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Tuesday, November 30, 2010
GASLAND Trailer 2010
Zodiac actor placed on terror list for opposing oil drilling method
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Indie actor Mark Ruffalo says he found himself on the Pennsylvania Homeland Security office's terror watch list for organizing screening of an oil-drilling documentary.
According to the World Entertainment News Network, Ruffalo -- who has starred in such films as The Kids Are All Right, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind and Zodiac -- told GQ magazine he found it "pretty f--cking funny" that he would be suspected of terrorism for raising the alarm about what many say is an environmentally harmful way of drilling for oil and gas.
Ruffalo has been promoting GasLand, a documentary that focuses on hydraulic fracturing, or "fracking." It's a process of drilling for oil and gas that involves pumping large amounts of water into a well to crack the rock under the ground, releasing the oil or gas. As energy prices rise and fossil fuels become scarcer, the practice has been growing in popularity.
The trailer for GasLand states that at least six states have documented some 1,000 incidents of groundwater pollution related to fracking. The documentary interviews people who say they suffered from neurological diseases and other conditions as a result of contaminated water.
The Pennsylvania Office of Homeland Security appears to be at least as heavily focused on anti-oil and gas documentaries as it is on international terrorism. In October, it was revealed that the department had declared the documentary Coal Country to be a "potential catalyst for inspiring 'direct action' protests or even sabotage against facilities, machinery, and/or corporate headquarters."
A Pennsylvania activist Web site reported earlier this month that the department has been monitoring the Twitter feeds of known anti-war activists.
From Greece to France to UK to Ireland to Portugal
Portugal: the general strike and the tasks of the left
Monday, 29 November 2010
On November 24, the working class paralysed Portugal in a general strike against the latest austerity plan of the Socialist Party government.
The vultures have smelled blood, and after winning over Ireland, international speculators are prepared to repeat the experience in Portugal, so they will increase their pressure. If this happens, it is highly likely that the EU, IMF and European Central Bank will impose a "rescue" plan which will mean the adoption of draconian austerity measures: cuts in public spending, cuts in pensions and wages of civil servants, higher taxes, and reforms to "liberalize" the economy. The problem is that these attacks, which places the burden of the crisis on the working class will only deepen the cuts already approved by the Portuguese government in successive adjustment plans since March. First was the so-called Stabilization and Growth Program (PEC), which envisaged the privatization of public assets, freezing the wages of civil servants and social spending cuts as well as tax increases and cuts in benefits. This plan soon proved to be insufficient in the eyes of the European bourgeoisie and the markets demanded more cuts. Thus, in May, coinciding with the plan of adjustment in Spain, the Socialist government of José Sócrates (ruling without an overall majority) was forced by the EU to raise taxes, especially VAT, in order to further reduce the deficit .But this was still not be enough and so the Portuguese Parliament, with the votes of the PS and the abstention of the right wing PSD, adopted on 3 November, as part of the budget for 2011, a new plan that cuts civil servant wages between 3.5 % and 10%, freezes pensions in 2011, slashes social spending and further increases VAT tax. These measures would lead to a sharp reduction in purchasing power in a country where the average wage is less than 800 Euro.
According to the unions, more than three million workers, out of a work force of 5.6 million, took part in the strike on November 24. Commuter trains, ferries that carry thousands of people on both sides of the Tajo river, buses and trams, were all paralysed. The Porto Metro closed down and in Lisbon only one line was open. Schools, universities and the justice system were brought to a standstill. But the most striking image of the strike was at the airports, where 90% of flights were cancelled. In the private sector, the strike was widely followed in the industrial hub of Palmela, where Autoeuropa, the massive Volkswagen factory is located, and in sectors such as cork production, engineering and energy. Manuel Carvalho da Silva, leader of the CGTP, the communist trade union, which represents a majority workers in Portugal, said:
“From now on we will be more demanding and strong in defending our demands such as the minimum wage, compliance with the agreements on defence of workers and the unemployed, and the demand for different policies.”
Other sectors, such as health care, also experienced high participation. In the case of nurses, during the night shift, participation in the strike was over 73%. Teachers also joined in, shutting down hundreds of schools, leaving thousands of students at home. Indeed, according to the teachers union, this was the largest participation ever of teachers in a strike. Even in areas such as call centre workers, mainly young and without trade union traditions, participation was 80%.
The Government, through the Minister of Labour, Helena André, gave very different figures, and assured journalists that only 20% of public employees had gone on strike, although she admitted that in some sectors such as transport had been almost totally paralysed. However, according to Spanish newspaper Público:
“Portuguese media refuted this official optimism, endorsing the figures given by the unions. The only that functioned where those required to by law as essential services, such as medical emergencies, energy, fire fighters and fuel and water supply, and the professions that are banned by law from striking, such as judges, parliamentarians, the military and the security forces.”
In a display of cynicism, the government accused the workers of making the country lose 500 million Euro. This statement is part of the discourse of fear and national unity, along the lines of, “we are all in this together and only together will we emerge from the crisis”. However, it has become clear that Portuguese workers, like the Greek, have broken radically with that idea. We have entered a stage at the European level where the class is entering the struggle with its own demands. So far, these demands have been mainly defensive in character with a view to preserve rights acquired in many decades of battles. But the Portuguese political scene has some interesting features compared to other European countries.
The Portuguese left
One of the most interesting features of Portugal is the existence of two strong parties to the left of social democracy, the Left Bloc (BE) and the Portuguese Communist Party (PCP). Between the two they have 31 seats in parliament, 16 for the BE (9.8%) and 15 for the PCP (7.9%) obtained in the 2009 parliamentary elections.
The PCP is a party with strong roots in society, an important network of members in the factories and it plays a dominant role trade union movement through the CGTP. This is reflected in its municipal election results, where it get almost 10% of the vote. However, its leadership is very sectarian towards the ranks of the Socialist Party and other left organisations, which limits them in expanding its social base. But the movement itself imposes unity, as in the case of the general strike.
Bloco de Esquerda is a different kind of party. It comes from a fusion between Maoists, Trotskyists and the former Euro-Communist sector of the PCP in 1999. It has between 4000 and 7000 members (about 10% of the membership the PCP claims), and its trade union roots are much weaker, mainly amongst teachers. However, it has been shown capable of gathering the vote of important sectors of the Portuguese urban youth. Their results at national level have been very good, but they go down to 3% in the municipal elections. The Bloco has taken controversial decisions lately, such as voting in favor of the Greek rescue plan in the Portuguese parliament. Such decision cannot be justified, neither from a Marxist nor from an internationalist point of view, and seems completely illogical. Digging a little deeper, however, we can see that one of the problems that the BE has is its inability to transform its votes into actual members, which means an increasing dissociation between its rank and file and its parliamentary group, together with a growing electioneering orientation. Undoubtedly, there are two contradictory pressures within BE: a reformist one, oriented towards the parliamentary arena, which suffers heavily from the pressure of bourgeois public opinion, and a more radical one, from its voters, which are looking for an alternative to the pro-capitalist policies of the leadership of the PS and the Stalinism of the leadership of the PCP.
Another issue is the support for Alegre in the forthcoming Presidential Election. Alegre is a left-wing Socialist leader, who once opposed the leadership of the PS, but that has already gone back to supporting the pro-capitalist policies of the social democracy. The leadership of the Bloco has decided to support him in the upcoming presidential elections, with the excuse of avoiding the re-election of the right wing Cavaco Silva. Thus, the BE finds itself in a peculiar and contradictory political position: while raising the banner of not managing the system with the social democracy, it supports the same presidential candidate as the PS. This decision obviously has not sat well with the ranks of BE, least of all at a time when the PS leads the attack against the Portuguese working class. On the other hand it has to be said that the PCP was not exactly in favour of a joint left candidate: the leadership of both parties has failed in offering a united workers' alternative able of standing up to the bourgeoisie and its agents.
Louça, the BE leader, told Viento Sur:
“If one party participates in elections it must learn to exercise the mandates it obtains in an exemplary way, through its proposals, its ability to innovate, the attitude of its elected representatives, the consistency of the positions defended and loyalty to the program it proposed to the voters. It must demonstrate an ability generate conflicts and mobilizations on which the struggle can be developed. But by having elected officials and participating in the institutions is also learns and thanks to this the Bloco is now much stronger, it knows reality better and is actually even more prepared to carry out the struggle for hegemony in all areas.”
Have the parliamentary group of BE and its leaders been consistent with these words? Or do they know base themselves only on considerations of short term electoral gains? It is true that the BE has strongly supported the general strike, along with the PCP (their respective leaders even left the parliament to participate in the picket lines). BE also supported the censorship motion submitted by the PCP against the Socrates government and opposed PEC austerity plans. Their presence in the unions is weak, however, due to its lack of systematic orientation to the working class. Such an orientation is not a guarantee that an organization will wage a serious fight against capitalism (there are dozens examples, such as the Italian or French CPs ). The two factors must come together: correct ideas in the struggle against capitalism and an organized presence in the working class, the only force materially capable of putting these ideas into practice.
The enormous potential of the Portuguese left, and its tasks for the future
This situation in the Portuguese left, which is relatively strong compared to its counterparts in countries such as Spanish, is based on a politically very turbulent few years, where the presence of a social democratic government has not acted as a brake for working class mobilization, even if this government had broad electoral support. These movements began in 2006 and took the form of huge demonstrations against Sócrates, three in one year, with tens of thousands of demonstrators, culminating in a general strike against the government's policies. These demonstrations were called and organised by the CGTP. One of the factors that explain the roots of the PCP in the labour movement is its hegemony within the CGTP. The orientation of the PCP towards the labour movement expresses itself in the presence of Communist worker cadres in factories and workplaces. The importance of this fact is shown when organisation of demonstrations takes place, in the participation in picket lines, rallies, etc. This strong relationship between party and union is comparable to that of the KKE in Greece. Interestingly, these are the two Western Communist parties which broke with Euro-communism and have maintained working class traditions that have been mostly lost by other organisations of the communist and post-communist left, although at the expense of maintaining a Stalinist structure and ideology. In the case of the PCP this is true both of its internal regime as well as the distinction it makes between the supposedly “progressive bourgeoisie” and the reactionary one.
The trade union militancy has allowed the Portuguese left to arrive with great potential at the outbreak of crisis. This has been reflected both in the electoral front as well as in rank and file organisation, although in this regard, there is still a lot of work to be done. Above all, it needs to break with the idea that there is a way out of the crisis within capitalism. The BE and the PCP speak of "neoliberal capitalism", but the problem is not one kind of capitalism but the system itself.
The mobilizations and their continuity: for an internationalist solution
The example of the recent movements in France and Greece show that in the current situation is difficult to stop the adjustment and austerity plans and in general attacks on the working class. The objective economic situation pushes the capitalist ruling class to a policy of permanent austerity. The situation is compounded by the existence of the Euro which prevents each country from applying monetary policies more suited to their needs. The attacks of the "financial markets" against the weakest economies in the Euro area are a reflection of the impossibility of apply the same monetary policy to very different economies.
Under these conditions, in order to face the attacks of capitalism the trade union movement needs a serious strategy of struggle which increases the intensity of the movement. In the case of France we saw how the trade union leaders refused to call an indefinite general strike, which would have been the next logical step after a series of very militant national days of action. In the case of Greece we saw how calling for 24 hour general strikes one after another led to wearing down the movement. In Portugal, if the government makes no concessions after the November 24 general strike, the trade unions should raise the call for a new general strike, this time for 48 hours, accompanied by mass demonstrations in the streets to demonstrate the strength of the working class.
At the same time, we must break with the dynamics of nationally isolated struggles, raising the idea of European-wide mobilizations. This is a realistic perspective. The attacks are similar if not equal in most of the EU countries. The reasons are the same and also , the European Central Bank is playing a key role in the imposition of such adjustment programs.
Moreover, it is important that in these demonstrations, the Portuguese left adopts a program that emphasizes the idea that these attacks are the consequence of the crisis of the capitalist system and therefore require a genuinely socialist program to fight them. One cannot propose half-way measures such as the creation of a public banking sector, as a solution. Actually, this bank would be a financial appendix of the bourgeois states, and, as such, it would be, as they are, vulnerable to the blackmail of international capital. We need to raise the slogan of nationalization of the banking system as part of the struggle to stop the cuts.
The Portuguese left, forged in major mobilizations and with powerful loud speakers in Parliament, has a real chance of stopping the wave of attacks waged by the European bourgeoisie, with the complicity of the parasitic Portuguese bourgeoisie .The general strike on November 24 has helped the working class become aware of its strength and the role it can play in the future in an alliance with the European working class, raising again the banner of April 25 and its revolutionary traditions in order, as the song of Zeca Afonso says to "esganar a burguesia" ("destroy the ruling class").
From Greece to France to Ireland
Ireland: 100,000 march to the GPO
Monday, 29 November 2010
100,000 marched from Wood Quay to the GPO today in protest against the austerity measures outlined in the four year plan despite the cold wintery weather. A few even demonstrated in a curagh on the Liffey – the workers navy has arrived. Meanwhile the government are behind closed doors discussing the bailout package with the officials.
There were dozens of trade union banners from SIPTU, Impact, INTO, TEEU and TUI among others and many home made placards in evidence also. It is clear that the political crisis has put the class struggle back on the agenda. The demonstrations against the pension levy in February last year and the demonstration on November 6th 2009 were of similar size, but this time the mood is different. The government is on the retreat and the stakes have been raised massively because of the intervention of the EU and the IMF.
Cowen and Lenihan have nowhere to hide, the by-election on Thursday illustrates that. Now, 95 years after the Easter Rising the choice of the GPO as the rallying point for the demonstration illustrates the anger in the state over the government being forced to go begging to Europe for a bailout. In an ex-colonial country like Ireland the memory of foreign rule runs deep.
But the crisis in Ireland is a crisis of Capitalism and it falls most heavily on the working class. That’s why there are big demonstrations like this, and that’s why the FF and the Greens are going to get banjaxed in the forthcoming election. But central to the struggle against the austerity and the cuts has to be the trade union movement and particularly its leadership. Whilst the trade union leaders made some important speeches today, what they do tomorrow is the important thing.
The movement has to campaign to defeat the cuts and drive the government out of office. The demonstration today shows the extent of worker’s anger. But the next step should be to galvanise the movement against the cuts into a 24 hour general strike encompassing private and public sector workers together. As the placards said today Fianna Failed. Now’s the time to drive them out.
Source: Fightback (Ireland)
The bitter fruits of "Anybody But Bush" politics
Pessimism Porn: Chris Hedges's New Book Is a Depressing Journey Into the Liberal Mind Chris Hedges's new book, The Death of the Liberal Class (Nation Books, November, 2010) exemplifies the limits of the liberal elite in critiquing itself, its double bind as it responds to the American state going haywire on empire, human rights, and capitalism. Exiled from his former position of privilege at the New York Times, Hedges has been busy impersonating past American Jeremiahs. Yet Hedges's narrative of "dissent" itself is the essence of failed liberalism.
Liberals are retreating farther and farther into defeatism, conspiracy theory, emotional darkness, and tunnel vision. Hedges's progression from War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning (2002) to American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War on America (2007) to Empire of Illusion: The End of Literacy and the Triumph of Spectacle (2009) to The Death of the Liberal Class (2010) represents the sorry spectacle of the boundaries of American liberalism in confronting horrors not included in its official creed.
Hedges's background as the son of a Presbyterian minister, and his sojourn at Harvard Divinity School, are the keys to his thought; religion always pulls him, even as he bemoans its abuse at the hands of the morally obtuse. Reinhold Niebuhr, the Christian realist who became virulently anti-communist and supported both World War II and the Cold War, is the most important influence on Hedges; Niebuhr's theological pessimism has been a dominant influence on post-World War II leaders, including Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton (as Jesus was George W. Bush's favorite philosopher, so Niebuhr is Obama's favorite).
In War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning, Hedges told us that the sensory quality of war belies our images of heroism and bravery. Having been a frontline reporter in war zones, Hedges felt qualified to offer the insight that war hollows out culture, as leaders mobilize nationalist myth to support aggression. Hedges reported from the Balkans and Central America, but felt no need to make the connection between American empire and the ravages of war. War is taken as an existential, depressing, unavoidable force.
Hedges tends to stay a couple of steps behind. When the Bush years were nearly over, in American Fascists he explained that there was no way to talk to Christian fundamentalists, and that the real danger was that in a time of economic crisis they may find broader footing. When the last wars of American empire had already peaked, in Empire of Illusion Hedges gave us a gloss on Daniel Boorstin's mid-twentieth-century insight that politics has become media spectacle; Boorstin's pseudo-event is the only way for politics to advance.
In Empire of Illusion, Hedges put together a compendium of the fully assimilated thought of Theodor Adorno, Hannah Arendt, Walter Benjamin, Umberto Eco, Neal Gabler, Aldous Huxley, Walter Lippmann, C. Wright Mills, Ortega y Gassett, George Orwell, Neil Postman, David Riesman, and William H. Whyte. Like an eager but not very bright graduate student, he compiled the pessimistic thought of twentieth-century critics of mass culture, and applied it to contemporary case studies like Barack Obama's election, professional wrestling, and happiness studies.
Note the consistent, growing, Niebuhrian strand of pessimism: war is inevitable; Christian fundamentalists are beyond the pale of discourse; there is no escape from the tyranny of media.
Empire of Illusion seemed to promise a coming synthesis, a semblance of an original argument. In fact, Hedges has crashed and burned in The Death of the Liberal Class. He founders on this shallow proposition:
The media, the church, the university, the Democratic Party, the arts, and labor unions--the pillars of the liberal class--have been bought off with corporate money and promises of scraps tossed to them by the narrow circles of power.
The institutions of the liberal class have been bought off? Instead of any historical analysis of these institutions, Hedges insinuates that in some golden age they were resistant to being bought by the highest bidder. What are the social forces that compel institutions to compromise? Have unions ever been as exalted in America as they have been in Europe? Not being an atheist like Christopher Hitchens, Hedges accepts the church as an indispensable pillar of the liberal class. We live and die by the two parties, neither of which has a coherent class critique, unlike political parties in Europe. As for the arts, Hedges hankers for a public support system encouraging the arts to instruct us about the misery of workers. Does Hedges know where to look for radical art?
The so-called pillars of the liberal class are fundamentally anti-oppositional, at times shifting by degrees but remaining essentially pro-state, pro-corporation, pro-war, pro-capitalism.
Hedges claims that "Unions, organizations formerly steeped in the doctrine of class struggle and filled with members who sought broad social and political rights for the working class, have been transformed into domesticated junior partners of the capitalist class."
Like other populist-liberal commentators, Hedges lacks a theory of economics. At heart, he's a nationalist, as is true of our most vocal liberal critics today. They're uncomfortable with the gains of globalization for the rising economies of the world; they've bought into the dogma that advances for other countries necessarily diminish us; they've left behind the basic doctrines of comparative advantage and free trade, and become advocates of various forms of barriers and borders. It's become unfashionable to advocate free movement of labor and capital. While Hedges criticizes Christian fundamentalists for having adopted a fearful mindset, he shows himself no less fearful--toward what globalization portends for American economic dominance.
Globalization benefited enormous numbers of people in the 1990s and 2000s, however, and the world is not likely to retreat from it, even if America is having second thoughts. Can unions be mobilized around the concerns of the past when most workers are in the information/service economy rather than in the industrialized trades? This is more difficult than accusing union leaders of treason.
Lacking a consistent ideology, Hedges is in two minds about the alleged death of the liberal class: "Ironically, in killing off the liberal class, the corporate state, in its zealous pursuit of profit, has killed off its most integral and important partner." Hedges desires the resurrection of the liberal class which was complicit in bringing us to the point of ruin. He claims that the liberal class served the function of a valve, but if the valve was small, ineffective, and perverse, why should we lament its closure?
In a functioning democracy, liberal institutions set the parameters for limited self-criticism as well as small, incremental reforms. The liberal class is permitted to decry the worst excesses of power and champion basic human rights while endowing systems of power with morality and virtues they do not possess.
Is there a separate liberal class such as Hedges posits, or is it a convenient narrative hook--another "us" versus "them" mythology, the result of shallow, ahistorical thought? Hedges says:
Dick Cheney and George W. Bush may be palpably evil while Obama is merely weak, but to those who seek to keep us in a state of permanent war, such distinctions do not matter.... The liberal class...can no longer influence a society in a state of permanent war and retreats into its sheltered enclaves, where its members can continue to worship itself.
Who are "those" who want to keep us permanently at war? Are they separate from the liberal class? Did the liberal class--before George W. Bush--not endorse the first Persian Gulf War, or the Balkan wars? Hedges himself is a prime example of a member of the liberal class who has retreated into a sheltered enclave, where he continues to idealize his own unstinting moral rectitude. Shortly before Bush assumed power, this brand of liberal defeatism told us--as in Morris Berman's The Twilight of American Culture--that liberals should disengage from public life, and be like the medieval monks who preserved knowledge for future generations.
Hedges presents himself as being an exile from the corridors of power he previously frequented at the New York Times--his commencement speech after the start of the Iraq War brought on his personal apocalypse--but as his acknowledgments testify, he remains the beneficiary of the largesse of the same liberal class whose demise he loudly proclaims (generous funding from the Nation Institute, the Ford Foundation, the Lannan Foundation, etc.).
Certain vocal environmentalists are also in the habit of advocating retreat from civilization. The righteous should await inevitable collapse due to overpopulation, resource exhaustion, and catastrophic climate change. They may want to get some farmland in Vermont while they're at it, for a possible future in subsistence farming. Hedges fits right into this strain of thinking; it's individualism run amok, in fact, the backup plan for the lone moral individual when the lights go out on civilization.
The upward transfer of wealth, the demolition of civil liberties, and the rampant nationalism supporting permanent war are entirely valid criticisms. But what principled philosophy do these thoughts hang around? Criticism of social injustice becomes numbing if its various dimensions are repeated as facts in themselves, not connected together. So Hedges draws on Noam Chomsky, Sheldon Wolin, Denis Kucinich, and anyone else with a handy opinion about propaganda and war. He ends up mythologizing corporations as omnipotent behemoths over whom citizens have no control. The corporations, in fact, are us, aren't they? Who do the vast majority of us work for?
Euphemisms (which always imply lack of clarity) are rampant among the liberal class. Hedges is particularly fond of Sheldon Wolin's "inverted totalitarianism," which "finds its expression in the anonymity of the corporate state" rather than revolving around a charismatic leader. Rather than theorists like Immanuel Wallerstein, Tzvetan Todorov, David Harvey, Ulrich Beck, or Slavoj Zizek, Hedges relies on Wolin, who explains that we give up power voluntarily. This tautology promotes passivity. Someone else is doing it to us, by means of propaganda. When the means of propaganda were rather rudimentary, in Orwell's time, it made sense to depict the apparatus as an external omnipresent entity; when this reality has become fully realized, it no longer makes sense to speak of it as a hidden force manipulating us. Today, we happily give up privacy for transparently false promises of security. Where is the corporate state's sleight of hand in that?
Similarly, Hedges's focus on mass culture would have had more resonance when Edward Bernays and Dwight MacDonald were first fleshing out the ideas at mid-century; it was a force only then emerging. Now anyone empowered enough makes his own contribution to mass culture, particularly through the Internet. If spectacle leads to illusion, it also leads to fulfillment. Thus movies were the twentieth century's dominant art form, reflecting a continuous schism between the repressive and the expressive, a dream world split right down the ambiguous middle, opening possibilities for hidden talents within all of us. Movies are democracy at work. Hedges, however, betrays his Niebuhrian darkness when he says:
Liberal and radical movements at the turn of the twentieth century subscribed to the fiction that human diligence, moral probity, and reform, coupled with advances in science and technology, could combine to create a utopia on earth.
This is the dream of the enlightenment; Hedges is anti-humanist when he expresses the technocrat-manager-stakeholder's skepticism toward the dream of reason. Hedges's discomfort with utopia comes from the American liberal class's lack of access to any coherent ideology of class. Therefore, Hedges is compelled to seek refuge in a mythical image of intellectual liveliness that never was: "Intellectual debate, once a characteristic of the country's political discourse, withered" (in the 1920s). Was it robust and rigorous before the 1920s? The interwar years were some of our best for intellectual discourse, and it's revealing that Hedges would pick the period of high modernist achievement as the beginning of intellectual decline. But it fits into his template of the history of mass communications, so he dates it then.
On the arts, Hedges is utterly misinformed. Hedges ignorantly misinterprets the 1930s. Art does not need the sponsorship of the liberal class; arguably, art does best under conditions of general indifference, or even repression. Hedges actually admires examples of propaganda theater! Proletarian literature of the 1930s is mostly a forgettable product; Hedges has no aesthetic sense, and if a play or novel depicts class conflict directly, then that constitutes worthwhile art for him. About the Federal Theatre Project, Hedges notes: "It was the high point of American theater." He endorses Sinclair Lewis's didactic, deeply flawed It Can't Happen Here, because its ideas are politically significant. Hedges invariably mistakes pedestrian protest in art for the real thing, the avant-garde; thus his dismissal: "Abstract painting emerged as the artistic expression of this sterile form of rebellion, an outgrowth of the apolitical absurdist and Dada movements." Art makes the highest political statement not when it directly transcribes political discourse, but when it is saturated by a higher political vision--what Hedges, like Niebuhr, would call utopia.
In their disdain for the counterculture, liberal and conservative critics have much in common; a puritan streak of repression, a suspicion of the Dionysian instinct, comes through. Hedges says:
Protest in the 1960s found its ideological roots in the disengagement championed earlier by Beats such as Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, and William Burroughs.... The counterculture of the 1960s, like the commodity culture, lured adherents inward. It set up the self as the primary center of concern.Politics as spectacle is a half-century-old criticism that has outlived its usefulness. All ideas operate in the media environment now. So when Hedges says that with the counterculture, "dissent became another media spectacle," he's reverting to a venerable tradition in American liberalism of blaming the medium itself. When we blame the omnipotent medium, we signify the end of active citizenship. In a familiar criticism, Hedges castigates the New Left for abandoning doctrinal rigor: "The New Left of the 1960s turned out to be a mirage.... The left and the right played their roles before the cameras. Politics was theater." But media constantly evolves. What about the new media? Hedges discounts the capacity of art to exceed the bounds of media spectacle.
He goes on to echo the common criticism that Marxist critics have become coopted by literature and humanities departments, as multiculturalism has become an end in itself. Whether it's pessimism toward politics as spectacle or the absurdities of identity politics, Hedges fails to provide any positive vision--a convincing counterpoint to Bush's ludicrious "freedom agenda." Past critics of liberalism from within the tradition, such as Orwell, were committed to a set of social principles. Criticism without political commitment is an exercise in futility. When Hedges says about the media that the "pernicious reduction of the public to the role of spectators denies the media, and the public they serve, a political role," he underestimates the capacity of citizens to reshape the media landscape according to their needs. Hedges is so busy criticizing elite institutions that he has no time for citizens.
Artistic expression today, Hedges holds, "is sustained by a system of interlocking, exclusive guilds," and "those who insist on remaining independent of these guilds...are locked out." True enough, but Hedges seems to yearn for the dominance of the right guild--made up of print-oriented, media-decrying, puritan artists who'll humanize art by making it aspire to the state of politics.
In checking off all of today's bad guys, Hedges can't resist the easiest of all targets, globalization. It's here that liberal critics appear at their most foolish. Hedges says:
By the time the touted benefits of globalization...were exposed as a sham, it was too late. The liberal class had driven critics of this utopian fiction from their midst.... [The liberal class] abetted the decline of the middle class.... It has permitted, in the name of progress, the dismantling of the manufacturing sector, leaving huge pockets of postindustrial despair and poverty behind.
So globalization is utopian fiction too? Wanting to perpetuate globally uncompetitive manufacturing is like calling for the majority of people to have remained in the agriculture sector a hundred years ago. Workers in poorer countries are on the whole better off because of globalization; the United States needs to be more nimble in moving to higher planes of manufacturing and services. It's intellectual deceit to call globalizaton a "sham." Hundreds of millions of people moving out of poverty in China and India is a sham?
Globalization, at its best, is an embodiment of the utopian ideal of freedom, but Hedges has difficulty accepting the consequences of freedom. There will always be winners and losers, but what is not sustainable is obsolete manufacturing--such as old Detroit--because it leaves consumers everywhere poorer in the long run. How is Germany, for example, adapting to globalization? If Hedges were to address this question, he would have to enter the substance of economics, and then, instead of lamenting the departure of Marxist critics to the humanities departments, he would have to weigh the pros and cons of redistributive economic policy.
Like other liberal critics today, Hedges betrays his regressive patriotism in his nostalgia for the American middle class before the economic shocks of the 1970s. Always the clarion call is to rejuvenate the old middle-class--with its safe pensions and affordable mortgages--never to alleviate the difficulties of the working class. Is Hedges going to call for any substantive economic policies to alleviate the pain of the indigent, including immigrants? Universal health care and universal college education? His brand of cultural critique--"the half-baked ideas of globalism" and of the "new world order"--overlooks the pragmatic choices facing working people.
Hedges's contradictions reach a crescendo in his fruitless search for a neat conclusion. He quotes Father Daniel Berrigan: "It is very rare to sustain a movement in recognizable form without a spiritual basis of some kind." Those of us without spiritual leanings are out of the preferred class. He may hate the media, and especially the New York Times which fired him, but he keeps emphasizing how crucial print newspapers are for democracy. He yearns for the good old days when the liberal class--church, media, Democratic party, universities--consisted of moralists not yet deformed by the heretic ideas of globalism and counterculturalism.
At one point--about when you'd expect him to seize you by the lapel and announce his grand doctrine--he suggests, in the context of radical social change, his plan of action:
Out of this contact [between the liberal class and the poor] we can resurrect, from the ground up, a social ethic, a new movement. We must hand out bowls of soup. Coax the homeless into a shower. Make sure those who are mentally ill, cruelly cast out on city sidewalks, take their medication.
In other words, benevolence and charity from the privileged liberal class toward the unfortunate others. This turns out to be a very conservative, incremental, and personalized message, for such a dire analysis.
Hedges's myopic, melancholy, self-righteous, elitist, detached, uncommitted, ultimately apolitical jeremiad, familiar from a century of American political discourse, has little traffic with structural explanations. The question should be, What is the prescription for the ordinary citizen to become guardian of his own moral role? Demonizing corporations is easy--they're the target du jour. Demonizing lobbyists is even easier.
Liberals need to answer, for their critique to have any meaning, these questions: Are they for or against globalization? And they can't hedge the answer by saying they're for "globalization with a human face," or some such fuzzy logic. Are they for unrestricted trade and capital flows and human mobility or not? If not, what do they propose in its place? Are they for media freedom, an unwavering stance on free speech, and if not, why not? Are they for or against empire? If they're against empire, then they should propose how to dismantle it. They can't be against empire, and yet be for "humanitarian intervention" (what gives America the right to be the world's policeman?), since this is the rubric used to justify every kind of war--the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq were meant to free Afghans and Iraqis.
The idea has been sold since the end of World War II by a certain class of American intellectual that utopia is a myth, that it leads inevitably to barbarism. In fact, utopia lies behind all progress. The enlightenment was utopian. Science is utopian. But like other environmental apocalyptics, Hedges even lays the environmental catastrophe, about whose imminent arrival he has no doubts, right at the feet of the enlightenment:
The fantasy that Enlightenment rationality will dominate human activity has collapsed before the brutal truth that those who seek to exploit human beings and nature commit collective suicide.... The death spiral, which will wipe out whole sections of the human race, demands a return to a radical militancy that asks the uncomfortable question of whether it is time to break laws that, if followed, ensure our annihilation.
So he's on the verge of calling for illegal actions to ward off the calamity, but of course he immediately backs off: "The fantasy of widespread popular revolts and mass movements breaking the hegemony of the corporate state is just that--a fantasy." If Hedges even hinted otherwise, he would be unlikely to get the generous funding of the institutions of the allegedly defunct liberal class for his books.
Hedges shows that it's possible to dumb resistance down to nothing:
Access to parcels of agricultural land will be paramount.... Music, art, poetry, journalism, literature, dance, and the humanities, including the study of philosophy and history, will be the bulwarks that separate those who remain human from those who become savages. Why must resistance take these small, incremental forms? Because we stand on the verge of one of the bleakest periods in human history, when the bright lights of civilization blink out and we will descend for decades, if not centuries, into barbarity.
This is straight out of James Howard Kunstler's fictions of catastrophe. Better throw in the economic catastrophists too--taking Nouriel Roubini, Naomi Klein, and Paul Krugman to extreme conclusions:
Once China and the oil-rich states begin to walk away from our debt, which one day has to happen, interest rates will skyrocket.... This is when inflation, most likely hyperinflation, will turn the dollar into junk. And at that point the entire system, beset as well by environmental chaos, breaks down.
Also throw in Jared Diamond, and a grim Malthusian pessimism:
Collapse this time around will be global. We will disintegrate together. And there is no way out. The ten-thousand-year experiment of settled life is about to come to a crashing halt.
There are environmentalists today who refute the gains of the Green Revolution and advocate a return to subsistence farming. Hedges echoes them:
If we build small, self-contained structures, ones that do as little harm as possible to the environment, we can perhaps weather the collapse.
In all this, Hedges reveals himself as a righteous member of the Brahmin class, unwilling to soil himself with commercial activity (the working class actually has to earn a living), positive thought, or inorganic foods. What does resistance consist of?
No act of resistance is useless, whether it is refusing to pay taxes, fighting for a Tobin tax, working to shift the neoclassical economics paradigm, revoking a corporate charter, holding global Internet votes, or using Twitter to catalyze a chain reaction of refusal against the neoliberal order.
He's throwing words around, hoping something will stick. How many of these acts of "resistance" (tweeting, Internet votes, refusing neoclassical economics) are open to average people? This anti-democratic message appropriates agency for the privileged alone. I'm waiting for Hedges to refuse to pay taxes as he gives up his fellowships and searches for self-fulfillment in the wilderness. But Hedges has preempted his own resistance. By no longer being part of the New York Times, he's searching for "moral autonomy," as a member of the "underclass." That's some underclass! He's been banished by one form of print culture! Borrowing from Neil Postman, Neal Gabler, and Russell Jacoby, Hedges says:
The death of the liberal class has been accompanied by a shift from a print-based culture to an image-based culture.... It has been supplanted by the wildfire anything-goes of the blogosphere, the social media universe, and cable television.
In the future, resistance will only be possible as long as one is "wedded to the complexity of print." And print is dead, so resistance is dead (except when Hedges publishes his own books). Moreover, the complex print people must be paid handsomely (echoes of Mark Helprin and Jaron Lanier):
The Internet, held out by many as a new panacea, is accelerating the cultural decline.... This means financial ruin for journalists, academics, musicians, and artists. Creative work too often is released for free to Web providers who use it as bait for corporate advertising.... The great promise of the Internet--to open up dialogue, break down cultural barriers, promote democracy, and unleash innovation and creativity--is yet another utopian dream.
Apparently, all of us Internet users have switches inside us, determining whether we behave as 'individuals or members of a mob"--as per Lanier. So the Internet is just an instrument of control. While the rest of us--who were never part of the liberal class to begin with--are mere switches, people like Hedges are the true dissidents. In a passage of grandiose delusion, he identifies with Vaclav Havel's description of his dissident status:
You are thrown into it by your personal sense of responsibility, combined with a complex set of external circumstances. You are cast out of the existing structures and placed in a position of conflict with them. It begins as an attempt to do your work well, and ends with being branded an enemy of society.
Can we have some joy back in liberalism? Some acceptance of risk, some objective valuation of danger, some appreciation of anarchy? We don't need elegies for the dead liberal class--we don't need to mythologize it. Hedges talks about how "important radical movements are for the vitality of the liberal class." This rather sounds like Arthur Schlesinger's "vital center," absorbing and coopting the more moderate possibilities of movement politics. I call this pessimism porn.
New advance in growing movement to free the Scott Sisters
Media’s “Discovery” of the Scott Sisters
by Richard Prince
The case of the Scott Sisters cannot be said to have instantly captured the attention of the media, Black or white. The two Black Mississippi women have been in prison for 16 years, serving double-life sentences in an $11 armed robbery. The journey from incarcerated invisibility began with a small website, and may yet set the Scott Sisters free.
Media’s “Discovery” of the Scott Sisters
by Richard Prince
This article previously appeared in Richard Prince’s Journal-isms, a publication of the Maynard Institute. [1]
“There are still a lot of people who don't know about this case.”
A black nationalist website was onto the case early. Then there were more websites and the muckraking magazine Mother Jones.
A talk-show voice on CNN, a local black radio station and the syndicated "The Michael Baisden Show" joined the mix, as did the NAACP and the Innocence Project.
The social media sites played their role. And now the "legacy" print media have joined in.
So, will two black Mississippi women, whom so many agree have been unjustly imprisoned, now be freed?
On Sunday, syndicated columnist Leonard Pitts Jr. of the Miami Herald became the latest to raise his voice. He wrote:
"Let’s assume they did it [2].
"Let’s assume that two days before Christmas in 1993, a 22-year-old black woman named Jamie Scott and her pregnant, 19-year-old sister Gladys set up an armed robbery. Let’s assume these single mothers lured two men to a spot outside the tiny town of Forest, Miss., where three teenage boys, using a shotgun the sisters supplied, relieved the men of $11 and sent them on their way, unharmed.
"Assume all of the above is true, and still you must be shocked at the crude brutality of the Scott sisters’ fate. You see, the sisters, neither of whom had a criminal record before this, are still locked away in state prison, having served 16 years of their double-life sentences.
"It bears repeating. Each sister is doing double life for a robbery in which $11 was taken and nobody was hurt. Somewhere, the late Nina Simone is moaning her signature song: Mississippi Goddam."
Pitts continued:
"For the record, two of the young men who committed the robbery testified against the sisters as a condition of their plea bargain. All three reportedly received two-year sentences and were long ago released. No shotgun or forensic evidence was produced at trial. The sisters have always maintained their innocence.
"Observers are at a loss to explain their grotesquely disproportionate sentence. Early this year, the Jackson Advocate, a weekly newspaper serving the black community in the state capital, interviewed the sisters’ mother, Evelyn Rasco. She described the sentences as payback for her family’s testimony against a corrupt sheriff. According to her, that sheriff’s successor vowed revenge."
“The sisters have always maintained their innocence.”
Lenore J. Daniels added last year on BlackCommentator.com:
"Evelyn Rasco has been fighting for her daughters' release the last 14 years [3]. Rasco lost her husband and an older daughter who died of congenital heart failure in 2001. This daughter left behind a 5 year old child. In these last 14 years, Rasco has tried to be the grandmother and the mother of 10 children (includes grandchildren of Jamie and Gladys) while sustaining the battle to free her two remaining daughters from prison."
Unlike in antebellum Mississippi, some of the accused villains in this saga, in both the prosecution and in law enforcement, are African American.
But that distinction hasn't meant much to Jamie Scott. In August 2009, she posted this message on a website maintained by her family [4]:
"Slavery in Mississippi has changed names. It is still very much active and alive in Mississippi. Its new name is called the LAW! So, if there is anyone out there that thinks this cannot happen to their child or family, think about Gladys and Jamie Scott. We were not criminals nor were we drug addicts. I worked every day. I have a right to be bitter, angry, mad as hell at the United States of America, but I choose not to because I know a higher power and Gladys and I WILL walk the streets again [5]."
Among the sisters' most ardent champions is Nancy R. Lockhart [6], who came across the sisters' case as a law student working with the Rainbow/PUSH Coalition. As a volunteer, Lockhart has dedicated her attention to the Scott sisters' case for the last four years.
"I will never forget the frigid, Chicago morning when I opened a letter from Mrs. Evelyn Rasco, a mother and widow [7]," Lockhart wrote two years ago for BlackCommenator.com. "She told the story of her daughters, and said she had written Rainbow/PUSH for 11 years, without a response. She redirected her strategy this time and wrote Congressman [Jesse] Jackson [Jr.] in a plea to get the letter to his father’s (Rev. [Jesse] Jackson) office. The letter was hand delivered."
Lockhart told Journal-isms on Monday that her piece came to the attention of Rip Daniels, a Realtor who owns WJZD in Gulfport, Miss., via a friend who read the piece in Cuba.
Daniels began publicizing the case on his station. He even urged listeners to write in the names of the sisters in opposition to the reelection bid of the presiding judge in their trial, Marcus Gordon.
“Rip Daniels began publicizing the case on his station.”
The case drew more attention in February after a small crowd gathered outside the state capitol in Jackson to push for the sisters' release.
Mother Jones' James Ridgeway, writing with Jean Casella, advanced the story on SolitaryWatch.com [8]:
"At the Central Mississippi Correctional Facility (CMCF) in Pearl, where Jamie and Gladys are incarcerated, medical services are provided by a private contractor called Wexford, which has been the subject of lawsuits and legislative investigations in several states over inadequate treatment of the inmates in its care. According to Jamie Scott’s family, in the six weeks since her condition became life-threatening, she has endured faulty or missed dialysis sessions, infections, and other complications. She has received no indication that a kidney transplant is being considered as an option, though her sister is a willing donor."
Then, in May, Ridgeway quoted from a letter from Jamie Scott:
"The living condition in quickbed area is not fit for any human to live in [9]. I have been incarcerated for 15 years 6 months now and this is the worst I have ever experience. When it rain out side it rain inside. The zone flood like a river. The rain comes down on our heads and we have to try to get sheets and blankets to try to stop it from wetting our beds and personnel property...I am fully aware that we are in prison, but no one should have to live in such harsh condition. I am paranoid of catching anything because of what I have been going throw with my medical condition."
The case caught the attention of cable television when CNN's Jane Velez-Mitchell used it on March 4 to illustrate the disparities in the criminal justice system. Lockhart posted the video on her website [6].
National black radio helped. An appeal on the "Michael Baisden Show" for a CAT scan to find the cause of Jamie Scott's headaches prompted listeners to pressure authorities [10]. "She's going blind," Lockhart said of Jamie Scott. The scan was performed, but Scott still does not know the results, Lockhart said.
“Columnist Bob Herbert devoted two columns to the case last month.”
Attention in the New York Times raised the case's profile. Columnist Bob Herbert, who is syndicated, devoted two columns to the case last month.
"This is Mississippi we’re talking about, a place that in many ways has not advanced much beyond the Middle Ages [11]," Herbert wrote. "The right thing to do at this point is to get the sisters out of prison as quickly as possible and ensure that Jamie gets proper medical treatment."
The piece "produced a different level of people who responded," Lockhart said, and their numbers pushed the Facebook support page [12] beyond its limit.
Meanwhile, other writers tried to put the case in a larger context. BlogHer's Nordette Adams wrote, "The high numbers of African-Americans being sent to prison for longer terms than whites committing a similar crime, as was seen in the case of the Jena 6, has prompted research that leads some people to conclude the prison system, with its work programs, has become the agent of "neoslavery. [13]"
On the other hand, a Mississippi writer objected to using the case as a slur against his state. "I don't want Mississippi's painful history stricken from the nation's textbooks, and I don't want outsiders to stop trying to effect change in the Magnolia state, if they feel so moved [14]," M. Scott Morris of Tupelo's Northeast Mississippi Daily Journal wrote last month. "But there are a whole lot of sins buried in a whole lot of backyards in this country."
For all the news outlets who have mentioned the Scott sisters case, however, many more have not. Lockhart praises Charles Evers, the civil rights leader who is station manager for WMPR-FM in Jackson, and investigative reporter Kathy Y. Times of WDBD-TV in Jackson, who is also president of the National Association of Black Journalists. But Lockhart can also name media outlets that have not returned telephone calls or have made inquiries but never followed up.
"The media have been very important," she told Journal-isms, but the women are still in prison and at least one is in need of medical attention. Gov. Haley Barbour is weighing a pardon, but that is by no means certain. "We still need a lot of coverage. There are still a lot of people who don't know about this case," Lockhart said. "The media are very much needed in this case. I do not exaggerate when expressing the medical condition that Jamie is in. We need more of a public outcry!"
Publications referenced:
Eve Conant, newsweek.com:Left Wing: Pardon Me, Governor Barbour [15]
Toure Muhammad, the Final Call: Jailed for $11: Sisters locked up 16 years in Dirty South injustice [16]
News release:1961 Freedom Riders Call For Prisoners' Release [17]
Pamela D. Reed, thedailyvoice.com:Mississippi Goddam: Free the Scott Sisters [18]
James Ridgeway, Mother Jones:Haley Barbour Will Decide the Fate of the Scott Sisters [19]
[20] [1] http://mije.org/
[2] http://www.miamiherald.com/2010/11/20/1935670/taking-11-fails-to-justify-life.html
[3] http://www.solidarity-us.org/current/node/2226
[4] http://www.freethescottsisters.blogspot.com/
[5] http://freethescottsisters.blogspot.com/search?q=%22%22Slavery+in+Mississippi+has+changed+names%22
[6] http://nancylockhart.blogspot.com/
[7] http://www.blackcommentator.com/300/300_mississippi_vs_scott_lockhart_guest.html
[8] http://solitarywatch.com/about/for-jamie-scott-an-11-robbery-in-mississippi-may-carry-a-death-sentence/
[9] http://motherjones.com/mojo/2010/05/jamie-scotts-letter-prison
[10] http://www.michaelbaisden.com/tools/podcast/player.php?file=all-natural-thursday/ant_hr3_a_10282010.mp3&title=All%20Natural%252%200Thursday%20Hr%203%20%2010.28.201
[11] http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/12/opinion/12herbert.html?_r=1&ref=bobherbert
[12] http://www.facebook.com/l/;www.freethescottsisters.comso#%21/StandingwiththeScottSisters
[13] http://www.blogher.com/social-media-takes-freeing-scott-sisters-mississippi?page=full
[14] http://nems360.com/pages/full_story/push?article-M-+SCOTT+MORRIS-+Cheap+shot+doesn-t+help-case-+Herbert%20&id=10020686
[15] http://www.newsweek.com/blogs/the-gaggle/2010/03/11/left-wing-pardon-me-governor-barbour.html
[16] http://www.finalcall.com/artman/publish/National_News_2/article_7044.shtml
[17] http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/1961-freedom-riders-call-for-prisoners-release-105761698.html
[18] http://thedailyvoice.com/voice/2010/11/mississippi-goddam-free-the-sc-1-002670.php
[19] http://motherjones.com/mojo/2010/10/haley-barbour-will-decide-fate-scott-sisters
[20] http://www.addtoany.com/share_save?linkurl=http%3A%2F%2Fblackagendareport.com
Movement to free imprisoned Scott sisters - WLBT 3 - Jackson, MS:
Jackson attorney and City Councilman Chokwe Lumumba will soon deliver 24,000 additional petitions and support letters to Governor Haley Barbour in an effort to secure the release of two imprisoned sisters.
Lumumba represents Jamie and Gladys Scott. He claimed the two women were unfairly punished for an armed robbery in Scott County in 1993.
Wednesday, the Jackson attorney told reporters the state parole board is reviewing the case.
Lumumba said, "It appears that the governor and or the parole board have taken some affirmative steps to at least investigate our petition and we expect an answer in the near future."
The petitions for clemency were signed by people from across the United States. The Scott sisters have been incarcerated for almost 17 years.
They received double life sentences for an armed robbery in which Lumumba claimed only $11 dollars was taken from the victim. The sisters did not have a prior criminal history.
Useful blog
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Terry Eagleton on petty-bourgeois "new atheist" arrogance
Two-front attack on 'new atheists'
25 November 2010
Archbishop and Marxist challenge Dawkins et al's 'off-the-peg enlightenment'. Matthew Reisz writes
The "new atheism" promoted by academics and writers such as Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett and Christopher Hitchens came under fire at a debate in Cambridge.
Terry Eagleton, distinguished professor of English literature at Lancaster University, opened the discussion, titled Responses to the New Atheism. He said that the last time he had spoken at the University of Cambridge's Great St Mary's Church was in 1968, during a debate on student radicalism - something, he noted, that we are likely to see a good deal more of.
"Why is God back centre stage again?" he asked. "Just when grand narratives seemed to be over, He's back in the spotlight."
It was the events of 11 September 2001, Professor Eagleton suggested, that brought the issue of religion "to a new focus of intensity and politicised the debate, not entirely to its benefit".
This had led to the erroneous idea that "all faith is blind faith, an abdication of all rationality". Although he had great respect for "the kind of atheism which costs something, where you knowingly reject something", he had none at all for easy "off-the-peg enlightenment".
Rowan Williams, the Archbishop of Canterbury, said that he hoped to "clarify terms and bring to the fore religious people's self-definition - it is always dangerous to define for someone else who they really are".
Religion should be seen neither as a survival strategy - it often called upon people to behave in dangerous ways - nor as "an explanation of the funny things that happen in the world - a bad explanation that has been superseded", he said.
The new atheism, noted Dr Williams, "believes that religion should not exist, perhaps should not be allowed to exist, which makes it very different from other styles of atheism".
Earlier atheist thinkers had raised important challenges to believers about "the internal coherence of faith, notably the problem of evil".
But much of the new atheism amounted to "attacks on things that no one I know believes", Dr Williams added.
Part of the appeal of neo-Darwinism, he claimed, was that it gave people the seductive feeling of "being on the inside track", able to see through what people say to the underlying motives beneath.
This had led to a surprising "eagerness to believe we are auto-mata, not really thinking what we are thinking. One of the things religion brings to public debates is a powerfully non-negotiable sense of human dignity."
The event on 19 November was organised by the Faraday Institute for Science and Religion, based at St Edmund's College, Cambridge.
matthew.reisz@tsleducation.com.
Monday, November 29, 2010
Vietnamese comrades celebrate frock-coated communist
Seminar on brilliant theorizer F. Engels
Truong Tan Sang, Politburo member of the Communist Party of Vietnam Central Committee (CPVCC) and permanent member of the CPVCC’s Secretariat said Engels is the closest friend, comrade and communist of Karl Marx.
Engels and Marx founded Marxism, scientific and revolutionary theory and the ideology of the working class and the communists in the fight to abolish the capitalist regime and build a new socialism and communism, Sang said.
Engels also joined Marx in disseminating the revolutionary thought and building revolutionary organisations for the working class, he said, adding that Engels became a leader of the working class struggle movement in European countries in mid 19th century.
The Party official pointed out that the 80-year revolutionary cause of Vietnam and its people, led by the CPV and President Ho Chi Minh, have overcome many difficulties and challenges to gain great victories.
The CPV always affirms Marxism-Leninism and Ho Chi Minh Thought as the thought foundation and a guideline for action, he said.
Speeches presented at the seminar highlighted Engels’ thought and theoretical contributions and his bright personality to the world’s revolution as well as focused on the values of Engels’ theories to Vietnam’s revolution and its current renovation process.
"....a political importance that can scarcely be over-estimated in the affairs of Central Asia"
Frederick Engels
Afghanistan [40]
Review of J W Kaye’s The Afghan War, by Engels
Afghanistan, an extensive country of Asia, north-west of India. It lies between Persia and the Indies, and in the other direction between the Hindu Kush and the Indian Ocean. It formerly included the Persian provinces of Khorassan and Kohistan, together with Herat, Beluchistan, Cashmere, and Sinde, and a considerable part of the Punjab. In its present limits there are probably not more than 4,000,000 inhabitants. The surface of Afghanistan is very irregular, – lofty table lands, vast mountains, deep valleys, and ravines. Like all mountainous tropical countries it presents every variety of climate. In the Hindu Kush, the snow lies all the year on the lofty summits, while in the valleys the thermometer ranges up to 130°. The heat is greater in the eastern than in the western parts, but the climate is generally cooler than that of India; and although the alternations of temperature between summer and winter, or day and night, are very great, the country is generally healthy. The principal diseases are fevers, catarrhs, and ophthalmia. Occasionally the small-pox is destructive. The soil is of exuberant fertility. Date palms flourish in the oases of the sandy wastes; the sugar cane and cotton in the warm valleys; and European fruits and vegetables grow luxuriantly on the hill-side terraces up to a level of 6,000 or 7,000 feet. The mountains are clothed with noble forests, which are frequented by bears, wolves, and foxes, while the lion, the leopard, and the tiger, are found in districts congenial to their habits. The animals useful to mankind are not wanting. There is a fine variety of sheep of the Persian or large-tailed breed. The horses are of good size and blood. The camel and ass are used as beasts of burden, and goats, dogs, and cats, are to be found in great numbers. Beside the Hindu Kush, which is a continuation of the Himalayas, there is a mountain chain called the Solyman mountain, on the south-west; and between Afghanistan and Balkh, there is a chain known as the Paropamisan range, very little information concerning which has, however, reached Europe. The rivers are few in number; the Helmund and the Kabul are the most important. These take their rise in the Hindu Kush, the Kabul flowing cast and falling into the Indus near Attock; the Helmund flowing west through the district of Seiestan and falling into the lake of Zurrah. The Helmund has the peculiarity of overflowing its banks annually like the Nile, bringing fertility to the soil, which, beyond the limit of the inundation, is sandy desert. The principal cities of Afghanistan are Kabul, the capital, Ghuznee, Peshawer, and Kandahar. Kabul is a fine town, lat. 34° 10' N. long. 60° 43' E., on the river of the same name. The buildings are of wood, neat and commodious, and the town being surrounded with fine gardens, has a very pleasing aspect. It is environed with villages, and is in the midst of a large plain encircled with low hills. The tomb of the emperor Baber is its chief monument. Peshawer is a large city, with a population estimated at 100,000. Ghuznee, a city of ancient renown, once the capital of the great sultan Mahmoud, has fallen from its great estate and is now a poor place. Near it is Mahmoud’s tomb. Kandahar was founded as recently as 1754. It is on the site of an ancient city. It was for a few years the capital; but in 1774 the seat of government was removed to Kabul. It is believed to contain 100,000 inhabitants. Near the city is the tomb of Shah Ahmed, the founder of the city, an asylum so sacred that even the king may not remove a criminal who has taken refuge within its walls.
The geographical position of Afghanistan, and the peculiar character of the people, invest the country with a political importance that can scarcely be over-estimated in the affairs of Central Asia. The government is a monarchy, but the king’s authority over his high-spirited and turbulent subjects, is personal and very uncertain. The kingdom is divided into provinces, each superintended by a representative of the sovereign, who collects the revenue and remits it to the capital.
The Afghans are a brave, hardy, and independent race; they follow pastoral or agricultural occupations only, eschewing trade and commerce, which they contemptuously resign to Hindus, and to other inhabitants of towns. With them, war is an excitement and relief from the monotonous occupation of industrial pursuits.
The Afghans are divided into clans[41], over which the various chiefs exercise a sort of feudal supremacy. Their indomitable hatred of rule, and their love of individual independence, alone prevents their becoming a powerful nation; but this very irregularity and uncertainty of action makes them dangerous neighbours, liable to be blown about by the wind of caprice, or to be stirred up by political intriguers, who artfully excite their passions. The two principal tribes are the Dooranees and Ghilgies, who are always at feud with each other. The Dooranee is the more powerful; and in virtue of their supremacy their ameer or khan made himself king of Afghanistan. He has a revenue of about £10,000,000. His authority is supreme only in his tribe. The military contingents are chiefly furnished by the Dooranees; the rest of the army is supplied either by the other clans, or by military adventurers who enlist into the service in hopes of pay or plunder. Justice in the towns is administered by cadis, but the Afghans rarely resort to law. Their khans have the right of punishment even to the extent of life or death. Avenging of blood is a family duty; nevertheless, they are said to be a liberal and generous people when unprovoked, and the rights of hospitality are so sacred that a deadly enemy who eats bread and salt, obtained even by stratagem, is sacred from revenge, and may even claim the protection of his host against all other danger. In religion they are Mohammedans, and of the Soonee sect; but they are not bigoted, and alliances between Sheeahs and Soonees[42] are by no means uncommon.
Afghanistan has been subjected alternately to Mogul[43] and Persian dominion. Previous to the advent of the British on the shores of India the foreign invasions which swept the plains of Hindostan always proceeded from Afghanistan. Sultan Mahmoud the Great, Genghis Khan, Tameriane, and Nadir Shah, all took this road. In 1747 after the death of Nadir, Shah Ahmed, who had learned the art of war under that military adventurer, determined to shake off the Persian yoke. Under him Afghanistan reached its highest point of greatness and prosperity in modern times. He belonged to the family of the Suddosis, and his first act was to seize upon the booty which his late chief had gathered in India. In 1748 he succeeded in expelling the Mogul governor from Kabul and Peshawer, and crossing the Indus he rapidly overran the Punjab. His kingdom extended from Khorassan to Delhi, and he even measured swords with the Mahratta powers.[44] These great enterprises did not, however, prevent him from cultivating some of the arts of peace, and he was favourably known as a poet and historian. He died in 1772, and left his crown to his son Timour, who, however, was unequal to the weighty charge. He abandoned the city of Kandahar, which had been founded by his father, and had, in a few years, become a wealthy and populous town, and removed the seat of government back to Kabul. During his reign the internal dissensions of the tribes, which had been repressed by the firm hand of Shah Ahmed, were revived. In 1793 Timour died, and Siman succeeded him. This prince conceived the idea of consolidating the Mohammedan power of India, and this plan, which might have seriously endangered the British possessions, was thought so important that Sir John Malcolm was sent to the frontier to keep the Afghans in check, in case of their making any movement, and at the same time negotiations were opened with Persia, by whose assistance the Afghans might be placed between two fires. These precautions were, however, unnecessary; Siman Shah was more than sufficiently occupied by conspiracies, and disturbances at home, and his great plans were nipped in the bud. The king’s brother, Mahmud, threw himself into Herat with the design of erecting an independent principality, but failing in his attempt he fled into Persia. Siman Shah had been assisted in attaining the throne by the Bairukshee family, at the head of which was Sheir Afras Khan. Siman’s appointment of an unpopular vizier excited the hatred of his old supporters, who organized a conspiracy which was discovered, and Sheir Afras was put to death. Mahmud was now recalled by the conspirators, Siman was taken prisoner and his eyes put out. In opposition to Mahmud, who was supported by the Dooranees, Shah Soojah was put forward by the Ghilgies, and held the throne for some time; but he was at last defeated, chiefly through the treachery of his own supporters, and was forced to take refuge amongst the Sikhs. [45]
In 1809 Napoleon had sent Gen. Gardane to Persia in the hope of inducing the shah [Fath Ali] to invade India, and the Indian government sent a representative [Mountstuart Elphinstone] to the court of Shah Soojah to create an opposition to Persia. At this epoch, Runjeet Singh rose into power and fame. He was a Sikh chieftain, and by his genius made his country independent of the Afghans, and erected a kingdom in the Punjab, earning for himself the title of Maharajah (chief rajah), and the respect of the Anglo-Indian government. The usurper Mahmud was, however, not destined to enjoy his triumph long. Futteh Khan, his vizier, who had alternately fluctuated between Mahmud and Shah Soojah, as ambition or temporary interest prompted, was seized by the king’s son Kamran, his eyes put out, and afterward cruelly put to death. The powerful family of the murdered vizier swore to avenge his death. The puppet Shah Soojah was again brought forward and Mahmud expelled. Shah Soojah having given offence, however, was presently deposed, and another brother crowned in his stead. Mahmud fled to Herat, of which he continued in possession, and in 1829 on his death his son Kamran succeeded him in the government of that district. The Bairukshee family, having now attained chief power, divided the territory among themselves, but following the national usage quarrelled, and were only united in presence of a common enemy. One of the brothers, Mohammed Khan, held the city of Peshawer, for which he paid tribute to Runjeet Singh; another held Ghuznee; a third Kandahar; while in Kabul, Dost Mohammed, the most powerful of the family, held sway.
To this prince, Capt. Alexander Burnes was sent as ambassador in 1835, when Russia and England were intriguing against each other in Persia and Central Asia. He offered an alliance which the Dost was but too eager to accept; but the Anglo-Indian government demanded every thing from him, while it offered absolutely nothing in return. In the mean time, in 1838, the Persians, with Russian aid and advice, laid siege to Herat, the key of Afghanistan and India[46]; a Persian and a Russian agent arrived at Kabul, and the Dost, by the constant refusal of any positive engagement on the part of the British, was, at last, actually compelled to receive overtures from the other parties. Burnes left, and Lord Auckland, then governor-general of India, influenced by his secretary W. McNaghten, determined to punish Dost Mohammed, for what he himself had compelled him to do. He resolved to dethrone him, and to set up Shah Soojah, now a pensioner of the Indian government. A treaty was concluded with Shah Soojah, and with the Sikhs; the shah began collecting an army, paid and officered by the British, and an Anglo-Indian force was concentrated on the Sutlej. McNaghten, seconded by Burnes, was to accompany the expedition in the quality of envoy in Afghanistan. In the mean time the Persians had raised the siege of Herat, and thus the only valid reason for interference in Afghanistan was removed, but, nevertheless, in December 1838, the army marched toward Sinde, which country was coerced into submission, and the payment of a contribution for the benefit of the Sikhs and Shah Soojah.[47] Feb. 20, 1839, the British army passed the Indus. It consisted of about 12,000 men, with above 40,000 camp-followers, beside the new levies of the shah. The Bolan Pass was traversed in March; want of provisions and forage began to be felt; the camels dropped by hundreds, and a great part of the baggage was lost. April 7, the army entered the Khojak Pass, traversed it without resistance, and on April 25 entered Kandahar, which the Afghan princes, brothers of Dost Mohammed, had abandoned. After a rest of two months, Sir John Keane, the commander, advanced with the main body of the army toward the north, leaving a brigade, under Nott, in Kandahar. Ghuznee, the impregnable stronghold of Afghanistan, was taken, July 22, a deserter having brought information that the Kabul gate was the only one which had not been walled up; it was accordingly blown down, and the place was then stormed. After this disaster, the army which Dost Mohammed had collected, at once disbanded, and Kabul too opened its gates, Aug. 6. Shah Soojah was installed in due form, but the real direction of government remained in the hands of McNaghten, who also paid all Shah Soojah’s expenses out of the Indian treasury.
The conquest of Afghanistan seemed accomplished, and a considerable portion of the troops was sent back. But the Afghans were noways content to be ruled by the Feringhee Kaffirs (European infidels), and during the whole of 1840 and ’41, insurrection followed on insurrection in every part of the country. The Anglo-Indian troops had to be constantly on the move. Yet, McNaghten declared this to be the normal state of Afghan society, and wrote home that every thing went on well, and Shah Soojah’s power was taking root. In vain were the warnings of the military officers and the other political agents. Dost Mohammed had surrendered to the British in October, 1840, and was sent to India; every insurrection during the summer of ’41 was successfully repressed, and toward October, McNaghten, nominated governor of Bombay, intended leaving with another body of troops for India. But then the storm broke out. The occupation of Afghanistan cost the Indian treasury £1,250,000 per annum: 16,000 troops, Anglo-Indian, and Shah Soojah’s, had to be paid in Afghanistan; 3,000 more lay in Sinde, and the Bolan Pass; Shah Soojah’s regal splendours, the salaries of his functionaries, and all expenses of his court and government, were paid by the Indian treasury, and finally, the Afghan chiefs were subsidized, or rather bribed, from the same source, in order to keep them out of mischief. McNaghten was informed of the impossibility of going on at this rate of spending money. He attempted retrenchment, but the only possible way to enforce it was to cut down the allowances of the chiefs. The very day he attempted this, the chiefs formed a conspiracy for the extermination of the British, and thus McNaghten himself was the means of bringing about the concentration of those insurrectionary forces, which hitherto had struggled against the invaders singly, and without unity or concert; though it is certain, too, that by this time the hatred of British dominion among the Afghans had reached the highest point.
The English in Kabul were commanded by Gen. Elphinstone, a gouty, irresolute, completely helpless old man, whose orders constantly contradicted each other. The troops occupied a sort of fortified camp, which was so extensive that the garrison was scarcely sufficient to man the ramparts, much less to detach bodies to act in the field. The works were so imperfect that ditch and parapet could be ridden over on horseback. As if this was not enough, the camp was commanded almost within musket range by the neighbouring heights, and to crown the absurdity of the arrangements, all provisions, and medical stores, were in two detached forts at some distance from camp, separated from it, moreover, by walled gardens and another small fort not occupied by the English. The citadel or Bala Hissar of Kabul would have offered strong and splendid winter quarters for the whole army, but to please Shah Soojah, it was not occupied. Nov. 2, 1841, the insurrection broke out. The house of Alexander Burnes, in the city, was attacked and he himself murdered. The British general did nothing, and the insurrection grew strong by impunity. Elphinstone, utterly helpless, at the mercy of all sorts of contradictory advice, very soon got every thing into that confusion which Napoleon [Bonaparte] described by the three words, ordre, contre-ordre, disordre . The Bala Hissar was, even now, not occupied. A few companies were sent against the thousands of insurgents, and of course were beaten. This still more emboldened the Afghans. Nov. 3, the forts close to the camp were occupied. On the 9th, the commissariat fort (garrisoned by only 80 men) was taken by the Afghans, and the British were thus reduced to starvation. On the 5th, Elphinstone already talked of buying a free passage out of the country. In fact, by the middle of November, his irresolution and incapacity had so demoralised the troops that neither Europeans nor Sepoys[48] were any longer fit to meet the Afghans in the open field. Then the negotiations began. During these, McNaghten was murdered in a conference with Afghan chiefs. Snow began to cover the ground, provisions were scarce. At last, Jan. 1, a capitulation was concluded. All the money, £190,000, was to be handed over to the Afghans, and bills signed for £140,000 more. All the artillery and ammunition, except 6 six-pounders and 3 mountain guns, were to remain. All Afghanistan was to be evacuated. The chiefs, on the other hand, promised a safe conduct, provisions, and baggage cattle.
Jan. 5, the British marched out, 4,500 combatants and 12,000 camp-followers. One march sufficed to dissolve the last remnant of order, and to mix up soldiers and camp-followers in one hopeless confusion, rendering all resistance impossible. The cold and snow and the want of provisions acted as in Napoleon’s retreat from Moscow [in 1812]. But instead of Cossacks keeping a respectful distance, the British were harassed by infuriated Afghan marksmen, armed with long-range matchlocks, occupying every height. The chiefs who signed the capitulation neither could nor would restrain the mountain tribes. The Koord-Kabul Pass became the grave of nearly all the army, and the small remnant, less than 200 Europeans, fell at the entrance of the Jugduluk Pass. Only one man, Dr. Brydon, reached Jelalabad to tell the tale. Many officers, however, had been seized by the Afghans, and kept in captivity, Jelalabad was held by Sale’s brigade. Capitulation was demanded of him, but he refused to evacuate the town, so did Nott at Kandahar. Ghuznee had fallen; there was not a single man in the place that understood any thing about artillery, and the Sepoys of the garrison had succumbed to the climate.
In the mean time, the British authorities on the frontier at the first news of the disaster of Kabul, had concentrated at Peshawer the troops destined for the relief of the regiments in Afghanistan. But transportation was wanting and the Sepoys fell sick in great numbers. Gen. Pollock, in February, took the command, and by the end of March, 1842, received further reinforcements. He then forced the Khyber Pass, and advanced to the relief of Sale at Jelalabad; here Sale had a few days before completely defeated the investing Afghan army. Lord Ellenborough, now governor-general of India, ordered the troops to fall back; but both Nott and Pollock found a welcome excuse in the want of transportation. At last, by the beginning of July, public opinion in India forced Lord Ellenborough to do something for the recovery of the national honour and the prestige of the British army; accordingly, he authorised an advance on Kabul, both from Kandahar and Jelalabad. By the middle of August, Pollock and Nott had come to an understanding respecting their movements, and Aug. 20, Pollock moved towards Kabul, reached Gundamuck, and beat a body of Afghans on the 23rd, carried the Jugduluk Pass Sept. 8, defeated the assembled strength of the enemy on the 13th at Tezeen, and encamped on the 15th under the walls of Kabul. Nott, in the mean time, had, Aug. 7, evacuated Kandahar, and marched with all his forces toward Ghuznee. After some minor engagements, he defeated a large body of Afghans, Aug. 30, took possession of Ghuznee, which had been abandoned by the enemy, Sept. 6, destroyed the works and town, again defeated the Afghans in the strong position of Alydan, and, Sept. 17, arrived near Kabul, where Pollock at once established his communication with him. Shah Soojah had, long before, been murdered by some of the chiefs, and since then no regular government had existed in Afghanistan; nominally, Futteh Jung, his son, was king. Pollock despatched a body of cavalry after the Kabul prisoners, but these had succeeded in bribing their guard, and met him on the road. As a mark of vengeance, the bazaar of Kabul was destroyed, on which occasion the soldiers plundered part of the town and massacred many inhabitants. Oct. 12, the British left Kabul and marched by Jelalabad and Peshawer to India. Futteh Jung, despairing of his position, followed them. Dost Mohammed was now dismissed from captivity, and returned to his kingdom. Thus ended the attempt of the British to set up a prince of their own making in Afghanistan.
Footnotes
40. That Engels wanted to write an article on Afghanistan (with emphasis on the Anglo-Afghan war of 1838-42) is evident from the fact that he included this topic in the provisional list of articles for The New American Cyclopaedia in his letter to Marx of May 28, 1857. On July 11, 1857, however, Engels informed Marx that the article would not be ready by July 14, as agreed. The work on it apparently took longer than expected. Marx had received it by August 11 and, as can be seen from the entry in his notebook for this date, sent it off to New York, In a letter to Marx of September 2, 1857 Charles Dana acknowledged receipt of “Invasion of Afghanistan”.
When working on this article Engels used J. W. Kaye’s History of the War in Afghanistan Vols. I-II, London, 1851 (see this volume, pp. 379-90).
41. Engels uses the term “clan”, widespread in Western Europe, to designate heli (tribal groups) into which Afghan tribes were divided.
42. Soonees (Sunnites) and Sheeahs (Shiites) – members of the two main Mohammedan sects which appeared in the seventh century as the result of conflicts between the successors of Mohammed, founder of Islam.
43. The Moguls – invaders of Turkish descent, who came to India from the cast of Central Asia in the early sixteenth century and in 1526 founded the Empire of the Great Moguls (named after the ruling dynasty of the Empire) in Northern India. Contemporaries regarded them as the direct descendants of the Mongol warriors of Genghis Khan, hence the name “Moguls”. In the mid-seventeenth century the Mogul Empire included most of India and part of Afghanistan. Later on, however, the Empire began to decline due to peasant rebellions, the growing resistance of the Indian people to the Mohammedan conquerors, and increasing separatist tendencies. In the early half of the eighteenth century the Empire of the Great Moguls virtually ceased to exist.
44. The Mahrattas (Marathas) – an ethnic group who lived in Northwestern Deccan. In the mid-seventeenth century they began an armed struggle against the Empire of the Great Moguls, thus contributing to its decline. In the course of the struggle the Mahrattas formed an independent state of their own, whose rulers soon embarked on wars of conquest. At the close of the seventeenth century their state was weakened by internal feudal strife, but early in the eighteenth century a powerful confederation of Mahratta principalities was formed under a supreme governor, the Peshwa. In 1761 they suffered a crushing defeat at the hands of the Afghans in the struggle for supremacy in India. Weakened by this struggle and internal feudal strife, the Mabratta principalities fell a prey to the East India Company and were subjugated by it as a result of the Anglo-Mahratta war of 1803-05.
45. The Sikhs – a religious sect which appeared in the Punjab (Northwestern India) in the sixteenth century. Their belief in equality became the ideology of the peasants and lower urban strata in their struggle against the Empire of the Great Moguls and the Afghan invaders at the end of the seventeenth century. Subsequently a local aristocracy emerged among the Sikhs and its representatives headed the Sikh principalities. In the early nineteenth century these principalities united under Ranjit Singh whose Sikh state included the Punjab and some neighbouring regions. The British authorities in India provoked an armed conflict with the Sikhs in 1845 and in 1846 succeeded in turning the Sikh state into a vassal. The Sikhs revolted in 1848, but were subjugated in 1849.
46. The siege of Herat by the Persians lasted from November 1837 to August 1838. Intent on increasing Britain’s influence in Afghanistan and weakening Russia’s in Persia, the British Government declared the Shah’s actions to be hostile to Britain and demanded that he should lift the siege. Threatening him with war, it sent a squadron into the Persian Gulf in 1838. The Shah was forced to submit and to agree to a one-sided trade treaty with Britain. Marx described the siege of Herat in his article “The War against Persia.”
47. During the Anglo-Afghan war the East India Company resorted to threats and violence to obtain the consent of the feudal rulers of Sind, a region in the northwest of India (now in Pakistan) bordering on Afghanistan, to the passage of British troops across their territory. Taking advantage of this, the British demanded in 1843 that the local feudal princes proclaim themselves vassals of the Company. After crushing the rebel Baluchi tribes (natives of Sind), they declared the annexation of the entire region to British India.
48. Sepoys – mercenary troops in the British-Indian army recruited from the Indian population and serving under British officers. They were used by the British to subjugate India and to fight the wars of conquest against Afghanistan, Burma and other neighbouring states. However, the Sepoys shared the general discontent of the Indian people with the colonial regime and took part in the national liberation insurrection in India in 1857-59.
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Source: MECW Volume 18, p. 40;
Written: in July and the first 10 days of August 1857;
First published: in The New American Cyclopaedia, Vol. I, 1858;
Transcribed: Andy Blunden, 2001;
Proofread: and corrected by Andy Blunden in February 2005.