Cassandra Voices

Category: Current Affairs

  • Public Intellectual Series: George Orwell – A Crucial Man for Our Time

    George Orwell has never been unfashionable, and is in vogue now more than ever. His writing, best represented by his many essays on a variety of subjects, rather than the more celebrated novels, presage in myriad ways the problems we face today.

    Those famous novels 1984 (1949) and Animal Farm (1945) are visionary works depicting totalitarian societies, but in a more significant way it is the cornucopia of themes broached in his essays that anticipate a present era of thought control.

    Orwell despised abstractions, especially nationalism, but also extremism on the left. Accordingly, in his essays we find focus on the particular and daily life. All political concerns are deemed local. Indeed, his works is identifiable as part of British tradition of empiricism with its distrust of grand ideas and gestures.

    Mumbo-Jumbo

    Orwell would have no time for the mumbo-jumbo of post-modernism and structuralism, just as he dismissed the ideological psychobabble of fascism and Communism. Instead he venerated the common sense of the ordinary person, and was deeply sensitive to how ideologies crushed the human spirit.

    Yet he was also aware of how seductive ideologies could be, anticipating what Zizek has called ‘ideological misidentification’ – that includes voting for those who will undermine your interests, as blue collar America did in electing Trump; or believing what you read in The Daily Mail about foreigners.

    Orwell is nonetheless firmly opposed to the mentality of the mob. Were he alive today, he would surely be a genuine tribune for those on the margins of society, but decidedly against the recrudescence of Populism and appeals to bigotry.

    The casual racism he despised, now so evident in many cultures including Britain, was shaped by his experiences of British colonial barbarism in Burma, as indeed was his hatred of the death penalty, invoked in his short story A Hanging (1931), which was based on personal experience.

    Orwell would definitely understand how, through social media and the machinations of Cambridge Analytical the ordinary man is manipulated – brainwashed even – by subliminal messaging and online influencers. Perhaps the docile uncritical consumerism we are creating is best represented in Aldous Huxley’s dystopian 1932 novel Brave New World (1932), a companion piece to 1984 and Animal Farm for understanding our troubled zeitgeist. Either way, both Orwell and Huxley saw what was coming.

    Throughout his writing Orwell emerges as the champion of the underdog, and zealous opponent of vulgar nationalism, whether emanating from state authorities, or the untutored blatherings of brainwashed victims.

    Orwell had no truck with popular prejudice, esteeming instead basic decency. Doubtless, he would recognise how the populace could be whipped into a mass frenzy today and vote in crypto-fascists or even for Brexit. He was sensitive to how popular decency could be corrupted by propaganda into anti-Semitism and the portrayal of Eastern Europeans as degenerates, as he addresses in Notes on Nationalism (1945).

    Uncommon beliefs

    Orwell thus is a believer in the common sense of the common man, but not popular prejudice or vulgar nationalism, or especially not the racism that spills forth from the mouths of those subjected to propaganda.

    He is prescient about how an ordinary person intuitively believes in the Rule of Law. Thus, in ‘The Lion and The Unicorn’ (1940) he argues that the English believe in law, not power. He further opines in ‘Inside The Whale’ (1940) that this stems from a lack of experience of violence and illegality: ‘With all its injustices England is still the land of habeas corpus and the overwhelming majority of English people have no experience of violence and illegality.’

    Homage to Catalonia (1938) is an account of his his Spanish sojourn fighting on the Republican side during the Spanish Civil War against Franco’s fascists. There he saw clearly how extremism of both left and right has no restraints or humanitarian boundaries, and that a society morphs rapidly into lawless banditry.

    Dotty Dreamland

    The dotty dreamland of England, then and now, is suffused with moderation, incrementalism and a lack of experience of licensed thuggery. This is the basic decency Orwell finds in the novels of Charles Dickens, along with a sympathy for the underdog.

    Living in London I now recognise that the British do not seem to understand, rightly so – and certainly do not tolerate – the manipulation or abuse of law by power.

    In this, arguably, they stand alone in Europe, where we see the law used as a tool of oppression in Spain by proto-fascists, who have imprisoned those with the temerity to hold a peaceful independence referendum; not to mention the crypto-Nazi enclave of Orban’s Hungary, and with the rise of La Liga in Italy; more insidious in Ireland is the undermining of decency and corporate takeover.

    The championing of the underdog is a noticeable feature of British life, and the obligation to vindicate the rule of law against the interests of the powerful is still taken seriously, unlike in Ireland which endorses the interests of the corporations to such an extent that the state resists a tax windfall of €13 billion.

    It is not for nothing that the reasonable man test, or the notional man on the Clapham Omnibus, is intrinsic to British legalism and the Rule of Law.

    That is perhaps why the British became so resistant to the idea of their interests being undermined by faceless bureaucrats for Europe, although tragically the result of Brexit may be to deliver them into the hands of a worse set of faceless bureaucrats in the shape of the American corporatocracy.

    In ‘The Lion and the Unicorn’ (1940) Orwell emphasises how the British are repelled by miscarriages of justice, and believe in holding power accountable, which demands impartial administration of justice by independent officials, who are not bought or compromised. This originates in patterns of independent and generally depoliticised appointment not evident in most other European jurisdictions.

    Use of language

    Orwell is highly attuned to the misuse of language. A prevalent theme is how expression should be clear and unequivocal, in a plain style emphasising the virtues of informality and flexibility. Thus he sedulously exposes techno-babble, and the notorious doublespeak encapsulated by slogans such as ‘four legs good two legs better’ from Animal Farm, which anticipate the arrival of political spin doctors. In short, he saw post-truth coming.

    This includes the fakery of our present narratives, where innocent slogans conceal and occlude a multitude of evils. So terms like ‘austerity’ or ‘fiscal stabilization’, or even ‘ethnic cleansing’, are adopted to mask individual and societal destruction.

    Similarly, the anodyne word ‘evacuation’ was used neutrally by Nazi Reinhardt Heydrich at the Wanassee Conference in 1942 to convey crimes against humanity and genocide. Today sloganing by advertisers, hucksters and snake oil salesmen of all shapes and hues are inducing a form of corporate fascism, and state-sponsored murder.

    1984 is a novel about the totalitarian left, as well as the right. Orwell had a ringside seat on the evils of both in Barcelona during The Spanish Civil War, documented brilliantly in Homage to Catalonia (1938).

    Piquant Irony

    It is a piquant irony of intellectual discourse that the left should have embraced the meandering nonsense of post structuralism from the 1960’s onwards only to see it appropriated by the alt right. Truth is not truth Donald as he must have been advised, and Mr .Giuliani echoes.

    Thus as Derrida can change meaning from one sentence to another, so can Trump or Bannon.

    In The Politics and The English Language” (1947) Orwell cauterises the elevation of grammar and syntax as indicia of anything, and focuses on the precise use of language and the avoidance of cliché, or what he terms Americanisms.

    In fact, focusing on grammatical form, at the expense of content, is the classic sign of a box-ticking pedantic and second-class intelligence, or an establishment ruse designed to avoid engagement with arguments of substance.

    The post truth universe that he saw on the horizon is a feature of most his writing. Thus, in ‘Looking Back at The Spanish Civil War’ (1942) he observes that totalitarianism denies that objective truth exists, and in ‘Notes on Nationalism’ (1945) he points out presciently: ‘Since nothing is ever proved or disproved, the most unmistakeable fact can be impudently denied.’

    These are tactics evident in Mr. Giuliani aforementioned denial of objective truth and Ryanair’s Mr. O’Leary denial of climate change. An approach which, by being reported on, rather than dismissed outright, is given a veneer of respectability

    It is also increasingly evident that that those in power blind themselves to their outright criminality, as long as it comes from their own side, including the Neo-Cons and Blairite proponents of just war, known euphemistically as ‘humanitarian interventions.’

    Increasingly, the true subversives among the state and corporate oligarchy inflict criminality on others with impunity. As Orwell writes in his ‘Notes on Nationalism’ (1945): ‘There is no crime, absolutely none, that cannot be condoned when our side commits it.’

    They ask: are you with us or against us? One of us, or representing the demonised and excluded Other. This is particularly prescient in an age of increasing fractiousness, intolerance and division.

    Orwell chose the middle way, however difficult that path may be. Today being reasonable is often not viable. Alas, he who shouts loudest gains most in our present distorted politics.

    The Enemies of Truth

    In ‘The Prevention of Literature’ (1946) we find Orwell revealing that the enemies of truth and freedom of thought to be press lords and bureaucrats. Then as now, and let us add for good measure include social media manipulators and multinational corporations.

    Perhaps his definitive essay is ‘How The Poor Die’ (1929), a crucial text for these times of austerity, where social supports are being steadily withdrawn. The unthinking consequences of an awful ideology, or rather a deliberately planned extermination of anyone deemed unworthy, alongside the cartelisation of wealth into ever decreasing bands, and hands.

    The focus of Orwell is of course also on secularism and the Enlightenment; the repudiation of false Christian values.

    In an essay on Jonathan Swift the author of Gulliver’s Travels he suggests the one-time Dean of St. Patricks Cathedral rejected the Christian idea of an afterlife, a view commended by Orwell. Swift himself was also highly attuned to the interests of the poor in Ireland, subjected to the excesses of Malthusian capitalism, a theme which he brilliantly parodies in his disturbing ‘A Modest Proposal’. (1729). The consumption of babies is used to highlight a meltdown in human fellowship familiar to our present time.

    So there we have it, George Orwell, dead in 1950 but not as Dead as Doornails. Right back in fashion in fact and on the money.

    Why? Well in essence his own time of totalitarianism, economic meltdown, fascism and propagandistic post-truth are replicated in our own, while his fiction, and especially his essays, are an intellectual counterweight more relevant than ever.

    Let us thus secularly worship Eric Blair, not Tony Blair. He was the prince of journalists, a writer of mystic prescience and curiously, perhaps the single most relevant intellectual for our day and age.

    All references are from The Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters of George Orwell (Secker and Warburg 1968).

  • Refugee Education: Can We Regenerate Lost Generations?

    The future of a generation born during over eight years of conflict in Syria is under threat. More than half of all school-aged Syrian children living as refugees in neighbouring countries do not enjoy access to a formal education. In this two-part series humanitarian activist and author Bruna Kadletz addresses a global educational crisis for school-aged refugees.

    Istanbul, May 2016

    What are the immediate and long-term consequences of living without a fundamental human right: access to a quality education?

    In the basement of an old building in the district of Fatih, a district with the highest concentration of Syrian refugees in Istanbul, Turkey, I first contemplated this multifaceted question.

    I travelled for the first time to Turkey in May 2016. The country is host to the highest concentration of refugees in the world. Almost four million people have sought protection in Turkish territory, including 3.6 million registered Syrian refugees, as well as approximately 365,000 from other parts of the world.

    At the time of my first visit, the refugee crisis was at its peak. This prompted me to volunteer for two months in Small Projects Istanbul, an independent NGO operating a community centre for displaced persons. The organisation offers Turkish and English lessons for adults and children, as well as providing employment opportunities for women. It is a safe haven for men, women and children fleeing for their lives from a war-torn country.  

    The centre operates from the basement of an old building in Fatih. I well remember the day my mind turned to one of the most devastating outcomes of wars and conflicts: the lack of educational opportunities for displaced children and youth.

    Leila

    It was a Saturday morning when I first met Leila, a sweetly smiling nine-year old Syrian girl with long, silky hair. Leila was attending Arabic classes with her elder sisters Amal, and younger one Hanan. I sat next to her and watched as she copied the lesson from the board. When she had finished, I asked her to read what was written in her notebook.

    Leila looked at me with her expressive eyes, and timidly said, ‘I can´t read.’

    The import of her words didn´t sink in immediately, assuming she had misunderstood me. I repeated the question more slowly this time, thinking she hadn’t been able to translate what was written into English. Of course she could read her native language I assured myself. Using the same words, however, she replied in almost perfect English, ‘I can´t read in Arabic.’

    Once more, her answer puzzled me. To my mind, it didn´t make sense. How could Leila be able to communicate perfectly in both Arabic and English, copy the lesson from the board and, yet, not be able to read it?

    After telling me her story, I understood.

    This young girl had never attended school. The Syrian War began when she was just four years of age, depriving Leila and her siblings access to formal education, let alone a normal childhood. She had learned how to communicate normally, and even copy the shapes of the words from the board onto her notebook. But she had no knowledge of the individual letters or how they sounded.

    The meaning of the sentences she was copying down were a mystery to her. War had left her illiterate. Amidst all the other problems and challenges, her education had not been prioritised.

    Living as refugees in Turkey, Leila and her sisters could not access formal education. Since the girls did not speak Turkish, they could not enrol in a public school. The community centre, where they took Arabic classes, was the closest thing they experienced to a school environment.

    Ahmed

    Public schools and temporary education centres are the two main options for refugee children who wish to continue their studies. Yet more than half a million school-aged Syrian refugees in Turkey don´t access these options and are left without an education.  

    A week after meeting Leila I learned about a fourteen-year-old boy in a similar situation. Ahmed was also out of school, but for different reasons. After fleeing the conflict he and his family settled in Istanbul. His father carried on into Europe, leaving the boy as the family’s primary breadwinner.

    Ahmed worked exhausting shifts in a backpack factory to sustain his mother, siblings and disabled uncle. Yet the squalid working conditions and low wages hadn’t take away his spark. He used to spend his days off at the community centre learning English, playing football and trying his best to live a normal adolescence. Remarkably, he always had a smile on his face.

    These stories reflect a global trend. For millions of refugee children bearing the human cost of war and armed conflict, education is a distant dream rather than a lived reality. According to the UNHCR´s latest report on refugee education, ‘Stepping Up: Refugee Education in Crisis’, more than 3.7 million school-aged refugee children and youth are out of school.

    The report provides other worrying statistics: only 24% of refugees enrol in secondary education, compared to a global average of 84%; just 3% of refugees have access to higher education.

    Another statistic attracted my attention from the report: approximately 2.9 million school-age refugee children, and youth, live in just five countries, namely Turkey, Lebanon, Pakistan, Sudan and Uganda. These are developing countries in need of international support to cope with the refugee education crisis.

    ‘Zones of vulnerability’

    There are many barriers preventing refugee children and youth from attending school, including language, absence of documentation, and a lack, or absence altogether, of teachers and schools. Refugees also face restrictive school enrolment policies, lack of income to pay for schooling and social stigma.

    A lack of educational opportunities, alongside inadequate integration policies, place refugee communities in zones of vulnerability, leading to further exclusion, cycles of poverty and low prospects of finding suitable employment opportunities. These are a few of the consequences of being denied the right to a quality education.

    How can we regenerate the losses of generations adversely affected by wars and conflicts and ensure a fundamental right to education is vindicated?

    Filippo Grandi, the UN’s high commissioner for refugees, says the solution to the crisis lies in the need to ‘invest in refugee education or pay the price of a generation of children condemned to grow up unable to live independently, find work and be full contributors to their communities.’

    Investment in refugee education goes beyond including school-age refugee in national education systems and providing further funding for UN agencies. Host countries must ensure cultural and linguistic inclusion, as well as creating opportunities for parents to resume their careers, enjoy access to paid employment and provide assistance to entrepreneurs.

    Education is a major stepping stone for societal evolution, human development and psychological liberation. With an education a refugee can transcend the dehumanising labels imposed on them and potentially realise their full potential; children confined in refugee camps and urban slums can develop a sense of dignity and belonging. Moreover, education protects children from exploitation, forced marriage and child labour. Education is the pathway for a safer and brighter future.

    To invest in refugee education is to invest in the future of humanity.

  • David Cameron and the Origins of Brexit

     

    In 2015 comic Frankie Boyle penned a darkly titled article ‘What if David Cameron is an evil genius?’ Only slightly tongue-in-cheek, Boyle – citing plans to erase the Human Rights Act from U.K. law – wondered whether Cameron was, ‘A shrewd and malevolent psychopath who thinks two moves deeper into the game than any of his opponents?’

    Having secured an overall Conservative majority in the general election earlier that year, Boyle marvelled at how the Prime Minister had ‘managed to set England against Scotland, Scotland against Labour. He had given his enemies the referendums [Alternative Vote 2011, and Scottish Independence 2015] they asked for, and won’, leaving erstwhile coalition partner Nick Clegg ‘looking like one of those terrified mouse faces that you find in an owl pellet.’

    A year on, in 2016, however, aged just forty-nine, David Cameron’s career was effectively over as his boldest gamble failed when the U.K. electorate voted, by a narrow majority, to leave the E.U.. Right-wing Populism had upset a carefully laid plan to rid the Conservative ‘brand’ of visceral Euroscepticism, and maintain a two-track Union to the benefit of trade and commerce. As Cameron admits, the centre-right could not hold.

    Actually Boyle’s closing assessment of Cameron as a ‘sort of bored viceroy engaged in the handover of power from government to corporations’ seems closer to the mark. Really David Cameron seems to be neither a genius nor a psychopath, but instead a recognisable product of a privileged upbringing and an archaic political system – with a skewed democracy running under a first-past-the-post voting system maintaining a ruling centre right consensus, and an ‘unwritten’ constitution bringing uncertainties in an era of regular referendums.

    The personality that emerges in a recently published autobiography For the Record is of a savvy and hard-working insider, lacking in profound insight or deep learning, and beholden to a mercantile outlook as the son of a stockbroker. In another era he might have had a fine career in the East India Company before taking a seat in Parliament to plot imperial escapades.

    This autobiography dangles morsels of gossip from ‘blue on blue’ Conservative feuding – especially with one-time friends, including current Prime Minister Boris Johnson and Michael Gove – but incessant retrospective justification, often with cherrypicked data, makes for a generally tedious, and long, read. Regrets are in terms of tactical choices: anyone expecting that a fall from power would bring profound questioning of the nature of conservatism in the twenty-first century will be disappointed.

    The closing paragraph, in which he spells out advice he will proffer to future prime ministers conveys an essential banality, oddly reminiscent of the adventure books of Captain W. E. Johns, with Cameron assuming the role of Biggles, and George Osborne as Chancellor of the Exchequer his loyal sidekick Algie:

    Whoever they are, I will tell them this. That Britain is the greatest country on earth. Our greatness is derived not from our size, but from our people – their decency, their talent, and that special British spirit. There is no need for new ideology or systems, we have the best one here: democracy. We are lucky that this political system enables politicians to act upon what I think motivates most of them: the national interest and public service. And if you listen hard, beyond the sound and the fury, you will hear that this quiet patriotism and belief in democracy is what unites people too. Remember that as you pick up the baton and lead. I will be willing you on as you do.

    Cameron’s apparently simplistic patriotism – born of faith in the enduring greatness of the British ‘spirit’ – coincided with an avowed ‘little ‘e’ and little ‘s’ ‘euroscepticism.’ This prevarication over Britain’s relationship with Europe played a crucial role in producing a career-defining Brexit. The attempt, and essential failure, to renegotiate a deal with the EU prior to the referendum left an unmistakable impression that EU membership was a relationship of convenience to be borne stoically, involving competing nation-states, rather than one of interdependence and mutual benefit.

    Schooldays and Oxford

    Cameron presents a picture of growing up among a happy, bibulous family including two sisters and one brother, featuring an especially affectionate father-son relationship. This did not, however, prevent him from being packed off to boarding school at the tender age of seven.

    There he recalls: ‘At bath time we had to line up naked in front of a row of Victorian metal baths and wait for the headmaster, James Edwards, to blow a whistle before we got in.’ Punishment he says was, ‘old-fashioned. They included frequent beatings with the smooth side of an ebony clothes brush.’

    Such childhood experiences have long forged ‘the stiff upper lip’ characteristic of the upper strata of British society, with medieval origins in the fostering of noble sons as page boys to aristocratic peers. Over centuries, hardened by emotional suppression in childhood, many among this ruling class have been inured to the suffering of racial and social ‘inferiors’, assuming a combination of hard work and punishment for wrongdoing to be a panacea for societal ills.

    Yet Cameron is clearly no dinosaur of a bygone age in the apparent mould of his fellow Conservative Jacob Rees Mogg, and he includes tender reminiscences of a severely disabled son Ivan, who passed away before he took office in 2009, and an apparently loving relationship with Samantha his wife, to whom the book is dedicated.

    Nonetheless, a residual harshness is evident in his attitude towards crime – with an emphasis on deterrence – and poverty, with frequent allusion to the ‘medicine’ of fiscal measures required to restore the U.K.’s economic fortunes after the Crash of 2007-2008. Work would set the poor free, conveniently to the benefit of a wealthy elite.

    After prep school came Eton College, like his ‘father, grandfather, mother’s father and his father’, where the teenage Cameron had a brush with authority – having been caught smoking pot – before knuckling down sufficiently to gain entry to Brasenose College, Oxford, and later earn a first class degree in oft-derided – by Boris Johnson not least[i] – PPE (Politics, Philosophy and Economics); incidentally he dismisses the account of what he did with a pig’s head while a member of the Bullingdon Club as ‘false and ludicrous.’

    During his time at Eton Cameron first encountered the economic ideas that have informed his political outlook since the 1990s, when he worked under the right-wing Chancellor Norman Lemont. From the start he says, ‘it was the radical monetarists and free marketeers who seemed to have the new and exciting ideas.’

    This indicates approval for what Naomi Klein describes as the ‘Shock Doctrine’[ii] espoused by Milton Friedman – the idea of using a political crisis to bring budgetary austerity in order to generate conditions favourable to rapid economic growth. Any recovery generally enriches an economic elite, with the consolation of high employment for the wider society, however precarious and poorly paid.

    ‘Compassionate’ Conservatism

    Cameron styles himself a ‘Thatcherist rather than a Thatcherite,’ a distinction appearing to be a branding exercise as opposed to any substantial divergence from the outlook of his predecessor, whose uncompromising policies established a predominantly post-industrial and unequal society reliant on a London-based financial services industry, over the course of eleven seismic years in power between 1979 and 1990.

    He reveals: ‘I wasn’t always convinced by her approach, and thought some of the rough edges needed to come off. But on the big things – trade union reform, rejecting unilateral nuclear disarmament, our alliance with Ronal Reagan’s America, privatization, Europe – she was absolutely right.’ Essentially, Cameron recognized that ironing out “rough edges” would be necessary to make the Conservative Party electable after Tony Blair had shifted New Labour to the political centre ground.

    He even hails the architect of New Labour: ‘Tony Blair was the post-Thatcher leader the British people wanted’ he says, combining, ‘pro-enterprise economics with a more compassionate approach to social policy and public services.’

    Cameron recognised that taking the Thatcherite (or Thatcherist) project any further had become electorally impossible, at least in the short term. In fairness to him, levels of inequality, while remaining significantly higher than other advanced northern European economies,[iii] stabilized rather than widened during his tenure, and universal healthcare through the NHS was maintained.

    Cameron spells out the changes in emphasis he believed were required to make his party electable: ‘Instead of tax cuts, crime and Europe, we needed to shift our focus onto the issues the Conservative Party had ignored: health, education, and tackling entrenched poverty … women and ethnic minorities.’ As Conservative leader from 2005 and Prime Minister from 2010, Cameron embraced non-economic causes such as marriage equality, and made sure to be pictured alongside women and members of ethnic minorities. To some of extent the exercise of ironing out “the rough edges” was assisted further by going into coalition with the Lib-Dems under the ineffectual Nick Clegg in 2010.

    Over the course of his tenure, in close collaboration with his friend George Osborne as Chancellor of the Exchequer, Cameron rewarded wealth acquisition by reducing the highest rate of income tax from 50 to 40 per cent and slashing corporation tax went from 28 to 17 per cent. He quotes approvingly J.M. Keynes description of the ‘animal spirits’ motivating enterprise, disregarding the altruism often underpinning innovation.

    As with Thatcher’s idea of an ‘Ownership Society’, his government fed aspirations for house ownership through a 2013 ‘Help to Buy’ scheme for council houses, which only seems to have inflated property values while the market was under supplied. An increase in the rate of VAT from 17.5 to 20%, alongside reductions in the welfare budget no doubt impelled many into taking up employment, but much of this was low paid and precarious – with zero hours contracts increasingly the norm. This job insecurity and low pay may account for what is described as the ‘productivity puzzle’ in the U.K. whereby, as of 2018, labour productivity was 18.3% below its pre-downturn trend.[iv]

    Damningly, as of 2018 – two years after he had left office – almost a million-and-a-half were reliant on food banks.[v] Yet his (scary) ‘assessment now is that we didn’t cut enough. We could have done more, even more quickly, as smaller countries like Ireland had done successfully.’

    On Europe, he and his fellow Modernisers that included Boris Johnson ‘were all convinced that the Conservative Party had become, and should remain, a Eurosceptic party’, but that ‘banging on about Europe’ … was damaging.’ Thus, crucially, he refused to tackle the issue head on, and as Prime Minister postured among his European colleagues, insisting on British exceptionalism to the public gallery.

    Environment and the ‘Big Society’

    The rebranding of Conservatism also embraced environmentalism, memorably conveyed through a much-derided photograph of Cameron astride a sledge pulled by huskies inside the Arctic circle, which was intended to convey his acceptance of the reality of Climate Change.

    During his period in power significant progress was certainly made in terms of wind energy generation in the U.K., although it is unclear whether government policies facilitated this as opposed to technological advances, and the country’s favourable weather conditions. Cameron’s government certainly did not embark on any serious divestment from fossil fuels.

    He also displays little concern for biodiversity, bemoaning how the Environmental Agency ‘seemed to worry more these days about newts and butterflies than homes and livelihoods,’ and reveals support for badger culling as a means of combating bovine T.B..

    As Prime Minister he acknowledges an overriding consideration to maintain rising GDP, which is given almost aphrodisiacal qualities:

    When your GDP is on the up, your power rises with it. Your global stature increases, public confidence grows, your party’s fortunes rise, and your economy’s success sparks the interests of investors. Growth begets growth … But when GDP is stagnating or shrinking (or at least when you are told it is – the provisional figures don’t always turn out to be true), you’re in a permanent state of precariousness.

    Absent is any discussion of whether a politics predicated on economic-growth-without-end, involving intermittent recessions, is capable of generating any kind of environmental equilibrium for human beings living on planet Earth.

    Another aspect of Cameron’s Compassionate Conservative formula was the so-called ‘Big Society’, which called for a revival of volunteering. It is an idea not without merit – a non-remunerative space of interaction between private enterprise and the state – however easy it may be to satirise as a patrician fantasy world of village fetes and pumpkin-growing-competitions.

    An absence of engagement, however – in this book at least – with theories of social capital indicate, like much else about Compassionate Conservatism, that it is a veneer masking an overwhelming dedication to free market economics. This approach diverged from other northern European states, where living standards were generally maintained after the Crash.

    Referendum

    After becoming leader of the opposition in 2005, Cameron used his first PMQ, in which he was pitted against Tony Blair, to raise the failure of the Labour government to hold a referendum on the Lisbon Treaty. Although he did not make a career of deriding the European project, his public utterances revealed suspicion throughout. Ultimately, pursuing a “small ‘e’ and small ‘s’ euroscepticism” agenda would make arguments in favour of the European project ring hollow.

    Nonetheless, having emerged with a successful result from the Scottish independence referendum of 2014, in part thanks to the intervention of his one-time sparring partner Gordon Brown, and the Alternative Vote in 2011, Cameron chose to take on the major challenge of an ‘in-out’ European referendum. He wished to settle the argument once and for all within the Conservative party, as the emergence of UKIP under the ‘charismatic’ Nigel Farage was threatening its right flank.

    In hindsight Cameron recognizes that he ‘had allowed expectations about what could be achieved through a renegotiation to become too high.’ But failure to control close lieutenants within Conservative ranks would be his ultimate undoing.

    Both Old Etonians and Oxford graduates, Johnson and Cameron were seen as fellow ‘Modernisers’ within Conservative ranks: ‘I liked Boris and he made me laugh.’ Cameron tells us, ‘But I didn’t always trust him.’ He provides an amusing picture of an occasional tennis partner: ‘Boris’s style on the court is like the rest of his life: aggressive, wildly unorthodox (he often uses an ancient wooden racquet) and extremely competitive.’

    This aggression appeared to border on lunacy at times, as when, on one Johnson family visit to the Prime Minister’s country residence at Chequers, in a highly competitive game of football on the front lawn, Boris slide-tackled one of his own children, ‘so vigorously they had to retire hurt.’

    As Mayor of London Cameron says, ‘Boris was the one who was full of jealousies and paranoias.’ At one time he informed Cameron that after the end of his second spell as Mayor he would finish with public life altogether: ‘I’m leaving public life after this. People say I want to be an MP. I don’t. I’m not going to do that.’

    In the event Johnson resumed his parliamentary career, and when it came to the referendum he initially dithered – by his own admission ‘veering all over the place like a broken shopping trolley’ – before deciding to give the Leave campaign his wholehearted backing.

    We gain insights into what appears to be almost a domestic drama as Cameron reveals how prior to this decision Boris’s wife Marina, ‘rather effectively shouted him down, saying ‘Dave’s thought it through. I’m not sure you have. Why don’t you let the prime minister get on with it?’ – or words to that effect.’ Apparently fixated on the issue of the supremacy of EU law, Johnson consoled himself that ‘Brexit would be crushed like the toad beneath the harrow.’

    In a rare moment of insight Cameron intuits his opponents’ motivations: ‘Whichever senior Tory politician took the lead on the Brexit side – so loaded with images of patriotism, independence and romance – would become the darling of the party. He didn’t want to risk someone else with a high profile – Michael Gove in particular – to win that crown.’

    foam-flecked Faragist

    Ironically, Cameron himself persuaded the Sunday Times journalist, and fellow Oxford graduate, Michael Gove to seek a parliamentary seat. Gove went on to serve as a reform-minded Education Secretary during Cameron’s first administration, and turned out to be a star turn at Cabinet meetings: ‘He’d link together two stories of the day, something from popular culture, something from the other side of the world, and then deliver it with Carry On campness.’

    What Cameron regards, however, as the poisonous influence of his advisor Dominic Cummings brought disputes with the teaching profession, and in a reshuffle Gove was demoted to Chief Whip, with a diminished income. This rankled with Gove’s wife the journalist Sarah Vine at least, who ominously described a ‘shabby day’s work which Cameron will live to regret.’

    Although in Cameron’s estimation Gove, unlike Johnson, was a true Brexit believer, he had counselled against holding a referendum, and indicated he would only play a minimal role in the campaign. So the ‘ferocity and mendacity’ of his (and Johnson’s) tactics arrived as a shock. Dismissal of experts along with false claims about expenditure on the NHS came with anti-immigrant invective: ‘Michael Gove, the liberal-minded, carefully considered Conservative intellectual, had become a foam-flecked Faragist warning that the entire Turkish population was about to come and live in Britain.’

    Cameron reveals wounds of betrayal when he says that both Gove and Johnson, ‘behaved appallingly, attacking their own government, turning a blind eye on their side’s unpleasant actions and becoming ambassadors for the expert-trashing, truth-twisting age of populism.’

    End of days

    The referendum result left Cameron with little choice but to resign, plunging the country into an enduring constitutional crisis. The crocodile-tear-stained-text he received from Johnson is worth recalling: ‘Dave, I am sorry to have been out of touch but couldn’t think what to say and now I am absolutely miserable about your decision. You have been a superb PM and leader and the country owes you eternally.’

    One conclusion is that Cameron was a political lightweight who simply merged New Labour’s techniques in political spin with old school monetarist Thatcherite (or ‘Thatcherist’) economic policies. This may have been conducive to economic growth, with the U.K. emerging as an employment powerhouse in the wake of the Crash, attracting hundreds of thousands of workers from more sluggish European economies that generally afforded greater labour protection. But the uncertainties of boom and bust seem to have demanded scapegoats in the shape of immigrants, leaving the country vulnerable to a populist surge.

    The poverty of Cameron’s ideas is revealed in a paradoxical attitude towards monarchy:

    I have always been a passionate monarchist, but never able to explain precisely why. A person’s future should be determined by their talent and hard work, not by the accident of their birth – my whole political life has been dedicated to that meritocratic ideal.

    Also, reliance on the spectacle of the London Olympics to relieve social tensions is oddly reminiscent of Ancient Rome: ‘They seemed to be an antidote to so much that was wrong in our country. To the social breakdown we’d seen in the riots, proof that young people were a positive force.’

    And yet, despite his obvious deficiencies, foreign misadventures (including Libya) and shameful disregard for poverty, one cannot help feeling a certain nostalgia for his period in office. Then at least the Rule of Law seemed assured and the “rough edges” of conservatism were considered problematic.

    For the Record by David Cameron, William Collins, London, 2019.

    [i] Sonia Purnell, ‘Boris Johnson and David Cameron: How a rivalry that began at Eton spilled out on to the main stage of British politics’, February 23rd, 2016, The Independent, https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/boris-johnson-and-david-cameron-how-a-rivalry-that-began-at-eton-spilled-out-on-to-the-main-stage-of-a6891856.html

    [ii] Naomi Klein, The Shock Doctrine, Knopf Canada, Toronto, 2007.

    [iii] Eurostat, https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/web/products-eurostat-news/-/EDN-20180426-1

    [iv] Untitled, ‘UK productivity continues lost decade’, April 5th, 2019, BBC, https://www.bbc.com/news/business-47826195

    [v] May Bulman, ‘Food bank use in UK reaches highest rate on record as benefits fail to cover basic costs’, 24th of April, 2018, The Independent, https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/food-bank-uk-benefits-trussell-trust-cost-of-living-highest-rate-a8317001.html

  • Bull Moose – Climate Crisis to Opportunity

    As Washington swirls with the drama and intricacies of the impeachment enquiry, spare a thought for climate. Yes, our climate.  

    Much was written in Europe, and elsewhere, about the remarkable Greta Thurnberg. The effectiveness of her singular obsession with the issue – seemingly aided by an Asperger’s condition that leaves her unaffected by social cues that would deter most of us – caused a storm.  She was honest, impassioned, and right about the dire consequences awaiting our planet if we fail to take action. Yet, her message was also largely ineffective this side of the pond.      

    Not that she was a hypocrite, having made her way to the US on a solar-powered sailing boat. Everyone remembers Al Gore’s huge mansion powered by low wattage light bulbs.

    Just last month, the rich and famous made their way to Sicily by way of private jet and luxury yacht to discuss climate change. Really. It made for great headlines here in America: ‘further evidence of the liberal elite telling ‘us’ what to do, while abiding by a different set of rules…’ 

    For the host, Google, being tone-deaf in the climate debate counted for little. It was a lobbying effort.  Besides, compared to the Exxon Mobile’s of the world, at least they’re trying to do something.

    Even in America it’s apparent that the climate is accelerating faster than expected. Anecdotal evidence is piling up. In cities like Houston, Miami, Charleston, and San Francisco, historic rains, drought and storms are starting to sway public opinion. 

    In Atlanta this September more heat records were broken than any ever before. Even some Republicans – accustomed to towing the party line of sowing seeds of doubt about the cause of climate change – are beginning to acknowledge the changing conditions.

    This is a first step. As one ardent Trump supporter, Florida Congressman Matt Gaetz, put it bluntly: ‘I didn’t come to Congress to argue with a thermometer.’[i]

    Whether Republicans are prepared for real measures is another matter as, for many Americans, taking away an automatic right to a supercharged engine is akin to taking away their guns – not on your life.

    In this context, let’s examine how Greta was received in the US. While many praised her direct message and blunt language, not a single person we spoke to had actually changed their mind; while Fox News’s depiction – satirizing a Stephen King novel ‘children of the climate’ – generated lots of laughter, regardless of political conviction.

    Also, Greta Thunberg’s angry accusations against politicians, paradoxically, made them seem sympathetic by comparison. In America even a dagger to the back is often accompanied with a smile; in the political culture and day-to-day-life outward politeness is a constant, especially in the South, which is where most people need convincing about the human impact of climate change. 

    Maybe Greta’s speech at the UN swayed some young people, and gave momentum to environmentalists. But it did little to sway public opinion, define a clear strategy, or mark a way forward.

    So, with the oxygen sucked from the pages of the news by impeachment, how can real change be inspired in America?

    For America to take a leadership role on climate two things need to occur. First, Republicans, who make 30-40% of the national electorate, need to be convinced that this is an urgent priority. Currently a majority either think it’s a non-issue (outright denial), or that it should not be a priority. 

    Secondly, the issue needs to be reframed into one of opportunity, rather than as a daunting problem because of our past and current habits. This last point is often missed. America has thrived on being a nation of opportunity. Obama got elected on the back of a message of hope; Trump on a ticket of change to the status quo.

    When it comes to climate, we are far more adept at talking in terms of catastrophes than we are at talking up opportunities. Perhaps it is because obvious solutions simply don’t exist, or perhaps it’s the size of the task appearing too big. 

    Yet for there to be real action this issue needs to be reframed. Environmentalists should stop trying to inspire fear, and instead talk in terms of opportunity, disruption, innovation, the American Dream, leadership – appeal to America’s pride rather than guilt. And perhaps remember that the Chinese character for crisis is the same as opportunity! Taking on board this message is key to winning the next election.

    [i] Rebecca Beitsch and Miranda Green, ‘GOP lawmaker parodies Green New Deal in new climate bill’April 4th, 2019, The Hill, https://thehill.com/policy/energy-environment/437244-gop-lawmaker-introduces-viable-alternative-to-green-new-deal

  • Reviving the Language of Care in Climate Change Consciousness

    As a child I had recurring dreams of great waves crashing over me. Some would swallow me up, making me lose consciousness. In others I would reach the top of a hill, where I would observe the sea level slowly rising from afar, engulfing the fishing village in which I still live.

    My village is in a protected area in southern Brazil. The place is an idyllic meeting point, where hills, river, white sand dunes and the sea merge into a breath-taking view. The river, called Madre, meaning mother, dances through the wetlands, appearing like a serpent before it reaches the sea. Most days its floodplain lies well away from the houses on the coast line.

    Lately, however, we are observing higher tides and the shrinking of the sandbank. This year winter arrived late and was shorter than usual. We experienced extreme heat alternating with cold days that interfered with the mullet’s reproduction cycle. As a result the fishing season was shorter than usual.

    Climate fluctuation is increasingly evident, affecting the rhythms of nature and impacting on livelihoods.

    For millions of people around the globe, the climate breakdown is a living reality rather than a far off prediction. According to the Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre, 17.2 million[i] people fled their homes in 2018, due to storms, hurricanes, floods, other cataclysmic weather events or environmental shifts. Those living in the Philippines, China and India have been most adversely affected by these phenomena.

    Climate change and forced displacement are the defining challenges of our times.

    In the wake of climate breakdown last month António Guterres, the United Nations Secretary-General hosted the 2019 Climate Action Summit in New York, calling for concrete action to meet the global climate predicament.

    In spite of being in the company of many of the world’s most powerful political leaders, the star of the summit was clearly a Swedish teenager who had just crossed the Atlantic Ocean in a zero-carbon sailboat. Greta Thunberg, climate activist and global phenomenon, managed to capture all our attention. In a powerful speech addressed to governments, businesses and civil society, she condemned world leaders for betraying younger generations, and for indolence in response to the climate collapse and its attendant human costs. 

    I was moved and indeed overjoyed to observe Greta calling humanity’s attention to a dimension often excluded from these talks – the human and ecological costs of our destructive economic system and fossil fuel-addicted societies. 

    Visibly emotional, she uttered the now famous words: ‘people are suffering; people are dying; entire ecosystems are collapsing; we are in the beginning of a mass extinction, and all you can talk about is money and fairy tales of eternal economic growth.’

    At a stroke Greta had restored the language of care to climate talks, having underpined her arguments with reference to the science.

    In as much as we must address issues related to carbon emissions, build creative and sustainable solutions, and change our economic systems and modes of production, the conversation must include climate justice for those on the frontline of climate change. We will only understand forced displacement in the context of climate breakdown once we revive within ourselves the language of care for others, for all living beings, and for the planet itself.

    Unless we humanise the lived experience of those forced to flee hurricanes, floods and droughts, we will continue to externalise the human cost of climate breakdown, and carry on with business as usual: the “fairy tales of eternal economic growth.” 

    If the images of Cyclone Idai, which hit Mozambique, Zimbabwe and Malawi, and Hurricane Dorian – the strongest storm ever to land in the Bahamas – do not awaken concern and care for the victims of climate breakdown, then humanity seems doomed.

    Often I have a sense of hopelessness. I understand many people share similar responses and feelings. When I feel overwhelmed and insignificant in the face of this global crises I take refuge in silence.        

    As an adult working with communities displaced by wars, poverty and weather events, my childhood dreams now support me. At times, caught up in the here and now, I am immersed in the sea of action; at other points, I pause and step back to reflect, restore and witness the larger picture.

    To my mind, these are complementary movements sustaining an open heart and active hands in a world in crisis. As I delve inwardly I observe my motivations. I connect with my principles and values, I feel the pain of a suffering world. As I emerge outwardly, I align my actions and speech with deeper aspects of myself. They are the in-breath and out-breath of sacred activism, that operate like the seasons of my existence.

    To confront widespread climate breakdown, and the despair this brings, one must connect with the language of deep care for the Earth and all living beings. Then we can respond from a place of transformation and embody a new way of living and relating to the planet.

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    [i] Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre, ‘Global Report on Internal Displacement 2019’, http://www.internal-displacement.org/global-report/grid2019/

  • Hate Crimes in Spain not as they Seem

    Some years ago I read about a small theatre in Moscow staging hard-hitting plays critical of Official Russia. It goes without saying that the authorities did not take kindly to Teatr.doc and its founders, Mikhail Ugarov and Elena Gremina (who both died of heart attacks within six weeks of each other in 2018).[i]

    In 2014 Moscow City Council closed the theatre on a planning technicality regarding the location of a window. Then, in 2018, nine of the theatre’s actors were arrested for ‘unlawfully drinking alcohol in central Moscow.’[ii] And in August of this year, unknown assailants stormed the stage during a gay-themed play.

    But despite all the bureaucratic obstacles put in its way, Teatr.doc continues because even a regime like Putin’s baulks at blatantly shutting down a tiny theatre – it prefers to use legal levers to stifle dissent.

    Unfortunately, Putin’s regime is not alone in basing its repression on the ‘rule of law’. Erdogan’s Turkey is also at it. Even in the EU, Poland, Hungary and Spain are using repressive legislation and compliant judges to shut down non-conformism.

    Flawed Democratic Transition in Spain

    The case of Spain is the most alarming because few people are aware of the problems there. Ever since dictator Francisco Franco died in 1975, the country has been portrayed as the poster child for a transition from totalitarianism to democracy. But, as is often the case with the family of an alcoholic who falls off the wagon, its friends are ignoring the warning signs, hoping that it’ll right itself, and turning a blind eye to lapses.

    Problems have long dogged the fledgling democracy. In the mid-1980s, the then Socialist government organised death squads against those suspected of links to Basque terrorist organisation ETA. A few bureaucrats and a senior minister even spent a few months behind bars for their role in the scandal.

    Then in the late 1990s, judges shut down a number of Basque nationalist publications on the grounds that they were financing ETA. The conservative prime minister at the time, Jose Maria Aznar, even boasted ‘Did anyone believe we wouldn’t dare close [them] down?’[iii] An unusual thing to say in a democracy supposedly with a Separation of Powers.

    Most disturbing of all, journalists from those publications served jail sentences of up to eleven years. The closures of all the publications were later – too late for those who had been jailed –found by Spain’s higher courts to have been unlawful.

    the ‘Gag Law’

    Those cases could be written off as once-in-a-decade incidents caused by disconcertion in responding to a terrorist campaign. But since 2015, new legislation – the Organic Law for Citizens’ Security, colloquially known as the ‘Gag Law’ – has allowed the authorities to clamp down on free speech, free assembly and peaceful acts of civil disobedience.

    Complementing the Gag Law is anti-discrimination legislation – known as ‘hatred offences’ – which was introduced to deal with, for example, racism and sexism but is increasingly being used to prosecute people on ideological grounds. And from looking at official statistics, it’s clear that such legislation is being disproportionately employed in two regions: Catalonia and the Basque Country.

    In 2017, the last year for which official figures are available,[iv] there were 1,418 ‘hatred offenses’ in Spain. Of these, 36% were prosecuted in Catalonia and 10% in the Basque provinces. That means almost half of all cases in two regions accounted for just a fifth of the population.

    ‘ideological hatred’

    And when hatred offenses are broken down, ‘ideological hatred’ in Catalonia accounted for 42% of all cases nationally. There’s an explanation for this.

    Since the beginning the decade, Catalan nationalism has gone from being satisfied with devolution within Spain to demanding a referendum on independence. After being stonewalled by the government in Madrid, they went ahead and organised one on their own. The conservative government at the time responded by sending in thousands of riot police to requisition ballot boxes. In carrying this out, the police beat voters with truncheons and fired rubber bullets into crowds queuing outside polling stations.

    The images were seen around the world and proved a PR disaster for Spain, which has since then tried to dismiss these events as ‘fake news’ and ‘Catalan propaganda’. The Supreme Court in Madrid is now deliberating on the fate of twelve Catalan leaders accused of violent rebellion, sedition and embezzlement for organising the referendum. They face up to twenty-five-years behind bars.

    Going hand-in-hand with the trial of the leaders is a lower level persecution of ordinary Catalans, who publicly display separatist sympathies. Many are charged with ‘ideological hatred’. And while the cases are often thrown out by the courts, on account of risible evidence, the stress of being charged and the cost of hiring a legal team might deter democratic expression of political opinions. Thus, the threat of prosecution allows the state to persecute without explicitly having to do so.

    Other targets

    That said, Catalan nationalists aren’t the only ones being targeted. The Podemos mayor of Cadiz, José María González Santos, is standing trial[v] at the time of writing on an ‘ideological hatred’ charge. He has been accused of ‘hatred of Israel’ in response to cancelling a run of Israeli movies during a film festival. Also a Barcelona University professor is being investigated for ‘calumny’[vi] after claiming that prisoners are tortured in Catalan prisons.

    Other almost comical cases that have made headlines are those of a clown with a red nose[vii] who stood beside a policeman and a car mechanic[viii] who refused to service the vehicle of a police officer. Both were Catalans and both were charged with ‘ideological hatred’. Both cases were thrown out, but not after the accused had endured months of uncertainty.

    Both cases also serve to highlight how legislation designed to protect minorities is being used to persecute members of a national minority in order to protect police from perceived slights. As the former interior minister, the conservative judge Jose Ignacio Zoido said: ‘All those who have disrespected the forces and corps of security of the state will pay for it in the courts.’[ix]

    One such case is that of Catalan satirical magazine El Jueves, which was charged with ‘hatred’[x] for a cartoon saying that cocaine supplies had run out in Catalonia because of all the riot police sent there from the rest of Spain. While people who protested outside a hotel hosting said riot police were also investigated for ‘hatred.’[xi]

    Against the Constitution?

    The crime of ‘hating’ police has given rise to some controversy among legal academics. Professor Joaquin Urias, a constitutional law expert at Seville University, has argued that ‘it can’t be applied to protect an institution.’ He added: ‘Accepting that hating the police is a criminal offence could insert us into a terrible spiral of repression.’ He was responding to the so-called ‘Alsasua 8’[xii] youths, who were jailed for between two and thirteen years for public disorder offences and ‘ideological discrimination’ after a bar fight with two off-duty policemen.

    Perhaps the most notorious cases are those of the puppeteers Alfonso Lazaro de la Fuente and Raul Garcia, who spent three days in jail, and the TV comedian Dani Mateo, who is Catalan. The puppeteers were charged with ‘hatred’ and ‘glorifying terrorism’ after parents complained about a banner held by one of the puppets in a children’s matinee in Madrid. They endured an eleven-month ordeal from their arrest to the judge striking out the case. Meanwhile, Mateo was charged with ‘hatred’ for appearing to blow his nose on a Spanish flag during a TV sketch. His ordeal lasted a mere three months.

    The situation is, to put it mildly, an affront to democracy. Amnesty International has said that it is having ‘a profoundly chilling effect, creating an environment in which people are increasingly afraid to express alternative views, or make controversial jokes.’

    Esteban Beltran, Director of Amnesty International Spain, added: ‘Sending rappers to jail for song lyrics and outlawing political satire demonstrates how narrow the boundaries of acceptable online speech have become in Spain.’

    He continues: ‘People should not face criminal prosecution simply for saying, tweeting or singing something that might be distasteful or shocking. Spain’s broad and vaguely worded law is resulting in the silencing of free speech and the crushing of artistic expression.’

    What next?

    The current caretaker government of Socialist Pedro Sanchez indicated while in opposition that it would address these worrying trends. But despite being in power for more than a year, it has done nothing other than to set up a propaganda ministry, Global Spain, which aims to fight the ‘disinformation’ about the state of democracy spread by, wait for it, ‘the enemies of Spain.’

    What can be done to make Spain change course? With four of the five big parties in its parliament fully behind the idea that Spain is protecting democracy by clamping down on freedom of expression, there are appears to be little hope. Foreign criticism, such as claims that there are political prisoners in its jails, makes the Spanish establishment bristle. But perhaps more concerted criticism from the EU and its member states might have an effect. We won’t know until the EU speaks out – up till now, it has chosen to look the other way.

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    [i] Sophia Kishkovsky, ‘Moscow Theater Rebels, Husband and Wife, Are Dead’, June 8th, 2018, The New York Times, https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/08/obituaries/gremina-and-ugarov-russia-teatr-doc-die.html

    [ii] Katie Davies, ‘Actors from Russia’s independent Teatr.doc detained by Moscow police’, July 5th, 2018, The Calvert Journal, https://www.calvertjournal.com/articles/show/10464/actors-from-russias-independent-teatr.doc-detained-by-moscow-police.

    [iii] Jose Miguel Larraya, ‘”¿Alguien pensaba que no nos íbamos a atrever a cerrar ‘Egin’?”’ July 23rd, 1998, El País, https://elpais.com/diario/1998/07/23/espana/901144814_850215.html

    [iv] http://www.interior.gob.es/documents/10180/7146983/ESTUDIO+INCIDENTES+DELITOS+DE+ODIO+2017+v3.pdf/5d9f1996-87ee-4e30-bff4-e2c68fade874

    [v] Untitled, ‘José María González ‘Kichi’ declara en el juzgado por cancelar un ciclo de cine israelí’, September 17th, 2019, Diario de Cadiz, https://www.diariodecadiz.es/cadiz/Jose-Maria-Gonzalez-Kichi-declara-juzgado_0_1392460911.html.

    [vi] Untitled, ‘El juez admite la querella de CCOO e imputa a un profesor de la UB por decir que en las prisiones “hay torturas”’ September 19th, 2019, eldiario.es, https://www.eldiario.es/catalunya/sociedad/querella-CCOO-profesor-UB-prisiones_0_942806331.html

    [vii] Jordi Pessaradona, ‘Imputado por un delito de odio el concejal catalán de la nariz de payaso’, February 23rd, 2018, Público, https://www.publico.es/politica/imputado-delito-odio-concejal-catalan-nariz-payaso.html

    [viii] Jordi Cabre, ‘Archivado el caso del mecánico de Reus acusado de delito de odio’, 23rd of March, 2019, Diari de Tarragona, https://www.diaridetarragona.com/reus/Archivado-el-caso-del-mecanico-de-Reus-acusado-de-delito-de-odio-20190325-0057.html

    [ix] Carles Villalonga, ‘Delito de odio: ¿uso o abuso?’, March 4th, 2018, La Vanguardia, https://www.lavanguardia.com/politica/20180304/441143656491/delito-odio-incitacion-violencia.html

    [x] Pascual Serrano, ‘El delito de odio, la revista ‘El Jueves’ y la Policía’, November 14th, 2017, Público, https://blogs.publico.es/otrasmiradas/11541/el-delito-de-odio-la-revista-el-jueves-y-la-policia/

    [xi] Javier Álverez, ‘Fiscalía investiga por delitos de odio y amenazas la expulsión de los policías de los hoteles’, October 3rd, 2017, Seiz, https://cadenaser.com/ser/2017/10/03/tribunales/1507017054_809275.html

    [xii] Guy Hedgecoe ‘Ghost of ETA refuses to fade for Spanish Right’ June 9th, 2019, politico.eu https://www.politico.eu/article/eta-spanish-right-basque-country-alsasua/

  • September 11th Recalled

    A few months after the destruction of the World Trade Centre in New York on September 11th, 2001, Frank Armstrong wrote this article, which was originally published (translated into Spanish) in La Vanguardia. He recalls how his sister had visited the building only the day before the attack, and goes on to observe that – beyond the immediate tragedy of approximately three thousand lost lives – it signalled that history was not at an end as had been predicted at the end of the Cold War.

    It is exceptional that a news story produces shock waves across the world. An event like the death of Princess Diana dominated the media, at least in the United Kingdom but was somehow parochial, pop cultural, and at times comical. Even those who lit their ‘candle in the wind’ must have realised that Diana’s death did not have the potential to alter the course of human history.

    Similarly, it is possible to read about two-and-a-half million deaths in the Congolese Civil War, or about the threat of global warming, and find these happenings uninvolving. Undoubtedly, the loss of life in Africa is awful, but it is all happening so far away; unrecorded and unconnected to the wider world. Likewise, one can worry about global warming and its attendant threats, but it recalls the concerns of the character Vitalstatistix from Asterix, who feared that tomorrow the sky would fall on his head – but tomorrow never arrives. So we carry on, taking flights, driving cars, heating houses. What can we do? The luxuries have become necessities.

    When September 11th occurred it felt like it could bring about the end of the world as we knew it. The attack on the epicentre of capitalism revealed the fragility of the global economy. Those of us who had consistently criticised the ‘World Order’, who bemoaned the crass commercialisation of our age; the McDonaldisation of culture; the instillation of MTV values, suddenly realised that we too had been become dependent on the fruits of commercial progress.

    How would it be possible to live without flying away to other countries, without the opium of televised football and the succour of culinary variety? Even worse, one had to contemplate the terrifying spectre of war, the poison of chemical and biological weapons and the Armageddon of nuclear catastrophe.

    The television images that came before us were horrifyingly hypnotic, perversely satisfying. Across the world people were transfixed. Most had a clip that stood out. My own personal one was the sight of an aeroplane disappearing altogether into the vastness of the tower, like sperm implanting an egg.

    The events became a movie blockbuster played out across the news media: each one of us was a character in the movie, caught inside the buildings, jumping out the windows, powerless, vulnerable.

    Many people have their own personal involvement with what happened. My sister was in New York at the time. On September 10th, less than twenty-four hours before the first plane hit its target, she visited the World Trade Centre, took a lift to the top and appreciated the view like so many other tourists had done before her, but will never do again. At the bottom of the tower, she purchased her brother a t-shirt in The Gap. Now that t-shirt is mine, my own little part of history, like a fragment of Berlin Wall.

    How times have changed since September 11th is a question that will fill vast quantities of newsprint over the course of the forthcoming week. In reality little has changed, there are still two worlds, the North and the South, one aspiring to be the other. Beyond the three thousand innocent people killed and their families, it has only really affected a change in perception. A realisation that history is not at an end, that the steady march to prosperity could be de-railed.

    A moment of high drama captivated a planet. Two of the great phallic symbols of capitalism rendered impotent. It seemed to be inaugurating an era of uncertainty, but instead we went back to work, to watching football, to eating Indian food, and to taking trips to far off places, but it did shake us, and forced conclusions to be drawn.

    In exchange for the pleasures that we derive from the liberal economy so we must accept the dominance of the US Superpower. The torture of prisoners in Guantanamo Bay or the deaths of Afghani civilians may trouble us but we learn to forget very quickly as such occurrences do not imperil our existence. In all likelihood we won’t do anything beyond mutter disapproval if the US affect regime change in Iraq. The US government is the guardian of the wealth and material comfort to which we have become accustomed, and most of us, including myself, are, in the final analysis, unwilling to countenance the alternative. That is what was scary about September 11.

    All images (c) Constantino Idini

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  • Exclusive: Brazilian Indigenous Leader Condemns Failure to Protect the Amazon

    Institutes such as the Amazon Man and Environment (IMAZON) and the National Space Research (INPE) have pointed to increased deforestation throughout the Amazon region. Although the data preliminary, the increase in the range of felling and burning is very significant, raising major concerns over the safety of indigenous peoples.

    Francisco Piyãko, leader of the Ashaninka tribe and president of the Juruá River Indigenous Peoples Organization (OPIRJ), warns Brazilian society about the consequences of these criminal acts, the Amazon being one of the main regulators of the global climate and rainfall.

    Today, in this forest, we are witnessing and seeing the fire, which is burning the Amazon as a whole. this deforestation, this impact which has no borders.

    This is going to be very bad for all of us.

    We saw São Paulo getting dark because of the smoke one afternoon.

    We need to have the ability now to understand the reality that nature has a limit.

    The Amazon doesn’t have the size; it does have a certain capacity to deal with this situation for a while, but it can lose this capacity; and without the Amazon, everyone living here will suffer a lot, but it won’t be just here. We all need to understand this.

    The value of forests cannot only be thought of in our generation; it is our future!

    If we all understand the importance of the forest, it makes it simpler for us all to unite around this cause.

    We cannot have and see the Amazon as something that is not ours, no matter where you are.

    Millions of poor people are starving around of the world.

    They are miserable because we destroy everything.

    And we are still thinking of burning more.

    What thoughts do we have to help the state, the country, the government, and humanity to rethink again the future?

    I think that we are here, to show as one the biggest examples for the history of the world, to protect the forest – with awareness, and with valuing the diversity as well as the culture and species that the jungle gives life to today.

    (translated by Bartholomew Ryan)

    Deforestation is a long-term concern. Smoke from forest fires has already spread to cities, with consequences for human health; it degrades the soil to such an extent that small-scale agriculture becomes impossible. Deforestation directly affects families that are trying to survive in the jungle.

    In the long run, the destruction of the Amazon accelerates climate change, affecting agriculture and drinking water consumption worldwide, as well as destroying biodiversity that is invaluable to the national economy and the region’s residents.

    Among farmers, unfortunately, all the talk of is of a new freedom to destroy the forest. Connected to this is the dismantling of national policies to combat deforestation and promote economic alternatives, such as that administered by the Amazon Fund, along with attacks on NGOs set up to protect the Amazon region, including INPE, IBAMA and ICMBio.

    Article translated by Felipe Lopes.
    Images     © Arison Jardin

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  • Jeremy Corbyn and Bernie Sanders Confront Common Neo-Liberal Frenemies

    The Corbyn phenomenon – and the utter media-class meltdown over it – is weirdly but obviously reminiscent to anyone who witnessed the rise of Bernie Sanders here in the United States. In both cases, the harbingers were clear, both in terms of responding to grim economic data for an indebted younger generation, and arriving in the wake of bona fide progressive movements such as Occupy.

    Clearly, both the U.S. Democratic Party (which has never been a left-wing, working class party) and the British Labour Party (that dumped Clause IV of its constitution calling for common ownership of industry under Tony Blair, before repeating every Clintonian bromide in a posh accent) were not only ill-equipped to address rising inequalities, but ideologically unaligned with the interests of their electoral bases. But more so than Trump, or Boris Johnson, neither Sanders nor Corbyn were supposed to happen as national phenomena.

    Burning Bernie

    In the case of Sanders – who with 51%[i] of his support coming from non-white voters has the most diverse support of any major candidate – the line was that his supporters were a bunch of white male ‘Bernie Bros’, whose ‘leftism’ provided a thin veneer for deep-seated misogyny and wounded racial privilege. A typical litany from The Nation’s Joan Walsh from 2016 read:

    I’m tired of seeing her confronted by entitled men weighing in on her personal honesty and likability, treating the most admired woman in the world like a woman who’s applying to be his secretary. I’m stunned anew by the misogyny behind the attacks on her, and her female supporters, including my daughter. I’m sick of the way so many Sanders supporters, most of them men, feel absolutely no compunction to see things through female Clinton supporters’ eyes, or to worry they might have to court us down the road, take special care not to alienate us lest we sit the race out in November, if our candidate loses.[ii]

    This tack, which conflated scattered outbursts of sexist or racially insensitive statements, generally online, from Sanders supporters, with far more numerous disagreements, sometimes sharp, without discernible sexist or other bigoted undertones, is still a mainstay of coverage in such venues as MSNBC, The Washington Post, and The New York Times – whose almost ludicrously biased coverage on Sanders has been ably skewered by Katie Halper.[iii]

    Indeed, when Sanders had the temerity to suggest that Amazon CEO, and all-around Bond villain, Jeff Bezos’s ownership of The Washington Post has an effect on its coverage of his campaign, the Krakatoa-level eruption of media outrage was something to behold. [iv]

    NPR characterized Sanders’s well-deserved jab as ‘sounding like Trump,’[v] while Aaron Blake in the Post itself sneered at his ‘bogus media beef,’ declaring in what was one step from tone-policing:

    But as Trump has also shown, the gripes can often be badly exaggerated, undermining whatever valid points you might be making. If you’re going to criticize the media for being bad actors — and we’re hardly above criticism — you should choose your words more carefully and make sure you’re not undermining your own credibility in the process.[vi]

    Perhaps the establishment-liberal-objection to Sanders was best (if rather stupidly) summarized by prosecutor-turned-MSNBC commentator Mimi Rocah, who declared, ‘Just as a woman, probably considered a somewhat moderate Democrat … Bernie Sanders makes my skin crawl,’[vii] and then predictably, and with no particular evidence, cries ‘Bernie Bro!’ when ratio’ed into oblivion on Twitter for saying something dumb.

    One could go on like this, and many have, and here in the U.S., we have more than a year left of this, at the conclusion of which we will all be worse people than we are now. The point is the attacks on Sanders emanating from the ‘liberal’ media in the U.S., which almost universally loathes him, are cartoonish, poorly reasoned, and often in bad faith. Lurking beneath, however, is that for the first time in a long time, American politics may be reconfiguring on a class axis.

    The End of Socialism

    Which brings us to Corbyn. Back in the latter half of the 1990s, it was a lonely station being a leftist. The standard line, including from supposed left-wing publications, was that, per Francis Fukayama, the big conflicts were over. Socialism, after the fall of the USSR, whether taking its cues from Enver Hoxha, Leon Trotsky, Eduard Bernstein, or Billy Bragg, was as intellectually discredited as phrenology, Lysenkoism, and Ptolemaic astronomy. And that went equally for nationalized industry and tuition-free grad. school.

    Back then the leader of the British Labour Party, Tony Blair, could be heard to boast ‘When businessmen say to me, ‘Tony, I never thought I’d be doing this but here’s a big cheque to help you beat the most dishonest, negative campaign in history,’ I say thank you to them’ – which in retrospect may be the most important line of Blair’s 1996 Blackpool speech.[viii]

    Corbyn was an under-the-radar backbencher who wound up in the running for the Labour leadership in 2015 as a sop to what were widely assumed to be the demoralized remnants of the Labour Left, a footnote to what was expected to be a contest between the competing progeny of New Labour forefathers. Corbyn’s leadership wasn’t supposed to happen.

    As with Sanders, but possibly worse because the British press, improbably, outdoes even its American equivalent in narrow-minded pettiness, blinkered class prejudice, and general unpleasantness, Corbyn has been on the receiving end of every possible calumny.

    When he says he likes the novel Ulysses, the media class reminds us of his modest educational attainments; as if James Joyce wrote that novel to test the erudition of Oxbridge graduates instead of entertain its readers. He has been labelled a Stalinist, a dunce, and a doctrinaire ideologue.

    The Labour Party’s apparatus spent his first year as leader assiduously purging, or attempting to purge, new members for such infractions as publicly stating the desire to vote Green in previous elections, or, in the case of Irish poet Kevin Higgins, writing a satirical poem in support of Corbyn.

    Anti-Semitist Slurs

    The lowest point among the multitude of attacks has been the accusations of anti-Semitism against Corbyn and his allies. Two things are simultaneously true – anti-Semitism is a serious problem in the world, Britain included. Also, the British Labour Party has ninety-nine problems, but systemic anti-Semitism ain’t one. The accusations come from a place of bad faith, and to the extent that they are not merely a case of punching the left, they are mounted in defence of what is a jaw-droppingly racist Israeli state under Benjamin Netanyahu (with an only fractionally less racist internal opposition).

    In terms of political opportunism, the case of Luciana Berger, who exited the Labour Party in 2019 in favour of the entity currently called Change UK (currently polling at 0%) stands out. When members of her local party constituency, where her anti-Corbyn stance had made her deeply unpopular, submitted no-confidence motions, the Blairite wing of the Labour Party went into full smear mode.

    Tom Watson expressed ‘our solidarity, our support, as she battles the bullying and hatred from members of her own local party,’[ix] whose crime was wanting leadership that better represented them. Blair himself got in on the act, and the media soon pivoted from a story of a local Corbynite membership revolting against a Blairite M.P. to one of an anti-Semitic membership against a Jewish M.P., based on isolated incidents, all to bury the rebels’ main point in their main motion, namely: ‘Instead of fighting for a Labour government, our M.P. is continually using the media to criticise the man we all want to be prime minister.’

    That Alex Scott-Samuel, the constituency co-chair at the time, had regularly appeared on an internet show sponsored by conspiracy theorist David Icke was bad optics at the very least,[x] but Scott-Samuel’s membership in the ‘Jewish Voice for Labour’ should make one wary of sweeping claims of anti-Semitism.

    If anything, Corbyn has been too accommodating to his critics, with Labour repeatedly suspending his key ally Chris Williamson not for being an anti-Semite, but for questioning the good faith of those who continue to challenge the Labour Party on the issue. Corbyn repeatedly denounces anti-Semitism; the Labour Party has developed an educational program to combat it; and Labour has mounted a series of online videos and pamphlets against anti-Jewish stereotypes and politics. And yet the attacks continue – even as a post-Windrush, Boris Johnson-led Conservative Party takes after Donald Trump and says the formerly quiet, overtly-racist bits increasingly loudly.

    Slow-motion Pub Brawl

    Perhaps as ludicrous, if slightly less fatuous, are those attacks related to the never-ending slow-motion pub brawl that is Brexit. This, too, had its origins in Establishment hubris. It wasn’t supposed to pass. BoJo was supposed to use the opportunity to throw some raw meat into the gaping maws of the slavering rubes while Cameron was supposed to let him have his moment, after which Boris was supposed to shut his goddamn mouth. And yet again, a different wing of the in-crowd underestimated how little the nerds, burnouts, hoods, punks, shitkickers, and other people not seated at the cool kids’ table liked them.

    There are plenty of reasons not to like the E.U.. It is, at its core, a neo-liberal trade pact, and as the Syriza government in Greece discovered, the E.U. would rather see a country pauperized than let it renegotiate a payment schedule with its citizenry in mind. E.U. rules against state aids render the renationalisation of industry that Labour currently advocates not technically, but effectively impossible.

    That is not to say that a no-deal Brexit wouldn’t be catastrophic, or that many of the loudest pro-Brexit arguments aren’t tinged with xenophobia and racism. It is to say, however, that the #FBPE crowd’s almost utopian view on the E.U. is underpinned by a combination of frequent class privilege (‘how will I be able to pop over to the villa in Provence next weekend if Britain leaves the E.U.?’) and disdain for the socialist project.

    Corbyn’s Considerations

    In terms of relations with the E.U., Jeremy Corbyn has consistently attempted to manoeuvre through a deeply complicated series of conflicting demands in a political environment dominated by disinformation and demagogy. As I see it, his main concerns are:

    1. A Labour Party membership deeply divided over Brexit.
    2. Genuine belief that one cannot in good faith override a democratic vote because it did not produce the desired outcome.
    3. Desire to preserve positive aspects of the E.U. (ease of movement within the area, for instance), to blunt the effects of a hard Brexit (e.g. to trade) without glossing over the negative.
    4. Letting the Tory Party, which caused the mess, to bear the political costs.
    5. Keeping the Blairite majority among the party leadership at bay without completely selling out to them.

    The latter two have probably caused Corbyn the most problems. Ex-Labour (and current Lib Dem via Change UK) M.P. Chuka Umunna griped in The Independent: ‘I cannot think of any Labour leader in my lifetime who would not have instinctively said ‘Remain’ but the party has changed irrevocably under the current set up.’[xi]

    Of course Corbyn is not the only one – a number of those from the 2015 intake of MPs who are mooted to succeed him are on record of being even more hostile to the notion of a People’s Vote.’ Umunna was born in 1978, and the Labour Party under Michael Foot (leader 1980-83) favoured leaving the E.E.C., a position reversed by Neil Kinnock, whose main contributions to world history were paving the way for Blair, air-balling what should have been an easy election in 1992, and giving speeches for Joe Biden to plagiarize.

    This may seem an historical quibble, particularly as Corbyn campaigned, albeit unenthusiastically, to remain in an institution unworthy of enthusiasm, but Umunna inadvertently captures the key ideological disconnect.

    Left-no-longer

    For many years socially liberal yuppies like him dominated what, in official circles, constituted the ‘left.’ The socialist project, either isolated in its traditional mass party like Britain or essentially vilified and repressed to the point of near-extinction as in the United States, became a vehicle for free-market and militaristic ideas – but performatively anti-racist, pro-woman, and pro-gay – and a gaping political void emerged.

    With the genuine article re-appearing in the shape of Corby and Sanders, the ‘left’ of the Blair-Clinton era is the left-no-longer. But they like the real estate. Thus come the ludicrous charges.

    As Noam Chomsky noted of Corbyn:

    One must admire the incredible skills the media have in manipulating the population. They’ve managed to convince many that the most passionate anti-racist campaigner of the last 40 years, Jeremy Corbyn, is actually pro-racist and anti-Semitic.[xii]

    Of course Blairites favour, not social equity, but aspirational mobility, treating inequality as isolable matters of exclusion on the basis of race, gender sexuality, and so forth, rather than economic inequality, reflecting exploitation inherent in capitalism.

    There is a block in favour of radical, egalitarian change, and its leaders aren’t named Kamala Harris, Tom Watson, Chuka Umunna, Rachel Maddow, Alyssa Milano, or J.K. Rowling. Or Elizabeth Warren, frankly. Thus the ‘anti-Semitism’ slurs, and the ‘Bernie Bro’ canard.

    Many with leftist sympathies are genuinely bamboozled, given the ubiquity of this garbage. Other claiming these affinities really don’t really like socialism, universal health care, free college, and railroads that aren’t owned by the likes of Richard Branson. And those people should be honest about that, and if they aren’t, it’s okay to own them relentlessly on social media.

    Feature Image by ‘paulnew’ is of Jeremy Corbyn speaking at a leadership election rally to his supporters in August 2016.

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    [i] Untitled, ‘Profiles of supporters of the leading Democratic candidates’, Pew Research Center, August 20th, 2019, https://www.people-press.org/2019/08/16/most-democrats-are-excited-by-several-2020-candidates-not-just-their-top-choice/pp_2019-08-16_2020-democratic-candidates_0-06-2/.

    [ii] Joan Walsh, ‘Why I’m Supporting Hillary Clinton, With Joy and Without Apologies’, January 27th, 2016, The Nation,https://www.thenation.com/article/why-im-supporting-hillary-clinton-with-joy-and-without-apologies/.

    [iii] Katie Harper, ‘MSNBC’s Anti-Sanders Bias Makes It Forget How to Do Math’, July 26th, 2019, FAIR, https://fair.org/home/msnbcs-anti-sanders-bias-makes-it-forget-how-to-do-math/.

    [iv] Chavie Lieber, ‘Bernie Sanders called out Jeff Bezos for poor treatment of Amazon workers. In a rare move, the company fired back.’, August 30th, 2018, https://www.vox.com/2018/8/30/17797786/amazon-warehouse-conditions-bernie-sanders.

    [v] Domenico Montenaro, ‘Bernie Sanders Again Attacks Amazon — This Time Pulling In ‘The Washington Post’’, NPR, August 13th, 2019, https://www.npr.org/2019/08/13/750800062/sanders-again-attacks-amazon-this-time-pulling-in-the-washington-post.

    [vi] Aaron Blake, ‘Bernie Sanders’s bogus media beef’, The Washington Post, August 14th, 2019, https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2019/08/14/bernie-sanderss-bogus-media-beef/.

    [vii] Josh Feldman, ‘MSNBC Panelist: Bernie Sanders ‘Makes My Skin Crawl,’ I Don’t See Him as ‘Pro-Woman Candidate’’, Mediaite, July 21st, 2019, https://www.mediaite.com/tv/msnbc-panelist-bernie-sanders-makes-my-skin-crawl-i-dont-see-him-as-pro-woman-candidate/.

    [viii] British Political Speeches, Leader’s speech, Blackpool 1996, http://www.britishpoliticalspeech.org/speech-archive.htm?speech=202

    [ix] Untitled, ‘Labour row erupts over no confidence vote in Luciana Berger’, BBC, February 8th, 2019, https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-politics-47169929.

    [x] Lee Harpin, ‘University distances itself from academic who promoted Rothschild conspiracies on David Icke show’, THE JC, February 12th, 2019, https://www.thejc.com/news/uk-news/university-insists-academic-who-promoted-rothschild-conspracies-on-david-icke-1.479941.

    [xi] Chuck Umunna, ‘Jeremy Corbyn is happily helping Britain leave the EU – he is and always was a Brexiteer’, The Independent, March 18th, 2019, https://www.independent.co.uk/voices/jeremy-corbyn-brexit-chuka-umunna-the-independent-group-leave-remain-a8828001.html.

    [xii] Frea Lockley, ‘Here’s how thousands of people are standing up to smears against Jeremy Corbyn’, The Canary, March 26th, 2018, https://www.thecanary.co/uk/2018/03/26/heres-how-thousands-of-people-are-standing-up-to-smears-against-jeremy-corbyn/.

  • Joe Rogan and the American Male Zeitgeist

    Anyone unfamiliar with Joe Rogan would do well to watch his stand-up shows on Netflix, or read a recent piece entitled ‘Why is Joe Rogan so Popular?’ from The Atlantic. Perhaps you already know him from a notorious interview with Elon Musk, where the latter liberally drinks whiskey and smokes weed, much to Wall Street’s chagrin.

    Why is Bull Moose talking about Joe Rogan? Well, for starters, he has the second most popular podcast in the country, but, more importantly, he is popular with men across the political spectrum.  Men who are fed up with political correctness, the victimhood so prevalent in American politics, and above all the constantly changing idea of what it means to be a man in America. Listen to Mr. Rogan and you’ll soon learn that he provides a welcome reprieve from conventional thinking, if nothing else.

    Joe Rogan is a showman. He is a professional comedian. But he’s also one who seemingly understands that the ‘average’ American man is frustrated. This average man has political power, yes, but his personal power (and his pocketbook) has been curtailed since the Great Recession. He asks his wife about whether he should change the diapers; seeks her for permission to go out for a beer; can’t pay off his debts, and somewhere along the way, Joe Rogan contends, he stopped acting like a man and started behaving like a pussy.

    The average Joe Rogan fan is unhappy about this state of affairs. They are American men of whatever race and background who realise they should have the power to succeed, and strive to be a better version of themselves, but see obstacles in their way. They realise the empty promise of a bigger TV, or a faster car. As Joe Rogan put it:

    We got sidetracked and diverted into these boxes, these cubicles in offices … So instead of investing your time in a passion, you’ve sold your life to work for an uncaring machine that doesn’t understand you. That’s the problem with our society. And what’s the reward? Go home and get a big TV.

    The media widely assumes that this group of disaffected, frustrated men voted for Trump. Many of them did, but just as many would never vote for him. They are the accountants, the soccer dads, the everyday Americans who believe this country is already great, and that, no, we don’t need to buy Greenland.

    Reaching out to this disaffected part of the population and offering them a voice will be key to winning the White House in 2020. Trump did it in 2016, and will surely count on their support in 2020. Democrats should take heed. Understanding the scale of their frustrations is one of the keys to a successful campaign. The anointed Democratic candidate should voice their concerns, appreciate their contributions, and make them feel part of his or her agenda.

    No, Bull Moose is not calling for an embrace of divisive gender politics as a way to win an election. Quite the opposite, the candidate that taps into this frustration will be the one that gives men the sense that they too can be who they want to be: a citizen who feels good about the opportunity he has for personal and professional success, to the benefit of the country as a whole.

    Past American leaders of different political convictions – from FDR to JFK or even Reagan and Obama – all called for sacrifices for the greater good. They instilled a pride in the average American man that his individual sacrifice was contributing to a great country. Increasingly, however, his sacrifices are accompanied by a diminishing quality of life, and income; nor has he much to feel proud about in the public sphere.

    What Joe Rogan understands – and what makes his so popular – is that lying beneath male frustrations is an enduring conviction that the ‘average Joe’ can become whatever he wants, and that self-actualization is more important than material gain. They are inspired to become the hero in their own movie: to be kind; to pursue excellence; to be relentlessly positive; to think freely; to be unafraid.

    So, you might ask, what’s the point? The point is Democratic Presidential candidates should start talking about opportunity and freedom inclusively, and not only for those disadvantaged historically. Also, please refrain from using the expression ‘the average hard-working American man.’ No one wants to be labelled “average.” Focus instead on the unlimited potential of every human being.

    Feature image is Joe Rogan with Gerald Strebendt, circa 2002.

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