Letter to the New Left
January 27, 2008
C. Wright Mills wrote this letter nearly half a century back (New Left Review, No. 5, September-October 1960), but most the arguments made herein — especially the critique of end-of-ideology proponents, the media, and ‘Victorian Marxists’ — remain just as valid today.
WHEN I settle down to write to you, I feel somehow “freer” than usual. The reason, I suppose, is that most of the time I am writing for people whose ambiguities and values I imagine to be rather different from mine; but with you, I feel enough in common with you to allow us “to get on with it” in more positive ways. Reading your book, Out of Apathy, prompts me to write to you about several problems I think we now face. On none of these can I hope to be definitive; I only want to raise a few questions.
It is no exaggeration to say that since the end of World War II in Britain and the United States smug conservatives, tired liberals and disillusioned radicals have carried on a very wearied discourse in which issues are blurred and potential debate muted; the sickness of complacency has prevailed, the bi-partisan banality flourished. There is no need — after your book — to explain again why all this has come about among “people in general” in the NATO countries; but it may be worthwhile to examine one style of cultural work that is in effect an intellectual celebration of apathy.
Copyright regime vs. civil liberties
January 21, 2008
A lecture by the founder of the Pirate Party, their policies are not only about piracy, privacy and the internet they are also important in challenging patents that prevent 3rd world countries such as in Africa legally producing the medicine they require to control Aids and other diseases.
What’s Your Consumption Factor?
January 8, 2008
Jared Diamond argues that it is consumption, rather than a population explosion that poses the real threat to the globe.
TO mathematicians, 32 is an interesting number: it’s 2 raised to the fifth power, 2 times 2 times 2 times 2 times 2. To economists, 32 is even more special, because it measures the difference in lifestyles between the first world and the developing world. The average rates at which people consume resources like oil and metals, and produce wastes like plastics and greenhouse gases, are about 32 times higher in North America, Western Europe, Japan and Australia than they are in the developing world. That factor of 32 has big consequences. Read the rest of this entry »
Justify My War
January 5, 2008
Today’s guest editorial is actually the trailer for a film my friend Jason Coppola is working on.
Justify My War is a documentary film about our culture’s relationship to war. It re-examines how we rationalize it, our justifications for fighting it, what happens when our beliefs are shattered by the reality of it, and what we can learn from it. While it is not about the war in Iraq, it does attempt to look at ourselves through it.
Adrift in a Sea of Booze
December 1, 2007
Alexander Cockburn reflects on the “Emblems of the Bush Age”. Maybe they do hate ‘our’ way of life.
Politicians here still parrot Nancy Reagan’s “Just Say No” campaign against teen drug use. Barrack Obama’s in trouble for supposedly having told teens as part of his counseling that he too used bad drugs including heroin. But the needle and the increasingly potent joint don’t hold a candle to simple booze in which the current cohort, stretching from mid-teen high schoolers through to college age kids, is marinating itself into weekly oblivion. Though there are those who deprecate claims that youth is drinking more than earlier cohorts, it seems a new lost generation is in the making, emblem of the Bush Age.
One big concern touted in the press endlessly used to be date-rape, with the girl-victim laid out by drugs. Now it’s binge-drinking. High schoolers, and in particular high school girls, drink hard liquor in large quantities as fast as they can and pass out. Sometimes they get gang-raped and wake up pregnant.
A lesson in humility for the smug West
October 22, 2007
Gandhi was once asked what he thought of Western civilization. ‘It would be a good idea’, he replied.
‘ Many of the western values we think of as superior came from the East and our blind arrogance hurts our standing in the world’, argues William Dalrymple in the following essay.
About 100 miles south of Delhi, where I live, lie the ruins of the Mughal capital, Fateh-pur Sikri. This was built by the Emperor Akbar at the end of the 16th century. Here Akbar would listen carefully as philosophers, mystics and holy men of different faiths debated the merits of their different beliefs in what is the earliest known experiment in formal inter-religious dialogue.
Representatives of Muslims (Sunni and Shi’ite as well as Sufi), Hindus (followers of Shiva and Vishnu as well as Hindu atheists), Christians, Jains, Jews, Buddhists and Zoroastrians came together to discuss where they differed and how they could live together.
Muslim rulers are not usually thought of in the West as standard-bearers of freedom of thought; but Akbar was obsessed with exploring the issues of religious truth, and with as open a mind as possible, declaring: “No man should be interfered with on account of religion, and anyone is to be allowed to go over to any religion that pleases him.” He also argued for what he called “the pursuit of reason” rather than “reliance on the marshy land of tradition”.
All this took place when in London, Jesuits were being hung, drawn and quartered outside Tyburn, in Spain and Portu-gal the Inquisition was torturing anyone who defied the dogmas of the Catholic church, and in Rome Giordano Bruno was being burnt at the stake in Campo de’Fiori.
It is worth emphasising Akbar, for he – the greatest ruler of the most populous of all Muslim states – represented in one man so many of the values that we in the West are often apt to claim for ourselves. I am thinking here especially of Douglas Murray, a young neocon pup, who wrote in The Spectator last week that he “was not afraid to say the West’s values are better”, and in which he accused anyone who said to the contrary of moral confusion: “Decades of intense cultural rela-tivism and designer tribalism have made us terrified of passing judgment,” he wrote.
The article was a curtain-opener for an Intelligence Squared debate in which he and I faced each other, along with David Aaronovitch, Charlie Glass, Ibn Warraq and Tariq Ramadan, over the motion: “We should not be reluctant to assert the superiority of western values”. (The motion was eventually carried, I regret to say.)
Murray named western values as follows: the rule of law, parliamentary democracy, equality, and freedom of expression and conscience. He also argued that the Judeo-Christian tradition is the ethical source of these values.
Yet where do these ideas actually come from? Both Judaism and Christianity were not born in Washington or London, however much the Victorians liked to think of God as an Englishman. Instead they were born in Pales-tine, while Christianity received its intellectual superstructure in cities such as Antioch, Constanti-nople and Alexandria. At the Council of Nicea, where the words of the Creed were thrashed out in 325, there were more bishops from Persia and India than from western Europe.
Judaism and Christianity are every bit as much eastern religions as Islam or Buddhism. So much that we today value – universities, paper, the book, printing – were transmitted from East to West via the Islamic world, in most cases entering western Europe in the Middle Ages via Islamic Spain.
And where was the first law code drawn up? In Athens or London? Actually, no – it was the invention of Hammurabi, in ancient Iraq. Who was the first ruler to emphasise the importance of the equality of his subjects? The Buddhist Indian Emperor Ashoka in the third century BC, set down in stone basic freedoms for all his people, and did not exclude women and slaves, as Aristotle had done.
In the real world, East and West do not have separate and compartmentalised sets of values. Does a Midwestern Baptist have the same values as an urbane Richard Dawkins-read-ing atheist? Do Aung San Suu Kyi and the Dalai Lama belong to the same ethical tradition as Osama Bin Laden?
In the East as in the West there is a huge variety of ethical systems, but surprisingly similar ideals, and ideas of good and evil. To cherry-pick your favourite universal humanistic ideals, and call them western, then to imply that their opposites are somehow eastern values is simply bigoted and silly, as well as unhistorical.
The great historian of the Crusades, Sir Steven Runciman, knew better. As he wrote at the end of his three-volume history: “Our civilisation has grown . . . out of the long sequence of interaction and fusion between Orient and Occident.” He is right. The best in both eastern and western civilisation come not from asserting your own superiority, but instead from having the humility to learn from what is good in others, as well as to recognise your own past mistakes. Ramming your ideas down the throats of others is rarely a productive tactic.
There are lessons here from our own past. European history is full of monarchies, dictatorships and tyrannies, some of which – such as those of Salazar, Tito and Franco – survived into the 1970s and 1980s. The relatively recent triumph of democracy across Europe has less to do with some biologically inherent western love of freedom, than with an ability to learn humbly from the mistakes of the past – notably the millions of deaths that took place due to western ideologies such as Marxism, fas-cism and Nazism.
These movements were not freak departures from form, so much as terrible expressions of the darker side of western civilisation, including our long traditions of antisemitism at home.
Alongside this we also have history of exporting genocide abroad in the worst excesses of western colonialism – which, like the Holocaust, comes from treating the nonwestern other as untermenschen, as savage and somehow subhuman.
For though we like to ignore it, and like to think of ourselves as paragons of peace and freedom, the West has a strong militaristic tradition of attacking and invading the countries of those we think of as savages, and of wiping out the less-developed peoples of four continents as part of our civilising mission. The list of western genocides that preceded and set the scene for the Holocaust is a terrible one.
The Tasmanian Aborigines were wiped out by British hunting parties who were given licences to exterminate this “inferior race” whom the colonial authorities said should be “hunted down like wild beasts and destroyed”. Many were caught in traps, before being tortured or burnt alive.
The same fate saw us exterminate the Caribs of the Caribbean, the Guanches of the Canary Islands, as well as tribe after tribe of Native Americans. The European slave trade forcibly abducted 15m Africans and killed as many more.
It was this tradition of colonial genocide that prepared the ground for the greatest western crime of all – the industrial extermination of 6m Jews whom the Nazis looked upon as an inferior, nonwestern and semitic intrusion in the Aryan West.
For all our achievements in and emancipating women and slaves, in giving social freedoms and human rights to the individual; for allthat is remarkable and beautiful in ourart, literature and science, our continuing tradition of arrogantly asserting this perceived superiority has led to all that is most shameful and self-de-feating in western history.
The complaints change – a hundred years ago our Victorian ancestors accused the Islamic world of being sensuous and decadent, with an overdeveloped penchant for sodomy; now Martin Amis attacks it for what he believes is its mass sexual frustration and homophobia. Only the sense of superiority remains the same. If the East does not share our particular sensibility at any given moment of history it is invariably told that it is wrong and we are right.
Tragically, this western tradition of failing to respect other cultures and treating the other as untermenschen has not completely died. We might now recognise that genocide is wrong, yet 30 years after the debacle of Vietnam and Cambodia and My Lai, the cadaver of western colonialism has yet again emerged shuddering from its shallow grave. One only has to think of the massacres of Iraqi civilians in in Falluja or the disgusting treatment meted out to the prisoners of Abu Ghraib to see how the cultural assertiveness of the neocons has brought these traditions of treating Arabs as subhuman back from the dead.
Yet the briefest look at the foreign policy of the Bush administration surely gives a textbook example of the futility of trying to impose your values and ideas – even one so noble as democracy – on another people down the barrel of a gun, rather than through example and dialogue.
In Iraq itself, we have succeeded in destroying a formerly prosperous and secular country, and creating the largest refugee problem in the modern Middle East: 4m Iraqis have now been forced abroad.
Elsewhere in the Middle East, the US attempt to push democracy in the region has succeeded in turning Muslim opinion against its old client proxies – by and large corrupt, decadent monarchies and decaying nationalist parties. But rather than turning to liberal secular parties, as the neocons assumed they would, Muslims have everywhere lined up behind those parties that have most clearly been seen to stand up against aggressive US intervention in the region, namely the religious parties of political Islam.
Last week, the Islamic world showed us the sort of gesture that is needed at this time. In a letter addressed to Pope Benedict and other Christian leaders, 138 prominent Muslim scholars from every sect of Islam urged Christian leaders “to come together with us on the common essentials of our two religions.” It will be interesting to see if any western leaders now reciprocate.
We have much to be proud of in the West; but it is in the arrogant and forceful assertion of the superiority of western values that we have consistently undermined not only all that is most precious in our civilisation, but also our own foreign policies and standing in the world. Another value, much admired in both East and West, might be a simple solution here: a little old-fashioned humility.
William Dalrymple’s new book, The Last Mughal: The Fall of a Dynasty, Delhi 1857, published by Bloomsbury, has just been awarded the Duff Cooper Prize for history
Pakistan’s Mercenary Elites
October 9, 2007
The Pakistani Air Force — or Air Farce as some within its ranks prefer to call it — has just bombed women and children in North Waziristan, BBC reports. In the following highlights from M. Shahid Alam’s scathing indictment of the Pakistani military we learn of its new role as Washington’s mercenary proxy.
In Pakistan, the US effected regime change without a change of regime. There was no need for an invasion, no need to fire a shot, no need for covert operations. At the first American touch, almost overnight, a terrible beauty was born. Instantly, the US had drafted the Pakistani military, nay the Pakistani state, to wage war against Islamic ‘extremists.’ The US had gained an army: and Pakistan’s military dictators had gained longevity.
The ease with which Pakistan’s sovereignty was terminated, the speed of this transaction, and no less the completeness of the foreign take-over, speaks volumes about Pakistan’s history, the nature of her ruling elites, the timbre of her ‘national’ institutions, and the alienation, degradation and dereliction of Pakistan’s middle classes. Within a few years of her birth, the state was privatized by landlords, generals and bureaucrats: three factions created, nurtured and guided into positions of leadership by the British.
Instead of mobilizing the people, instead of educating them in the values of citizenship, instead of enriching Islamic traditions, instead of building a national economy, instead of developing indigenous technologies, Pakistan’s ruling elites built bridges to the United States, to the US military, to foreign corporations, and to US-dominated multilateral institutions to create a technologically weak, a debt-ridden, and financially dependent economy controlled from outside through local elites…
For sixty years, Pakistan has been managed by different factions of its ruling elites – the military, bureaucracy, landlords – taking turns to plunder the people, competing against each other to serve foreign masters, at first covertly, but of late more openly, more blatantly, more treasonously. So complete now is the alienation of the domestic elites from their own society that their bidding against each other, the domestic competition to sell the institutions of the ‘state’ is now conducted in open view.
In order to stifle resistance, this dependent state methodically creates a weak, alienated, demoralized, and corrupt society. By failing to provide education, skills, and jobs, the state forces people to look outward, to turn to foreign shores for education, for jobs, and cultural inspiration. For every person who leaves for foreign shores, there are ten who are forced to stay at home, and whose education, careers, and very lives are organized around the chance of leaving the country. Pakistani society increasingly consists of would-be migrants waiting for their chance to dash out of the country’s airports, ports and border-crossings.
It is the middle classes now who ape the elites, who in turn have been aping their foreign masters for more than a century. As English increasingly becomes the passport to success, they are forsaking their native languages. In the colonial era, the elites sent their children to the grammar schools, the missionary schools, and then they were packed off to Cambridge and Oxford. On succeeding their white masters, these ‘whitened’ natives brandished their command of English as the visible symbol of their new elevation to power. It marked them off from the ‘natives’ over whom they now ruled. A new caste had emerged, the native ‘whites’ segregated from their ‘backward’ cousins by their alien language, their affluence, their Western loyalties and dress, their moral turpitude, and their Western vacations and honeymoons.
The most damaging product of this alienation has been a deepening intellectual sterility. Despite the proliferation of degrees, every new generation of Pakistanis is intellectually more sterile than its predecessor. Each new generation has eagerly surrendered the traditional virtues of its predecessor without acquiring the virtues of its masters, their scholarship, their energy, and the humanity which they practice among their own kind. The aping and mimicking of the diseases of foreign masters is far easier than the cultivation of the virtues that distinguish them, that are the sources of their power over their dark subjects.
Yet, resistance revives in some troubled hearts. At some point, this wholesale degradation of a society, this prostitution of national institutions, this miscegenation of foreign and native elites, produces revulsion in a few sensitive hearts. It gives birth to anger, art, struggle, new theories, and hopes for regenerating society.
But this regeneration is arduous. The mongrel elites have raised many barriers, they have strung barbed-wire fences with watch-towers across the country’s landscape. They have trained a mercenary military and perfidious police, led by officers schooled in the arts of repressing dissent. However, it is not these overt forces of repression alone that weaken and deflect the resistance.
The resistance can stand up to repression if it resonates with the people, if it can engage, stir, and mobilize them behind the cause of justice. But the alienation in society is so deep, the demoralization and apathy so complete that the few sensitive souls who choose to resist are left to twist in the wind, unsupported, unshielded, to be singled out and decapitated by the mercenary military and police.
Yet, Pakistan is not without hope. In one corner of Pakistan, that hope comes from the sons and daughters of the mountains, yet uncontaminated by ‘civilization,’ firm in their faith, clear in their conviction, proud of their heritage, and ready to fight for their dignity. Though unschooled, they are clear-eyed as the eagle of the mountains. Their poverty steels their determination. They stood up against the Soviet marauders: and defeated them. Today, they are standing up again to reclaim their dignity and their lands from foreigners and native mercenaries.
In Pakistan now, as in much of the Islamic world, the alienation of the institutions of the state has reached its climax. In Iraq, the United States could not have restored colonialism without planting her boots on the ground. In Iran too, they dare not dream of capturing the state without boots on the ground. In Pakistan, however, the task of regime change has been truly a cake walk: it was achieved with Pakistani boots on the ground.
A US weekly, Newsweek, has written that the Pentagon “wants [Musharraf] to turn much of Pakistan’s military into a counterinsurgency force, trained and equipped to combat Al-Qaeda and its extremist supporters along the Afghan border.” There, you have it – dear Pakistanis – in clear, bold print. What is this if not a plan for plunging your country into civil war, into a carnage far worse than what the Algerians have gone through?
How is it that the Pentagon dares to make such outlandish demands on the Pakistani army? The answer is simple. They do it because they know for a certainty that Pakistan’s elites are eager to deliver; they know that Pakistan’s mercenary-generals compete for American patronage; and Pakistan’s scavenger-politicians crawl to Washington begging not to be left out of the deals to sell the Pakistani state. Worse, until recently, Pakistanis have watched from the sidelines, or turned away, and let it happen.
For the first time now, a tiny segment of Pakistan’s middle classes, the lawyers – though still outfitted in the ridiculous black attire given them by their erstwhile English masters – have stuck out their necks against the mercenary-generals, against the mercenary military, against the commodification of their state. It is an auspicious turning point for Pakistan.
It is a sign that the Iqbalian spirit stirs a few Pakistanis. And observe what it has already accomplished. A few hundred Iqbalians have put the mercenary-generals on notice. The mercenary-generals postured, they scowled, they threatened, in desperation they turned to their masters for advice, they called up the scavenger-politicians to provide civilian cover. In short, for a brief moment, there was panic in the top ranks of the mercenary military.
For a brief moment only. The mercenary generals will not surrender so soon, or so easily. Indeed, it does not matter if one batch of mercenary-generals departs the scene: many more wait in the wings to take their place. If Pakistanis wish to avert civil war – and a bloody civil war it will be – then they must steel their hearts, they must gather courage, they must plan, they must organize, they must mobilize to take back their country, their state, and their military: to take it back definitively and with a clear understanding of how to make this nationalist appropriation irrevocable.
The lawyers alone cannot do it for them; when they become too troublesome, the mercenary state will start disappearing the lawyers. Nevertheless, change will come to Pakistan: for those who can read the signs, the writing is on the wall. Pakistan’s mercenary elites have hitched their wagon to the US ‘global war on terror.’ The United States will direct this war, and it will be a dirty war. As in Iraq, American experts in counterinsurgency will not hesitate to turn Pakistan into a Guatemala or worse.
Will Pakistanis dare to exert to make a stand for the change they want? If they choose to stay unconcerned, unthinking, disengaged, impassive, change will be imposed on them by the mercenary state. They will find themselves being dragged through a dirty war: many will loose their lives. Disappearances, executions, arbitrary arrests, in short, state terror will become common: the order of the day.
If Pakistanis dare to change themselves, they can choose the change they want: to make the state work for them not against them, to reclaim history, to become the historical force that produces change. However, this change demands a price, a price in will, values and sacrifice. Pakistanis must search their hearts to revive the fire they have smothered for too long: the will to struggle, to resist, to live in dignity, connected to their history, drawing on their best traditions to forge a future that they will control. If they fail now, the game is lost. It may be lost forever.
Pakistanis can learn from Latin America, whose oppressed peoples – in particular, their indigenous people – after five centuries of oppression are raising their heads everywhere. Together, they are throwing off the shackles of the predatory state, the mercenary state that collaborated with a succession of Empires to destroy their lives, their hopes, their struggles. Today, they are reclaiming the state in Venezuela, in Bolivia, in Ecuador, in Nicaragua, and they are getting ever closer to victory across the entire continent.
The United States today is powerless to roll back these revolutions. It is powerless because the struggles of oppressed peoples are interconnected, interwoven. When the dispossessed resist in Palestine, when Iraqis battle behemoths in their country, when underdogs make a stand in Lebanon, when Afghan peasants run circles around armies of occupation: in short, when the wretched of the earth tie down the Empire in West Asia, they raise hopes of liberation in every quarter of the world, even amongst the oppressed classes in the very centers of power.
The struggles of the past six years in West Asia have quickened the pace of history: they have opened a window for the liberation of the oppressed peoples everywhere. Just when the Empire was hatching its Project for the New American Century, history decided otherwise. It will be a new century alright, but there is scarce a doubt six years later that it will not be an American century, a reality that Americans should have the courage to accept graciously. Instead, it will be multipolar century, with many centers of power, scattered across all the continents of the world. Once again, power is being decentralized, and we can hope that this new round of decentralization will produce more enduring results than the last one. The men and women leading the new decentralization are a new breed: they have not been chosen by their erstwhile masters.
It is for Pakistanis now to seize this historical moment, to join the forward march of history. The historic changes underway in Latin America, and the new forms of resistance being forged in Iraq, Lebanon, Afghanistan and Palestine are delivering new hope, new ideas, and new inspiration to oppressed peoples everywhere. Global empires are too costly to be sustained anymore: that is the singular message that Iraqis and Afghans are delivering to the world.
Will Pakistanis dare to join this universal struggle, harness its power, and seize the scales of justice? Will they follow the lead of the brave lawyers so that the streets of every city, every town, every village in Pakistan reverberate with their cries for honor and justice? Or will they choose to lengthen their vegetative séance, embrace ignominious death, and become the litter in the graveyard of history, their epitaph written by the foreign masters they have served for so long and so well?
These questions are historical: they are also urgent. The choices before Pakistanis are clear: it is life or death. If they fail to act now, they will concede the stage to the Taliban and the mercenary elites. May the Pakistanis ponder deeply for an answer: may they choose to walk in the paths of justice: and may their difficult journey be victorious.
M. Shahid Alam is professor of economics at Northeastern University. He is author of Challenging the New Orientalism (2007). He may be contacted at alqalam02760@yahoo.com. Visit his website at: http://aslama.org. © M. Shahid Alam.
A Message to Black Britain?
August 29, 2007
So the British establishment erects Mandela a statue [1], and Mandela goes on to absolve it of its responsibility towards eliminating the barriers that lead to low achievement and violence in inner cities. ‘At the start of a visit to Britain to celebrate his own life’, reports The Independent, Mandela ‘made an impassioned appeal for leading black Britons to take a lead in countering violence and low achievement in the inner cities.’ The article is titled, ‘Mandela’s message to Black Britain’. No similar admonitions as far as I am aware were offered ‘White’ Britain. By implication, the violence and low achievement are a Black problem as no mention is made of the structural reasons.
I am reminded of something a friend had told me recently. One of her in-laws is of a dark complexion, and he strictly avoids running in public because he fears the consequences of running-while-black in Britain. In race relations, perceptions all too often trump reality (speaking of which, Crash, despite its many flaws, is a good film that revolves around this theme)
Increasingly since his accomodation with the neoliberal world order, the great Mandela has not lived up to his own exemplary principles. He has dispensed his saintly blessings on the likes of Tony Blair, who visited him for his final photo-op, and, ever susceptible to flattery, Mandela reciprocated with his usual platitudes (Incidentally this was shortly after Blair had declared that Blacks’ problems have nothing to do with poverty). Mandela has turned into a one man image laundering industry for failed Western politicians.
John Pilger was the first to separate the man from the myth. His support for US bombing of Afghanistan was unpardonable. He criticized Bush during his visit to South Africa, only to rush the White House months later when Bush chose to ‘honour’ him. As George Carlin said of Colin Powell, Mandela is now ‘openly White’, he just ‘happens to be Black’.
Returning to The Independent’s report:
Mr Mandela’s intervention takes place amid growing concern that youths in inner cities are being drawn into gangs because they see a lack of alternatives.
Tony Blair caused anger among black community leaders when he used a speech shortly before his resignation to insist that a spate of fatal shootings and stabbings in London was caused by a distinct black culture rather than poverty.
And of course, shortly afterwards he was received with open arms by Mandela. Thankfully, the article then goes on to quote people with more sensible voices.
US civil rights activist the Reverend Jesse Jackson said last week that stemming the flow of guns and drugs into the UK was “critical”.
But he echoed the thoughts of many black leaders when he said that equal importance needed to be attached to bringing ethnic communities into politics and investing in issues such as job opportunities, wage inequality, the impact of debt and day-care provision.
Reach, a report by 20 experts on how to tackle the issues faced by black youngsters published this month, highlighted mentoring as key measure alongside investment to prevent the creation of US-style ghettos in the inner cities.
Dr John Sentamu Archbishop of York
“The criminalisation of generations of black men is being accompanied by the demonisation of Asian, Muslim men. Criminality does not belong to one ethnic group, nor is it innate. It is learnt. It is not a ‘black problem’, it is a human problem…
Kano Rapper
“politicians who blame everything on family breakdown miss the real point: broken homes will generally only breed criminals if they’re poor. This is about young people and poverty, not about colour. Except for a few, black people raised in the UK are not raised by rich families. The children themselves have to raise cash, and from an early age. Of course some of them will be forced into crime. Talking about it in terms of race only entrenches the feeling of difference and opposition amongst communities. If we talk about black people as being particularly predisposed to crime, suddenly everyone becomes afraid of black people. As a result, black people feel victimised. It all gives rise to a kind of ‘they don’t care about us’ feeling within society.”
John Regis Olympic medal winner
His nephew, Adam Regis, was stabbed to death in Plaistow, East London, in March
“It’s neither useful nor fair to treat this as a ‘black’ problem. What we’re dealing with is a nationwide epidemic. We have to face up to the fact that a generation of young people (mostly men) have lost direction. This is largely because our politically correct adults have lost faith in their own authority. The result is that children have lost all sense of discipline. We need much tougher penalties for children who misbehave. That starts in school.
Teachers used to feel confident about asserting their authority, but now they let kids off lightly because they’re fearful of prosecution. This is nonsense: we need our schools to be strict environments where children are rewarded for good behaviour and punished for bad behaviour. People like those who killed my nephew join gangs because they offer a sense of worth. But it is totally false. Gangs are like families which you qualify for through crime. We need to demonstrate to young people that family ties are the truest source of love and security.”
Ray Lewis Founder and executive director of Eastside Young Leaders Academy
“Our first flaw has been talking of the ‘black community’. That label is hollow: no such community exists. An absence of community is the major problem on British streets: it leaves a vacuum filled by crime. Only be re-invigorating community spirit can we give our young a sense of belonging, regardless of colour.
“Increasingly, young, black Britons become socially excluded as a matter of choice. It’s important that we recognise that they are active players in this. Poverty has plenty to do with it, yes, but there is no direct link between poverty and criminality. Instead, many black Britons live on the margins of society because they feel a sense of abandonment and alienation. This leads directly to a collapse in aspiration. Many young black men are suffering from an identity crisis, and don’t know how much of themselves they have to give up in order to feel British.
“Beyond this, the collapse of family values has gripped many young black men. I was raised by a single mother, and I don’t believe that a single mother can raise a boy to manhood. No family is complete without a masculine voice and presence.”
Simon Wooley National co-ordinator, Operation Black Vote
“We need to be clear that racism still thrives in the UK, and the depiction of young black men as criminals is part of that. Black people are still seen as inferior by most people who aren’t black. They are still much less likely to get a job than their white counterparts. They tend to be born into deprivation. And deprivation can breed criminality.
The government has openly admitted that black people still face sustained discrimination within the criminal justice system, for example. It’s the combination of racial inequality and social inequality that has brought us to our current situation. Black people are unique in suffering heavily from both. When the two combine it’s a massive problem: there is an added dynamic of deprivation when it comes to race. If we’re to move on from this situation, black people must be the agents of change. We have to break the cycle of exclusion and start creating opportunities. We need black people to have the same chances as everyone else in terms of getting jobs and houses. Incentivising marriage through the welfare system is a total red herring: poverty is the problem, not single-parent families.
[1] Interestingly, an expert witness from the Westminster Council’s planning committee has criticized the Mandela statue as “run-of-the-mill mediocre modeling” rather than good art.
Bourne and Bond
August 15, 2007
The first time I heard of Howard Zinn was in the film Good Will Hunting which Matt Damon and Ben Affleck had co-written. While Affleck’s choice of films has been less than impressive, Damon has appeared in some good films recently. The Bourne series is clearly not one of them. Here he compares Bourne to Bond.
Hollywood star Matt Damon has dismissed James Bond as being stuck in the past.
The actor, who appears in the Bourne thrillers, said: “The Bond character will always be anchored in the 1960s and in the values of the 1960s.”
The suave spy was “so anachronistic when you put it in the world we live in today”, he said, but added that Bourne was no better or worse than Bond.
Damon was speaking in London, where The Bourne Ultimatum, the third film in the franchise, is having its UK premiere.
“Bond is an imperialist and a misogynist who kills people and laughs about it, and drinks Martinis and cracks jokes,” he told reporters.
“Bourne is a serial monogamist whose girlfriend is dead and he does nothing but think about her.”He added that Bourne “doesn’t have the support of gadgets, and he feels guilty for what he’s done”.
Television, The Drug Of The Nation
August 15, 2007
Here is the inimitable Michael Franti with a rocking indictment of a nation addicted to the inanitites of the tele. For more on how the TV has emptied life of meaning and helped incapacitate and infantilize whole populations, check out Neil Postman’s classic, Amusing Ourselves to Death (which also inspired Roger Water’s ‘Amused to Death’).
Once again I’m indebted to my friend Ann, whose excellent blog remains an indispensable resource for gems like these.
Television, The Drug Of The Nation
by Disposable Heroes Of HiphoprisyOne nation
under God
has turned into
one nation under the influence
of one drugTelevision, the drug of the Nation
Breeding ignorance and feeding radiationT.V., it
satellite links
our United States of Unconsciousness
Apathetic therapeutic and extremely addictive
The methadone metronome pumping out
150 channels 24 hours a day
you can flip through all of them
and still there’s nothing worth watching
T.V. is the reason why less than 10 per cent of our
Nation reads books daily
Why most people think Central Amerika
means Kansas
Socialism means unamerican
and Apartheid is a new headache remedy
absorbed in it’s world it’s so hard to find us
It shapes our mind the most
maybe the mother of our Nation
should remind us
that we’re sitting too close to…Television, the drug of the Nation
Breeding ignorance and feeding radiationT.V. is
the stomping ground for political candidates
Where bears in the woods
are chased by Grecian Formula’d
bald eagles
T.V. is mechanized politic’s
remote control over the masses
co-sponsored by environmentally safe gases
watch for the PBS special
It’s the perpetuation of the two party system
where image takes precedence over wisdom
Where sound bite politics are served to
the fastfood culture
Where straight teeth in your mouth
are more important than the words
that come out of it
Race baiting is the way to get selected
Willie Horton or
Will he not get elected on…Television, the drug of the Nation
Breeding ignorance and feeding radiationT.V., is it the reflector or the director ?
Does it imitate us
or do we imitate it
because a child watches 1500 murders before he’s
twelve years old and we wonder why we’ve created
a Jason generation that learns to laugh
rather than to abhor the horror
T.V. is the place where
armchair generals and quarterbacks can
experience first hand
the excitement of warfare
as the theme song is sung in the background
Sugar sweet sitcoms
that leave us with a bad actor taste while
pop stars metamorphosize into soda pop stars
You saw the video
You heard the soundtrack
Well now go buy the soft drink
Well, the onla cola that I support
would be a union C.O.L.A.(Cost Of Living Allowance)
On televisionTelevision, the drug of the Nation
Breeding ignorance and feeding radiationBack again, “New and improved”
We return to our irregularly programmed schedule
hidden cleverly between heavy breasted
beer and car commercials
CNNESPNABCTNT but mostly B.S.
Where oxymoronic language like
“virtually spotless”, “fresh frozen”
“light yet filling” and “military intelligence”
have become standard
T.V. is the place where phrases are redefined
like “recession” to “necessary downturn”
“Crude oil” on a beach to “mousse”
“Civilian death” to “collateral damages”
and being killed by your own Army
is now called “friendly fire”
T.V. is the place where the pursuit
of happiness has become the pursuit of
trivia
Where toothpaste and cars have become
sex objects
Where imagination is sucked out of children
by a cathode ray nipple
T.V. is the only wet nurse
that would create a crippleTelevision, the drug of the Nation
Breeding ignorance and feeding radiation
