#and yes even being an internationalist

[wartakes]

Some Musings on Avoiding Empire (OLD ESSAY)

This essay was originally posted on July 14th, 2021.

In this essay, I continue my musings on how a democratic socialist state engages in warfare in support of like-minded allies and partners and peoples across the world without falling into the trap of becoming the same as the empires it wishes to both forsake and combat. I don't pretend to have the answers completely, but I at least try to get the ball rolling.

(Full essay under the cut).

When I first started writing these essays, the earliest topics that I covered – and the ones that I keep returning to consistently throughout the overall thread of my work – is that a.) war isn’t going anywhere, and b.) it’s something that we need to understand and be prepared for on the left, even under a different system to the one we live under now. To that end, I’ve talked about the circumstances under which it may be necessary for us to go to war.

However – disregarding those who are acting in bad faith or have ulterior motives – there are still many people who have justifiable misgivings about the idea of the United States or any great power or superpower using force, even under a hypothetically more just governing system and even if it is defendable as the right thing to do under specific circumstances. I’ve had a number of conversations with friends on this topic, which has come up sporadically as various events and crises unfold in the world and the topic of outside intervention invariably arise. While I hold a different view, I can understand why some folks may be suspicious of or hesitant to suddenly get behind the idea of a powerful state notionally using its military power for “good” – especially those who live in other countries and have had to live at the whims of U.S. foreign policy or that of other foreign powers. To some, it may simply seem like empire under a different name.

That raises a question that I felt was worth an essay in its own right: in that hypothetical future I try to think about from getting too bummed out with the present, how do you conduct a global foreign and defense policy without being an empire? While I don’t think the idea of a changed-United States or any country using military power in a more just fashion is equivalent to empire in its own right, I feel like the danger of backsliding into imperialistic attitudes is still very much present and a danger. I see how it could be very easy to make a poor decision here, an exception there, and end up doing the same sort of foreign policy that got us where we are today.

After spending some time pondering this, I’ve come up with an extremely non-scientific, purely vibes-based set of principles that – while I make no claims towards being definitive, exhaustive, or foolproof – seem like a good starting point for how to carry out the kinds of concepts I rail on about without just being what we currently have and have had before but in a different guise. Those four principles, which I will go into more detail on each below, include: being selective of allies and partners, respecting countries’ consent, promoting countries’ self-sufficiency, and maintaining a minimal international footprint. Some or all of these may seem obvious to some, but I’ve found in this day and age, I can’t take anything like this for granted. So, let us begin.

1. Being Selective of Allies and Partners

To be a good leftist or socialist or however you label yourself, one almost by definition needs to be a good internationalist. You should care not only about improving the lives of everyone in your own community, city or country, but also about improving the lives of all people, everywhere. Thus, part of this naturally should entail establishing partnerships and forging alliances with countries that are similarly inclined in order to defend one another from hostile forces and to continue to try and improve things the world over (yes I realize this may sound a bit sappy and idealistic as I type this out, especially in the current environment, but I have to believe that something like this is achievable and that life is not endless sorrow and agony).

Note, that the key terms here are finding allies in countries that have similar principles, those principles of course being things like a democratic system of government, freedom of expression, freedom of the press, a legal and judicial system that isn’t draconian and doesn’t grind a bootheel into the neck of its citizens, supporting said citizens from want and deprivation, etc. etc. All that good stuff that we’re into, and that some governments claim they’re about.

When you look back at the history of the United States and other great powers from the past, you’ll find that the track record of finding allies based on these principles is “spotty” if I’m going to be charitable. The Cold War is an excellent example of this. When the United States searched for partners across the globe in its competition against the Soviet Union, its criteria were more about whether or not governments or leaders opposed communism rather than sharing any sort of affinity towards the principles that the United States claimed to value. What this resulted in was the United States supporting or installing regimes that were extremely right-wing or even fascistic purely on the basis of them hating communism (or any form of leftism) and doing everything they could to oppose it – including mass oppression, imprisonment, and murder of their own citizens. From Latin America, to Africa, to the Middle East and the Far East, you’d be hard pressed to find an area where the United States didn’t support a questionable regime in the course of great power politics.

This practice found new life to a different ideological end following the September 11th Attacks and the outbreak of the Global War on Terrorism. This time, the enemy wasn’t communism, but Islamic fundamentalist terrorism. If the United States wasn’t choosy about its allies during the Cold War, it was even less so in finding allies and partners to help it fight al Qaeda and similar groups – some of which were about just as bad as al Qaeda, had a role in its formation, or were even actively supporting them or other similarly minded or aligned groups like the Taliban.

This is a very long-winded way of me saying, in the future, if we want to conduct ourselves justly in the world of international relations, it means thinking critically about who our friends are. This is a problem that not only conservatives and liberals have, but far too many people on the left have when it comes to uncritically supporting unabashedly authoritarian regimes just because they’re aesthetically leftist or just anti-American. If we don’t want to be morally bankrupt to our own beliefs, then we’ll have to take a long, hard look at any country we consider as an ally and about whether aligning ourselves to them is the right thing to do, or something we’re doing purely out of self-interest or for political or ideological street cred.

2. Respecting the Consent of Other Countries

Our being more selective of allies and partners based on our principles and beliefs is only one part of the equation when it comes to working with other countries throughout the world. The flip side to aligning ourselves to countries more in sync with what we believe, is also realizing that countries and their populaces may not always necessarily want to be our ally, even if we think they have much in common with us and we’d like to help them. As with many other things in life, the magic word here is consent. If a country and its people do not consent to accepting help from us, then forcing the issue is simply adopting a paternal or imperialistic attitude.

There may be a myriad of reasons for this. Part of it may be the suspicion and wariness that I spoke of earlier, which may take generations to pass for some – or may potentially never pass for others. But there may be other reasons as well. The reasons matter less though, then what a country – but more importantly, its people – want. At the end of the day, if a government does not want anything to do with us or any other country offering help, and this is a genuine reflection of the will of its people as a whole, then that’s that. Unless they change their mind at some point in the future, any further efforts are simply trying to unjustly impose your will on another country – the very thing we’re supposed to be trying to avoid.

This same sort of logic applies to supporting movements seeking liberation, whether they are trying to establish an independent state for their people, or to overthrow a government that is oppressing them. Even if we have much in common with the principles of a liberation movement and want to help them, if they want nothing to do with us, we really have nothing else we can do other than cheer them on and wish for the best and hope maybe they change their minds. If I’ve found one thing out from being active on the internet as an artist and writer for most of my adult life, it’s that you can’t force people to be you friends. Sometimes, things just don’t ‘click’ from one end, and you just have to accept you’ll never be as close as you’d like things to be. Sometimes people may warm up to you over time or under different circumstances, but the key thing is that’s up to them, not you. In my eyes, the same thing applies to this case.

Now, I feel like there are potentially exceptions here. One big one that comes to mind is when humanitarian intervention comes up, such as intervention to provide aid to a starving populace or to stop the genocide of a group of people by a state – something behind the basis of the United Nations concept of Responsibility to Protect (something that is invoked far too little in my opinion). These are cases where you can strongly argue that its acceptable to intervene without a request for help – or that it is actually necessary to do so in order to prevent further death and destruction. That all being said, I also think if you look back through history, you’ll be very hard pressed to find any situation where a people were being brutally massacred or were starving to death and were flatly refusing any assistance and aid rather than begging any country with the means to do so to save them from being wiped out. But I felt I should bring that one up regardless just for the sake of being intellectually honest on the issue of consent.

We see the repercussions of ignoring the idea of consent across twenty years of Forever War, in particular Afghanistan and Iraq. While the United States may have initially been welcomed as liberators in both countries and both the Taliban in Afghanistan and Ba’athist state in Iraq were objectively terrible regimes, at the end of the day there was no genuine, country-wide mass movements or representatives of said movements requesting that the United States aid them in their liberation. Our invasions of those countries were forced on them from the outside, and that is part of why they were doomed to failure from the start – as most regime changes are.

3. Promoting Self-Sufficiency

Throughout the modern era, great powers have lavished military aid and arms sales upon allies and partners that suited them. Such aid could be made under the claims of ensuring that country’s ability to defend itself or being out of some notion of brotherhood and comradeship. Of course, like so many things, this aid is also about the game of great power politics and serves just as much as an instrument of influence and control as it did as a means of self-defense – if not more. As much great powers have an interest in ensuring certain countries could defend themselves and their regimes, they also had a vested interest – for many reasons – in making sure said countries were dependent upon them in some shape or form for defense.

There are some glaring examples of this seeding of dependence in how the United States provides military aid or sells arms to other countries currently, especially in an age of more complicated and technologically sophisticated weapons. Often the United States provides arms and armaments to an ally or partner without going through the effort of teaching and enabling them how to maintain them. Instead, it will simply employ contractors or even U.S. military personnel to maintain the equipment for the country, meaning that country is dependent upon the U.S. and U.S. companies (who also naturally have a vested interest in continuing to make money from servicing said equipment) for their defense – putting them in a precarious position.

Under a more just system, the intent of such aid prior to a conflict actually breaking out, would be the exact opposite. The primary purpose of our support to a country in bolstering its defense should be to make it self-sufficient as possible in its own defense, so that it will only need outside help under the most dire of circumstances. We should be genuinely trying to help a country stand on its two feet and not be beholden to any outside power for its survival (and this should be the case in general with all things, though obviously I’m focusing on defense and the military here as that is my wheelhouse and the focus of this blog, but felt it needed calling out). This would mean not only providing arms to a country, but also teaching them how to maintain them, helping them build the means to maintain them domestically, or even setting up their own domestic ability to produce weapons and material, and more – if they are able to do so.

The old adage goes that if you love something, set it free. Well, if we truly care about the well-being of an ally, then we should be building them up so that at the end of the day, they either don’t need us at all or only need us when things get really bad. If we treat them well and help them earnestly and in good faith, then even when they don’t need us, they will want to stand alongside us in defense of the same, shared ideas and belief. Likewise, we’ll have made that community of like-minded peoples and governments stronger by increasing the overall ability to defend itself as a whole against hostile, reactionary forces.

4. Maintaining a Minimal Footprint

One of the aspects of U.S. imperial attitudes that is brought up much on the left is the expansive, worldwide U.S. military presence. The United States maintains bases and troops to varying degrees in a wide swath of countries across the globe – around 40% of the world’s countries in 2019. These bases can serve as a point of serious contention even in countries where their presence is more welcome or at least not reviled. Even if they are not significantly or directly affecting the country they are located in, overseas bases are a lightning rod for their role in perpetuating conflict and U.S. imperialism. As a result, what I often have heard on the left is a desire for the United States to vacate all of its overseas military bases and bring all of its troops back home. While I completely understand this desire and empathize with it, I also feel it is unrealistic if in the future we want to be anything other than isolationist and inward looking – something that is incompatible with the very idea of socialism.

Contemporary warfare is a fast-moving endeavor, under which reacting quickly can mean the difference between victory and defeat – as well as how much destruction is visited and how many lives are lost. Even if we wish to spurn being an imperial power, if we want to be in any position to help other countries that come under attack by an aggressor and are unable to defend themselves on their own and request assistance, we need to be able to react swiftly so that our solidarity doesn’t end up coming too late to be of any help to those under attack. Having a military that can rapidly deploy, rather than be permanently or semi-permanently forward-deployed – may actually deter potential conflict better anyway.

Of course, rapid deployment of forces this still means crossing vast distances of time and space to get to wherever an ally may be in danger.  So, in my typical wishy-washy, “enlightened centrist leftist” fashion, I advocate there has to be some kind of middle ground. If we want to be of any help to allies and partners but still avoid empire, any overseas military installations we maintain need to be kept to a bare minimum. They need to be limited only to what we think we really need. What we “need” should be based on doing actual analysis and assessment of what our stated national security goals are, who are allies and partners are that we anticipate we may need to come to the aid of, where they are located, and etc. It basically just requires us going through the effort of thinking critically about what we need to do what we think is important and in line with our principles and not just gobbling up bases left and right in order to further our own power, influence, control as an imperial power does.

This can’t account for every instance, of course. There may be a case when we need to come to the aid of a country or group that we did not anticipate. This is just a risk you run when planning for various scenarios of war. You set yourself up to be ready for the most likely cases, and then when the least likely or unexpected ones occur, you make do best you can. In those instances, we may be able to lease bases or request temporary access for the duration of a campaign from a third country along the way to the operational area – packing up and going home ASAP once our (hopefully) very clearly defined objectives have been completed.

With that in mind, we should be viewing these bases as being temporal in general. None of them should be thought of as “permanent.” We should be planning out our needs with the idea that they will change over time. We should be reassessing on a regular basis as to what ones we still need, based on the abilities of our allies and partners, the various threats we face, and so on. Over time, it may make more sense to leave one base and set up shop somewhere else. Not only does it make good strategic sense, but it also aids in avoiding digging in roots and fostering imperial attitudes towards the lands that we’re supposed to be guests in – not overlords of.

At the end of the day, no matter how good of relations you have with a country, over time you’re going to wear out a welcome. That in itself is not a good reason to not have military forces stationed overseas at all, but it is a good reason to make sure we only maintain the bases and troops we really need to honor our principles and commitments – especially in peacetime. Despite our widespread military presence currently, most of the military still is stationed in the United States, so it really wouldn’t be that huge of a change. It would just mean thinking harder about what paths and processes we need to rapidly move it to a conflict zone. Really, a lot of this is about thinking harder in general, not only about what we believe as leftists, but also about practical applications of military force and the challenges that involves. We just need to think.

We Can Try (And We Should)

One of the things I grapple with when I try to think of a more ethical and just use of military power is, no matter how I try to dress it, there are always going to be people that I otherwise express solidarity with that are going to be suspicious of it and opposed to it. Some people may take a very long time to come around to the idea and may only do so in part. Some may never come around to it. Frankly, I’ve come to accept that. As much as I want to try and educate and elaborate on why I think this is the realistic and right thing to do, I know that I can’t convince everyone and that ultimately, I can only do so much to try and convince people and the rest is up to them and is their own choice. That, and I can’t blame people – especially those living overseas who have been more directly affected by imperialism than I ever have – for having these attitudes towards the idea of foreign military intervention.

While that is definitely a little discouraging and demoralizing, I try not to let it get me down too much. God knows there so many traps I can fall into – and still fall into – on a daily basis that can lead to depression, discouragement, and borderline “doomerism” and “black pilled” thought with how the state of the world is and the likelihood for change. But I have to believe in something. I have to believe there can be a better world, and I also have to believe I can somehow use what I know from my professional life to contribute to that.

I strongly believe war isn’t going anywhere even if we do (and I hope we do) affect political change. I think we’re going to want to help people beyond our own borders and that will sometimes require providing military aid or carrying out military action. Doing so runs the risks of falling back into old habits unknowingly. While the ideas I’ve laid out here are by no means a panacea for avoiding that sliding back into imperialism, I feel like its maybe a solid starting point. Even if there are going to be people who will still be justifiably suspicious of trying to use military power throughout the world for any sort of positive ends – and that may create stumbling blocks towards doing so, I still think we owe it to try and be a global force for good in that hypothetical future even if it may be difficult and frustrating at times. Why? Because it’s still the right and necessary thing to do. If there’s one thing we know as lefties, it’s that doing the right thing is sometimes a demoralizing pain in the ass – but that doesn’t make it any less right.

#essay #War Takes #War Takes Essay #leftism #leftist #socialism #democratic socialism #international relations #IR #national security #national defense #international security #foreign policy #foreign affairs #military intervention #internationalism #war #empire #imperialism

[straycatboogie]

2024/03/19 English

BGM: Jesus Jones - International Bright Young Thing

I worked early today. This morning, I enjoyed the morning English meeting on Zoom as usual. There, a participant taught us that her personal computer had been infected by a computer virus. The other members and I tried to help her by giving various suggestions as advice. I wish her situation would get better… and also, I also felt this is a power of our connection/friendship.

During today's work, I've thought about the novel I am writing - Through this writing, I want to try to keep on asking this to myself. It is simply "Why have I been learning English?". It can be the core of this trial. Why… To become an internationalist? Or just being fluent in English seems really cool? I can't langh at these questions because these ideas are also the ones I have once had in this foolish mind.

Besides that writing, I have been thinking about diversity. One of the reasons why is because April has the "World Autism Awareness Day," therefore I need to think about what autism does mean generally. About this issue, we have to look at the "neurodiversity", which means our brains must have plenty of variety/variation.

Indeed, I am now living my life as having a sense of confidence/self-esteem with this autism. But, how could I have built this esteem? I ask this myself… and find that it must have been built by the various connections I can have had. Once, I had been bullied by a lot of (almost ALL of) classmates. But, now I have so many friends in this "global" world. What connections have enabled me to become this person?

What if I hadn't started learning English like this? Then, I couldn't understand how large this world is… I could even shut this self from any outer actual world, and become a hikikomori - with trying to think that my life is just on my own therefore I must live this life by myself alone.

But, as you can see, it must be wrong. Our life, this lovely life, must have been built by the associations with others I believe. Learning/speaking English actually always reminds me of that principle. Yes, we're not alone.

#english #diary #journal #tumblr diary

[st-just]

Got a theory on how socialism went from “working class idpol” to “PMC idpol”, while still claiming to be the former?

There is, as they say, a lot to unpack here.

So first of all, calling socialism ‘working class idpol’ isn’t necessarily wrong but a) phrasing it like that makes me physically cringe and b) it’s really pretty reductionist. The official Marxist doctrine isn’t that the proletariat is especially virtuous or enlightened or deserving, its that it’s exploitation is necessary to the functioning of capitalism, meaning that as capitalism becomes ever more universal workers will have both the means and motive to overthrow it. Though, like, not to say that there isn’t a lot of ‘working class idpol’ in there. If you want to get all Early Christian Heresy about it, I think that got denounced as I want to say Workerism at some point? Something like that.

(Though, like, the period of early Soviet history where people’s class histories was explicitly taken into account in court when determining how harsh a sentence to give them is just very funny in terms of ‘American conservative fever dreams that turn out to have actually happened’. I have a weird sense of humour. Though come to think of it Ascribing Class is actually a pretty useful read in terms of how identity is socially constructed and assigned from on high).

But honestly, well socialism has always been for the working class, the critique that it’s actually by a bunch of genteel delinquents cosplaying as revolutionaries is basically as old as the term. Like, ‘came from a well-to-do family, radicalized when they joined an illicit reading group in school and found Marx’ is basically a cliche of early Bolshevik biographies, and the closest to industrial labour quite a lot of them got was volunteering to teach night schools for the actual proletariat. Like, it was something of an embarrassment for a while the degree that the movement of the working class was actually composed almost entirely of professional revolutionaries and radical intelligentsia – the creation of a socialist labour movement was a deliberate and conscious project which took a decent amount of time to really work, with many (many, many, many) failures along the way. (Too radical and anti-religious and feminist and internationalist for the salt of the earth working types, you understand)

But anyway, all that’s mostly tangential, mostly to say that lawyers and teachers being strident Marxists isn’t even close to new. To at least approach answering your actual question – okay, with apologies to Barbara Ehrenreich, I really feel like ‘Professional-Managerial Class” as a term has gotten so warped by The Discourse that it’s actual use is fairly limited. Like, the Wikipedia article somehow includes ‘teachers’ and ‘nurses’ as central examples (even leaving aside accuracy if you’re a serious socialist on I feel like preemptively disavowing one of the only halfway vital sections of the American labour movement is anathema on a purely tactical level). A lot of the use is just, well, vulgar identity politics  – imagining class divides based on culture and affect rather than material circumstances. And to the people the term is actually useful for – wait, have you seriously met many managers or corporate lawyers who call themselves socialists? Like, seriously? I mean, I guess so did Louis Napoleon, but I wouldn’t exactly call him central to the movement.

Alright, sorry, I’m being intentionally obtuse, here. So to answer the question I think you’re asking-

The contemporary boost in the prominence of socialism (in the discourse and in terms of number of publications, if nothing else) has been largely driven by the downwardly mobile children of relatively comfortable parents, both white collar workers and yes, of the professional-managerial class. Due to shifts in economics, culture, and government policy over the last several decades, they overwhelmingly at least attempted to get a college degree. Generally speaking, they were radicalized at least as much by the fact that the system that supported their parents has singularly failed to do so for them as by any particular points of history or theory. Once a significant number in various social circles and cultural scenes were genuinely radicalized, it just became a generally fashionable or acceptable stance to strike, and a useful vocabulary for anyone with even vaguely compatible issues or interests to articulate themselves in.

The natural and inevitable consequence of this is that the modern, western iteration of the socialist movement (such as it is) is generally expressed in the cultural vernacular of people raised as comfortable, liberal children of the American dream, or people directly reacting and responding to that culture. It also means that the focuses and idiosyncratic neuroses of the movement are going to have at least as much to do with the culture as with the ideology – such is human nature, unfortunately.

#reply #anon #political theory #socialism #in this essay I will #this is theoretically a writing blog #long #Anonymous

[andypartridges]

the style council for the band ask! :)

am i a fan? yes !!

first song i heard by them? when i was 12 i was watching an episode of pop quiz where they were playing snippets of the biggest hits of 1983, and one of the songs they played was long hot summer. i really loved how it sounded and that was the first time i had ever heard of the style council or even paul weller :')

favourite song? my ever changing moods, headstart for happiness, here's one that got away, internationalists, speak like a child, long hot summer, a stone's throw away

favourite album? café bleu - it's just one of my favourite albums of all time in general

favourite music video? oh it's absolutely the mv for come to milton keynes. there are so many Questionable Moments but also the 4 unit hsc english student in me is having a field day with analysing the symbolism throughout it. i've been meaning to gif it for ages !!

have any merch? i have café bleu and our favourite shop on vinyl, as well as the 7" of speak like a child. every day i regret not buying home and away at this one record shop bc it was so cheap and every copy i've seen since has cost twice as much :/ apparently my dad also had it on cassette but he doesn't know where it is smh

seen them live? no :(

favourite member? not to be hideously predictable but paul weller <3 although with that being said, dee c lee could absolutely step on me and i would thank her

send me a band!

#thank you tiff !! <3 #answered

[qqueenofhades]

i absolutely love your modern!Heartrender husbands! did they have any growing pains when they got in a relationship/got married cause of their different backgrounds (fedyor being a “posh city boy” and ivan a blue collar factor worker).

Obviously i’d imagine so but i didnt know if we’d see any of this in their appearance in your fantastic helnik story since they’re already so established by then.

Oh, there absolutely were moments of Extreme Struggle. Fedyor's family isn't rich, but they're closer to the well-off end of the spectrum than they are to Ivan's family, and his dad was one of those who actually made out pretty well during Russia's decade of chaotic post-communism privatization. The Kaminskys were at a respectable level of nomenklatura (in other words, members of the family held various government and Party functionary posts during the Soviet Union) and Fedyor had an important uncle or two and ways to get special treats. This means he grew up in relative comfort in Nizhny Novgorod, got admitted to the prestigious Moscow State University, and turned out as a Western-sympathetic internationalist bleeding-heart liberal, who is fluent in English, familiar with the outside world, a fierce critic of the Putin regime, and while he's proud of being Russian, he doesn't consider that to be first and foremost his only identity. In Phantom!Verse, he's 24 in 2010, when he first meets Ivan, which means that he was born in 1986. He barely remembers the USSR, though he probably has a very hazy memory of hearing about the fall of the Berlin Wall and then the end of the whole thing in 1991. This wasn't really a scary thing or an existential threat to him/his family, though, since as noted, his dad did well for himself afterward.

Ivan, on the other hand, is from a dirt-poor working-class family in Krasnoyarsk, Siberia, and his views are very different. He doesn't necessarily agree with how things have gone, politically speaking, but he's still deeply traditionalist, conservative, and nationalist, and he is VERY proud of being Russian and will always see that as his foremost loyalty. In all the cases where he perceives that Russia as a country is being slighted (the Olympics, accusations of Western election interference, etc), he will still more naturally take the Russian side, even if he doesn't always agree with it or personally like Putin. Ivan is 26 in 2010, when he meets Fedyor, so he was born in 1984 and has... a few more memories of the Soviet Union, the fears of the late-term Cold War, the delicate negotiations with Gorbachev and Reagan and the beginning of glasnost and perestroika, and the end of Soviet superpowerdom. Hence the fall of the USSR was terrifying for him, not exciting like it was for Fedyor. His dad and brothers are all of the same "we can't let crazy America get domination over us again, even if Putin is a dick" mindset, and Ivan shares it to some degree.

Of course, Ivan had his own struggles with growing up in a deeply conservative, macho culture/family and realizing that he was gay, which is why he left Krasnoyarsk and moved to Moscow when he was 21 (since he tells Fedyor he's been there for 5 years). He only has a high school diploma and hasn't traveled outside of Russia except to former Soviet countries that also speak Russian, so he's not that familiar with the West except from how it's given to him through the news. He doesn't trust it and doesn't see them as some shining beacon of hope (which you know, Ivan, totally fair). He also thinks that the valiant efforts of Fedyor and his fellow activists are idiotic, doomed, completely pointless, and will only get them into a ton of trouble, but he faithfully turns up at every protest anyway to protect Fedyor, and they have learned how to accept it.

So yes, when they first started living together, it was a bit of a car crash. Fedyor is a night owl who stays up late and then sleeps late in the morning, while Ivan, having worked since he was 16, gets up at 5:00 am every single day (and since they're sharing a bed, his alarm always wakes up Fedyor, which Fedyor doesn't like). Fedyor is messy, while Ivan is obsessively neat and gets stressed out by Fedyor NOT PICKING THE FUCK UP AFTER HIMSELF. They have the aforementioned clash of cultures/personal views to work through, though Ivan is (by the time PEL starts) a lot more liberal than he used to be, at least in some ways. The two of them are married and living (pretty happily) in Brighton Beach, Brooklyn, where Fedyor is still a member of the Russian international resistance in exile and Ivan just likes the fact that everywhere he goes in the neighborhood can speak Russian and it's a decent facsimile of being at home. Which is where they are when they come into PEL in chapter 8. I am on chapter 9 now, so there will probably be another update batch after I finish 10.

As ever, I am excited. For many reasons. So yes.

#ivan x fedyor #heartrender husbands #a phantom in enchanting light #pel asks #i have Many Headcanons about them in phantom!verse #as you can see #anonymous #ask

[tracingavantgardeinfluences]

This is the sound of dancing architecture “I get to corner Ralf Hütter in a cluttered backwater of EMI house, for a conversational nexus in which we poke theories at each other through the language barrier… Frank Zappa said “writing about music is like dancing about architecture.” This is the sound of dancing architecture…“ An interview with Ralf Hütter by Andrew Darlington, 1981 (the taped conversation is written up later). Red man. Stop. Eins, Zwei, Drei, Vier. Green man. Go. People respond, regulated by the mechanical switch of coloured lights. Crossing the Pelican towards EMI House it’s easy to submerge in a long droning procession of Kraftwerkian images, pavement thick with lumbering showroom dummies reacting to Pavlovian stimuli, parallel lines of thruways, multi-legged ferroconcrete skyways, gloss-front office-blocks waterfalling from heaven, individuality drowned, starved to extinction, etc, etc. This could get boring. This could be cliché. Ideas prompt unbidden, strategies of sending my cassette recorder on alone to talk to the Kraftwerk answering machine. That’s Kraftwerk, isn’t it? I got news for you. It ain’t. Ralf Hütter (electronics and voice) is neat, polite, talks quietly with Teutonic inflection, and totally lacks visible cybernetic attachments. He’s dressed in regulation black — as per stereotype — slightly shorter than me which makes him five-foot-eight-inches, or perhaps nine, hair razored sharp over temples not to allow traces of decadent side-burns. Shoes are black, but sufficiently scuffed to betray endearingly human imperfections. He walks up and down reading review stats thoughtfully provided by EMI’s press division. Seems it’s a good review in The Times? Strong on technical details… yes? "No. The writer says we play exactly as on the records, which is not so.” He is evidently chagrined by this particular line of criticism, which is an interesting reaction. I file it for reference. But then again he’s just got up and come direct from his hotel. He wants breakfast. Coffee and cakes. An hour or so to talk to me, then down to Oxford for the dauntingly exacting Kraftwerk sound check rituals. The other Kraftwerkers — Florian Schneider (voice and electronics), Karl Bartos and Wolfgang Flür (both electronic percussion) are otherwise occupied. So every vowel must count. I extend a tentative theory. The image Kraftwerk project of modernity, it seems to me, is largely derived from twenties and thirties originals: the Futurist dedication to movement and kinetic energy; the Bauhaus emphasis on clean, strictly functional lines; the Fritz Lang humans-as-social-ciphers thing. Even an album ‘inspired’ by Soviet Constructivist El Lissitzky with all the machine-art connotations that implies. Doesn’t Hütter find this contradictory? “No. In the twenties there was Futurism in Italy, Germany, France. Then in the thirties it stopped, retrograded into Fascism, bourgeois reactionary tendencies, in Germany especially…” And time froze for forty years. Until the Kraftwerk generation merely picked up the discarded threads, carried on where they’d left off. After the war “Germany went through a period with our parents who were so obsessed with getting a little house, a little car, the Volkswagen or Mercedes in front, or both All these very materialistic orientations turning Germany into an American colony, no new idea were really happening. We were like the first generation born after the war, so when we grew up we saw that all around us, and we turned to other things.” Kissing to life a dormant culture asleep four decades? But computers only print out data they’re programmed with, so working on this already grossly over-extended mechanistic principle I aim to penetrate Kraftwerk motivations. The dominant influences on them then were — what? American Rock? “No.” In that case, do Kraftwerk fit into the Rock spectrum? “No. Anti - Rock'n'Roll.” So their music is a separate discipline? “Yes, in a way, even though we play in places like Hammersmith. We are more into environmental music.” So if not Rock, then what? — Berio? Stockhausen? “Yes and no. We listened to that on the radio, it was all around. Especially the older generation of electronic people, the more academic composers — although we are not like that. They seem to be in a category within themselves, and only circulating within their own musical family. They did institutional things — while we are out in the streets. But I think from the sound, yes. From the experimenting with electronics, definitely. The first thing for us was to find a sound of Germany that was of our generation, that was the first records we do. First going into sound, then voices. Then we went further into voices and words, being more and more precise. And for this we were heartily attacked.” He mimics the outrage of his contemporaries — “You can’t do that… Electronics? What are you doing? Kraftwerk? German group — German name? It’s stupid. Music is Anglo-American — it has to be, even when it is in Germany.” The incredulity remains: “Still today, you know. Can you imagine? — German books with English titles, German bands singing English songs. It’s ridiculous!” Of course it is. But didn’t the Beatles do some German-language records at one time? “Sure” shrugs Hütter, friendly beyond all reasonable expectations. “They were even more open than most of the Germans…” I’d anticipated some mutual incomprehensibility interface with his broken English and my David Hockney Yorkshire. You find the phrasing strange? I’ll tell you… when the possibility of doing this interview first cropped up I ransacked my archives and dug out everything on Kraftwerk I could find. Now it occurs to me that each previous press chat-piece, from Creem to Melody Maker, have transposed Herr Hütter’s every utterance into perfect English. Which is not the case. His eloquence is daunting, but it inevitably has very pronounced Germanic cadences. Sometimes he skates around searching for the correct word, other times he uses the right word in the wrong context. When he says “we worked on the next album and the next album, and just so on”, it really emerges as “ve vork on ze next album und ze next, und just zo on”. It might be interesting to write up the whole interview tape with that phonetic accuracy, but it would be difficult to compose and impossible to read. Nevertheless, I’m not going to bland out his individuality by disinfecting his speech peculiarities, or ethnically cleansing his phrases entirely… But now he’s in flight and I’m chasing, trying to nail down details. In my head it’s now turn of the decade — sixties bleeding into the seventies, and this thing is called Krautrock. Oh, wow! Hard metallic grating noises, harder, more metallic, more grating and noisier than Velvet Underground, nihilistic Germanic flirtations with the existential void. Amon Düül II laying down blueprints to be electro-galvanised into a second coming by PiL, Siouxsie & The Banshees and other noise terrorists. Cluster. Faust. Then there is the gratuitous language violence of Can, sound that spreads like virus infection from Floh de Cologne and Neu, and Ash Ra Temple who record an album with acid prophet and genetic outlaw Timothy Leary. Was there a feeling of movement among these bands? A kinship? “No.” One note on the threshold of audibility, shooting down fantasies. “In Germany we have no capital. After the war we don’t have a centre or capital anymore. So instead we have a selection of different regional cultures. We — Kraftwerk — come from industrial Düsseldorf. But Amon Düül II came from Munich, which has a different feeling. Munich is quite relaxed. There’s a lot of landscape around.” Now for me it’s not just some off-the-top-of-the-head peripheral observation, but the corner-stone of my entire musical philosophy that this affable German is effortlessly swotting, and I’m not letting him off lightly. I restate histories carefully. American Rock'n'Roll happened in 1954 — Memphis, Sun Studios. From there it spread in a series of shock waves, reaching and taking on the regional characteristics of each location it hit. By the mid-sixties a distinctive UK variant had come into being, identifiably evolving out of exposure to US vinyl artefacts, but incontrovertibly also home-grown. Surely Krautrock was evidence that Germany had also acquired its own highly individual Rock voice? It seems to me there is a common feeling, a shared voice among these diverse groups. But he’s not buying. You don’t think so? “No. At least not as far as we were concerned.” When they started out they recorded in German-language. „We always record in German” he corrects emphatically. „Then we do — like in films, synchronised versions for English. The original records are all German, but we also do French, and now Japanese versions. We are very into the internationalist part.” Continuing this trans-Europe theme he suddenly suggests „Britain is a very historical society. The Establishment. The hierarchy. We come here and we feel that immediately. On the one hand you have this very modern…” he tails off. Starts again, „it’s a schizophrenic country, a modern people, new music and everything, but on the other hand the… how can I say it, a theatrical establishment.” I retaliate, yes — but surely it could equally be argued that all Europe forms a common cultural unit attempting to survive between the historic power-block forces of the USA and the old Soviet Union? Indeed, to journalist Andy Gill, Kraftwerk’s music is „promoting the virtues of cybernetic cleanliness and European culture against the more sensual, body-orientated nature of most Afro-American derived music” (‘Mojo’s August 1987). Europe shares a common heritage uniting Britain, Germany and France, which are all being subtly subverted by a friendly invasion of American Economic and McCultural influences, movies, records, clothes? Witter himself once said „in Germany, Pop music is a cultural import”. „Yes, I know. Certainly when we came to Birmingham (England) we thought it was similar to Düsseldorf. There’s no question. But in Germany it happens even more though, because here in England at least you notice, you know the language and everything. In Germany they don’t notice, it was just taken over.” I’d always considered the German language to be a defence against foreign influence. It was far easier for mainstream British culture to be accessed, and infiltrated because of a common American-English language. In France, for example, the Government is actively resisting the 'Anglicisation’ of their language through 'Franglaise’, because they rightly see its corruption as the thin end of the wedge. “Maybe. That should be checked. But you, together with the Americans had another situation to start with. After the war, Germany was finished. I’m not saying why or whatever, that’s OK. But when I grew up we used to play around the bomb-fields and the destroyed houses. This was just part of our heritage, part of our software. It was our education and cultural background…” The spectre of Basil Fawlty springs unbidden. Earlier an entirely innocent question about Kraftwerk’s origins had dislodged similar sentiments. He’d spoken of Germany’s Fascist years — “in Germany especially, that’s what I mostly knew about, then all the (artistic / creative) people emigrated, Einstein had to leave, and everybody knows the reasons. And then only after the war — he came back. But I think Germany went through a period, with our parents, who had never had anything. They went through two wars…” Breakfast becomes manifest. Mushroom quiche — no meat — followed by a choice of apricot or apple flan, plus two coffees. I sit opposite him, tape machine on the floor between us picking up air, the windows of EMI House blanding out over the trees of Manchester Square. I’m marshalling scores. So for, not content with winning each verbal exchange hands down, Ralf Hütter has also squashed each of my most cherished illusions about Krautrock. But on the plus side, massive giga-jolts of respect are due here. Long before the world had heard of Bill Gates or William Gibson, when Silicon Valley was still just a valley and mail had yet to acquire its 'e’ pre-fix, Kraftwerk were literally inventing and assembling their own instruments, expanding the technosphere by rewiring the sonic neural net, and defining the luminous futures of what we now know as global electronica. So perhaps it’s time to probe more orthodox histories? It seems to me there are two distinct phases to Kraftwerk’s career. Or perhaps even three. The first five years devoted purely to experimental forays into synchromeshed avant-electronics, producing the batch of albums issued in Britain through Vertigo — Kraftwerk in 1972, Ralf Und Florian the following year, the seminal Autobahn in 1974, and the compilation Exceller 8 in 1975. Then they switch to EMI, settle on a more durable line-up and the subsequent move into more image-conscious material, a zone between song and tactile atmospherics. The third, and current phase, involves a long and lengthening silence.   "No, it wasn’t like that” says Hütter. “It was…” his hand indicates a level plane. 'There was never a break. It was a continual evolution. We had our studios since 1970, so we always worked on the next album, and the next album, and so on. I think Düsseldorf therefore was very good because we brought in other people, painters, poets, so that we associated ourselves with…“ his sometimes faulty English — interfacing with my even more faulty German — breaks down. The words don’t come. So he switches direction. “Also we had some classical training before that [Ralf and Florian met at the Düsseldorf Conservatory], so we were very disciplined.” Others in this original extended family of neo-Expressionist electro-subversives included Conny Plank (who was later to produce stuff for Annie Lennox’ The Tourists, and Ultravox), Thomas Homann and Klaus Dinger (later of Neu), artist Karl Klefisch (responsible for the highly effective Man Machine sleeve), and Emil Schult (who co-composed Trans-Europe Express). In the subsequent personnel file, as well as Hütter, there is Florian Schneider who also operates electronics and sometimes robotic vocals. While across the years of their classic recordings they are set against Karl Bortos and Wolfgang Flür who both manipulate electronic percussion. I ask if they always operate as equal partners. “Everybody has their special function within the group, one which he is good at and likes to do the most.” It was never just Ralf und Florian plus a beatbox rhythm section? “No. It’s just that we started historically all that time ago and worked for four years with about twenty percussionists, and they would never go into electronics, so we had to step over, banging away and things like that. And then Wolfgang came in.” With that sorted out I ask if he enjoyed touring. „Yes, basically, because we don’t do it so often. But we also enjoy working in our studios in Düsseldorf, we shouldn’t tour too much otherwise… we get lost somewhere, maybe! We get too immunised. When you have too much you must shut down because you get too many sounds and visions from that tour. For the first five years we toured always in Germany on the Autobahns — that’s where that album came from. Since 1975 we do other countries as well.” They first toured the USA in March 1975, topping the bill over British Prog-Rockers Greenslade, then — leaving an American Top Thirty hit, they went on to play eight British dates in June set up for them by manager Ira Blacker. How much of that early music was improvised? Was the earlier material 'freer’? Kraftwerk numbered Karl Klaus Roeder on violin and guitar back then, so are the newer compositions more structured? „No. We are going more… now that we play longer, work longer than ten years, we know more and every afternoon when we are in the Concert Hall or somewhere in the studio we just start the machines playing and listen to this and that. Just yesterday we composed new things. Once in Edinburgh we composed a new piece which we even included in that evening’s show. New versions on old ideas. So we are always working because otherwise we should get bored just repeating. And it’s not correct what he (the hostile gig reviewer) was saying — that we play on stage exactly like we sound on the record. That’s complete rubbish. It means people don’t even notice and they don’t listen. They go instead over to the Bar for a drink! We, our music is very basic, the compositions are never complex or never complicated. More sounds — KLINK! KLUNK!! Metallic sound. We go for this sound composition more than music composition. Only now they are thematically more precise than they were before.” After so long within the genre don’t they find electronics restricting? „No, just the opposite.” Words precise with the sharp edge of Teutonic resonance. „We can play anything. The only restrictions we do find are, like in writing, as soon as you have a paper and pen — or a computer or a cassette recorder and a microphone, and you bring ideas, you find the limitation is in what you program rather than what is in the microphone or the cassette. You — as a writer, writing this interview, can’t say that the piece you are writing is not good because the word processor did not pick out the right words for you. It’s the same with us. If we make a bad record it’s because we are not in a good state of mind.” Change of tack. There’s a lot of Kraftwerkian influence around. Much of current electro-Dance seems to be plugged directly into the vaguely 'industrial’ neuro-system that Hütter initially delineated, while dedicated eighties survivalist cults Depeche Mode and Human League also have Kraftwerk DNA in their gene-code. He nods sagely. “There’s a very good feeling in England now. It was all getting so… historical.” Is the same thing happening in Germany now? Is there a good Rock scene there? “No. But New Music (Neu Musik).” Hütter’s opinions on machine technology have been known to inspire hacks of lesser literary integrity to sprees of wild Thesaurus-ransacking adjectival overkill, their vocabularies straining for greater bleakness, more clone-content, 'Bladerunner’ imagery grown bloated and boring through inept repetition. And sure, Kr-art-werk is all geometrical composition, diagonal emphasis, precision honed etc, but their imagery is not entirely without precedent. Deliberately so. Their 'Man-Machine’ album track “Metropolis” obviously references German Fritz Lang’s 1926 proto-SF Expressionist movie. The sleeve also acknowledges the 'inspiration’ of Bauhaus constructivist El Lissitzky. I went on to hazard the connections with German modern classical music bizorro Karlheinz Stockhausen — particularly on Kraftwerk’s Radio-Activity album, where they use the 'musique concrete’ technique of surgical-splicing different sounds together from random areas. Radioland uses drop-in short-wave blips, bursts and static twitterings, Transistor has sharp pre-sample edits, alongside the pure found-sound audio-collage The News. A technique that resurfaces as late as Electric Cafe, where The Telephone Song is made up of 'phone bleeps and telecommunication bloopery. He’s familiar with the input. Immediately snaps back the exact location of the ideas — Kurzwellen, from Stockhausen’s back-catalogue. And what about the aural applications of Brion Gysin/William Burroughs’ literary cut-up experiments? Is there any interaction there? “Maybe” he concedes. “'Soft Machine’, contact with machines. But we are more Germanic.” He pauses, then suggests “we take from everywhere. That’s how we find most of our music. Out of what we find in the street. The Pocket Calculator in the Department Stores.” The music is the message — 'the perfect Pop song for the tribes of the global village’ as Hütter once described it. The medium and the form? “If the music can’t speak for itself then why make music? Then we can be writers directly. If I could speak really everything I want with words then I should be working in literature, in words. But I can’t, I never can say anything really, I can’t even hardly talk to the audience. I don’t know what to say. But when we make music, everything keeps going, it’s just the field we are working in, or if we make videos we are more productive there.” I quote back from an interview he did with Q magazine in July 1991 where he suggests that traditional musical skills are becoming increasingly redundant. “With our computers, this is already taken care of,” he explains. “So we can now spend more time structuring the music. I can play faster than Rubenstein with the computer, so it [instrumental virtuosity] is no longer relevant. It’s getting closer to what music is all about: thinking and hearing.” So technology should be interpreted as a potentially liberating force? “Not necessarily. I don’t always find that. Dehumanising things have to be acknowledged. Maybe if you want to become human, first you have to be a showroom dummy, then a robot, and maybe one day…” An expressive wave. “People tend to overestimate themselves. I would never say I am very human. I still have doubts. I can project myself as a semi-god. I can do that. The tools exist for me to achieve that. But I’d rather be more modest about this, about our real function in this society, in these blocks here,” indicating out through the plate glass, across the square, to the city towers of finance and global commerce beyond. “People overestimate themselves. They think they are important. They think they are human.” I’m out of synchronisation again. Surely, if people have to extricate themselves from the machinery they have created, to become human, then it’s due to the imperfections of the technology — not the people. Machines are intended to serve, if they do otherwise, they malfunction. “Not so. They should not be the new slaves. We are going more for friendship and co-operation with machines. Because then, if we treat them nice, then they treat us nice. You know, there are so many people who go in for machines, who when you come to their homes their telephones are falling to pieces, their music centres don’t function, the television set is ruined. But if you take care of your machines then they will live longer. They have a life of their own. They have their own life-span. They have a certain hour of duration. There are certain micro-electronics which work a thousand hours. Then there is a cassette recorder battery which operates ten or twelve hours.” The mentality you oppose, then, is that of conspicuous consumption, planned obsolescence, the psychology of 'a spoilt child’? “The energy crisis, the whole thing is a result of thinking that everything is there, we just have to use it, take this, and — PTOOOOFFF! — throw it away. But make sure that the neighbours see! This whole attitude of disassociating oneself from machines — humans here and machines over there. When you work so much with machines — as we do — then you know that has to change.” Earlier he’d spoken of growing up 'playing around the bomb-fields and destroyed houses’ in the wake of WWII, so this respect for material possessions is perhaps understandable. But he sees beyond this. He sees machines having the potential to free people physically from unnecessary labour, and culturally to create whole new thinking. “I mean — where is my music without the synthesiser? Where is it?” The music, the intelligence, is in your head. Without that the synth is just….“ "Yes, bringing it about! The catalyst. We are partners. We two can together make good music, if we are attuned to each other.” But you could operate another instrument. The vehicle you use is incidental. You could walk out this building, buy a new synth here in London, and play it just as well as your own equipment in Düsseldorf. “Yes. That is because I have this relationship with this type of thing.” I’m reproducing this exactly as it happens, and still I’m not exactly sure what he’s getting at. Perhaps something is lost in the language gap. Like earlier, he’d said “I would never say I am very human” and I’d accepted it first as role playing — until he’d made it obvious that he equates 'becoming human’ with 'achieving freedom’. Humanity is something that has to be earned. You can’t be robot and human. But this is not a natural conversation. This is on interview. A marketing exercise designed to sell Kraftwerk records by projecting certain consumer-friendly imagery. He is playing games, and this cyber-spiel is what journalists expect from Kraftwerk? But to Ralf Hütter there seems to be more to it than that. He believes what he is saying. At least on one level. Some impenetrable levels of ambiguity are at work concerning this alleged relationship to technology. Baffled, I skate around it. What crafty work is afoot for the future? “For me? For Kraftwerk? Well, certain things that I had to remember and memorise and think about are now programmed and stored. So there’s no restriction that we have to rehearse manually. There’s no physical restriction. I can liberate myself and go into other areas. I function more now as software. I’m not so much into hardware. I’m being much more soft now since I have transferred certain thoughts into hardware. That is why we put those two words together Software/Hardware on the album. Because it is like a combination of the two — Man/ Machine — otherwise it would not be happening. We can play anything. Our type of set-up — and group, the studio, the computers and everything. Anything.” So what’s new in electronics, Ralf? “What we find now is like, a revolution in machines. They are bringing back all the garbage now that has been put into them for the last hundred years and we are facing a second, third and fourth Industrial Revolution. Computers. Nano-electronics. Maybe then we come back into Science Fiction? I don’t know.” Then, on inspiration, “there’s another thing coming out. 'Wet-Ware’, and we function also — in a way, as Wet-Ware.” I’m hit by a sudden techno-blur of off-the-wall ideas, imperfectly understood concepts of some electro-erotic wet ’T’-shirt ritual in the pale blue wash of sterile monitors. What is 'Wet-Ware’, Ralf? Spoken with bated breath. And he explains. Like hardware is machines. Software is the data that is fed into them. “Wet-Ware is anything biochemical. The biological element in the machine!” The programmer? I see. Fade into intimations of cybernetic übermensch conspiracies. So with these limitless vistas of techno-tomorrows, Kraftwerk will continue for some time yet? "Yoh. Yes.” Pause, then the laugh opens up, “… until we fall off the stage!” Auf Wiedersehen, Ralf… Eins, Zwei, Drei, Vier…

[pilferingapples]

for @shitpostingfromthebarricade , who very nicely asked for an elaboration of my partial disagreement with the idea that Grantaire represents “the people”  of France or Paris: 

First let me say again it’s a partial  disagreement; I do think he represents a specific segment of the people. But one which is not ~~**~~ The People~~**~~  which I will hopefully be able to explain here?

- As far as “the people” goes, that term-- that specific  term, “the people” detached from other qualifiers-- especially in Hugo’s specific  political-social group-- seems to have been used mostly to mean the workers-- workers, small artisan-merchants, maybe peasants. If someone in a socialist-writer text of the period is called a “child of the people” it means they’re from the working class; if they’re a Man Of The People , ditto. Feuilly is the representative of The People in the Amis’ group-- Enjolras even specifically says so, in the middle of one of his full-on visionary speeches--Feuilly,vaillant ouvrier, homme de peuple, hommes des peuples” (valiant working-man,man of the people--and then the transition/combo that can be read as “man of all peoples”  or “men  of the people” , plural (or, actually, as “the people’s man”, depending on what you’re choosing to focus on. Lamarque song rewrite go!) .  For a guy with very few lines, Feuilly is specifically carrying a LOT of social/political representation here :P (and of course it’s even more Symbolic because Feuilly has no known human parents; his class background is also his family background, he’s of The People, full stop, not of any more specific background. )

We’re never given Grantaire’s exact socioeconomic background, and certainly working-class kids could go into art studies in certain circumstances-- but Grantaire also has no apparent job and has a lot of middle-class-kid hobbies (boxing, singlestick, dancing, etc etc). Everything about Grantaire marks him as middle-class in background, currently choosing to vie-boheme it up. He’s definitely not a representative of “the people” in this sense. 

I also can’t go with Grantaire representing Paris, at least not Full On Spirit Of Paris.  Leaving aside that Grantaire specifically disavows Paris and his own Parisian-ness in Preliminary Gayeties, Hugo sets up very specific symbolism and character for Paris in Les Mis, and he’s pretty direct about it!

 Hugo’s Paris is wild, bold, anarchic, laughing, unafraid of violence, sometimes lazy or careless but essentially generous, bold, insightful and daring, and always  inherently inclined to liberty (and also essentially Romantic at its heart, because this is a Hugo novel and anything good has to be essentially Romantic at heart:P)  (and Hugo has a Lot of Feelings about Paris). Paris in miniature--Paris Atomized, Paris made human-- is Gavroche,  not Grantaire. Even among just the Amis, the one closest to being Hugo’s Paris Avatar is Bahorel, who shares so many echoes of the gamin chapters in his intro, the group’s flâneur-- flâner est Parisien!--and connection to the city,  in the same way Feuilly is their connection to the wider world and internationalist causes.  

But like I said, I do  really think Grantaire represents a part of the population of Paris! An important part! 

Specifically, he’s representing that part of the population that wants to take a damn break.   The part that feels that “of great events, great hazards, great adventures, great men, thank God, we have seen enough, we have them heaped higher than our heads”,(4.1.1) the part that having found a seat wants to sit.  The perhaps selfish, but very understandable, part of the population that is secure enough itself to feel like it will do nothing but lose in another revolution, that “some one whose name is all” that says “I am young and in love, I am old and I wish to repose, I am the father of a family, I toil, I prosper, I am successful in business, I have houses to lease, I have money in the government funds, I am happy, I have a wife and children, I have all this, I desire to live, leave me in peace.” (5.1.20)

That is to say...Grantaire is representing the apathetic, the burned out, and the bourgeoisie. 

This is certainly not the most flattering thing to be representing, but then Grantaire isn’t a particularly aspirational  character--not until the very end of his arc, when he stands up and announces himself For The Ideal. Like the people who close their doors,like the bourgeoisie who just wants to rest, he doesn’t hate the ideal, really...but he’s had Enough Trying, he wants peace and security and to not die or see his loved ones die,  and all of that is very understandable! But if he were genuinely happy  with that...well he wouldn’t be with the Amis at all. He also wants that Ideal, a better kinder world, and unfortunately to get that he’s going to have to stand up.

..Well, not him, personally,of course. When he  stands up he’s-a-gonna die, albeit in a super symbolic transformational/salvational way.  But the Not Very Subtle At All implication is that this is where the revolution wins: when the comfortable people , and especially  the bourgeoisie (well, as Hugo defines them), who have been sitting down, sleeping, wake up and take part. 

(This is of course true in a grand sense-- revolutions need mass participation! -- and it’s also true in the very specific sense of what went down in 1830 vs 1832. In 1830, a lot of the bourgeoisie did  get involved , and it’s a big part of why that went as smoothly as it did. But in 1832, by and large they said No Thanks We’re Good; a handful of students and some wild Romantics really was about all participation outside of the working/poor classes. But this is already so freaking long and this is not a Barricade Day post!) 

So: all of that very  long ramble is to say, yeah, I think Grantaire is symbolizing not The People (who are , symbolically and historically, already on the barricade)  but a specific and crucial subset of The People Of France (Or Wherever), which is why I never feel like I can go either “Yeah!!” or  “Ugh No” when I see a “Grantaire is the people” mention. :P

--sorry I can’t put them under a second cut >< , but these are relevant longer chunks of some of the quotes above!

Of great events, great hazards, great adventures, great men, thank God, we have seen enough, we have them heaped higher than our heads. We would exchange Cæsar for Prusias, and Napoleon for the King of Yvetot. “What a good little king was he!” We have marched since daybreak, we have reached the evening of a long and toilsome day; we have made our first change with Mirabeau, the second with Robespierre, the third with Bonaparte; we are worn out. Each one demands a bed.Devotion which is weary, heroism which has grown old, ambitions which are sated, fortunes which are made, seek, demand, implore, solicit, what? A shelter.”(4.1.1, Well Cut) 

The bourgeois is the man who now has time to sit down. A chair is not a caste.

But through a desire to sit down too soon, one may arrest the very march of the human race. This has often been the fault of the bourgeoisie. (4.1.2, Badly Sewed)

And it appears that they are going to fight, all those imbeciles, and to break each other’s profiles and to massacre each other in the heart of summer, in the month of June, when they might go off with a creature on their arm, to breathe the immense heaps of new-mown hay in the meadows! Really, people do commit altogether too many follies. An old broken lantern which I have just seen at a bric-à-brac merchant’s suggests a reflection to my mind; it is time to enlighten the human race. Yes, behold me sad again. That’s what comes of swallowing an oyster and a revolution the wrong way! I am growing melancholy once more. Oh! frightful old world. People strive, turn each other out, prostitute themselves, kill each other, and get used to it!

... I don’t think much of your revolution,I don’t execrate this Government. It is the crown tempered by the cotton night-cap. It is a sceptre ending in an umbrella. In fact, I think that to-day, with the present weather, Louis Philippe might utilize his royalty in two directions, he might extend the tip of the sceptre end against the people, and open the umbrella end against heaven. ” - (Grantaire, from Premliminary Gayeties, 4.12.2)

What, then, is progress? We have just enunciated it; the permanent life of the peoples.

Now, it sometimes happens, that the momentary life of individuals offers resistance to the eternal life of the human race.

Let us admit without bitterness, that the individual has his distinct interests, and can, without forfeiture, stipulate for his interest, and defend it; the present has its pardonable dose of egotism; momentary life has its rights, and is not bound to sacrifice itself constantly to the future. The generation which is passing in its turn over the earth, is not forced to abridge it for the sake of the generations, its equal, after all, who will have their turn later on.—“I exist,” murmurs that some one whose name is All. “I am young and in love, I am old and I wish to repose, I am the father of a family, I toil, I prosper, I am successful in business, I have houses to lease, I have money in the government funds, I am happy, I have a wife and children, I have all this, I desire to live, leave me in peace.”—Hence, at certain hours, a profound cold broods over the magnanimous vanguard of the human race.  (5.1.20, The Dead Are In The Right and the Living Are Not Wrong)

#long post #all of the words or none of the words that's how it goes #Grantaire talk

[blackwoolncrown]

This article is a must read, and so I have posted it here. Douglas Rushkoff is a fantastic human, please follow him on twitter here. Check out his books and Ted talks, he also has interviews on Youtube.

Anyway this article is just...incredibly revealing. America is really just one big PsyOp. His comments on civilization are A+++:

“Until quite recently, films like 1954’s Abstract in Concrete were banned for American viewers. Although produced with U.S. tax dollars, this cinematic interpretation of the lights of Times Square was meant for European consumption only. Like the rest of the art and culture exported by the United States Information Agency, Abstract in Concrete was part of a propaganda effort to make our country look more free, open, and tolerant than many of us preceived or even wanted it to be. In the mid-1940’s, when conservative members Congress got wind of the progressive image of America we were projecting abroad, they almost cut the USIA’s funding, potentially reducing America’s global influence.

Well, America today is in no danger of projecting too free, open, or tolerant a picture of itself to the world. But I’m starting to wonder if maybe the nationalist, xenophobic, inward-turned America on display to the world these days might just be the real us — the real U.S. Maybe the propaganda we created to make ourselves look like the leading proponents of global collaboration and harmony was just that: propaganda.

~Once the USSR and the U.S. divided Europe into East and West and the Cold War began, America went on a propaganda effort to present itself as more enlightened and free than the communists.~

Since the great World Wars, America has had a vested interest in fostering a certain global order. President Woodrow Wilson, who had run for president on a peace platform, ended up bringing America into World War I. When it was done, he established something called The League of Nations, which was meant to keep the peace. Thanks to an isolationist Congress, however, the United States never actually joined the League of Nations. That should have been a big hint that America’s interest in global cooperation was fleeting, at best.

During World War II, Roosevelt took his shot at global harmony with his “Declaration by United Nations,” which eventually gave birth to the UN, dedicated to international peace and basic human rights around the world. To most Americans, however, the United Nations represented little more than a way of preventing the sort of war that would again require American intervention. Yes, it was in New York, and yes, it was conceived and spearheaded by Americans but this didn’t mean that America really thought of itself as part of a great international community. The UN was really just a way for us to avoid having to go “over there” again.

This was surprising to me. I grew up in the 1970s, at the height of America’s cultural outreach to Europe and the world. I remember how great Russian artists and ballet dancers would come to New York, and how American artists and writers would go to Europe. There were exchange students in my high school from Italy, France, and Germany. The outside world — the international society of musicians, writers, thinkers that America was fostering— seemed more artistic, cultural, and tolerant than what I knew here, at home. It seemed like the future.

~~~

This was by design, and part of a propaganda effort that began in the 1940's. Once the USSR and the U.S. divided Europe into East and West and the Cold War began, America went on a propaganda effort to present itself as more enlightened and free than the communists. The State Department, the CIA, and the United States Information Agency, as well as an assortment of foundations from Rockefeller’s to Fulbright’s, all dedicated themselves to painting a positive picture of America abroad. This was big money; by the late 1950’s the USIA alone spent over $2 billion of public money a year on newsreels, radio broadcasts, journalism, and international appearances and exhibitions. This included everything from Paris Review articles to Dizzy Gillespie concerts.

The problem was that the image of America that these agencies projected to the world wasn’t the image many Americans had of their country. Information agencies were busy trying to make us look like an open and free society, as sophisticated and cosmopolitan as any European one. So, abstract art exhibits and films, book collections with modernist novels, intellectuals, people of color, modern dancers, and all sorts of avant-garde culture was sent for consumption abroad.

Conservative Americans, as well as the senators who represented them, saw this stuff as gay, communist, Jewish, urban, effete, and an altogether terrible misrepresentation of who we were and what we stood for. Why, they asked, should we be spending upwards of two billion dollars exporting decadent, self-indulgent art and culture to the world?

~~~

So Congress — convinced that there was still a national security advantage, or at least a business justification, in maintaining American global outreach — passed a compromise called the Smith-Mundt Act in 1948. The law made it illegal for the USIA to release any of its propaganda within the United States. Ostensibly, this was to protect Americans from the potentially manipulative propaganda it was spreading abroad. Information is a form of PSYOPS (psychological operations), after all, and we are not going to use such weapons on our own people.

But the real reason for the Smith-Mundt act was to prevent Americans from seeing themselves represented in ways that they didn’t agree with. The books in the traveling library were titles that many Americans thought would be better burned than celebrated. And the overall ethos of the program — to promote America’s internationalism and free society — were in direct contradiction to the values that many Americans held. The Smith-Mundt act created a wall between the image of America we exported to the world, and the one we maintained about ourselves.

By the time the Internet emerged, this division became impossible to keep up. YouTube, the Internet Archive, and Facebook bring everything to everyone. So in 2012, Smith-Mundt was repealed. Concerned netizens saw a conspiracy. Did this mean the government would now be free to use its psychological warfare on U.S. citizens? Perhaps. But the real intent was to relieve the government’s communications agencies from trying to hide their messaging from Americans in an age when hiding such programming is impossible.

~~~

But now that Americans are becoming more aware of America’s internationalist activities and sentiments, many are horrified and calling for retreat. This is the province of George Soros, the Rothschilds, and the Zionist conspiracy — not the good old U.S. of A. I wonder: was the Smith-Mundt Act hiding an internationalist and open-minded America from the few Americans who weren’t ready for it? Or was it simply hiding the nationalist and backwards-thinking America from the world? For all our efforts at telling Europe otherwise, maybe we are not really the modern society we self-styled proponents of public diplomacy like to think we are.

The measure of a civilization’s advancement is its capacity to insulate its people from the cruelty of nature. Right now, Americans don’t seem to be dedicated to that principle. Civilizations build public roads, baths, aqueducts, and later transportation, healthcare, and education into the fabric of society, as givens. Instead of seeing the poor as deserving of discomfort, civilizations see all human beings as deserving of essential human dignity. The more a civilization can spread these basic human rights and freedoms through the world, the more advanced the civilization.

However, this particular understanding of modernity and enlightenment is not universal. Instead of breaking down boundaries and building an international society, America’s current stated goal is to reject globalism, build walls, and treat other nations as business competitors. The America we were once hiding behind billion-dollar international culture campaigns is now the America we are broadcasting to the world. Instead of compensating for our American-made missiles with progressive art and media, now we are justifying their sale and use with America-first rhetoric.

America’s best hope for cross-border connection, identification, and intimacy is its people. This means you and me, sharing our beliefs, aspirations, culture, and compassion with as much of the world as possible. Just as conservatives fought against the export of an America they didn’t agree with is, it’s the progressives’ turn to speak on behalf of the connected and collaborative world we still hope for — even if we aren’t fit to be its leader, anymore.

(emphasis mine)

#civilization #climate crisis #politics #res1st #team human #douglass rushkoff #society #america #revolution #propaganda

[alexsmitposts]

I Never Saw a World So Fragmented! It is amazing how easily, without resistance, the Western empire is managing to destroy “rebellious” countries that are standing in its way. I work in all corners of the planet, wherever Kafkaesque “conflicts” get ignited by Washington, London or Paris. What I see and describe are not only those horrors which are taking place all around me; horrors that are ruining human lives, destroying villages, cities and entire countries. What I try to grasp is that on the television screens and on the pages of newspapers and the internet, the monstrous crimes against humanity somehow get covered (described), but the information becomes twisted and manipulated to such an extent, that readers and viewers in all parts of the world end up knowing close to nothing about their own suffering, and/or of the suffering of the other. For instance, in 2015 and in 2019, I tried to sit down and reason with the Hong Kong rioters. It was a truly revealing experience! They knew nothing, absolutely zero about the crimes the West has been committing in places such as Afghanistan, Syria or Libya. When I tried to explain to them, how many Latin American democracies Washington had overthrown, they thought I was a lunatic. How could the good, tender, ‘democratic’ West murder millions, and bathe entire continents in blood? That is not what they were taught at their universities. That is not what the BBC, CNN or even the China Morning Post said and wrote. Look, I am serious. I showed them photos from Afghanistan and Syria; photos stored in my phone. They must have understood that this was original, first hand stuff. Still, they looked, but their brains were not capable of processing what they were being shown. Images and words; these people were conditioned not to comprehend certain types of information. But this is not only happening in Hong Kong, a former British colony. You will maybe find it hard to believe, but even in a Communist country like Vietnam; a proud country, a country which suffered enormously from both French colonialism and the U.S. mad and brutal imperialism, people that I associated with (and I lived in Hanoi for 2 years) knew close to nothing about the horrendous crimes committed against the poor and defenseless neighboring Laos, by the U.S. and its allies during the so-called “Secret War”; crimes that included the bombing of peasants and water buffalos, day and night, by strategic B-52 bombers. And in Laos, where I covered de-mining efforts, people knew nothing about the same monstrosities that the West had committed in Cambodia; murdering hundreds of thousands of people by carpet bombing, displacing millions of peasants from their homes, triggering famine and opening the doors to the Khmer Rouge takeover. When I am talking about this shocking lack of knowledge in Vietnam, regarding the region and what it was forced to go through, I am not speaking just about the shop-keepers or garment workers. It applies to Vietnamese intellectuals, artists, teachers. It is total amnesia, and it came with the so-called ‘opening up’ to the world, meaning with the consumption of Western mass media and later by the infiltration of social media. At least Vietnam shares borders as well as a turbulent history with both Laos and Cambodia. But imagine two huge countries with only maritime borders, like the Philippines and Indonesia. Some Manila dwellers I met thought that Indonesia was in Europe. Now guess, how many Indonesians know about the massacres that the United States committed in the Philippines a century ago, or how the people in the Philippines were indoctrinated by Western propaganda about the entire South East Asia? Or, how many Filipinos know about the U.S.-triggered 1965 military coup, which deposed the internationalist President Sukarno, killing between 2-3 million intellectuals, teachers, Communists and unionists in “neighboring” Indonesia? Look at the foreign sections of the Indonesian or Filipino newspapers, and what will you see; the same news from Reuters, AP, AFP. In fact, you will also see the same reports in the news outlets of Kenya, India, Uganda, Bangladesh, United Arab Emirates, Brazil, Guatemala, and the list goes on and on. It is designed to produce one and only one result: absolute fragmentation! *** The fragmentation of the world is amazing, and it is increasing with time. Those who hoped that the internet would improve the situation, grossly miscalculated. With a lack of knowledge, solidarity has disappeared, too. Right now, all over the world, there are riots and revolutions. I am covering the most significant ones; in the Middle East, in Latin America, and in Hong Kong. Let me be frank: there is absolutely no understanding in Lebanon about what is going on in Hong Kong, or in Bolivia, Chile and Colombia. Western propaganda throws everything into one sack. In Hong Kong, rioters indoctrinated by the West are portrayed as “pro-democracy protesters”. They kill, burn, beat up people, but they are still the West’s favorites. Because they are antagonizing the People’s Republic of China, now the greatest enemy of Washington. And because they were created and sustained by the West. In Bolivia, the anti-imperialist President was overthrown in a Washington orchestrated coup, but the mostly indigenous people who are demanding his return are portrayed as rioters. In Lebanon, as well as Iraq, protesters are treated kindly by both Europe and the United States, mainly because the West hopes that pro-Iranian Hezbollah and other Shi’a groups and parties could be weakened by the protests. The clearly anti-capitalist and anti-neo-liberal revolution in Chile, as well as the legitimate protests in Colombia, are reported as some sort of combination of explosion of genuine grievances, and hooliganism and looting. Mike Pompeo recently warned that the United States will support right-wing South American governments, in their attempt to maintain order. All this coverage is nonsense. In fact, it has one and only one goal: to confuse viewers and readers. To make sure that they know nothing or very little. And that, at the end of the day, they collapse on their couches with deep sighs: “Oh, the world is in turmoil!” *** It also leads to the tremendous fragmentation of countries on each continent, and of the entire global south. Asian countries know very little about each other. The same goes for Africa and the Middle East. In Latin America, it is Russia, China and Iran who are literally saving the life of Venezuela. Fellow Latin American nations, with the one shiny exception of Cuba, do zero to help. All Latin American revolutions are fragmented. All U.S. produced coups basically go unopposed. The same situation is occurring all over the Middle East and Asia. There are no internationalist brigades defending countries destroyed by the West. The big predator comes and attacks its prey. It is a horrible sight, as a country dies in front of the world, in terrible agony. No one interferes. Everybody just watches. One after another, countries are falling. This is not how states in the 21st Century should behave. This is the law of attraction the jungle. When I used to live in Africa, making documentary films in Kenya, Rwanda, Congo, driving through the wilderness; this is how animals were behaving, not people. Big cats finding their victim. A zebra, or a gazelle. And the hunt would begin: a terrible occurrence. Then the slow killing; eating the victim alive. Quite similar to the so-called Monroe doctrine. The Empire has to kill. Periodically. With predictable regularity. And no one does anything. The world is watching. Pretending that nothing extraordinary is taking place. One wonders: can legitimate revolution succeed under such conditions? Can any democratically elected socialist government survive? Or does everything decent, hopeful, and optimistic always ends up as the prey to a degenerate, brutal and vulgar empire? If that is the case, what’s the point of playing by the rules? Obviously, the rules are rotten. They exist only in order to uphold the status quo. They protect the colonizers, and castigate the rebellions victims. But that’s not what I wanted to discuss here, today. My point is: the victims are divided. They know very little about each other. The struggles for true freedom, are fragmented. Those who fight, and bleed, but fight nevertheless, are often antagonized by their less daring fellow victims. I have never seen the world so divided. Is the Empire succeeding, after all? Yes and no. Russia, China, Iran, Venezuela – they have already woken up. They stood up. They are learning about each other, from each other. Without solidarity, there can be no victory. Without knowledge, there can be no solidarity. Intellectual courage is now clearly coming from Asia, from the “East”. In order to change the world, Western mass media has to be marginalized, confronted. All Western concepts, including “democracy”, “peace”, and “human rights” have to be questioned, and redefined. And definitely, knowledge. We need a new world, not an improved one. The world does not need London, New York and Paris to teach it about itself. Fragmentation has to end. Nations have to learn about each other, directly. If they do, true revolutions would soon succeed, while subversions and fake color revolutions like those in Hong Kong, Bolivia and all over the Middle East, will be regionally confronted, and prevented from ruining millions of human lives.

[vodcar]

where do you stand on anarchism? im pretty far on the left but i've always been unsure about that cause usually they dont really have a strong answer to welfare and universality questions. like. one time i asked how social security would work under anarchism and they just answered "the families" would take care of it? like...ah yes, the families. those dead certain connections that everyone can always rely on. thats why there's already no poverty or homelessness and welfare systems are obsolete.

heya! thanks for your q !!!So idk really where I stand on anarchism mainly because I haven’t read any anarchist texts really! I’m a big fan of marxist writings so I’m working my way through them which takes some time. I plan to read a lot of anarchism once I’ve had my share to see what they say. (i’ve got a few anarchist friends who similarly haven’t read any marx lol !! so i can imagine there’s a lot of anarchists out there who would be marxists or anarcho-communists and vice versa)in terms of organising I’ll happily organise with anarchists, so long as I think their internal organising structures are good and actually structured and have processes to hold people accountable. I think consensus decision making is largely rubbish (maybe ok in tiny groups of like three to five people lol but other than that) and like structureless groups im very wary of bc they can fall back on pre-established friendships or other privileges that means not everyone can have a say, or if they abuse power in that organising circle there’s no real way to combat it! (which is also why im wary of marxist groups that are overly masculine and white lol. there’s a lot of shitheads in marxist groups that refuse to be held accountable for being shitty and they’re defended or covered up by other people in that group with pre-existing privilege and social capital! it’s gross!!!) In terms of anticapitalist goals i think at this point communists and anarchists should absolutely be working together and re-realising what our ideological differences mean in light of global warming and how we can work together to build power and communities with power where we live. I think we can learn a lot from each other in these respects.im married to an anarchist lol and we tend to agree on a lot of this vis-a-vis what a potential utopian world would look like, but that’s not really a fruitful way to go about things from a marxian tradition, so arguments over ‘what an anarchist world would look like’ i dont really find helpful. like, they can be useful and fun ways to pass the time and test theory but i think both marxist and anarchist theory and organising should be about what we do right here and now and strategies of survival and working towards toppling the bourgeoise rule. in the UK at least, we’re a LONG ways off from any revolution. I think marxist and anarchist collaborations on how to create pockets of community within capitalism and to try and consolidate sustainable eco-socialism in our living lives is very important however, and i know a lot of anarchists working towards things like this, and i also know a lot of marxists undergoing radical action in setting things up to the end of social care.nevertheless, if we are to engage in these arguments, to give favour to our anarchist friends, their construction of ‘the family’ i think hearkens back to feudal or even pre-feudal models of community (which is not to say this is the goal or even desirable, we have a lot of technology and advancement we must always reckon with in any theory of different worlds or ways of living) where things like communal parenting and communal sharing of resources were entirely different to ‘the family’ under capitalism. With communities or ‘families’ with access to their own resources and their own means of distribution and production of said resources, there is no reason why this local community couldn’t provide housing, social care, food, shelter, etc. autonomously. Now, I could easily see a system such as this working under communism in that the means of producing sustenance are owned by the workers themselves, and the workers themselves then organise small local systems by which they distribute such things amongst themselves and amongst their communities.the key difference is in getting to these societies. In the marxist tradition, the ‘withering away of the state’ is theorised and has been practised to various degrees of success and raises questions about resisting quasi-capitalist structures and state suppression of fair criticism, but the anarchist tradition is often to abolish the state outright without a transitory period from a capitalist society to a socialist society to a communist one, which has its flaws in terms of wider questions of consolidating power from the dethroned bourgeoise class, resisting global US/European imperialism/colonialism, questions over nationalism and internationalist organising for a global revolution; and both of these methods in practice face questions of infrastructure, education, distribution, and accountable democratic power structures in the long term.All of these questions are questions specific to each movement in the left. What is true for one anarchist compound is not true for another. What is true for the soviet union was not true for the people’s republic of china, and it certainly won’t be true in the 21st century internet era europe. what we can say and what we can practice is how to organise communities into leftist ideals and justices. Whether than means union organising, growing your own veg and opening up a communal allotment, joining antifa, campaigning in abolitionist movements, in my view, it really doesn’t matter what kind of leftist you are in terms of anarchist or communist, because our focus right now is anticapitalist. Whichever camp u fall into you should be reading the other, and learning from your fellow comrades. you should be critiquing them, and open to critiques about your own practices.

#anarchism #communism #marxism #some harper thoughts!!! #im also very new to marxist literature too so i've probably oversimplified things or just got things plain wrong lol #also there's all that weird sectarianism over trotsky/stalin #i hate that stuff too! not that it's not important or anything #its just not THAT important to split the left over! #Anonymous

[adrianfavell]

The View from Global Britain (a small Island off the North West of Europe, sailing North-by-North-West towards an unknown destination)

Later, when he reviewed the strange sequence of events that led to the breakdown of order and the reversion of the high rise residence to a state of near primitive excess and violence, Dr Gove concluded that it might all be traced back to that one day...

A sickly, swollen orange early morning sun squinted pallidly through the chemical haze over the East End of London’s Docklands. Gove reached over casually from his balcony chair to pick up one of the three books lying on his coffee table. It was a warm day already at 8am outside on the apartment balcony:  he had not bothered to change out of his boxer shorts and T-shirt. A well thumbed classic Penguin edition of George Orwell’s Collected Essays and Journalism Volume 4, lay on one side of the reclining beach style chair, that was his usual morning professional treat before the driver arrived. It was marked with pink post it slips on the pages of the essay ‘The Lion and the Unicorn’. Underneath, was a glossy, less well read edition of translated selections from Michel Foucault’s 1970 College de France Lectures on Governmentality. But the book he perused over the top of his red designer Ace & Tate glasses – which he had bought on the last trip to Amsterdam – was a cherished copy of Roger Scruton’s The Philosopher on Dover Beach. An opera lover, the strains of one of Wagner’s Rings could be heard from his Danish Bang & Olufsen state-of-the-art stereo system inside. Funnily enough, he had seen it live together with his friend, rival and now boss, Johnson, and their now ex-wives in Germany, only a few weeks before D-Day, all that time ago. He congratulated himself once again on the purchase of the Segafredo coffee maker, as he drained the content of his third nespresso of the morning, pausing only slightly to feel the slight twinge of pain that followed in his chest. If only he were George Clooney, he thought, wryly.

Such was the cool clarity of his thoughts, that he barely stirred as a scream was heard from the Branson Mansion above him on the 255th floor of the monstrous tower block he lived in. This state of the art tower occupied mainly by high ranking government officials such as himself, or top end CEOs such as Branson, was one of two similar twin towers – “The Rock” across from “The Edge” – that commanded the entire festering zone wasteland of the former Docklands, north of Greenwich. The high rises were impregnable silver fortresses, self contained with sporting facilities, state of the art cinematic entertainment, and a high end shopping mall, that also functioned seamlessly as child care and schooling facilities for families, and contained all other essential services. The building was equipped with two helicopter landing pads that usually were high enough to clear the low lying cloud of pollution which mostly separated the social classes. Below the towers, under ground level society, was an interconnected underground elite parking facility, that led directly out on to the national freeway grid. His quizzical blue eyes lifted up momentarily from the pages of the philosopher Scruton elucidating a point about Edmund Burke, as a large dead dog thrown from above, flew past the balcony and down, a further half kilometer or so, before crashing through the roof of one of the dozen White “Go Home Immigrants” hostility vans parked there. There was a small commotion among a group of female cleaning service workers arriving for work, apparently Polish, from the distant sound of their foreign voices in the silent city morning. There were still irregularities in the population, he surmised.

He shifted his body with discomfort, however, when he noticed that one or two drops of a rabid red froth from the half decapitated dog had landed on the page of Scruton’s text. He lay the book aside to make a note on a pad that Branson would have to be asked to leave the country.

Gove had been around as a shadowy governmental advisor in the Santiago and Buenos Aires of the 1970s; you sometimes knew when it was a time for a change. These were places he had learned his trade. He recognised though that for all its rationality, violently capturing, torturing and then dumping by helicopter these “nowhere” types in the Thames Estuary was no longer a viable option in the England of the Twenty First Century. Yes, they were a fifth column. These cosmopolitan, nomadic, “transnational” intellectuals and their rich compatriots, who shared a hypocritical nostalgia for the free moving global planet of their youth; a few were still EU sympathisers and internationalist terrorists. Still, he smiled wryly, there was no going back to the River Plate during the heady days of the 1978 World Cup. Even for a criminal like Branson, it was not a practical option. Well, he’d made damn sure that his superior Mrs Thatcher wash her hands of any responsibility for anything her old friend, General Pinochet, had done. And it was true that after, his comrade General Galtieri had returned the favour to the dear Iron Lady, who had been in a tough spot herself in 1981. What they devised was the courtesy of a staged, “low level” invasion of the Falklands Island, that had proven a pioneer of a new brand of simulacra wars (“good for politics, good for business”, a military showcase “win-win-win” all round) that independent islands could engage in to maintain autarkic economic dynamism and electoral support in an now entirely protectionist world. Those were the stuff of international relations today, but always dangerous of course given the hardware, sometimes even nuclear, involved. Protest was usually muted among any remaining “Remain” activists or (so-called) “global” protestors. There were still plenty of academic sanctuaries abroad for renegade university academics, and Branson would be easily “persuaded” – with the right threat –  to take a one way ticket to New York or Los Angeles; places where enclaves of humanitarian CEOs still grumbled together in secret societies about the policies of supreme leader Donald Trump.

He wondered about the scream, though, and idly flicked on the telescreen that was partly masked behind a reproduction of a Kandinsky print on the dining room wall. The Party spokesman was celebrating loudly another victory for the People, that had been delivered that morning, like clockwork, with monotonous weekly regularity. The magic numbers: 52% for Leave, 48% for Remain; a weekly plebiscite delivered electronically by a large, government owned public opinion survey company, Big Big DATA Inc. The weekly vote stabilised the ongoing national need to adjust the population – for example, by removing persons of certain foreign extraction – to deliver the correct mathematical proportion that had been adjusted to represent the exact optimal mix for a definitively binding democratic result (the formula went): “democratic outcomes in divided societies which had decided to resolve their differences by a simple direct Yes/No method”. It was also one reason why they could not go on more strongly with the policy his previous boss Mrs May had devised. The “Go Home” Immigration vans and deportation squads (the “weekly hostility” she called it), particularly targeted at the heavily Europeanised university academic population. Too many deportations and the Remain vote (“Remoaners”, he chuckled) might be too quickly depleted.

The screen changed to an image of a man in a red tie, the officially employed Opposition Leader that Gove himself had hired in one of his occasional, but nonetheless regular, strokes of genius. The annoying man on screen swiftly changed the topic as always to a passionate denunciation of the poverty conditions of white working class voters. What a national shame it was, he said, they had been forced to live now for several decades of austerity gentrification and slum clearance, that had left nothing much of most major cities in the kingdom except mile upon mile of concrete wreckage underneath the sporadic, tree like growth of these huge, shiny residential blocks. Most of these had been built by shady Shanghai and Istanbul owned corporations that had been offered bi-lateral franchise access to the Island, in spite of other barriers to World Trade.

He went back to his laptop writing, a new proposal for entirely consolidating a nationalisation of the national game, which he had loosely imagined as an evolution of the Eton Wall Game. An architect of the national curriculum that had expurgated any traces of “global citizenship” from the education of Engand’s youth, Gove’s influence over the last years had extended to all areas of national culture where some sort of withdrawal from the previously established global or international practices needed to be conceived. Sport was his new brief. The idea had first come to him while watching the World Cup of Summer 2018: the brilliant combination of young British Black and White talent – Ali, Lingard and Kane – that had combined to score goal after goal against foreign allcomers – Japan, Columbia, Sweden – before unfairly succumbing to evil European refereeing against Croatia in the semifinal. As all the newspapers had said, in that hot and heady summer after the first Brexit vote, all future troubles were forgotten as England had united, and seemed to throw away all bitterness and caution in celebration, drinking, cheering, loving and kissing; the white St.George red cross fluttered everywhere over a happy and unified multi-racial land.

Indeed, as economists made clear, the date of January 31st 2020 was the demographic turning point. D-Day, it was called now, a national holiday; Independence Day, being the other major national festival on 23rd June. D-Day, Gove had argued, was the date at which Britain’s international and foreign population was at its optimal peak of absorption into a wholly national economy. The doors could be clanged shut on freedom of movement, but also on trade and industry, since Gove and his colleagues had devised a failsafe scheme to enable Britain to slowly transform all of its internationalised practices into distinct, diverse, incompatible alternatives, that would by their difference and originality, be highly innovative, rich in IP, and world beating. They would however have no compatibility with the outside; of little moment, given the huge backwater of an empire the Island still could call upon. This left a problem of course, for Britain’s national sport and greatest global export, football. This had necessitated Gove’s creative intervention, adapting the Eton Wall Game. He chuckled again at the thought of his heroes Ali, Lingard and Kane, mucking in with the boys, down in the scrum next to the wall, just as Gove, Johnson, Cameron, Goodhart and their idol Orwell had all done as youngsters.

This was still a white paper, for now, and the nation had continued to rely on bi- and multi-lateral agreements and some irregularities to allow the open labour market for the Championship League. It was true: it had more Italian and Portuguese football managers, and more star African players than ever. And yes, it was an exception to the nation’s stringent anti–immigration, zero foreigner policy. A mere “anomaly” , he had called it on Question Time.

What economists and demographers had also discovered though in 2016 was fateful. A now legendary paper by a demographer called Coleman, its framed original folio at the entrance to the British Museum, had shown that if population trends continued – with freedom of movement and immigration – the original White British population would become a minority by 2070, amidst mixed marriages, higher immigrant child birth rates, and (far) too many “people of colour” among foreign-origin migrants. Gove was analytic enough to recognise these populations had been sources of the extraordinary boom years of the 1990s and 2000s, but had been the one thinker with the foresight to see that the door had to be shut in June 2016, if Britain was ever to integrate all these human resoruces and become an independent island again. The People was called upon, and dutifully delivered its 52%. The answer was naturalising, rigorously, everyone on the Island at that moment in time – whether they wanted it or not. That was the key although it would be havoc for the weekly referendum that he knew was needed to maintain the 52% plebiscite of democracy over the Remain vote – hence the further statistical tricks and legal exclusion – and “disappearances” out to sea, if necessary.

They were well on the way to creating a new British population, however, which was remarkable for its multi-racial “super-diversity” (it was called) and yet could maintain stably what another economist, Collier, had calculated as England’s uniquely 80% English DNA national origins, traced back to the Magna Carta. Freedom and Rationality could grow again on this soil.

It was of course on that day, 31st January 2020, that England unveiled its secret plan to escape from Europe, at the cliffs of Dover: making use of the decaying tunnels abandoned by Eurostar and roll-on-roll-off transportation companies, the government had motorised the white cliffs, using a clever combination of nuclear and wind power, that in fact would enable a significant geological shift to begin to move the Island (henceforth capitalised) in a North-by-North-Westerly direction towards the Atlantic. The colony of Ireland would be merged again, as it collided with the British Isles, and a Scotland somewhat reduced -- natural shrinkage caused by damage to its exterior north west coastline buffered by the rough merging and the seas as the Island moved implacably in the direction of Greenland. The South East of England became the only temperate part of the Island as it moved out to sea, further driving up housing prices.

And so on that day, the TVs were all re-set to Telescreens and Party news only, and the new People’s Democracy began. Gove’s slightly lazy left eye almost welled with a gin soaked tear, as he recalled the first judder and grinding geological movement of the Island at the Dover coast. On the cliffs, all the major national dignitaries and leaders had gone to celebrate the occasion. Yes, the Island was moving in the sea, and it had been followed by the slow, at first imperceptible descending of a mist, then an ever thicker fog, which cut off all visible trace of the receding continent across the water. As had been planned, telecommunications and internet networks were disrupted to come under strict territorial control again, and the Island had its independence back. News footage of Lady Diana’s funeral had been used as the first broadcast, to set the right tone. The people cheered wildly, underneath the white and red cross flags, across the nation – the true World Cup spirit back again – as it headed out, impregnable and forever undefeated, towards the icy waters of the North West Atlantic....

*****

It may only have been synchronicity, but at that very moment in a liberal arts college in Southern California, Dr Wong, a young Asian Amercian academic put down her laptop, and reached for a lemonade. The book on her table was a new edition of Gayatri Spivak’s collected essays. The palm trees over the boulevard swayed lightly as a sweet breeze blew in from the desert.

She finished the final sentence of the draft of of a paper for Global Text, which proposed the theoretical framework for the creation of a new interdisciplinary field of occidentalist area studies, “England Studies”. The topic had strangely never been tried before. She had made her name as a post-doc in cosmology, studying black holes (like Steven Hawking, she used to joke), but had switched briefly but brilliantly to zoology during the first five years of her teaching career, making a cutting contribution to contemporary Japanese cultural studies, writing about its remarkable population of otaku and cosplay database animals. However, publisher interest in this well known remote but inaccessible East Asian Galapagos fantasy island lost somewhere in the Pacific, had been waning for some time. Were there not other black holes to discover? One day at the gym a new idea came to her. Why not somewhere in Europe instead of Asia, as a next career move? – especially since the EU had become such a historical curiosity, since its demise. After all, nobody could now quite work out what on Earth anyone had been thinking when they dreamed ludicrously of “European Community” or – and this one really took the grand prix – “European Citizenship”!!. What hilarious and zany times those European post-war “trentes glorieuses” had been!

Yet, ten years on from Independence Day, it seemed that Britain (as it was sometimes still referred to, in academic circles) had moved far enough away from mainland Europe into the upper ocean streams of the Atlantic – somewhere between “Greenland” and “Iceland”, which already had fields devoted to them – to allow for a new field of Area Studies, however challenging the remote fieldwork there. An Island, no doubt with its own strange, unsustainable, close-to-extinct creatures, practices and ideas, like 3G phone technology before the iPhone.

This would surely get her tenure, or even an outside job offer on this year’s market, certainly good enough to allow a fresh negotiation with her Department Chair, she thought....

  ADRIAN FAVELL

Berlin, 9 Dec 2018, early AM

with apologies to J.G.Ballard (1930-2009)

#brexit #global britain #j.g. ballard #gove #eurostar #eu citizens #boris johnson

[sesquipunzel]

Act 1 (161-170)

So here we are, in our virtual tomorrow, ready to FORGE A HEAD — I mean, it doesn't look like there's a forge among John & Rose's new toys, but who knows what Phernalia they have yet to acquire?

Page 161 - John: Examine Alchemiter in a cautious manner.

161.  If the "in a cautious manner" in the command line/page title is any indication, ye olden tyme reader/players from the forum were starting to get a little scared about these machines, just like I am. ("Well, excited AND scared.")  But John doesn't know the meaning of the word danger! At least, he doesn't often seem to think about consequences before acting, and climbing up on the Alchemiter platform is no exception. He gets away with it… this time.

162.  John looks through the telescope...but no, doom is not yet imminent. Just a clear sunny day.

163.  TT tries to grab the toilet with the post-operative cake (and yes, there's that other still-looks-hairy fake arm), forgetting that a toilet isn't a piece of furniture, and has attachments beneath the floor.  "Whoops," she understates.  

Wonder if there's an UNDO command in this game?  (Control-Z could be a rapper, Controlzy could be an artist, what would Command Zee be? Or Command Zed, if we're being internationalistic. [Just occurred to me to wonder, do the Great British call him Jay-Zed?] )

164.  John hears TT making a bigger mess of his mess; she tries to play it down as she sets the toilet down by the playthings, in the backyard. Hoping for a chance to fix it before anyone (with eyes) notices?

165.  "Augh!" John notices — bet he's thinking about consequences now! Looking down through the hole he sees a glass door, a sledgehammer and a green card.

I'm gonna guess that's the door to the backyard — if my mental map isn't too fuz-Z, is this a corner of the kitchen?

But why is there a sledgehammer there? I mean, I think it's probably going to turn out to be very convenient for someone with a HAMMERKIND, uh, specibus. But (assuming this is the kitchen)...I snicker at the imagery: does DAD use this to threaten a recalcitrant oven?  Does he fear someone breaking in to steal his spatulas?

And I don't think we've seen a green card/deck yet, so something new there.

Right — TT sends him downstairs so she can try to fix things; the reader/player wants him to get there by hopping down the hole in the floor.  [I think I'm already beginning to exhaust my quota of "how could that go wrong", and I'm only a tiny fraction of the way into this story.]

166.  Okay, so nothing goes wrong with John's hop, and it's a utility room, not kitchen. [Wonder what a Sport-Utility Room would look like?]  (And okay, a sledgehammer makes a little more sense in a utility room, but I'm now snickering at the image of DAD using it to threaten a recalcitrant washing machine.)

167.  Now he's got two hammers, one fo'... oh, nevermind. "You think it's cool that things don't always have to be a federal fucking issue." Are we toning down the inventory slapstick now? Whew!

168-169.  Look! On the PDA! It's a pestering...GG! She's eager to know if he got her green gift, and is not a gung ho gamer like the rest of them — doesn't even know what SBURB is. But an explosion outside her house! Exciting! I mean terrible! (If she hasn't installed the client software, it can't be someone else messing with her house the way TT is messing with John's, but I'm betting it's related anyway.)  And John is worried for her...

170.  Might as well check out the Cruxtruder while he worries. Back to the living room. Heh, TT put it in front of a door she couldn't see, because we never esplored the 3rd and 4th walls in this room. And John is sassing her for attempting to be elegant, even at the expense of other things. More interesting characterization. And now she's not answering. Just busy trying to fix the toilet...probably. But GG's explosion makes this feel ominous.

Hurrying on to my next post....

#homestuck liveblog #hs act 1 #sesquipunzel reads homestuck #homestuck #hs week 002

[berniesrevolution]

JACOBIN MAGAZINE

Last Friday, Yanis Varoufakis was in Italy to promote European Spring, a list of candidates standing across the continent in next May’s European election. The former Greek finance minister visited Rome just days after the European Commission had struck down the Italian government’s budget, sparking further rows over Brussels’ authority to curb member states’ spending.

At his press conference, Varoufakis called for a “radical Europeanism,” as an alternative to both the populist right and the neoliberal center. Built around the DiEM 25 movement which he launched in 2015, his European Spring initiative brings together forces from Benoît Hamon’s Génération.s in France to Alternativet in Denmark.

Jacobin’s David Broder caught up with Varoufakis to talk about the European institutions’ handling of the Italian budget, the prospects for building a progressive alternative within EU structures, and what future lies ahead for post-Brexit Britain.

David Broder:

We’re in Rome, where the key political battle of the moment has set the Five Star/Lega government on a collision course with Europe over its budget. Deputy prime minister and Lega leader Matteo Salvini has a tax cutting agenda yet has picked a fight with Brussels over plans to run a 2.4 percent deficit, thus allowing him also to posture as a defender of Italian public spending. European Commission chief Pierre Moscovici has seemingly played into Salvini’s hands by condemning the Italian government’s irresponsibility.

Yanis Varoufakis:

Absolutely, Moscovici plunged headlong into the trap!

David Broder:

But in your preferred vision of Europe, would the European Commission have a role in setting limits on national budgets at all, or maintain control mechanisms like the Semester?

Yanis Varoufakis:

Let’s look at the example of the United States. You can only have balanced budgets for the state governments, because you have the federal government looking after the shop. In Europe, balanced budgets — which is effectively what the Semester process is, with the Fiscal Compact — are an abomination, an assault against rationality. Because you’ve got governments that have to look after banking systems and have to bail them out and have to look after public investment. It is impossible to do this with a balanced budget. So, the rules are created as if they are there to be violated — by the deficit countries at least.

Imagine if in the United States you didn’t have the Federal Reserve bailing out banks, if you did not have public infrastructure spending, spending on Medicare and so on being funded from federal budgets. It would be impossible for Missouri, Mississippi, even California for that matter, to remain within the union. So, we have a serious problem.

To answer your question, yes, you can have limits for the [EU member] states, as long as at the eurozone level you have the Europeanization of the banking system, of the bailout system, of overall public investment — hopefully, green investment — and of anti-poverty schemes, like food stamps for instance in the United States.

David Broder:

You have in the past, including in your Modest Proposal, spoken about such mechanisms as Eurobonds as part of a Europe-wide response to the crisis. At the same time, you have said such a response doesn’t demand the creation of a transfer union or, as it is often described, German taxpayers having to pay out for Southern European countries. You also talk in terms of acting within the existing European treaties rather than proposing a general reorganization of those treaties.

So what mechanisms actually exist to change course in the eurozone? And, at a more strictly political level, how can they be “sold” to the public across the continent?

Yanis Varoufakis:

Well, the treaties do have to change, and the rules must be changed. They are idiotic; they cannot work. But! Politically speaking, if you go out there and say to people, “Vote for us, because we believe that we need to change the rules so as to ameliorate the crisis that is destroying you,” people will look at you and say “Well, changing the rules will take twenty years: do you want us to die in the meantime?”

So, this is why I have been working on the Modest Proposal. The question is, what can be done tomorrow morning to stabilize the crisis effectively, to stabilize the lives of citizens — to stop this punitive austerity, within the rules. That’s not because I don’t want to change the rules, but because the only way of changing the rules is by creating a kind of green-investment-led growth [to boost] the incomes of the victims of the crisis so that we can have the political space in which we can then start having a genuine discussion about what kind of rules we want, once we have changed them.

To give you an example, take green investment: it’s not that we need something like FDR’s New Deal. 5 percent of GDP can be spent on infrastructure. In the present era, unlike in the 1930s, we need green infrastructure. Green energy, a green transport system: Europe is really very much behind in all these areas. So, we need something like five to six hundred billion [euros] a year. Where does the money come from? The [EU’s member] states can’t afford it, and there’s all sorts of rules. Is there anything we can do, legally, tomorrow morning, to get that five hundred billion? We think, yes.

We are making a very clear proposal. You have the European Investment Bank, which belongs to all of us. It’s been issuing junk bonds now for twenty-five, thirty years, they are AAA rated even by these terrible credit agencies. Say it issues five hundred billion every year. But some say, “No you can’t do that, the price [of the bonds] will fall, the yields will go up” and so on.

But it just takes one press conference. The European Central Bank could announce just for those bonds, and for no others, that if the yields start going up, it will buy them. But they will not be divided. Because in Europe today we have around two and a half trillion euros in the banking and financial system doing nothing, sloshing around, just bidding up house prices and doing damage but not being invested. So, we just need one press conference.

Of course, you need the political will, for the leaders to give the orders for that to happen. But here is an example of what you can say to people out there who ask, “So what’s the solution?” I’m not saying that it will be implemented. But to get people angry with the establishment, not with the foreigners, the other, the Muslims, the Jews, the Greeks, the Germans, and so on, what you have to do is to channel the anger properly, into a rational anger.

This crisis is unnecessary: we could change it tomorrow morning. It’s not that we’ll have socialism, it’s not that we’ll have the best of all possible worlds. But it’s something far, far better than what we have today. That is how you build up your political capital as a progressive.

David Broder:

In terms of political will, though: obviously the experience of Greece’s Syriza government showed the difficulties of a single EU country taking on the others or seeking to remodel Europe without allies. You are now proposing a pan-European political movement and in this sense differ from the likes of Jean-Luc Mélenchon, whose basic idea holds that either France alone or France and other states could impose some sort of rupture, also by threatening to leave. You, however, are planning to build up a movement across Europe at the same time, including by standing candidates for the European Parliament across the continent. But if not through wielding power in one particular nation-state, how do you foresee a process of continent-wide political change actually playing out, even in an ideal scenario?

Yanis Varoufakis:

The establishment’s great success over the last ten years of crisis is that they took a banking crisis — a crisis of an international group of people, of internationalists, the bankers — and in order to bail out those guys they turned the Greeks against the Germans, the Italians against the French. They took the victims and turned them against each other.

The only thing we can do as progressives is to run across Europe saying that there is no conflict between Greeks and Germans, there is no conflict between North and South. There are however innocent victims in both North and South. That is why we have opted for a transnational movement.

The problem with Jean-Luc Mélenchon and the reason for our disagreement has to be the fact that when you start talking about going back to the nation-state, you are blowing fresh wind into the sails of Le Pen. The only ones who are going to benefit from the disintegration of the European Union today are the forces of the Right. Even if you are a well-meaning left-winger who thinks in terms of socialism in one country [laughs], in the end you are not going to be the one who gains power in this revived nation-state. It will be Le Pen, it will be Salvini. We are absolutely convinced of this.

This is why, even though our Lexit friends have a very good point in criticizing the European Union — the European Union sucks, there’s no doubt about it, it is a regressive set of vile institutions — its disintegration is not going to propel progressives.

(Continue Reading)

#politics #the left #jacobin #jacobin magazine #yanis varoufakis #eu politics #progressive #progressive movement #democratic socialism

[jewish-privilege]

A non-exhaustive list of systemic and institutional white supremacist dog-whistle euphemisms for Jews and other phraseology that is antisemitic (99.9% of the time) in and of itself (there will be contexts in which some of the following would not be antisemitic, but in general, err on on the side of “That’s Jew hate!”):

Swastika graffiti

Elites

Liberals

The liberal agenda

The media

The liberal media

Hollywood

The bankers

Rothschild

The Deep State

Neo-liberal/neo-conservative

Globalists

Internationalists

(Jewish) octopus

Communists

Socialists

Cultural Marxists

America First

George Soros being behind/paying for anything

The Koch brothers being behind/paying for anything (I’m sure I’m going to get blowback for this)

New Yorkers (or New York as an adjective, see Roy Moore’s description of Gloria Allred as “New York lawyer” even though she was not born, raised, or lives in NY)

“Jews aren’t the only semites [sic]! It’s racist for Jews to claim antisemitism as only anti -Jewish bigotry!”

white genocide, perpetrators of

multiculturalism, forcing of

Calling any Jewish person a white supremacist (this is not the same as calling a Jewish person racist nor is this saying that you can’t criticize a racist Jewish person or a Jewish person upholding white supremacy)

“I’m not talking about Jews, I’m just talking about white Jews.” (If you’re referring to white privilege that white-skinned individuals have then you don’t need to include or discuss their Jewishness. Including their Jewishness shows that you aren’t referring to white privilege, you’re just antisemitic.)

“They’re playing the Holocaust card.”

“False accusations of antisemitism keep us from discussing actual real antisemitism.” (Read: I don’t like being accused of antisemitism, so I’m going to gaslight and practice whataboutism.”)

Zionist occupation government

Zionist hoax (this is usually, but not always, in reference to the Holocaust)

Zionazi

Jews/Israelis/Zionists are the new Nazis

Jews didn’t learn anything from the Nazis/the Holocaust

Zionists/Israel oppress Mizrahim and the Beta Israel. (Israeli Mizrahim and Beta Israel are Zionists, sometimes much more hardcore than Israeli Ashkenazim, so this accusation makes no sense. This is not and should not be read as a denial of orientalism, intra-Jewish tribalism/bigotry/racism.)

Following up something a Jewish person says about antisemitism with “but what about Palestine?”

Dual loyalty/it’s because of Israel/Jews are not loyal citizens

Being blamed for the Holocaust/antisemitism (“I’m just saying there must be a reason Jews have been thrown out of every country.” There is a reason: antisemitism.)

Being blamed for the Holocaust being commemorated, studied, and remembered.

Israel being held as an example of white supremacy (note this is not the same as being critical of Israeli policy or arguing against Palestinian self-determination or statehood.)

Jews poisoning the water or food supply (yes, this includes Israeli Jews).

Any form of the following (None of the following states or should be read to state that Palestinians, and other peoples indigenous to the same land, aren’t indigenous to the same land.):

Jews aren't indigenous to the land the modern of state of Israel encompasses.

Jews aren’t actually Levantine.

Ashkenazi Jews aren’t actually Levantine.

Ashkenazi Jews are really just European.

Ashkenazim/Beta Israel/Kaifeng Jews etc. are not real Jews, they’re just converts.

The Khazar theory.

Any Jewish sub-ethnicity is really only indigenous to the land in which they had their ethnogenesis in the diaspora after the the world expulsion and not to the land the modern of state of Israel encompasses.

They aren’t the real Jews.

They are the real Jews.

Speaking over Jews to define our identity in general.

#Antisemitism #long post #I will call out Islamophobia racism and other isms #don’t coopt my post #Alexis’s posts

[raflangslim]

This is the sound of dancing architecture

“I get to corner Ralf Hütter in a cluttered backwater of EMI house, for a conversational nexus in which we poke theories at each other through the language barrier… Frank Zappa said "writing about music is like dancing about architecture.” This is the sound of dancing architecture…“

An interview with Ralf Hütter by Andrew Darlington, 1981 (the taped conversation is written up later).

Red man. Stop. Eins, Zwei, Drei, Vier. Green man. Go. People respond, regulated by the mechanical switch of coloured lights. Crossing the Pelican towards EMI House it’s easy to submerge in a long droning procession of Kraftwerkian images, pavement thick with lumbering showroom dummies reacting to Pavlovian stimuli, parallel lines of thruways, multi-legged ferroconcrete skyways, gloss-front office-blocks waterfalling from heaven, individuality drowned, starved to extinction, etc, etc. This could get boring. This could be cliché. Ideas prompt unbidden, strategies of sending my cassette recorder on alone to talk to the Kraftwerk answering machine. That’s Kraftwerk, isn’t it? I got news for you. It ain’t.

Ralf Hütter (electronics and voice) is neat, polite, talks quietly with Teutonic inflection, and totally lacks visible cybernetic attachments. He’s dressed in regulation black — as per stereotype — slightly shorter than me which makes him five-foot-eight-inches, or perhaps nine, hair razored sharp over temples not to allow traces of decadent side-burns. Shoes are black, but sufficiently scuffed to betray endearingly human imperfections. He walks up and down reading review stats thoughtfully provided by EMI’s press division. Seems it’s a good review in The Times? Strong on technical details… yes? "No. The writer says we play exactly as on the records, which is not so.” He is evidently chagrined by this particular line of criticism, which is an interesting reaction. I file it for reference. But then again he’s just got up and come direct from his hotel. He wants breakfast. Coffee and cakes. An hour or so to talk to me, then down to Oxford for the dauntingly exacting Kraftwerk sound check rituals. The other Kraftwerkers — Florian Schneider (voice and electronics), Karl Bartos and Wolfgang Flür (both electronic percussion) are otherwise occupied. So every vowel must count. I extend a tentative theory. The image Kraftwerk project of modernity, it seems to me, is largely derived from twenties and thirties originals: the Futurist dedication to movement and kinetic energy; the Bauhaus emphasis on clean, strictly functional lines; the Fritz Lang humans-as-social-ciphers thing. Even an album ‘inspired’ by Soviet Constructivist El Lissitzky with all the machine-art connotations that implies. Doesn’t Hütter find this contradictory? “No. In the twenties there was Futurism in Italy, Germany, France. Then in the thirties it stopped, retrograded into Fascism, bourgeois reactionary tendencies, in Germany especially…” And time froze for forty years. Until the Kraftwerk generation merely picked up the discarded threads, carried on where they’d left off. After the war “Germany went through a period with our parents who were so obsessed with getting a little house, a little car, the Volkswagen or Mercedes in front, or both All these very materialistic orientations turning Germany into an American colony, no new idea were really happening. We were like the first generation born after the war, so when we grew up we saw that all around us, and we turned to other things.” Kissing to life a dormant culture asleep four decades?

But computers only print out data they’re programmed with, so working on this already grossly over-extended mechanistic principle I aim to penetrate Kraftwerk motivations. The dominant influences on them then were — what? American Rock? “No.” In that case, do Kraftwerk fit into the Rock spectrum? “No. Anti - Rock'n'Roll.” So their music is a separate discipline? “Yes, in a way, even though we play in places like Hammersmith. We are more into environmental music.”

So if not Rock, then what? — Berio? Stockhausen? “Yes and no. We listened to that on the radio, it was all around. Especially the older generation of electronic people, the more academic composers — although we are not like that. They seem to be in a category within themselves, and only circulating within their own musical family. They did institutional things — while we are out in the streets. But I think from the sound, yes. From the experimenting with electronics, definitely. The first thing for us was to find a sound of Germany that was of our generation, that was the first records we do. First going into sound, then voices. Then we went further into voices and words, being more and more precise. And for this we were heartily attacked.” He mimics the outrage of his contemporaries — “You can’t do that… Electronics? What are you doing? Kraftwerk? German group — German name? It’s stupid. Music is Anglo-American — it has to be, even when it is in Germany.” The incredulity remains: “Still today, you know. Can you imagine? — German books with English titles, German bands singing English songs. It’s ridiculous!”

Of course it is. But didn’t the Beatles do some German-language records at one time? “Sure” shrugs Hütter, friendly beyond all reasonable expectations. “They were even more open than most of the Germans…” I’d anticipated some mutual incomprehensibility interface with his broken English and my David Hockney Yorkshire. You find the phrasing strange? I’ll tell you… when the possibility of doing this interview first cropped up I ransacked my archives and dug out everything on Kraftwerk I could find. Now it occurs to me that each previous press chat-piece, from Creem to Melody Maker, have transposed Herr Hütter’s every utterance into perfect English. Which is not the case. His eloquence is daunting, but it inevitably has very pronounced Germanic cadences. Sometimes he skates around searching for the correct word, other times he uses the right word in the wrong context. When he says “we worked on the next album and the next album, and just so on”, it really emerges as “ve vork on ze next album und ze next, und just zo on”. It might be interesting to write up the whole interview tape with that phonetic accuracy, but it would be difficult to compose and impossible to read. Nevertheless, I’m not going to bland out his individuality by disinfecting his speech peculiarities, or ethnically cleansing his phrases entirely…

But now he’s in flight and I’m chasing, trying to nail down details. In my head it’s now turn of the decade — sixties bleeding into the seventies, and this thing is called Krautrock. Oh, wow! Hard metallic grating noises, harder, more metallic, more grating and noisier than Velvet Underground, nihilistic Germanic flirtations with the existential void. Amon Düül II laying down blueprints to be electro-galvanised into a second coming by PiL, Siouxsie & The Banshees and other noise terrorists. Cluster. Faust. Then there is the gratuitous language violence of Can, sound that spreads like virus infection from Floh de Cologne and Neu, and Ash Ra Temple who record an album with acid prophet and genetic outlaw Timothy Leary. Was there a feeling of movement among these bands? A kinship?

“No.” One note on the threshold of audibility, shooting down fantasies. “In Germany we have no capital. After the war we don’t have a centre or capital anymore. So instead we have a selection of different regional cultures. We — Kraftwerk — come from industrial Düsseldorf. But Amon Düül II came from Munich, which has a different feeling. Munich is quite relaxed. There’s a lot of landscape around.”

Now for me it’s not just some off-the-top-of-the-head peripheral observation, but the corner-stone of my entire musical philosophy that this affable German is effortlessly swotting, and I’m not letting him off lightly. I restate histories carefully. American Rock'n'Roll happened in 1954 — Memphis, Sun Studios. From there it spread in a series of shock waves, reaching and taking on the regional characteristics of each location it hit. By the mid-sixties a distinctive UK variant had come into being, identifiably evolving out of exposure to US vinyl artefacts, but incontrovertibly also home-grown. Surely Krautrock was evidence that Germany had also acquired its own highly individual Rock voice? It seems to me there is a common feeling, a shared voice among these diverse groups. But he’s not buying. You don’t think so? “No. At least not as far as we were concerned.”

When they started out they recorded in German-language. „We always record in German” he corrects emphatically. „Then we do — like in films, synchronised versions for English. The original records are all German, but we also do French, and now Japanese versions. We are very into the internationalist part.” Continuing this trans-Europe theme he suddenly suggests „Britain is a very historical society. The Establishment. The hierarchy. We come here and we feel that immediately. On the one hand you have this very modern…” he tails off. Starts again, „it’s a schizophrenic country, a modern people, new music and everything, but on the other hand the… how can I say it, a theatrical establishment.” I retaliate, yes — but surely it could equally be argued that all Europe forms a common cultural unit attempting to survive between the historic power-block forces of the USA and the old Soviet Union? Indeed, to journalist Andy Gill, Kraftwerk’s music is „promoting the virtues of cybernetic cleanliness and European culture against the more sensual, body-orientated nature of most Afro-American derived music” ('Mojo’s August 1987). Europe shares a common heritage uniting Britain, Germany and France, which are all being subtly subverted by a friendly invasion of American Economic and McCultural influences, movies, records, clothes? Witter himself once said „in Germany, Pop music is a cultural import”. „Yes, I know. Certainly when we came to Birmingham (England) we thought it was similar to Düsseldorf. There’s no question. But in Germany it happens even more though, because here in England at least you notice, you know the language and everything. In Germany they don’t notice, it was just taken over.”

I’d always considered the German language to be a defence against foreign influence. It was far easier for mainstream British culture to be accessed, and infiltrated because of a common American-English language. In France, for example, the Government is actively resisting the 'Anglicisation’ of their language through 'Franglaise’, because they rightly see its corruption as the thin end of the wedge. “Maybe. That should be checked. But you, together with the Americans had another situation to start with. After the war, Germany was finished. I’m not saying why or whatever, that’s OK. But when I grew up we used to play around the bomb-fields and the destroyed houses. This was just part of our heritage, part of our software. It was our education and cultural background…” The spectre of Basil Fawlty springs unbidden. Earlier an entirely innocent question about Kraftwerk’s origins had dislodged similar sentiments. He’d spoken of Germany’s Fascist years — “in Germany especially, that’s what I mostly knew about, then all the (artistic / creative) people emigrated, Einstein had to leave, and everybody knows the reasons. And then only after the war — he came back. But I think Germany went through a period, with our parents, who had never had anything. They went through two wars…”

Breakfast becomes manifest. Mushroom quiche — no meat — followed by a choice of apricot or apple flan, plus two coffees. I sit opposite him, tape machine on the floor between us picking up air, the windows of EMI House blanding out over the trees of Manchester Square. I’m marshalling scores. So for, not content with winning each verbal exchange hands down, Ralf Hütter has also squashed each of my most cherished illusions about Krautrock. But on the plus side, massive giga-jolts of respect are due here. Long before the world had heard of Bill Gates or William Gibson, when Silicon Valley was still just a valley and mail had yet to acquire its 'e’ pre-fix, Kraftwerk were literally inventing and assembling their own instruments, expanding the technosphere by rewiring the sonic neural net, and defining the luminous futures of what we now know as global electronica. So perhaps it’s time to probe more orthodox histories?

It seems to me there are two distinct phases to Kraftwerk’s career. Or perhaps even three. The first five years devoted purely to experimental forays into synchromeshed avant-electronics, producing the batch of albums issued in Britain through Vertigo — Kraftwerk in 1972, Ralf Und Florian the following year, the seminal Autobahn in 1974, and the compilation Exceller 8 in 1975. Then they switch to EMI, settle on a more durable line-up and the subsequent move into more image-conscious material, a zone between song and tactile atmospherics. The third, and current phase, involves a long and lengthening silence.  

"No, it wasn’t like that” says Hütter. “It was…” his hand indicates a level plane. 'There was never a break. It was a continual evolution. We had our studios since 1970, so we always worked on the next album, and the next album, and so on. I think Düsseldorf therefore was very good because we brought in other people, painters, poets, so that we associated ourselves with…“ his sometimes faulty English — interfacing with my even more faulty German — breaks down. The words don’t come. So he switches direction. “Also we had some classical training before that [Ralf and Florian met at the Düsseldorf Conservatory], so we were very disciplined.” Others in this original extended family of neo-Expressionist electro-subversives included Conny Plank (who was later to produce stuff for Annie Lennox’ The Tourists, and Ultravox), Thomas Homann and Klaus Dinger (later of Neu), artist Karl Klefisch (responsible for the highly effective Man Machine sleeve), and Emil Schult (who co-composed Trans-Europe Express). In the subsequent personnel file, as well as Hütter, there is Florian Schneider who also operates electronics and sometimes robotic vocals. While across the years of their classic recordings they are set against Karl Bortos and Wolfgang Flür who both manipulate electronic percussion.

I ask if they always operate as equal partners. “Everybody has their special function within the group, one which he is good at and likes to do the most.” It was never just Ralf und Florian plus a beatbox rhythm section? “No. It’s just that we started historically all that time ago and worked for four years with about twenty percussionists, and they would never go into electronics, so we had to step over, banging away and things like that. And then Wolfgang came in.”

With that sorted out I ask if he enjoyed touring. „Yes, basically, because we don’t do it so often. But we also enjoy working in our studios in Düsseldorf, we shouldn’t tour too much otherwise… we get lost somewhere, maybe! We get too immunised. When you have too much you must shut down because you get too many sounds and visions from that tour. For the first five years we toured always in Germany on the Autobahns — that’s where that album came from. Since 1975 we do other countries as well.” They first toured the USA in March 1975, topping the bill over British Prog-Rockers Greenslade, then — leaving an American Top Thirty hit, they went on to play eight British dates in June set up for them by manager Ira Blacker.

How much of that early music was improvised? Was the earlier material 'freer’? Kraftwerk numbered Karl Klaus Roeder on violin and guitar back then, so are the newer compositions more structured? „No. We are going more… now that we play longer, work longer than ten years, we know more and every afternoon when we are in the Concert Hall or somewhere in the studio we just start the machines playing and listen to this and that. Just yesterday we composed new things. Once in Edinburgh we composed a new piece which we even included in that evening’s show. New versions on old ideas. So we are always working because otherwise we should get bored just repeating. And it’s not correct what he (the hostile gig reviewer) was saying — that we play on stage exactly like we sound on the record. That’s complete rubbish. It means people don’t even notice and they don’t listen. They go instead over to the Bar for a drink! We, our music is very basic, the compositions are never complex or never complicated. More sounds — KLINK! KLUNK!! Metallic sound. We go for this sound composition more than music composition. Only now they are thematically more precise than they were before.”

After so long within the genre don’t they find electronics restricting? „No, just the opposite.” Words precise with the sharp edge of Teutonic resonance. „We can play anything. The only restrictions we do find are, like in writing, as soon as you have a paper and pen — or a computer or a cassette recorder and a microphone, and you bring ideas, you find the limitation is in what you program rather than what is in the microphone or the cassette. You — as a writer, writing this interview, can’t say that the piece you are writing is not good because the word processor did not pick out the right words for you. It’s the same with us. If we make a bad record it’s because we are not in a good state of mind.”

Change of tack. There’s a lot of Kraftwerkian influence around. Much of current electro-Dance seems to be plugged directly into the vaguely 'industrial’ neuro-system that Hütter initially delineated, while dedicated eighties survivalist cults Depeche Mode and Human League also have Kraftwerk DNA in their gene-code. He nods sagely. “There’s a very good feeling in England now. It was all getting so… historical.” Is the same thing happening in Germany now? Is there a good Rock scene there? “No. But New Music (Neu Musik).”

Hütter’s opinions on machine technology have been known to inspire hacks of lesser literary integrity to sprees of wild Thesaurus-ransacking adjectival overkill, their vocabularies straining for greater bleakness, more clone-content, 'Bladerunner’ imagery grown bloated and boring through inept repetition. And sure, Kr-art-werk is all geometrical composition, diagonal emphasis, precision honed etc, but their imagery is not entirely without precedent. Deliberately so. Their 'Man-Machine’ album track “Metropolis” obviously references German Fritz Lang’s 1926 proto-SF Expressionist movie. The sleeve also acknowledges the 'inspiration’ of Bauhaus constructivist El Lissitzky. I went on to hazard the connections with German modern classical music bizorro Karlheinz Stockhausen — particularly on Kraftwerk’s Radio-Activity album, where they use the 'musique concrete’ technique of surgical-splicing different sounds together from random areas. Radioland uses drop-in short-wave blips, bursts and static twitterings, Transistor has sharp pre-sample edits, alongside the pure found-sound audio-collage The News. A technique that resurfaces as late as Electric Cafe, where The Telephone Song is made up of 'phone bleeps and telecommunication bloopery. He’s familiar with the input. Immediately snaps back the exact location of the ideas — Kurzwellen, from Stockhausen’s back-catalogue. And what about the aural applications of Brion Gysin/William Burroughs’ literary cut-up experiments? Is there any interaction there? “Maybe” he concedes. “'Soft Machine’, contact with machines. But we are more Germanic.” He pauses, then suggests “we take from everywhere. That’s how we find most of our music. Out of what we find in the street. The Pocket Calculator in the Department Stores.”

The music is the message — 'the perfect Pop song for the tribes of the global village’ as Hütter once described it. The medium and the form? “If the music can’t speak for itself then why make music? Then we can be writers directly. If I could speak really everything I want with words then I should be working in literature, in words. But I can’t, I never can say anything really, I can’t even hardly talk to the audience. I don’t know what to say. But when we make music, everything keeps going, it’s just the field we are working in, or if we make videos we are more productive there.”

I quote back from an interview he did with Q magazine in July 1991 where he suggests that traditional musical skills are becoming increasingly redundant. “With our computers, this is already taken care of,” he explains. “So we can now spend more time structuring the music. I can play faster than Rubenstein with the computer, so it [instrumental virtuosity] is no longer relevant. It’s getting closer to what music is all about: thinking and hearing.”

So technology should be interpreted as a potentially liberating force? “Not necessarily. I don’t always find that. Dehumanising things have to be acknowledged. Maybe if you want to become human, first you have to be a showroom dummy, then a robot, and maybe one day…” An expressive wave. “People tend to overestimate themselves. I would never say I am very human. I still have doubts. I can project myself as a semi-god. I can do that. The tools exist for me to achieve that. But I’d rather be more modest about this, about our real function in this society, in these blocks here,” indicating out through the plate glass, across the square, to the city towers of finance and global commerce beyond. “People overestimate themselves. They think they are important. They think they are human.”

I’m out of synchronisation again. Surely, if people have to extricate themselves from the machinery they have created, to become human, then it’s due to the imperfections of the technology — not the people. Machines are intended to serve, if they do otherwise, they malfunction. “Not so. They should not be the new slaves. We are going more for friendship and co-operation with machines. Because then, if we treat them nice, then they treat us nice. You know, there are so many people who go in for machines, who when you come to their homes their telephones are falling to pieces, their music centres don’t function, the television set is ruined. But if you take care of your machines then they will live longer. They have a life of their own. They have their own life-span. They have a certain hour of duration. There are certain micro-electronics which work a thousand hours. Then there is a cassette recorder battery which operates ten or twelve hours.” The mentality you oppose, then, is that of conspicuous consumption, planned obsolescence, the psychology of 'a spoilt child’?

“The energy crisis, the whole thing is a result of thinking that everything is there, we just have to use it, take this, and — PTOOOOFFF! — throw it away. But make sure that the neighbours see! This whole attitude of disassociating oneself from machines — humans here and machines over there. When you work so much with machines — as we do — then you know that has to change.”

Earlier he’d spoken of growing up 'playing around the bomb-fields and destroyed houses’ in the wake of WWII, so this respect for material possessions is perhaps understandable. But he sees beyond this. He sees machines having the potential to free people physically from unnecessary labour, and culturally to create whole new thinking.

“I mean — where is my music without the synthesiser? Where is it?” The music, the intelligence, is in your head. Without that the synth is just….“

"Yes, bringing it about! The catalyst. We are partners. We two can together make good music, if we are attuned to each other.” But you could operate another instrument. The vehicle you use is incidental. You could walk out this building, buy a new synth here in London, and play it just as well as your own equipment in Düsseldorf. “Yes. That is because I have this relationship with this type of thing.”

I’m reproducing this exactly as it happens, and still I’m not exactly sure what he’s getting at. Perhaps something is lost in the language gap. Like earlier, he’d said “I would never say I am very human” and I’d accepted it first as role playing — until he’d made it obvious that he equates 'becoming human’ with 'achieving freedom’. Humanity is something that has to be earned. You can’t be robot and human. But this is not a natural conversation. This is on interview. A marketing exercise designed to sell Kraftwerk records by projecting certain consumer-friendly imagery. He is playing games, and this cyber-spiel is what journalists expect from Kraftwerk? But to Ralf Hütter there seems to be more to it than that. He believes what he is saying. At least on one level. Some impenetrable levels of ambiguity are at work concerning this alleged relationship to technology.

Baffled, I skate around it. What crafty work is afoot for the future? “For me? For Kraftwerk? Well, certain things that I had to remember and memorise and think about are now programmed and stored. So there’s no restriction that we have to rehearse manually. There’s no physical restriction. I can liberate myself and go into other areas. I function more now as software. I’m not so much into hardware. I’m being much more soft now since I have transferred certain thoughts into hardware. That is why we put those two words together Software/Hardware on the album. Because it is like a combination of the two — Man/ Machine — otherwise it would not be happening. We can play anything. Our type of set-up — and group, the studio, the computers and everything. Anything.”

So what’s new in electronics, Ralf? “What we find now is like, a revolution in machines. They are bringing back all the garbage now that has been put into them for the last hundred years and we are facing a second, third and fourth Industrial Revolution. Computers. Nano-electronics. Maybe then we come back into Science Fiction? I don’t know.” Then, on inspiration, “there’s another thing coming out. 'Wet-Ware’, and we function also — in a way, as Wet-Ware.”

I’m hit by a sudden techno-blur of off-the-wall ideas, imperfectly understood concepts of some electro-erotic wet ’T’-shirt ritual in the pale blue wash of sterile monitors. What is 'Wet-Ware’, Ralf? Spoken with bated breath. And he explains. Like hardware is machines. Software is the data that is fed into them. “Wet-Ware is anything biochemical. The biological element in the machine!” The programmer? I see. Fade into intimations of cybernetic übermensch conspiracies.

So with these limitless vistas of techno-tomorrows, Kraftwerk will continue for some time yet? "Yoh. Yes.” Pause, then the laugh opens up, “… until we fall off the stage!”

Auf Wiedersehen, Ralf…

Eins, Zwei, Drei, Vier…

[kirstymcneill]

This is a love story: thinking globally during COVID19

This piece first appeared on Global Dashboard on the 30th of March 2020. 

This is a love story. Forget what you’ve heard. It isn’t a war, it isn’t a fight. It isn’t a race, it isn’t a competition. This is a love story.

Over the last few years, bringing international NGOs together to make the case for aid and development, we’ve been digging deeply into how people think (or, more accurately, how they hardly ever think) about the life-saving work their taxes pay for. We’ve captured that below, as dos and don’ts designed to help spokespeople from international organisations frame interviews, opinion pieces and social media posts in a way that will resonate at a time when families are worried about the impact of the coronavirus crisis on their own finances.

When testing the response to Facebook videos or observing body language when discussing foreign aid on street stalls in small towns across the country, we’ve heard the same dominant theme again and again: ‘charity begins at home’ is a frame we need to go through, not around. Through a combination of our hyper-localised testing and nationally representative insight work (you can read more on the latter here), we have built up a clear understanding of how to get a different end to that sentence: yes, charity begins at home, but it doesn’t have to end there. Many of the twelve lessons below draw from three years of experiments and from the long-standing research funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and translated for practitioners by the team at the DevCommsLab, using data from the Aid Attitude Tracker, and now the Development Engagement Lab.

The 2019 General Election had already created a new campaigning context for us (more on that here). International charities now worry that, with unprecedented risk facing our loved ones, we are even more likely to concentrate our concern on our nearest and dearest. With media stories about the potential for the NHS to be overwhelmed coming on top of several years of ‘winter crisis’ stories, the national mood is one of gratitude to health workers but (legitimate) questions about whether the system itself is properly funded.

Meanwhile, optimists point to the spike in volunteering in mutual aid groups and generosity to Sport Relief as reasons to hope that COVID19 may create a new era of solidarity and care for strangers.

Our own view is that what happens will be down to the effectiveness of the storytelling of leaders (of all sorts) in the weeks to come. As Alice Sachrajda lays out here, this is a story that’s still being written. If we, as internationalists, can follow some of the twelve rules below we can contribute to a story that is positive for global development, but won’t necessarily be about global development. We know from successful strategic communication efforts on other issues (you can read about one here) that one of the key things that campaigners get wrong is thinking that the objective and the message have to be the same.

Our intended outcome is a Britain where people continue to give their consent to aid spending, but the most effective storytelling won’t be about aid. It has long been time to kill off the literalism (you can read more about that here) but this crisis gives an added urgency to our drive to do emotionally resonant communications.

Thankfully that should be straightforward, because the underlying dynamic of the COVID19 crisis and of Britain’s international development spending is the same: this is a love story. At their most basic, both depend on the choices we make to behave in a loving way to people we haven’t met. When we have introduced our joint work to new partners, the one slide that they always remember is the one with this pie chart.What it shows is how few people in Britain have been to the developing world. From the get-go, only 76% of British people have passports. When they use them, they are almost entirely visiting ’advanced economies’ – as defined by the IMF, or the poorer countries in the rest of Europe.  

What it shows is how few people in Britain have been to the developing world. From the get-go, only 76% of British people have passports. When they use them, they are almost entirely visiting ’advanced economies’ – as defined by the IMF, or the poorer countries in the rest of Europe.  

What it shows is how few people in Britain have been to the developing world. From the get-go, only 76% of British people have passports. When they use them, they are almost entirely visiting ’advanced economies’ – as defined by the IMF, or the poorer countries in the rest of Europe.  

For most of the British public, the ‘aid’ conversation is one about people they’ll never meet in places they’ll never go to. As argued here, people who are trying to get their heads around the reality of poverty should be encouraged to expand what they do know, not sneered at for what they don’t. For people who spend a lot of time railing against inequality, development campaigners can be pretty slow to realise that, to our audiences, we are the ones who look rich and remote. You can read more about that here.

While all the rules are based on the best current evidence, some of them will be overtaken by events. We are watching closely what friends in allied movements are doing and staying across the best guides coming out of the US but we will be missing things so please do let us know which of the 12 rules work for you and which don’t.

Rule 1: Appeal to the Larger Us

Please do: Talk about our shared challenges, encouraging our best instincts to ‘tend and befriend’ as laid out by The Collective Psychology project here or the Frameworks Institute here. That would mean saying something like ‘people here in the UK are worried about their access to healthcare and how they will have enough food and of course there’s a lot of worry about work and paying the bills. Family life is being turned upside down around the world and we are determined to help wherever the need is greatest. It’s hard to imagine living in a refugee camp all packed in and without proper access to water to wash your hands, but we won’t leave anybody behind’.

Please don’t: Imply the challenges in other countries are so different that it is a different kind of problem for a different kind of person – a story of ‘us and them’ of the sort we are already primed to believe. Instead, point out the bald facts, as Kevin Watkins does here, without creating a hierarchy of suffering. This beautiful Comic Relief film says it best: we all need each other.

Rule 2: Talk about our interdependence, not our interests

Please do: Talk about our interdependence, saying things like ‘in order to fight this virus everywhere we need to stop it anywhere. Everybody – wherever they are from, whatever they look like – is vulnerable to infection, so we need to work together with other countries if we’re to save lives and stay safe here in the UK. All of us are only as safe as any of us, so we need to make sure nobody is left out of the world’s response’. The Bill Gates talk here is a good example.

Please don’t: Talk explicitly about our national or self-interest. This is a much-loved framing by politicians and DFID continue to use it but repeated testing shows that people respond best to moral arguments about relieving human suffering. Using a nationally representative sample of over 8,000 people from YouGov, the Aid Attitude Tracker found national or self-interest arguments to be the least effective (compared to both the moral case and mutual interest arguments). And even polling (by Brunswick) of Conservative voters showed that messaging on aid on the basis of national security or economic benefit to the UK didn’t play well. As well as not working to persuade the public, national interest arguments open the door to further consideration of a merger of DFID with the Foreign Office. This thread consolidates the arguments against that in one place.

Rule 3: Amplify the hope

Please do: Link the kindness of local volunteers to the values local NGO staff and local humanitarian responders show every day, saying things like, ‘all across the country and all across the world communities are coming together to look after each other. It’s so moving to see retired doctors and nurses coming back to the NHS and around the world refugee medics are signing up to serve. That spirit of kindness is the same one we see after natural disasters and in poor communities everywhere we work’. The backlash against last year’s attacks on the RNLI shows people do fundamentally believe in our common humanity. As we say at Save the Children, never bet against the British public. Time and again they dig deep for the Disasters Emergency Committee, just as they did for refugees as laid out so movingly by Jonathan Freedland here.

Please don’t: Catastrophise about dystopian outcomes or share stories about stockpiling, attacks on human rights, anti-aid sentiments or anti-migrant sentiments in a way that makes them seem more common than they actually are (more on the dangers of that in the Center for Countering Digital Hate’s #DontFeedTheTrolls report here).

Rule 4: Show health workers as heroes

Please do: Talk about the inspiration provided by health workers everywhere, saying things like ‘On my own street I’ve got amazing NHS workers working on the frontline for all of us and it’s such a powerful reminder that we all get sick and we all need help when we’re unwell. I’m so proud my colleagues are providing care overseas just like my neighbour is providing care here in the UK’.

Please don’t: Depersonalise health. The NHS is one of the biggest employers in the world – pretty much everybody knows somebody working in it. Reminding people of their own experiences of care will resonate much more than abstract jargon about ‘global health’ or ‘public health’.  

Rule 5: Remind people there’s a plan #ForPeopleForPlanet

Please do: Talk about what has changed. ‘Clearly there has been an extraordinary outpouring of compassion and all of us understand that we’re all in this together. The government has moved fast to announce new measures and that shows what can be done. We are all frightened but all pulling together and that’s the spirit that will get us through this. Once we’ve beaten this disease hopefully that same love for each other will help us deal with other issues too but that is for the months to come. Right now, the priority is saving lives and making sure everybody can get fair access to the healthcare and help they need’.

Please don’t: Imply that nothing will ever be the same and it’s time to ‘rip up the rules’. We know from British Future’s work on immigration that the sense things are out of control and nobody has a plan triggers more inward-looking responses. Instead we should remind people there is already a plan – the Sustainable Development Goals – agreed by world leaders to redesign policy and systems to work #ForPeopleForPlanet. We definitely need institutional innovation, as laid out by Alex Evans and David Steven here, but there is a risk of further fuelling public cynicism about the effectiveness of democratic institutions (see seven trends analysis here). Leaders must be held to account for their choices (Professor Devi Sridhar provides a good model of how to do that here) without undermining faith in collective action through government. The Frameworks Institute has some guidance on that here.

Rule 6: Make it manageable

Please do: Talk about the unprecedented level – but not nature – of the threat, saying things like ‘a pandemic of this size and speed is not something we have seen before, but the world has plenty of experience fighting disease. Whether it is eradicating smallpox, nearly wiping out polio, turning the tide against malaria or fighting back against Ebola, we know what can be done if people work together’.

Please don’t: Imply it is inevitable that this crisis will overwhelm the multilateral system or the capacity of communities to cope. If it’s right that the emotional pre-conditions for change are a sense of hope and of agency (as argued in this podcast here) then we need to be wary of any messages that make people feel like catastrophe is inevitable and there is no point in acting. Alex Evans draws out some lessons about the collective psychology of coronavirus here, based on years of research in climate storytelling about how doom-mongering drives a sense of powerlessness rather than engagement.

Rule 7: Put communities, not organisations, centre stage

Please do: Talk about what is being done by our frontline colleagues in communities, with messages like ‘right now our community health workers are helping the people worst hit by this crisis. Today like every day they are in some of the toughest places in the world helping to save and change lives and they desperately need your help’. We know frontline workers with relatable job titles (like teacher, nurse and doctor) are the most trusted to talk about development work (see more here).

Please don’t: Talk about the challenges facing your organisation as a corporate entity. NGO umbrella body BOND is already working with government, as are our other sector bodies like NCVO and ACEVO, to get support to charities to get us through the crisis. They are doing a fantastic job so spokespeople addressing public audiences should let them get on with it and focus instead on what our organisations achieve rather than how they work.

Rule 8: Talk about Britain’s contribution to the collective efforts

Please do: Talk about Britain’s contribution. As Heather Hamilton lays out here, appeals to national or regional values can be effective, but need plausible proof points rather than hyperbolic appeals to exceptionalism, so focus on saying things like ‘Britain has a tradition of playing our part in the world when times are tough. It’s fantastic to see that the Department for International Development is at the forefront of the global work to find a coronavirus vaccine. As we saw with Ebola, DFID is very expert at dealing with international health challenges and I’m pleased we have somebody in the cabinet charged with thinking about saving lives and fighting disease as their number one priority’.

Please don’t: Talk about Britain as a ‘world leader’. One way to cause a backlash is to suggest that Britain is contributing more than its fair share. Qualitative research by Britain Thinks shows that the ‘charity begins at home’ frame is easily triggered by suggestions that Britain did more than others to help overseas while cutting services at home. Focus not on quantity but quality, not on cash but on expertise.  

Rule 9: Be patient about our other issues

Please do: Talk about the linkages between this issue and others we work on, saying things like ‘our work with refugees / disabled people / people affected by climate change / people affected by conflict already showed how fragile life can be. This is another challenge facing the world’s poorest people and one we have to pull together to meet if we’re to end poverty for good’.

Please don’t: Imply this is a distraction from or less important than our other work. The letter calling for emergency action for people and the planet that many of us signed at New Year still holds, but we have to wait for coordinated action on one of the biggest humanitarian and economic events in the history of the world to be agreed first.

Rule 10: Allow for anxieties

Please do: Talk about how we are all connected and will all do better if we cooperate, saying things like ‘all of humanity is facing a huge challenge now, but we can get through it together. We need the genius of the world’s best scientists, the support of the world’s biggest companies, the commitment to work together from the world’s political leaders and for all of us individually to do our bit to stop the spread and look after others’.

Please don’t: Imply any previous scepticism about aid or development has been shown to be illegitimate. Ali Goldsworhty of the Depolarisation Project lays out in the Times (£) there is a real risk of further polarisation if people are triumphalist about their views being vindicated by the crisis. Instead we should answer people’s ongoing questions about aid (as Beth Howgate does here) and refrain from any temptation to defend the indefensible.

This rule is particularly important because of the risk of campaigners falling prey to the ‘empathy delusion’. You can read Andrew Tenzer’s brilliant report here but essentially his argument is that people who spend a lot of time looking at insight work (like us!) can actually end up less good at listening, because we think we’ve already done enough to get on the wavelength of the people we’re talking with.

Likewise, as campaigners become ever more sophisticated commissioners and readers of insight work there is a danger we will start to think more about the ‘personas’ research companies serve us up than we do about the real people who are trying to have a conversation with us. Time and again we’ve seen advocates thinking they need to appeal to a separate category of people, not realising that the fight between different narratives and ways of seeing the world is taking place inside all of us, not between all of us. Our job in making the case for aid and development is to prompt a moment of reconsideration for people who are already conflicted on this issue. In thinking through our strategy we have been hugely influenced by the Heartwired approach and, in particular, how advocates for LGBTQI+ liberation worked inside the conflicts and made it easy for people to process their anxieties and change their minds.

Rule 11: Make inequality tangible

Please do: Talk about how inequality means this hits people differently, saying things like ‘families who already had the least will be hit the hardest. If you can’t pay a fee at the hospital, are already living in a crowded refugee camp or don’t have access to clean water you can imagine how much harder it is to keep your family safe right now’.

Please don’t: Talk about inequality in the abstract. We know from colleagues in the domestic poverty sector that inequality just doesn’t move public audiences the way it motivates campaigners, so it’s far better to talk about unjust outcomes than philosophical concepts. There is a consolidation of some of the evidence on this point here.

Rule 12: Practice the cooperation we preach

Please do: Celebrate the good works of other INGOs responding, saying things like ‘governments need to work together on this but so do charities and we are teaming up with partners in every country where we work. Our NHS workers are our national heroes and frontline aid workers are our global heroes. We are all in this together and every charity worker is doing their bit’.

Please don’t: Compete. Almost nothing riles the public more at the best of times, there will be no forgiveness for it here in the worst. Mike Adamson of the Red Cross has some great advice on strategic collaboration here.

And finally, don’t forget to take care of yourself in this strange and stressful time. We’ve long believed there’s a role for popular culture to help us all make sense of big topics but as far as we can see nobody is curating the art that would help us all envision a future world where refugees are safe, nature protected or gender equality achieved. Campaigners need to get much better at collecting the poetry to read, films to watch and sci-fi to engage with, if we’re to open up the collective imagination. In that spirit we will leave you with some anthems of interdependence. Let’s take a pause to listen to our love songs before we tell our love stories, then let’s beat this thing back with the same fierce love for humanity that brought us to this work in the first place.

Kirsty McNeill is Chair of the Campaign to Defend Aid and Development and Richard Darlington is Campaign Director.

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