of contending factions, the Representatives of the People at length acquired a character and produced a form of government. A sudden change in the success of the nation announced to Europe the regeneration which was operated in the national representation. But to this point of time, even now that I address you, it must be allowed that we have been impelled thro' the tempest of a revolution, rather by a love of right and a feeling of the wants of our country, than by an exact theory, and precise rules of conduct, which we had not even leisure to sketch.
It is time to designate clearly the purposes of the revolution and the point which we wish to attain: It is time we should examine ourselves the obstacles which yet are between us and our wishes, and the means most proper to realize them: A consideration simple and important which appears not yet to have been contemplated. Indeed, how could a base and corrupt government have dared to view themselves in the mirror of political rectitude? A king, a proud senate, a Caesar, a Cromwell; of these the first care was to cover their dark designs under the cloak of religion, to covenant with every vice, caress every party, destroy men of probity, oppress and deceive the people in order to attain the end of their perfidious ambition. If we had not had a task of the first magnitude to accomplish; if all our concern had been to raise a party or create a new aristocracy, we might have believed, as certain writers more ignorant than wicked asserted, that the plan of the French revolution was to be found written in the works of Tacitus and of Machiavel; we might have sought the duties of the representatives of the people in the history of Augustus, of Tiberius, or of Vespasian, or even in that of certain French legislators; for tyrants are substantially alike and only differ by trifling shades of perfidy and cruelty.
For our part we now come to make the whole world partake in your political secrets, in order that all friends of their country may rally at the voice of reason and public interest, and that the French nation and her representatives be respected in all countries which may attain a knowledge of their true principles; and that intriguers who always seek to supplant other intriguers may be judged by public opinion upon settled and plain principles.
Every precaution must early be used to place the interests of freedom in the hands of truth, which is eternal, rather than in those of men who change; so that if the government forgets the interests of the people or falls into the hands of men corrupted, according to the natural course of things, the light of acknowledged principles should unmask their treasons, and that every new faction may read its death in the very thought of a crime.
Happy the people that attains this end; for, whatever new machinations are plotted against their liberty, what resources does not public reason present when guaranteeing freedom!
What is the end of our revolution? The tranquil enjoyment of liberty and equality; the reign of that eternal justice, the laws of which are graven, not on marble or stone, but in the hearts of men, even in the heart of the slave who has forgotten them, and in that of the tyrant who disowns them.
We wish that order of things where all the low and cruel passions are enchained, all the beneficent and generous passions awakened by the laws; where ambition subsists in a desire to deserve glory and serve the country: where distinctions grow out of the system of equality, where the citizen submits to the authority of the magistrate, the magistrate obeys that of the people, and the people are governed by a love of justice; where the country secures the comfort of each individual, and where each individual prides himself on the prosperity and glory of his country; where every soul expands by a free communication of republican sentiments, and by the necessity of deserving the esteem of a great people: where the arts serve to embellish that liberty which gives them value and support, and commerce is a source of public wealth and not merely of immense riches to a few individuals.
We wish in our country that morality may be substituted for egotism, probity for false honour, principles for usages, duties for good manners, the empire of reason for the tyranny of fashion, a contempt of vice for a contempt of misfortune, pride for insolence, magnanimity for vanity, the love of glory for the love of money, good people for good company, merit for intrigue, genius for wit, truth for tinsel show, the attractions of happiness for the ennui of sensuality, the grandeur of man for the littleness of the great, a people magnanimous, powerful, happy, for a people amiable, frivolous and miserable; in a word, all the virtues and miracles of a Republic instead of all the vices and absurdities of a Monarchy.
We wish, in a word, to fulfill the intentions of nature and the destiny of man, realize the promises of philosophy, and acquit providence of a long reign of crime and tyranny. That France, once illustrious among enslaved nations, may, by eclipsing the glory of all free countries that ever existed, become a model to nations, a terror to oppressors, a consolation to the oppressed, an ornament of the universe and that, by sealing the work with our blood, we may at least witness the dawn of the bright day of universal happiness. This is our ambition, - this is the end of our efforts....
Since virtue and equality are the soul of the republic, and that your aim is to found, to consolidate the republic, it follows, that the first rule of your political conduct should be, to let all your measures tend to maintain equality and encourage virtue, for the first care of the legislator should be to strengthen the principles on which the government rests. Hence all that tends to excite a love of country, to purify manners, to exalt the mind, to direct the passions of the human heart towards the public good, you should adopt and establish. All that tends to concenter and debase them into selfish egotism, to awaken an infatuation for littlenesses, and a disregard for greatness, you should reject or repress. In the system of the French revolution that which is immoral is impolitic, and what tends to corrupt is counter-revolutionary. Weaknesses, vices, prejudices are the road to monarchy. Carried away, too often perhaps, by the force of ancient habits, as well as by the innate imperfection of human nature, to false ideas and pusillanimous sentiments, we have more to fear from the excesses of weakness, than from excesses of energy. The warmth of zeal is not perhaps the most dangerous rock that we have to avoid; but rather that languour which ease produces and a distrust of our own courage. Therefore continually wind up the sacred spring of republican government, instead of letting it run down. I need not say that I am not here justifying any excess. Principles the most sacred may be abused: the wisdom of government should guide its operations according to circumstances, it should time its measures, choose its means; for the manner of bringing about great things is an essential part of the talent of producing them, just as wisdom is an essential attribute of virtue....
It is not necessary to detail the natural consequences of the principle of democracy, it is the principle itself, simple yet copious, which deserves to be developed.
Republican virtue may be considered as it respects the people and as it respects the government. It is necessary in both. When however, the government alone want it, there exists a resource in that of the people; but when the people themselves are corrupted liberty is already lost.
Happily virtue is natural in the people, [despite] aristocratical prejudices. A nation is truly corrupt, when, after having, by degrees lost its character and liberty, it slides from democracy into aristocracy or monarchy; this is the death of the political body by decrepitude....
But, when, by prodigious effects of courage and of reason, a whole people break asunder the fetters of despotism to make of the fragments trophies to liberty; when, by their innate vigor, they rise in a manner from the arms of death, to resume all the strength of youth when, in turns forgiving and inexorable, intrepid and docile, they can neither be checked by impregnable ramparts, nor by innumerable armies of tyrants leagued against them, and yet of themselves stop at the voice of the law; if then they do not reach the heights of their destiny it can only be the fault of those who govern.
Again, it may be said, that to love justice and equality the people need no great effort of virtue; it is sufficient that they love themselves....
If virtue be the spring of a popular government in times of peace, the spring of that government during a revolution is virtue combined with terror: virtue, without which terror is destructive; terror, without which virtue is impotent. Terror is only justice prompt, severe and inflexible; it is then an emanation of virtue; it is less a distinct principle than a natural consequence of the general principle of democracy, applied to the most pressing wants of the country.
It has been said that terror is the spring of despotic government. Does yours then resemble despotism? Yes, as the steel that glistens in the hands of the heroes of liberty resembles the sword with which the satellites of tyranny are armed. Let the despot govern by terror his debased subjects; he is right as a despot: conquer by terror the enemies of liberty and you will be right as founders of the republic. The government in a revolution is the despotism of liberty against tyranny. Is force only intended to protect crime? Is not the lightning of heaven made to blast vice exalted?
The law of self-preservation, with every being whether physical or moral, is the first law of nature. Crime butchers innocence to secure a throne, and innocence struggles with all its might against the attempts of crime. If tyranny reigned one single day not a patriot would survive it. How long yet will the madness of despots be called justice, and the justice of the people barbarity or rebellion? - How tenderly oppressors and how severely the oppressed are treated! Nothing more natural: whoever does not abhor crime cannot love virtue. Yet one or the other must be crushed. Let mercy be shown the royalists exclaim some men. Pardon the villains! No: be merciful to innocence, pardon the unfortunate, show compassion for human weakness.
The protection of government is only due to peaceable citizens; and all citizens in the republic are republicans. The royalists, the conspirators, are strangers, or rather enemies. Is not this dreadful contest, which liberty maintains against tyranny, indivisible? Are not the internal enemies the allies of those in the exterior? The assassins who lay waste the interior; the intriguers who purchase the consciences of the delegates of the people: the traitors who sell them; the mercenary libellists paid to dishonor the cause of the people, to smother public virtue, to fan the flame of civil discord, and bring about a political counter revolution by means of a moral one; all these men, are they less culpable or less dangerous than the tyrants whom they serve? ...
To punish the oppressors of humanity is clemency; to forgive them is cruelty. The severity of tyrants has barbarity for its principle; that of a republican government is founded on beneficence. Therefore let him beware who should dare to influence the people by that terror which is made only for their enemies! Let him beware, who, regarding the inevitable errors of civism in the same light, with the premeditated crimes of perfidiousness, or the attempts of conspirators, suffers the dangerous intriguer to escape and pursues the peaceable citizen! Death to the villain who dares abuse the sacred name of liberty or the powerful arms intended for her defence, to carry mourning or death to the patriotic heart...."

"Another China Rising"

2010-08-07T20:36:00.001+01:00

From Counterfire.org:

Another China rising

Thursday, 05 August 2010 17:28
Written by Chris Nineham

As a rising labour movement gains strength in China, the reprint of Harold Isaacs's classic Marxist history of the Chinese revolution provides both inspiration and a warning from history, writes Chris Nineham.
As all eyes are on China, the reprint of this classic Marxist history should be a major event. The book is not about Mao’s peasant led 1949 revolution but the story of the great worker led insurrection of 1925 to 1927. It is an extraordinary half-buried story of popular uprising and political betrayal, brilliantly told. And even though it was written in 1937 it’s a story that throws much light on China’s subsequent development.

Despite its relative obscurity, the Chinese revolution of the 20’s was a major turning point. Isaac’s book helps explain the shape of revolutionary struggle in the twentieth century and up to our day. It gives context to the defeat of the working class internationally in the 1920s and 30s. It also helps to explain the pattern of so many anti colonial uprisings which often succeeded in throwing out colonial occupiers but never in solving the problems of the mass of the population.

It suggests too an alternative model for liberation in the developing world. We are witnessing a new series of struggles for democratic and social change against authoritarian regimes from Burma to Egypt, from Thailand to Nepal. Chinese workers themselves are taking strike action on a scale not seen since the 1970’s. Isaacs’s book is an inspiration and a warning.
The seeds of revolt
Isaacs lived in China for the first part of the 1930s and he outlines the background of desperate economic suffering and imperial oppression in early twentieth century China with a rare combination of anger and insight.

The secret to the revolutionary period was that social change came late and therefore in a concentrated, explosive way to China. The country was drawn into the capitalist world by colonial brutality. The British devastated the export trade and social fabric of China during the Opium Wars in the mid-nineteenth century. They used opium to force entry in to Chinese markets.

The attention of colonial powers had a contradictory impact on China. As well as wiping out traditional manufacturing it created a layer of comprador capitalists who made huge fortunes. The colonialists’ sponsorship of merchants, landlords, officials and warlords helped to perpetuate pre-capitalist forms of organisation but at the same time they introduced the most modern forms of production.
The new market relations ruined millions of peasants whose families had survived off their small plots for generations. Meanwhile the industrial development that was being grafted onto the country in such a chaotic way sucked millions into unprepared cities creating a rapidly growing, immiserated working class.

The movement against imperialism began to stir during the First World War. One fascinating section of the book outlines the impact of the Russian Revolution on the East. Isaacs describes how a combination of war weariness and the example of the Russian revolution generated national and anti-colonial revolts in Turkey, Syria, Egypt, Arabia, Afghanistan, India, Indonesia, Indo-China, and Korea and beyond. The revolution’s impact was reinforced when the new workers’ government withdrew its claims on foreign territory in China and elsewhere. The revolution also embodied vital theoretical and strategic lessons.

As it turned out the importance of the Russian Revolution was double-edged. It helped unleash rebellion across the region, but the immense and unchallenged authority it gave to the Russian State became a liability.

The great divide in Chinese society was between the new industrialists, bankers, brokers, capitalist landowners (local and foreign), and the mass of the poor. While the Chinese bourgeoisie played a subservient role to the foreigners and no doubt fantasised about independent capitalist development, the gulf between them and the poor was much greater than any antagonism with their foreign colleagues. For Isaacs, ‘this fundamental fact predetermined the unity of the Chinese and foreign exploiters against the exploited.’

The spreading revolutionary mood collided with the plans of Japanese imperialism and the cynicism of the imperialist horse traders at the treaty of Versailles. On May 4, 1919 there were huge student demonstrations in Peking which were quickly joined by striking workers, some of whose leaders had laboured abroad during the war and had had contact with the socialist movement.

Though the movement led to a huge revival in the mainstream nationalist Kuomintang, it also led to the growth of Marxist and socialist circles, many of which came together in 1920 to form the Chinese Communist Party.
Communists and nationalists
The central problem of the Chinese Revolution was the relationship between the left and the nationalist movement. There was never any doubt that the Communists should fight at the forefront of the anti-imperialist movement. But a new policy was developed by the Communist International for China, which led to a deal between Soviet diplomats and nationalist Kuomintang leader Sun Yat Sen. In January 1923 the two sides issued a joint communiqué agreeing that ‘the conditions did not exist in China for the successful establishment of socialism or communism’ and that the immediate aim for China should be the ‘achievement of national union and national independence.’

This was a clean break from the strategy agreed by the second world congress of the Communist International in 1922 and from the whole Bolshevik policy that culminated in revolution in October 1917. It meant an end to political and organisational independence of the Chinese Communist Party and an uncritical adoption of nationalist policies. The turn was justified by the novel argument that the Kuomintang was not the party of the emerging bourgeoisie but a party in which all classes united in common cause against the foreign interloper.

Isaacs argues this nonsense was a rationalisation of a pragmatic change of course in Russia. Listening to the experiences of the activists he interviewed convinced him of the correctness of Trotskys’s analysis of the defeat in China and its connection witrh the degeneration of the Russian revolution. The development of the ‘two stages’ theory of revolution embodied the realism of the emerging Stalinist leadership. It marked a turn away from an internationalist policy of spreading revolution to realpolitik of alliances with ‘progressive sections of the bourgeoisie’. It was part of an accommodation to capitalist reality and it set the pattern for communist policy internationally.

It was a policy that was pursued with great energy by the Chinese Communist Party. Their leaders went out of their way in a series of open letters, articles, telegrams and meetings to reassure the nationalists that there was no prospect of the party threatening the interests of the bourgeoisie.

The results of the policy were catastrophic. The militancy and initiative of the Chinese working class reached great heights. General strikes had spread from Honk Kong and Canton in 1925 and helped create the first power base for the nationalist Kuomintang in Guandong in the South. They also triggered peasant insurgencies across Southern China.

Workers led an insurrection in Shanghai on 21 March 1927 in advance of the approach of the nationalist army. The city was brought to a standstill by a general strike in which more than half a million workers played an active role. A workers militia of 5,000 took the main police stations and military outposts. Although they started off with just 150 pistols in one day they confiscated enough guns to lead the workers in an assault on the key arsenal in the South of the city. There the soldiers surrendered without a fight and the workers were able to arm themselves fully and take the other key strategic targets in the city.

By the time the nationalist troops arrived, all of Shanghai was in the hands of the workers with the exception international settlement and the French concession where foreigners cowered, fearing for their lives.

The Shanghai insurrection deepened the rebellion on the land. To the horror of the Kuomintang leaders the slogan ‘Down with the bad landowners’ turned into the longer but rather more radical ‘all who have land are oppressive and there are no gentry who are not bad.’ In Isaacs’ words the shockwaves from the workers action had helped ‘generate the realisation amongst the toilers on the land that they too were human beings, that they too existed. From that, the will to live not as an animal but as a man, hurled not one but
millions of toilers into a struggle against the system that had made them the packhorses of a civilisation thousands of years old’.

The great Chinese revolt of spring and summer 1927 confirmed Lenin and Trotsky’s analysis that even in the most impoverished and underdeveloped countries revolutionary action led by workers can defeat the best armed ruling classes and change the course of history. This was the basis on which they both fought for the revolution in October 1917.

The tragedy was that the Chinese experience of 1927 also became a negative confirmation of Lenin and Trotsky’s views. Both of them had concluded that the middle classes could no longer be relied upon to play any progressive role, even in anti-imperialist struggles. This was the starting point for Trotsky’s theory of Permanent Revolution and the rationale for the Russian October. But it was this insight that the Communist International had abandoned when it ordered the Chinese Communists into an uncritical ‘alliance of equals’ with the Kuomintang.
The great betrayal
When Kuomintang leader Chaing Kai-Shek landed at Shanghai on the afternoon of 26 March 1927 he was welcomed as a hero by the CP-led workers. The next day a demonstration of 50,000 filled the streets to greet him. The communist leaders failed to inform the workers that the nationalist army had delayed its advance on Shanghai in the hope that the workers movement would be contained or crushed by counter revolutionary forces.

Now the nationalist leaders had to take the situation into their own hands. The workers’ movement had served its purpose for them. It had given Chinese bankers and merchants a lever with which to extract concessions from the foreign capitalists. Now it had to be broken.

The process had started earlier in February when Chiang Kai-Shek had ordered the dissolution of the communist-led Kuomintang in the militant city of Nanching. Leaders had been arrested and the unions and student organisations had been suppressed. Once again the communist leadership failed to explain these facts to the Shanghai workers.
In Shanghai the repression had to be planned more carefully and reach a much higher level.

Chiang prepared the ground by removing garrisons sympathetic to the workers and drafting in soldiers fresh from the country. He organised made deals with occupying armies, particularly the French, but including British and Japanese units. He appeased the communist workers for a few weeks before unleashing a co-ordinated wave of terror.
Unarmed demonstrators were massacred with machine guns, working class areas were terrorised, activists picked up in their hundreds in dawn raids while special courts threw thousands into prison.

Thanks to the policies and active collaboration of the communist leaders the working class was taken completely off guard and was unable to defend itself effectively.

The carnival of reaction that followed was evidence of the fact that every section of the Chinese bourgeoisie felt in the end of the day closer to the imperialist capitalists than to the Chinese masses. There were of course different sections of the Chinese bourgeoisie. The comprador capitalists, brokers of foreign capital, were the most conservative and corrupt section of the Kuomintang alliance. But once the workers’ rebellion was in full swing even the most liberal of the Chinese middle classes became alarmed. They acknowledged that the labour movement had been useful but the feeling grew, in the words of one amongst them, that ‘it is one thing to utilize the workers… but quite another to let them bite off more than they can chew.’

Unbelievably the Communist Party learnt nothing from this disaster of Shanghai. A year after the massacre, Mao Tse Tung, the future leader of the Red Army, was once more promising the nationalist leaderships that the party had renounced the struggle for workers’ power. He even provided guarantees that if the forces of revolution raise their heads again the Chinese Communist Party would play the role of executioner.

The result of such capitulation was the decimation of the working class movement and the Communist Party through bitter demoralisation and sheer terror. Bizarrely the CP responded with a sharp left turn and a call to prepare for insurrection. But internal Comintern documents admitted that the CCP had no surviving groups in any of the great industrial centres.
The legacy
The damage was lasting. Remaining leftists fled to the countryside and formed armed groups that sought support amongst the peasantry. There was such a sense of betrayal and distrust amongst the peasants that they often drove Communist Party members out of their districts. In other areas these declassed Red Army groups managed to rebuild relations with the peasants and regroup. Mao himself was involved in the desperate defensive manoeuvre that was later to be as the Long March. But the Communist Party lost all connection with the organised workers.

Meanwhile free from any pressure from its left, the Kuomintang fought a half-hearted and purely military struggle against the Japanese occupiers. They relied on British and American aid even though neither state was prepared to openly oppose Japan’s actions and both had ambitions to dominate the region themselves. Such alliances were preferable for the Chinese capitalists to any attempt to stir up mass resistance to the Japanese. The war continued indecisively, exhausting the economy and the country.

In 1935 the Communist International made a turn away from any semblance of revolutionary policy. Frightened by the defeat of the German workers and the rise of Hitler, Stalin turned to a policy of wooing the western democracies as potential allies
against fascism. The Communist International announced its struggle was now not for workers’ revolution but for bourgeois democracy. Communist parties everywhere were officially suspending hostility towards capitalist governments in return for alliances with Moscow. What remained of the party in China moved towards another deal with its own butcher, the Kuomintang.

The turn in the Communists fortunes came on the basis of a concerted peasant war against the Japanese and then the Kuomintang itself. When it came a decade after Isaacs wrote his book, the liberation of China was led by the Communist Party. Mao Tse Tung, who had rebuilt his support amongst the peasantry, led a decisive struggle against the discredited Kuomintang. The world started talking of a 'victory for communism' in China. The Chinese Communist Party was however to characterise its military victory over the Kuomintang as the 'victory of the national bourgeois democratic revolution' which had begun 38 years earlier. And for good reason.

The theory of the two stages of the revolution had been completely internalised by the world Communist movement. What this really amounted to was the internalisation of bourgeois nationalist politics, the accommodation of Marxism to the demands of national capitalist development. Workers played no role in the final liberation of the China, not because they were unorganised, but because they were told not to by the CP. As they approached the cities Red Army leaders sent orders ahead that ‘workers and employers in all trades will continue to work and business will operate as usual.’ When Mao announced that the transformation to socialism would come later what he meant was workers rights would have to wait and workers aspirations would have to be put on hold, as the first and only priority was capital accumulation.

For all the romantic myths that surround Mao, the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution were nothing but the working out of the brutal logic of the two stage revolution. They were centralised and savage attempts to increase work discipline and productivity. The project of state-led capitalist development succeeded in driving China forward but at a terrible price.

Now Chinese workers have started to rebel against the conditions created by the final accommodation of the Chinese Communist Party: the opening to the market. The tragic story of the workers insurrection of the 1920’s shows how history could have taken a very different course. The working class is incomparably stronger than it was in the twenties but anyone fighting for workers’ rights, democracy and social change today would do well to investigate the half forgotten story of the Chinese revolution and study its lessons. Isaacs’ book is a fine place to start.

A debate on emancipation

2010-08-07T20:20:00.000+01:00

The brilliant Slavoj Žižek once again, this time giving a lecture on revolutionary politics in the present juncture of Marxism's evolution:

The ideal Idea

2010-08-07T17:17:00.001+01:00

The forgotten revolutionary

2010-08-07T15:36:00.007+01:00

Everybody has heard of Ernesto 'Che' Guevara, the modern, Pop-Art-like pin-up fetishistic symbol of 'revolution' (misguided rebellion or simple rebelliousness would be more correct descriptions of the 'thingification' of Che's image, persona and memory as commercial or cultural commodities).

How many, however, remember Buenaventura Durruti, the visionary anarchist and leader of the Durruti Column in the Spanish Civil War, who perished in his prime as a standard-bearer for all true libertarians and socialists?

Buenaventura Durruti (1896-1936)

To illustrate his courage, idealism and comradeship, below are comments made by Durruti in August 1936 to Pierre van Paasen of the Toronto Daily Star:

"For us", said Durruti, "it is a matter of crushing Fascism once and for all. Yes; and in spite of the Government".
"No government in the world fights Fascism to the death. When the bourgeoisie sees power slipping from its grasp, it has recourse to Fascism to maintain itself. The Liberal Government of Spain could have rendered the Fascist elements powerless long ago. Instead it compromised and dallied. Even now at this moment, there are men in this Government who want to go easy on the rebels."
And here Durruti laughed. "You can never tell, you know, the present Government might yet need these rebellious forces to crush the workers' movement . . ."
"We know what we want. To us it means nothing that there is a Soviet Union somewhere in the world, for the sake of whose peace and tranquillity the workers of Germany and China were sacrificed to Fascist barbarians by Stalin. We want revolution here in Spain, right now, not maybe after the next European war. We are giving Hitler and Mussolini far more worry with our revolution than the whole Red Army of Russia. We are setting an example to the German and Italian working class on how to deal with Fascism."
"I do not expect any help for a libertarian revolution from any Government in the world. . . . We expect no help, not even from our own Government, in the last analysis."
"But", interjected van Paasen, "You will be sitting on a pile of ruins."
Durruti answered: "We have always lived in slums and holes in the wall. We will know how to accommodate ourselves for a time. For, you must not forget, we can also build. It is we the workers who built these palaces and cities here in Spain and in America and everywhere. We, the workers, can build others to take their place. And better ones! We are not in the least afraid of ruins. We are going to inherit the earth; there is not the slightest doubt about that. The bourgeoisie might blast and ruin its own world before it leaves the stage of history. We carry a new world here, in our hearts. That world is growing this minute."

All wrong

2010-08-07T15:16:00.009+01:00

These 'comrades' were all wrong.
Marx and Engels, the first two (from the left), did not err in their philosophy, untested during their lifetimes, but were wrong in their 'utopianism': in hindsight, they expected too much from the 'leadership' of the working classes and from collective ownership, and too little from capitalism, which survived and evolved.
Lenin, the one in the middle, had some progressive ideas but ultimately became a dictator and planted the seeds for the following characters.
Stalin and Mao, the last two, were, on both counts -- theory and practice -- utterly wrong; they caused untold horrors through the addition of personality cults, violence, criminality and autocracy to their errors in thought and judgement.
How does the saying go? Power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.

The boatman's (h)arbour

2010-08-07T13:30:00.002+01:00

From Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds' album The Boatman's Call (1997), the wonderful song "Lime Tree Arbour":

The journey upside down

2010-08-07T12:40:00.005+01:00

Al-Idrisi's Tabula Rogeriana, drawn in 1154 for Roger II, the Norman King of Sicily, is oriented southwards, with North at the bottom:

The Borgia mappa mundi, ca. 1430, was likewise conceived, with South at the top:

The final journey (III)

2010-08-07T12:05:00.001+01:00

To the end of days: the destruction of the Earth as the Sun expands before dying as a white dwarf:

The final journey (II)

2010-08-07T11:45:00.003+01:00

To nothingness, that which does not exist, deprived of being, and that which I, as an atheist, am convinced is our ultimate individual fate, therefore:

The final journey (I)

2010-08-07T11:43:00.002+01:00

The Fields of Elysium:

According to Pindar, the island of Elysium, ruled by the Titan Kronos, is where the souls of the virtuous rest in the Underworld:

And those that have three times kept to their oaths,
Keeping their souls clean and pure,
Never letting their hearts be defiled by the taint
Of evil and injustice,
And barbaric venality,
They are led by Zeus to the end:
To the palace of Kronos.

The journey upriver to perdition

2010-08-07T10:31:00.010+01:00

Read Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness here, in full view and for free.

Come here to listen to the audio version of the masterpiece (QuickTime Player plug-in required).

The art of the lonely boatman

2010-08-07T10:18:00.001+01:00

Claude Monet, Le Bateau-atelier, 1876

Charon

2010-08-07T10:08:00.001+01:00

Gustave Doré's illustration to Dante's Inferno (from the Divine Comedy); Plate X to Canto III: Charon the ferryman herds the evil souls onto his boat.

Another journey by a different ferryman

2010-08-07T09:51:00.002+01:00

Chikanobu Toyohara, The Boatman, 1898

The 'real' Finisterra

2010-08-07T08:55:00.002+01:00

Finistère (Brittany, France), Land's End (Cornwall, England), Fisterra (Galicia, Spain), all of them geographical Finis Terrae, the furthest ends of the earth.

Below is a picture of the first one:

The next leg of the journey

2010-08-07T08:43:00.001+01:00

The starting point of the journey

2010-08-07T08:33:00.002+01:00

The Arquimedes palimpsest

2010-08-04T17:05:00.001+01:00

For more on this palimpsest, come here.

New image

2010-08-04T10:44:00.014+01:00

I have decided to refurbish the design, layout and colours of this blog.

The new picture in the header is a reproduction of Dream Journey to the Peach Blossom Land (몽유도원도/夢遊桃源圖), painted in 1447 by Ahn Gyeon (안견/安堅).

The previous header, shown below, is explained here:

Die Zukunft

2010-08-03T19:46:00.000+01:00

Collateral...

2010-08-03T18:46:00.004+01:00

The short version of the (in)famous video released by WikiLeaks:

Watch it carefully and keep the commentaries in mind.

A "glorious" example: at 12:49, the fun and laughter from the personnel in the helicopter as they witness an armoured vehicle being driven over a body.

Finisterra

2010-08-02T12:02:00.015+01:00

At the conclusion of a long hiatus in this blog, a change of direction is about to occur.

My imminent return to Europe will no doubt entail a different outlook. I shall naturally be focusing more on non-Asian topics, and inevitably the tone of my opinions will increasingly reflect a more overtly Western viewpoint on issues which straddle the East-West divide.

Make no mistake: there are no common cultural approaches. When civilizations meet, they establish a dialogue, they do battle, and no single one is ever right or wrong, superior or inferior, better or worse (except in the arena of human rights, the sole universal repository of that which makes us all equally members of the species homo sapiens sapiens).

My years in Asia have taught me that there is an unbridgeable gulf between the Oriental mind and the Western one. And whenever both cultures congregate in a certain community -- i.e., Eurasians --, either one of them prevails, through assimilation, consensual or otherwise, or a new hybrid culture arises.

Such a hybrid culture is very rarely a balanced mixture of the original mating cultures. It is not a melting pot, nor does it encapsulate a harmonious co-existence with 'The Other'.
Let me provide an example.

I have found, to my dismay, that Macau has been producing a growing number of Eurasians who identify with a parochial and asymmetric blend of East and West, in which the local Cantonese microscopic and myopic mentality, including tastes, customs and habits, predominates to a very large extent.
Apart from a few culinary and linguistic remnants from Portugal, I see very little of Europe in local Eurasians. In fact, not a few of my own generation of Macanese -- Eurasians of Portuguese and Asian, mostly Chinese, extraction -- actually disdain their Portuguese heritage. To behold the Chinese (especially Northerners) working in Macau who are more fluent in Portuguese, and who have a greater interest in, and regard for, Western culture, only compounds the barrenness of the picture and rubs salt into the wound...
One should not blame people for being who, what or how they are. Existing as a lonely community, an islet in the vast ocean that is China, is not easy. The need to avoid cultural encirclement and isolation is overwhelming, as is the consequent pressure to adapt to the surrounding environment. It might be argued that it is a matter of survival.
However, that does not prevent one from holding a negative appreciation of a few hard truths. The fact is that more and more younger Macanese have become the fellow-travelers of the inward-looking, 'frog-in-a-well'-type hoi polloi that the culturally spartan Macau milieu has to offer.
Yes, the community has 'survived', but at the cost of its own identity: immersion into the local Cantonese culture and mores is eroding its distinctiveness as Eurasian.
My view is not beyond reproach, as generalizations never are. To paint a segment of society with a single brush is unfair, as it leaves out the many laudable individual exceptions that do exist. And to shed an unfavourable light on ethnic groups might be seen as impolite or discriminatory, if not outright bigoted and even racist.
Nonetheless, political correctness should not obfuscate reality as I see it: centuries of Western cultural influence in Macau has really come to an end. It is not, historically or anthropologically speaking, a good or a bad outcome. It is what it is.
I fear that in a few decades the fate of the Macanese will not be dissimilar to that of the Eurasian communities of India, Sri Lanka and Malaysia: apart from their surnames and perhaps a few gastronomical delicacies, nothing else shall remain of their Portuguese ancestors.

CNY

2010-02-12T14:32:00.018Z

Equating the Chinese New Year, which begins this Sunday, with a new lunar year, is a common misconception.
Actually, the Chinese calendar is lunisolar: a combination of properties from the solar and the lunar models, indicating the cycle of both the seasons and the phases of the moon.

The date of the so-called 'Lunar New Year', as celebrated in most East Asian civilisations, is always determined through a lunisolar calendar. The Hindu and Hebrew calendars are likewise lunisolar.

The only major lunar calendar system in use is the Islamic one.

An unofficial Chinese character,

combining a total of four characters 招財進寶 (zhāo cái jìn bǎo).

It is a greeting/wish for a prosperous new year.

The Chinese New Year is also known as the Spring (春) Festival

The 'banality' of evil?

2010-02-10T16:35:00.002Z

The Evil of Banality
Troubling new revelations about Arendt and Heidegger.
By Ron Rosenbaum in Slate
Posted Friday, Oct. 30, 2009, at 12:37 PM ET

Will we ever be able to think of Hannah Arendt in the same way again? Two new and damning critiques, one of Arendt and one of her longtime Nazi-sycophant lover, the philosopher Martin Heidegger, were published within 10 days of each other last month. The pieces cast further doubt on the overinflated, underexamined reputations of both figures and shed new light on their intellectually toxic relationship.
My hope is that these revelations will encourage a further discrediting of the most overused, misused, abused pseudo-intellectual phrase in our language: the banality of evil. The banality of the banality of evil, the fatuousness of it, has long been fathomless, but perhaps now it will be consigned to the realm of the deceitful and disingenuous as well.
The first of the two new reports—and the one most overlooked here in America, perhaps because it's not online—appeared in the sober pages of London's Times Literary Supplement on Oct. 9. It was titled "Blame the Victim—Hannah Arendt Among the Nazis: the Historian and Her Sources." Arendt—the German-born refugee intellectual, author of the influential The Origins of Totalitarianism and the controversial Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil—has come under fire before for "blaming the victim" in her Eichmann trial book, but the author of the TLS piece, the distinguished British scholar Bernard Wasserstein, breaks new ground here with material I found shocking.
In a long, carefully documented essay, Wasserstein (who's now at the University of Chicago), cites Arendt's scandalous use of quotes from anti-Semitic and Nazi "authorities" on Jews in her Totalitarianism book.
Wasserstein concludes that her use of these sources was "more than a methodological error: it was symptomatic of a perverse world-view contaminated by over-exposure to the discourse of collective contempt and stigmatization that formed the object of her study"—that object being anti-Semitism. In other words, he contends, Arendt internalized the values of the anti-Semitic literature she read in her study of anti-Semitism, at least to a certain extent. Wasserstein's conjecture will reignite the debate over Arendt's contemptuous remarks on certain Jews who were victims of Hitler in her Eichmann book and in her letters.
Could these revelations help banish the robotic reiteration of the phrase the banality of evil as an explanation for everything bad that human beings do? Arendt may not have intended that the phrase be used this way, but one of its pernicious effects has been to make it seem as though the search for an explanation of the mystery of evil done by "ordinary men" is over. As though by naming it somehow explains it and even solves the problem. It's a phrase that sounds meaningful and lets us off the hook, allows us to avoid facing the difficult question.
It was the banality phrase—and the purported profundity of it in the popular mind—that elevated Arendt above the ranks of her fellow exile intellectuals in America and made her a proto-Sontag figure, a cerebral star of sorts and a revered icon in cultural-studies departments throughout America. It was the phrase that launched a thousand theses.
To my mind, the use of the phrase banality of evil is an almost infallible sign of shallow thinkers attempting to seem intellectually sophisticated. Come on, people: It's a bankrupt phrase, a subprime phrase, a Dr. Phil-level phrase masquerading as a profound contrarianism. Oooh, so daring! Evil comes not only in the form of mustache-twirling Snidely Whiplash types, but in the form of paper pushers who followed evil orders. And when applied—as she originally did to Adolf Eichmann, Hitler's eager executioner, responsible for the logistics of the Final Solution—the phrase was utterly fraudulent.
Adolf Eichmann was, of course, in no way a banal bureaucrat: He just portrayed himself as one while on trial for his life. Eichmann was a vicious and loathsome Jew-hater and -hunter who, among other things, personally intervened after the war was effectively lost, to insist on and ensure the mass murder of the last intact Jewish group in Europe, those of Hungary. So the phrase was wrong in its origin, as applied to Eichmann, and wrong in almost all subsequent cases when applied generally. Wrong and self-contradictory, linguistically, philosophically, and metaphorically. Either one knows what one is doing is evil or one does not. If one knows and does it anyway, one is evil, not some special subcategory of evil. If one doesn't know, one is ignorant, and not evil. But genuine ignorance is rare when evil is going on.
Arendt should have stuck with her original formulation for the Nazi crimes, "radical evil." Not an easy concept to define, but, you might say, you know it when you see it. Certainly one with more validity than banality. (Wasserstein dryly notes that "her epigones have tried valiantly to reconcile the two positions, she herself recognized the inconsistency"—between radical and banal evil—"but never satisfactorily resolved the fundamental self-contradiction.") But Arendt fled from radical evil into banality in more ways than one.
Where the Wasserstein article breaks new ground is in his citation of some of the anti-Semitic sources Arendt used for what is considered her major work, The Origins of Totalitarianism. Of course, Arendt has been called hostile to Jews, particularly those who lack the Germanic acculturation she was so proud of.
But The Origins of Totalitarianism has not, until now, come under fire on these grounds. And I must say that even though it's a book massively bloated by irrelevant show-your-work history, it serves as ballast for an important theoretical insight: that the similarities among police-state surveillance regimes are more important than the differences, that the similarities can be summed up by a single word—totalitarianism—that applies to dictatorships of the left and right, of any ideology and by extension any theocratic regime or movement.
It's a concept that has great relevance right now because there are still those who don't understand how theocratic police states can be called "fascist." Duh! It's because they're totalitarian. Whatever religion they profess, what they share with past fascist regimes is greater—in terms of denial of human rights—than what separates them. Just as political regimes adopt religious-type totalist worship of the state or the leader to enforce their oppression, religious or theocratic regimes adopt political oppression to enforce their orthodoxies.
But Wasserstein (who ironically delivered his conclusions originally at "the Hannah Arendt Lecture" at Holland's Radboud Universiteit, Nijmegen in December 2008—probably not what they expected) has found some problems in her historical analysis of anti-Semitism.
He introduces his findings with a curt nod to the Arendt defenders: "In The New York Review of Books in 2007 Jeremy Waldron reproved the historian Walter Laqueur for having speculated that Arendt 'had read too much anti-Semitic literature for her own good.' " Waldron, Wasserstein observed, "considered the conjecture 'offensive.' "
"Actually," Wasserstein continues, "it merits serious consideration, as emerges if we examine the use of sources in her work. Consider, for example, Arendt's discussion, in the second section of Origins, of the role of Jews in the gold and diamond rushes in South Africa at the turn of the twentieth century. She relies here on the account by the British economist J.A. Hobson in which he referred to Jewish financiers 'leaving their economic fangs in the carcasses of their prey. They fastened on the Rand … as they are prepared to fasten upon any other spot on the globe'—part of a passage that Arendt quotes with explicit and unironic approval, commending it as 'very reliable in observation and very honest in analysis.' "
"Fangs"? You say this sounds like pure Hitlerite rhetoric that could have been lifted from Mein Kampf? Well, yes, it does, doesn't it?
And then there's this: "One of her authorities on South African Jews," Wasserstein reports, is an article by Ernst Schultze, "a longstanding Nazi propagandist, that appeared in … a German publication founded and directed by the prominent Nazi ideologist Alfred Rosenberg."
And then "in a new preface [to The Origins of Totalitarianism] written in 1967, Arendt commends the work of the leading Nazi historian Walter Frank … whose 'contributions,' " Wasserstein quotes Arendt, " 'can still be consulted with profit.' "
Wasserstein wonders about her motives here: "Was she bending over backwards not to be totally dismissive of ideological opponents who despised her on categorical (i.e. racial) grounds?" he asks.
"But there must have been more to it than that," he answers, "because modern Jewish history was the only subject where she repeatedly relied on Nazi historians as external authorities, that is, other than as evidence of what the Nazis themselves thought or did. Moreover she internalized much of what the Nazi historians had to say about Jews, from the 'parasitism' of Jewish high finance to the 'internationalism' of [Walther] Rathenau [the Weimar German minister assassinated by anti-Semites.]"
Of course, there have always been Jewish critiques of Jews. But Arendt's "aversion clearly ran much deeper" than has been supposed, Wasserstein asserts. He concludes his piece by wondering, "Why?"
I believe the new Heidegger revelations may shed some light on that question. It's always been controversial to discuss Arendt's lifelong romantic infatuation with the Nazi-sympathizing professor and how it might have shaped her intellectual positions. Arendt's defenders dismiss these as "tabloid" concerns, irrelevant to the purported transcendental purity of her thought.
But leaving Heidegger out of the equation is becoming ever more difficult. Not only did Arendt have an affair with him when she was an 18-year-old student about half his age, before Hitler took over, but despite his public exaltation of the Fuhrer, despite his firing Jews once he became rector of Freiburg University. We now know that she later resumed some kind of warm relationship with the brownshirt philosopher (yes, it turns out he often wore one to his lectures). Arendt helped usher Heidegger back into the intellectual version of polite society, indeed assisted in preventing his ostracism as a Hitlerite, at least by those who considered his notoriously opaque use of philosophical language to offer something of value beneath it—apart from further opacity.
The new Heidegger material offers further evidence of his slavish devotion to the Fuhrer, not merely in his public speeches but also in his desire to find a philosophical grounding for Hitlerism in the elevated realms of his thought.
Consider this quotation from a delightfully acerbic review essay by Carlin Romano in the Oct. 18 Chronicle of Higher Education, which discusses new revelations about Heidegger's shameless adoption of Nazism.
Next month Yale University Press will issue an English-language translation of Heidegger: The Introduction of Nazism Into Philosophy, by Emmanuel Faye, an associate professor at the University of Paris at Nanterre. It's the latest, most comprehensive archival assault on the ostensibly magisterial thinker who informed Freiburg students in his infamous 1933 rectoral address of Nazism's "inner truth and greatness," declaring that "the Führer, and he alone, is the present and future of German reality, and its law."
Faye, whose book stirred France's red and blue Heidegger départements into direct battle a few years back, follows in the investigative footsteps of Chilean-Jewish philosopher Victor Farias (Heidegger et le Nazisme, 1987), historian Hugo Ott (Martin Heidegger: Unterwegs zu Zeiner Biographie, 1988) and others. Aim? To expose the oafish metaphysician's vulgar, often vicious 1930s attempt to become Hitler's chief academic tribune, and his post-World War II contortions to escape proper judgment for his sins. "We now know," reports Faye, "that [Heidegger's] attempt at self-justification of 1945 is nothing but a string of falsehoods."
Romano's Chronicle piece generated an often-furious comments thread, a spectacle of postmodernists in temper tantrum mode.
I can understand the splenetic attacks on Romano for not taking Heidegger seriously, although the angry Heideggerian academics never explained exactly why we should.
In general, I'm in favor of separating the man (or woman) from the work, but it was Heidegger himself, his defenders don't seem to recognize, who claimed Nazism for his own. He didn't make the separation between man and philosophy that they conveniently claim to excuse his personal racism.
The debate about Heidegger reminded me of a conversation I had with philosopher Berel Lang on "the evolution of evil," an exchange I wrote about in Explaining Hitler. We discussed whether Hitler represented a new depth of evil and what the next step down into the abyss might be. Were there degrees of evil—that led to Hitler? And would Hitler lead to degrees of evil beyond his own? I had suggested Holocaust denial was such a next step, in the sense that it added insult to injury, but Lang disagreed, arguing that Heidegger's postwar silence on Nazism exemplified the next step in the evolution of evil. After the war, this purportedly great and comprehensive philosopher never published anything that addressed the fact of the Holocaust that his party perpetrated. It just didn't impinge on his worldview. He had time to write polemics against mechanized agriculture but not industrialized murder. Lang thought Heidegger's indifference was a whole new kind of evil. (He even wrote a book called Heidegger's Silence.)
Which brings us back to Arendt again. As the extent of Heidegger's enthusiastic embrace of Nazism becomes more apparent, and as it becomes ever clearer that the allegiance was not merely opportunistic and careerist but derived from a philosophical affinity with his Fuhrer's effusions, it becomes impossible not to reexamine certain questions. Such as: How much did Arendt know about the depth of Heidegger's allegiance? Did Heidegger lie to her? Did she believe him the way she believed Eichmann? Did she assume his complicity with the genocidaires was something careerist and banal? Or worse, did she know? And did she disingenuously (or self-deceptively) construct her false banal Eichmann from her false banal Heidegger?
Writer Paul Roazen once speculated on this question:
If Eichmann was simply following orders, and his conduct was certifiably normal within the context of Nazi Germany, her own defense of Heidegger can reflect the way a social thinker such as herself might be conditioned by circumstances and advantage to curry favor in the midst of the most vile forms of evil. Having as a Jew escaped from Germany in 1933, Arendt remained for the rest of her life loyal to the whole philosophic tradition that had helped lead to Hitlerism. ...
It may forever remain a mystery, even more so now. Wasserstein believes she internalized anti-Semitic literature; I would perhaps modify this to say she internalized the purported universalism of Germanic high culture with its disdain for parochialism. A parochialism she identified with, in her own case, her Jewishness, something she felt ashamed of on intellectual grounds, so primitive, this tribal allegiance in the presence of intellects who supposedly transcended tribalism (or at least all tribes except the Teutonic).
One can still hear this Arendtian shame about ethnicity these days. So parochial! One can hear the echo of Arendt's fear of being judged as "merely Jewish" in some, not all, of those Jews so eager to dissociate themselves from the parochial concerns of other Jews for Israel. The desire for universalist approval makes them so disdainful of any "ethnic" fellow feeling. After all, to such unfettered spirits, it's so banal.

Readings on evil

2010-02-10T15:42:00.003Z

Understanding the origins of political oppression, in general, and of its extreme modality, violent totalitarianism, in particular, is a requirement for all lovers of liberty and of human emancipation.

A good starting point at the philosophical level is Hannah Arendt's The Origins of Totalitarianism (first edition by Schocken Books [New York: 1951]; I read a reprint of the 1972 edition [New York: Harvest Book/Harcourt, 1976]).

The biopolitical perspective -- i.e., the extermination of life as the outcome of exclusionary governance -- is illuminated by Giorgio Agamben in Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998).

No doubt Adolf Hitler and Joseph Stalin come to mind as the paragons of evil in any analysis of the last century.

For an historical account, I recommend Richard Overy's The Dictators: Hitler's Germany, Stalin's Russia (London: Penguin, 2005). A multidisciplinary effort is performed by Ron Rosenbaum in Explaining Hitler. The Search for the Origins of His Evil (London: Papermac/Macmillan, 1999).

Below is a documentary on the aforesaid monsters:

Double-click on the video to enlarge and to access the next segments.

DPRK

2010-02-08T14:32:00.001Z

North Korea by night:

Qi

2010-01-24T12:36:00.003Z

Propellerheads

2010-01-23T18:14:00.001Z

The previous post serves well to remind ourselves of the gargantuan number of shitheads and dickheads that populate this planet.

But not all "[something-]heads" are abject. Take David Byrne's Talking Heads, for instance. Or the Propellerheads, one of the best big beat/drum & bass bands of the late 90s:

Pat Robertson on Haiti

2010-01-23T17:32:00.004Z

Watch and cringe at the unbelievable utterances of this unlettered, Bible-thumping non-entity.
And to think that millions of Americans share the same persuasion...

MOS MINORUM

Pode haver um capitalismo "democrático"?

THE CRISES OF DEMOCRATIC CAPITALISM

I. MARKETS VERSUS VOTERS?

2. POST-WAR SETTLEMENTS

3. LOW INFLATION, HIGHER UNEMPLOYMENT

4. DEREGULATION AND PRIVATE DEBT

5. SOVEREIGN INDEBTEDNESS

6. SEQUENTIAL DISPLACEMENTS

7. POLITICAL DISORDER