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Contents
Die Sonne:
The Sun
Women Against
Fundamentalisms
Cultural
Bulimia
Anti-Semitism,
Zionism, and the Palestinians
Communities
in Resistance
Zine &
Comic Reviews
Lost in
France
Concrete
Social Interventions
Out for
the Night
Making
Waves
Cube culture
The Project
meets The Office:
This Year's
Module
Tired of
the Soup du Jour?
City of
Culture:
_____________________________________________________
Through the Looking
Glass
Since the Scottish Arts Council's threat of legal action against Variant (detailed in the last issue) and after a long awaited meeting, the SAC commissioned an independent assessment of Variant from Andrew Brighton of Tate Modern. The exact purpose for commissioning the report was unclear. We were told that it could not be used in our attempted appeal against the SAC and that (regardless of its content) it would not inform SAC funding decisions: it was for the 'director's own personal use'. In a generous act, the SAC allowed Brighton to release his findings to Variant. It transpired that of prime importance to Brighton was trying to explain to the SAC the workings of Variant as an artist-run project. The report overwhelmingly championed Variant and concluded that if the SAC was going to support Variant it should support it for what it is. Clearly such beliefs don't sit comfortably within a climate of exhaustively managed Culture. (The report is available on the Variant web site www.variant.org.uk ) Since then the SAC Visual Arts Dept. has informed us that it has come to their attention that there's a 'gap in the market' for an art magazine in Scotland. This moot point is not an admittance of a failure on their part to support critical writing. Rather, sidestepping their historical culpability, their aping of market rhetoric serves to conflate market priorities with cultural priorities as justification for now acting. To corroborate their 'gap', the SAC has bought in the services of the well-worked "research expertise" company ScotInform. In a letter from the Visual Arts Dept. we were told ScotInform would be contacting Variant for access to our data-bases to enable them to carry out their research, and that this research would go on to inform some hazy intention to establish an art magazine in Scotland. ScotInform did contact us: we had been identified to participate in their survey of art magazines based in the UK. We responded by asking for ScotInform's brief from the SAC in full as we wished to know exactly what process we were being engaged in, for what purposes, if there were any projected outcomes as there seemed to be, and how this was going to benefit existing (unsupported) projects in this field, like Variant? (Given the SAC's alleged inability to support this area in the past, we'd also like to know just how much ScotInform are being paid out of Cultural resources for their services?) We still haven't been given the answers to these questions. As part of ScotInform's research, a closed meeting was held where a small group of invited artists & gallerists were asked to express their views on 'an art magazine for Scotland.' Those gathered were told the 14% increase in arts funding in England, though expected in Scotland and allegedly to be used to fund such a magazine, was not going to be reciprocated by the Scottish Executive. As a result, funding for this magazine would come out of existing SAC resources. In return for supposedly having their funding eaten into, the implication is an uncritical, 'celebratory' association between the magazine and those organisations deemed to have forfeited something in this transaction. Variant have been told that the model for this magazine put forward by ScotInform & SAC was a confused hotchpotch of 'everything' from applied art to fine art photography; it would incorporate the urban and the rural, and include a market section, an international section, listings, opportunities, etc. (These strands seemed to result from ScotInform's interpretation of a phone poll they conducted, the objectivity of which needs to be examined in itself.) Because ScotInform seemingly have little experience of the area they are dealing with, they made the mistake of assuming that these elements are editorially benign and that they will combine seamlessly because they are 'Scottish', and to a much lesser extent 'contemporary'. It would be fair to say that their model for the magazine seemed to have altered little from the beginning of the meeting to their summing up at the end, despite criticisms. The impression is that ScotInform fundamentally lacked an appreciation of the complexities of what they were dealing with. Evident was a naïve assumption of some sort of unified Scottish arts community, with the SAC as the legitimising body of this consolidation of mutual self-interest. (That old chestnut of you don't just control production but also distribution, and importantly here the circulation and reception of ideas.) What's exposed by these shenanigans is a highly conservative view (or suppression) of what might actually constitute the sites of 'Visual Art' and what forms and focuses a cultural magazine might independently take: that it might take them independently at all. It would seem that under a guise of market-necessity, pseudo-populism and public-accountability 'Culture' is only that which is officially allowed to be. Does it really need to be spelt out that artists' practises are not utterly contained by national boundaries, phantasmic markets, illusory departmental designations, or the control of bureaucratic functionaries? Further evidence of adverse interference within the 'Cultural sector' (this time as a more blatant result of coerced public/private 'partnership' models of funding) is the utter farce surrounding the title of a recent exhibition at the Fruitmarket Gallery, Edinburgh. The show of mainly Vancouver-based artists, many of Scottish descent, was sponsored by Standard Life Investments. On hearing that the show was to be titled 'Homesick' Standard Life intervened. Not wanting the slightest chance of being miss-associated with the word 'sick' they asked the curator and artists to change the title to something more acceptable to their brand image. ("In October, [Standard Life] cut the maturity payouts on 2.1m pensions and endowment policies by 10% and imposed an additional 10% penalty on those wanting to cash in their policy early." Guardian, 30.11.02) Sadly for the artists, gallery, and contemporary Scottish art scene, the result of this intervention was another innocuous title for what was (in part) an interesting exhibition, and the Fruitmarket Gallery and public funding in Scotland being the butt of ridicule in Vancouver. Similarly, when EasyJet sponsored the Fruitmarket they inflicted a sizable bright orange banner advertising cheap flights to Amsterdam across the bottom of the show's posters and invitation cards. Clearly, we should criticise the Fruitmarket for these crass commercial deals which raise fundamental questions about freedom of expression and corporate power, but ultimate responsibility lies higher up the ladder. Those overseeing the stripping back of arms-length public funding are replacing it with a structure which exposes such galleries to unnecessary and totally disproportionate corporate influence. As a result, such galleries are being brought about to serve flagrant commercial and political interests. The generating of private revenue as an essential requirement to receive public funding recently left its squalid mark elsewhere in Scotland, exposing the contradictions of a supposed liberal Cultural scene... Centre for Contemporary
Armaments
"We glorify war as the sole hygiene....." Marinetti, Futurist manifesto. The CCA in Glasgow may be modest about its programme; all the more surprising that one of the more notable gatherings in the building recently has gone without mention in its publicity. A seminar organised by Scottish Enterprise and the Ministry of Defence on Thursday 3rd October featured Anthony Ingram MP ( Minister of State for the Armed Forces), representatives from Nobel Industries, The Defence Export Services Organisation, Defence Supply Service, and representatives from the Glasgow Universities, mingling with Glasgow's would-be body bag suppliers and weapons makers. The Defence Diversification Agency exists to diffuse the expertise from Britain's defence laboratories into industry, and vice versa. A session on "the inventor and the MOD" featured exemplary tales such as that of the man who invented a new hygienic non/piercing syringe, now used for mass inoculation in the US and UK armies. Unfortunately the "percent for art" formula was not applied to this public gathering; artists use of the building was strictly confined to CCA6 where Bill Drummond's journey from Southampton to Dounreay traced parallel lines of nuclear force. When the CCA re-opened [after a Lottery refurbishment], many of us felt a bit puzzled: there seemed to be little extra functional space, and a corporate style atrium cafe which squeezed artists out. Even more startling was the news that this mismatch of environment to its expected uses was up for major architectural prizes. Now it's clear that these reservations were due to our complete misunderstanding of the purpose of Lottery revamps on arts structures. The hermetically sealed CCA5 makes a secure and confidential venue for any variety of military-industrial encounters. Assorted nooks and spaces make for quiet discussion zones, and excellent service from the cafe sweetens each encounter. It's good to see the CCA devoting its soul to the necessary expenditure on future mayhem. But why leave artists out? If British Airways can commission a series of ethnic tailfins, think what contemporary artists could do with an F16. Defoliants have huge possibilities in Land Art. And a chic desert camouflage motif on the CCA cafe cups will convey an ideal zeitgeist punch this autumn. Why shouldn't artists get their hands on the incredible beauty represented in the apocalypses of tomorrow? The above polemic appeared on the Ambit email discussion group and rapidly spread. What became apparent was a widespread sense of unease amongst artists relating to the question of space, and in particular the abandonment of the idea of public space. Several other strands of coping behaviour also emerged: liberal seeing-both-sides, denial, and from the CCA a surface response of seeking dialogue, with simultaneous threats of dismissal for any staff who talked about it. Voice of Ambit List
Moderator: I'm very aware that the subscribers to this list are being
asked to make moral judgements on a variety of issues surrounding the CCA
and this seminar based on minimal information.
Gair Dunlop:
My intention was solely to help the CCA promote this radical "new audience"
initiative.
Response from Mandy
Macintosh: so my reaction is quite sad really, i mean one day i was
passing [the CCA] and popped in and the Scottish Football Association had
taken over the front and cafe so i couldnt even get near the cappuccinos
for trays full of vol au vents.
No matter. Try again.
Fail again. Fail spectacularly
This has been a year of mixed messages and unfulfilled commitments for the arts in Ireland, a hubristic year, on both sides of the border. As great plans wither on the vine and funding bodies fail once again to present a co-ordinated approach to cultural policy and provision, artists are left wondering what the 'criteria' are that they're meant to be fulfilling. One thing is left unchanged by this year of reversals and terminations: artists continue to be the last to know. When Arthouse, then the Multimedia Centre for the Arts, was conceived of more than a decade ago, artists in Dublin (and across Ireland) were unsure what the new centre would either be or do. Many felt that a huge new venue for an artform that had yet to define itself was not only premature but remarkably ill-judged; at that time the word 'multimedia' was still applied to work that used video and sound, and the idea that artists who couldn't even get access to facilities to work in these media would somehow embrace 'digital art' (whatever that was or is) was surely a peculiar one. There's no innovation without experimentation, of course, but as the twin edifices overshadowing the new Curved Street were completed, many felt that the manner in which the Multimedia Centre had been developed was characteristic of the lack of consultation in the Temple Bar project as a whole. Arthouse opened far behind schedule and (much to the surprise of those venturing in for the first time) with no dedicated exhibition space. From the very beginning this was one of the main problems with the building (for the building became synonymous with the entity it housed); where was its centre? While shows were hung awkwardly in the reception area, the café became the only effective and frequented space in the building. There's no point going over the details of Arthouse's demise once again, five months after the event. Even the dogs in the street know that story, as we say in Belfast. We know also that it's naïve to assume that lessons will be learnt from the calamitous demise of such ill-defined, ill-used facilities. If you've got a big idea, the last thing you want is a rabble of scruffy creative types telling you it just won't work. "The traffic lights, and yellow lines, and the illuminated signs, that all say 'welcome to the borough that everybody's pleased in'..." Willie Rushton, 'Neasden' And so to Imagine Belfast, or the fiasco of an aborted renaissance. In this issue of Variant, John Gray, librarian of the Linen Hall library, points out that the failure of Belfast's bid to be European Capital of Culture in 2008 was only a surprise to those who compiled it. Those dogs on the street had sensed that here was another grand project that would fail because it had no connection with the activity that already existed in the city. The grandiloquent schemes described in Imagine's bizarre bid document mentioned only selectively, and then in passing, those organisations whose sole work in the past ten, twenty or thirty years has been putting culture in the recovery position and stopping it from swallowing its tongue. The bid, 'One Belfast', was almost perverse in its naivety, acknowledging on the one hand the massive social and political problems, the fragmentations and dissolutions and blindness that cripple Belfast (Belfast is a city 'acquainted with grief', as one Biblical passage in the bid would have it), whilst proposing on the other that we could wish all these away with a 'culture' that would heal the wounds and, more importantly, get the cash registers chiming (in unison, obviously). No one could agree what this vision of 'culture' was, least of all the team of Imagine Belfast, as John Gray points out. The desire to make Belfast a 'whole' city is a laudable one; it deserves more to see it to realisation than the platitudinous pledges of a pack of PR consultants: "Yet Europe is still a continent with boundaries, barriers and borders. In Belfast we have our walls. We are one of the last cities in Western Europe to be divided by 'peacelines'. But we have other walls too. Invisible walls, between men and women, rich and poor, young and old. The culture of barriers will end. "We will cultivate the arts of infiltration, transparency and transgression. We will come through not in ones and twos, but in our thousands. We will bring others to come through. From Ireland and Britain and Europe, we will bring the people who suffer and fret and remember, and we will bring them through what were our walls and barriers. "We will reconnect our populations. We will cement conciliation. We will replace the peace lines with peace. We will bring down the walls of Belfast. We will embed our peace in the fabric of the city and in the conscience of Europe... "One Belfast: The whole various, unexpected, unreliable, dependable, unruly, uproarious, threatening, stubborn, generous, violent, scary, hospitable, perverse, cack-handed city in a bucket between sea and hill." What many found particularly galling about Imagine's schemes was the application of 'cultural' activity to the ends of inward investment and economic and social regeneration. This instrumentalised approach to culture is to be found in any city desperately trying to reinvent itself after years of industrial or social decay, so it's hardly a surprise that it's become virulent across the North in the last eight years. But the collective sigh of relief that many artists released when the bid failed was a recognition of the fact that culture is not a panacea, something exclusively benign that speaks to everyone and no-one. Early on in the bidding process, poet-in-exile Tom Paulin rowed in behind the bid with a proposal that Belfast's real 'culture' was to be found in the patterns of its vernacular, something which Imagine seized on and incorporated into their document. Their hugely Imaginative proposal was that a different 'word of the day' from English, Irish or Ulster Scots would be featured on billboards across town during 2008. This seems to epitomise the way in which the bid conceptualised the future for Belfast; the only way forward, it proclaimed, is in the policy of 'equal but different', a kind of cultural power-sharing in which all cultures are to be valued and none to be questioned. In the post-ceasefire, post-Agreement climate, 'culture' is used cannily by all seeking to gain political advantage; it's one of the few weapons that doesn't have to be decommissioned. The frenzied rush to acclaim Ulster Scots as a 'language', and thus a marker of a truly different 'culture' within the North, is a testament to this. Culture has always been implicated in the grand crimes and petty misdemeanours of history, and so it goes on. Tom, it was a load of
auld boke.
Variant has secured
funding towards the next three issues from Awards for All in Northern Ireland,
and we will be developing a broad range of content from Ireland and Britain
over the coming year. In particular we will be organising an event in Belfast
early in 2003, exploring the huge variety of small arts publishing that
goes on in these islands. The next issue will extend our collaborations
with organisations across Ireland, drawing in new contexts and debates
and further broadening the magazine's remit.
back to top_____________________________________________________ Die
Sonne: The Sun
It was while photographing psychiatric hospitals in Eastern Germany that I first heard of the name Sonnenstein (pronounced Zonnenstein) and its association with Nazi euthanasia centres. Up until this point the small idyllic town of Pirna in the heart of the Saxony region was a singular identity and quite unconnected with my interest in hospital institutions. Yet it was at another hospital that of Arnsdorf that I was to be introduced to the reality of the hidden and secret past of Sonnenstein. I had already visited this hospital some four months earlier and photographed the many ward buildings with their overtly Germanic, geometric figures. On returning to my car I noticed out of the corner of my eye a memorial plaque that I had not remembered seeing on my first encounter with Arnsdorf. The plaque, possibly recently erected had the name Elfriede Lohse-Wächtler inscribed in gold letters on it. A date 4.12.89 - 31.7.40 and the name Sonnenstein accompanied the inscription. Standing in front of this epitaph I decided to find out more of Sonnenstein and who Elfriede Lohse-Wächtler was and why she had died there. Whilst researching at the Deutches Hygiene Museum in Dresden and by referring to original journals I traced Sonnenstein back to 1922 when as a Heil und Pflegeananstalt (care and cure institution) it had originally housed 672 psychiatric patients. Sonnenstein's history over the decades like the other hospitals, Großschweidnitz, Arnsdorf and Bühlau that it shared its pages with, seemed at first glance unassuming enough. But then I noticed that it had suddenly closed in 1939 A year later Sonnenstein reopened its doors and by order of The General Foundation for Welfare and Institutional Care (Die Gemeinnützige Stiftung für Heil und Anstaltspflege), a state run medical agency, Sonnenstein became a special hospital to undertake medical experimentation and euthanasia. Early in 1940 an organisation called T4 visited every mental hospital and psychiatric clinic in Germany to 'observe' each patient for evaluation and selection for the now in place euthanasia centres.1 Sonnenstein was not unique as five other main centres were also by now staffed and operational. Elfriede I learnt had been a patient at Arnsdorf, when one day a group of T4 specialists arrived at the hospital. Few staff and patients would have suspected the true identity of the visitors and the real reason for their journey, nor the eventual outcome of their mission. On inspection of the hospital register she too was among those selected for observation. Under the Nazis ideology of 'life unfit for life' thousands of individuals, those viewed as a 'burden to society' and therefore a drain on resources, the mentally ill and mentally handicapped as well as the elderly and those with incurable illnesses were to be taken from the many institutions and transported to the awaiting death centres. Elfriede was one of up to 100,000 individuals (the true figure is unknown) removed from Germany's hospitals. I left Dresden (the birth place of Elfriede) where I was staying, and embarked on the thirty kilometer drive to Anstalt-Pirna that would roughly trace the route taken by those expelled from Arnsdorf some sixty years ago. At this point I still did not know if the buildings at Sonnenstein were still standing or even what had become of it over the years. While travelling my emotions seemed to heighten and become more aware. Lucid images of those confused at leaving their only refuge or for some the excitement of a promised holiday that was not to be, flowed uncomfortably through my mind. As the winter sun flickered between the buildings of each successive small village that passed, I wondered, had they seen what I was seeing and had they known what I already knew? I was later disturbed to read that the windows on the buses in transport were blacked out. And unlike those from the institutions on route to Sonnenstein I knew where this journey would end. At first on arrival at Pirna, I failed to spot the large buildings which lurked in the background of a protective village and resembled a stately home much less a killing centre. It looked so inconspicuous, but there it was, Sonnenstein. I climbed a series of stone stairs into the small estate which was surrounded by about four or five main buildings. It was a strange looking structure, the front profile was fortified like a castle yet at its rear the ground levelled out and was accessible by a small road which provided a natural terminus directly in front of the main buildings. This is where, several times a week, those arriving from catchment areas such as Sachsen, Thueringen, Franken, Schlesien, the Sudenten area, as well as transports from East and West Prussia would have disembarked. I approached a doorway at the nearest building, which I was surprised to find was unlocked for some reason. So I entered Sonnenstein. The building I found myself in had been empty for many years, nevertheless it had been preserved much as it had been left. The long ashen coloured corridors with their lofty ceilings trailed into the distance and were sporadically interspersed by thick archways. Small windows illuminated the passageway and led to each of the individual rooms, which were also large and capacious. Over all it looked functional and purposeful. I spent over two hours walking around Sonnenstein's airless interior trying to uncover its past, but the ghosts had long left this place, covered up to be forgotten. The lifeless building, no longer sentient, held few memories of what had once taken place here back in 1940. What had I really expected to discover and what of Elfriede who was the reason for my searching of Sonnenstein in the first instance? It all seemed so delusive trying to identify one single person where so many were held, yet all are now unreachable because there are no records, no witnesses that they have ever existed. I knew that for all the men, women and children who entered this building, there was simply no trace. Six months had passed since I had returned home somewhat disappointed that Sonnenstein had failed to yield its former secrets. I was frustrated to have abandoned my story unfinished, when one morning I received a news paper article from Dresden which described the plans for an exhibition and a workshop for the disabled which had recently opened at Sonnenstein. As part of the exhibition, biographies of 22 former inmates were to be displayed. At the foot of the feature was printed the name of one patient: Elfriede Lohse-Wächtler. I realised that although I had been in the Sonnenstein centre, I had not entered the sections known as C 16. These parts of the building by agreement have remained unused and are rarely visited. It was within one of the disused rooms of C16 that the mobile gas chamber and crematorium (which would have been screened off from the eyes of the victims) had operated. Yet with innate clarity one could envisage how nearly 15,000 people had been murdered in the solitary three story building of C16. One would be surprised to realise how little space is required to facilitate the killing of so many people. The whole operation which required technical specialists, support staff, administrators, clerks, carers, doctors, nurses and the special command (police) at the institution's gate amounted to no more than a mere 100 staff. As I reflected on the empty room I could see them rapt, silently working away, the smooth cotton of their white coats concealing the coarseness of their grey regulation uniforms. This gives one an insight, incredulously as it may seem into the Nazi process for extermination and just how proficient it actually was. It could be argued today that the difficulty for many people (albeit few would deny) in accepting the sheer scale of the actions of the Nazis is the fact that whether statistically or in reality; conceiving of these things is still difficult for many. Sonnenstein was closed in 1941 after the cessation of the official euthanasia program.Wild euthanasia, especially of children continued until 1945.2 This was not before a secret directive from Berlin, known as 'Aktion 14f 13', committed to death by euthanasia thousands of mental defectives, the incurably ill / insane, criminals and Jews who had been sent via the various concentration camps.3 It was the chilling first step in the collaboration between the euthanasia centres and the concentration camps, and the progression towards what would become the systematic execution of millions in the new extermination camps. The seemingly unimaginable number of deaths, estimated somewhere between 11 and 15 million (which became the holocaust) proposed by the Nazi Government had also been potentially realised through the research carried out within the euthanasia programs. The methods or more so the aptitude for killing which had been devised, developed and tested in the euthanasia centres were in 1942 transferred to the secret, purpose built extermination camps of Poland. In Belsec, Sobibor and Treblinka (Chelmno & Auschwitz were already operational) the technological legacy of euthanasia (gassing) would be further perfected to that of mass genocide on an unimaginable scale.4 It is generally accepted that the sequence of events that we now refer to as the holocaust were premeditated, to be initiated by powerful bureaucrats in the Nazi hierarchy and delivered by the party elite: the SS - Schutzstaffel (protection squad). The killing system had to be flexible and in practice relied far more on the individual personalities and the dispositions of those involved than any rigid system. It is only when we view these separate stages of the holocaust that we can see an overall plan. It is no mere coincidence that from the close of the main euthanasia centres around 1941, the Reich Main Security Office (RSHA) then began its biggest campaigns against civilians. Poland's mental hospitals, institutions and sanatoriums had already been cleared by the Einsatzgruppen (SS death squads), who followed closely behind the main occupational troops.5 One year into the invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941; 750,000 civilians had been killed. As in Poland, Russia's hospitals were also ransacked and its patients disposed of by the SS and former T4 operatives.6 In Russia, the gas vans that proved so instrumental in the euthanasia program and the deaths of the mentally ill now drove a 'new victim' relentlessly for miles, until they were dead. The final death toll of (Russian) Jews would be in the millions. Most were shot but the increased use of gassing as a chosen means of extermination had played an active part; and would continue to do so. In January of 1942 at the Wannsee conference, Ministers and Nazi leaders proposed a final solution draft to the 'Jewish problem'. Their decision culminated in Operation Reinhard. In May of 1942, the same year as Belzec, Sobibor, Treblinka II, Chelmno (Kulmhof) and Auschwitz Birkenau came into being, the SS battalions of Operation Reinhard were mobilised.7 Assisted at times by the Wehrmacht (army) the Einsatz Kommando units started to round up, with systematic intent, the millions of individuals who would be transported (or killed on the spot) to the awaiting extermination camps. Albeit the numerous 'aktions' were intended primarily to drive the Jewish populace to the death camps; tens of thousands of people from other ethnic and social groups also became victims of the SS purges. All the camps that had the euthanasia centers (whose sole objective was to kill) used gas as the agent to dispatch its victims. Appointed as heads to the camps at Belzec, Sobibor, Treblinka II, Chelmno and Auschwitz Birkenau were those who had previously worked in T4. Absorbed and then consumed in the inferno; whole communities, their culture, history and (most precious) their lives were lost forever to the dictator regime. Are we guilty too in forgetting them and not seeing our fellow human being? Of course we are not. But it was designed by the Nazis that we should. As with the euthanasia centres and extermination camps it was the intention to erase all traces of the individual, their actual death and in many cases even the person's past identity. When one views the monochrome photographs of the Nazi camps, these anomalous images of bodies hardly recognisable as our own, and notes their impersonal titles--'victims', 'removing the dead', 'survivors'--one sees another dimension of Nazi philosophy: their deliberate desire to not only destory the human being but also the human spirit. Yet these holocaust deaths do not stand alone as a single genus or a single event nor were the violations perpetrated solely by one individual group against one distinct individual. The largest group of individuals to have suffered from the racial policies of National Socialist doctrine were Jewish (approximately 6 million deaths). One of the lesser groups and often the least remembered were those identified as disabled, elderly, handicapped and mentally ill. In the post war years with the focus firmly fixed on the anti-Fascist hero and the ensuing Cold War, Sonnenstein's victims were quickly forgotten. The future generations were not told of individuals such as Elfriede Lohse-Wächtler and the thousands of other murdered (psychiatric) patients. Obscured by the secrets of a dark past, their identities have remained hidden. Although my thoughts are of Elfriede and it is she I search for, I feel that we have lost her forever. For from within the shadows of that spiritless room in C16, a multitude of unidentified and unnamed faces clamber through my mind. I am engulfed by the pleas of their lament which pursues me from their darkness, and whose (own) voices ask with a defenceless whisper; 'what about me?' Although I now realise that I will never find her, it is with Elfriede (who initially, yet unintentionally led me to the story of Sonnenstein) that I will conclude my story. Elfriede was born in 1899, into the comforts of a respected middle class family. Her father, Gustav Adolf Wächtler, a salesman had high hopes for his cultured daughter. Elfriede's hunger to pursue a serious artistic career developed during her teenage years, much to her father's frustration. Gustav Wächtler disapproved of his daughter's choice of career. Elfriede nonetheless enrolled at the Dresden School of Applied Art in 1915 to study fashion design. Quickly changing her course, she joined the department of applied graphics. As a young artist, Elfriede swiftly escaped from the control of her father and started to explore her new life. In 1916 (still only seventeen) she moved into her own apartment. The short bob hairstyle and the unorthodox manly apparel (cap and pipe) worn by Elfriede soon got her noticed among her peers. Her relationship with her father however had practically ceased. Elfriede would only visit her family when he was not present. A talented artist of astute character, Elfriede continued her profession under the guidance of Oskar Georg Erler (professor of art) and produced work in many media, including porcelain pendants and lithographic greeting cards, which she sold to finance her studies. Adopting the pseudonym 'Nikolaus' in an attempt to promote her reputation, Elfriede mingled with the avant guarde of her generation and made significant connections with such established artists as Conrad Felixmüller, Otto Dix and Otto Griebel. She met Kurt Lohse (an art student) through one such encounter with Johannes Baader (Dada movement) and Lohse practically moved in with Wächtler. Married in 1921, Kurt struggled to provide for Elfriede, and her disappointment in Kurt weakened an already temperamental relationship. The couple lived apart while Elfriede worked in other cities and then later by choice. Albeit married to Elfreide, Kurt fathered three illegitimate children between 1927 and 1930. Kurt resented Elfriede's independence and craved a subordinate wife, who would stay at home and produce a family. Increasingly isolated by Kurt and by the couple's friends, who rallied to Kurt's side, Elfriede's marriage and her mental state started to fall apart. Kurt on his part further displayed his indignation towards his wife by giving her finished canvases to his art students to paint over. In 1929 while residing in Hamburg, Elfriede, troubled by her relationship worries and personal debts, suffered a serious nervous breakdown and was hospitalised. (Always the artist) Elfriede produced a series of sketches portraying psychiatric patients. She emerged two months later to start (according to many) the most successful period of her career as an artist. Elfriede's resilient nature fortified her and in May of 1929, she held her first major exhibition (a collection of her hospital portraits) at the Kunstsalon Marie Kunde. Lacking funds, Elfriede economised and worked in water colour and pastel. She produced a large volume of work from allegorical fantasy scenes to the reality of life in Hamburg's notorious red-light district. More exhibitions and favourable reviews followed but her success was short-lived. Germany was sunk in economic depression and about to face the politics of anew era--that of Nazism. From the early 1930s, until her admission to a mental hospital in1932, Elfriede's life was one of near poverty and periodic homelessness. Alone and vulnerable, she returned to her parents' home. In June of 1932 Elfriede was committed (on her father's request) to Arnsdorf psychiatric hospital, and subsequently diagnosed as having schizophrenia.8 During her formative years at the institution (she found hospital life quite unbearable), Elfriede remained optimistic towards her future and continued with her sketches.9 Between 1932 and 1934, she frequently wrote to her parents in the hope that they would request her release from Arnsdorf. In May 1935, the institution became Elfriede's legal guardian. Refusing to be sterilised, the hospital no longer permitted her to visit her parents which she had done for one week each year. Hence in 1935, Elfriede was forcibly sterilised by order of the 'Law for the prevention of Genetically Defective Offspring' in Dresden Friedrichstadt, a general hospital. Her human spirit broken by the sterilisation, Elfriede ceased her art work. Seven months later Kurt Lohse divorced her. From 1939, Elfriede's only meals were thin soups. Coupled with the hospital's lack of care towards its patients and suffering the effects of malnutrition due to her starvation diet, Elfriede's physical health deteriorated. Despite this, she remained mentally resolute and on the 5th March 1940, sent an Easter postcard (which she had drawn) to her mother. Elfriede's Easter card entitled Blumenstück (the flower arrangement) read: "Don't be afraid anymore, things will be fine again". "I'm also looking forward to your visit." On the 31st July 1940 (five months later), Elfriede died in the gas chamber of Pirna-Sonnenstein. Many of her sketches drawn at Arnsdorf were destroyed as degenerative art. Today we have the paintings and sketches drawn by Elfriede Lohse-Wächtler; whom as a young woman dared to be different and dream of artistic acclaim, yet would not live to enjoy her success.10 Through these art works, we can share in her personality, aspirations and her thoughts.11 Her work is her testament and allows us to appreciate the richness of her talent and of her life. notes 1. T4: the code name
for the euthanasia program was derived from the address of the chancellery
headquarters at Tiergartenstrasse No. 4 in Berlin.
back to top_____________________________________________________ Gita Sahgal is a writer, activist and broadcaster, originally from India and now settled in England. She has been an active member of Southall Black Sisters and Women against Fundamentalisms. This year she came to speak at Glasgow University in the Series on Gender and Globalisation organised by the International Centre for Gender & Women's Studies. Robin Sen spoke to her there. Robin Sen: Can you tell me about your work with Southall Black Sisters? Gita Sahgal: I'm not a member of Southall Black Sisters now but I was a very active member for a good ten years. They're very important as they're a secular, largely Asian, organisation which have served the community in Southall on issues of domestic violence and all the related issues: poverty, immigration, policing etc. which come out around that. What's particularly important about the group is that while we were secular, we drew people from Sikh, Hindu and Muslim backgrounds, and that's one of the joys of being in Britain, that you can make these cross connections. Now new refugees have come into the area, so for example you have Somali women coming in using the centre. The organisation has also worked a lot with the local estates where there are a lot of mixed race kids. For instance, there are white working class mothers of black sons who were getting into trouble with the police, and Southall Black Sisters have worked with them on a number of issues. We were also involved in the founding of a group called Women Against Fundamentalisms around the time of the Rushdie Affair in 1989. We felt it was important to stress that the group were working in the context of Britain as a Christian state. So the problem is not just of fundamentalisms within minority religions but that the actual structure of the state is Christian--it has a blasphemy law, it protects Christianity, it enforces acts of Christian worship in schools. So we were arguing with other women about the way multiculturalism in Britain was used to police and silence minorities, rather than produce a genuine mixing of people who could challenge the orthodoxies within their own communities. RS: As an Asian woman, working within a secular feminist tradition, is it hard to find an identity within the Asian community as an atheist? GS: I don't think so because there are plenty of people like me within it. It's been buried now, but when people came to this country they had politics with them. People that came into the factories in areas like Southall came from the left. They came from nationalist traditions, they came from Communist traditions, every single variety of Marxism was represented in the early Indian Workers' Associations. We clashed with the Indian Workers' Associations because they didn't want to recognise domestic violence--they were very socially conservative in terms of family life--but they were politically radical in other ways, so there were things we could relate to. During the Rushdie Affair we defended Rushdie's right to write as part of our right to critique our own traditions and in defence of our secular traditions--we've come out of radical traditions that we bring with us. People told us that the stand we took would put us outside the community, but it actually meant more Muslim women came to us, and we didn't lose any Muslim clients. RS: Do you think religious identity is becoming more fixed? GS: I think it is. When I was at university in the 70s there were national groups, Indian Student Associations and Pakistani Student Associations and stuff like that, and we actually were from India and Pakistan rather than British Asians. Now there are many more British Asians at the universities and you'll find many more Muslim groups of different kinds, there will be a Hindu Students' Federation which is very active on the campuses--I cannot imagine these existing in the '70s or even early '80s. RS: One of the things New Labour has done is to support the creation of single faith schools. Do you see anything positive in this? GS: No, I think it's a disaster. Again there is the influence of Christianity within the state system, the existence of voluntary controlled Christian schools who can pick and choose who they take in has been one of the fundamental problems. I think one of the reports on Bradford [following the 'race' riots in the north of England in the Summer of 2001] pointed this out--that segregation has occurred because the Christian schools have attracted white kids and Afro-Caribbean kids to them and left the local state schools being totally Asian. So it leads to a sort of racial divide within the school system. Single faith schools are however also partly a response to very active Islamic, Hindu and Sikh organisations that are arguing for these schools to be set up. There's an argument that you can create a more positive identity from within those schools, but I don't buy it. I think the kind of identity developed in, for example, a Muslim school cuts out the lived Islam of the Subcontinent which is actually a very diverse Islam. RS: There have been a number of issues concerning religion and race relations since New Labour came to power--Blair's discourse on Christianity, the treatment of asylum seekers, the 'race riots' over the Summer of 2001--do you think those things are connected in any way? GS: I think that Blair has moved the argument from race to religion, so Blair looks at religious minorities rather than racial minorities. I think that movement has come about partly because the minorities are asserting themselves in a religious voice. But that ties in with Blair's own thinking. I think that the general Christian ethic which is being asserted, and the promotion of faith schools along side that, is a disaster. At the same time that the Government talks of adopting British norms and so on, they're actually dividing Britain up more and more into different religious groupings. I think it is hard for those of us who are atheists and who want to live in a genuinely multicultural society with interracial mixing, to find a space within that. RS: There's a seeming contradiction between the assertion of 'Britishness' on the one hand and the way the economy is now dominated by multinational companies on the other. Do you think that as the economy becomes more global people feel the need to draw a sense of national identity closer? GS: I think in England there really has been a loss, with the founding of the Scottish Parliament and the Welsh Assembly. People don't really know what to be English means anymore. There have been a lot of blind alleys that certain kinds of rather sterile, state forms of anti-racism have taken. The people who originally opposed racism were not merely anti-racists but had a vision of something else. Mistakes have been made in failing to look at white exclusion. This is a Government--for all its talk--that is not interested in the white working class, or the people who are not working class anymore as they've lost their jobs and don't have a place in the world. And I don't think it cares about Asian socially excluded people either, other than rapping them over the knuckles. It worries about them because it doesn't want riots and [so] it will put resources into them. But the forms through which they try and mobilise around these groups--through community leaders who are already discredited and through religious leadership--are not necessarily effective. The offset of this is that there is going to be a resurgence in forms of racial and religious identity. RS: You've talked about left-wing traditions in both the Asian and Afro-Caribbean communities. Do you think there is a possibility of the reformation of these communities around political issues? GS: I hope there is. We see signs, there was some attempt at having a Civil Rights Movement that came out of the struggles of families for justice over issues of policing and deaths in police custody. But I think that if
we don't take on board some of the difficult things within our own societies--and
one of the key issues is the religious revival and the growth of fundamentalist
movements--then we really won't be able to formulate a new movement.
Contacts Southall Black Sisters
Women Against Fundamentalisms
back to top_____________________________________________________ Cultural
Bulimia
Famously, Raymond Williams argued that culture is one of the most complicated words in the English language.1 It would be reasonable to assume that its complications are accretions, i.e. that an original and simple word, meaning, say, to grow, has been stretched, morphed and twisted around to the loss of any core reference it once possessed. Anyone harbouring suspicion of the academic world could no doubt explain this by wagging a finger at meddling academics prone to too much intellectual monkey business. Yet they would be wrong as, according to Williams, from the beginning the word had a range of meanings. Colonies, cults and cultivation were there at the outset, like a chain linking habitation, worship and natural growth. To paraphrase Williams, culture may be ordinary but it has also always existed in a state of flux. What gives contemporary complications of the word culture their special quality is that they are flavoured with all sorts of contestation, rivalry, dispute and fissure, which have effects and consequences beyond the confines of academia. It is one thing for a word to have a number of meanings, to be prone to semantic slippages, but it is quite another for those meanings to be incompatible. Here a common set of beliefs gels protagonists together in such a way that arguments are primarily disagreements over the interpretation of accepted rules, etc. However with the word culture, and its possible meanings and interpretations, we are confronted with the wedge which splits and tears this neat and tidy social space. Here, there is no shared set of ground rules. The divisions which spill out from culture flow along frequently disparate, isolated paths. We would undoubtedly be able to come to an agreement over semantic differences of a word, but the argument resulting from setting Beethoven against Tammy Wynette in the cultural stakes would present infinitely more insurmountable problems. Today, the complications embedded in the word culture point to incommensurable interpretations. Ultimately they speak of cultural and social divisions. The root of much of the division has been the effect and influence of what has become known as popular culture. Whether it be art, opera, classical music, literature or ballet, the spectre of this 'other' form of culture (whose name has shifted from kitsch to mass- to popular-) has shadowed the paths of these more traditional, accepted examples of culture (what we might once-upon-a-time have referred to as Culture with a Capital C ). Existing in a peculiar parental relationship, popular culture was in its earlier more lumpen incarnations often tarred as the bastard, vampiric child of Culture with a Capital C. Contemporary forms of communication such as film and television have frequently been abused for feeding on and sucking the life from these noble inhabitants of Culture's lofty palaces. While today such black and white, slap dash cartooning of the cultural landscape would be unthinkable (for all but the most mule-like conservative), it's worth remembering that our present more enlightened cultural habitat is a relatively new phenomenon. While popular culture may be an elusive, shape shifting, mischievous body which academics, artists and intellectuals tussle over, previous theorised incarnations didn't have the same trouble. Throughout the first half of the twentieth century, the notion of kitsch had certain, specifiable properties over which there was a broad intellectual consensus. Similarly, the idea of mass culture conformed to a given set of social and economic relations. What unified the intellectual reference to kitsch and mass culture was not just the obligatory disparagement of "the debased and academicized simulacra of genuine culture."2 The formulation of the concepts of kitsch and mass culture also shared the critical, even radical, analysis of the relationship between low cultural value and the overarching presence of management and marketeering. This was best summed up in the term culture industry, understood as the primacy of industrial and commercial interests in the production of goods that are barely cultural at all. In this schema, the stench of business ensured that consumers of such products were relegated to the cultural wasteland. The idea of being banished to a cultural wasteland is a potent one; it is what fuelled the dystopian, alienated landscape of cultural conservatives such as T.S.Eliot, and fuelled some of Clement Greenberg's more extreme pronouncements on art and culture. Entrenched and seemingly intractable, it was this conception of culture which held sway. Such a dystopian view of the corrupting evils of popular culture's beguiling charms enabled dedicated protectors of all that was noble and right to scaremonger publicly about the contaminating effects of film and television. The culture which has no name The term popular culture was initially brought in to protect radical or authentic culture (a modern version of folk art) from the same criticisms. Richard Hoggart's book The Uses of Literacy, coupled with his setting up of the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies at Birmingham University in 1963, ensured that he is widely seen--as Jim McGuigan has written in his overview of the history and evolution of cultural studies, Cultural Populism--as being responsible for a shift in British cultural debate from "a stark opposition between elitist minority culture and lowly mass culture towards a serious engagement with the value and values of majority cultural experience." If cultural theory schools across Britain have a theoretical godfather it is Hoggart, not Williams. After the popular culture explosion in the late '50s and early '60s, the term popular culture became more capacious in its use, referring to experiences that had once been thought kitsch and commercial. Hoggart's rather romantic, genteel conception of popular culture was quickly replaced by the white heat of a far more robust, hungry form of popular culture. A determined group of radicals campaigned against the use of such divisive stereotypes of culture and cultural consumption, turning such terms as kitsch and mass culture into anachronisms. If the substitution of the term popular culture for its predecessors had done away with conservative and radical anxieties about it, then popular culture would possibly be no more than an anthropological term referring to an heterogeneous field of cultural and economic activity. Instead, it is one of the most contested and misconstrued pieces of jargon of the 20th and 21st Century. Stuart Hall, one of the pioneers of Cultural theory, remarked that symbolic aggression against mass culture was always, though perhaps cryptically, a version of aggression against the masses. It is worth pursuing the hypothesis that repressed fear and loathing for the working class returns as contempt for mass culture, but the argument has to go further than that. The term popular culture was coined by intellectuals, aesthetes and the educated in order to refer to the culture of others. From the outset it was a projection. If the term popular culture refers to anything at all it is not the people or the culture it purports to name but the fantasies and anxieties of those who are doing the naming. This is why it is often said that popular culture means nothing, that it picks out no specifiable set of cultural norms or qualities; popular culture is nothing other than the culture which is excluded from legitimate or cultivated culture (and defined from within legitimate culture as its other). This results in a very confused or at best weak sense of popular culture's own identity. It gets worse. If popular culture is defined negatively and relationally, then the radical incorporation of popular culture into the university and the gallery creates even more problems. When the academics of cultural studies include popular culture as a legitimate object of intellectual study then the last remaining criterion of its identity is fudged. The same sort of thing happens when artists and curators sidle up to popular culture, permitting its access to galleries and artworks in a radical gesture that erases the divisions which maintain art's privilege. The effect is that popular culture doesn't only attain its longed for prestige but loses its distinctive character. If popular culture is excluded culture, then its inclusion turns this empty category into an indeterminable boundary. This is, roughly speaking, what has emerged as the current cultural impasse: the divide between art and popular culture has slackened or disappeared so that either value and criteria has to be found to reinstate cultural division3 or we should no longer think in terms of cultural division. Neither option is satisfactory. Culture is Ordinary Williams almost filed for adoption papers on the word culture. Nobody since Matthew Arnold has had such an impact on the way the term is used. It was Arnold's evangelical tub-thumping about the value of Culture--for it to represent "the best that has been thought or known in the world current everywhere"--which, Williams recognised, was the trigger for the now widespread suspicion of all talk about culture. It would be wrong to say that Williams' concept of culture was not normative. But, he argued so much against the normative conception of Culture that he produced an ethics of the value of the forms of life which that normative conception of Culture brushes aside. An extended and serious engagement in culture based on the fact of division and difference might have extended the scholarship of the connoisseur to every last hiding place of dignity in the lives of ordinary people, annihilating the toffee-nosed superiority-complex while reinvigorating the intelligent aspirations of culture. Instead, culture became the battleground of ideological sectarianism, postmodernist posturing, identity politics, political correctness and post -colonial, -feminist, -Marxist studies. Williams may still prove to have the requisite subtlety to outdo most of our misgivings about the holistic approach to cultural analysis and social transformation. It is Richard Hoggart's legacy, however--his establishment of cultural studies as an academic exercise--which takes the limelight today. It is not through lack of respect that we hesitate to call it an academic discipline; cultural studies is internally resistant to having strict demarcations placed on its interdisciplinary activities. Initially, cultural studies had to be of a politically radical hue before it could maintain that all form of culture is worthy of analysis irrespective of their relative prestige. The position implies a full-frontal attack on the realm of aesthetics which dominated cultural discourse and effectively ruled out any potential alternative by passing itself off as the very soul of humanity, all else being unworthy of the term culture. So how did cultural studies turn into the wretched display of subject positions without recourse to judgement, value and ethics? Before we can answer that we must finally face up to the high-tide of cultural studies, a scholastic world in which poor, black kids in inner city Britain 'resist' and 'subvert' power through the ingenuity of their haircuts. We don't doubt the radical credentials of the initial intentions of cultural studies, and the impact the work has had. It would be interesting, however, to compare it with the history and development of ultraviolence in Hollywood. At first it was something of a scandal for Hollywood to depict the lives of the lumpen proletariat in a graphic and realist style, but at each step when the brutality gave way to charm or flavour the criminality and frankness had to be stepped up. It was almost enough in itself that Hoggart wrote seriously and sympathetically about the working class, but Dick Hebdige, writing in the '70s, was only interested in subcultural, prickly, indigestible elements of the working class. The idea that heroes had to be good and wholesome was shot to pieces. What couldn't be sustained, though, was the tendency in cultural studies to make political claims on behalf of the yobs, mods or rastas and later the fans of boybands and romance novels. We don't mean that the politics of resisting the authority of school teachers or of indulging in mainstream culture was inflated, we mean that it didn't exist. It exists as a politics only insofar as the study of them interferes with academic customs and standards. This is a classic case of projection. The reason there is now an impasse within academic schools of cultural studies is that its radical politics was based to some degree on the challenge to a politically unacceptable, entrenched cultural schema. Within this orthodoxy a routinised aesthetic gradient cast popular culture out of serious discussion. Radicals took this normativity by the scruff of the neck and saw what was valuable in the most detested and debased cultural forms. What's more, it worked. It turned out that no one behaved in the manner which cultural prejudice had expected. Writers such as John Fiske 'discovered' that ordinary people watching TV were active and discriminatory; the surrender to consumerism was done on an individual basis, and with intelligence; scholars discovered that different individuals bought the same newspapers and used them in different ways. Well done, but why did it take so long and why did we have to disabuse ourselves of the prejudices against popular culture before we could assault the myths about art? Now, at long last, you don't have to be an old-style Marxist to acknowledge that artists are no different from anyone else; art is just as likely to include rubbish as everlasting truth, galleries are part of the tourist industry, and the supposed superiority of art over mass culture has to be tested case by case. Having established these inversions of established wisdom, though, the radicals of cultural studies had achieved the academic levelling of art and popular culture (anything now, it seems, can go into a Ph.D. thesis), but that doesn't mean that all cultural division has vanished, or indeed that all culture is of equal value. Cultural studies failed to question the relationship between the scholar and culture, it merely extended the range of the scholar's objects of analysis. The forms of attention expected of an intellectual were not challenged, even if punks and schoolgirls were magically accorded the qualities and attitudes which were previously the preserve of the educated. No, the reason a new aestheticism emerged in the wake of cultural studies and the social history of art is that the radical politics which furnished the latter with its progressive vision of culture did not equip it for an encounter with recidivist philistines (the slightly bruised cultural conservative who had been saving up arguments about value and quality just in case the momentum of cultural democratisation would slip). It makes no sense, and holds no radical promise, to defend the cultural worth of Some Mothers Do 'Ave 'Em, The Bay City Rollers or Star Wars. It's not that these are irredeemably 'bad' examples of culture, or even that it is not possible to enjoy them with a sizeable degree of intellectual, moral or political savvy. But the procedure of attending to popular culture for the purposes of those intellectual, moral or political principles leaves something to be desired. Again, we're not trying to insist on the irreducible worthlessness of those who love popular culture, quite the opposite, what is frustrating, infuriating, is that their affection for it is being turned into its opposite. Insofar as intellectuals translate popular pleasures into radical gestures, the things which count in popular culture--the forms of attention and affection which popular culture lives off--the very things which guarantee its popularity, are being sidelined. In other words, cultural elitists regard popular pleasures to be hardly worthy of the title pleasure, and radical commentators fail to attend to this normative ranking of pleasure because they prefer a different vocabulary entirely, to speak of political acts rather than entertaining experiences. Artists have done the same, reclaiming popular culture for artistic forms of attention. A whole genre of art has built itself out of an anthropological relationship between the artist and popular culture. It is what Hal Foster calls the 'ethnographic turn of contemporary art': "In our current state of artistic-theoretical ambivalences and cultural-political impasses, anthropology is the compromise discourse of choice".4 One reason why anthropology seems so desirable to contemporary artists, especially in their relations with popular culture and everyday life, is that it simultaneously holds out a generous hand to the downgraded aspects of social life and guarantees that the artist's own privileged position will not be infected by the values of the befriended culture. Anthropology offers a model in which the artist can engage in 'low' culture with the emphasis squarely on knowledge rather than pleasure, in circumstances where the pleasures of popular culture are hardly considered to merit the term pleasure at all. Questions about art's relationship to popular culture are rarely pitched with anything but the most scant ethical attention. When writers are not merely observing the traffic between two worlds, they moan about standards or exclusions--quality or equality. It generally depends on whether the writer thinks that the two worlds ought to remain firmly separated or nicely, kindly, democratically fused. It is as if the elitist is happy to think of cultural rivalry so long as elitist culture is on top, whereas the populist is not happy unless rivalries within culture have been dissolved. Think, for instance, of the Leftist recoil from young British art's avowed populism or somatic pleasures, its media fuelled glamour or unmediated mundanity. This art since the late '80s, it seems, has broken into a retreat from the critical, intellectual, mature business of taking culture seriously. Or, 'high art lite'--to use Julian Stallabrass' slogan--carries 'a marked lack of seriousness.' Stallabrass' argument--that there is an 'anti-theoretical heart of high art lite'--can be read as a demand to return to established modes of thinking, a rearguard attempt to reinstate an old hierarchy of pleasures and knowledges. But art today cannot rely on such pedigree--not because serious thinking is haughty or corrupting, but because the situation requires us to think differently. The problem is not just with critics who demand that artists take art seriously. Artists too have often sidled up to popular culture with their enthusiasm dampened by anxiety. Fair enough, perhaps: no artist wants their romance with popular culture to consume their romance with art. The danger, though, as we've often seen, is that of being branded unserious and uncritical, to be seen as part of the culture of the spectacle and thus to have fallen through the safety net of art's autonomy. The anxiety is related to real effects but it is almost always overplayed. It is as if every tentative step toward the popular has to be followed by an over compensatory gesture of resistance to it, a theatrical restatement of art's need for its ablution of the philistine impulses in entertainment and commerce. Such artists are the bulimics of popular culture, the more they are drawn to it the more forcefully they immunise themselves against it. Notes 1 Raymond Williams,
Keywords, Fontana, p.87
back to top_____________________________________________________ Anti-Semitism,
Zionism, and the Palestinians
It's useful to mention a moral principle that's so trivial it's embarrassing--the reason for doing so is it's near universally disregarded. It's easy (and not even gratifying) to criticise and condemn the crimes of others. It's a little harder to look in the mirror and ask what we're doing because it's usually not very pretty, and if we're minimally decent we're going to try to do something about it. When we do, depending on where you are in the world the problems can vary. In some countries it can mean prison, brutal torture, or getting your brains blown out. In countries like ours its condemnation, the loss of job opportunities, or something mild by international standards. It's much harder than to just talk about how awful the other guy is. For example, there's a US literary genre developing with many books, articles and passionate discussions about a flaw in our character: 'We don't react properly to the crimes of others', and 'What's the matter with us that prevents us from doing this?' There are obviously much bigger problems--like why do we continue to participate in massive atrocities, repression, terror, but we don't do anything about it? But there's no literary genre on that. All of that shouldn't be necessary to say, but I've said it. Beginning with anti-Semitism. In the US when I was growing up anti-Semitism was a severe problem. In the 1930's depression when my father finally had enough money to buy a second-hand car and could take the family on a trip to the mountains, if we wanted to stop at a motel we had to check it didn't have a sign saying 'Restricted'. 'Restricted' meant no Jews, so not for us; of course no Blacks. Even when I got to Harvard 50 years ago you could cut the anti-Semitism with a knife. There was almost no Jewish faculty. I think the first Jewish maths professor was appointed while I was there in the early '50s. One of the reasons MIT (where I now am) became a great university is because a lot of people who went on to become academic stars couldn't get jobs at Harvard-so they came to the engineering school down the street. Just 30 years ago (1960s) when my wife and I had young children, we decided to move to a Boston suburb (we couldn't afford the rents near Cambridge any longer). We asked a real estate agent about one town we were interested in, he told us: 'Well, you wouldn't be happy there.' Meaning they don't allow Jews. It's not like sending people to concentration and termination camps but that's anti-Semitism. That was almost completely national. By now Jews in the US are the most privileged and influential part of the population. You find occasional instances of anti-Semitism but they are marginal. There's plenty of racism, but it's directed against Blacks, Latinos, Arabs are targets of enormous racism, and those problems are real. Anti-Semitism is no longer a problem, fortunately. It's raised, but it's raised because privileged people want to make sure they have total control, not just 98% control. That's why anti-Semitism is becoming an issue. Not because of the threat of anti-Semitism; they want to make sure there's no critical look at the policies the US (and they themselves) support in the Middle East. With regard to anti-Semitism, the distinguished Israeli statesman Abba Eban pointed out the main task of Israeli propaganda (they would call it exclamation, what's called 'propaganda' when others do it) is to make it clear to the world there's no difference between anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism. By anti-Zionism he meant criticisms of the current policies of the State of Israel. So there's no difference between criticism of policies of the State of Israel and anti-Semitism, because if he can establish 'that' then he can undercut all criticism by invoking the Nazis and that will silence people. We should bear it in mind when there's talk in the US about anti-Semitism. To turn to what are called the problems of Israel / Palestine, that's a misnomer. It should be called the problems of US-Israel versus Palestine. Britain is also involved in its usual manner--a British Foreign Officer in WW II said that 'from now on Britain is not going to be an independent actor in world affairs, its going to be junior partner to the US.' Essentially correct. (There are less flattering terms used now in the British press, but the picture is about the same.) Britain doesn't play an initiating, active role in the conflict but a passive role essentially supporting the US. The US plays an overwhelming and decisive role. Europe can play an independent role; insofar as it chooses not to act and to use its influence it is essentially supporting what the US does. I'm not going to try to run through the history of the conflict, so let's take the current Intifada and the military aspects which are revealing. A few weeks ago in the Hebrew press there was a report by a well known, respected military correspondent attending a meeting of high Israeli military officials discussing the military tactics in the Intifada. One of the officers asked for information about ordnance: How many bullets got fired? The information came back from the IDF (the Israeli army) that "in the first few days of the Intifada [Sept 30th 2000 and the next few days] the IDF fired a million bullets." There was some surprise, it sounded high, and one officer said kind of bitterly (they don't necessarily like the orders they're given to carry out): 'That means approximately one bullet for every Palestinian child.' Remember what was going on then, some teenagers throwing stones. The same article reported another military source who gave a graphic illustration of how it works. He reported that an official from the Palestinian authority who had a European visitor in the first weeks of the Intifada wanted to illustrate to him how it works, so he had his body guard shoot a single bullet. That was followed by two hours of heavy Israeli gun fire aiming at no particular target in response to a single bullet that was fired. In the first month of the Intifada (according to Israeli sources) the ratio of deaths was about 20 to 1 (75 Palestinians / 4 Israeli soldiers in the Occupied Territories). Another example, in the first days of the Intifada Israel immediately began using what are called in the press 'Israeli helicopters'. They're not Israeli helicopters, they're US helicopters with Israeli pilots that were used to attack civilian complexes, killing and wounding dozens of people. That was sort of reported, it wasn't a secret. That's in response to stone throwing, at most. The US did react to that officially. October 3rd 2000, the Clinton administration made the biggest deal in a decade to send new military helicopters to Israel, along with more parts for Apache Attack helicopters--the most advanced in the arsenal which had been sent in September. It's not that they didn't know what they were using them for, you could read that in the newspapers. They were using them to attack and murder civilians. But they needed more because a million bullets in the first few days isn't enough so we need to send them attack helicopters and missiles. When you hear of the atrocities in Gaza (July 22nd 2002, 14 civilians killed by a helicopter missile attack) that's thanks to the US government, and its allies who didn't raise a finger. How did the American press respond to this? They did report helicopters attacking civilians, but the deal made by the Clinton administration (the biggest in a decade for military helicopters) went literally without report. To be precise, one opinion column in a small newspaper in Virginia mentioned it. That's it for the 'free' press. It's not that they didn't know about it. It was all over the Israeli press, and there were queries to the Pentagon from European reporters asking what are the conditions on the sale of these helicopters. They were told there are no conditions, we don't second guess Israeli commanders, they use if for what they want--and they knew what they were using it for. Two weeks later Amnesty International had a report condemning this and no mention of that, which continues. The reason is, it is considered the right thing to do for the West. Remember Israel is virtually a US military base, an offshoot of the US military system. The same reporter quoted a General as saying: 'Israel is no longer a state with an army, it's now an army with a state.' If you're talking about the Israeli government you're talking about the military. The top political figures are almost always ex-Generals, chiefs of staff and so on. It's not a small army, according to the IDF and analysts their air, naval, armour forces are larger and more advanced than those of any NATO power outside of the US, and as an offshoot it certainly is. So we have an army with a State, the army's basically a branch of the Pentagon. That's the system and it's considered right for them to use these kinds of tactics--a million bullets in the first few days, US helicopters to murder civilians. So we send them more helicopters and so on, because it's a normal way for things to be, and it goes way back. If you know your history of the British Empire you can find many examples. To cite one, 1932, the distinguished British statesman Lloyd George wrote in his diary: 'We have to reserve the right to bomb niggers.' He was referring to the fact Britain had just succeeded in undermining an international disarmament conference which was attempting to put restrictions on the use of air power to attack civilians. Britain very quickly understood that use of air power to attack civilians was far more cost effective and murderous than using ground forces. In parts of the Empire where they no longer had the power to control by ground forces they turned to air power--in the Arab world, against Kurds, Afghans, Iraqis, others who were not front pages. Air power was turning out to be a very effective way to control and suppress civilian populations, hence Britain naturally wanted to undermine disarmament conventions which would block it. (A precedent its successors as global rulers also follow.) Lloyd George was commenting on the British success in this, praising the Government for undermining the treaty as: 'We have to reserve the right to bomb niggers.' That's a fundamental principle of European civilisation, and basic principles like that have a long life. People usually don't say it publicly, but Lloyd George was correctly articulating their inner thoughts and the reason that lies behind them, and what I just described in the first few days of the Intifada is a perfect example. We could go on from there up till today, and trace it back to the earliest days of what has been from the beginning a harsh and brutal occupation. In which for the most part Israel itself was immune from retaliation from within the territories. It carried out oppressive, brutal often murderous policies--mainly the usual imperial techniques: humiliation, degradation, making sure that what are called the 'Arabushi' (Hebrew slang for 'niggers') don't raise their heads and if they do they get beaten down, meanwhile taking the land and resources, with the US army. It's a US-Israeli operation which continues until today. All of that was fine. It's only when the Arabushi did raise their heads and the niggers started bombing us that it becomes a horrifying atrocity. It is an atrocity, but it's not the first and it's not the largest, something we would easily recognise if we were able to rise to the level of looking in the mirror, thinking about ourselves and what we do. Let me turn to the political. Once the Arabushi are beaten down and they don't raise their heads any more then you can talk, and you move to the stage called 'diplomacy'. There was another recent article in the Hebrew press, this time our main newspaper, the New York Times. The article (by a former high official in the Foreign Office and vice president of Tel Aviv University) was translated into English. In it he was reputing the idea that General / Prime Minister Sharon doesn't have a strategy. He said Sharon does have a strategy, one which goes way back. In the 1970s and '80s high officials in the security establishment were paying close attention to what was going on in South Africa, regarding it as a model that Israel should follow. What was going on in South Africa was an effort to establish 'bantustans'--independent black run homelands. The South Africa government in the depths of the Apartheid regime was trying to gain international support for the idea that these black-run States were viable independent States: the leadership was black, the police forces were black, the population was mostly black. To gain international support for them South Africa subsidised them, they actually tried to develop industry, keep them viable somehow. Well the world wouldn't go along, but the Israeli and I'm sure the US establishment was keeping a close eye on them. (South Africa was an ally of the US and Britain throughout this period. As late as 1988 the US government identified Nelson Mandela and the African National Congress as "one of the more notorious terrorist organisations of the world." The US congress did try and impose sanctions on South Africa, which the Regan administration finally passed after vetoing it but found ways around so that US trade with South Africa actually increased in the late 1980s. Britain was playing similar games with Rhodesia, South Africa.) In 1993 the US and Israel moved to trying to impose a South African style solution-it's called the Oslo Peace Process. The Oslo Peace Process was described quite accurately by one of the leading Israeli doves, Shlomo Ben-Ami (Foreign Minister under Ehud Barak and chief negotiator at Camp David). He said: "The goal of the Oslo Process is to establish for the Palestinians a neo-colonial dependency which will be permanent." That is to establish a bantustan in the Occupied Territories. (He was from the dovish end of the spectrum but it's a pretty narrow spectrum, as in most countries.) Throughout the Oslo process Israel and the US jointly (you can't do it without US authorisation or support) moved to institute a neo-colonial dependency that would be permanent, bantustans essentially as the model. So US-funded settlement programmes continued right through the Oslo years, peaking in the last Clinton / Barak years. And settlement plans were continued still further, Sharon escalated it--there is a spectrum but it's the same policy. The settlements are built with an eye for the future-take a look at a map. Take the map presented at Camp David. Camp David was described by the US and much of the West as an amazing, magnanimous, generous offer by Clinton and Barak which the terrible Palestinians turned down and so therefore are responsible for their own fate. In the US no maps were presented. That's crucial if you want to determine how magnanimous and generous the offer was. If maps weren't presented there's a reason: the maps would tell you exactly how magnanimous and generous an offer it is (and it's better for the public not to know things like that, particularly when you're praising the magnanimity and magnificence of our great leaders). Maps were published in Israel. If you look at the maps you'll discover exactly how generous the Camp David offers were, and what Ben-Ami meant when talking of a 'permanent neo-colonial dependency.' They reflect the settlement policies of the Peres and Rabin Governments. Israel takes what's called Jerusalem. Jerusalem is a vastly expanded area with no resemblance to the pre-1967 Jerusalem which was effectively annexed in violation of Security Council orders. To the East of what's called Jerusalem there's an Israeli settlement (which includes a city, Ma'al Adumim) extending virtually to Jericho, which was established to all effect with the purpose of bisecting the West Bank. (A town and settlement means infrastructure, roads, developments on the sides of the roads and so forth). There's another development in the north going to the settlement of Ariel and beyond which bisects the Northern area. That's three basic cantons: one Northern around Nablus, another central around Ramallah, another Southern, parts of Bethlehem. These three cantons are separated from a small part of East Jerusalem which would be under Palestinian administration. (Jerusalem is traditionally the centre of Palestinian cultural, commercial, and other life in fact for the whole region.) That's the West bank: four cantons, separated from Gaza which is a fifth, and the fate of Gaza was unclear. That's the generous settlement. You can see why maps aren't presented. It should be stated however that Clinton / Barak did improve the situation at Camp David, as prior to it the Palestinians in the West Bank were divided into over 200 separated areas. (Some a couple of square kilometers surrounded by barriers and road blocks, mainly for the purpose of humiliation and degradation, they didn't serve any military function to speak of.) They reduced it from over 227 to only 4. That's a step forward, a step towards the South African solution, and notice from below because the South African bantustans (whatever you think about them) were reasonably viable by comparison to what was being offered the Palestinians. The settlement programmes also insured the main resources (the best land in the West Bank, the nice suburbs of Tel Aviv and Jerusalem) primarily were and would remain under effective Israeli control with this outcome, and the Palestinians would be able to have a neo-colonial dependency. Under the Oslo agreements the Palestinian Authority which was established had the same role granted by South Africa to the leadership of the black homelands. Their primary role in South Africa was to ensure the security and safety of the white population, to prevent that notorious terrorist organisation Nelson Mandela and the ANC from harming the people that count. Meanwhile the people that count reserve the 'right to bomb niggers'--that's a constant. But the Arabs don't shoot back, for if they do they become notorious terrorists. And the same is true in the Palestinian bantustan. It was intended that the Palestinian Authority should be brutal, repressive and corrupt. That's exactly what Israel and the US wanted, that's why they liked Arafat. What they're criticising him for is correct, he's supposed to be brutal, corrupt, repressive and control the population, to sustain the neo-colonial dependency. Prime Minister Rahbin was very frank about it, right after Oslo in the Hebrew press he said 'look, if we give security control over to the Palestinian Authority they'll be able to control the population without any concern about the high court, or human rights organisations, or mothers and fathers who may not like what their children are doing', and so on. And if Arafat robbed European money, or his Authority lived in villas in Gaza while the population is starving, that was fine as long as they did their job--they control the population and ensure that the neo-colonial dependency is established, and make sure the people that count don't get harmed. They can bomb the niggers but they themselves don't get harmed. That was the policy of the Clinton administration, and so it continues, until they raise their heads. Then we get one million bullets, helicopters, two hours of firing after a pistol shot, the horror from the West over the fact that the wrong people are being attacked by atrocious actions--and they are undoubtedly atrocious, but the gun fire is the wrong way. That's essentially it, we can choose to disregard it but technically the facts are pretty straight. Questions: We recently had a demonstration (estimates of 400,000 people) calling for no war on Iraq and freedom for Palestine. Do you think, to some degree, we are the Achilles heel of the Bush / Blair alliance, and what effect do you think a successful peace movement in Britain would have on the peace movement in the US? Noam Chomsky: (I'll have to be brief about each of the questions, unfortunately, as they deserve long answers.) The American ideological leaders understand exactly what you're saying and therefore the demonstrations in England were very much played down. The Palestine issue was barely mentioned, if at all. And the reasons are very clear. They know that what you describe is the effect that happens: there's an interaction. There's an active peace movement in the US too. Big demonstrations took place last weekend, there's more planned, and yes that's the Achilles heel. Popular courses and movements don't follow orders. Populations (especially in more democratic countries like ours) can influence and effect policies. That's the reason why there is the suppression of information I described (including the marginalisation of the protests in London), because of the realisation that people who have power--if they choose to organise, act and exercise it--can reverse these processes, both in Palestine and in the case of the war against Iraq. On the role of the UN, let's not mislead ourselves, the UN can act exactly as far as the great powers authorise it to act. That means primarily the US-Britain as kind of a reflexive support. What will it allow them to do, what's the role of the UN? The countries in the UN would like to do more, such as the Non-Aligned Movement. The Arab position representing 80% of the world population is totally different from that of the Western powers. That's usually true but they're given very short shrift. So that's the role of the UN, what we allow it to do. What's in it for Blair? The US is the richest, most powerful country in the world. Britain can be the junior partner, the attack dog when needed, fits very well into British history. Then it gets whatever benefits come from following the big guy. Or it can try to pursue an independent course. That means facing costs, being honest, being a moral force and an effective force, but those are harder traits. Fox, CNN and the rest, is it outright propaganda? Surely not! There are people in the media who have professional integrity, especially reporters on the scene. As what they do gets filtered up through the institutions, the editorial staffs and the forces that operate on them (corporate and state powers) the picture changes. Things get filtered, shaped, organised, sometimes totally excluded. I gave cases of total exclusion, something pretty hard to achieve even in totalitarian States hence quite remarkable when it happens in a free society, where it's done voluntarily. The effect is a highly distorted version of the world. It may not be the one reporters see, but it's the one that works its way through to the system that's presented. Public support for attack on Iraq? That's hard to answer because it depends what the public thinks. The US declared a national emergency in the 1980s because of the great danger to the national security of the US posed by the government of Nicaragua. The President (the brave cowboy in the White House) told us they were only two days march from Texas. The Secretary of State (a moderate in the administration) informed Congress that there is a cancer right here in our land mass, who's following the plans of Mein Kampf and intending to conquer the hemisphere. And if that wasn't bad enough there was a mad dog, Gadaffi, who was 'trying to expel America from the world' as Regan put it, by arming the Nicaraguans so that they could fight us on our home soil. And people were frightened. Now they're being frightened by Saddam, who's undoubtedly a monster. He's nowhere near as dangerous as when daddy Bush, Colin Powell and the rest were coddling him, giving him aid and offering him the means to develop weapons of mass destruction. Just as anyone would! At a time when he was really dangerous, and after his worst atrocities were past--the ones Blair tells you about--Britain and the US continued to support him. You didn't hear about the gassing of the Kurds then. He's still a threat to anyone within his reach though the reach fortunately is much smaller, you can tell from the reactions of the countries in the region. But it's easy to terrify people with the threat Sadam's going to come and get you. And when people are frightened they tend to support the use of violence. Over time (with educational efforts, organising) that reduces and people's actual understanding comes out. And it turns out the main concern of Americans (every poll show this) is the economy. The Bush administration is carrying out a major assault against the population here, the way the same people did under Regan-they're recycled Reganites. The first thing they did under Regan was drive the country into a deep deficit to undercut the possibility of social spending. The Bush administration is doing the same. It worries people, and the last thing the administration wants them to think about (with the 2004 election coming up) is how do you take care of your elderly mother, what's happening to your pension, why is the environment being destroyed, why don't I have health care, why don't I have a job? They want them to huddle in fear because a monster is going to come and get them and therefore they'd better support power, the whole package. So public support looks high but it's extremely thin and can disappear very quickly. The Hebrew press is much more open than the English language press, and there's a very obvious reason: Hebrew is a secret language, you only read it if you're inside the tribe. Like most cultures it's a tribal culture. I don't want to exaggerate, but the English translations on the internet are very revealing and very interesting. Influence of Israel over the US elite? In my opinion essentially nothing. They're very close. People like Richard Perle and others inside the central power group within the US happen to be close to the ultra right wing in Israel. Perle was actually writing position papers for Benjamin Netanyahu (who's to the hawkish side of Sharon) just a few years ago. So there's a lot of interaction but Israel can have no influence on the US. If the US doesn't want them to do something it tells them and they follow orders. We saw that with the pullout from Ramallah a couple of days ago. That same point extends to the power of the Jewish lobby and its backers--technically it's not a Jewish lobby, it's a pro-Israel lobby. A substantial part of the lobby happen to be Christian fundamentalists who in the US are a very important force. The US is one of the most Fundamentalist cultures in the world--the proportion of people who believe that the world was created 6,000 years ago, there are miracles and so on, is astounding. It's a fundamentalist society. It's not institutionalised, so it's not like Iran with institutional fundamentalism, but our culture is highly fundamentalist. The right wing fundamentalist Christian block is very strong and mixed--some are activists in the Solidarity movement, but overwhelmingly it's jingoistic and supportive of Israel, also there's plenty of anti-Semitism. That's not a contradiction. If you read the Book of Revelations (which they take seriously) you'll see why. So you can be both an anti-Semitic Christian fundamentalist and a strong supporter of Israeli oppression and atrocities. It's not a contradiction and it's a real political force. So there is an Israel lobby and it has influence insofar as it is allied to actual US power. Where it runs into any conflict with US power it dissolves. (Another factor is they have enormous influence over the media because they happen to be strong within the intellectual community.) So yes, they're powerful, but I wouldn't exaggerate their power. A lot of what's going on now is aimed at keeping Bush in power. Take the war on Iraq: their timing is critical--the war on Iraq has to take place over the winter, you can't fight in the desert through mid-summer, so it's got to be around February. It can't take place in 2004 as you're in the middle of a presidential campaign. At the time of the presidential campaign they want to make sure they have a hero running for power who has a great victory behind him and maybe the population won't pay attention to what's being done to them, they'll be praising the hero. So the war has to be over by then and there has to be a victory, so it has to be right now. So the tax cut which is already harming the economy, and will be devastating, that's timed to come in after the 2004 election. There is careful planning, but will it work? Is it a war for oil?
Anything in that region of the world has something to do with oil, that's
not even questionable. Iraq has the second largest oil reserves in the
world, whoever controls it will be an extremely powerful force in world
affairs--apart from the fact there are huge profits to be made. And it's
always been clear that sooner or later the US will move to take control
over this. But that's been true for a long time. I don't think that's to
do with the timing, it's in the background.
This is an edited transcript of a live video link-up from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology to public meetings called by the Scottish Palestine Solidarity Campaign, and other groups & organisations, throughout Scotland and the north of England, on Friday 11 October 2002. Scottish Palestine Solidarity
Campaign
Tel: +44 (0)131 538 0257 email:
palsolcam@blueyonder.co.uk
back to top_____________________________________________________ Communities
in Resistance
Over 1,000 villages and small towns in Chiapas, Mexico have declared themselves communities in resistance. Organised together into 38 Autonomous Municipalities in eastern Chiapas, the Zapatista indigenous people are building a new world. Visiting these communities is an inspiring experience. Local people have taken control of the land, schools and health care, and run things through a system of grass-roots democracy. In many communities state officials and private businesses are unable to set foot. The Beginnings The communities in resistance are the fruit of many years of grass-roots organising. This struggle burst into the global headlines on New Years Day 1994 when thousands of armed indigenous people took over the city of San Cristobal de las Casas and the towns of Ocosingo, Altamirano, Las Margaritas and Chanal in Chiapas. The Zapatistas soon withdrew from the towns but in the indigenous countryside the communities in resistance were busy being born. Many estate owners fled and others were forced to give up most of their land, keeping only that which they could work themselves. Local people took over the abandoned land--800 estates, totalling 80,000 hectares, according to a Landowners Association. Some communities in resistance were formed by ejidos, an officially recognised communal land owning system, deciding to go a big step further and openly declare their total rejection of the government and its system. Land and Liberty The communal control of the land is at the heart of the economy in the Zapatista communities. They are totally opposed to the government attempts to introduce privatisation of land through new laws and government agricultural aid and projects. The economy is essentially subsistence agriculture, maize and beans being staples, with coffee also grown for sale. Cattle are raised in some areas. "Our main production project is coffee. We pick the coffee beans together and put them in great big baskets...Then we clean the beans well and put them out to dry in the sun...We do all this together, and when we sell the coffee the money is for all of us..." : A women's collective in Morelia. Some land In the Zapatista villages is worked communally, and some is worked by families. A new development is the promotion of communal vegetable plots, worked by both men and women, and growing a variety of vegetables for local consumption, thus aiming to improve nutrition and health. There are plans to widen the food available by interchanging products between different Zapatista areas. The Zapatistas are determined to resist the introduction of genetically modified crops, which threaten the maize seeds indigenous people have developed over centuries. The Mother Seeds in Resistance project based at the Oventik autonomous secondary school is collecting, storing and safeguarding such seeds. All the shops I saw were co-operatives. I visited a co-op shoe and boot making workshop, a "women in resistance" craft shop and wee co-op village shops where the community members take turns to staff the shop. While people have to
work really hard you get the feeling from seeing people sing and laugh
while they work that it's a big change from the days of the harsh finca
bosses.
Complete Control "Our goal is to govern ourselves--to be independent and autonomous of the state and federal government. We make our decisions communally and we carry them out. All decisions here are made at the General Assembly. Every man and woman over the age of 16 votes in the Assembly, and all of us make decisions together." Zapatista villagers from Morelia describing how in the communities in resistance decision making power lies with the people. The local village meetings also choose "responsables" to carry out particular duties, and to represent that community's view in the Autonomous Municipality. Autonomous Municipalities bring together 30 - 40 villages in the same area. Each Autonomous Municipality has a Council chosen to carry out the day to day administration. This council takes its instructions from the Assembly of the Autonomous Municipality, with representatives from each community. Important decisions affecting a whole Autonomous Municipality are taken by a "consulta". First an assembly in each community discusses the issue, and then sends its rep, mandated to express the view of that community, to the assembly of the Autonomous Municipality. This assembly discusses the issue, but cannot reach a decision there and then. What it does is try to come to a provisional proposal. This proposal is then put to another assembly in each community, for the communities to vote yeah or nay. The final decision is arrived at by a majority vote of all the communities. This system based on control by the grass-roots is expressed by the Zapatista slogan mandar obedeciendo--to govern by obeying. Commandante Tacho explains the nature of The Indigenous Clandestine Revolutionary Committee (CCRI): "All us commandantes were democratically chosen in the community assemblies or by the local 'responsables' who choose the regional 'responsables'. The assemblies choose the delegates of the CCRI because the comrades at the grass-roots have to know who they are choosing, and if these people conduct themselves badly the grass-roots will remove them. Because here we are not talking about the work of an organisation but the work of a people." Healthy Autonomy Before 1994 health in the indigenous communities was very poor, with widespread ill health and preventable diseases. After the insurrection, people in the communities came together to start a network of health centres and health promoters. This process is based on what the communities themselves feel they need. Health promoters from different villages come together to discuss their local health needs. What illnesses are affecting people? What kind of health courses are needed? Later, follow up meetings check how work is progressing. The communities believe that preventing illness is much better than having to take drugs when you're already ill. Thus health education has led to basic but vital changes, e.g. boiling drinking water, improving food preparation hygiene, the construction of well situated latrines and safe disposal of rubbish. I visited two autonomous hospitals, both built by Zapatistas from far and near donating their labour. Vital facilities like the kitchen are staffed on a rota basis by unpaid volunteers from different Zapatista villages, some walking long distances to carry out their work. These hospitals run courses for health promoters. The health promoters then return to their villages and work to develop good health there, often running a small health house with basic medical supplies. Health promoter courses include herbal medicine, pharmacy and dentistry. Despite no government funding and the frequent lack of a reliable electricity and water supply, the autonomous hospitals are striving to expand their services. An autonomous hospital I visited provided a dental service, consultations with a qualified doctor, a pharmacy, a laboratory which undertakes analysis of specimens, and a wide range of herbal medicines and preparations. Herbal medicine is being strongly developed. I attended a graduation ceremony for 13 health promoters who had just completed a course in herbal medicine. At the ceremony each student gave a short speech, telling how they would return to their villages to practise and share their knowledge with their neighbours. This hospital featured a recently built "herboleria" where medicinal plants grown in the hospital's herb garden were processed. In many respects the promotion of herbal medicine is a rebirth of traditional indigenous knowledge. In contrast to the rigid hierarchy of conventional hospitals, the autonomous hospitals have an ethos of sharing and discussion. For example qualified personnel like Doctors share in tasks like cleaning. Those involved recognise that a huge amount remains to be done. Poverty and a lack of basic services like good drinking water undermine good health. The autonomous hospitals still largely lack facilities to deal with operations and severe illnesses and injuries. But after only 8 years the foundations of community-based health care have been created. Autonomous Education Many Zapatista communities have expelled the government teachers and formed their own autonomous schools. The communities choose local people, often teenagers, to be "education promoters", to learn to teach in the autonomous schools. Where possible promoters take a six month course in one of the two autonomous education centres. Most autonomous schools are primaries but there are also autonomous secondary schools, e.g. at Oventik where a young education promoter enthusiastically showed me the computer room, library, and new classrooms under construction. The idea is for promoters to develop a different vision of education of their own making, also reflected in the development of new teaching materials. The children are encouraged to learn and are not punished. Girls and women participate fully. Education is non-competitive. In addition to history, language, maths and the environment, etc. the children learn how to organise themselves, how they can resist an exploitative system, about the rights of children, about the rights of women. Indigenous culture and language is fostered. Children learn about natural medicine, herbs and plants, and about the need to preserve and protect nature. In a Zapatista village I visited, the sounds of singing and music were often heard from the school. One day I saw the children and the teenage education promoter roving the village on a treasure hunt, an exercise which led to the children drawing beautifully coloured maps of the village. Plays were performed before the whole community at fiestas. I had not anticipated that my journey to rebel Chiapas would include playing one of the 3 Wise Men in the school Nativity play! When you see girl pupils excitedly hug their dedicated woman teacher, you understand that this is far from the authoritarian education system we are familiar with. Each school has autonomy, the decisions to do with the running of the school being made locally. Autonomous education is for the adults too. In New Guadalupe Tepeyac in the Lacandona jungle 60 women attended literacy classes 3 times per week, and women participated in a textile workshop for an hour each day, providing a communal break from domestic work. Different adults sometimes also contribute to the learning process, coming into school to speak about a particular topic. "The classroom is a space where the community can share its ideas, everyone sharing their ideas and in this way being equal." The Zapatista communities have decided that it is not acceptable for adults to hit children, and this is banned. In the small community I spent time in, the children and youths worked as well as going to school, carrying firewood and rubbish, picking fruit, etc. I gained the impression they were much more integrated into the community than in the UK. Women Organise "We work collectively. When the organising started everybody, men and women, started to organise. Women left their homes to go to meetings. They didn't do their work at home any more. There was no time for that. In the past we never worked collectively like we do now. Men used to tell women that they had no rights. Now we know that we all have rights. Young people work together--men and women together. Our lives are better now. We are happier now because we all have the right to get out of the house, to work in the projects and to participate in the life of our town." Women and men from the Zapatista community of Morelia. Women from Morelia speak :" We have a Women's General Commission. We meet once a month, here or in other towns. These meetings are only for women. When all the representatives from all the communities come, there are about 150 of us. We had a meeting to draft the rules of the Women's commission. We also had a meeting to discuss the Revolutionary Women's Laws...These laws are very important. They are teaching us about our rights as women. We think that our lives as women are better now. We are happier now because we have the right to do what we want and need to do..." Before the insurrection women didn't have any say. They were often forced to marry someone they hadn't chosen, when still very young, e.g. 13 or 14. They didn't go to community meetings. Girls often didn't go to school, having to stay home and help with the housework. Women didn't play sports or even dance. Now in the Zapatista communities, women participate in the meetings, girls go to school, girls and women dance and play sports. Women hold positions of responsibility in the communities and Autonomous Municipalities. Women are "health promoters" and "education promoters". Women's collectives run shops, organic gardens, bakeries, coffee production, animal raising and many other projects. The Zapatista Women's Revolutionary Laws assert that women have the right to freely choose their partner, the right to freedom from violence by strangers or relatives, the right to occupy positions of leadership in civil and military organisations, and other basic rights. The banning of alcohol in the Zapatista communities was, I was told, largely a women's initiative--women had suffered badly from alcohol-fuelled domestic abuse. It is widely recognised that much still has to be done for women to achieve real equality--but at last things are moving in the right direction. Basic Services The poverty and lack of basic services suffered by indigenous communities in Chiapas is difficult to imagine for people in the "First World". Many communities don't have electricity, or have an erratic and unreliable supply. It is exceptional for homes--which are generally wooden huts with a dirt floor--to have piped water. Often water is gathered from stand pipes in the village, sometimes it has to be carried some distance from a spring. Generally the water has to be boiled before being drunk. Communities do not have sanitation. Cooking is usually done over open wood fires, leading to women especially suffering illnesses from the smoke. The Zapatista communities are striving to improve the quality of life by installing basic services, often with national and international solidarity. Projects include supplying drinking water, generating electricity, sometimes by solar power, building enclosed wood stoves, constructing compost toilets, etc. I worked for a short time on a water project called Kiptik. Together with the local people we were installing a much-needed rain-catchment drinking water system in a small Zapatista community which up till then had no proper water supply at all. Kiptik works along with the Autonomous Municipalities, who decide in which community the project's resources are most needed. Skills and resources are shared to promote self-sufficiency. Community based water committees provide a means whereby the drinking water systems can be maintained. The Zapatistas refuse to work with NGO's who try to impose their own priorities. The Zapatista communities in resistance are among the many communities in Chiapas who are refusing to pay the exorbitant electricity tariffs. Many Zapatista villages sport an electricity supply which has been diverted from a passing electricity line destined for a garrison or government-supporting town. Communal Culture The Zapatista communities have a thriving communal culture. I attended fiestas where hundreds of men, women and children arrived from dozens of different Zapatista villages in that region, with the women often in beautifully embroidered traditional dress. At a big fiesta at the Zapatista Aguascalientes of Morelia a new football pitch was especially created on the edge of the forest for the grand Zapatista football tournament. Our internationalist team battled its way through penalty shoot outs to the semi-finals, before crashing 5-0 to a local team who were probably more used to hard physical activity at 7am than us. My glimpse of the simultaneous women's basketball tournament indicated it was equally hard fought! The five Zapatista Aguascalientes, located in different zones of rebel Chiapas, are large-scale resource centres and meeting places for the communities in resistance, with facilities such as workshops, giant meeting halls, dormitories and many communal buildings. At one remote Zapatista village I visited, the population of 130 or so doubled for the Christmas and New Year celebrations. Giant pots were employed to cook over blazing wood fires. The unfortunate cow provided a welcome change from the usual beans and tortillas as the whole village and their guests sat down to an al fresco feast, under a specially constructed roof over the courtyard of the autonomous school. An afternoon of games saw both children and adults enjoy themselves in competitions where all won a prize, the kids scrambling excitedly for sweets. A short piece of theatre portrayed paramilitaries menacing an indigenous community. Songs were sung, poems declaimed, music played as dozens participated in a cooperatively created cultural extravaganza. The day culminated in dancing under the stars to the local marimba band. On Christmas Day I listened agog to the local catechista, or lay preacher. "Here is the devil", he proclaimed, holding up a drawing that bore a remarkable resemblance to a policeman. "Look how he is stamping on a poor person", denounced the catechista. The devil/policeman's uniform bears the number 666. The catechista holds up a second drawing and explains: "The devil created this monster called capitalism. See its seven heads." These heads are businessmen, bankers, merchants, multinationals, politicians, land owners--and the 7th head is the United States. Religion--but not as we know it--plays an important role in the Zapatista communities. A blend of liberation theology Catholicism and elements of traditional Mayan belief produce a practice which often leads to conflict with the Vatican hierarchy. I attended church services where the reading was followed by political discussion, and saw a church painted with the Virgin Mary and Che Guevara. At the New Year fiesta the anniversary of the 1994 insurrection was celebrated by heartfelt speeches by local people. Beneath a huge banner of balaclavad Zapatista fighters swooping from the mountains to take the towns a woman talks of how they need an end to malaria, an end to death from the curable diseases that along with poverty plague the indigenous communities. She talks of all the animals, wild and domestic, that live in that beautiful area, and how they need to protect them. "We need a world without
exploitation." she insists.
Low Intensity Warfare 110 Zapatista villages and settlements are among many indigenous communities threatened with eviction from Montes Azules Biosphere Reserve, deep in the Lacandona jungle, Chiapas. The Mexican government cites conservation concerns, but the real motive is the economic and strategic interests of transnational corporations and the USA and Mexican governments. A recent report by Global Exchange "Human Rights, Biodiversity and Local Autonomy: The Case of Montes Azules", states that the eviction would serve two purposes: 1) it would attack the heart of Zapatista communities, and 2) grease the wheels for the absolute exploitation of Montes Azules' prolific natural resources. These include biodiversity, oil, uranium and hydroelectricity. Since late July, a new wave of violence has broken out in and around the Lacandona Jungle and around the Montes Azules Biosphere. Five Zapatista villagers have been killed and over 20 wounded in conflicts involving local paramilitary groups. Several Zapatista communities have fled because of paramilitary violence. It is strongly suspected that the paramilitary attacks in the Montes Azules area are linked to the eviction threat against the indigenous communities there. Low intensity warfare is being waged against all the Zapatista indigenous people. In addition to paramilitary attacks, there is harassment by the Mexican army, the state fostering divisions and manipulating conflicts within the communities, selective bribery, building new roads for military and commercial purposes. As the price of the coffee grown by the indigenous communities drops drastically, further increasing poverty, Government agricultural projects create division and promote land privatisation. Over 12,000 people are living as internal refugees, displaced from their own land. The plans to exploit Montes Azules are linked to the Plan Puebla Panama (PPP). Initiated by the USA, Mexican and Central American governments, the PPP aims to generate major capitalist development from Puebla, in southern / central Mexico, to Panama. Peasants are to be forced off the land and into maquiladoras--sweatshop factories, benefiting from special tax concessions. New highways and railways are to open up remote areas rich in natural resources and potential cheap labour to exploitation by the global market. The PPP itself is part of the drive to create the Free Trade Area of the Americas. In recent months, popular opposition has grown faster than the Plan itself. In Veracruz and Chiapas, and in Guatemala and Nicaragua, social and indigenous organisations have united to totally reject the PPP. On August 16th, 15,000 marched against the PPP in San Cristobal de las Casas, in the Chiapas Highlands. Michael Cropley recently returned from six months in Chiapas where he was working as a volunteer human rights observer and on a water project in Zapatista communities. Info / Contacts Zapatista Solidarity:
Chiapaslink, Box 79.
Kiptik water project
Info on Montes Azules
Never Again a World
Without Us--
Edinburgh Chiapas Solidarity
Committee, c/o 17 West Montgomery Place, Edinburgh, EH7 5HA
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& Comic Reviews
Another bumper crop of print creations this time around, and as there's lots of small publications it seems logical to review everything in size order, biggest first, leaving the little ones for last. Next issue I'm planning a whole column of free publications, all contributions and suggestions of publications to include will be gratefully received. Found notes and letters have an enduring appeal and have often appeared in zines and one-off collections previously, Found Magazine |