Author: old_wp_importer

Just a link today – to [Police State UK](http://policestate.co.uk), a new blog “intended as an information source for people who are concerned about the direction politics and policing have taken in the UK”. Not so much there yet, but I’m sure it will continue to grow over time. After all, there’s no shortage of material.

[Nancy Fraser](http://www.eurozine.com/authors/fraser.html) isn’t a name I’d come across until last week, when I [read](http://www.eurozine.com/articles/2009-04-21-eurozinerev-en.html) a fascinating [interview](http://www.eurozine.com/articles/2009-04-21-fraser-en.html) with her for Eurozine.

Fraser is a political-scientist-cum-philosopher, who has attempted to sum up the political culture of the last few decades in a shift from ‘redistribution’ to ‘recognition’. That is, people stopped mobilizing around inequalities of wealth and power, and instead dedicated their energies to demanding respect for their identities within the same market structure. So out went tax-and-spent, benefits were cut, the rich got richer and the poor stayed poor. But there were massive sttrides forward in feminism, gay rights, reducing racism, and the like. [I’m butchering her ideas.

I’m obviously butchering Fraser’s ideas here, but her generalisation holds up surprisingly well. From Tony Blair to the culture wars to the issues exciting student campaigners, the left gave up on fighting economic inequality. Those who did keep a focus on redistribution — notably, the unions — were depicted as dinosaurs.

This ties in to the soul-searching happening on [Liberal Conspiracy](http://www.liberalconspiracy.org/2009/04/21/the-lefts-response-to-the-financial-crisis-is-indeed-weak/) and elsewhere. It’s hardly surprising that we have nothing to say about the financial crisis, if we’ve spent the past 2 decades looking the other way when it comes to poverty.

Online government transparency projects have reached the [hype cycle](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hype_cycle) where proponents and pundits get disillusioned, and start to wonder if the whole thing has any value at all.

So [Aaron Swartz](http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/transparencybunk), of Watchdog, theinfo, and many other excellent projects, has decided that ‘transparency is bunk’:

For too long we’ve been funding transparency projects on the model of if-we-build-it-they-will-come: that we don’t know what transparency will be useful for, but once it’s done it will lead to all sorts of exciting possibilities. Well, we’ve built it. And they haven’t come. The only success story its proponents can point to is that transparency projects have bred even more transparency projects. I’m done working on watchdog.net; I’m done hurting America. It’s time to give old-fashioned narrative journalism a try.

Aaron’s strawman here is the idea that just making information available will have people investigations rather than watching soaps. Which is, well, obvious. This stuff was always going to be mainly used by the usual lobbyists, hacks, and campaigners, plus a small crowd of obsessive amateurs. That’s how it feeds into journalism and politics. At best, as with mysociety projects, ease-of-use can broaden the circle of people who would look at official data.

Likewise [Cory Doctorow](http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2009/apr/29/cory-doctorow-police-transparency) has figured out that speaking truth to power achieves little by itself, in particular about police misbehaviour at last year’s climate camp:

And here’s where transparency breaks down. We’ve known about all this since last August – seven months and more. It was on national news. It was on the web. Anyone who cared about the issue knew everything they needed to know about it. And everyone had the opportunity to find out about it: remember, it was included in national news broadcasts, covered in the major papers – it was everywhere.

And yet … nothing much has happened in the intervening eight months. Simply knowing that the police misbehaved does nothing to bring them to account.

Again, this shouldn’t be a shock to anybody who has ever been involved in a political campaign. The truth doesn’t change anything until it is pointed at an election, or a law-court, or at influencing somebody in power.

[Evgeny Morozov](http://neteffect.foreignpolicy.com/node/17241) has a decently calming reaction to all this, but to me the short answer is that sites collecting government data are tools rather than end-products, which aren’t much use without further work to build stories out of the raw facts.

For some reason, charges of hyocrisy and misdirected attention make both Johann Hari and Sunder Katwala break out the neologisms. [Hari](http://www.huffingtonpost.com/johann-hari/how-to-spot-a-lame-lame-a_b_185787.html) calls it ‘whataboutery’:

>When you have lost an argument – when you can’t justify your case, and it is crumbling in your hands – you snap back: “But what about x?”

>You then raise a totally different subject, and try to get everybody to focus on it – hoping it will distract attention from your own deflated case.

>So whenever I report on, say, atrocities committed by Israel, I am bombarded with e-mails saying: “But what about the bad things done by Muslims? Why do you never talk about them?” Whenever I report on the atrocities committed by Islamists, I am bombarded with e-mails saying: “But what about Israel?

[Sunder](http://www.liberalconspiracy.org/2009/04/23/calling-time-on-the-whynoblogathon/) applies the principle to blogs, where it becomes the ‘Whynoblogathon’:

>Oh, I see you have blogged about X but you chose not to blog about Y. Ah-ha! Now we see your hidden agenda.

On a personal level, I agree with both of them. But they’re smudging an important distinction between personal blame and group behaviour. I don’t care what one columnist, or one blogger, writes about. But the importance we attach to issues depends on whether we are repeatedly confronted with them. Media attention is the main reason why a British life counts for so much more than an Afghan one. It’s why we distrust science (because we hear about the entertaining bad science, but not about the good science). It’s why Mail readers get wildly distorted ideas about race and crime. This is stuff we need to talk about, in the same way as we need to be able to talk about institutional racism without calling people bigots.

What I love about May-day is the sheer number of meanings, stacked over each other. “Police vs. Punks” has been top of the deck in Berlin since annual riots became a Mayday calendar fixture in the 1980s. Numerically larger but less prominent are the marches of trade unionists and political parties, and a free music festival attempts to divert people’s attention. Below it all are the spring festivities of Beltane, Walpurgisnacht and the like.

The interplay between those meanings isn’t a side-note; it’s what makes the festival. It’s a day for anarchists and trade unionists, hippies and organizers, [spontaneity and organization](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rosa_Luxemburg#Dialectic_of_Spontaneity_and_Organisation). Political may-day grew out of the campaign for an 8-hour day, towards the end of the nineteenth century. Organized from above as a limited political protest, it absorbed from below a tangle of quasi-religious meaning, drawn from folk customs and the unfulfilled desire for a workers’ festival. Events could take place under the dual banners “Proletarians of all lands, unite” and “Love one another”; red flags and red flowers were jointly symbols.

By the same token, the idea of a sensible protest being disrupted by a violent minority doesn’t wash. Much of what started the demonstrations was police violence: French police [killed](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fourmies,_Nord) eight peaceful protesters on May 1, 1891; five years earlier many had been killed by a bomb at a protest or by the police response in Chicago. The murkiness of the latter is utterly familiar; it’s unclear who threw the bomb, but four anarchists were nonetheless executed for it. I’m no great fan of “playing chicken with pigs” as a form of protest, but it’s no strange hijacking of something otherwise calm.

This year, the German media have spent several months hyping the destructive side of the demonstrations, egging on the car-bombers with their lurid outrage, predicting that the recession will make the whole event bigger and more destructive. Maybe they’re right; hype is a self-fulfilling prophesy. Personally I’ll be avoiding the riots and letting my hippie side hang out for a day.

[the historical bits here have largely been yoinked from [Hobsbawm](http://www.ata.boun.edu.tr/asistanlar/hist551/w11/Hobsbawm_Ranger_the%20invention%20of%20tradition.pdf)]

Somebody [flings a shoe](http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/7787792.stm) at George Bush. A [Cambridge](http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/uk/article5643558.ece) student follows his lead, and misses Wen Jiabao. The idea catches on in [India](http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/Now-a-shoe-thrown-at-Chidambaram/articleshow/4369381.cms) and [Ukraine](http://www.presstv.ir/detail.aspx?id=79054&sectionid=351020606). By now activists are planning target practice (all those misses are pretty embarrassing), the paranoids have started questioning whether Zaidi was a “lone shoeman”, and [shoe-throwing](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shoe_throwing) has become a recognizable idiom of protest.

It’s not a bad model for how protests take shape. A successful new idea is replicated everywhere, often with more concern for imitation than effectiveness. Over time it becomes increasingly ritualistic and ‘symbolic’, until eventually somebody comes along to cut through the crap. Protest, like the rest of politics, works through analogy and institutional momentum more than through reason.

I’m not complaining. Repetitive protests give the rest of society at least a fighting chance of figuring out what the hell is going on, and even to respect them. If you hesitate to cross a picket line, it’s because you know what a picket line is. It’s a shame when ineffective forms of protest become dominant, but that’s just the price we pay for lack of imagination.

Mainly, I’m intrigued by the history of protest techniques. South Asia, for example, clearly favours some styles which are less common in Europe. Other forms are dictated by the behaviour of the authorities. British protesters can let themselves be arrested, with only a small risk of being mistreated by the police. In Greece or Russia, only the foolhardy play chicken with the cops. Forget the causes they’re advancing; I want to read the story of how protesters make themselves heard.

No time to write a real post today. Instead:

* something cheery: parts of the Aral Sea, which once looked as though it would be wiped out completely by water mismanagement, are [making a comeback](http://www.eurasianet.org/departments/insight/articles/eav042409.shtml)

* something bizarrely cyberpunk: [Brazilians](http://www.wired.com/politics/security/news/2009/04/fleetcom?currentPage=all) have been breaking into old US military satellites, and using them as ersatz orbital CB relays

* something thoughtful: [Eliane Glaser](http://newhumanist.org.uk/289) in the New Humanist, arguing that Snow’s ‘two cultures’ (science and the humanities, unable to talk to one another) are outmoded, and now we’re back to science vs. religion

The case for religion tends to be much more convincing than the case for belief. Mike Davis, author of _Planet of Slums_, plans to discuss Pentecostalism in his next book. Meanwhile, he [says](http://bldgblog.blogspot.com/2006/05/interview-with-mike-davis-part-2.html):

>For someone like myself, writing from the left, it’s essential to come to grips with Pentecostalism. This is the largest self-organized movement of poor urban people in the world – at least among movements that emerged in the twentieth century. It has shown an ability to take root, dynamically, not only in Latin America but in southern and western Africa, and – to a much smaller extent – in east Asia. I think many people on the left have made the mistake of assuming that Pentecostalism is a reactionary force – and it’s not. It’s actually a hugely important phenomenon of the postmodern city, and of the culture of the urban poor in Latin American and Africa.

Far from being an escapist _sigh of the oppressed_, this is religion as a pragmatic way of dealing with the surrounding world. As [Eliza Griswold](http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200803/nigeria) writes in a piece on religion in Nigeria:

>Pentecostalism has updated Max Weber’s Protestant work ethic for the 21st century. Pentecostals do not drink, gamble, or engage in extramarital sex; so all of that formerly illicit energy can go into either business or education.

Grey as that life may sound, I can’t fault it as a route out of the slums.

It would be nice to have a secular alternative with as much force as religion gets by making up stories, but I can’t see it happening yet. Meanwhile I’ll keep on looking, forlornly, for a godless cult to join.

Life gets pretty unpleasant for people falsely accused of terrorism: once the authorities have publicised somebody as a terrorist, it becomes embarrassing to see them walk free. The lucky ones find [support from the community](http://www.sidalidonations.net/about.php) and grudging government acceptance that they have at least some rights. Others, like Rafil Dhafir, find themselves hounded for anything the authorities can pin on them

Dhafir is an Iraqi-American doctor. He is currently serving 22 years in an American jail, confined to a ‘[communications management unit](http://www.greenisthenewred.com/blog/communication-management-units-mcgowan/1747/)’ that severely restricts his contact with the outside world. The US government thinks of him as a terrorist, and ‘[counts](http://www.usdoj.gov/opa/pr/2005/December/05_opa_641.html)’ his imprisonment as a success in the War on Terror.

But Dhafir has never been so much as charged with terrorism. He was instead convicted of sending money to Iraq, in violation of sanctions. He claims the money was for charitable purposes, and nobody seems to deny this.

[Sanctions on Iraq](http://www.casi.org.uk/) were one of the most bone-headedly counter-productive policies of recent years. Variously intended to contain Iraq, force it to dismantle its WMD programs, or force Saddam from power, they in fact only managed to harm the weakest in Iraq (to the tune of several hundred thousand deaths), while strengthening the regime. But forget that breaking this law is far more honourable than obeying it, and you still bang up against the length of the sentence. 22 years?! When [other sanctions-breaking attempts](http://www.rdrop.com/~/vitwpdx/vitwpdxnews052102.html) went unpunished, and comparable fraud offence rarely carry anything like this sentence? This is a sentence that makes no sense — except on a political level.

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