Arundhati Roy + John Cusack's "Things that Can and Cannot Be Said": Book Review

The Indian writer Arundhati Roy's critiques of "what cannot be said" within the war on terror, the "Lifestyle Wars" that seek to perpetuate conflict for the benefit of the few and the coddled, the influence of NGOs and World Bank-types of organizations on taming activism, and the surveillance state are familiar to readers of her many essays. This little book can be read in a sitting, but it sums up many of her positions. The co-authorship with actor John Cusack comes from his proposal to visit Edward Snowden in Moscow. Daniel Ellsberg joins them, at the end of 2014, in Moscow.

Cusack mainly feeds Roy questions; she responds in her accustomed fashion. This as in her journalism can be strident, verbose, and stretch for effect, but her aims reveal her concern for the issues ignored by the mainstream press. She excoriates the current system, lamenting that it lacks a rival structure, and that those fighting it must be resigned to more guerrilla tactics, as Snowden and Ellsberg demonstrate, against the powers.

The brief chapters are mostly conversations. There's also a meeting with Julian Assange. Roy explains that it cannot be accounted for here. That adds to the odd sense of much of this book. You feel these are disembodied voices lamenting the lack of concerted resistance, as if partisans speaking in a trench on a chilly night. The continual fears of nuclear weapons, often glossed over now, comprise Ellsberg's comments, while Roy reminds us of the collusion between Silicon Valley and the Beltway as to data gathering, boding poorly for future liberty from algorithmic control. (Amazon US 11/12/16)

Tsering Woeser's "Tibet on Fire": Book Review

 

Since the Tibetan uprising of 2008, nearly 150 monks, nuns and laypeople have set themselves on fire to protest Chinese domination. Poet-activist Tsering Woeser argues that this defiant act of self-immolation is not an act of despair but “a positive symbol of action, national identity, and spiritual strength." Woeser’s short book explores the context and the fate of these bold dissidents.

The author is a dissident "under close surveillance" in the Chinese capital, and speaks out for those silenced in their decimated and deracinated homeland. Woeser explains that there is no tradition of this fiery act in her native Tibet. She tracks its sudden and recent escalation to the month of March, a period full of holidays celebrating the Himalayan realm that has become a time for national and cultural pride and resistance to Communist suppression. Rather than judge self-immolation by Buddhist principles, Woeser regards this act as "ignited by ethnic oppression."

Woeser lists five reasons for Tibet's fierce opposition to Chinese domination. First, the forced "patriotic education" given monastics. Next, the damage done to the Tibetan plateau, destroyed by exploitation and global warming hastened by Chinese capitalism. Third, the discouragement of the Tibetan language. Fourth, the massive immigration of lowland Han into the region. Finally, top-down control of the region by "nets in the sky and traps on the ground." Data secured by aerial footage and on land by cameras or spies capture many who are fighting for Tibet's survival. Postcard scenes of Lhasa romantics admire disguise a venal economy and a police state.

Analyzing nearly 50 statements left behind by those who have set themselves on fire, Woeser and her husband Wang Lixiong determine two central concerns. The protesters emphasize the restoration of the Tibetan language, proscribed and disdained by the Party and its native collaborators. The Tibetans also promote the independence of the Land of Snows. This tactic separates these restive rebels from those such as the present Dalai Lama and the Tibetan government in exile, which has adopted a less confrontational and more diplomatic set of negotiations presented to the People's Republic of China.

As only Chinese-approved journalists can operate openly in Tibet, videos and testimonies by native sympathizers are difficult to obtain and dangerous to transmit. Woeser changes identifying names and places, and narrates the stories of those who have set themselves on fire, including the disturbing cases of those who survived and were spirited away by Chinese authorities, never to resurface.

These acts are considered not only religious protest but political protest. With the completion of the first rail line to Lhasa in 2012, the Chinese Han majority enter the former Tibetan capital with greater ease, while Woeser and Lhasa natives are corralled and interrogated by Chinese police before they can enter. Limits to Tibetan freedom are only increasing, not only by bureaucratic obstacles but by closed circuit television monitoring, collective punishments for families of protesters and rewards for informants. Due to restrictions and caution, Woeser can only report limited evidence. Journalists who are not in favor with the PRC occupation are forced to smuggle out firsthand reports from those trapped inside a militarized crackdown. Yet this book is as thoroughly documented as possible, with current websites and interviews appended or elaborated in end-notes. Tibet on Fire may be a concise volume, but it conveys rare voices that would otherwise be hushed.

After the failed rebellion in 2008, Woeser regards non-violence as the only solution. Recalling  Thích Quảng Đức’s  iconic self-immolation in Saigon in 1963, Woeser points to the Buddhist presence of a "lamp offering" as a congenial image. Using their bodies as candles, Tibetan protesters radicalize their uprising. They turn themselves into light. This harms no others, Woeser concludes, and by this horror, the attention of the world may be held.

Another dissident, the artist Ai Weiwei, memorably portrays this struggle. His cover design for Tibet on Fire reveals a hidden message under a logo of swirling flames: the names of these human "lamp offerings" are embossed into the background. May their impact widen among those who fight for freedom against an empire. (Spectrum Culture  )

John Gimlette's "Elephant Complex: Travels in Sri Lanka": Book Review

A few years ago, the title "At the Tomb of the Inflatable Pig" caught my eye, naturally. It was a travelogue through Paraguay, full of interest and wit. The author, John Gimlette, has wandered into many realms before and since that one, and he's chronicled them similarly. Inspired by his Tamil neighbors in London, he decides to visit Sri Lanka.

While William McGowan's harrowing "Only Man Is Vile" (1992; also reviewed by me) delved into the civil war in the eastern territory between the Hindu Tamils and the Buddhist Sinhalese, Gimlette visits the island nation as its people struggle to recover, a few years into a precarious peace. He is admirably cautious in sifting through the accounts of strife. His notes suggest further reading on topics, a valuable resource to a nation about which much lately had been reported.

His book's chapters track some of the titular paths the elephant takes as it traverses, for thousands of years, the terrain, without caring for the humans who have settled there since. Starting in Colombo, he takes in the dry zone of the north-central province, the cinnamon forts and traces of the Portuguese colonization, echoes of Dutch burghers on the south coast and Sinhalese redoubt, and the Great Road and the highlands. Then he stays in Kandy, and later with "Little England" planters amid the tea terraces. The south-east with both the much-reduced indigenous tribes and the post-war Tamil Tigers populate a remote region. The spirits of "Trinco" from another war, the world one seven decades ago, haunt that area.

The last chapters revolve around the island's conflict and the physical and emotional impacts it left on the nation's peoples. Gimlette, a skilled veteran, keeps the pace steady and his gaze alert. He does not delve into sentiment, but he sympathizes with the damage, and he directs us to follow his itinerary with alertness. He ends by knowing when his welcome is over, and when he passes away from the end of a troubled era here. (Amazon US 12-31-15)

Michael Mott's "The Seven Mountains of Thomas Merton": Book Review

After a visit to the Abbey of Gethsemani, I wanted to find out more about where Merton had spent half of his life, and how the famous depiction of his first half, in 1948's The Seven Storey Mountain, differed from or confirmed what Michael Mott learned in his diligent research for this 1984 biography. Mott's documentation makes this the authorized biography, for he had access to primary sources and archives which previous scholars and biographers did not, and as he had the cooperation of the Order to enhance the interviews and correspondence he incorporates into a comprehensive representation. Luckily for all involved, this is no hagiography. It fairly analyzes what Merton wrote and what we know, apart his many writings in print or not, as judged in the context of his friends and his lifetime.

Highlights for me began with Mott's eloquent parallel of Merton's troubled year at Caius College, Cambridge, reading Dante with Professor [Edward] Bullough. But Mott does not give the professor's first name, presumably relying only on Merton's unpublished notes, and such small details, despite the meticulous attention the author devotes to his subject, sometimes disappoint slightly. For instance, while this is meant as a biography rather than a critical work, one finds many of the three-dozen-plus titles and countless essays or reviews Merton published in his lifetime mentioned as if in passing. A few gain from Mott's insightful excerpts or summaries, but more context on the rest of them, even if minor by comparison, would have enhanced the value of this book. Admittedly it's already long, but it's not dull or rambling. Snippets on Buddhism, for instance, late in the narrative could have also benefited from elaboration, as Mott compresses complex and disparate intellectual and spiritual contexts which Merton expanded. The shift of Merton towards the East is not an easy one to reduce to a few pages. The focus on main events is understandable, but again, the endnotes could have extended discussion.

He was full of contradictions. Gregarious, he chose a cloister. Restless, he wanted to be a hermit. Affable, he withdrew from a wide circle of friends. Proud, he resented his monastic discipline. Mott handles the tensions calmly, illustrating how Merton's early infatuation with his Trappist community gave way, as he matured, to conflicts with his fellow monks. However, when by the mid-1960s his dream of a hermitage on the property came true, Merton kept appealing for chances to travel, and opportunities to chat with visitors. He swung back and forth, longing for solitude but wandering back to the world, with dangerous results as have been revealed concerning his affair with a student nurse in Louisville when he was around fifty years old. I kept noting how Merton, vowed to poverty, somehow accumulated his beloved LPs by Dylan and Joan Baez and Mozart, so many books he needed a big set of shelves, and beer and brandy (the latter might have been sneaked in by visitors).

Certainly, he felt after a quarter-century of service as novice master, and as a productive if sometimes too prolific author, he generated attention and income indirectly or directly (how did royalties work out? Another area I puzzled over, as I figured the Order garnered the sales but somehow Merton had money to spend inside and outside the monastery during his later years at least there as a hermit...). So, he figured he had earned his keep. But I understood how his fellow monks may have rankled at his barbed wit and quick tongue, and also how Merton tried to make right some of the wrongs he inflicted on his confreres and his friends, given the pressures of living so long in such close quarters.

Mott delves into such difficulties well. "It was a voice breaking the silence to praise silence." (251) As acclaim for Merton made him a celebrity after his autobiography appeared, he sought the attention but also retreated from it, if it was not from those closest to him, perhaps. Some of the liveliest passages here are about the monastic hubbub that ensued when unwanted callers tried to crash in, or apply as postulants, drawn by Merton's fame. For a while, the abbey had to house monks under a circus tent, so great were the numbers. But that passed, and Vatican II itself, with the renewal Merton helped progress, led to the diminution of much that made religious life in the Cistercians so austere.

Social changes drew Merton into the conversation in the rest of the world beyond the walls, as the late-1950s agitation filtered into his reading and correspondence. Marco Pallis and Merton wondered in letters if the atrocities attributed to WWI sparked WWII propaganda, and Mott shows how Merton evolved from a Cold War proponent to a more balanced observer and challenger to capitalist cant. Opposing the Vietnam War, in 1965 he wrote "The Answer of Minerva." If the question is "Why must this pointless war go on?", then the goddess' response is: "You must fight on, for if now you make peace with the enemy, you will offend the dead." (qtd. 416) A perennial, if unfortunate, exchange. 

The reforms that changed Catholicism, I always figured, would have been supported without delay by Merton. But Mott shows more ambiguity in Merton as the 1960s revealed immaturity among clergy freed from restraint, and as a rush to improve liturgy and architecture and ritual threw out some of what made the Church so cherished by many. A letter in 1968 finds him at odds with both extremes. "Paralyzing incomprehension--what does one do when he realizes he is part of an organization whose members systematically try to 'make a fool of God'? I suppose I begin by recognizing that I have done it as much as the best of them." A characteristic note, for Merton in his private journals strives to meet the nuanced note, less combative or preening than some of his public proclamations betrayed.

He took a long time to get over the priggish or self-righteous attitude. After all, he was an intellectual probably more than the playboy his youthful memoir made him out (despite censorship from within or outside himself) to be. He talked his way around and in the monastery, where a promise of stability and discretion overruled his natural ebullience, if not his concomitant despair and self-loathing, the balance between good conduct and righteous morality never lasted long. He lived in tumultuous times, and he continued in one of those years, 1968: "But then a 'God is dead' Church is no better, or are the 'God is dead' Christians are an improvement over the others. Just the same established flippancy and triviality. And even more successful." He ends with "They make a good living out of God's death." (527)  A fitting sample of Merton's ability to turn a phrase, to cut through pretense. 

I liked the hints of how Merton related to his friend, the artist Victor Hammer (whose drawing of Merton graces the back of the dust jacket) as an "unbelieving believer." I would have liked more about this, as to how friends of Merton managed to align their own beliefs or lack of such with his. (Some material here, as in his affair, was redacted or limited, as at the time Mott prepared this, it was less than the quarter-century moratorium that Merton requested for release of his private documents. Since Mott's book, some of the journals and letters have been published, for better or worse, maybe.)

An "existentialist contemplative," Mott avers on the next page, beckoned as ideal. Not only for the hermit-despite-himself, as he prepared to depart for the West Coast and then a tour of the Southeast Asian landscape and monasteries who increasingly loomed as his final set of mountains to argue with, in Mott's construct (playing off of Merton's title and that Dantean depiction of Mt. Purgatory). Merton wanted not only to write about life, but to live it. He wanted to demonstrate his contemplative commitment and to withdraw (at least some of the time, him being Merton), from all the attention. 

In his Asian journal, his last set of writings, he muses over what he has learned after living with himself, itching to travel but insisting he was called to a vocation apart from even his fellow monks. "Our real journey in life is interior: it is a matter of growth, deepening, and an ever greater surrender to the creative action of love and grace in our hearts. Never was it more necessary for us to respond to this action. . ." (qtd. 543)  He was open to this spiritual evolution, and he struggled to progress. 

Mott can lighten the mood. As to the journal Monks Pond in its last year of the monk's life, "Merton made the mistake as editor of including the work both of poets who were friends and of friends who claimed to be poets." (503)  While his last recorded words in public have been taped in Bangkok, that day nearly twenty-seven years exactly from the time he entered the monastic life at twenty-seven, many cite the eerie premonition of the first clause. The second one also shows Merton, in his everyday side, that made him so much a figure of devotion or imitation or even excoriation by many.

"So I will disappear from view and we can all have a Coke or something." Then, a "Thank you very much" concludes his final address, preceding his electrocution by a faulty fan's wiring in his hotel bathroom. (564) That "you may know the Christ of the burnt men" in premonitory fashion also serves as the last phrase of his autobiography, another circle rippling across many decades and mountains. (Amazon US 12-17-14)

Caption the flag

I entered the grounds where I work today. Small Stars-and-Stripes flags dotted the verges of the lawn, a scarce green in this hundred-degree heat wave in my drought-plagued State. I wondered if there were three-thousand or so, but it was probably a tenth of that. A security guard stood in the driveway, taking pictures of them on his cellphone, flags among the beds of pansies which are cared for, next to an empty fountain.

At the meeting I attended, the convener opened with a moment of silence. She commemorated those who had died "helping other people" that day, and those who were the victims. She did not mention the millions who have died before and after this Patriot Day, in the name of vengeance rained upon 19 perpetrators, "death from above," let alone the fatal fraction of that morbid total among those from hereabouts who volunteered or were sent to fight overseas. I teach, as I often report here, those returning from places far hotter than here, and of the state mentally or physically many are in. They are welcomed here to study, and often lauded.

I asked a few vets if they would recommend joining to others. I recall one who vehemently, if calmly, insisted against anyone he knew ever doing so. One of my best students now has in the past left class or been unable to attend as waves of gloom and inner pain leave him unable to motivate himself. I have taught amputees, those with plates in their head or their backs, and those unable to go to sleep. Some must move around, or sit in a way they are trained to cover a room and not turn their backs. Others find it difficult to stay still in a chair due to their injuries, or to focus and escape their demons.

I have been reading a lot of left-libertarian perspectives lately. They seem to echo my own concerns. We get caught up so rapidly in the rush to judge, the compulsion to curse, the joy of fulmination.

The juggernaut of aggression, the grievances, the culture of complaint drives us, even more than in 2001, as we rush to social media and smartphone cameras to upload our laments. As I heard, after a fine dinner of salmon at the nearby Industriel (sic), which I recommend by the way, Salman Rushdie spoke at the L.A. Public Library last night about the "freedom of expression" he noted the enemy in the West. Not Muslim immigration so much as "the victimizers acting as if they are the victims." Those who inflict offense claim they are offended. Trigger warnings create cowed citizens. He also compared intractable contentions such as Israel and Palestine to "contested narratives." Ones that cannot be reconciled. I feel increasingly estranged from those who claim to speak for and to lead us. I live in a nation whose "civic religion" of mottoes, pledges, and slogans disorients my own spirit.

As in the recession in 2008, I wondered post-9/11 if American triumphalism would subside. We all know that it did not. Obama replaced Bush jr., but the drone attacks and the trumped-up victories, as when he appeared to take credit for the Navy Seal raid that killed Osama bin Ladin, rogue scion of the dynasty our dollars supported as surely as they do the Saudis who escaped blame then heaped on Iraq and Afghanistan, also our former cronies in skulduggery, continued "our" Great Game abroad. 

The mandated duties managers insist upon, the erosion of the work-life balance, the wage stagnation, ecological devastation, the stifled possibilities that billions of us have who want to contribute to a better life for all creatures, not only our own (thankfully I guiltily admit today) air-conditioned nests. All these stir within us. During the day, we may be distracted, but how many at night wonder what 9/11 added up to, fourteen years on? My sons can barely recall it, and I now teach a generation that includes incoming students who would have been barely out of diapers on Sept. 11th, 2001. Soon enough, like the Civil War and Pearl Harbor, the San Francisco quake of '06 and the Shoah, we will lose the living links with dramatic rescues, heartbreaking recollections, and a scent of sudden death.

Until the next time. Living in Los Angeles, that may be natural or artificial. A new show, a pre-quel, takes place near me in El Sereno, a largely Latino neighborhood, as the Walking Dead zombies stir.
All deny it officially, but those more vulnerable or streetwise sense the media and political lies. I don't need to scrawl a highlighter to make the allusion. When George Bush at the time rose as he had to, reassuring us, he also encouraged us to get out there and spend, lest our national will falter and our economy--after all those Made in China flags were sold--sputter. My older son recalls reading a David Foster Wallace essay, as I had, about being with his relatives in Illinois the day after 9/11. Where did all those displays of patriotism, on fabric, fluttering from cars and from porches, come?

Like the once-ubiquitous "three-peat" {TM} Lakers pennants from cars, you rarely see the national flag flown. It's intriguing that the "NorCal" contingent seem to have popularized the State's Bear Flag. I always liked it, even if the forty-day or so California Republic was more akin to a (right-wing) libertarian attempt at getting back at los Californios than a true-sons-of-liberty attempt at equality. The poor grizzly on it is the only one left, as the "expansion" obliterated is as surely as dodo and passenger pigeon. No flag seems perfect. I have a liking for a few in my magnet collection at work, and I admit I display Quebec out of a sneaking liking for its stubborn separatism, and New Mexico for its Zia sun's simplicity and beauty; as a kindergartner my favorite reading was, precociously, a booklet Flags of the World given away by a bourbon company. Maps and flags, yes, divide us, but I remain fascinated by both manifestations of the divide and conquer, cheer for the home team, school spirit that deep within us is so difficult even for those who strive for equality and liberty to overcome.

"Every innocent person affected by the bombs we drop, the aid we provide to oppressive governments, the injustices we condone, becomes another potential terrorist. Save lives, overseas and at home—take your power out of the hands of the politicians and the terrorists they raise. Let them know they can't count on your silence." "Your Leaders Can't Protect You But They Can Get You Killed"  This 2006 statement (click for pdf) closes by quoting Tom Paine: “It is the duty of the patriot to protect his country from its government.” Image: "There is no flag large enough to cover the shame of killing innocent people." Howard Zinn.

Mark Boyle's "Drinking Molotov Cocktails with Gandhi": Book Review

This Irish activist lived without money and oil for three years. Yet he writes in his third book about how such gestures seem to pale before what lies ahead. Those who disdain the capitalist and ecologically destructive system, Mark Boyle concedes, are outnumbered and overwhelmed by it.

And by those of us who capitulate to its ecocide. Drinking Molotov Cocktails with Gandhi, as its title signals, carries a mixed metaphor to those who want change. Peacemaking can only go so far against relentless violence perpetuated upon our planet. Boyle confronts pacifists with tough questions about how far they can advance their rear-guard and small-scale efforts, however ethical and sincere, against an uncaring economic juggernaut. What, Boyle reasons, is the violent action carried out to protect earth when compared with that inflicted upon it? We need, he demands, to fight back hard.

Many figures enter this to give some guidance to Boyle. He draws on influences from Aldo Leopold to Slavoj Zizek, Thoreau to Tolkien. Also, he integrates Earth First! leader Dave Foreman's arguments into his own lively reaction to those who condemn eco-fighters as if terrorists, while either directly or indirectly colluding with a far deadlier cabal of corporations and nations who damage far more than a lumber road into old-growth forests. Boyle makes a convincing case for rethinking this.

Boyle also includes a few anecdotes to make his case. I found a telling one in how the communal activity of cutting the bog for peat in rural Ireland, followed by a break to boil the water for tea, allowed the workers to relax and chat. When the flask was introduced, each laborer could then take his or her own tea, warmed already all day, into the bogs, and this cut down interaction with others.

Out of such incidents, we grow apart as technology separates us from our natural ties to each other. Nature and its draw plays of course a central role in this polemic. Boyle may not give glib answers to us, but from his own experience making it on a three-acre farm, he confronts what he tries to solve. 
(To be published Oct. 13; e-galley reviewed.)

Rojava's revolution

 

"In Northern Syria, 2.5 million people are living in a stateless, feminist, religiously tolerant, anti-capitalist society of their own creation. They call their territory Rojava, and they defend it fiercely." So begins the introduction to A Small Key Can Unlock a Large Door, a 2015 book from the radical press collective Strangers in a Tangled Wilderness. They interpret a complicated Kurdish reality, misunderstood by many, not only leftists. "We need some context to truly understand the words and ideas of the rebels of Rojava, else we can be easily seduced by over-simplifications and distortions — like the claims that the struggle in Rojava is a replay of the Spanish Revolution, or that it is a sophisticated public relations makeover for a Maoist national liberation struggle." Small Key mixes left-libertarian analysis with interviews, firsthand accounts, and journalism.

"Rojava is neither a state nor a pure anarchist society. It is an ambitious social experiment that has rejected the seduction of state power and nationalism and has instead embraced autonomy, direct democracy, and decentralization to create a freer society for people in Rojava. The Rojava principles have borrowed from anarchism, social ecology, and feminism in an attempt to chart a societal vision that emphasizes accountability and independence for a radically pluralistic community." By direct democracy and a common economy, Rojava reinvents. {I updated this entry w/more hyperlinks to coverage, 12-19-15}

Dilar Dirik, in another excerpt, looks at women's subversion. Against ISIS, they join men who resist.  "Being a militant is seen as 'unwomanly'; it crosses social boundaries, it shakes the foundations of the status quo. War is seen as a man’s issue – started, led, and ended by men. So it is the 'woman' part of 'woman fighter' which causes this general discomfort." I think of a difference my wife and I have. She insists if women ruled, war would end. Perhaps in time it will, with such women as leaders?

Yet, they claim violence is not an end. Dirik shows: “'We don’t want the world to know us because of our guns, but because of our ideas,' says Sozda, a YPJ commander in Amûde, and points at the pictures on their common room’s walls: PKK guerrilla fighters and Abdullah Öcalan, the imprisoned ideological representative of the movement. 'We are not just women fighting ISIS. We struggle to change the society’s mentality and show the world what women are capable of.' Though there is no organic tie between the PKK and the Rojava administration, the political ideology is shared."

I admit peacemakers may, as in other self-defense campaigns, find their fervent hopes for conflict resolution thwarted by the reactionary and remorseless might of ISIS. The Kurds, under attack as non-Arabs for centuries by indigenous rulers and imperialist entities, cannot fend off by earnest appeals or amicable parleys the armed assaults and brutal regimentation of the Daesh, who have wiped out so many people in their invasions. Against their remorseless incursion, the Kurds take aim.

Across three cantons in Western Kurdistan on the Syrian frontier, a parlous situation continues. The map in the STW excerpt shows the smallness of the liberated Rojava areas vs. the vast ISIS territory. Western strategists understandably follow events here, while many on the left worldwide nit-pick. Libcom offers a helpful reading guide, where the comments and coverage display the pro-con sides.

I commented in an earlier post about the controversial legacy of "Apo" Ocalan, founder of the PKK, over his Maoist and Marxist-Leninist origins. But STW regards the recent transformation of Rojava as noteworthy. "Any sincere analysis of the past two years in Rojava shows an honest commitment to pluralistic and decentralized ideas, words, and practice." Against the male-dominated Kurdish traditions, feminism and plurality of ethnic and religious identities are encouraged. Anti-capitalism and a Murray Bookchin-Zapatista grassroots economics via cooperative ideals are promoted. Much more about these issues can be found hyperlinked at Peace in Kurdistan. More at Anarchy in Action.

The latter site reports, quoting Rafael Taylor: "The PKK itself has apparently taken after their leader, not only adopting Bookchin's specific brand of eco-anarchism, but actively internalizing the new philosophy in its strategy and tactics. The movement abandoned its bloody war for Stalinist/Maoist revolution and the terror tactics that came with it, and began pursuing a largely non-violent strategy aimed at greater regional autonomy." Ocalan calls this participation "democratic confederalism."

Since I wrote this, Turkey is bombing the Kurds in its zone in retaliation, supposedly, for ISIS. This cynical strategy is payback for Kurdish resistance, and the situation seems more dire than when I researched this two months ago. This dispirits me, and again, I wonder about self-defense against such overwhelming odds. Yet, unlike the Tibetans, say, surely some nations are arming many Kurds. 

You can support the people yourself. An autonomous university is opening and needs books and Kindles. A People's Library seeks stock to counter the destruction visited upon such centers by ISIS. Liberation can happen, the authors admit, as long as Western supporters and allies do not waste time over-analyzing the diverse roots of the struggle, rather than come to its practical, not theoretical, aid.

'When Marx has more effect than hormones, there is nothing to be done.'"

This past spring, I posted an iconic photo of Catalan communist journalist Marina Ginestà. In Barcelona during the Spanish Civil War, she donned a uniform and hoisted a rifle once. That made her famous, on a hotel roof, in 1936. 

Anthony Beevor's history of that war cites Juliàn Marías, who "never forgot the expression of a tram-driver at a stop as he watched a beautiful and well-dressed young woman step down into the pavement. 'We've really had it,' Marías said to himself. 'When Marx has more effect than hormones, there is nothing to be done.'" I thought of this when reading about the Kurdish guerrilla fighters now.

Joseph Anthony Lawrence joined them as a photographer. The power of images, as the SCW with Robert Capa and Pablo Picasso taught us, endures to document and admittedly heroicize war as well as lament its destruction. Lawrence, according to an article in the Huffington Post,  was curious whether the fighters, 40% women, were "fearless warrior women" as the "foreign press" treated them, or terrorists, as the Turkish government depicts them in their fight against Assad in Syria and ISIS.

Joey L., as he calls himself, reports on his admittedly handsome subjects how their pride and martial ardor are evident in his photography of the YPJ, the female counterparts of the YPG. This army rescued many Yazidis from ISIS retaliation in Rojava. "Some carry the signs of a hard-fought war: chemical burns, chapped hands and scars. All the women are treated as equals to their male counterparts, but it is the men who will readily admit that a woman can fight better because she is a natural creator of the world, so she therefore has more to lose -- and therefore more to fight for."

My wife always chides that if women ran the world, there'd be an end to war. As this movement takes its guidance from the PKK, with its roots in Marxist-Leninism, I wonder. Their English-language website features a depiction of Abdullah Ocalan, in Borat-like celebration as the mustached and olive-fatigue uniformed leader at the center of emanating yellow and red rays, in typically People's Republic fashion. Admittedly, a glance at this reminds me of Qadafi's Green Revolution, or the later days of the paper Ginesta translated for, Pravda. Or maybe Granma, Castro's regime's mouthpiece. Our American media, with its corporate-sponsored slogans about "heroes coming home," echoes this.

The HuffPo snippets on the Kurdish fighters don't explain the background. Go to an earlier piece this year, by Gareth Watkins on the site CvltNation. "The Revolution Nobody's Talking About" draws parallels to Spanish anarchists and the Catalan dominance of women in leadership and in combat. Ocalan calls this "democratic confederalism." I am unclear as to the YPJ/G ties to Ocalan, as not the PKK but the Democratic Union Party (PYD) and Kurdish National Council (KNC) are credited by Watkins in Rojava, where left-libertarianism is said to thrive along with eco-feminist structures.

Learn more at the Libcom reading guide on Rojava. The comments debating, typically, David Graeber's affirmative visit to Kurdistan are telling as anarchist-communists argue over the situation.  Graeber enters the thread and despairs that the radicals cannot give credence, when their theory obscures the truth, to any left-libertarian progress, but opponents caution any praising Ocalan's "cult."

At the PKK site, "Killing the dominant male: Instituting the Third Major Sexual Rupture against the dominant male" features Ocalan. "The male has become a state and turned this into the dominant culture. Class and sexual oppression develop together; masculinity has generated ruling gender, ruling class, and ruling state. When man is analysed in this context, it is clear that masculinity must be killed." Reading this essay, I can imagine many peace-loving Westerners nodding in agreement.

Concerning the predictable debates at Libcom and the media attention towards the female fighters, I confess mixed reactions. Aren't we expected to cheer on the revolution from suppressive categories and restrictive belief-systems? Is Lawrence's photo-journalism the necessary exposure of a step towards freedom for Middle Eastern women? Is violence the necessary and only practical reaction as self-defense rallies men and women to protect the Yazidi and the Kurds from Islamic State and Syrian Army-led decimation? Perhaps so; I doubt if any pacifists among Jews, Muslims, or Eastern Christians survived the Crusader's invasions. Yet, part of me shrinks back wary of the celebration of armed men and women as the ideal we should strive towards. And then part of me retaliates, as my sympathies remind me of revolutionaries who rose up to free our ancestors from slavery if not debt.

With my own direct ancestor implicated in such rebellion in Ireland, who am I to discount its perpetuation? Yet he was murdered mysteriously for the Cause. I used to be self-righteously bent on a refusal to listen to any opponent of Irish independence. Now, despite my atavistic intransigence, after three decades and more leading classroom discussions, at least I hear out all sides in any debate. In the conflict with the Islamic State and Assad's regime, are there any sensible voices on the other side? Addressing war, we must ask this, unlikely as it seems to us. And, who am I not to reiterate the most lasting path to equality and harmony, and to come closer to anarchic dreams, is to lay down that RPG.
(Photo by Joey L. Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK) Guerrillas Patrol Makhmour Countryside, Iraq
.)

Flag Day

My mom would mark her birthday on June 14th. This is Flag Day in the U.S. But few ever flew the Stars and Stripes, I noticed. But she was tickled that her natal day coincided with what in her youth, I reckoned, must have been a far more celebrated commemoration of patriotism. It also must have been so back then, as she was born a few years after the end of WWI and was married the year America entered WWII, in which her only sibling, her beloved brother Jack and my namesake two decades later, died at Saipan.

I found recently a scarifying quote by the Indian anti-globalism activist-writer Arundhati Roy. “Flags are bits of colored cloth that governments use first to shrink-wrap people’s brains and then as ceremonial shrouds to bury the dead.”

I thought of this watching last week this video by Neil Halloran, "The Fallen of World War II." George Dvorsky comments on how the impact of Stalin on his own civilians, whom he let die so as to make his soldiers fight harder, and the immense amount of casualties the Soviet Union endured, remains eerily evident in these data. Halloran masterfully combines narration and charts, with simple sound effects, minimal pictures, and a clear argument, to show how since 1945, the richer nations have not warred with each other. Civil war declines as nationalism grows, and now, far fewer die. Roy blames death on nationalism; India and Pakistan's birth pangs attest to this slaughter, admittedly.

Halloran would admit that such barbarism in the past few years when it happens may loom as more disproportionate. While news fills our feeds with conflict, very low numbers of deaths register. This is not to minimize loss, but Halloran reminds us that there is a growing tendency from the hard  numbers to demonstrate a definite move away from armed conflict and terror as inflicted worldwide.

At the bottom of every mortal, bloody bar chart he shows, a small flag can be seen. For these, and for of course the ideologies each nation represented (or in some cases, was forced to uphold after invasion or capitulation), I was reminded of my ambivalence towards ritual rallies. In my cubicle, a souvenir (je me souviens) magnet of Québec aside, all I have hanging are mini- Tibetan prayer flags.

This may or may not uphold my principles. In kindergarten, I cherished a booklet of the world's flags; in stamps from colonies and countries, I loved learning geography. Kashmir's partition, Bhutan's frailty, the takeover of Sikkim by India, Maoist victory in Nepal, and the predicament of Tibet all speak to another rebel flag: "Don't Tread on Me." But as the Buddhist appeal in its lofty heartland tries to remind us if unsuccessfully given its own decimation under a red banner, that the ultimate reminder of our shared humanity points to pieces of cloth we hoist with not hate but humility.

Debt and taxes

Since I posted last time about Jeremy Hammond, the hacker now serving a ten-year Federal sentence for exposing collusion between the government and Statfor, as to how anti-terrorism laws are being used or misused by the FBI, I noticed this in my FB feed. As Hammond (see that piece) defines himself as an anarcho-communist, I wondered how such a philosophy, if made our politics, might look. Gary "Z." McGee asserts "5 Reasons Why Anarchy Would Be an Improvement in Human Governance." But whereas the likes of Hammond argue that grassroots, anti-capitalist, decentralized systems of cooperation would supplant the top-down coercion which is business as usual, McGee alludes, while not quite defining, a "cosmic law" and the possibility that choices could be not only moral but amoral--yet never immoral, in such a model of how people might get along and thrive. 

He gives #1 as checks and balances. McGee claims 95% of human history (or prehistory) has been Fierce Egalitarian Hierarchy. Food, shelter, protection had to be shared, as the clan had to survive. He wants us know to place first freedom, then health, then a recognition of the interconnection of all. This reminds me of Gary Snyder's Buddhist Anarchism, articulated by him back in the 1960s.  McGee agrees, but the quirk of "amoral" I find noteworthy, as I don't recall this term being used earlier. "The monumental problem with our Statist society is that we are not taught to be as moral or as amoral as we need to be in order to maintain a healthy cosmic, ecological, and social order. In fact, statism purposefully forces whatever the state decrees to be healthy, as healthy, whether or not it is actually healthy according to cosmic law." Maybe that "cosmic" law aligns with Snyder's interbeing?

As I wrote about earlier this week, the "industry of death" decried by Pope Francis and Jimmy Carter recently ties into the #2 point of McGee. He asks: "How does anarchy flip the tables on the authorization and glorification of plunder? It prevents plunder from ever becoming possible because anarchy-based modes of governance are engineered in such a way that groups never get to the point of concentrated centers of power. The monopolization of power never gets to the point to where it becomes corrupt, because of controlled leveling mechanisms such as reverse dominance and wealth expiation. Like Jim Dodge said, 'Anarchy doesn’t mean out of control; it means out of their control.' Whoever 'they' may be: monopolizing corporations, overreaching governments, tyrants." We all wonder, at least those of us less enamored with capitalism and intrusion by entities above us, how the power switch might happen. As David Graeber devoted his big book on debt to revealing, the power of banks to print money, charge interest on it, and keep the masses indebted underlies this injustice.

A bit awkward in McGee's expression, but as the weather reports remind us daily by now, the ecological perspective ties in to #3. "In a system of human governance that is systematically transforming livingry into weaponry, it is the supreme duty of all healthy, moral, compassionate, eco-conscious, indeed anarchist, people to question authority to the nth degree." Similarly, #4 seeks reciprocity as an ethical basis for "expiation of wealth" by an ecologically sustainable distribution.

Finally, he conjures up Thoreau's non-conformity as a reminder of the power of leaders who can rally change. McGee cites Martin Luther King, Jr.: “The hope of a secure livable world lies with disciplined nonconformists, who are dedicated to justice, peace, and brotherhood. The trailblazers in human, academic, scientific, and spiritual freedom have always been nonconformists. In any cause that concerns the progress of mankind, put your faith in the nonconformist.” Hammond to Chris Hedges spoke the same way, and I happen to be reading John Lydon's "Anger is an Energy" where he tells us that his own enemies have never been human beings, but institutions, in his own struggle.

Very few look to Assange, Manning, Snowden, Hammond, Lydon, or McGee as role-models. We are forcibly taxed for the war machines, the prison complexes, the collusion of lenders and universities, and Obamacare as the safety net for the "benefits" corporations refuse to grant exploited workers. Not to mention the rise of automation, reliance on "contingent" labor, and the reduction of secure jobs. The militarization of the police, the trillions wasted on the security state at home and abroad, the damage to the earth, the uncontrolled levels of population increase and immigration, the refusal to address global warming. All the while, we gush over the latest "outrage" by pro athletes or reality show celebrities. My students keep leashed to their phones, and I wonder if literacy will survive long.

While many claim to inherit the mantle of King, few consider the complexity of pacifism and non-violence as opposed to what Hammond argues, the decision to fight back. Looking at Tibet over my lifetime, as it was taken over not long before my birth, I acknowledge the Dalai Lama's decision not to worsen his homeland by calling for an uprising, but I sympathize with the younger generations who have given over to despair, and self-immolation in the extreme cases, as the Chinese supplant the Tibetans with the Han, with the foreign language, with the prohibition of the native language and customs, and I cannot see how these can survive within the heartland much longer unless as staged folk pageants or monastic museums for tourists who now take the train to Lhasa. All this reminds me of the Nazi plan to establish a Yiddish heritage display when the Reich triumphed, and I remain torn between the ideal of non-violent resistance and the frustration as again, a nation and a tradition face extinction. We might add to this our own global predicament at the hands of multinationals and superpowers. Will we rise up against the one percent, or will we, hoping to become our masters, still bow and cringe? The John Adams quote above shows how our war and our debt together enslave us.

Jeremy Hammond's radical morality as a hacker

Edward Snowden and Chelsea/ Bradley Manning are names we recognize. Excoriated as traitors, celebrated as patriots, these two whistleblowers from within the belly of the beast can at least be credited for the NSA's decision this week to cut back some of its phone surveillance. If not for WikiLeaks and related revelations, the Obama administration would have gone on pretending that hope and change created a less draconian governmental presence, and that all was well post-2008 with us, if not exactly post-9/11 threat.

A third name, to me, was new. Chris Hedges in a chapter from the well-titled Wages of Rebellion: the Moral Imperative of Revolt asks: "Why should we be so impoverished that so that the profits of big banks, corporations, and hedge funds can swell?" Not exactly pithy words to fit on a rebel flag or even a bumper sticker, but this issue cannot be reduced to soundbites or slogans. It is vast; it impels.

In 2013, Hedges narrates, he watched in court as Jeremy Hammond was sentenced to the full ten years his charges could earn. "Hammond, then age twenty-six, released to WikiLeaks, Rolling Stone, and other publications some 5 million emails in 2011 from the Texas-based company Strategic Forecasting Inc., or Stratfor." Like Manning, Snowden, and the MSM-reviled Julian Assange, Hammond sought to expose what the State wants to hide, in the name of supposed national security.

"The 5 million email exchanges, once made public, exposed the private security firm’s infiltration, monitoring, and surveillance of protesters and dissidents on behalf of corporations and the national security state. And perhaps most importantly, the information provided chilling evidence that antiterrorism laws are being routinely used by the state to criminalize nonviolent, democratic dissent and falsely link dissidents to international terrorist organizations. Hammond sought no financial gain. He got none." Hedges explains that for hacking, this long U.S. sentence was one of the toughest ever.

"It was wildly disproportionate to the crime—an act of nonviolent civil disobedience that championed the public good by exposing abuses of power by the government and a security firm. But the excessive sentence was the point." The judge herself has ties to firms that were exposed, and her ruling seems to be compromised by her vendetta, as she appears to have used her power to abuse him.

Hedges asks, aloud, what many wonder: "Why should we respect a court system, or a governmental system, that does not respect us? Why should we abide by laws that protect only criminals like Wall Street thieves while leaving the rest of us exposed to abuse? Why should we continue to have faith in structures of power that deny us our most basic rights and civil liberties? Why should we be impoverished so that the profits of big banks, corporations, and hedge funds can swell?"

Hedges portrays Hammond as a working-class radical, with a punk-rock father who in a Western Chicago suburb had to raise twins alone after their mother abandoned them at three. Hammond picked up a talent for computers early on, and a passion for subversive, non-party politics. A different heartland machine than that which maneuvered Hillary or Obama into the White House, surely.

"Hammond, six feet tall and wiry, defined himself when we met in jail as 'an anarchist communist.' He said he had dedicated his life to destroying capitalism and the centralized power of the corporate state and that he embraced the classic tools of revolt, including mass protests, general strikes, and boycotts. And he saw hacking and leaking as critical tools of this resistance, to be used not only to reveal the truths about systems of corporate power but to “disrupt/destroy these systems entirely.”

Once the FBI's #1 most wanted cybercriminal, Hammond explained his motivation to Hedges from his imprisonment at the FCI Greenville, Illinois, facility. 'I saw what Chelsea Manning did,' he said when we spoke, seated at a metal table in a tiny room reserved for attorney-client visits. 'Through her hacking, she became a contender, a world changer. She took tremendous risks to show the ugly truth about war. I asked myself, If she could make that risk, shouldn’t I make that risk? Wasn’t it wrong to sit comfortably by, working on the websites of Food Not Bombs, while I had the skills to do something similar? I too could make a difference. It was her courage that prompted me to act.'”

Hammond told Hedges how he strove to attain “'leaderless collectives based on free association, consensus, mutual aid, self-sufficiency and harmony with the environment.' It is essential, he said, that all of us work to cut our personal ties with capitalism and engage in resistance that includes 'mass organizing of protests, strikes, and boycotts,' as well as hacking and leaking, which are 'effective tools to reveal ugly truths of the system or to disrupt/destroy these systems entirely.'" But what if the system fights back, as it always does? Hammond knows Chicago history, as at Haymarket in 1887.

Hedges famously criticized some who wanted confrontation at Occupy Wall Street. I found it noteworthy that he allowed at length here Hammond to have his say to the contrary. "Hammond said he was not interested in a movement that 'only wanted a ‘nicer’ form of capitalism and favored legal reforms, not revolution.” He said he did not support what he called a 'dogmatic nonviolence doctrine' held by many in the Occupy movement, describing it as 'needlessly limited and divisive.' He rejected the idea of protesters carrying out acts of civil disobedience that they know will lead to arrest. 'The point,' he said, 'is to carry out acts of resistance and not get caught.' He condemned the 'peace patrols'— units formed within the Occupy movement that sought to prohibit acts of vandalism and violence by other protesters, most often members of the Black Bloc—as 'a secondary police force.'”

"Furthermore, Hammond dismissed the call by many in Occupy not to antagonize the police, whom he characterized as 'the boot boys of the one percent, paid to protect the rich and powerful.' He said such a tactic of nonconfrontation with the police ignored the long history of repression by the police in attacking popular movements, as well as the 'profiling and imprisonment of our comrades.' He went on: 'Because we were unprepared, or perhaps unwilling, to defend our occupations, police and mayors launched coordinated attacks driving us out of our own parks.'" I posted on this blog the photos of the LAPD in hazmat gear, giant trucks destroying the Occupy LA site and I am not sure, given that department's record in dealing with urban protest, if armed defense would be true defense.

Hedges had critiqued Black Bloc, while Hammond champions it. “'I fully support and have participated in Black Bloc and other forms of militant direct action,' he said. 'I do not believe that the ruling powers listen to the people’s peaceful protests. Black Bloc is an effective, fluid, and dynamic form of protest. It causes disruption outside of predictable/controllable mass demonstrations through unarrests, holding streets, barricades, and property destruction. Smashing corporate windows is not violence, especially when compared to the everyday economic violence of sweatshops and "free trade." Black Bloc seeks to hit them where it hurts, through economic damage. But more than smashing windows, they seek to break the spell of "law and order" and the artificial limitations we impose on ourselves.” This smacks to me of rhetoric, but underneath, there lurks a call to real liberty. I sympathize with this perspective, but part of me, however cowed, seems to admit its futility. There always seems, as the Irish situation reveals, a spy in the revolutionary ranks, an agent provocateur.

Facing his sentence, Hammond spoke: “The acts of civil disobedience that I am being sentenced for today are in line with the principles of community and equality that have guided my life. I hacked into dozens of high-profile corporations and government institutions, understanding very clearly that what I was doing was against the law, and that my actions could land me back in federal prison. But I felt that I had an obligation to use my skills to expose and confront injustice—and to bring the truth to light." And here, a bit freed of phrases he repeated earlier, I sense an honest, truly "direct action."


The FBI used a hacker to trap Hammond, keeping back doors open so the agency could track Hammond and watch him progress in his exposure. Hammond pled guilty, but he wonders why the corporations and entities responsible for the crimes of the State and of Capital get off free. He claims after his prison stint that nobody should be incarcerated. I think of some madmen and unhinged women behind bars, but perhaps in his anarchist vision, alternative treatment of facilities might be envisioned. For now, he encourages non-cooperation, non-capitalism, and sustained resistance.

I tried to excerpt more here from Hedges’ article. But after I pasted the penultimate paragraph above, my net went haywire. Google’s blog platform froze and then the characters went backwards. The Salon site blared a commercial embedded for State Farm Insurance. Microsoft, where I tried to copy this post so I could edit it, at first refused to allow me to transfer any more of the Hedges column.

I close this, then, prematurely, while wondering at the connivance of the system Hammond fights to fight back, somehow occluded, against even those like me who attempt to disseminate his struggle. I urge you to visit the original interview with Hammond, and to spread the good word and good fight.