The pyramid of exploitation

Click to view in more detail. No comments required. It's all self-explanatory and -- one could add, without being entirely wrong -- self-evident.

The circle of opposites

The Taijitu (太極圖), the circle representing the fluidity of the opposing forces of Yin and Yang in Taoism, had a corresponding Western symbol, actually predating the Chinese version by seven centuries!
The cultural concepts underlying each of the equivalent graphic representations were naturally different.
The Western one was the emblem of the armigeri defensores seniores, a Roman infantry unit of the Late Empire (circa 430 CE).

Compare for yourself:

The Taoist version

The Roman version

'Being-there': from where?

One of the less well known aspects of Heidegger's life is the controversy over the source of his concept of Dasein, or 'being-there', formulated in his magnum opus Sein und Zeit (1927). 
While most will agree that the first consistent usage of the term can be found in Ludwig Feuerbach, with the meaning of 'existence', the Japanese philosopher Tomonobu Imamichi contends that it was his mentor, Okakura Kakuzo, who introduced the new signification to -- and as espoused by -- Heidegger. 
The story goes like this: in his oeuvre The Book of Tea, Kakuzo addressed the Taoist philosophy of Master Zhuang  or Zhuangzi (莊子), a Chinese sage from the 4th century BCE.  
In 1919, Kakuzo presented Heidegger with a German translation of his work, wherein a core ontological category of Zhuangzi's thought was 'Westernised' and rendered as das In-der-Welt-Sein, or 'to be in the being of the world'.

Heidegger never said a word on the provenance of Dasein.
Could Dasein be said to have an Eastern inspiration, as a 'parallel' stepping stone on the universal path leading to the holistic Way (道)?

Martin Heidegger

The episode on Heidegger, one of the most impenetrable of all philosophers, from the BBC series "Human, All Too Human", brought to my attention by a post on Nietzsche in the blog Oriental Praia:

USSR/Russian anthem

Ideology, politics, systems, everything aside, the Soviet anthem was the most beautiful and moving national song ever.
No wonder the Russian Federation adopted it in 2001 (with changes to the lyrics):

L'Internationale

I still get goose bumps from listening to this anthem:

Debout ! les damnés de la terre !
Debout ! les forçats de la faim !
La raison tonne en son cratère :
C’est l’éruption de la fin.
Du passé faisons table rase,
Foule esclave, debout ! debout !
Le monde va changer de base :
Nous ne sommes rien, soyons tout !

Refrain :

C’est la lutte finale :

Groupons-nous, et demain,

L’Internationale

Sera le genre humain

(bis)

Il n’est pas de sauveurs suprêmes :
Ni Dieu, ni César, ni tribun,
Producteurs, sauvons-nous nous-mêmes !
Décrétons le salut commun !
Pour que le voleur rende gorge,
Pour tirer l’esprit du cachot,
Soufflons nous-mêmes notre forge,
Battons le fer quand il est chaud !

(Refrain)

L’État opprime et la loi triche ;
L’Impôt saigne le malheureux ;
Nul devoir ne s’impose au riche ;
Le droit du pauvre est un mot creux.
C’est assez, languir en tutelle,
L’égalité veut d’autres lois ;
« Pas de droits sans devoirs, dit-elle
« Égaux, pas de devoirs sans droits ! »

(Refrain)

Hideux dans leur apothéose,
Les rois de la mine et du rail
Ont-ils jamais fait autre chose
Que dévaliser le travail ?
Dans les coffres-forts de la bande
Ce qu'il a créé s’est fondu
En décrétant qu’on le lui rende
Le peuple ne veut que son dû.

(Refrain)

Les Rois nous soûlaient de fumées,
Paix entre nous, guerre aux tyrans !
Appliquons la grève aux armées,
Crosse en l’air, et rompons les rangs !
S’ils s’obstinent, ces cannibales,
À faire de nous des héros,
Ils sauront bientôt que nos balles
Sont pour nos propres généraux

(Refrain)

Ouvriers, paysans, nous sommes
Le grand parti des travailleurs ;
La terre n’appartient qu’aux hommes,
L’oisif ira loger ailleurs.
Combien de nos chairs se repaissent !
Mais si les corbeaux, les vautours,
Un de ces matins, disparaissent,
Le soleil brillera toujours !

C’est la lutte finale :

Groupons-nous, et demain,

L’Internationale

Sera le genre humain!

On Marx (II)

A 'different version' of Karl Marx, by the great British socialist comedian Mark Steel (double-click to enlarge and to go to the next segments of the video):

On Marx (I)

Listen, learn and enjoy (double-click to enlarge and to select the next parts of this excellent programme):

Young Marx

Returning to pages of the New Left Review is always a joy.

One of its main contributors in the 1970's was the Italian philosopher Lucio Colletti, whose introduction to a Penguin selection of Karl Marx's writings from his early years -- originally The Young Marx (if memory serves me! I read it in my late teens, together with another Penguin collection, The Revolutions of 1848), and now re-titled Early Writings -- had a great influence on my development:

"(...) this astonishingly rich body of works formed the cornerstone for his later political philosophy. In the Critique of Hegel's Doctrine of the State, he dissects Hegel's thought and develops his own views on civil society, while his Letters reveal a furious intellect struggling to develop the egalitarian theory of state. Equally challenging are his controversial essay On the Jewish Question and the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts, where Marx first made clear his views on alienation, the state, democracy and human nature. Brilliantly insightful, Marx's Early Writings reveal a mind on the brink of one of the most revolutionary ideas in human history - the theory of Communism.
This translation fully conveys the vigour of the original works. The introduction, by Lucio Colletti, considers the beliefs of the young Marx and explores these writings in the light of the later development of Marxism."

I then chose the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts (1844) as the most notable essay therein. Learning about the aggiornamento of Marx's thinking during and after the break with the Young Left Hegelians (Bruno Bauer, Ludwig Feuerbach) is fundamental to understanding his 'mature' works.
A text of the Manuscripts can be obtained here for free.
Below is the present 'look' of the book:

Žižek x 2

Read "How to begin from the beginning", in New Left Review, 57, May-June 2009: "Mountaineering lessons from the Bolsheviks’ master strategist provide a metaphor for regroupment in hard times. Slavoj Žižek identifies the principal antagonisms within contemporary capitalism, as the basis for positing anew the ‘communist hypothesis’".

Yevgeny Yevtushenko

The hell with it. Who never knew
the price of happiness will not be happy.

"Lies" (1952), line 11
in Selected Poems (London: Penguin, 2008), page 52.

Anna Akhmatova

Why is this age worse than earlier ages?
In a stupor of grief and dread
have we not fingered the foulest wounds
and left them unhealed by our hands?

In the west the falling light still glows,
and the clustered housetops glitter in the sun,
but here Death is already chalking the doors with crosses,
and calling the ravens, and the ravens are flying in.

"Why is this age worse...?"

(See source here.)

Osip Mandelstam

Our lives no longer feel ground under them.
At ten paces you can’t hear our words.

But whenever there’s a snatch of talk
it turns to the Kremlin mountaineer,

the ten thick worms his fingers,
his words like measures of weight,

the huge laughing cockroaches on his top lip,
the glitter of his boot-rims.

Ringed with a scum of chicken-necked bosses
he toys with the tributes of half-men.

One whistles, another meows, a third snivels.
He pokes out his finger and he alone goes boom.

He forges decrees in a line like horseshoes,
One for the groin, one the forehead, temple, eye.

He rolls the executions on his tongue like berries.
He wishes he could hug them like big friends from home.

"Stalin Epigram" (1933)
(See source here.)

This poem led to the author's imprisonment by the NKVD and, ultimately, to his death in 1938.
The "Kremlin mountaineer" is, of course, a reference to Stalin.

Autograph of "Stalin Epigram"

written down at the time of Mandelstam's interrogation in prison

1979 (IV)

It is impossible to mention the first major punk-rock band (the Sex Pistols), without immediately recalling one of rock's greats: The Clash.

Yours truly is the very proud owner of their complete LP discography in vinyl!

1979 saw the release of the memorable double-LP London Calling.

Here is the eponymous single:

1979 (III)

1979 was the year Sid Vicious of the Sex Pistols "OD'ed".

Remember "God Save the Queen"? Try to register the lyrics.

The Pistols produced the quintessential sound of the late 1970's urban gloom and angst amid the death throes of industrial society.

Our post-industrial, IT-dominated and globalised society is reacting in much the same vein, albeit less dramatically, ushering in post-capitalism and the ET (energy technology) green era.

1979 (II)

"1979", by the Smashing Pumpkins:

1979 (I)

Thirty years ago Deng Xiaoping consolidated his power, the Islamic Revolution rocked Iran and Margaret Thatcher was elected.

Niall Ferguson, the eminent British historian, argues that 1979 had a greater long-term impact than 1989 in "The Year the World Really Changed -- Forget the fall of the iron curtain: the events of '79 matter more", published in this week's edition of Newsweek.

Tha Fall of the Wall (II)

Another excellent article by Christopher Hitchens, from Slate magazine: 

"The Lessons of 1989 

The fall of the Berlin Wall is a reminder of the duty of solidarity.

By Christopher Hitchens

Lenin once defined a revolutionary situation as one that occurred when the rulers could not go on in the traditional way and the ruled did not wish to continue in that old way. Engels was more metaphorical, saying that revolution was the midwife that delivered a new life out of an older body. Both images come to mind in remembering the revolutions of 1989, which humbled a ruling system that believed itself to be based on the historical wisdom of Lenin and, indeed, of Engels.

In fact, the Communist leaderships of Eastern Europe had almost wholly ceased to believe in anything but their own survival and self-interest, which is one of the reasons their demise was so swift. While the revolution from below was not animated by any great "new" idea, as had been the case in 1789, 1848, or even 1917, the intellectuals and the masses were agreed that they wanted the unexciting objective of "normality"—a life not unlike that of Western Europe, where it was possible to express everyday criticism, register a vote, scrutinize a free press, and become a consumer as well as a producer. These unexciting demands were nonetheless revolutionary in their way, which gives you an idea of the utter failure and bankruptcy of the regimes that could not meet them. In 1988, in a public debate with a hack official of the Polish Communist Party, Lech Walesa won over the audience with his simple statement that "Europe moves by car, and we are trying to catch up with them by bike." (This glimpse appears in Elzbieta Matynia's new book Performative Democracy, which gives a first-rate and firsthand account of the slow but inexorable transformation of Poland.)

This 20^th anniversary has seen yet another crop of boring articles about how so many people, especially in former East Germany, are supposedly "nostalgic" for the security of the old Stalinist system. Such sentimental piffle—which got a good airing in that irritating movie Good Bye Lenin!—would not long survive a reading of another new book: Revolution 1989: The Fall of the Soviet Empire, by Victor Sebestyen. Making effective use of archives opened since the collapse of the Berlin Wall, Sebestyen describes the day in late October 1989 when the head of State Planning in the German Democratic Republic, Gerhard Schürer, presented the party leadership with the unvarnished economic news. "Nearly 60 per cent of East Germany's entire economic base could be written off as scrap, and productivity in mines and factories was nearly 50 per cent behind the West." Even more appalling was the 12-fold increase in the GDR's national debt—a situation so grotesque that it had been classified as a state secret lest loans from Western creditors dry up. "Just to avoid further indebtedness," wrote Schürer, "would mean a lowering next year of living standards by 25 to 30 per cent, and make the GDR ungovernable." So the wall came down just before the hermetic state that it enclosed would have imploded. I doubt that there would have been much "nostalgia" for that.
Sebestyen's book shows how it all, eventually, became a matter of looking the facts in the face. Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev and Foreign Minister Eduard Shevardnadze seem to have resolved to do this after the meltdown of the Chernobyl reactor and the campaign of reflexive official lying that at first accompanied it. From then on, they accepted one thing after another: the inevitable defeat in Afghanistan and the unsustainability of the Warsaw Pact alliance. It was only a matter of time before a satellite government picked up this cue. The decisive moment came when the Hungarian authorities decided to open their frontier with Austria, allowing East German "tourists" in Hungary to begin an exodus to the West. (They had previously asked Shevardnadze for his reaction to such a move and been told that as far as the Soviet Union was concerned, it was their own affair. That was the end.)

There will be the usual stuff this week, I expect, about how Ronald Reagan and his faithful ally Margaret Thatcher brought down the wall with their intransigent anti-communism. The most recently opened archives aren't so kind to this view, either. In September 1989, the Iron Lady visited Moscow and lectured Gorbachevagainst the reunification of Germany: It "would undermine the stability of the whole international situation and could endanger our security," she said. She kept up this view even after the people of Berlin had taken history into their own hands and demolished the barrier.

Also overlooked in most histories and much commentary is the role played by "people power" movements in non-Communist countries. Throughout the 1980s, democratic insurgencies in the Philippines and South Korea, as well as the long resistance of the anti-apartheid forces in South Africa, showed that when the ruled do not want to go on in the old way, all they really need do is to fold their arms. These examples were studied behind the Iron Curtain: Matynia's book on Poland makes a direct comparison case with South Africa, and leading Polish dissident Adam Michnik was a close observer of the gradual but impressive manner in which Spain evolved from a sort of fascistic theocracy into a civil and secular society.

Today, the memory of the "velvet revolution" or the "soft revolution" is very strong in Iran, where arrested intellectuals and activists are accused in so many words by the secret police of having a "velvet" agenda. In Tehran, alas, there are still many in the clerical leadership who believe, as the Communists no longer did, in their own primitive and oppressive ideology, and who are willing—if not, indeed, eager—to kill for it. (And the brutish Iranian mullahs secured the first great-power endorsement of their election theft from Vladimir Putin's Moscow, which, these days, is the seat of an aggressive, chauvinist, militarist, and clerically influenced regime.) So we still have our duties of solidarity with movements of transformation, and we can draw on the memory of a time when civilized peoples, so long forced to hold their tongues and hold their breath, all exhaled at the same moment and blew the old order away without a shot being fired."

Žižek

I cannot say that I am familiar with Slavoj Žižek's works. So far I have only read In Defense of Lost Causes (New York: Verso, 2008, 528 pp.), which I quite enjoyed.
The opus reassesses the 'Utopian' projects of the Left in this era of failed capitalism and calls for a new type of emancipatory politics: it is a shout in the wilderness, in search of a new Zeitgeist.
(Who said that the libertarian left was dead? Just read Chomsky for a taste of the possible in these impossible times.)
This description by the publisher may persuade you to have a go at the book, unless you are a primitive and virulent anti-socialist:

"Is global emancipation a lost cause? Are universal values outdated relics of an earlier age? In this combative major new work, philosophical sharpshooter Slavoj Zizek takes on the reigning ideology with a plea that we should re-appropriate several “lost causes,” and looks for the kernel of truth in the “totalitarian” politics of the past. Examining Heidegger’s seduction by fascism and Foucault’s flirtation with the Iranian Revolution, he suggests that these were the “right steps in the wrong direction.”
Highlighting the revolutionary terror of Robespierre, Mao and the Bolsheviks, Zizek argues that while these struggles ended in historic failure and monstrosity, this is not the entire story. There was, in fact, a redemptive moment that gets lost in the outright liberal-democratic rejection of revolutionary authoritarianism and the valorization of soft, consensual, decentralized politics. Zizek claims that, particularly in light of the forthcoming ecological crisis, we should reinvent revolutionary terror and the dictatorship of the proletariat in the struggle for universal emancipation. We need to courageously accept the return to this cause —even if we court the risk of a catastrophic disaster. In the words of Samuel Beckett, “Try again. Fail again. Fail better.”

For more on Žižek, visit, for instance, the entry on him in The Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy.

The Fall of the Wall (I)

This year marks not only the 60th anniversary of the People's Republic of China and the 10th of the resumption of Chinese sovereignty over Macau, but also, inter alia, the 20th anniversary of both the so-called 'incidents' at Tiananmen Square and the fall of the Berlin Wall.

On the latter event, the brilliant Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Žižek had this to say in the 9 November 2009 edition of The New York Times:

"20 Years of Collapse

TODAY is the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall. During this time of reflection, it is common to emphasize the miraculous nature of the events that began that day: a dream seemed to come true, the Communist regimes collapsed like a house of cards, and the world suddenly changed in ways that had been inconceivable only a few months earlier. Who in Poland could ever have imagined free elections with Lech Walesa as president?
However, when the sublime mist of the velvet revolutions was dispelled by the new democratic-capitalist reality, people reacted with an unavoidable disappointment that manifested itself, in turn, as nostalgia for the “good old” Communist times; as rightist, nationalist populism; and as renewed, belated anti-Communist paranoia.
The first two reactions are easy to comprehend. The same rightists who decades ago were shouting, “Better dead than red!” are now often heard mumbling, “Better red than eating hamburgers.” But the Communist nostalgia should not be taken too seriously: far from expressing an actual wish to return to the gray Socialist reality, it is more a form of mourning, of gently getting rid of the past. As for the rise of the rightist populism, it is not an Eastern European specialty, but a common feature of all countries caught in the vortex of globalization.
Much more interesting is the recent resurgence of anti-Communism from Hungary to Slovenia. During the autumn of 2006, large protests against the ruling Socialist Party paralyzed Hungary for weeks. Protesters linked the country’s economic crisis to its rule by successors of the Communist party. They denied the very legitimacy of the government, although it came to power through democratic elections. When the police went in to restore civil order, comparisons were drawn with the Soviet Army crushing the 1956 anti-Communist rebellion.
This new anti-Communist scare even goes after symbols. In June 2008, Lithuania passed a law prohibiting the public display of Communist images like the hammer and sickle, as well as the playing of the Soviet anthem. In April 2009, the Polish government proposed expanding a ban on totalitarian propaganda to include Communist books, clothing and other items: one could even be arrested for wearing a Che Guevara T-shirt.
No wonder that, in Slovenia, the main reproach of the populist right to the left is that it is the “force of continuity” with the old Communist regime. In such a suffocating atmosphere, new problems and challenges are reduced to the repetition of old struggles, up to the absurd claim (which sometimes arises in Poland and in Slovenia) that the advocacy of gay rights and legal abortion is part of a dark Communist plot to demoralize the nation.
Where does this resurrection of anti-Communism draw its strength from? Why were the old ghosts resuscitated in nations where many young people don’t even remember the Communist times? The new anti-Communism provides a simple answer to the question: “If capitalism is really so much better than Socialism, why are our lives still miserable?”
It is because, many believe, we are not really in capitalism: we do not yet have true democracy but only its deceiving mask, the same dark forces still pull the threads of power, a narrow sect of former Communists disguised as new owners and managers — nothing’s really changed, so we need another purge, the revolution has to be repeated ...
What these belated anti-Communists fail to realize is that the image they provide of their society comes uncannily close to the most abused traditional leftist image of capitalism: a society in which formal democracy merely conceals the reign of a wealthy minority. In other words, the newly born anti-Communists don’t get that what they are denouncing as perverted pseudo-capitalism simply is capitalism.
One can also argue that, when the Communist regimes collapsed, the disillusioned former Communists were effectively better suited to run the new capitalist economy than the populist dissidents. While the heroes of the anti-Communist protests continued to dwell in their dreams of a new society of justice, honesty and solidarity, the former Communists were able to ruthlessly accommodate themselves to the new capitalist rules and the new cruel world of market efficiency, inclusive of all the new and old dirty tricks and corruption.
A further twist is added by those countries in which Communists allowed the explosion of capitalism, while retaining political power: they seem to be more capitalist than the Western liberal capitalists themselves. In a crazy double reversal, capitalism won over Communism, but the price paid for this victory is that Communists are now beating capitalism in its own terrain.
This is why today’s China is so unsettling: capitalism has always seemed inextricably linked to democracy, and faced with the explosion of capitalism in the People’s Republic, many analysts still assume that political democracy will inevitably assert itself.
But what if this strain of authoritarian capitalism proves itself to be more efficient, more profitable, than our liberal capitalism? What if democracy is no longer the necessary and natural accompaniment of economic development, but its impediment?
If this is the case, then perhaps the disappointment at capitalism in the post-Communist countries should not be dismissed as a simple sign of the “immature” expectations of the people who didn’t possess a realistic image of capitalism.
When people protested Communist regimes in Eastern Europe, the large majority of them did not ask for capitalism. They wanted the freedom to live their lives outside state control, to come together and talk as they pleased; they wanted a life of simplicity and sincerity, liberated from the primitive ideological indoctrination and the prevailing cynical hypocrisy.
As many commentators observed, the ideals that led the protesters were to a large extent taken from the ruling Socialist ideology itself — people aspired to something that can most appropriately be designated as “Socialism with a human face.” Perhaps this attitude deserves a second chance.
This brings to mind the life and death of Victor Kravchenko, the Soviet engineer who, in 1944, defected during a trade mission to Washington and then wrote a best-selling memoir, “I Chose Freedom.” His first-person report on the horrors of Stalinism included a detailed account of the mass hunger in early-1930s Ukraine, where Kravchenko — then still a true believer in the system — helped enforce collectivization.
What most people know about Kravchenko ends in 1949. That year, he sued Les Lettres Françaises for libel after the French Communist weekly claimed that he was a drunk and a wife-beater and his memoir was the propaganda work of American spies. In the Paris courtroom, Soviet generals and Russian peasants took the witness stand to debate the truth of Kravchenko’s writings, and the trial grew from a personal suit to a spectacular indictment of the whole Stalinist system.
But immediately after his victory in the case, when Kravchenko was still being hailed all around the world as a cold war hero, he had the courage to speak out passionately against Joseph McCarthy’s witch hunts. “I believe profoundly,” he wrote, “that in the struggle against Communists and their organizations ... we cannot and should not resort to the methods and forms employed by the Communists.” His warning to Americans: to fight Stalinism in such a way was to court the danger of starting to resemble their opponent.
Kravchenko also became more and more obsessed with the inequalities of the Western world, and wrote a sequel to “I Chose Freedom” that was titled, significantly, “I Chose Justice.” He devoted himself to finding less exploitative forms of collectivization and wound up in Bolivia, where he squandered all his money trying to organize poor farmers. Crushed by this failure, he withdrew into private life and shot himself in 1966 at his home in New York.
How did we come to this? Deceived by 20th-century Communism and disillusioned with 21st-century capitalism, we can only hope for new Kravchenkos — and that they come to happier ends. On the search for justice, they will have to start from scratch. They will have to invent their own ideologies. They will be denounced as dangerous utopians, but they alone will have awakened from the utopian dream that holds the rest of us under its sway.

Slavoj Zizek, the international director of the Birkbeck Institute for the Humanities in London, is the author, most recently, of “First as Tragedy, Then as Farce.”".

We want our crosses!

Italy's reaction to the ECHR's decision was not surprising. Here is a report on the ensuing outcry .

Silvio Berlusconi even claims that Europe's Christian "roots" are being denied!

Italy is a mountain of contradictions. Nobody there really cares what the Pope preaches, but Italians somehow feel attached to religious-cum-cultural symbols which have no rightful place in state-run establishments of an officially "laicised" country.

Of  Latin Europe's 'Catholic' nations, Spain and Portugal have slowly progressed beyond such archaisms (although the Church still demands unwarranted respect and privileges, examples of which are tax exemptions and the concordats with the Holy See).

The French, as usual in such matters, are ahead of the pack. I admire their tradition of rigid and no-nonsense separation between the State and religion(s) and their model of 'assimilationist' multi-culturalism:  the former is one of the everlasting legacies of the Revolution of 1789, while the latter is a core feature of the unifying and egalitarian spirit of "la République".

Of course, Northern Europe does not have this problem with trivial objects: Luther and Calvin condemned the worshiping of symbols and icons.

No crucifixes please!

In the landmark Lautsi vs. Italy case, decided unanimously last week, the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) in Strasbourg found the Italian Republic in violation of parents' right to educate their children, as well as the freedom of religion (and of not having any religion belief) to which children are entitled, by requiring the display of crucifixes in classrooms of public schools.

Below is the ECHR's press release:

"CRUCIFIX IN CLASSROOMS:

(...)

Violation of Article 2 of Protocol No. 1 (right to education)

examined jointly with Article 9 (freedom of thought, conscience and religion)  

of the European Convention on Human Rights

Under Article 41 (just satisfaction) of the Convention, the Court awarded the applicant 5,000 euros (EUR) in respect of non-pecuniary damage. (The judgment is available only in French.)

Principal facts

The applicant, Ms Soile Lautsi, is an Italian national who lives in Abano Terme (Italy). In 2001-2002 her children, Dataico and Sami Albertin, aged 11 and 13 respectively, attended the State school “Istituto comprensivo statale Vittorino da Feltre” in Abano Terme. All of the classrooms had a crucifix on the wall, including those in which Ms Lautsi’s children had lessons. She considered that this was contrary to the principle of secularism by which she wished to bring up her children. She informed the school of her position, referring to a Court of Cassation judgment of 2000, which had found the presence of crucifixes in polling stations to be contrary to the principle of the secularism of the State. In May 2002 the school’s governing body decided to leave the crucifixes in the classrooms. A directive recommending such an approach was subsequently sent to all head teachers by the Ministry of State Education.

On 23 July 2002 the applicant complained to the Veneto Regional Administrative Court about the decision by the school’s governing body, on the ground that it infringed the constitutional principles of secularism and of impartiality on the part of the public authorities. The Ministry of State Education, which joined the proceedings as a party, emphasised that the impugned situation was provided for by royal decrees of 1924 and 1928. On 14 January 2004 the administrative court granted the applicant’s request that the case be submitted to the Constitutional Court for an examination of the constitutionality of the presence of a crucifix in classrooms. Before the Constitutional Court, the Government argued that such a display was natural, as the crucifix was not only a religious symbol but also, as the “flag” of the only Church named in the Constitution (the Catholic Church), a symbol of the Italian State. On 15 December 2004 the Constitutional Court held that it did not have jurisdiction, on the ground that the disputed provisions were statutory rather than legislative. The proceedings before the administrative court were resumed, and on 17 March 2005 that court dismissed the applicant’s complaint. It held that the crucifix was both the symbol of Italian history and culture, and consequently of Italian identity, and the symbol of the principles of equality, liberty and tolerance, as well as of the State’s secularism. By a judgment of 13 February 2006, the Consiglio di Stato dismissed the applicant’s appeal, on the ground that the cross had become one of the secular values of the Italian Constitution and represented the values of civil life.

Complaints, procedure and composition of the Court

The applicant alleged, in her own name and on behalf of her children, that the display of the crucifix in the State school attended by the latter was contrary to her right to ensure their education and teaching in conformity with her religious and philosophical convictions, within the meaning of Article 2 of Protocol No. 1. The display of the cross had also breached her freedom of conviction and religion, as protected by Article 9 of the Convention.  

The application was lodged with the European Court of Human Rights on 27 July 2006.

Judgment was given by a Chamber of seven judges, composed as follows:

Françoise Tulkens (Belgium), President,
Ireneu Cabral Barreto (Portugal),
Vladimiro Zagrebelsky (Italy),
Danutė Jočienė (Lithuania),
Dragoljub Popović (Serbia),
András Sajó (Hungary),
Işıl Karakaş (Turkey), judges,

and Sally Dollé, Section Registrar.

Decision of the Court

The presence of the crucifix – which it was impossible not to notice in the classrooms – could easily be interpreted by pupils of all ages as a religious sign and they would feel that they were being educated in a school environment bearing the stamp of a given religion. This could be encouraging for religious pupils, but also disturbing for pupils who practised other religions or were atheists, particularly if they belonged to religious minorities. The freedom not to believe in any religion (inherent in the freedom of religion guaranteed by the Convention) was not limited to the absence of religious services or religious education: it extended to practices and symbols which expressed a belief, a religion or atheism. This freedom deserved particular protection if it was the State which expressed a belief and the individual was placed in a situation which he or she could not avoid, or could do so only through a disproportionate effort and sacrifice.

The State was to refrain from imposing beliefs in premises where individuals were dependent on it. In particular, it was required to observe confessional neutrality in the context of public education, where attending classes was compulsory irrespective of religion, and where the aim should be to foster critical thinking in pupils.

The Court was unable to grasp how the display, in classrooms in State schools, of a symbol that could reasonably be associated with Catholicism (the majority religion in Italy) could serve the educational pluralism that was essential to the preservation of a “democratic society” as that was conceived by the Convention, a pluralism that was recognised by the Italian Constitutional Court.

The compulsory display of a symbol of a given confession in premises used by the public  authorities, and especially in classrooms, thus restricted the right of parents to educate their children in conformity with their convictions, and the right of children to believe or not to believe. The Court concluded, unanimously, that there had been a violation of Article 2 of Protocol No. 1 taken jointly with Article 9 of the Convention."

***

For the complete text of the judgment (in French), come here.

See also the ECHR Blog.

Kindle revisited

So far I have had no reason to regret buying the Kindle ebook reader (see my post on the subject from 1 November and respective comments).
On the contrary, I am very satisfied both as a user of the device and a customer of the Kindle Store.

I would like to add that most ebooks with the Mobipocket (.mobi) format are readable on the Kindle and quite a few of them may be downloaded for free from a host of websites. A leading one for the classics is Project Gutenberg.

Other ebooks, though not gratis, are nearly so. In fact, I have just purchased the complete collection of Joseph Conrad's novels for only US$3.00 (yes, no mistake, THREE!), and all of Friedrich Nietzsche's works for US$6.79!

I have found that, for recent publications, the average price of a Kindle ebook matches, or is even slightly lower than, the corresponding paperback version's (not including the savings on postal and delivery charges for printed materials, which can be significant; such charges may actually surpass the cost of the delivered books, depending on the number of items and their weight!).

Et sequens (V): ars gratia artis?!

Now kindly take a moment to compare the previous buildings to/with the project below (the Macau pavilion at next year's Shanghai World Expo; see this post too):

+

Et sequens (IV)

Rem Koolhaas's pièce de résistence is probably the CCTV building in Beijing:

Et sequens (III)

The previous post showed the "Casa do Cinema", in Porto, whereas this photo is of the "Casa da Música", in the same Portuguese city, a stunning achievement by Rem Koolhaas:

Et sequens (II)

One more Portuguese oeuvre, from Eduardo Souto de Moura:

Casa do Cinema in Porto, Portugal

Et sequens (I)

From another Portuguese architect, Aires Mateus:

Faculty of Sciences in Coimbra, Portugal

Siza

The renowned Portuguese architect Álvaro Siza Vieira is a descendant of the modernist tradition grounded on the Bauhaus movement.

A few masterpieces:

Faculty of Architecture in Porto, Portugal

Building in Berlin, Germany

Bauhaus (II)

The brief existence of the eponymous British post-punk/gothic band was a watershed in the history of rock music, and from which Peter Murphy and Love & Rockets drew their origins.

Their version of David Bowie's "Ziggy Stardust" is arguably better than the original:

Bauhaus (I)

I am a great admirer of the Bauhaus school (1919-1933), the bringers of true modernity -- Modernism -- into the realms of architecture, design and art in general.

Functionality, simplicity, sobriety and objectivity were key traits.

Names such as Walter Gropius, Mies van der Rohe, Paul Klee and Wassily Kandinsky stand out.

The Bauhaus seal

Walter Gropius

Bauhaus building in Dessau, Germany

Wassily Kandinsky
 "On White II" (1923)

"Where is my mind?"

From the soundtrack of David Fincher's cult film Fight Club (1999), the Pixies' fabulous single:

The Pixies

Great news!

A week from today Minotaur, by the Pixies, will be released worldwide.

It is a remastered collection of the band's materials, in two editions.

Watch this press release:

And read on (quoted from 4ad.com):

"Five classic 4AD releases from Pixies are going to be reissued as both Limited Edition and Deluxe Edition collector's sets entitled Minotaur. Spearheaded by Jeff Anderson, founder of A+R (Artist in Residence), who has put together expansive and eye-catching versions of releases by Nine Inch Nails, Beck and Sigur Ros - Minotaur will be available for pre-order at www.ainr.com beginning Monday, June 15, 2009. The Minotaur Deluxe Edition will retail for $175, while the Minotaur The Deluxe Edition will include all five Pixies studio albums - Come On Pilgrim (1987), Surfer Rosa (1988), Doolittle (1989), Bossanova (1990), and Trompe le Monde (1991) - on 24k layered CD and Blu-ray (five discs total), with reinterpreted artwork by Vaughan Oliver, the graphic designer who created all of the artwork that accompanied the Pixies' studio albums. Also included in the Deluxe Edition will be a DVD of a Pixies 1991 performance at the Brixton Academy in London, the group's videos, possible live tracks, and a 54-page book, all housed in a custom slipcase. The Minotaur Limited Edition version will include everything in the Deluxe Edition, as well as all five albums on 180 gram vinyl, a Giclee print of Oliver's artwork, and a 72-page hardcover book, all housed in an oversized custom clamshell cover.
Anderson explained the idea behind the set. "As a Pixies fan, I asked myself, 'How can we re-release this without making this just another box set?' I think we've all been down that road where you've purchased a box set and have been disappointed by only getting a few bonus tracks and a few extra photos. With the Pixies, because they remain such a contemporary band and their sound is still so relevant today, we wanted to re-introduce them to their fans, giving them something that they would truly appreciate and cherish. And also, how can we introduce the band to new fans? What soon followed was the idea of Vaughan Oliver."
Oliver - who was the resident album designer for 4AD - explains how he assembled the now instantly-recognizable album covers for the band. "My starting point would always be the music, reading the lyrics, talking with the band - what their preferences were, in film and painting. With the Pixies, it was work that was always close to my heart and my own personal aesthetic - the images that Charles [aka Black Francis] painted with his lyrics really struck a chord. His work is full of fantastic imagery that always appealed to me, and those were ideas I was trying to reflect with the packaging."
After discussing the project with Anderson, Oliver came up with an intriguing idea. "I said, 'That was then, this is now. Why don't we do a whole new body of work? It's all born of the same lyrics and albums - it would be evolving the ideas we had in the original packages.' I worked with the same photographer who I worked with back then, Simon Larbalestier. If there were a 'fifth Pixie,' it would have been Simon - his work so suited what they were doing. Simon's gone out and shot a whole new body of work. He was a bit panicked at first, he said, 'The old sleeves - with the topless Spanish dancer, the red planet - have become iconic.' I said to Simon, 'Don't be scared. You're 20 years on, you're a better photographer. Let's take all those same things and do a new body of work.' He shot some amazing images that I think surpass what we did first time around."
An occasional design tutor at the University of the Creative Arts in Epsom [Surrey, U.K.] whilst still running his v23 design business, Oliver called upon his students for some input for the Pixies set. "I selected a team of students under my direction to work with the titles in the track listing, in a three dimensional way. Cutting the track listing out of cards, shining light through it, making the track titles from nails - all very organic. We're using the type as 'image.' There's a link when you look at them visually with the images that I'm putting next to them in the book."
Upon seeing the gorgeous packaging and effort that has gone into both the Deluxe and Limited Editions of Minotaur, Pixies fans worldwide will get a chance to experience the Pixies in a whole new manner, thanks to Anderson, Oliver, and Larbalestier. "We design some interesting and innovative packages," adds Anderson. "We're not inexpensive, but I think there are still people out there who don't mind paying for great quality."
For more information and to pre-order, visit www.ainr.com. "

Max Hastings

The first book downloaded onto my Kindle: Max Hastings's latest work, Finest Years: Churchill as Warlord, 1940-1945 (HarperPress, 2009; file size: 1713 KB; print length: 576 pages).

A very favourable review of this study appeared in The Sunday Times.

History buffs will remember two of the author's other outstanding books, Armageddon: The Battle for Germany, 1944-1945 and Nemesis: The Battle for Japan, 1944-1945.

Max Hastings is at the top of the game, and ranks alongside luminaries of military history such as John Keegan, Richard Overy and Antony Beevor.

Kindle

I have very recently become the proud owner of a second-generation Kindle e-book reading device (6" display, U.S. & international wireless), a.k.a. Kindle 2.
I shan't bore you with my descriptions or critiques; a simple peek at this site (and especially the videos embedded therein) will make all that you need to know self-evident.

One country, two museums

Watch this video on the history of the National Palace Museum's treasures, from their beginnings and raison d'être as the Chinese emperors' personal items, collected over the centuries; their transformation into assets of the Palace Museum, opened in 1925 and located inside Beijing's Forbidden City; their removal, in 1933, and constant relocation during the Japanese occupation of China; to the transport in 1948-1949, by order of Chiang Kai-shek, of the most valuable pieces to Taiwan, where they remain to this day as prized possessions of the Taipei successor, and rival, to the original and extant Palace Museum in Beijing.

Yongzheng Era in Taipei

The National Palace Museum in Taipei is currently holding an important exhibit, Harmony and Integrity: The Yongzheng Emperor and His Times, until 10 January 2010.

For more information, visit the exhibit's website here.
Quite significant is the fact that some of the works of art shown in Taipei are on loan from the Palace Museum in Beijing.

The Yongzheng Emperor

(1678-1735; reign: 1722-1735)

Crossroads

An ongoing series of articles and media by The Guardian on China's development, interactions, challenges, hopes and fears in this defining epoch of the Middle Kingdom's (and the world's) history, "China at the crossroads" is well worth following closely.

A debate (?) on the debate

A critique by Lisa Miller in Newsweek on the (ir)relevance of the God debate:

"Two White Guys Walk Into a Bar …

Let's move beyond faith versus reason.

Published Oct 22, 2009

From the magazine issue dated Nov 2, 2009

Fourteen minutes into the new film Collision, my fingers started to itch for the fast-forward button. I desperately scanned the movie's press materials: "How long can this go on?" I wondered. (Answer: 90 minutes.) The documentary, which opens this week, shows the public intellectual Christopher Hitchens and an Idaho pastor named Douglas Wilson arguing in one drab venue after another over whether Christianity is "good for the world." So uncinematic is this picture—two middle-aged white men talking—that my attention insistently wandered toward anything humanizing and finally dwelled, for too long perhaps, on a fleck of something on Hitchens's eyelash. All the while Hitchens and Wilson went on and on and on and on, always well mannered, never conceding a thing. (Click here to follow Lisa Miller)

Really, what's the point of all this?

For five years, since the publication of Sam Harris's The End of Faith, the so-called faith-versus-reason debate has been a favorite pastime of certain secularists and intellectuals, the subject of innumerable books and lecture series. Three charismatic men—Harris, Richard Dawkins, and Hitchens (who is a NEWSWEEK contributor)—have not just dominated the conversation, they've crushed it. And so they've become celebrities. Together they've sold more than 3 million books worldwide, which suggests they may be in this for more than just our edification.

Their polemics were exciting at first. They gave voice—and, better, status—to the 12 percent of Americans who say they don't believe in God. As advocates for those whose lack of belief has historically made them suspect, Harris et al. have been extremely important.

But this version of the conversation has gone on too long. We have allowed three people to frame it; its terms—submitting God to rational proofs and watching God fail—are theirs. We in the media have to bear some of that responsibility. Just as we covered Jerry Falwell when he said the Teletubby Tinky Winky was gay, we cover the "new atheists" because following controversy is part of what we do. As religion editor of NEWSWEEK, I have done my share of enabling these battles, most recently in a September interview with Dawkins. But we can't shoulder all the blame. The atheists are, more than other interest groups, joyous cannibals and regurgitators of their own ideas. They thrive online, where like adolescent boys they rehash their rhetorical victories to their own delight.

The whole thing has started to feel like being trapped in a seminar room with the three smartest guys in school, each showing off to impress … whom? Let's move on.

There are other voices out there, and other, possibly more productive ways to frame a conversation about the benefits and potential dangers of religious faith. In 2003 the historian and poet Jennifer Hecht wrote Doubt: A History, an exhaustive survey of atheism. She advises readers to investigate questions of belief like a poet, rather than like a scientist. "It is easier to force yourself to be clear," she writes, "if you avoid using believer, agnostic, and atheist and just try to say what you think about what we are and what's out there." Hecht is as much of an atheist as Hitchens and Harris, she says, but she approaches questions about the usefulness of religion with an appreciation of what she calls "paradox and mystery and cosmic crunch." "The more I learn, the more complicated things get, the more sympathy I have with religion," she told me one recent morning by phone. "I don't think it's so bad if religion survives, if it's getting together once a week and singing a song in a beautiful building, to commemorate life's most important moments."

This week Harvard's humanist chaplain Greg Epstein comes out with Good Without God, a book arguing that people can have everything religion offers—community, transcendence, and, above all, morality—without the supernatural. This seems to me self-evident, yet the larger point is important. We need urgently to talk about these things: ethics, progress, education, science, democracy, tolerance, and justice—and to understand the reasons why religion can (but does not always) hamper their flourishing. This new conversation won't be sexy, but let's face it: neither is two white men in a pub sparring over God."

Another debate on religion (III)

Christopher Hitchens's latest article in Slate:

"Faith No More 

What I've learned from debating religious people around the world.

This week sees the opening on various cinema marquees of the film Collision: a buddy-and-road movie featuring last year's debates between Pastor Douglas Wilson, who is a senior fellow at New St. Andrew's College, and your humble servant. (If I may be forgiven, it's also available on DVD, and you can buy our little book of exchanges, Is Christianity Good for the World?)

Newsweek's reviewer beseeches you not to go and see the film, largely on the grounds that it features two middle-aged white men trying to establish which one is the dominant male. I would have thought that this would be reason enough to buy a ticket, but perhaps she would have preferred the debate held in London last week featuring me and Stephen Fry (two magnificent specimens of white mammalhood) versus a female member of Parliament who is a Tory Catholic convert and the Roman Catholic archbishop of Abuja, Nigeria. It filled one of the largest halls in the city, and many people had to be turned away. For a combination of reasons, the subject of religion is back where it always ought to be—at the very center of any argument about the clash of world views.

Ever since I invited any champion of faith to debate with me in the spring of 2007, I have been very impressed by the willingness of the other side to take me, and my allies, up on the offer. A renowned scholar like Richard Dawkins, who is quite used to filling halls wherever he goes with his explanations of biology, is now finding himself on platforms with dedicated people who really, truly do not believe that evolution is anything more than "a theory." I have been all over the South, in front of capacity and overflow crowds, exchanging views with Protestants most of the time, but also with Catholics and, in New York and the West Coast and Canada, with—mostly Reform—Jews in large and well-attended synagogues. (So far no invitations from Orthodox Jews, Mormons, or Muslims.)

I haven't yet run into an argument that has made me want to change my mind. After all, a believing religious person, however brilliant or however good in debate, is compelled to stick fairly closely to a "script" that is known in advance, and known to me, too. However, I have discovered that the so-called Christian right is much less monolithic, and very much more polite and hospitable, than I would once have thought, or than most liberals believe. I haven't been asked to Bob Jones University yet, but I have been invited to Jerry Falwell's old Liberty University campus in Virginia, even though we haven't yet agreed on the terms.

Wilson isn't one of those evasive Christians who mumble apologetically about how some of the Bible stories are really just "metaphors." He is willing to maintain very staunchly that Jesus of Nazareth was the Christ and that his sacrifice redeems our state of sin, which in turn is the outcome of our rebellion against God. He doesn't waffle when asked why God allows so much evil and suffering—of course he "allows" it since it is the inescapable state of rebellious sinners. I much prefer this sincerity to the vague and Python-esque witterings of the interfaith and ecumenical groups who barely respect their own traditions and who look upon faith as just another word for community organizing. (Incidentally, just when is President Barack Obama going to decide which church he attends?)

Usually, when I ask some Calvinist whether he is really a Calvinist (in the sense, say, of believing that I will end up in hell), there is a slight reluctance to say yes, and a slight wince from his congregation. I have come to the conclusion that this has something to do with the justly famed tradition of Southern hospitality: You can't very easily invite somebody to your church and then to supper and inform him that he's marked for perdition. More to the point, though, you soon discover that many of those attending are not so sure about all the doctrines, either, just as you very swiftly find out that a vast number of Catholics don't truly believe more than about half of what their church instructs them to think. Every now and then I read reports of polls that tell me that more Americans believe in the virgin birth or the devil than believe in Darwinism: I'd be pretty sure that at least some of these are unwilling to confess their doubts to someone who calls them up on their kitchen phone. Meanwhile, by any measurement, the number of those who profess allegiance to no church (I am not claiming these as atheists, just skeptics) are the fastest-growing minority in America. And don't tell me that warfare increases faith and that there are no unbelievers in foxholes: Only recently I was invited to a very spirited meeting of the freethinkers' group at the Air Force Academy in Colorado Springs, Colo., where there has been a revolt against on-campus proselytizing by biblical-literalist instructors.

Thanks to the foolishness of the "intelligent design" faction, which has tried with ignominious un-success to smuggle the teaching of creationism into our schools under a name that is plainly stupid rather than intelligent, and thanks to the ceaseless preaching of hatred and violence against our society by the fanatics of another faith, as well as other related behavior, such as the mad attempt by messianic Jews to steal the land of other people, the secular movement in the United States is acquiring a confidence that it has not known in years, while many of those who put their faith in revelation and prophecy and prayer are feeling the need to give an account of themselves. This is a wholly good development, and it is part of the pluralism and polycentrism that distinguish the sort of society that we have to defend against all enemies, foreign and domestic."