Elsewhere Today 454
Aljazeera:
Aircraft crashes in DR Congo
THURSDAY, OCTOBER 04, 2007
14:07 MECCA TIME, 11:07 GMT
A cargo aeroplane has crashed in the capital of the Democratic Republic of Congo, killing all on board, according to the Reuters news agency.
The Antonov AN-26, belonging to Congolese airline Africa One, crashed on Thursday morning in the densely populated Kingasani neighbourhood of Kinshasa, near Ndili airport.
Airport officials said 17 people were on board but Michel Bonnardeaux, a spokesman for the UN mission in Congo (Monuc), said the plane was carrying 27 people.
The differing head counts were due to airlines often giving incorrect passenger manifests to avoid taxes, officials said.
The aeroplane, which crashed shortly after take-off, had a Russian crew, according to Russia's ITAR-Tass news agency.
Major Gabriel De Brosses, a spokesman for Monuc, said the mission had sent a rescue team and firefighters to the crash site.
Burning wreckage
Joe Bavier, a local journalist, told Al Jazeera that the aircraft crashed into a densely populated slum, and that there were reports that a market had been hit.
An airport security official who visited the crash site told Reuters that fire crews had experienced difficulty in reaching the burning wreckage.
"There are at least four houses burning, the airplane is burning... There's a lot of smoke and flames, everybody in the houses must be dead," he said.
Papy Kangufu, a resident, told the Associated Press that dense smoke at the crash site was making it difficult to assess the scale of death and injury.
Safety record
Cargo aeroplanes in Congo are often flown by pilots from former Soviet states, but the aircraft are often poorly maintained and overloaded.
DR Congo's air safety record is one of the world's worst and was called an "embarrassment" by the International Air Transport Association (IATA) last year.
Africa One airlines is on the European Union's list of banned airlines.
All but one of the airlines certified by the DR Congo authorities are banned from the EU.
In 1996, 300 people were killed when an Antonov AN-32 crashed after take-off from Kinshasa's main airport and plowed into a crowded open-air market.
Source: Al Jazeera and agencies
http://english.aljazeera.net/NR/exeres/A590AE01-CA6E-4DF4-BF81-EB94C5E76AB4.htm
AllAfrica:
Court Adjourns Killer Drug Case Against Pfizer
Leadership (Abuja) NEWS
3 October 2007
A Kano State high court today adjourned to November 6 a criminal case over an alleged illegal drug test brought by Kano State government against the US pharmaceutical giant Pfizer.
The court ordered the state police to deliver a summons to Pfizer and its nine staff named in the suit, all US citizens living in the United States.
"Due to the absence of the defendants the case is hereby adjourned to November 6. The court registrar should prepare summons for the commissioner of police to serve on all the accused, ... for them to appear in court on the stated date," presiding judge Shehu Atiku said.
The counsel for Pfizer, Anthony Idigbe, insisted that the defendants never received two separate previous summons served them by the court.
Kano state in March filed civil and criminal suits against Pfizer, demanding 2.75 billion dollars (1.94 billion euros) compensation and the prosecution of nine Pfizer doctors for a clinical trial of the meningitis drug Trovan.
The allegedly unauthorized trial was carried out in 1996 on some 200 children at a government hospital during a triple epidemic of measles, cholera and meningitis in which 12,000 people died.
The alleged drug test led to the death of 11 children and various deformities - including deafness, blindness, paralysis and brain damage - in 189 others.
Despite the state government being involved in out-of-court settlement negotiations with Pfizer in London, its justice commissioner Aliyu Umar threatened to have the defendants arrested if they fail to appear on November 6.
"If they fail to appear in court we will have no option but to seek the help of Interpol in arresting them and bringing them to court," Umar said at a press conference after the court sessions.
"We have been involved in negotiations with Pfizer for a possible settlement .. out of court but that does not deter us from pursuing the case to its conclusion pending a conclusive out-of-court agreement," he continued.
Umar confirmed that a four-man Kano state delegation and Pfizer officials met in London on September 28 where they began talks to settle the case out of court, with the Kano officials insisting Pfizer pay the 2.75 billion dollars' compensation they are demanding in court.
He said negotiations in the out-of-court settlement would resume November 17.
Two other courts Wednesday adjourned parallel suits against Pfizer. Another Kano state high court adjourned the Kano state civil case against the company to December 5 to allow some of the lawyers involved to undertake other duties.
And a court in Abuja hearing a federal government lawsuit against the drugs firm adjourned the hearing to October 22 to allow for the serving of court summonses on the Pfizer executive names.
The federal government in July withdrew an earlier lawsuit against Pfizer, only to refile it - whence the need for fresh summonses to be served.
Copyright © 2007 Leadership. All rights reserved.
http://allafrica.com/stories/200710031150.html
AllAfrica:
Pfizer - Protesters Demand Compensation Now
By John Shiklam and Muhammad Kabir, Kaduna
Daily Champion (Lagos) NEWS
4 October 2007
PROTRACTED legal tangles over Pfizer Pharmaceuticals International's controversial clinical tests, of its Trovan in Kano degenerated into angry protests in Kaduna, yesterday.
However, the company has insisted that it did nothing wrong or unethical.
Separate courts in Kano and Abuja yesterday set different dates for more legal arguments in the matter but civil society groups apparently lost their patience as scores of protesters marched on the drugs company's Kaduna plant, chanting angry slogans.
A coalition of civil society groups in northern Nigeria is protesting against delays in payment of compensation to victims of the Trovan trial in Kano State which resulted in hundred of deaths, but federal high court judge Justice Babs Kuewumi set October 22, 2007 for hearing, so that Pfizer may be served.
Already, the pharmaceuticals firm has filed a separate court action to quash the report of a committee which faulted the clinical tests, but indications emerged yesterday that the parties may settle out of court.
At a rally which held at the zonal office of the pharmaceuticals company, on Waziri Ibrahim Crescent , Kaduna, protesters threatened to force the federal government to boycott the sale and patronage of Pfizer products and services in the country if the company fails to compensate victims of its drugs by February 2008.
Northern Civil Rights Coalition, leader, Shehu Sani who spoke at the rally, said that civil society groups in the north would continue to speak out against the injustice by the company until justice was done.
"We are gathering here today as part of the continuation of our struggle against Pfizer and we should always know that Pfizer is the pharmaceutical company that conducted the test trial in 1996 in Kano that brought about the death of over 11 people, while several others were injured."
However, attorney general of Kano State, Aliyu Umar confirmed that there are hopes to settle the matter out of court soon, to reduce the trauma of the aggrieved families. But, in a twist in Abuja also yesterday, federal high court judge Justice Anwuli Chikere set October 8, 2007 for hearing in a motion by Pfizer sealing an order of certiorari to quash the March 2001 report of the investigating committee on the Trovan tests.
Justice Chikere fixed the date aftr hearing counsel in the suit, Chief Anthony Idige (SAN) and Damien Dodo (SAN) for Pfizer and Prof. Yemi Osibajo (SAN) and Mrs. Mariam Uwais for the attorney-general of the federation (AGF).
At the hearing of the motion Osibajo had informed the court that they only got to know of the certoriary processes last Friday and that they made efforts to file a memorandum for a conditional appearance since government needed time to respond to the motion.
Another court in Abuja presided by Kuewumi had earlier yesterday allowed the federal government to serve a summons on Pfizer Inc to defend itself against a $6.5 billion lawsuit over a drug trial.
The federal government and the Kano state government are suing Pfizer for a combined $8.5 billion in damages over the 1996 trial of Trovan.
Pfizer says Trovan saved lives and the alleged victims were affected by meningitis, not Trovan.
Trovan had been tested on 5,000 people before it was used in Nigeria. It was licensed by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration for use on adults a few months after the Kano trial.
It briefly became one of Pfizer's top-selling drugs, with 300,000 prescriptions per month. But authorities imposed severe restrictions on its use three years later when it was found to cause serious liver injuries in some patients.
The federal government's lawsuit was first filed in the United States, but was thrown out in 2005 by a judge who said it should be heard in Nigeria.
The Kano state government's $2 billion civil suit against Pfizer also came up on Wednesday, but was adjourned until Dec. 5, 2007 to allow both sides more time to study the case.
However attorney general of Kano state Umar said he would be leading a delegation to hold talks with Pfizer on Nov. 17, in the U.S, with a view to a possible out-of-court settlement.
Copyright © 2007 Daily Champion. All rights reserved.
http://allafrica.com/stories/200710040117.html
AlterNet:
How Americans Like Their Greed: Supersized
By Joe Bageant, AlterNet
Posted on October 4, 2007
HOPKINS VILLAGE, BELIZE-Right now I am doing something only someone as fucked up as an American-style lefty could possibly do: waiting for Hurricane Dean to strike my rickety shack and masturbating an indignant essay about "the global class struggle."
It seems we Americans as a people are much given to personal indignation, if not national action, excepting perhaps aerial bombing and mass surveillance. But the poor of these Caribbean villages struggling for merest daily sustenance - the money for which is so often doled out by a well-scrubbed white hand much like my own - cannot afford open indignation much less "class struggle."
Meanwhile, two gecko lizards are staring at one another on the wall above my laptop, as the small TV in my cabana blares an update on approaching Hurricane Dean. But the rain hammers the tin roof so loudly it's impossible to hear what is being said, even with the sound turned all the way up. So I watch the hot blonde, the satellite pics and blurry shots of storm tortured palms and hope for the best.
Thanks to Hurricane Dean, for the next few days this Garifuna household of six, the Castillos, is sleeping several to a bed with the Rubio family, including this old gringo, who is most grateful to have drawn an older boy, not a little one still pissing on the sheets. The Rubios are a fishing family, evacuees are from the black "bakkatown" (back of town) shacks out on the reefs, which usually get smashed in such storms, even when not struck by the 'cane itself.
Every plastic jug, pot and pan is filled with fresh water, and we cook the hell out of tortillas, beans, rice and everything else in an already near barren cupboard, stretching food between us and waiting for the power to go out - which also shuts down our meager trickle of a water system - a certainty given that it happens a couple times a week anyway without the help of a storm. So far, there is not a trace of panic. Between the hammering squalls, the sun cracks open brightly, the guy across the road goes back to work on his roof, and the lady of our house, Marzlyn, stands under the mango tree mashing plantains with a 4-foot wooden mortar and pestle. And Hurricane Dean just blew through Jamaica and past the Cayman Islands at 150 miles per hour. Look out, Cancun.
By the second day it's beginning to look like we're far enough south to miss the eye of Dean, if not some torrential rains and high winds. With luck we will not get enough rain to blow out the four-mile dirt road to the main highway (3-foot deep stretches forty feet across are not uncommon this time of year), and high winds will not strip our mango, lime, plantain, soursop and breadfruit trees - important staples - of their not yet ripe fruits.
At the same time we may get nothing more than a severe rain storm, severe here being in a whole other league than in the United States. Picture 8 inches in an hour. Such is middle-class life in the hundreds of Caribbean villages you never see on American TV, even when they are wiped off the map by hurricanes, places with names like Seine Bight and Monkey River Town. Places that provide the groundskeepers and table wipers for the destination resorts such as Caye Chapel island golf course ($200 and up to tee off) where the likes of Bill Gates fly in to enjoy 'round the clock concierge, what has got to be the most challenging windage factor in all of golfdom, and disciplined black or Hispanic attendants to their every whim, in a country where the minimum wage is USD $1.50 for those lucky enough to find employment that actually pays it. All this happens without so much as a whisper of the subject of class on anyone's part, black or white.
The poor cannot afford open indignation, much less class justice. Granted, I tend to see class issues behind every curtain because of the powerless redneck class that shaped me from birth. Anyway, the leopard does not change its spots, so I still smoke, cuss, put too much salt on everything and have enough class anger to burn down every gated community and refurbished Manhattan brownstone and university in the country (sparing maybe Evergreen up there in the Northwest).
But that is because I can afford financially to be angry. Even though I voluntarily live on $4,000 a year, an economic penitent if you will, I am nevertheless among the 6 percent world's rich and white human beings called Americans. Last week my neighbor, a middle aged barrel-chested man working as a resort security guard, sat on my porch and told of his dream of a national union for resort workers. We both looked down from the porch at his wife and daughter and his yet unpaid for house.
Nobody had to say aloud that the risk was just too great, or that the resort owners, U.S. speculators and the foreign shadow governments such as the U.S., (and increasingly, the Taiwanese buying up Belizean property and investing toward a soft landing when they are finally booted from their island stronghold) will never let that happen. Class struggle does not happen in Belize for the same reasons it does not happen in the U.S.: Fear. The global issue of class is however starting to be dealt with, and not-so-small fires of liberation are breaking out all over in Venezuela, Bolivia, Oaxaca, the Philippines, Indonesia ... and other "terrorist states unimpressed by Kevlar-clad GI Joes or the latest or the antics of Paris Hilton. Class will one day be dealt with in America too.
In fact, it's starting to be discussed by people other than internet socialists and old greybeard Jewish lefties in musty apartments in Patterson, N.J. Even the GOP is scouring the bushes for someone among them who can make populist noises into a microphone. And at this point, for reasons too numerous to go into here, they have a better chance of coming up with such a person than the Democrats. Populism is the newest term being used by both parties and the media to avoid the nasty C word, another brilliant cooption of liberal language for conservative purposes. It's hard to argue with the fact that we are all people (except for Muslim Americans, of course).
The term carries echoes "of the people, for the people and by the people." You don't revolt against the ghost of Abe Lincoln. Yet, were there to be a class revolution in the U.S. next week, and the old folks looted the drug stores (I'd be right there with 'em, though probably not for the same drugs) and even if that pack of Gucci whores at the Fed said: "Fuck it, let's spread all the geet we've looted equally among every American," we still will not have begun to touch the core of our national disease, our uniquely American supersized version of a universal one - individual greed. The national mindset of "I want all I can grab for myself and I want it now, even if it has to be on credit," constitutes a much bigger crisis than class in and of itself, and is the driver of our unfolding national catastrophe.
Garden variety personal greed may be a human constant in history - and we certainly have our share of it here in Hopkins - but it has been dangerous only on the part of the rich and powerful. After all, when was the last time selling someone a lame camel, a rotten mango or a quarter ounce of ditch weed oppressed millions? But few civilizations have ever upheld greed as the highest common virtue and civic responsibility as the American culture has. We do this under such false labels as self-advancement, opportunity, success, national economic good, or entitlement, but mostly because "I fucking want one of those!" The wanting is not the problem. The problem is that we get what we want. Or more correctly, we get what we are told to want, and are told to want more of everything from Louis Vuitton purses to Gameboys, depending upon our class, while the families such as the two piled into this household tonight are told to expect nothing. Is American economic culture inherently cruel and oblivious? Well, yes. Are Americans themselves moreover cruel or oblivious? This time last year I would have said that, granting the obvious exceptions to any generalization, yes. I have come to understand that, although we may well be conditioned to obliviousness by our market culture (our culture IS the market), and more recently, kept in a state of fear by a corporately backed criminal leadership, we are by no means especially cruel. In our socially alienated market society, in which we don't need each other so much as we need money to insulate ourselves from each other (what the fuck, poverty and bad taste might be contagious!), we are simply denied any real opportunity for face-to-face, on-the-ground compassion and service to our fellow man. Instead, our altruism is channeled through BIG BROTHER CHARITY INC, the United Way, the Red Cross, the Sierra Club, or any of the American Christian Syndicate's save the children rackets. What changed my mind? Living (as much as possible at least) in Hopkins. But before I again inadvertently unleash a flood of email enquiries regarding the Belizean coast as an expat paradise, let me say this: As I write this, I am watching the influx of fairly rich American assholes escaping the coming economic disaster up there in Gringolia. They are building their sterile fortified communities on either end of the village, stealing and bulldozing many Garifuna-owned acres, including the village's heritage-laden graveyard (illegal as hell, outright brazen theft, but as Old Charlie the Garifuna fisherman told me last night over a beer, "The man has not yet been born in this village who can lead us against this thing that is happening." We've got the same problem, Charlie.
But for every U.S. bloodsucker I've encountered here, I have also met an American, usually a young backpacker - but sometimes a retired couple having what they know will be their last ruggedly romantic adventure together - give their last damned dollar to a villager in need. Sometimes they keep back only enough for bus fair for the 35-mile ride into Dangriga to punch the ATM for cash on their Visa cards, knowing it is going to hurt like hell when they get home to pay the tab on a fixed income. They are never the rich, who don't come into the village, anyway, except to hire a house slave or two.
In my experience the generous and compassionate older Americans are nearly always working class or old hippies. The last American I saw do it was a retired machinist. And sometime in the next few months a Nashville librarian and her husband are coming down to explore the possibility of building a children's library with their own meager savings. When I meet such Americans, I get choked up inside and am released from some part of my cynicism about my country. Little do they know that when they give to others, including jaded old American writers who, as inveterate observers of life, are too often lost in the horrors they have witnessed - even helped create - and have been too unaware of the compassion that often flowers before them.
Helen and Bob and the suicidal Hindu
The Great and Glorious World Money Machine! The Enlightenment's gilded engine of commerce, sprung gloriously and fully formed from the womb of ration! It may have delighted the hell out of Alexander Hamilton and Adam Smith but has created a thousand hells for non-European peoples and still creates new ones daily. Even when the system functions peacefully, assuming it ever has, and to our maximum prosperity, the gauge of which now seems to be obesity (someday there will be a Sumo-style weigh-in to qualify for U.S. citizenship) we are made willing fools, not to mention unconscious instruments of orchestrated global cruelty. One small example: We find ourselves turned into walking signage for the system itself, wearing Nike or Old Navy or Izod shirts made from Indian cotton produced by small farmers forced to use expensive Monsanto pesticides and seed bought on credit (many of whom committed suicide when this mounting debt cost them their traditional family plots of land. If you missed that on CNN, it's because it was never there and never will be). We do not know those Indians' names or the faces of their children. Then again, they do not know ours, which matters not to us because there are umpteen millions of the wretched fuckers over there where life is cheap. We, on the other hand live in the land of the rich and the free, and we've got the Indian cotton T-shirt to prove it. Pass the Doritos. And when the T-shirt is tossed a couple months later, it ends up in one of those rag bales shipped to the Third World. Thus the world traveler is treated to the bizarre sight of a malnourished fellow human lying on the sidewalk in Mexico City's Zocalo - most likely an Indian or mestizo - wearing a "What Happens in Vegas Remains in Vegas" T-shirt. The small grimy hand lifts in supplication for a few pesos. Helen and Bob, vacationing on their credit cards, look away, partly because we've been taught not to stare at the poor (conveniently not noticing inequity) and partly because Americans are at least still capable of inner embarrassment at the inequity they are conditioned to avoid. In the end, though, both the beholder and the beheld have been standardized and depersonalized by the division of labor and mass scale inherent in America's free market capitalism, which Chomsky says, "… historically, we've never honestly practiced even once."
He mi iduhei!
Meanwhile, there's that approaching hurricane … Among the Rubios staying with us until Dean passes is their 12-year-old adopted child, Julian. Through my high kitchen window I can see him joyfully helping his mom remove billowing bedsheets from the clothes line. And when he is not doing that, he is running to help his dad with every task. His adoptive father, Labon, is a stern one, hard as nails by American standards, quick to laugher and affection with his family. But what drives Julian's eager cooperation is his deep admiration for his adopted father, as his model for a strong manhood. Boys think about becoming men here, the same as everywhere else, I suppose, but much more so. I've spent time with the Rubios on a solitary atoll out in the reefs and watching the interplay of Julian and his adopted parents. Normal as it is to them, it remains one of the most beautiful human family experiences I've ever witnessed.
Nor is it particularly unique. His cousin in our household, Kirky, does the same. To Kirky, his smiling, hard-laboring father, Luke, who admonishes me for buying the kids such things as soccer balls, "Spoil the pickney, spoil de man" (pickney is not a derogatory term here among the Garifuna, who were never enslaved), represents for Luke, as Labon does for Julian, all the dignity any man can ever hope to possess. Being allowed to sit among his father and other grown men late into the evenings is an achievement, proof of one more small step toward manhood. During the day when Kirky is not riding herd on the toddlers for his mom, Marzlyn, he voluntarily rakes the sandy yard clean, flat and white because it needs to be done every day, and because it will save his dad an hour of doing the same when he returns home from his job at the resort. And because it is what a grown man does - works, serves and honors family blood. Blood is thick here. When Julian showed up with his family to wait out Hurricane Dean, both boys were movingly overjoyed to see each other because, "He mi iduhei!" (cousin). And from what I can hear through the floorboards of my cabana as they linger in the shade below, they share the secrets of young boy's souls. Then go running off to shoot marbles in the wet hot sand. Neither has ever played an electronic game or has any notion of what a gameboy or an Xbox might be (though I'm sure there must be a few here among those villagers who've returned from working in the States). Tradition, community and clan, though rapidly declining, is the animating force of what's left of the old Garifuna culture that still exist along this coast, mostly in the villages. It's stubborn stuff. Right now I can hear the drumming of a Dugu (the traditional ancestor-based African religion of the Garifuna) coming from the long grass temple on the beach, not because there is a 'cane approaching, but despite that, there is one coming. Luke says they already had a ceremony planned and a little thing like a hurricane threat would never stop them. "The old ones, dey are stubborn!" he laughs. Stubborn or not, all of us feel how the drumming animates this night with the traditional Garifuna spirit. Cultural and spiritual cohesion is a bit easier for the Belizean Garifuna, given there are only a few thousand of them strung along the coastline. Since most families here never get split up or scattered, their human energies remain collective (if for no other reason than sheer necessity) in a manner utterly impossible amid the astounding diversity of the American people. Our only tangible national commonality, regardless of bullshit and rhetoric, is basically the currency and its transaction and accumulation. Consequently, American culture's animating force has always been the financial transaction. Even Tocqueville noted that Americans seemed driven to buy and sell everything they touched, apparently for the sheer hell of it. Two centuries later we find all collective human energies being directed toward purchasing and working to purchase cell phones, beanie weenies, spec houses, Dale Earnhardt crock pots and Korean-made electric ass scratchers, plus storage lockers to cram all this needless stuff into. Even Christianity gets into the act with hundreds of "Christian mortgage companies" and, honest to god, a "faith-based quick lube" auto service in my hometown of Winchester, Va., which doubters may Google in the Winchester Star newspaper. All of which is not exactly a recipe for producing a nation of high-minded intellectuals and altruists. What it has produced is this: 3 billion pounds of money-blinded human meat - 400 million pounds of which is lard - straining under the common corpo-military-financial yoke in order to pay for and consume 30 times what it takes to meet its basic needs. We've so far exceeded basic need that obese 18-year-old kids are dying of heart attacks. And all this at ever-escalating high cost too. Even leisure, relaxing and doing nothing, is among the most expensive damned things in the country. When it comes to leisure, our benevolent system provides two whole weeks a year (count 'em, folks!) but only to those with job security and the "discretionary income," left on the plastic to cough up for synthetic experiences (hallucinations, really) at "leisure destinations," such as the expensive gringo resort just outside this village. Last night an old expat owner of a modest beachside inn here told me of a tourist guest who had changed clothes in the car on the way down, then stepped out of it in a leopard bikini, spike heels and dark glasses. It's no mystery why she equated rustic little Hopkins Village with Cannes. In the travel industry's hallucination generating department, anyplace with sand and sun is Cannes, or at least Maui.
If we only had a brain
With the thoughts you'd be thinkin'
You could be another Lincoln
If you only had a brain!
-Dorothy, Wizard of Oz
The truth, however, is that, regardless of income, most Americans work too much and have too little time to experience true leisure, let alone time to develop a genuine intellectual and inner life. And that is the underlying horror of the consumer state and the source of that haunting sense of meaningless amid all the white noise and bright lights and toys. No functional sustaining interior life. No private mind-soul garden to cultivate, no psychospiritual inner home. No stable center of being. That sounds arrogant as hell, but I'm saying it anyway. If we had such a thing as a cohesive national moral and intellectual life, we surely wouldn't be the society of engorgement, not to mention the international thugs that we now are. Or at least not as much so.
But very few Americans, not even university professors, book editors, authors, theologians, all sorts of people one would expect to have a thriving intellectual life, have one. Zilch. Sure, some study rigorously, and possibly as many as a quarter of Americans buy, read and discuss "important books" and go see "important movies," (which I don't believe exist, but that's another matter). However buying and reading the best books does not necessarily, or even usually, have much to do with an interior intellectual life, the real kind that comes from spending countless unencumbered hours alone thinking about the world in our own internal and completely personal language, contemplating what we and our fellow man experience, thus bringing forth the unique elements of individual human comprehension and discovery. There is a word for the ongoing interplay and cultivation of these things, the cultivation of this mind-soul garden - spiritual. Predictably enough, the cartel that provides for every human need from Cheetos to iPods and self-help videos, is willing to sell us an intellectual and spiritual life, too. So we buy and read those "substantive" books, most often written by people working too hard at writing substantive books to experience much of the world's substance. Buying and reading books, which damned few Americans do anyway, is the mark of the "thinking classes." And a degree certifying they've read the state-sanctioned cannon for their narrow slot in the economic machinery certifies them as intellectuals. No room exists in the machinery for an Eric Hoffer, Thoreau or even an Aristotle, none of whom could get published today. Sorry Ari, no profitable demographic segment. Gandhi, however, might find a niche with the New Age crowd, providing he threw in a bar of Ayurvedic soap with each book sold.
Needless to say, good books are delightful and profound departure points to new avenues for an enlightened mind. It would be hard for a Western person to imagine an intellectual life without them. But they are certainly not the cause of one. Of the three living persons I admire most for their deep, graceful intellectual life and insight, two are famous, well-paid and surely among the most well-read people anywhere. But the third is an all-but-illiterate old Garifuna fisherman. Our practical relationship is based mostly on my sharing a few groceries and beers during the off tourist season when he cannot work as a fishing guide. As a younger man, he saw death and storms at sea, suffered daily abuse and insult under the British colonials who once ran this country and even today spends half of each year wondering where his next meal is coming from. Yet he manages to retain piercing intellect and insight (often beyond words), and though he is visited like the rest of us by the soul's miseries, he lets joy blow through his inner self as casually as the Caribbean breeze in which he's lived his entire life. There is much to be learned from the poor, so much in fact that we should be their students, not they ours. I've been told that Einstein once said that intelligence equals the ability to find happiness. Some Einstein scholar will surely write me that Al said no such thing. If not, then he should have. If happiness and moral rightness were to be found within the self, then as the most self-centered people on earth, we would be the happiest and most enlightened. And if "American style individualism" were the hallmark of freedom, there would be no Department of Homeland Security, no government satellites scanning every single email we send and we would be free to visit Cuba.
Another round of elections are coming up both here in Belize and in America, and the serious political junkies at both ends of the Caribbean (in other words, the suckers who believe "change can be effected within the system) are all worked up into slobbering fits. Belizeans of late have gotten slightly more from the system, a modest social security program, and, at long last, free school books for the nation's kids, written by the same incompetents who made fortunes on royalties from the old ones in a political fixed textbook publishing racket, similar to our own corporate one in the U.S. But despite having a far freer and more varied press than the U.S. (in a rather strange twist, lack of libel laws actually works for the people's interests most of the time) Belizean national elections are the same as those in the U.S. This is to say an elite game of political musical chairs, except that the stakes are astronomically higher for the princes of Gringolia. The upper-level candidates in both countries are wealthy and visible elites at the service of invisible ones who prefer to remain that way, thank you. The top dogs have pictures of themselves with prime ministers and presidents on their walls. As a veteran Washington reporter once told me, "If you are the kind of politico who likes pictures on the office wall of yourself with shaking hands with presidents, you ain't a player, you're just a useful pawn to a bigger pawn." It doesn't take much to be useful and get one of those photos. I have a framed photo of myself with Bill Clinton - yes, I was suckered into the Clinton personality cult - and all I did was deliver a couple of fake "foster children" to a campaign appearance so he could mug with them for the press. I long ago took the photo off my wall and buried it in the back of my files. But I'm probably going to hell for it, anyway.
In the end, no political personality cult or party, no "economic system," no ism, Marxism, capitalism nor even the most compassionate socialism is going to satisfy that inner void, that vacuum that is the source of the phenomenal greed that enslaves Americans. The void we keep stuffing with noise and spectacle and the gulag-made goods that produce so much of the world's misery because we are told to do so 24 hours a day. Believe it or not, as I write this and watch footage, Hurricane Dean's barreling our way, and frightened villagers trundle bed clothing and food toward more affluent neighbors with concrete houses or wait for the last bus to hurricane-proof Belmopan. George Foreman flickers on the screen trying to sell me a smokeless electric grill, followed by a gringo-targeted Nationwide ad for increased home insurance. There is no geographical escape from America. But there is a spiritual one, sometimes born of intellect, but always nourished by compassion, which in truth does not seek to escape the world, or to own the world, but to embrace it for what it can teach us in the brief span we are granted that opportunity. When it comes to filling our disastrous national void, not to mention saving our own asses from ecological and economic disaster, we can learn more from the world's poor than they can ever learn from the "American experience," or gain from the "American lifestyle" or national ethos of greed.
Dog fights, scorpions and paradise
This little village in this little country is not paradise, not even close. This is the land of the agonizing sand flea, the scorpion and the swarming sting rays of the night tides. It is a place where no wallet can be opened in a store without a dozen covetous eyes locking onto its contents and where dogs fight brutally in the yards. Last month our dog Hero killed a neighbor's dog in front of the whole family. And amid the screaming and crying, not even the powerful-bodied Luke could break Hero's death grip on the intruding dog's throat, brutally demonstrating the truth of planetary flesh from Palestine, to the Sudan, and even in America for the several millions in the unseen ghettoes of the national machinery. This is also a place where, sooner or later, with no small help from global warming, the village's tiny houses will be blown off their stilts and tumble into a hurricane's deep "surge waters," rolling over once, maybe twice, before becoming a pile of splintered boards, while the palm frond houses of the poorer families are atomized into grassy shreds amid the airborne cooking pots, baby clothing and cheap Taiwanese boom boxes. It also is where hypodermic needles turn up on the beach (hopefully illegally dumped medical waste drifted down from Mexico), where cocaine is dirt cheap for the minority who use it and where at least a couple of crackheads dwell and several more drift back and forth between here and Dangriga, 35 miles up the only paved road on this side of the country.
Yet the village is still a place where matrons bake coconut birthday cakes, kids shoot hoops by the sparse streetlight and adolescent couples walk bashfully holding hands under swaying palms and a silver pie pan moon. Since I started this, Dean has become a cat five 'cane. So the whole family has packed for that mountain-bound bus that won't be here because it is stuck in the already traffic-hammed road to hurricane-proof Belmopan. Generously, the brawny resort guard, who lives in a concrete house next door, has taken our family in for the night. Like I said, it ain't paradise. Just a spot on the planet where a man has time think and peck at a keyboard and pour bedtime orange juice for sleepy, well-scrubbed kids just before the moon comes up. Dean will come and go. But some things are eternal.
Note: Hurricane Dean spared the village of Hopkins entirely, and miracle of miracles, even the power and water were back on by noon next day. It may be simply my writer's imagination, but I could swear there was a knowing twinkle in the eye of the old Dugu drummer down at the vegetable stand this morning.
Joe Bageant is author of the book Deer Hunting With Jesus: Dispatches from America's Class War. (Random House Crown), about working class America. A complete archive of his online work, along with the thoughts of many working Americans on the subject of class may be found on his website.
© 2007 Independent Media Institute. All rights reserved.
View this story online at:
http://www.alternet.org/story/60900/
Asia Times:
Taliban poised for a big push
By Syed Saleem Shahzad
Oct 5, 2007
KARACHI - Following the success of their 2006 spring offensive, the Taliban were expected to make even further gains in Afghanistan this year. It never happened, due to strong pre-emptive action by Western coalition forces in Afghanistan and Pakistani military action against Taliban bases in the Pakistani tribal areas.
However, plans for a mass uprising on the back of renewed insurgency activity are far from shelved, and could be implemented with vigor at the end of the Islamic holy month of Ramadan next week, with tens of thousands of freshly trained men pouring into Afghanistan.
The key lies in Pakistan's tribal areas, from where the Taliban draw recruits, have training camps and run their logistics.
The Pakistani Taliban and Islamabad signed peace agreements in February 2005 and September 2006, under the terms of which the Pakistani Army cut back its troop levels in the tribal areas in return for militants stopping their attacks on the Pakistani Army and forces in Afghanistan.
In July the Taliban abandoned the treaties following the storming of the radical Lal Masjid (Red Mosque) in Islamabad by government troops. The mosque was an outspoken supporter of the Taliban movement and many militants used it as a sanctuary.
Since then, the Pakistani military has re-engaged militants in the tribal areas, severely choking their supply arteries.
In the past 10 days, however, militants have launched at least nine carefully planned operations against security positions in both North Waziristan and South Waziristan, and in towns in North-West Frontier Province (NWFP), including Bannu and Dera Ismail Khan, and in the Swat Valley.
As a result, all security operations against the Taliban and their al-Qaeda colleagues in the tribal areas have stopped, and by all accounts the army is running scared. It is estimated that Pakistan has 100,000 troops and 1,000 military posts along the Pakistan-Afghanistan border.
From the military's perspective, the situation is exacerbated by a political hiatus in Islamabad. President General Pervez Musharraf stands for re-election in Saturday's presidential polls, after which he is expected to step down as military head and prepare over the next few months for a civilian consensus government, most likely with former premier Benazir Bhutto. No new plans to tackle the problems in the tribal areas can be expected until this situation is settled.
The Taliban and their supporters now have the breathing space to replenish stocks and prepare for their new push into Afghanistan. It is envisaged that at least 20,000 fully trained fresh men from at least 16 entry points along the Durand Line that separates Pakistan and Afghanistan will be sent into Afghanistan.
According to people who spoke to Asia Times Online and who are familiar with the planning, the main points will be Noshki (in Balochistan province), Ghulam Khan (North Waziristan), Angur Ada (South Waziristan), Shawal (North Waziristan), and Chitral and Bajuar agencies.
The new forces will go to the front lines in Afghanistan in the southeastern provinces of Ghazni, Khost, Gardez, Paktia and Paktika, and many of them will be trained suicide bombers.
The action has already picked up in Ghazni. On Wednesday, hundreds of Taliban occupied the remote district of Ajristan, killing at least two policemen and forcing the rest to flee. The Taliban have occupied numerous other remote areas. Wednesday's attack came a day after a suicide attack on a police bus in the capital, Kabul, killed 13 people.
The strategy to attack the Pakistani Army is being orchestrated by a cabal of former army officers who have joined up with the militants in Waziristan. (See Military brains plot Pakistan's downfall Asia Times Online, September 26). They draw inspiration from the guerrilla strategy used by Vietnamese General Vo Nguyen Giap against the French and the Americans. Given the backoff by the Pakistani military, their plans are working, at least for now.
Military under attack
From the daring attacks on Frontier Constabulary forts in Bannu in NWFP, where fresh hostages were taken, to suicide attacks on military and paramilitary convoys in the Swat Valley, the militants' intelligence network is doing its job.
In all cases, the targets have been accurately pinpointed, and the operations carried out according to plan. The attacks have swiftly reached into the Swat Valley and send a clear message to the commanders in their barracks in Peshawar to pull back their troops or face the music.
Indeed, the latest offensive against the army has sent shockwaves through military headquarters in Rawalpindi, and it is even feared that they could spread to big cities such as Karachi, Lahore and the capital Islamabad.
Pakistani officials have admitted to more than 1,000 of the country's forces being killed in the tribal areas. Large-scale kidnappings also have a demoralizing effect on troops. To date, more than 500 troops have been abducted in different operations, the most recent being the capture of 22 in Bannu. Some of them have been swapped for Taliban prisoners, while some are still in captivity.
This week, while in the United States pleading for more time in taming the tribal areas, Pakistan's Foreign Secretary Riaz Muhammad Khan acknowledged his country had an "image problem".
Clearly it's more than just image. Pakistan's reaction - or inaction - in the tribal areas will have a direct bearing on the Taliban's offensive in Afghanistan, and the longer its troops are on the defensive, the better the chances of the Taliban.
Syed Saleem Shahzad is Asia Times Online's Pakistan Bureau Chief. He can be reached at
saleem_shahzad2002@yahoo.com
Copyright 2007 Asia Times Online Ltd. All rights reserved.
http://www.atimes.com/atimes/South_Asia/IJ05Df01.html
Clarín:
Octavio Paz y el debate sobre "Piedra de sol"
Es uno de los poemas más discutidos y sorprendentes de la literatura de América latina. En "Piedra de sol", publicado hace exactamente medio siglo, Octavio Paz invoca la libertad moral y la alegría inolvidable de lo efímero en más de quinientos versos en los que se manifestaba la vanguardia pero, también, el poder de la poesía clásica.
VICTOR MANUEL MENDIOLA Editor y escritor mexicano
29.09.2007 | Clarin.com | Revista Ñ
Hace exactamente cincuenta años, el 28 de setiembre de 1957, el Fondo de Cultura Económica publicó Piedra de sol. Al poco tiempo, en una voz unánime, quienes habían lamentado el giro surrealista de los últimos libros de Octavio Paz y los que lo habían justipreciado o encomiado, coincidieron sin ninguna duda en que había surgido un nuevo gran poema comparable desde ese momento con Muerte sin fin de José Gorostiza o con Altazor de Vicente Huidobro.
Todos o casi todos, viejos y jóvenes, exquisitos y rudos, nacionalistas y cosmopolitas, se sintieron compañeros de viaje del poema de 584+6 versos donde corrían en una prolongada órbita cósmica lo mismo los días del placer y el amor que los de la soledad y la guerra (esta composición adivinaba de manera intensa los tiempos por venir a finales de la siguiente década). Todos o casi todos advirtieron que el poema reproducía el complejo tiempo presente y que esta reproducción expresaba sus emociones y sus ideas; sintieron que ese cuerpo verbal redondo era contemporáneo y se sintieron contemporáneos de él.
¿De dónde provenía el poder magnético de este texto? ¿Qué hacía de él una pieza tan atractiva? ¿Por qué los críticos bajaron la guardia? No es fácil decirlo ya que Piedra de sol es un texto contradictorio -como el olmo que da peras. En el poema viven mundos y corrientes que en el siglo XX difícilmente podían convivir de manera plena y armoniosa. En Piedra de sol está vivo el surrealismo en una imaginación poderosa y desbordada que Paz mismo llama -en una línea del propio texto- "sigo mi desvarío", pero también encontramos despiertas una conciencia y una ética revolucionarias -incomprensible para el dogmatismo revolucionario- que prefieren la trasgresión: el crimen de los amantes suicidas, el incesto de los hermanos como dos espejos, el pan envenenado, los amores feroces.
En Piedra de sol oímos la amplitud de la prosa pero también escuchamos la escalera elevada del endecasílabo con su estela de arquetipos renacentistas, barrocos y simbolistas. En Piedra de sol se manifiesta la vanguardia pero también se despliega el espiritismo decimonónico y la imantación mitológica clásica. Este férreo discurso turbulento es la modernidad pero nunca deja de ser la tradición. Y lo que es más importante, esta escritura tan literaria, llena de ensimismamiento y referencias cultas, corre con urgencia hacia afuera de la literatura buscando la comunicación y el mundo del aquí y el ahora.
Less Murray, en otro contexto pero aludiendo a la misma idea, escribió: "Nada es dicho hasta que es soñado en palabras y nada es verdad si sólo es comprendido en palabras". Quizá por esta razón el poema de Paz está colmado de poesía en segundos, de frases libertarias, a veces casi de eslogans publicitarios que cualquier joven podría escribir en un muro de la ciudad o en su cuaderno: "la hora centellea y tiene cuerpo", "tu vientre es una plaza soleada", "todos los nombres son un solo nombre", "El mundo nace cuando dos se besan". Piedra de sol capturó la atención de los jóvenes rebeldes de finales de los años cincuenta en aquella hermosísima Ciudad de México donde todo ocurría como si no pasara nada y que los adoradores del cambio llamaban ciega y despectivamente un rancho grande. Volvió a tomar el ánimo de los jóvenes en rebelión durante el 68 y en los setenta. Y de nuevo los conmovió en los ochenta y noventa cuando cayó el muro de Berlín, hecho que le daba la razón a Paz en su lúcida crítica política.
Aunque el poema está organizado en las repeticiones de un ciclo estelar, el corazón de sus versos invoca la libertad moral y la alegría inolvidable de lo efímero. Piedra de sol es un poema del tiempo que borra a los hombres, y del instante, del eterno instante amoroso, que nos despierta por fortuna a casi todos a "...las felicidades inminentes".
La primera edición
Piedra de sol se terminó de imprimir el 28 de setiembre de 1957. El FCE tiró 300 ejemplares dentro de la colección Tezontle. Era una edición a la rústica, numerada y autógrafa. En su composición se usaron tipos Baskerville de 10: 12 y 14:18 puntos. Un diseño clásico y muy amable para la lectura, como todos los del FCE en esa época y durante muchos años hasta hace poco. El cuidado del volumen estuvo a cargo del legendario Alí Chumacero. Se nota su mano en la limpieza y equilibrio tipográficos.
José Emilio Pacheco, uno de los protagonistas de la particular historia de Piedra de sol, ha descrito varias veces la edición original, destacando la presencia de una nota explicativa al final del libro -Hugo J. Varani da este texto, en su bibliografía crítica de 1983, como de Ramón Xirau-, elaborada por el propio Paz sobre las referencias precolombinas y el significado del número de versos del largo poema. En esa nota el lector podía comprender la imagen que adornaba la portada: la cifra 585 en la numeración maya. El lector también podía entender gracias a ese texto que los dibujos que cuelgan como viñetas al principio y al final del poema corresponden, uno, al Día 4 Olín (movimiento), y el otro, al 4 Ehécatl (viento). La explicación deja claro que el número de versos del poema "es igual al de la revolución sinódica del planeta Venus...", que era una cuenta que llevaban los antiguos mexicanos.
La publicación de Piedra de sol se anunció en un cuadro de novedades editoriales del FCE en la Gaceta número 38 de octubre de 1957. Entre los libros que también aparecían en ese año se hallaban Yo soy mi casa de Guadalupe Amor, Manual de zoología fantástica de Jorge Luis Borges, el Tomo IV de las Obras completas de Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, Las estaciones y otros poemas de Sara de Ibáñez y los Tomos IV y V de las Obras completas de Alfonso Reyes. Al año siguiente, en enero de 1958, la Gaceta del FCE anuncia en su catálogo de obras recientes la plaquette en los siguientes términos:
Octavio Paz: Piedra de sol. 48 pp. Paz es uno de los mejores poetas mexicanos. Este libro este fue considerado unánimemente por la crítica como la mejor obra publicada en 1957.
Hostilidad y simpatías
De acuerdo con esta noticia y avistada la publicación del poema 50 años más tarde, uno podría pensar que Piedra de sol fue un libro sin ningún problema, que salió a la luz en un ambiente tranquilo y favorable, que su rotunda presencia tendría que estar precedida por una cadena de aceptaciones unánimes. Pero no fue así. Surgió en un contexto literario picado, donde lo mismo había simpatías y adhesiones que distancia y hasta hostilidad hacia precisamente la obra de Octavio Paz. Y lo que es más importante, la primera edición de Piedra de sol estuvo acompañada por una disputa que se remontaba a muchos años antes y que de alguna forma sigue viva.
Desde su regreso a México, a finales de 1953, después de nueve años de ausencia, la figura literaria del autor de El arco y la lira no había dejado de ser atacada. Las embestidas provenían no sólo por el cambio de sus convicciones políticas, expresadas sobre todo en el texto que publica en la revista Sur, donde Paz se suma abiertamente -escribe una nota de presentación de los testimonios de David Rousset- a la denuncia de los campos de concentración de la URSS, sino por su pensamiento poético y la estructura de sus poemas en una relación personal y de reflexión estética con la vanguardia artística francesa y con sus principales protagonistas.
La publicación de ¿Aguila o sol? (1951) y de Semillas para un himno (1954), plenos de hallazgos y pensamientos pero en un entrelazamiento íntimo con el surrealismo, había despertado, por un lado, la nostalgia del primer Paz, del Paz joven, del poeta de A la orilla del mundo (1942); y por el otro, severas críticas a su escritura más reciente, al Paz maduro, al autor de ¿Aguila o sol?. En 1955, en la revista Metáfora de julio-agosto, Jesús Arellano en un balance de la poesía joven de entonces escribió: "Octavio Paz, iniciado en la revista Barandal es, por ahora, la voz más completa y llena de inquietudes; inquietudes que lo han llevado, el tiempo lo decidirá, a un retroceso respecto de su obra anterior, obra ésta de grandes proyecciones y mejores enfoques líricos, despierta a todas las trascendencias humanas".
Casi un año más tarde, en 1956, también en la revista Metáfora, Elías Nandino elogiando, en un lenguaje pomposo, Tarumba de Jaime Sabines, lanza estas frases memorables: "Como poeta y por mi amor a la poesía, siento orgullo cuando entre nosotros hace presencia uno nuevo que canta sin careta, sin posturas, sin pretensiones intelectuales (la plaga que extermina)...", y en el siguiente párrafo culmina: "Sí, poeta Sabines: usted ya ha encontrado su camino. Quizá la provincia lo preserve de este languideciente oleaje surrealista que aún contamina".
Precisamente Elías Nandino en la revista que funda y dirige, Estaciones, intenta montar una campaña crítica contra el surrealismo y detrás de ella contra la poesía de Paz. El número 1 de Estaciones, tiene un gran interés porque ahí encontramos un ensayo de cuestionamiento del surrealismo de Salvador Echavarría, "Derroteros de la poesía contemporánea", y al mismo tiempo una antología y traducción del surrealismo preparada por César Moro que se publicó por primera vez en 1943, tres años después de la Exposición Internacional de Surrealismo, organizada en la Ciudad de México por André Breton y el propio Moro. La inclusión de esta antología es sin duda alguna un homenaje al poeta peruano recién fallecido pero también tiene el propósito de ilustrar las críticas de Echavarría.
"Derroteros de la poesía contemporánea" presenta un ensayo que, sin dejar de tener puntos interesantes, revela una incapacidad para comprender que los surrealistas comparten con los románticos y los simbolistas los mismos valores y que representan por tanto una fase más desarrollada de la rebelión subterránea iniciada un siglo atrás. Es divertido ver como Echavarría admite "los encantados dominios del sueño" en los poetas decimonónicos pero no los aprueba bajo una forma más radical en los autores del siglo XX. En una frase rotunda afirma: "El error de los surrealistas consiste en creer que existen puentes entre la vigilia y el sueño..." .
Unos meses más tarde, en el otoño de 1956, Estaciones vuelve a cargar contra el surrealismo con tres artículos. Uno, de nuevo, de Salvador Echavarría, otro de Salvador Reyes Nevares y otro más de Elías Nandino. En su segunda colaboración sobre el tema, "Surrealismo y babelismo", Echavarría reitera el razonamiento de que la comunicación poética sólo ocurre en la conciencia y suelta una frase que adivina aludiendo no sólo la postura de Octavio Paz sino el lema de un famoso libro futuro.
Echavarría después de muchas afirmaciones virulentas como "Si un cadáver pudiese expresarse con la pluma, escribiría poemas como los de Breton y sus secuaces...", formula de un modo exacto y sin quererlo una divisa estética: "Los surrealistas le piden peras al olmo". En ese mismo número, en el artículo "Después del surrealismo... ¿Qué?", de Elías Nandino, menos violento pero mucho más limitado en su intento por descalificar el sueño y las asociaciones inesperadas, opone a la imaginación las obligaciones de la realidad, dando por un hecho que la fantasía no puede penetrar en el mundo de las cosas y las necesidades. Sugiriendo el enfrentamiento de la guerra fría y lamentando las consecuencias del desarrollo científico, Nandino aconseja: "Ante el asomo de este trágico momento no es justo que el poeta conteste con diluvios de fantasía, su responsabilidad es otra".
La dualidad del poema
¿Qué nos ha permitido ver la irritación hacia el surrealismo y los poemas de Paz relacionados con esa estética así como qué nos ha descubierto el giro que significó Piedra de sol?
En Octavio Paz: el sentido de la palabra, Ramón Xirau sostiene: "El spleen de Baudelaire, la creación de un mundo estético que sustituye al mundo real (Mallarmé o Rilke), la búsqueda de lo inalcanzable en El castillo de Kafka, el afán desenfrenado de los surrealistas por encontrar en el inconsciente la unión de los opuestos, son todas ellas actitudes de desamparo... Entre esta soledad que ya no es la del petrarquiano "feliz solitarius", sino soledad de desolación y el deseo de comunión, se sitúa la obra de Octavio Paz. No es otro el tema central de La estación violenta ni es otro el de Piedra de sol". Xirau comprende que el famoso poema sólo podía ser alcanzado y resuelto en la corriente que desemboca en el surrealismo.
En Una obra maestra: Piedra de sol, publicado en La cultura en México en setiembre de 1965, José Emilio Pacheco, después de mostrar el desarrollo del poema en sus momentos esenciales y descifrar las múltiples referencias del texto, concluye que esta pieza no era un regreso a la poesía juvenil, como quisieron ver algunos, ni una renuncia al surrealismo, como sostuvieron otros, sino "la afirmación intransigente de la imaginación, el amor y la libertad", es decir, la puesta en acción del ideal libertario de la vanguardia, no del procedimiento de la escritura automática, representada por Breton.
Xirau y Pacheco también apuntan claramente el carácter circular del poema y las connotaciones cósmico míticas de las cifras que lo acompañan. Xirau subraya la relación estrecha de estas cuentas con el mito del eterno retorno. Otros críticos han destacado el rol esencial que juega en el poema la dialéctica establecida entre la fijación de un instante y su disolución en el flujo del tiempo. A propósito de este punto, Pere Gimferrer escribió: "De lo que se trata aquí es de asediar, de poner cerco al instante, en busca de su fijeza en el poema, que nos revelará nuestro verdadero ser". Asimismo, en el entendimiento del poema desempeña un papel principal visualizar que su desarrollo implica la operación de varias dicotomías gobernadas por la oposición mito / historia que implica, a su vez, la dualidad mundo precolombino / modernidad. Desde el libro ¿Aguila o sol? el lector podía advertir la acción de esta dualidad. Manuel Ulacia muestra que "Lo moderno en este poema, que incluye la incorporación de las lecciones que le dieron a Paz el modernismo norteamericano, el surrealismo y el barroco, aparece conciliado con la valoración estética e intelectual del universo mesoamericano".
Un mundo autosuficiente
Quizá valdría la pena agregar que el pensamiento dual de Piedra de sol tiene una fuerte correspondencia con el ritmo bimembre que impulsa desde el comienzo al poema: "Un sauce de cristal" -una pequeñísima pausa dada por la coma y el sentido- "un chopo de agua". Es cierto que el texto está formado por endecasílabos perfectos y que poseen una gran fluidez lograda gracias a los encabalgamientos y al uso predominante del compás italiano, pero también es cierto que la cesura de muchos de los versos producen una dualidad sonora, un diástole y un sístole en el corazón de la escritura. Asimismo, en la red de dualidades que gobiernan al poema hay una imagen doble central que aparece y desaparece: el árbol que se vuelve río, el río que se vuelve árbol. Dos palabras imanes en la obra de Paz. En el fondo de esta metamorfosis me parece que está la idea también doble de la oscilación compleja que existe entre la quietud y el movimiento. En este sentido Piedra de sol tendría guardado como una de sus semillas germinales el enunciado sintético de Villaurrutia: "Vámonos inmóviles de viaje" (otra manera de acercarse a la dicotomía quietud / movimiento).
También cabría señalar que este texto magnético es un mundo autosuficiente que no necesita inevitablemente de otros mundos para significar. Paz mismo le había dicho a Silvia Cherem: "Siempre he creído que la poesía no es un documento sino una creación...". Sin embargo, nunca deja de tener relevancia, aunque tratemos de evitarla, la cercanía de los momentos biográficos de la vida con la obra. Desconocerlos no nos empobrece, pero saberlos casi siempre nos enriquece. Manuel Ulacia ha explicado en su libro el alcance que tuvo en la infancia de Paz el encuentro con la indígena Ifigenia y, más tarde, con una pirámide en Mixcoac. De la misma forma, en los años cuarenta la amistad de Paz con los surrealistas y con Breton marca no sólo su obra; es un hecho que altera su vida.
De igual forma podríamos adivinar que en los años cincuenta el proceso de disolución de su matrimonio con Elena Garro y el hallazgo de Bona Tibertelli de Pisis serán fuerzas que encontraran en Piedra de sol una expresión. Al leer este poema es imposible no advertir el recuerdo de acontecimientos tumultuosos y, al mismo tiempo, el resplandor de un interior agitado.
Por último, habría que añadir que las enconadas críticas a la presencia del surrealismo en los poemas de Paz y a la capacidad que éste tenía de absorber ideas y recursos nunca comprendieron que Paz no fue un surrealista -como tampoco lo había sido Villaurrutia en su momento- ni estaba fuera de la "órbita mexicana" como pretendía la inocente y tonta opinión lírico nacionalista.
Paz, auténtico poeta crítico, sometió a esta tendencia a una discusión. Tomó unos ingredientes; desechó otros. Se quedó con el ideario libertario; descartó las generalizaciones del espontaneísmo, que hoy daña a nuestra poesía tan gravemente. Dijo sí pero nunca dejo de decir no en el más puro estilo de la tradición mexicana que se deja seducir más no apantallar. Así ocurrió en plena explosión vanguardista con los Contemporáneos. Así volvió a suceder con Paz. Este rasgo en el poeta mexicano adquirió una forma intensa pero no es de él, proviene de la rara sincronización que caracteriza a la poesía mexicana y que los supuestos poetas "críticos", igual que los nacionalistas líricos, no han siquiera adivinado.
Copyright 1996-2007 Clarín.com - All rights reserved
http://www.clarin.com/suplementos/cultura/2007/09/29/u-03011.htm
Guardian:
The atheists' revolt
Nigel Willmott
October 4, 2007 10:30 AM
Here's the scenario. The church has overwhelming social and cultural power and influence through its incorporation into state institutions, its performance of ceremonies such as marriage and funerals, delivery of education and participation in legislative councils. But many of its adherents are unhappy at the failure of the church to live up to its precepts, or to include everybody within its communion. A rapidly growing population and economic expansion, coupled with globalisaion of trade, has fuelled inequality, undermining many of the basic social structures of which the church is a part. A growing humanist movement is critical of many of its doctrines and practices, and an explosion of scientific activity is threatening its world view. Meanwhile Islam threatens to make inroads into its European heartlands.
It is, of course, the situation in Christian Europe in the early 1500s, just before a driven and intellectually remorseless critic, Martin Luther, posted his 95 theses on the church door in Wittenberg in 1517, setting in train what we now call the Reformation, which was to cleave Europe in two - not just religiously and politically, but socially, culturally and intellectually.
However, it could just as well describe the situation we currently live in. In Britain, for instance, bishops in the Lords, a head of state who is also head of the main church, leaders who claim to be guided by God; expanding numbers of faith schools and a compulsory act of Christian worship in all schools. On the other hand, gay people and women excluded from full communion and a church veto, through the Lords, on social legislation, such as gay rights and adoption. We have a population explosion, rapid economic growth and social dislocation caused by globalisation. Science is now a core academic and corporate activity, central to developed economies. And despite a widespread humanist commitment to race, gender and sexual equality, religious institutions refuse to incorporate these fully in their own practices.
On top of which, there is the fear of a worldwide Islamic revival, fuelling the "war on terror".
So is a there a new figure on the horizon to decisively shift the intellectual paradigm among all this turbulence? The urbane - and venerable - Oxford don Richard Dawkins is a long way from the driven young monk from Eisleben, yet he seems to have travelled something of the same intellectual journey. From a searching quest in his scientific research to understand the world, to critic of conservative bureaucratic institutions which seem to deny that reality and reject its implications, to outright scourge of those organisations and all their works - from faith schools to creationists in education, to university theology departments. And now he has moved on, in effect, to proselytising for a whole new ideological basis to western society with his decision to actively campaign for atheism in the US.
While any historical parallel can only be approximate, this seems to fall down completely in that Dawkins in his atheism and scientism seems to be already well outside of the dominant religious framework of western society. A fringe heretic rather than a mainstream Reformer; a Giordano Bruno rather than a Luther.
But this is deceptive. The historian Tristram Hunt has argued persuasively in his current BBC4 series that western society has been driven since the Reformation by a dynamic conflict between radical and conservative Protestantism - from the Peasants' Revolt of 1525 (denounced by the politically conservative Luther), to the struggle between Cromwell and the Levellers, to the arguments over the American constitution between egalitarians and slave-owning landowners, and beyond.
In the contemporary world, it is obvious who the religious conservatives are: the fundamentalist evangelicals who back the neoconservatives and the born-again Bush. But where are the radicals?
While it is true there are many religious people who hold a commitment to values such as peace and equality and human rights, they have nowhere near the profile of the right.
However, this is deceptive, because, in the postwar world, what has happened is that radical Protestantism has slipped the anchor of religion altogether, becoming secular and humanist. (As the scientist Laplace is reputed to have said to Napoleon when asked the place of God in his theories: "I have no need of that hypothesis.") But western secular humanists remain, even so, direct inheritors of that religious and intellectual tradition. Oxford, is after all, the heart of the Church of England establishment still.
But one man does not make a revolution - political or intellectual; Luther tapped into all the sources of dissatisfaction in his world and very quickly found enthusiastic adherents. And what is interesting about Dawkins is that there seems to be a growing following for his uncompromising views. Over the past two or three years, for instance, Dawkins' assaults on religion have generated more letters to the Guardian by far than any other single topic. As the religious communities have united to counterattack, secularists and members of the scientific community have become increasingly strident about "superstitious belief in unverifiable beings in the sky". From being passive a-theists, they are becoming active anti-theists; no longer just critics of the existing religious superstructure of our world, but iconoclasts seeking to radically change or abolish it.
As the religious of all persuasions put aside their differences and huddle together in defence of religious privilege and preference in face of this new intellectual predator, it adds an interesting extra dimension to our current "clash of civilisations".
http://commentisfree.guardian.co.uk/nigel_willmott/2007/10/the_atheists_revolt.html
Jeune Afrique: 27 ministres dont 7 femmes
pour le nouveau gouvernement
MALI - 4 octobre 2007 – Apanews
La composition du nouveau gouvernement malien dirigé par le contrôleur général de police Modibo Sidibé, nommé la semaine dernière premier ministre, a été révélée mercredi par la lecture devant les médias d’Etat et privés d’un décret du président Amadou Toumani Touré.
Composé de 27 membres, le nouveau gouvernement compte 7 femmes, selon le décret présidentiel lu à partir du palais de Koulouba par le secrétaire général du gouvernement, M. Fousseini Samaké.
Seize nouvelles figures font leur entrée dans l’équipe gouvernementale qui comprend également deux Touareg, M.
Mohamed El Moctar qui prend en charge le département de la Culture et Agatane Ag Alassane (environnement et assainissement)
Les postes clef restent aux mains de proches du président Amadou Toumani Touré.
Le général Kafougouna Koné et le général Sadio Gassama conservent respectivement la défense et la sécurité intérieure de même que sont reconduits Abou Bakr Traoré (Finances) et Moctar Wane (Affaires étrangères).
L’Education est scindée en deux départements : Enseignement secondaire, supérieur et Recherche scientifique d’une part, Education de Base, Alphabétisation et Langues nationales, d’autre part.
Ce dernier département est confié à Mme Sidibé Aminata Diallo, candidate écologiste lors de la présidentielle d’avril.
Le nouveau premier ministre malien devrait rapidement présenter son discours-programme à la nouvelle Assemblée nationale très largement dominée par les partis de la mouvance présidentielle.
Une autre tâche urgente de Modibo Sidibé consistera, selon ses propres termes, à « mettre en musique » le PDES (Programme de Développement et Economique et Social) que le président Touré a proposé aux Maliens lors de la campagne électorale d’avril.
Le nouveau gouvernement remplace celui de Ousmane Issoufi Maiga dont les 28 membres ont collectivement démissionné jeudi dernier, après 41 mois d’activités.
AT/mn/APA
http://www.jeuneafrique.com/jeune_afrique/article_
depeche.asp?art_cle=APA75127ministnemen0
Mail & Guardian:
The town that refused to die
Goma, Democratic Republic of Congo
04 October 2007
War has been good to Masumbuko Kakera. The peace is making him richer still but the wily Congolese trader could not have become one of the wealthiest men in Goma without the years of foreign invasion, occupation and rebel governments, besides the help of nature's occasional assault.
"There was no government to speak of so people helped themselves," said the 42-year-old, who has just added a luxury hotel to his assets. "There is a lot here. Gold, coltan, everything. People are building everywhere these days. There's a lot of wealth."
Whether war has been as good for his traumatised hometown and most of the rest of its 160 000 residents is another question.
The "tourist capital of Congo", perched on unforgiving volcanic rock on the northern shore of Lake Kivu in the far east of the country, has emerged from each crisis over the past 15 years a little bit more wrecked and hoping that whatever came next would not be worse than what went before. But it was.
The mass graves of Rwandan refugees, the tide of lava that ripped the heart out of the town and the booming security industry to protect those with money from those without (but who do have some of the guns that came with the wars) are a testament to what Goma has endured.
So are the deeply rutted roads, the days without electricity and the grand but crumbling old post office built by Belgian colonisers on the main street that hasn't delivered a letter in more than two decades.
But, for now at least, Goma is enjoying a boom of sorts as new cars and motorbikes clog its streets, and a property surge has driven up the price of land more than ten-fold in the past few years.
Kakera waves his arm toward a small plot next to his hotel. It has just sold for $200 000.
"Five years ago you could get that for $30 000. Prices are going up because the money from the gold and coltan have created a lot more demand for land," he said. "Everyone is making money, even the guys who used to sell pieces of goat on a stick next to the road. Now they are selling mobile phone recharge vouchers."
That is not a universal view.
"War is good for some people and bad for others," said Jean Paul Lukunato, singer in Goma's best-known rumba band. "Some do excellent business and others just go down into a hole. There are many more cars, many new houses. But you never know how these people with their big cars and nice houses got their money. Perhaps it was the wrong way. Many people get rich because the government isn't really in charge."
Lukunato's band used to call itself Financier, deriding the spirit of the age in Goma. Now the members are known collectively as Tout Chic OBG Mouv.
"In Kinshasa everybody sings love songs but we play music for peace and life," he said. "People in Kinshasa haven't really experienced war like we have so they don't think about it. We think about it a lot."
The wars, Lukunato said, changed everything.
"It created division between people. Before the war, I could live with you without caring where you are from. But after the war, I would say you are from the south or Rwanda, you are not from my village, you are different," he said. "I don't think we know what we are anymore. We are not one country. We are not one people. We are Gomatraciens."
Few towns have suffered as much. Goma's decline under Mobutu Sese Seko's neglectful rule in the seventies and eighties from a thriving resort popular with tourists in pursuit of mountain gorillas was hastened by the mass looting of the town by the army in 1992.
Soldiers barracked a few kilometres to the north were not paid so they followed the example of their comrades in the capital, Kinshasa, and tore the town's shops apart.
There wasn't much in the stores to begin with but by the time the army swept through just about all that was left were a few of the basic foodstuffs.
A month later the soldiers were not paid again. The commanding officer arrived in Goma to offer the mayor a choice; come up with the cash to pay his men or they would be back to loot people's homes.
The Catholic church led a massive collection, with townspeople carrying cardboard boxes of the rapidly devaluing national currency - then running at about six million zaires to the US dollar - into a local bank. (The bank is now a Chinese restaurant, another innovation for Goma).
When the army commander returned, the mayor broke the news that about half of what the soldiers were demanding had been collected. It was good enough and the town was spared another pillage.
Still, the destruction from the first one had driven many businesses into the ground and the future was bleak as Goma's economy sank.
Hutu influx
Two years later came the next blow. Gomatraciens awoke one July morning to an indecipherable low rumble as hundreds of thousands of Rwandan Hutus shuffled through the town, broken, exhausted and silent as they fled the Tutsi rebel victory across the border.
The soldiers of the defeated Rwandan army, and the Hutu militiamen who had led the genocide of Tutsis, arrived fed and often riding on the backs of lorries.
The women and children arrived on foot after walking for days, living off bananas and a few other plants along the roadside. Some crossed into what was then Zaire and, relieved of the burden of trying to escape, died on the spot from exhaustion.
More than a million Hutus struggled into Goma over three days. Those that could were forced to keep walking north and settled in refugee camps on the unsparing volcanic rock where they swiftly began to die in their tens of thousands from cholera.
It was another testament to the shortcomings of the United Nations that so many should succumb to a disease that kills through dehydration within a short distance of one of the biggest lakes in Africa.
UN officials said they couldn't hire lorries to carry water to the refugees because they lacked the necessary forms for authorisation. It took an Irish medical charity to shell out the cash to get things moving.
The roadsides were lined with corpses wrapped in the reed mats the dead had carried from Rwanda.
Yet many Gomatraciens and aid workers could not shake off the knowledge that a large number of these "refugees" were unrepentant murderers of their Tutsi neighbours.
Adding to the sense of apocalypse, the Nyiragongo volcano that dominates the Goma skyline fired up a carpet of ash that hung over the town, darkening the skies and prompting mutterings of divine retribution.
There is nothing today to mark the mass graves of the Rwandan Hutus in Goma. There is one opposite the airport, covered in banana plants these days, and others on the edge of town carved out by diggers and filled within days. Many in Goma pass by the burial sites every day without even knowing they are there.
"It's as though we forgot part of our history," said Lukunato. "We all knew they came here and died. Everyone saw it. They were tripping over the bodies. But I don't think anyone really remembers that they are still here, beneath our feet."
Invasion and civil war
But the Hutu refugees' legacy to Goma was to be more than their own graves.
Few would have imagined it at the time but the exodus was to herald years of invasion and civil war. The soldiers and murderous militiamen kept up their killing of Tutsis with cross border raids and in 1996 the new government in Rwanda invaded Zaire through Goma to clear the camps - the start of years of slaughter in Eastern Congo.
The Rwandans were back two years later installing a puppet rebel government in Goma to control a large swath of the east of the country.
It was then that Kakera saw his chance, trading with the rebel leadership as the money from the plunder of the gold and cobalt mines rolled into the town.
"I made my money trading. I started at the lowest level bringing in sand from Rwanda and sending lorries to Bujumbura and then branched out to Kampala, Nairobi, even Dubai," he said.
Kakera was one of a clutch of businessmen who swiftly replaced the old Mobutu loyalists and Belgians and came to dominate trade in the town by tying themselves to the Rwandans and their rebel allies who took over Goma.
"Under Mobutu people were like prisoners. No one could see what people did in other countries. Goma had no future. It wasn't like this before. Mobutu just took what he wanted and left nothing for anyone else. Now Goma has a future," said Kakera.
The old kleptomaniac, who stashed away about $5-billion while his country went to ruin, was driven from power by the first Rwandan invasion.
It is striking how completely the visible signs of Mobutuism have been erased. The greatest monument to the thieving dictator's disdain for his people was his Goma palace on the banks of Lake Kivu.
While the rest of the town struggled to get around in clapped out cars, and relied on a hospital with few medicines and a lack of even the most basic medical equipment, when Mobutu fell, six new black Mercedes and a fully equipped ambulance - the only one in Goma - were discovered parked at the palace ready for the rare occasions the great man visited.
But the young view fondly an era that they cannot remember but which at least didn't involve war.
"Mobutu wanted to unite people, to make one country," said Muhindo Musi, who plays in the rumba band and who was 12-years-old when the man who ruled Zaire for 32 years fled the country of his creation and died a few months later of cancer.
"People could travel without being attacked. Now it's very difficult to go from one region to another because of these armed groups. We are not one country anymore."
Some things don't change. Travelling the length of Lake Kivu to the city of Bukavu in the south is very much easier than in years past with a three-hour ride on a comfortable high-speed boat in place of an eight-hour journey on some of the worst roads in Africa.
But the old Congo rears its head at the port's immigration desk, which everyone must pass even when travelling from town to town inside the country.
Passports are scrutinised with intensity to see if some minor infraction might be used to extort a few dollars. Failing that there is the "hygiene" desk where foreigners are obliged to produce evidence of their vaccinations.
No yellow card and you're offered a choice, neatly spelled out in an official looking form: pay $10 for a jab or $15 not to have one.
Pulling out a camera to photograph a butterfly nearly causes a national security incident even though there are no military installations to be seen and the buildings look as if they'll collapse of their own accord without help from foreign saboteurs.
Eruption
The volcano finally erupted in 2002, sending a tide of lava a kilometre wide and two metres deep through the centre of town.
Walk along the main street today and suddenly the potholes give way to a hump of hardened volcanic rock. Some of the old shops remain, their entrances strangely below the new street level. But most were carried away as the eruption cleared a swath through the town and down to the lake.
Near the water's edge a clutch of rusting cars sticks out of hardened volcanic rock like tombstones after their owners left them atop a hillock and fled into Rwanda, but the lava rose high enough to engulf the vehicles.
The eruption destroyed about 40% of the town - more than 4 500 buildings and a large part of the airport runway, although the progress of the lava was slow enough that there were few human casualties.
But the new coat of volcanic rock also cleared the way for a building boom, and set off a bidding war for land. Dotted across its surface are new shops and homes.
Kakera's hotel, which opened in April, is one of an array of new and comfortable hotels sprinkled along the lake front, a huge advance on the filthy and dilapidated Grand Lac hotel that had a near monopoly before.
The tourist town doesn't have many tourists but the hotels are busy enough with businessmen, aid workers and an array of foreigners with East European and Southern African accents.
"Goma is a town different from the rest of Congo," said Kakera. "It doesn't look to Kinshasa for its survival. It looks to its neighbours to the east - Uganda, Kenya, Rwanda. It looks to the rest of Africa. They all come here, for good or bad."
Yet, for all Goma's tribulations, the rumba band members agree on one thing. They would all like to travel and make their names as famous musicians, but they will always come back.
"Goma is a paradise," said Lukunato. "People outside may not see it but if we had peace this would be the first town in all Congo."
Guardian Unlimited © Guardian Newspapers Limited 2007
http://www.mg.co.za/articlepage.aspx?area=/breaking_
news/breaking_news__africa/&articleid=321047
New Statesman:
My last conversation with Aung San Suu Kyi
John Pilger recalls the last time he met with Burmese opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi
John Pilger
Published 04 October 2007
As the people of Burma rise up again, we have had a rare glimpse of Aung San Suu Kyi. There she stood, at the back gate of her lakeside home in Rangoon, where she is under house arrest. She looked very thin. For years, people would brave the roadblocks just to pass by her house and be re assured by the sound of her playing the piano. She told me she would lie awake listening for voices outside and to the thumping of her heart. "I found it difficult to breathe lying on my back after I became ill."
That was a decade ago. Stealing into her house, as I did then, required all the ingenuity of the Burmese underground. Aung San Suu Kyi wore silk and had orchids in her hair. She is a striking, glamorous figure whose face in repose shows the resolve that has seen her along her heroic journey. "What do I call you?" I asked. "Well, if you can't manage the whole thing, friends call me Suu."
"The regime is always saying you are finished, but here you are, hardly finished. How is that?"
"It's because democracy is not finished in Bur ma . . . Look at the courage of the people who go on working for democracy, those who have already been to prison. They know that any day they are likely to be put back there and yet they do not give up."
"But how do you reclaim the power you won at the ballot box with brute power confronting you?" I asked.
"In Buddhism we are taught there are four basic ingredients for success. The first is the will to want it, then you must have the right kind of attitude, then perseverance, then wisdom . . ."
"But the other side has all the guns?"
"Yes, but it's becoming more and more difficult to resolve problems by military means. It's no longer acceptable."
We talked about the willingness of foreign business to come to Burma. I read her a Foreign Office press release: "Through commercial contacts with democratic nations such as Britain, the Burmese people will gain experience of democratic principles." "Not in the least bit," she responded, "because new investments only help a small elite to get richer and richer. Forced labour goes on all over the country, and a lot of the projects are aimed at the tourist trade and are worked by children."
"People I've spoken to regard you as something of a saint, a miracle worker."
"I'm not a saint and you'd better tell the world that!"
"Where are your sinful qualities, then?"
"Er, I've got a short temper."
"What happened to your piano?"
"You mean when the string broke? In this climate pianos do deteriorate and some of the keys were getting stuck, so I broke a string because I was pumping the pedal too hard."
"You lost it?"
"I did."
"It's a very moving scene. Here you are, all alone, and you get so angry you break the piano."
"I told you, I have a hot temper."
"Then how do you cope being alone?"
"Oh, I have my meditation, and I did have a radio . . . I'd look forward to a good book being read on Off the Shelf on the BBC."
"Was there a point when you had to conquer fear?"
"Yes. When I was small in this house. I wandered around in the darkness until I knew where all the demons might be . . . and they weren't there."
For several years after that encounter with Aung San Suu Kyi I tried to phone her. One day I got through. "Thank you so much for the books," she said. "It has been a joy to read widely again." (I had sent her a collection of T S Eliot, her favourite, and Jonathan Coe's political romp What a Carve Up!.) I asked her what was happening outside her house. "Oh, the road is blocked and they [the military] are all over the street . . ."
"Do you worry that you might be trapped in a terrible stalemate?"
"I am really not fond of that expression," she replied rather sternly. "People have been on the streets. That's not a stalemate. The defiance is there in people's lives, day after day . . . No matter the regime's physical power, in the end they can't stop the people. We shall have our time."
http://www.newstatesman.com/200710040020
Página/12:
El superpoder “psi”
MICHEL FOUCAULT Y EL PSICOANALISIS, EN UN ANTICIPO DEL ULTIMO LIBRO DE JEAN ALLOUCH
El psicoanalista Jean Allouch recurre a la obra de Michel Foucault para reexaminar críticamente la posición del psicoanálisis en relación con la “función psi”, que, nacida en los manicomios, actúa “en todas partes donde sea necesario que la realidad funcione como poder”.
Por Jean Allouch *
Jueves, 04 de Octubre de 2007
Un título como La hermenéutica del sujeto, ¿no era capaz de zumbarles en el oído a los psicoanalistas, en primer lugar a los lacanianos? A la distancia, actualmente no se puede asumir que ese curso de Michel Foucault, publicado en 2001, haya tenido importancia para ellos. Tal vez se sospechó, si es que se lo leyó, que tenerlo en cuenta implicaría demasiados trastornos dentro de la teoría así como dentro de la práctica psicoanalíticas.
Sea como fuera y más radicalmente, ¿sería posible que las transformaciones a las cuales Foucault invita al psicoanálisis sean precisamente las que le convienen en adelante?
¿Pero qué pasó entonces para que se impusiera ese gesto de redoblar a Lacan por parte de Foucault? Tomemos El poder psiquiátrico, Los anormales y La hermenéutica del sujeto. Salta a la vista al leer esos textos, especialmente el último, que se trata nada menos que de la genealogía del psicoanálisis. Según Foucault, “genealogía quiere decir que realizo el análisis a partir de una cuestión presente”. (“El cuidado de la verdad”, en Obras esenciales, ed. Paidós.) Dicha cuestión es la siguiente: “Cuando actualmente vemos la significación, o más bien la casi total ausencia de significación, que les damos a expresiones sin embargo muy usuales y que no dejan de aparecer en nuestro discurso como: volver en sí, liberarse, ser uno mismo, ser auténtico, etcétera, cuando vemos la ausencia de significación y de pensamiento que hay en cada una de esas expresiones usadas hoy, creo que no hay que estar muy orgullosos de los esfuerzos que hacemos ahora para reconstituir una ética de sí. [...] Dentro del movimiento que ahora nos hace a la vez referirnos incesantemente a esa ética de sí sin darle nunca un contenido, pienso que cabe sospechar algo que sería una imposibilidad de constituir hoy una ética de sí, cuando tal vez sea una tarea urgente, fundamental, políticamente indispensable constituir una ética de sí, si después de todo es cierto que no hay otro punto, primero y último, de resistencia al poder político más que en la relación de sí consigo mismo” (La hermenéutica del sujeto, México, ed. FCE).
Para indicar aquello que vuelve tan indispensable, por el lado de Lacan, recurrir hoy a una genealogía del psicoanálisis, expondré lo siguiente: después de más de un siglo, a fuerza de haberse devanado los sesos en todos los sentidos, el psicoanálisis ha llegado a no saber ya en dónde está, a dónde pertenece ni tampoco qué es. Algo que, aun teniendo efectos positivos, particularmente efectos críticos, sin embargo tiene consecuencias molestas en varios planos. Quizá no tanto en la práctica misma (práctica que de alguna manera es sostenida por el dispositivo freudiano, aunque haga falta examinarla más en detalle, pues a veces se descubre que ese dispositivo se coloca del lado del discurso del amo), sino más bien, por una parte, en lo que podemos llamar la posición del psicoanálisis dentro de la episteme y, por otra parte, en la manera en que el psicoanálisis tiene que presentarse en lo social a fin de poder subsistir, aunque fuera al modo de un parásito. ¿Cómo elegiría una política de la cual apropiarse, si ya no sabe ni quién es ni lo que es?
No tomaré más que un solo indicio de la actual desorientación: el combate que se llevó a cabo en Francia contra la evaluación y las terapias comportamentales cortas. ¿Cómo se reaccionó políticamente a nivel institucional? Conformando una especie de frente “psi” y devolviéndole consistencia al mismo tiempo al humanismo, que vuelve tan trascendente al sujeto que por principio debería escapar de toda evaluación. Se cae además en plena contradicción, porque quienes vociferaron con razón en contra de la evaluación no se privan, como atestiguan sus escritos, de evaluar con toda la fuerza, en particular usando el diagnóstico larga manu. Ese sujeto que escaparía de toda evaluación, el sujeto “humanista”, no es el de Lacan.
Por cierto, el recurso a ese sujeto pretende ser un arma contra la desastrosa y poderosa tentativa actual de reabsorción del sujeto en el individuo. El individuo, el indiviso, es el sujeto estadístico, vale decir, disuelto dentro de la estadística (la estadística supone que el mismo individuo responde a la pregunta 3 y a la pregunta 12 del formulario que hay que llenar, a cada una y a todas las preguntas; eliminen esa suposición, y ya no es posible ningún cálculo). ¿Pero acaso se advirtió en ese combate justo que así se estaba reviviendo lo que Foucault distinguía en 1973-1974 denominándolo “función psi”?
“Superpoderes”
Michel Foucault nombra la función psi exactamente el 9 de enero de 1974, para cartografiar enseguida su despliegue (véase El poder psiquiátrico, ed. FCE). Todo parte de la demostración previa según la cual el psiquiatra es alguien que dirige; así habría logrado, en gran medida, que se pusiera socialmente a su cargo la “dirección de conciencia”. Pero a Foucault le parece notable la manera en que el psiquiatra dirige. Al enfrentarse con el poder coercitivo del delirio en el alienado –coercitivo para el alienado, pero también para su entorno–, el psiquiatra se dedica a dirigir al alienado dándole a la realidad misma un poder coercitivo. Es lo que Foucault llama la tautología asilar: “Darle poder a la realidad, y fundar el poder en la realidad, es la tautología asilar” (El poder psiquiátrico, FCE). ¿Qué pasa con esa realidad? Foucault, como Lacan, no la considera como un dato en bruto, sino como voluntad del otro, es decir, del psiquiatra. Por supuesto, todo esto tiene mil resonancias en el psicoanálisis, pues basarse en “la parte sana del yo” equivale a la recuperación de una de las tácticas del tratamiento moral.
Pero Foucault lleva más lejos su investigación y se pregunta acerca de los alienados: ¿por qué la medicina? ¿Por qué la medicina, cuando la disciplina impuesta en los asilos no se distingue de la que se ejerce en los cuarteles, las escuelas, los orfanatos, las cárceles? Con este nuevo giro, nos espera una sorpresa. Señala en efecto que no es el saber médico lo que constituye la diferencia entre el médico y un administrador cualquiera que detenta el poder, porque agrega que no hay conexión, ni siquiera laxa, entre el saber y la práctica de los alienistas; ambos, el saber y la práctica, siguen su camino por su lado (y sigue siendo así, la psicofarmacología no lo ha modificado). En cambio, para conseguir que el alienado admita la realidad que se le contrapone y que se pretende que sea más coercitiva que su delirio, se apela nada menos que al cuerpo mismo del médico: un cuerpo imponente, un cuerpo que se impone (puede verse ya en la primera lección del curso), un cuerpo que adquiere, como muestra Foucault, las dimensiones del mismo asilo. Pero también en este punto Foucault no cede a la facilidad; una vez más, se pregunta acerca de ese cuerpo: “¿Por qué no un director administrativo, por qué un médico?” Respuesta: porque el médico sabe. Se objetará, ¿acaso el mismo Foucault no observó que el saber del médico precisamente no interviene en su práctica? Sí, por cierto. Sin embargo lo que importa no es que el médico detente un saber útil para el tratamiento, sino que lleve las marcas de un saber supuesto, supuesto por la misma inscripción de esas marcas. Dichas marcas, diríamos con Lacan, lo convierten en un ser supuesto saber. Y Foucault describirá las astucias de los médicos para que cobre consistencia frente a todos, estudiantes, enfermeros, administradores y, por supuesto, enfermos, esa impresionante figura de un doctor que sabría mejor que el enfermo lo que corresponde al enfermo y a su enfermedad. La más ostensible y la más repugnante de esas astucias es la presentación de enfermos, y no es un buen signo que aún hoy siga siendo ampliamente practicada en algunos sitios lacanianos.
Foucault precisa: “Son esas marcas del saber, y no el contenido de una ciencia, las que le permitirán al alienista funcionar como médico en el interior del asilo. Son esas marcas del saber las que le permitirán ejercer en el interior del asilo un ‘súper-poder’ absoluto, e identificarse finalmente con el cuerpo asilar” (El poder psiquiátrico).
Dentro de lo que Foucault llama “proto-psiquiatría” se trata pues del poder (del delirante) contra el poder (del alienista) –identificado a su vez como “súper-poder” o bien como “intensificación de la realidad”–. La función psi, escribe entonces, se encuentra “en todas partes donde sea necesario hacer que funcione la realidad como poder” (El poder psiquiátrico).
(¿Qué sucede, en este punto, con el psicoanalista? Su posición se caracteriza por el hecho de que no dispone de ninguno de los medios por los cuales el psiquiatra, en los límites de su acción, ejerce su súper–poder: ni los brazos fornidos de los enfermeros, ni camisa de fuerza química, ni pieza de aislamiento, ni amenazas o chantajes son admisibles. ¿Y entonces? Precisamente, despojado, su intervención podrá emplear su debilidad real como una palanca. Foucaultianamente hablando, se trata de un sub-poder, que remite a la regla del juego lacaniano según la cual el psicoanalista dispone de un poder, a veces otorgado por el analizante, pero un poder que precisamente no ejerce.)
Añadirle a esa super-realidad la realidad del inconsciente parece, desde esa perspectiva, un simple matiz, más exactamente un suplemento de súper–realidad que en el fondo no cambia nada. Como seguimos constatando cada día más, la función psi ha proliferado, empezando por la escuela, donde hace su ingreso por el sesgo del niño idiota. “Y es a partir de esa forma mixta, entre la psiquiatría y la pedagogía, a partir de esta psiquiatrización del anormal, el débil, el deficiente, etcétera, que se produjo, según creo, todo el sistema de diseminación que le permitió al psicólogo convertirse en esa especie de redoblamiento perpetuo de todo funcionamiento institucional” (El poder psiquiátrico).
Ahí tenemos pues la función psi, a la que actualmente parecemos suscribir con las mejores intenciones. ¿Es ése el lugar del analista? Había creído comprender que estaba por el contrario allí donde se rechazó, muy tempranamente, esa intensificación de la realidad, esa realidad elevada por Freud a la dignidad de un principio (el llamado “principio de realidad”). Antes bien, ¿no estaba determinado ese lugar por la resistencia freudiana a ese forzamiento cuya naturaleza se revelara con el fiasco público del psiquiatra Jean-Martin Charcot en el hospital de la Salpêtriere? (Charcot ridiculizado por las histéricas que simulan, sin que él lo sospeche, su pretendido saber.) Foucault revisa lo que pasó en la Salpêtriere. Recordemos que Charcot no quiere saber nada acerca de la lubricidad que sin embargo tiene ante los ojos (Charcot es una mirada). Freud, entonces, tomó partido por las histéricas, siguió sus indicaciones y no desatendió la lubricidad. ¿No se apartaba de ese modo de la función psi? Hoy no veo otra política posible para el psicoanálisis que la siguiente: cuanto más extendida, imponente y dominante se revele la función psi, más se hace preciso apartarse de ella.
Gringos
El aval que se otorgó a los psis de cualquier índole tiene que pagarse con algún costo para el psicoanálisis. Al conformar semejante comunidad psi, insertándose a su vez en ella, se olvidaban indicaciones valiosas de Lacan, por ejemplo la de que no valía la pena “psicoterapiar” el psiquismo –-la misma palabra es tan fea que, en efecto, no vale la pena–. Pero también se reforzaba la idea del psicoanálisis como una pastoral, como casi naturalmente al servicio del bien público de nuestras sociedades. Esto se lee claramente en algunos autores que identifican el combate psicoanalítico con el de la democracia. Según ellos, el psicoanálisis necesita de la democracia (y la experiencia latinoamericana debería pues pronunciarse de manera matizada, aunque también la de los gringos, cuyo estilo de democracia hizo añicos el psicoanálisis, que se supone le suministra ciudadanos adaptados, y aún más con la actual búsqueda desenfrenada de consenso). Sin embargo, no podríamos deducir la recíproca sin más: que el psicoanálisis necesite de la democracia (aceptémoslo por un momento) no implica que la democracia necesite del psicoanálisis. Tomémoslo como una definición: tal vez no haya verdadera democracia sino allí donde la modalidad situada en el poder tolera en su seno otros funcionamientos de esa misma modalidad (un problema que se enfoca en las llamadas sectas) y otras modalidades que no convergen necesariamente con ella. Según esta exigente definición, y sin evocar siquiera la esclavitud, la Atenas que mató a Sócrates no merece ser llamada una democracia.
* Extractado de El psicoanálisis ¿es un ejercicio espiritual? Respuesta a Michel Foucault, de inminente aparición (ediciones Literal, ed. El Cuenco de Plata).
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http://www.pagina12.com.ar/diario/psicologia/9-92399-2007-10-04.html
Página/12:
Sobrevivencia
Por Enrique Medina
Jueves, 04 de Octubre de 2007
Con el entusiasmo bailándole en los ojos, Doña Rosa Jara, bastón en mano (“mi compañero”, dice ella) ingresa al Centro de Jubilados. Es recibida con la sincera alegría de siempre: “Rosita de acá, Rosita de allá”. Mientras sirven el té, con un despliegue de facturas algo asombroso para estos tiempos, ella expone una síntesis de su existencia con vulgares digresiones: “Ayer en Norte me quisieron cobrar cuarenta y dos pesos el kilo de espárragos. ¡Cuarenta y dos pesos! ¡Se los dejé de sombrero ahí en la caja!” El altamente anarquizante alfilerazo es un maravilloso pie para que cada uno exponga su propia experiencia en los menesteres del caso. Miguel afirma que los corchos de los vinos se rompen antes de sacarlos. Con la mano en alto Guillermina confirma que los envases de los yogures vienen más finitos; y Amelita ha notado que el sabor de la “Coca-Cola Zero” ya no es el mismo. Cuando todos han terminado con su aporte realista, Doña Rosa Jara, sin disimular su vanidad al ver que le prestan atención como si fuera a hacer un discurso en las Naciones Unidas, imitando las inimitables pausas de Don Luis Landriscina, emprende su relato, mezcla de vía crucis con jolgorio de barrabrava pero con franco optimismo de resurrección: “¿Se acuerdan que les había dicho que me había olvidado de firmar la sobrevivencia? Les aconsejo que no se olviden. Gracias a que tengo a mi hija que me ayuda, pude hacer los trámites. Primero, quejarme al banco porque no me avisaron a tiempo. Me contestaron que no era responsabilidad de ellos, y me dieron formularios para llevar a Anses. Taxi. Cola. Anses confirma y vuelve a mandarme con otros formularios al banco. Taxi. El banco pone un sello y volvemos a Anses. Taxi. Cola. Que volvamos en una semana. Taxi. Volvemos. Taxi. Cola. ¡Se perdieron mis papeles! Vuelta al banco. Taxi. Papeles, sellos. Vuelta a Anses. Taxi. Cola. ¡Otra semana de espera! Taxi. Volvemos. Taxi. Cola. ¡Aflojan! Pobre de quien no tiene un familiar que lo ayude. Me dicen si prefiero que me lo paguen dentro de dos meses con el cobro común o me dan un cheque para el Banco de la Nación. Mi hija, que lerda no es, dijo “más vale pájaro en mano que cien volando”, y nos fuimos con el cheque. Taxi. Cola. ¡Qué lindo es el Banco de la Nación, una belleza! Tuvimos que ir a los subsuelos y hacer cola, pero cobramos. Y entonces mi hija me dice: “Disfrutemos”. Y disfrutamos: Primero fuimos a la Catedral que hacía como cien años que no iba. ¡Hermoso el mausoleo de San Martín! Hasta aprovechamos la misa. Paseamos por la plaza, por el blanco Cabildo, y nos metimos en un restorán de Avenida de Mayo y nos comimos una pizza impresionante, con cerveza. ¡Y de postre, flan con dulce de leche! Como yo estaba lista para la siesta, nos volvimos a casa, felices. Taxi. En definitiva, tanto habíamos gastado, en casi dos meses de trámites, entre taxis, confiterías, helados, restoranes...
Don Andrés, solidario y elemental pero gallardamente homérico, interrumpe:
–Nunca hay que olvidarse de firmar la ¡sobrevivencia!...
Imprevisto, malévolo, un silencio turbio taladra en las mentes de los jubilados que se han quedado prendidos de la aborrecida palabreja; lo que provoca que se observen en quimérica infinitud. Captando la alteración del clima, Doña Rosa Jara, rápida como la vida, con humor muda el invierno en primavera rematando tajante y mosqueteril:
–¡Seamos soldados, compañeros, todos para uno y uno para todos, que el enemigo no se la lleve de arriba; además de un deber, la sobrevivencia es el honor del jubilado!
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http://www.pagina12.com.ar/diario/contratapa/13-92440-2007-10-04.html
The Independent: Protesters stay put to battle junta
as world waits on Burmese border
By Peter Popham in Mae Sot, Thailand
Published: 04 October 2007
At the Moei river in Thailand there is sticky sunshine, jungle and the world's media in waiting. Yet there is no flood of refugees from across the border in Burma.
From Rangoon there are disturbing reports of monks fleeing the city; of thousands more locked up in windowless improvised prisons with little to eat or drink. Nine died during the disturbances, says the military junta that calls itself the State Peace and Development Council (SPDC) – an appropriately Orwellian name for the gang of butchers that rules the country where Orwell once served as a policeman. The real figure could be as high as 200 but as yet no one knows where the bodies are.
The Rangoon bloodbath last week was not a surprise to veteran observers of the country. What was expected to follow was what occurred following the far bloodier crackdown in 1988: a flood of political refugees to the border.
Yet it hasn't happened. One week ago three monks were smuggled across the Moei river which divides the two countries, and vanished into safe houses before any journalists could get at them. On Tuesday a major in the Burmese army, sick of carrying out despicable orders, followed them over. So far that's it.
Fleeing here from Rangoon, a distance of about 190 miles, is dangerous but not particularly difficult. A former student leader who fled Burma two years ago explained to me that there is a regular traffic in gem smugglers between Rangoon and Thailand, who smooth their path by bribing police along the route. He paid a smuggler to take him along with his gems. It happens all the time.
But it's not happening now, and not because it's even more dangerous than usual but for another reason, one that suggests that this particular uprising is far from over.
And that the mood of hand-wringing despair of some Western commentators may be premature.
I met Dr Naing Aung, a leading Burmese activist in exile, at a little coffee shop in this town which is a patchwork including Burmese ethnic groups, as well as Thai Muslims, Indians and Chinese. Dr Aung was one of the thousands who escaped from Rangoon and the certainty of many years in jail after the 1988 crackdown. But today, he told me, the mood in Rangoon is dramatically different.
"The big difference between 1988 and now is that when we came out of Burma to the border area, we were preparing for the armed struggle to overthrow the regime. We came out and began training to fight alongside the ethnic armies that were fighting.
"But now the protesters inside Burma are for the non-armed struggle. They want to win it by winning people's hearts.
"It requires more courage because they are facing armed people without any weapons. But they say, anyway we can't compete against the Burmese army in armed power – we can compete in terms of the support of the masses, in terms of truth and justice. They want to stay where they are to carry on the non-armed struggle and they don't want to go into exile."
In recent years, analysts have argued that non-violence against such regimes doesn't work, generalising from the failure of non-violent struggles, such as that of the Tibetans against the Chinese, to make significant headway. It worked for Gandhi because the British were soft-hearted foreigners who had to worry about elections and who in any case would have gone home some day anyway. But against pitiless regimes such as that in Burma, hands dripping with blood, it is futile.
According to Dr Aung, however, this new generation of rebels is bent on proving them wrong.
"They have been taking up Gandhian methods, what we call political defiance: demonstrations, boycotts, refusing to have religious communication with the regime; praying ..."
The world woke up to the Burmese uprising when the monks began their marches two weeks ago. But Dr Aung explains that this was the culmination of a long series of smaller demonstrations that began when activists of his generation, imprisoned after 1988, began coming out of jail in the early 1990s.
"They started small-scale movements that the regime could not do anything about: the 'White Sunday' movement, many people wearing white on Sundays; paying visits to political prisoners in jail; the 'White Expressions' movement, thousands of people writing about their sufferings under the regime, printing them, and distributing them secretly. Farmers whose land had been stolen and people who had been illegally taxed were encouraged to lodge law suits to fight these things. Activists out of jail did a lot of work educating ordinary people about their human rights. Last December they defiantly celebrated International Human Rights Day.
"The protest that launched the uprising last month also began in a small way. It was a silent walk to protest against the hike in fuel prices, first in Rangoon then in many other cities – no slogans, no banners; often just small numbers of people. The monks staged a silent march of their own. That was the beginning."
In the office of an exile organisation in Mae Sot called the Assistance Association of Political Prisoners, a monk who is one of its founders described his violent initiation into the life of the rebel.
U Te Za Ni Ya was a student in a Burmese technical college in 1988. When the regime shut down the colleges he went to Rangoon and took part in the uprising. The group he was with raided a police station, seized weapons and, during a day-long gun battle, killed three policemen. He was arrested with the others and given a 10-year jail sentence, serving more than than eight years. "After coming out of prison you want to clean yourself spiritually so I went into a monastery, as many ex-prisoners do, and became a monk," he explained. "In prison I mostly spent time with monks so I had become used to their customs and interested in religious matters."
Was it not strange, I asked, to see monks – the men of peace and prayer – taking such a central role in the new uprising?
"To play a physically violent role would be far from our beliefs," he said. "But we can have a mediating role. When Lord Buddha was alive he tried to mediate between one particular king and the people who were rebelling against him, in a peaceful way. We monks are Buddha's sons and so we try to follow in our father's footsteps."
But to get the generals to the point where mediation is a possibility seems inconceivable. Do the rebels secretly dream of a violent deus ex machina-type intervention from abroad, Baghdad-style?
Absolutely not, said Dr Aung firmly. "We need international support, but this is our cause, our struggle. The crucial element is our fight: we have to stand up. We want to be able to show the military regime, you are the only ones against us. Of course we also want co-ordinated international action. The generals think everything is fine. We need international pressure from inside to tell the truth to [Burma's military chief] Than Shwe. If China says, you cannot kill people on the streets, you cannot run your economy that way, they will listen. We want to hit their cronies hard with sanctions to send the message. The people are not retreating now. Most of the monks' leaders are free, only two were arrested – because they didn't make any speeches, they didn't identify themselves. This is the beginning of the end of military rule. It is not the final battle, but it is the first step in the final battle."
http://news.independent.co.uk/world/asia/article3024747.ece
ZNet | Venezuela:
A Revolution is Just Below the Surface
by Noam Chomsky and Eva Golinger
Venezuelanalysis.com; October 04, 2007
EVA: I read a quote of yours which said power is always illegitimate unless it proves itself to be legitimate. So in Venezuela right now we are in the process of Constitutional reform. And within that reform the People's Power is going to gain Constitutional rank, above in fact all the other state powers, the executive, legislative and judicial powers, and in Venezuela we also have the electoral and the citizen's power. Would this be an example of power becoming legitimate? A people’s power? And could this change the way power is viewed? And change the face of Latin America considering that the Bolivarian Revolution is having such an influence over other countries in the region?
CHOMSKY: Your word, the word "could", is the right word. Yes it "could" , but it depends how it is implemented. In principle it seems to be a very powerful and persuasive conception, but everything always depends on implementation. If there is really authentic popular participation in the decision-making and the free association of communities, yeah, that could be tremendously important. In fact that's essentially the traditional anarchist ideal. That's what was realized the only time for about a year in Spain in 1936 before it was crushed by outside forces, in fact all outside forces, Stalinst Russia, Hitler in Germany, Mussilini's fascism and the Western democracies cooperated in crushing it. They were all afraid of it. But that was something like what you are describing, and if it can function and survive and really disperse power down to participants and their communities, it could be extremely important.
EVA: Do you think it's just an idealist illusion or can it really be manifested?
CHOMSKY: I think it can. It's usually crushed by outside force because it's considered so dangerous...
EVA: But in this case when it's the government who's promoting it? The state who's promoting it?
CHOMSKY: That's what going to be the crucial question. Is it coming from the State or is it coming from the people? Now, maybe it can be initiated from the State, but unless the energy is really coming from the population itself, it's very likely to fall into some sort of top-down directed pattern, and that's the real question. In Spain in 1936, the reason for the very substantial success is because it was popular - it's a quite different situation from Venezuela. In Spain, the anarchist tradition was very deeply rooted. There had been 50 years of education, experiments, efforts which were crushed, I mean it was in people's minds. So when the opportunity came they were developing what was already in their minds, what they had tried to do many times, it wasn't spontaneous, it was the result of decades of education, organizing and activism on the ground. Now Venezuela is a different situation, it's being initiated from above, and the question is can that lead to direct popular participation and innovative and energy and so on. That's a real historical experiment, I don't know the answer.
EVA: I think it's a combination because the reason that the coup against Chávez was overthrown was because of the people's power...
CHOMSKY: That's right
EVA: It's just been unstructured and very spontaneous, so the idea behind this is to somehow structure that, and I question from that same anarchist perspective, if you structure that power will it....
CHOMSKY: Take off...
EVA: or become corrupted or illegitimate? Or will it Take off?
CHOMSKY: Take off...That's why the comparison with Spain is so interesting because there it was coming from below, nothing coming from above and it was there because people had been committed to it for decades and had tried it out, organized and so on. There was a live anarchist tradition, actually there is a live anarchist tradition in Latin America but it's been repeatedly crushed, in Mexico, Argentina, Chile, all over, actually I have a book right over there on the desk on the history of Anarchism in Chile which is not very well known, so it's been there, it's hidden, but I don't think these ideas are very far below consciousness almost anywhere, including the United States. If you talk to working class people they understand the notions. If fact it's not too well known but in the United States, there was never a powerful organized left, but in many ways it's one of the most leftist societies in the world. In the mid-19th century for example, right in the beginning of the industrialist revolution right around here in Boston, there was a rich literature of working class people, what were called factory girls, young women coming from the farms to work in the mills, or Irish artesians, immigrants in Boston, very rich literature, it was the period of the freest press ever in the country and it was very radical. They had no connection with European radicalism, they had never heard of Marx or anything else, and it was simply taken for granted that wage labor is not much different from slavery, and if you rent yourself to somebody that's not different from selling yourself. Actually in the Civil War in the United States, a lot of the northern workers actually fought under that banner, were against chattel slavery and they were against wage slavery. And the standard slogan of the people was "the people who work in the mills ought to own them and run them". It took a long time to drive that out of people's heads. In the 1890s there were cities, like Homestead, Pennsylvania, that were taken over by working class people with these ideas, and they're still there. You know it's kind of suppressed by lots of propaganda and repression and so on, but it's just below the surface and I would imagine that may be the same in Venezuela. These are natural beliefs and there's a possibility they might spring into fruition given the right circumstances.
EVA: That's actually included in the constitutional reform as well, the concept of creating communal cities, communes, that are worker-run, and including the companies. It will be very interesting to see how it develops.
CHOMSKY: It's very interesting
EVA: And how it then would change the force of power in the region
CHOMSKY: If it can carry out. In the past it has happened but it's been crushed by force and even here in the United States it was crushed by State violence.
EVA: On the notion of "crushed by force and state violence", thinking of Latin America and the changes occurring, the influences of Venezuela, right now President Chávez is mediating the peace process in Colombia. One, how do you view his role as the mediator? And two, do you think that the US is really going to allow for peace in Colombia when there has been an expansion of Plan Colombia and Colombia remains the stronghold of the United States and its military force in South America? Would they react in a more sort of aggressive way?
CHOMSKY: I think the US will do what it can to make sure Colombia remains more or less a client state. But I don't think the US has a commitment to the internal war in Colombia. They do want to see FARC destroyed. The US does not really want paramilitaries running the country and the drug trade, I mean that's not optimal from the point of view of an imperial power, you don't want to have para-powers carrying out State activities. They were useful, and the US not only supported them but in fact, they initiated them. If you go back to the early sixties in Venezuela, in fact in 1962, President Kennedy sent a military mission to Colombia, headed by a Special Forces General, General Yarborough, to advise Colombia on how to deal with its internal problems and they recommended paramilitary terror. That was their phrase: they recommend "paramilitary power against known communist adherents." Well, in the Latin American context, "known communist adherents" means human rights activists, labor organizers, priests working with peasants, I don't have to explain to you, and yeah, they recommended paramilitary terror. You can look back and say that Colombia has a violent history, but that changed it, that's really the initiation of the massive state and paramilitary terror that turned into a total monstrosity in the last couple of decades. But although the United States did implement it and support it right through Plan Colombia, it's not really in US interests and the interests of US power systems for that to continue. They'd rather have an orderly, obedient society, exporting raw materials, a place where US manufacturers can have cheap labor and so on and so forth, but without the internal violence. So I think there might be toleration at least of mediation efforts that could curb the level of internal violence and control the paramilitaries who will be and are in fact being absorbed into the state.
EVA: But Chávez doing it?
CHOMSKY: Well, that's going to be interesting. In fact, it's rarely discussed here. In fact right now there are also negotiations and discussions going on between Brazil and Venezuela about joint projects, the Orinoco River project, a gas pipeline, and so on. Try to find some report about that here. People are afraid of it. The conception, or if you like "party line" on Latin America, has had to shift. Latin America has changed a lot, it's not what it was in the 1960s. For the first time since the Spanish invasion the countries are beginning to face some of the internal problems in Latin America. One of the problems is just disintegration. The countries have very little relationship to one another. They typically were related to the outside imperial power not to each other. You can even see it in the transportation systems. But there is also internal disintegration, tremendous inequality, the worst in the world; small elites and huge massive impoverished people, and the elites were Europe-oriented or US-oriented later - that's where their second homes were, that's where their capital went to, that's where their children went to school. They didn't have anything to do with the population. The elites in Latin America had very little responsibility for the countries. And these two forms of disintegration and slowly being overcome. So there is more integration among the societies, and there are several countries taking steps to deal with the horrible problem of elite domination, which has a racial component to it also of course, there is a pretty close correlation between wealth and whiteness all over the continent. It's one of the reasons for the antagonism to Chávez, it's because he doesn't look white. But steps are being taken towards that, and that is significant. The US doctrinal system, and I don't mean the government, I mean the press, the intellectuals and so on, have shifted their description of Latin America. It's no longer the democrats versus the communists - Pinochet the democrat versus.... It's shifted, now it's conceded that there is a move to the left, but there are the good leftists and the bad leftists. The bad leftists are Chávez and Morales, maybe Kirchner, maybe Ecuador - they haven't decided yet, but those are the bad leftists. The good ones are Brazil, maybe Chile and so on. In order to maintain that picture it's been necessary to do some pretty careful control of historical facts. For example, when Lula the good leftist was reelected his first act was to go to Caracas where he and Chávez built a joint bridge over the Orinoco...it wasn't even reported here, because you can't report things like that, it contradicts the party line - the good guys and the bad guys. And the same is true in this very moment with the Brazil-Venezuela negotiations. I think they are very important. Colombia is significant. If Chávez can carry it off that's great for Colombia, but these other things are much broader in significance. If Brazil and Venezuela can cooperate on major projects, joint projects, maybe ultimately the gas pipeline through Latin America. That's a step towards regional integration, which is a real prerequisite for defense against outside intervention. You can't have defense against intervention if the countries are separated from one another and if they are separated internally from elites and general populations, so I think these are extremely important developments. Colombia as well, if it can be done, fine, reduce the level of violence, maybe take some steps forward for the people of Colombia, but I think these other negotiations and discussions proceeding at the same time have a deeper and longer term significance.
EVA: Right now Chávez is in Manaus, just yesterday and today...
CHOMSKY: Right
EVA: Well, one of the tactics of US aggression against Venezuela and against the rise of a new leftism or socialism in Latin America is precisely to divide and counteract what Venezuela under Chávez has been leading throughout the region which is now resulting in sovereignty and Latin American integration. I guess to focus that question on a media angle, one of the other tactics of aggression against Venezuela and other countries in the region is obviously psychological warfare, on an internal level in Venezuela, but also internationally to prevent the people around the world from knowing really what's happening. Within Venezuela under Chávez hundreds of new community media outlets have been created. This has helped us internally to combat media manipulation from corporate media in Venezuela, but on an international level, we haven't had much advance fighting the war against the media empire. How can we do that?
CHOMSKY: Well, the history of media in the west is interesting. I mentioned that the period of the freest press in the US and England was the mid-19th century, and it was rather like what you were describing. There were hundreds of newspapers of all kinds, working class, ethnic, communities of all kinds, with direct active participation, real participation. People read in those days, working people. Like a blacksmith in Boston would pay a 16 year old kid to read to him while he was working. These factory girls coming from the farms had a high culture, they were reading contemporary literature. And part of their bitter condemnation of the industrial system was because it was taking their culture away from them. They did run extremely interesting newspapers and it was lively, exciting and a period of a really very free vibrant press, and it was overcome slowly, most true in England and the United States, which were then the freest countries in the world. In England they tried censorship, it didn't work, there were too many ways around it. They tried repressive taxation, again it didn't work very well, similarly in the US. What did work finally was two things: concentration of capital and advertiser reliance. First the concentration of capital is obvious then you can do all kinds of things that smaller newspapers can't do. But advertiser reliance means really the newspapers are being run by the advertisers. If the source of income is advertising, the main source, well that's of course going to have an inordenent influence. And by now it's close to 100%. If you turn on television, CBS doesn't make any money from the fact that you turned on the television set, they make money from the advertisers. The advertisers are in effect, the corporation that owns it is selling audiences to advertisers, so of course the news product reflects overwhelming the interests of the corporation and the buyers and the market, which is advertisers. So yeah, and that over time, along with concentration of capital, has essentially eliminated or sharply reduced the diverse, lively and independent locally based media. And that's pretty serious. In the United States, which has had no really organized socialist movement, nevertheless, as recently as the 1950s, there were about 800 labor newspapers which probably reached maybe 30 million people a week, which by our standards were pretty radical, condemning corporate power, condemning what they called the bought priesthood, mainly those who run the media - the priesthood that was bought by the corporate system offering a different picture to the world. In England, it lasted into the 1960s. In the 1960s the tabloids - which are now hideous if you look at them - they were labor-based newspapers in the 1960s, pretty leftist in their orientation. The major newspaper in England that had the largest circulation, more than any other, was The Daily Herald, which was a kind of social-democratic labor-based paper giving a very different picture of the world. It collapsed, not because of lack of reader interest, in fact it had probably the largest reader interest of any, but because it couldn't get advertisers and couldn't bring in capital. So what you're describing today is part of the history of the west, which has been overcome slowly by the standard processes of concentration of capital and of course advertiser reliance is another form of it. But it's beginning to revive in the west as well through the Internet and through cheap publishing techniques. Computers, desktop publishing is now much cheaper than big publishing, and of course the internet. So the new technologies are giving opportunities to overcome the effects of capital concentration, which has a severe impact on the nature of media and the nature of schools and everything else. So, there's revival, and actually the major battle that's going on right now is crucial, as to who is going to control the Internet. The Internet was developed in places like this, MIT, that's the state sector of the economy, most of the new economy comes out of the state sector, it's not a free market economy. The Internet is a case in point; it was developed in the state sector like here, actually with Pentagon funding, and it was in the state sector for about 30 years before it was handed over to private corporations in 1995 under Clinton. And right now there's a struggle going on as to whether it will be free or not. So there's a major effort being made by the major corporate centers to figure out some ways to control it, to prevent the wrong kinds of things from their point of view from being accessible, and there are now grassroots movements, significant ones struggling against it, so these are ongoing live battles. There is nothing inherent in capitalist democracy to the idea that the media have to be run by corporations. It would have shocked the founding fathers of the United States. They believed that the media had to be publicly run. If you go back to the...it’s hard to believe now…
EVA: Well, that's why the airwaves are public
CHOMSKY: That's right, that's why the airwaves are kept public and it's a gift to the corporations to allow them to be used. But if you go back to Jefferson, even Hamilton, Madison and the rest of them, they were in favor of public subsidies to newspapers to enable them to survive as independent sources of information. Postal rates were set by the government in such a way as to give advantages to the newspapers so that the public would be able to have access to the widest possible range of diverse information and so on. The Bill of Rights, which technically established freedom of press, we can talk about whether that works, but technically said nothing about whether the government could intervene to support the media. In fact, it's not only a possibility but it's what the framers of the Constitution had in mind. Over the years, attitudes, the dominant culture, the hegemonic culture as Gramsci would have called it, has changed so that the idea of the corporatization of the media is sort of assumed kind of like the air you breathe, but it's not, it's a creation of capitalist concentration and the doctrinal system that goes with it...…It doesn’t have to exist
EVA: So, in that sense a couple of months ago the Venezuelan government decided not to renew the concession of one of the corporate media outlets for many reasons, tax violations, not paying social security for workers as well as being involved in the coup. Do you think that is a demonstration of the State assuring that those airwaves remain in the public sphere? And that is something that could be replicated in other countries or even in the United States, they didn't revoke the concession, they just didn't renew it.
CHOMSKY: You're talking about the RCTV case. Well, my own view of that is kind of mixed. Formally I think it was a tactical mistake, and for another I think you need a heavy burden of proof to close down any form of media so in that sense my attitude is critical...
EVA: But should corporations have a stronghold on the concessions?
CHOMSKY: Yeah, I know, that's the other side. The question is what replaces it. However, let me say that I agree with the western criticism in one crucial respect. When they say nothing like that could ever happen here, that's correct. But the reason, which is not stated, is that if there had been anything like RCTV in the United States or England or Western Europe the owners and the managers would have been brought to trial and executed – In the United States executed, in Europe sent to prison permanently, right away, in 2002. You can't imagine the New York Times or CBS News supporting a military coup that overthrew the government even for a day. The reaction would be "send them to a firing squad" . So yeah, it wouldn't have happened in the west because it would never have gotten this far. It seems to me that there should be more focus on that. But as to the removal of the license I think you just have to ask what's replacing it. In Venezuela, you know better than I, my impression is that it was not a popular move. And the population should have a voice in this, big voice, major voice, so I think there are many sides to it. But it kind of depends how it works itself out. Are you really going to get popular media, for example?
EVA: Should the concessions be in the hands of the people to decide?
CHOMSKY: I think they should, yes, in fact in a technical sense they are, even in the United States. Take the airwaves again, that's public property. Corporations have no right to it, It's given to them as a gift by the taxpayer and the taxpayer doesn't know it. The culture has reached the point where the people assume that's the natural order of things. It's not, it's a major gift from the public. In fact if you look at the history of telecommunications, radio and television, it's quite interesting. Radio came along in the 1920s and in most of the world, it just became public. The United States is an interesting case, it's almost the only major case in which radio was privatized. And there was a struggle about it. The labor unions, the educational institutions, the churches, they wanted it to be public, the corporations wanted it to be privatized. There was a big battle, and the United States is very much a business-run society, and uniquely, business won, and it was privatized. When television came along, in most of the world it was public, without question. In the United states it wasn't even an issue, it was just private because the business-dominated culture by then had achieved a level of dominance so that people didn't think of what was obvious, that this was public space that we're giving away to them. Finally, public radio and public television were permitted in the United States in a very small corner, because there had been public pressure to compel the corporate media to meet some level or public responsibility, like to run a few educational programs for children and things like that. And the corporations didn't like it, they didn't want to have any commitment to public responsibility, so they were willing to allow a small public, side operation, so they could then claim, well, we don't have to have any responsibility anymore because they can do it, and they don't do much of, they are also corporate-funded, but that's a striking difference between the United States and even other similar societies. It's a very free country, the United States, maybe the freest in the world, but it's also uniquely business-run, and that has enormous effects on everything.
EVA: On that note, the theme of the Book Fair in Venezuela this year is "United States: Is a Revolution Possible?" Is it?
CHOMSKY: I think it's just below the surface. I mean there is tremendous discontent. A large majority of the population for years has felt that the government doesn't represent them, that it represents special interests. In the Reagan years this went up to about 80% of the population. If you look at public attitudes and public policy, there is a huge gulf between them. Both political parties are far to the right of the population on a host of major issues. Just to take some examples; Read in this morning's New York Times, September 21st, there's a column by Paul Krugmann, who's sort of far left of the media, sort of a left, liberal commentator, a very good economist, who's been talking for some time about the horrible health system in the United States, it's a disaster, twice the per capita expenses of any other country and some of the industrial companies and some of the worst outcomes in the industrial world. And he has a column this morning that starts out by saying, hopefully, well now it turns out that maybe universal health care is becoming politically possible. Now that's a very interesting comment, particularly when it's coming from the left end of the media. What does it mean for it to become politically possible? For decades it's been supported by an overwhelming majority of the population but it was never politically possible. Now it's becoming politically possible. Why? He doesn't say why, but the reason is that manufacturing corporations are being severely harmed by the hopelessly inefficient and costly healthcare system in the United States. It's like how it costs a lot more to produce a car in Detroit than a couple of miles north in Windsor Canada because they have an efficient, functioning healthcare system. So by now there is corporate pressure from the manufacturing sector to do something to fix up the outrageous healthcare system. So it's becoming politically possible. When it's just the large majority of the population, it's not politically possible. The assumptions behind that should be obvious, but they're interesting. Politically possible does not mean the population supports it. What politically possible means is that some sectors of concentrated capital support it. So if the pharmeceutical industries and the financial institutions are against it, it's not politically possible. But if manufacturing industries come out in favor of it, well then maybe it begins to become politically possible. Those are the general assumptions, we're not talking about the left liberal commentary. I'm not talking about the editorials in the Wall Street Journal, that's the spectrum of opinion. Something is politically possible if it's support by major concentrations of capital. It doesn't matter what the public thinks, and you see this on international issues too. Like take what may be the major international issue right now: Is the United States going to invade Iran? That could be an utter monstrosity. Every viable presidential candidate - not Dennis Kucinich, but the ones that are really viable, has come out and said yeah, we have the right to invade Iran. The way they say it is, "all options are on the table", meaning, "we want to attack them, we can attack them." That's almost the entire political spectrum, but what does the population think? Well, about 75% of the population is opposed to any threats against Iran and wants to enter into diplomatic relations with them. But that's off the spectrum, in fact, it isn't even reported. But it's not part of the discussion. It's the same way with Cuba. Every since polls began in the 1970s, a considerable amount of the population wants to enter into normal diplomatic relations with Cuba and end the economic strangulation and the terror, which they don't know about, but they would be against that too. It's not an option, because state interests won't allow it. And that's separate from the population, and it's not discussed. Do a search of media and journals, including left journals and you just don't find it. Well, it's a very free country but also very much business controlled.
EVA: But how could that change come about?
CHOMSKY: It can come about by the kind of organization that will take public opinion - that will take the public and turn it into an organized force. Which has happened...
EVA: So in the end you need media control?
CHOMSKY: Well, that's part of it, but media control is in part a consequence of popular organization. So the media, take the Vietnam era, the media did turn into moderate critics of the war, but that was the result of popular mass movements. I could tell you explicit cases, one case I know very well was one of the major newspapers in the country, the editor happened to be a personal friend who was pretty conservative and became the first newspaper in the United States to call for withdrawal. It was largely under the influence of his son who was in the resistance, who I knew through the resistance activities, and who influenced his father. That's an individual case, but it was happening all over. The shift in the popular movements and popular attitudes led to a shift in the media, not a major shift, but a significant one. For one reason because the journalists are human beings and they live in the culture, and if they're coming out of a culture of criticism and questioning and challenging and so on, well, that's going to affect them. So there has been a change in many respects. Take say aggression. There is a lot of comparison now of the reaction to the Iraq war with the reaction to the Vietnam war - it's almost all wrong, there was almost no opposition to the Vietnam war. When the Vietnam war was at the level of the Iraq war today there was almost no opposition. Public protest of the Iraq war is far beyond that of the Vietnam war at any comparable stage. People have just forgotten. There was protest against the Vietnam war by 1968, lets say, but by that time there were half a million troops in Vietnam. The US had invaded...and it was seven, six or seven years after they had invaded South Vietnam and it had been practically wiped out and the word spread to the rest of Indochina. It was way beyond Iraq today - then there was protest. The first call for withdrawal from Vietnam in the major media was fall of 1969. That's seven years after the war began. Now you get it in the New York Times, they don't mean it, but at least you get it. These are changes, and the same changes have taken place in many other domains. Take say women's rights, it's pretty important, it's half the population. Well, the circumstances are very different now than the 1960s. You can see it right at this institution. Take a walk down the halls and you'll see about half women, about a third minorities, casual dress, easy interchanges among the people and so on. When I got here 50 years ago it was totally different. White males, well dressed, obedient - do your work and don't ask any questions. And it's indicative of changes throughout the whole society. Well, those are...the solidarity movements are the same. When you have popular movements, they change the society. If they reach a sufficient scale I think they can challenge fundamental matters of class domination and economic control.
EVA: Do you think the revolution in Venezuela serves as an example for people in the United States? That change is possible from the ground up?
CHOMSKY: It will if two things happen: One, if it's successful and two, if you can break through the media distortion of what's happening. Two things have to happen, ok? So, I mentioned that I was in Chile last October. The picture of Venezuela that is presented by the media, say in El Mercurio is about the same as it would have been in the old El Mercurio under Pinochet. So as long as that's the picture, that's the prism through which events are perceived, you can't have much of an effect. But if you can change the prism so that things are reported more or less accurately, and if what's happening in fact does constitute a possible model, if those two achievements can be reached, then yes, it could be.
EVA: Would you give a message to the people of Venezuela? Anything?
CHOMSKY: Yeah, make it succeed. The task for the people of Venezuela or for Latin America all together is to carry forth the programs of integration, of overcoming repression, inequality, poverty, lack of democracy, which is happening in various ways in different countries. Carry it through to success, and in collaboration and solidarity with people of the rich powers. Make it reach the point where it is understood there as well, that requires both sides, and they interact. Take liberation theology, it was mostly Latin America, and it had an influence in the United States, a big influence in the church and in the society, and the same can be true of other developments. There is a lot of interaction possible. More so now than before because of the existence of intercommunications and solidarity movements and so on.
http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?SectionID=45&ItemID=13946
posted by attilav at 15:09
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