iDose Therefore I Am
By Matthew Devereux
Stop me if you’ve heard this before. Your child is already dead and as a parent you’re to blame for their fatally uncontrolled behaviour in a confusing, predatory and dangerous world. Professor Ray Surette’s (1998) law of opposites, based on an analysis of the media’s reporting of crime and violence states that there is greater media coverage of events that are particularly unusual or severe against individuals over and above the percentile risks associated with actual crime. Furthermore there is a seeming social bias at play with a concentration of stories focussing on older or higher status victims and offenders. An emphasis Gregg Barak (1994) argues which ‘reinforces forms of social control’ by dictating how society should view these events in terms of right or wrong, victimhood, race, sex and class.
The ecstasy related death of Leah Betts in 1995 and those of Louis Wainwright and Nicholas Smith during 2010 at the hands of mephedrone in terms of the amount of coverage afforded to these three tragic occurrences can be said to have been boldly aggrandised by newsrooms in light of the public interest, or moral panic, or rank sensationalism. Mephedrone itself was unknown as miaow-miaow prior to the deaths and as Private Eye uncovered was a name concocted by the media itself (Private Eye 1259, 2010). Although the emphasis of new stories in correlating the taking of drugs as the prime cause of these fatalities was ultimately unmasked as erroneous, it helped to ensure the attention of public which in turn made the prohibition of mephedrone and ecstasy an easy political win in the UK. An act which has not stopped any further ‘drug related fatalities’ nor the use of either ecstasy or mephedrone, however it has criminalised a lot of otherwise carefree people.
Now the twist. In July 2010 we are presented with Drug Craze 2.0 in the form of iDosing, ‘A BIZARRE new craze in which youngsters get high by listening to droning MUSIC is sweeping the internet'. iDosing, or listening to Binaural music said to elicit illicit psychological responses, has been listed by US narcotic authorities as an insidious new gateway for teens to experiment with real drugs. The regularity of these hysterical panics suggest that we, the public, love them. The prurient heart pounding scares, the tang of alienation from a gloriously hedonistic society, the schadenfreude of the irresponsible in cuffs, why do we make these stories? And what makes them so good to tell?
And here lies the fundamental problem involved in this process of interpretation and re-interpretation. On the one hand, reportage of unusual events potentially affects perceptions of their probabilities. This was, in essence, the very centre of all the satire produced by Chris Morris in the Brass Eye era. Those who castigated Peadogeddon entirely confused the target of the satire (the increasingly hysterical representation of paedophilia in the media) with an affirmation of paedophilia itself. This is the equivalent of thinking that Jonathan Swift genuinely wanted English people to eat Irish babies, rather than satirically mocking the proto-Malthusianism of his age. However, rather like a variant of George Soros’s reflexivity theory in financial markets, perceptions also lead to changes in realities.
A hysterical news story might lead to a process of prohibition of a drug or, alternatively, it might lead to a massive uptake in its intake. I myself had never heard of an iDose until I read a news story which presented it as the new danger to the young, and then immediately and quite naturally rushed off to iDose (without much effect). Charlie Brooker’s Newswipe programme had a good segment on precisely this process where it argued that media representation of mass killings such as that in Columbine High School needed to be very subtle and very calm indeed in order to limit the propensity of similar events happening again.
It is constantly the case, however, that the “end of the world is nigh” message gets greater oxygen of publicity than the “things are moderately OK” communiqué. This is particularly true where journalism forgets its vocation of reporting events that have occurred or are occurring and instead speculates on future events, particularly when that speculation is based on an awareness of probability that would be intuitively understood as insane and as ludicrously fear-mongering by a primary school child (“Santa Claus not only doesn’t exist, but he is armed with a Kalashnikov and is outside your front door”).
This addled process operates in particular through the lens of the so-called ‘war on drugs’, a war unwinnable both pragmatically and in terms of nomenclature. This is not a new phenomenon: cannabis was vilified by the William Randolph Hearst media conglomerates in large part because of his extensive forestry interests, which were potentially threatened by hemp manufacture. The precise history of illegalisation is often very arbitrary. Moreover, as Thomas Szasz argued, the criminalisation of certain drugs leads to a situation where the drug-taker is infantilised; in Szasz’s typology, they are reduced to being versions of the Freudian id, desperately searching for short-termist highs, whilst the judiciary or police are institutionalised or entrenched as the ego or super-ego.
It is not the case that all drug-taking is benign, and in a subtle piece of journalism printed as part of his book Junk Mail Will Self wrote about the complexities of decriminalisation of cannabis in Amsterdam (although it does have to be said that those complexities are heightened by the existence of the Netherlands as an island of decriminalisation with the corollary of drugs tourism). Addictions of one kind or another can be hugely damaging and destructive. One can, however, become addicted to almost anything.
Whilst it is clear that crystal meth or Chris Morris’s cake have something inherently addictive in them at a physical level, it is the case that addictive behaviour is an underlying part of certain personalities, and, moreover, a form of behaviour that often arises when other problems are not being solved in the life of the addict (whether emotional, psychological, or in terms of housing and employment and so on). In so much of the depiction of addiction in the mainstream media, the focus is upon the symptom rather than the cause; on the external manifestation rather than the underlying dynamic, and on the mass production of panic.
A key question would be what effect on brain waves a hysterical news story has – does it boost alpha waves, delta waves, theta waves? Does it stimulate our natural fight or flight mechanisms and their chemical embodiments? Is it addictive? Does a diet of scare-mongering news lead one to desire experimentation with drugs – the dreaded gateway theory?
Another aspect of this rather curious story, therefore, is the very question of what drug-taking is. The brain itself is a potent chemical factory, and listening to music is only one way in which those chemical balances are changed and in which endorphins or serotonin or dopamine levels are played with. Other activities along with iDosing that involve such transmutations include cooking or having a conversation or kissing. Moreover, the targeted use of substances or of soundwaves to transform brain waves has been an element of all human societies. Isn’t music by definition sound structured for effect?
The question is, again, not so much whether a particular substance is healthy or unhealthy in itself, but rather whether the ways in which it is consumed are beneficial to the individual and the community. One of the most notable differences between Ecstasy culture and the culture of legal drugs such as Valium is that the former tends to be taken communally while the latter is taken on a more individual basis; the former is often used to ‘get high’ while the latter is often used to keep a person functioning in the everyday. Rather than simply seeing the two as the same process, there needs to be a consciousness of ‘set’ and ‘setting’ and of the end-goals of narcotic experiences. Taking Ecstasy every morning over the cornflakes in order to cope with the daily commute is not the same thing as taking it in at a music festival. Part of the discourse in some of the iDose reportage uses the term to ‘get high’ as a pejorative and as code for degenerative behaviour. But since it has happened throughout human history, what precisely is wrong with height? Again, there is the thought experiment of what a positive news story about drug taking would be like, as Bill Hicks had it.
The other subtext to this story is the fear of the internet as a place of chaos and access to the dangerous and the Dionysian. An element within that is, of course, the uneasy relationship between overwhelmingly top-down mainstream media and the overwhelmingly bottom-up world of cyberspace. These tensions are not new, since they also accompanied the development of the printing-press, the great antecedent of the internet. At times, today, there does seem to be a curious process where the top-down mainstream media and the bottom-up web 2.0 internet world create a kind of dance of short-termism. The Raoul Moat case was perhaps one of the most bizarre, with the formation of rapid pro-Moat and anti-Moat factions.
There is, of course, an immense attention deficit hyperactivity element to all this: this is today’s latest freak or outrage, to be forgotten by tomorrow morning’s caffeine intake. The danger, however, lies in the skewed perceptions of probability and reality that can accompany these fads, and the prohibitions that can follow them. As Montesquieu said, unnecessary laws weaken the necessary ones. A rule concocted out of hype is not likely to either be enforced or enforceable, let alone enlightened.
Plus ca change, plus c’est la meme chose. Despite the apparent Brave New World feel of the alpha waveology of the iDose, there is nothing new about moral panics and nothing new about fears over drug-taking and, on the other side of the coin, romanticisation and glamorisation and at times fetishisation. Particularly when there is a death as a result of drug-taking, we need to follow Voltaire’s argument that to the living we owe respect but to the dead nothing but the truth. One can only imagine how much excitement a death from an iDose, whether true or fictional, would cause – but, as in all these things, a sense of proportion and detachment is a healthy one. However, being hand reared for these stories all our lives, we are as a society jonesing for our next mad hit. The wildly hallucinatory accusations, the entreaties to youth, sex & music, the priapistic moral high ground culminating in climactic feelings of potent action, promises promises. In the sober light of morning declarations of the decline and fall of western civilisation as a result of iDose apathy may prove to have been premature.
Unless of course we all happen to die of boredom first, but never fear our children’s inappropriate behaviour assures our future’s destined to be outrageous.
References:
Technical Explanation of Binaural Beats
Java Applet Binaural Beat Generator
Ray Surette (1998)Media, Crime and Criminal Justice: Images and Realities (Wadsworth Contemporary Issues in Crime & Justice)
Gregg Barak (1995)Media, Process, and the Social Construction of Crime: Vol 10 (Current issues in criminal justice)
(please note: we are not affiliated with the authors of these books, however we do get a bit of money if you purchase the books via the links which goes some way to offsetting our costs, thanks.)
After the future, all is change
After the future, all is change.
By Douglas Bulloch
Is change more than a cliché? More than simply a word uttered to capture unnamed aspirations? As the US election primaries are showing once again, change has a miraculous appeal. In spite of the weathered cynicism that flows after every lofty hope falls, large numbers of people always seem ready to believe again in something, anything, and – in the case of Barack Obama – almost everything. There is nothing certain in this world but that nothing is certain, as the old saying has it, yet this shallow maxim has the appearance of wisdom only because constant change defies the grasp of the present. It says nothing about the pace of change we are living through, nor where change leads. Yet although Obama momentarily captured the mantle of change in American politics, time will show that he is less the putative agent of change, than its product.
To say that there is always change is to disregard it, instead to place a lonely faith in human nature as a timeless challenge to the vicissitudes of providence and fortune. To speak seriously of change we need to look beyond individual examples, and look instead at change as a process – one with its own dynamics. Change does not simply describe the differences between one state of affairs and another, but is the means by which settled relationships are undermined and replaced by new configurations. Instead of seeing how change is an ever-present feature of our past, and therefore our future, we can look at the pace of change itself and see that change – technological, political and social – is perpetually accelerating. And this acceleration has effects all of its own, independent of the actual changes described. Simply put, it makes change the normal state of affairs, against which we search for stability, or at least for stable narratives. But as the process of change accelerates, the future becomes less certain, and we turn our attention towards common moments and common threats.
With the end of the Cold War, the future looked momentarily like a long slow procession to wealth and liberal happiness. The 1990s didn’t quite follow the script, but the future became condensed around the forthcoming Millennium celebrations when, around the world, most of the population jointly held their breath and watched a dawn of new possibilities wash away the sins of history. The end of that same year, the narrowest election in US history revealed an unanticipated indecision over what should come next, and in September 2001 a new threat emerged to hold the world’s gaze. Now, a few years and a couple of wars later, the ‘War on Terror’ hasn’t gone away, but it has to some extent been normalised into a question of police cooperation and political containment. The firebomb attacks on Piccadilly and Glasgow airport were revealed to be amateurish, and although there is no discounting new dangers, there is also the need to move on and imagine a world beyond the suffocating presumptions of security policy. Yet there is no Millennium ahead of us, nor any date that would unite the world in a moment of common reflection. Nor is there any agreed template of future progress, just an ever-tightening cycle of technological and social change, the principal effect of which is a stultifying ennui, a retreat from seriousness and a descent into consumerist accumulation. There are the apocalyptic warnings of climate change, but these are accompanied by the sense that it would at least provide spectacle to an ever more dreary world of prohibitions and material satisfaction. At the same time as we are afraid of the effects of climate change, we are seduced by the possible excitement.
The Christmas and New Year Television schedules in Britain were characteristically drenched in impressions of the past. Cranford, Sense and Sensibility and Oliver Twist, offered up merely the latest instalments in our continuing obsession with the 18th and 19th Centuries. This unending cycle of dramatic adaptations may stem from a profound alienation with our present place in the world, a yearning for the certainties of class and social hierarchy, or an abject fear of the future, or indeed an element of all three. It is tempting to think that the past is easy and that the watching public feel comfortable there, that edgy contemporary drama is too difficult for a general audience. But when contemporary British drama involves placing Tony Blair on trial and assassinating President Bush, then perhaps that serves as its own explanation. And now that we have an unelected Prime Minister and an eviscerated political discourse it is no wonder that America looms ever larger in our political and cultural imagination.
Another part of the appeal of period drama is the portrayal of societies in flux. Oliver Twist was after all a polemical exposition on the perils of poverty in a fast industrialising London. Cranford was a clever portrait of a fading age, the railway bringing more than commerce to the genteel habits of a rural Georgian village. The 19th Century was a period of dramatic social upheaval and technological innovation. This was matched in the world of ideas as Darwin exiled man from the Garden of Eden, Marx awakened new social forces, Empire brought the world fully into view and steam power made it closer. The end of the 19th Century was a time of unbridled optimism in Europe brought to a shattering halt in 1914. But we shouldn’t let this cloud the undercurrents of change throughout this period. War simply drove them onwards ever faster.
By the end of the First World War, war itself had changed, as had our revulsion of it. The next twenty years saw extravagant advances in science and technology; the rise of radio, television, antibiotics and new synthetic materials opened up whole new horizons of human possibility, along with authors like HG Wells and Aldous Huxley determined to embrace them. This coupled with new and threatening forms of political organisation, all focussed on grasping the future, produced another deadly conflict that bequeathed nuclear technology, jet engines, rockets and the computer. Therefore, although the world looked very different in 1900 than it had in 1800, the next hundred years would see exponentially greater change again. Nor should our consideration end there. The end of the Cold War unveiled technologies that were almost inconceivable just a few years before. The Gulf War in 1991 seemed less an attempt to establish a new world order than a showcase for it, as information systems and precision weapons turned a powerful, multidimensional, million-man army into target practice. And it did not stop there. The last fifteen years have witnessed the most intense period of technological change in history. Computer hardware doubles in speed and durability in shorter and shorter periods of time; software is limited only by human imagination. New methods of energy generation point the way toward the end of our dependence on fossil fuels, and genetic technology already raises more questions than we know how to ask, let alone answer. All this, and with new developments in nano-technology, we are stretching our capacity to imagine the future and testing the limits of language to describe it comprehensibly.
The evolution of the social arena has been no less dramatic. The old-fashioned idea that identity comes through the learning and mastering of the habits and customs of a region, class or profession have rapidly dissipated; to be replaced by a refutation of externally applied categories. The public and private domains have been reversed, and individuals demand to be understood as such. No longer are people judged according to the choices they make, but according to the feelings they reveal. Life now is a voyage of discovery, where every achievement or failure reveals innate characteristics and brings one closer to one’s ‘true self’. The Internet has accelerated this process exponentially as like-minds form distant communities of mutual appreciation, and shared obsession. The meaning of friendship has been destabilised, such that one can have thousands of friends, and none. Mobile phones have made communication potentially instantaneous, while facebook makes interaction passive and ad hoc. Information flows have multiplied and accelerated to such an extent that people are subsumed within it, and ‘identity theft’ becomes a matter of knowing someone’s birthday and their mother’s maiden name. It is now almost possible to know everything and nothing about a person, simultaneously.
Politically this translates as the abandonment of party loyalty, and the rise of single-issue campaigns. There is no use attempting to unite people behind a shared program of social transformation, as social transformation accelerates every day. Better to capture those fleeting moments when everyone agrees about one thing. Political parties used to be respectable associations of common loyalty to a way of life or general social disposition; now they are merely the receptacles of strident and fissiparous individual ambition. When this ambition is realised, then governing becomes the management – or mismanagement – of the everyday. Long-term investment decisions get overtaken by events; minor clerical errors cause ministerial resignations. Governments can no longer even win wars because the reasons for waging them are continually crowded out by the life story of the latest casualty. They are no longer concerned with the future for the simple reason that – due to the permutations and combinations of proliferating technological and social change – we know less about the future now than at any time in history.
With all this change comes an intensification of the present. Change is not simply upon us, it overwhelms us daily. It generates fear and alienation. As the world changes, so we feel less at home in it. We fear being left behind, so we master new technologies and novel social codes, or we retreat and reach for old certainties. As the past becomes more distant, we venerate it all the more. We dig it up carefully on live TV, we recreate it meticulously as a tribute to an imagined stability and coherence. We hang on inexplicably to a simulation of traditional monarchy for the disguise it permits our tawdry voyeurism over their pointless, infantile lives. Most of all we adopt the latest fashionable opinion, and strive endlessly to seem familiar – even if disdainful – with the new. But of course, we do it ‘ironically’. We laugh at ourselves as we slavishly join facebook, we ‘do our bit’ for the environment, as long as it doesn’t mean any genuine sacrifice. We wear armbands and go to concerts to save the environment, laughing all the time at Ricky Gervais – laughing at us, laughing at him, laughing at us, etc. Life has become so ironic that irony itself is now meaningless. This crisis of meaning is revealed not simply by our obsession with the past, but also by strange direction comedy has taken. Ricky Gervais offers moments of original and deeply powerful social critique but is perhaps exceptional for that. Little Britain on the other hand is surely amusing, but nobody can explain why without just repeating the catchphrases and laughing. Not everyone likes Little Britain, but everyone knows about it, and it wins awards. To call it a freakshow serves no longer to condemn it as the rootless turmoil of our post-millennial life looks a little bit like a freakshow, doesn’t it? Where once we could draw on narratives of progress and national purpose for some consensus upon which to base our criticism and satire, now we are simply wheeling about looking for something odd to laugh at, and Big Brother offers us not just the vision, but the reality of a society that simply sits around, watching itself, laughing.
This vortex of technological and social change that sucks away the meaning in our lives by destabilising all certainties produces a generalised psychological distemper which meets the future with an exhausted shrug; a post-millennial condition which reduces to a kind of nervous, reflective cynicism, an arch contempt for purposeful risk and endeavour, and a soulless post-ironic reductionism that disdains seriousness in favour of wit and unapologetic self-obsession. To hold an opinion, or to believe something, is not the result of thoughtful consideration, but a kind of social performance. To believe is to value being perceived as believing.
Nevertheless, the world demands interpretation. Life still requires meaning. And even if the increasing pace of change elevates insouciant dilettantism up the social hierarchy, the need for interpretation renders public opinion both volatile and powerful. Influence becomes a case of playing the Pied Piper of Hamelin, seducing rats and children with irresistible mood-music. Given that change is a remorseless dynamo, we vest inordinate faith in those who claim to be its master, those who claim to know the way ahead. It is not necessary to say exactly what change is necessary, merely to pull at the bridle and look serene. Nor is this entirely negative. For a population to be sold an idea is not to interrupt change, nor to control it, but it may create fleeting commonalities of perception, and thus restore a semblance of joint purpose to the whole, distilling from the chaos and anomie a precious moment of parallel reflection.
And people clearly want to believe in the future. When everything is so uncertain, it’s no surprise that we grasp at any trace of meaning, any attempt to chart a path to progress. It is impossible to see the renewed enthusiasm among the US electorate and come to any other conclusion. Indeed, even if it is assumed that Obama’s message is short on specifics, that in itself is indicative of the lack of conditions his supporters place on the content of his message. They are simply seduced by the idea of hope after 7 years dominated by fear. But this article has been less about the specifics of Obama’s appeal, and more about the post-Millennial mindset, which acts as the context of conceptual instability in which grand appeals to the future can prove so attractive, not because of their specificity, but in spite of it.
A desire for change, so visible in the current US elections, is not what it seems. It is indicative of a yearning for predictable points in the future; moments to hang on to, things to be sure about. It is a perfect encapsulation of the post-millennial condition, where increasing uncertainty about the future raises the stakes of every private wager with aspiration. And when these desires coalesce around a political figure, it provides a moment of intense relief. To believe that a new face, one promising change, will deliver at least a point of common agreement momentarily sweeps aside the cloying retinue of meritless curiosities that occupy our degraded public life, and reminds us what politics is for. If we have abandoned grand narratives of political and social transformation, we cannot abandon the effects of change on our lives. We cannot simply sit back and show contempt for it all like monks in a weird form of public retreat, or pick at it like diners in a vast buffet. If change is perpetually accelerating and making our grasp of the future less certain everyday, then commitment to an idea of political community becomes more important, not less. And it is this sweeping undercurrent of social transformation that makes us reach out for the idea of unity. Living in the modern world can be a rollercoaster, but rollercoasters are no fun riding solo. As the idea of the future becomes more distant and opaque, we must become accustomed to change as the norm, to see it as much more than a cliché or an empty aspiration, but as the only thing we have left.
Standing Our Ground: Land reclamation in Bevere, Venezuela.
In the Bevere community, located outside Tucani, Venezuela the push for agricultural reform and ‘endogenous development’ is the government’s reported attempt to reduce the poverty and inequality which has beset this petroleum-rich nation for generations. With financial and technical support from the state and its various institutional mechanisms, the landless and the unemployed are being encouraged to re-populate the countryside and exploit the natural richness of Venezuela’s soil through cooperative work relations and shared titles to previously uncultivated land. The result has been a fortification of allegiances as new agricultural collectives and communities grow up on these expropriated lands and earlier sacrosanct ideas regarding private property, entitlement, citizenship, and individual rights have become violently contested cultural terrains. Trebuchet’s political editor Edward Ellis investigates.
Interview by Edward Ellis editorial by Douglas Bulloch
Translation assistance provided by Nahirana Zambrano
On March 3, 2004, Jesus Guerrero, a poor, landless campesino from outside the small town of Tucaní in Western Venezuela, was clearing a piece of land just south of Lake Maraicabo in one of the most fertile agricultural regions of his country. With his fellow farmers, he was preparing a previously neglected parcel of land for the cultivation of sugar cane, oranges, yucca, and plantains. One moment he was swinging his machete in the oppressive lowland heat. The next moment, he was dead. Jesus, a husband and a father, had been shot and killed by a mercenary in the pay of a local landowner trying to hold back the encroachment of landless peasants onto his massive, yet largely fallow plantation.
The murder of Jesus Guerrero was not a unique occurrence; over 150 farmers and campesino leaders have been killed in similar fashion during the last 5 years. However, news of peasant deaths does not always reach the public and prosecution of their killers is the exception rather than the rule. These farmers are the fallen soldiers in a war that is currently taking place in this country, a war referred to in official discourse as the ‘war against the latifundio’. Armed with machetes and the promise of land as guaranteed by the newly instituted Ley de Tierra Land Law, campesinos are settling on both public and private farmlands. In theory they have the legal-institutional backing of the anti-neoliberal, ‘revolutionary’ government of President Hugo Chávez Frías as part of Venezuela’s bold shift away from market-oriented development strategies and towards a ‘socialism of the twenty-first century’. In practice, however, that backing is unreliable.
As could be predicted, such a stark break with the status quo has created heightened levels of social upheaval and confrontation in Venezuela. Powerful members of the nation’s ancien regime now face systematic exclusion from the clientelistic and patronage networks they have enjoyed for more than half a century. Since 1998 alone, this country has witnessed no less than eight national elections, four general strikes, the demise of a fifty-year political tradition, the ratification of a new constitution, and a military coup which saw a democratically elected president ousted from office only to be returned to power two days later. Visceral polemics between those considered to be ‘chavista’ and those considered to be opposition ‘escualido’ (‘the squalid ones’) form a major staple of the political diet in Venezuela. Subjective meanings are thus given not only to political allegiances and identities but also to allegiances regarding the idea of what Venezuela is and what it will become.
Agrarian reform is a case in point. Currently, some 90% of Venezuelans live in cities, the product of early 20th Century urban migration following the industrializing effects of the oil boom. Popular conceptions of what ‘modern nations’ do and how ‘modern citizens’ behave have been conditioned by the influence of fashionable North American lifestyles witnessed during vacation trips to Miami. The seemingly endless tracts of rich farmland were forsaken – left to a handful of wealthy landowners and speculators with little incentive to use its potential as a way to diversify the economy away from reliance on oil exports.
The new push for agricultural reform and ‘endogenous development’ is the government’s reported attempt to reverse these trends and reduce the vast levels of poverty and inequality which have beset this petroleum rich nation. With financial and technical support from the state and its various institutional mechanisms, the landless and the unemployed are being encouraged to re-populate the countryside. The natural richness of Venezuela’s soil is being newly developed through cooperative work relations and shared titles to previously uncultivated land. The result has been a fortification of political allegiances as new agricultural collectivities and communities grow up on these expropriated lands and earlier sacrosanct ideas regarding private property, entitlement, citizenship, and individual rights have become contested cultural terrains.
The real story of Venezuela’s ‘’Bolivarian revolution’ is to be found here – in the rich complexities of policies such as agrarian reform. Yet an overwhelming amount of the international media coverage of this country has focused on the personal characteristics and leadership style of the nation’s charismatic and bombastic president, Hugo Chávez. Due to his fiery rhetoric, his Bush-bashing, and his wide support from the ‘poor masses’, Chávez has been cast by pundits everywhere as just another Latin American populist, and the entire Venezuelan population has been subsumed with him into that same unfortunate category. Local actors are all too frequently treated as unsophisticated political subjects, corralled into compliance by the mass patronage of a new ‘messianic’ president.
In an attempt to rectify this distorted perception of social change and politics in Venezuela, Trebuchet sat down with one of the leaders of agrarian reform in the western part of the country to talk about development, cooperativism, and the government. Miguel Basabe is the Director of Education and Public Relations at the agricultural cooperative of Bevere, south of Lake Maracaibo in the state of Mérida. Bevere is comprised of 45 families who are currently cultivating close to 200 hectares, which, although supposedly the property of a single owner, was determined through technical inspections to be owned by the state. The cooperative is a part of the Fundos Zamoranos, a government policy named after the Venezuelan revolutionary hero and peasant advocate, Ezequiel Zamora. The Land Law of 2001 legally enabled the members of Bevere to occupy this land, which they have been doing since 2003.
Edward Ellis: What does the idea of endogenous development mean?
Miguel Basabe: We have been hearing about endogenous development for some time. For me, the term endogenous development means giving potential to the vital capacities of the human being to improve his or her social well-being and through that the production coming from the resources that he or she has. What resources? Water, land, all of the resources that we have in this space. For example, in the case of Bevere, for me endogenous development of Bevere is the transformation of the human being. For me, it begins there, transforming ourselves first. What does that mean? Changing ideas, ways of thinking, ways of behaving; starting from the inside and with our potentialities – knowledge, ancestral knowledge, and diversifying production. In the case of Bevere, that translates as: a diversified production with fruits, cereals, animal husbandry, with production of organic fertilizer, production of organic products, managing the ecology of cultivation, promoting ancestral knowledge like artesanal works and culture. That’s to say all the knowledge that will let us create from the inside. For me, this is endogenous development – creating from the inside towards the outside.
E.E.: Could you explain what work is like on the cooperative?
M.B.: From the first day that we occupied the land we have worked collectively. Not in any moment has there been any division of the land into lots and we are not thinking of parceling it. We distribute the activities we carry out by team. At this moment we have someone responsible for every area of land cultivated. This has been a very important experience for us because every one of those responsible carry a register of what they do, how they do it, how much they spend, on what they spend it and the cost of man power. All of this is in the register. We also have someone who is responsible for where we keep our materials. This person has a list and keeps track of all the tools that are taken out and returned. This has been very successful for us. It has yielded excellent results, thankfully. The work has been totally collective and it has been a very beautiful experience for us. We didn’t have knowledge of collective work and in fact in Venezuela there is very little experience with collective work. We know that for many years there have been attempts to work collectively but in the way that we are doing it here at Bevere, this is the first time and it has been very successful. This includes the distribution of the tasks and those who are responsible for each cultivated area. In relation to the director positions, this also has been very positive. Each one of the directors has a specific responsibility and each one completes his or her commitment. This has been a very important factor for us because it has permitted us to increase the level of commitment from every companero, so that every companero takes up a protagonistic role and is a principal actor, not a secondary actor. This, inside campesino organizations and cooperatives is fundamental – that every associate understands that apart from being an associate of the cooperative, they play a leading role, a protagonistic role.
E.E.: Why have people become interested in working in collectivities rather than traditional capitalist work relations?
M.B.: For us, one of the first things we had to do was accept the reality that we have now – that there is a process of change and that as a social organization we have to be framed or directed by the policies of the state. The Fundos Zamoranos are a policy of the state so as we are a Fundo, we have to put into practice what the policies of the state are telling us. What is it that we are pushing for? Collective work and organization. In this sense we, as directors, maintain a clear direction. This has permitted the people who are behind us, the people who support us, to follow the same the path that we are following.
E.E.: But you were a cooperative before this state policy. So was there an impulse to work in collectives before the Chávez government?
M.B.: Before we had the land we did practically nothing as an organization. Everybody was in a different place and others worked. We began to function as an organization when we occupied the land. We began to live together and to learn how to live together because before we didn’t know. When we began to learn how to live together we began to see other types of social relations and this has strengthened us. So in reality, cooperativism marks a leading role right now politically in Venezuela to rescue these values. It’s the rescue of the values of mutual aid, solidarity, integration, cooperation, community interest. All of this we have been living little by little and we have achieved a cultivation of consciousness of community commitment, of commitment to the country, of commitment of the government toward this process of change.
E.E.: How did you know that this land was state land and not land that belonged to a private individual?
M.B.: One of the first steps that you have to take in regards to the land is to make a declaration about the land. For example, I declare that in such and such a place, there’s a farm that is fallow. Then we request a technical inspection from INTI [The National Institute of Land]. When INTI makes the technical inspection, there are some technical parameters that need to be taken into consideration to evaluate the productivity and the documental and legal part. So one has to make a comparison. And this decides whether the land is productive or not. If the land is productive then, of course, you have to respect the supposed owner, but if they do not produce sufficient documentation it can go to a negotiation. And if the land is not productive, the state proceeds to expropriate it.
E.E.: Have there been many problems with supposed owners of these lands?
M.B.: Yes. In some cases. Because there have been some areas of the country where the supposed owners refuse to recognize that the land belongs to the state. Because before this government arrived, there was a government policy that was carried out very poorly where those with money had the land and they wanted to continue to obtain more land. Many government functionaries permitted them and they gave them land and they sold them land like crazy. Now it’s the opposite. When the government arrived, it said, look, we need land for the campesinos but how are we going to rescue it. First, we have to demonstrate to the supposed owners that this land belongs to the state. It’s like the airwaves, for example – the space of the state. Not like some communication media believe, that the airwaves are private property. It’s not like that. This is what happened with the land with some supposed owners that believed they are the masters of this land. But they never took into account the fact that the state never gave them proof of ownership and many of them didn’t have any documents. They were extending their property, impinging on state lands, renting and buying from small farmers and in some cases taking it for under the market price. In this way they won extension of their lands. And so, with many of these plots, the supposed owners could not demonstrate that this was their land. And this led to state intervention through an administrative process which resulted in the adjudication of the organized groups and the cooperatives. But in some cases the supposed property owners have refused to recognize that the property belongs to the state and this has led to the killing of campesinos, our compañeros. It has led to resistance, and to attacks on campesinos, attacks on the organizations. Still there are some cases where supposed landowners refuse to recognize because it is a cultural problem. For many years they believed that this was theirs and nobody could touch it. But a government arrived that doesn’t favor them but rather those who are modest. And so they are not in agreement. Why? Because they lost a piece of the political power that they had. Before Chávez the government was in favor of the powerful sectors. Now this government has arrived and says no. This government is for the people. And it is of the people. 80 percent of the Venezuelan people are poor. This is the reality. This means that it was 80 percent of the Venezuelan people who elected this government. This government owes itself to the people. There is a big confrontation between the government and the rich sectors, big business, the big communication magnates, the big milk processors, for example. So the people, little by little, are taking consciousness, organizing themselves, and now we have cooperatives, communal councils, communal banks, NGOs, that’s to say, a series of social organizations, the Bolivarian circles, that are dedicated to the strengthening of political consciousness and the strengthening of citizen consciousness.
E.E.: Some people have said there have been 150 campesinos assassinated?
M.B.: We in the campesino sector know that there have been 150 murders. The government has another number, less. But in one way or another it is related to the campesino sector and in one way or another, the murders have come from the landowning sector who are not in agreement with this government and much less with the policies of the government. So, in truth, there have been 150 killed by paid assassins where we know that there are landowning sectors responsible. Where we know that the landowners have paid a lot of money. So this has been a concern for campesinos. We have maintained the struggle, the campesino front, to achieve the social redress for our people.
E.E.: In your opinion, is the government doing enough to persecute those responsible for the murders?
M.B.: In my opinion, the government has a great will, politically. But we have a big problem which is bureaucracy. Many institutions, still, have laws which are not in touch with the reality. They haven’t modified their laws. The bureaucratic paperwork is too convoluted. This impedes the execution of actions in a timely fashion. Because of this, in some cases, many of the campesino leaders who have been assassinated, their killers have fled. The same bureaucracy impedes the efficient action of the security corps. There is political will from the President of the Republic who is a political example. We struggle so that the institutions that impart justice are efficient and are less bureaucratic. This is the reality.
E.E.: Has the army aided in the protection of campesinos?
M.B.: In the case of the army, of the Venezuelan armed forces, there have been many processes. So at the moment of the enactment of the Ley de Tierras, we didn’t have the support of the Venezuelan army. In truth, the support has been pretty scanty. But in these last years, in the past year and a half, yes, there has been a change in the level of involvement of the army. After the coup d’etat in April 2002 there has been a process of cleaning the armed forces and we already have armed forces more in line with the people, more in line with the constitution, and, of course, more subordinate to the President of the Republic. This has permitted, then, the creation of a consciousness at the highest military levels who are most identified with the process of change which didn’t happen in 2000, 2001 when the armed forces were not with the people. Today we can say that we can count on the armed forces.
E.E.: There was a protest in Caracas a year ago over these assassinations, right?
M.B.: Yes, a year ago. It was the 12th of July, 2005. El Frente Campesino Ezequiel Zamorano led a march of campesinos in which we were able to mobilize close to 6,000 campesinos at the national level. This march had as its objective the solicitation and demand of justice from the government in the case of the 150 assassinated. Apart from this, an additional objective was the redress and social justice for all of the families of the campesinos who were assassinated. This opened a space. It opened a space of communication with the national government and it has been opening little by little. We have meetings, we are reaching agreements…
E.E.: And there was a commission or something formed along those lines?
M.B.: Yes. A special commission was created. A special committee made up of members of the national government and people from the national front of campesinos. We have already met and we are in contact.
E.E.: Are they going to issue a report?
M.B.: Yes, they are putting together a report at the current time. We have already seen some results and the national government is coordinating a process of redress for the families of the campesinos who have been assassinated. They are going to be beneficiaries of a kind of trust fund set up to help them.
E.E.: What does it mean to be a citizen in contemporary Venezuela?
M.B.: For me, the word citizen is not complicated. But it implies the conjunction of knowledge and of thoughts, which lead to the formation of a consciousness, a consciousness which permits the development of a person articulated with his or her people, with his or her work. This pushes the revolutionary process or generates the process of creating conscious citizens, citizens conscious of the change that we are living through. For me, this is a citizen. A person prepared from his or her consciousness, someone who is capable of pushing the revolutionary process in collective.
E.E.: Many people say that what is happening in Venezuela is a process.
M.B.: Yes that is true.
E.E.: What does this mean in relation to the Venezuelan government?
M.B.: This is a revolutionary process that is very old, since the war for independence that the Liberator Simon Bolivar started. There we have in the thoughts of Bolivar, Ezequiel Zamora, Simon Rodriguez, in the thoughts of Andres Bello, there we have the biggest ideas and proposals for social development. And there, in this thought, we already see a part of socialism, we already see a part of the political and social proposal that this government is putting forth. Because the first known socialist before these Venezuelan heroes was Jesus Christ. He was a socialist. So then, in our case, Chávez is a consequence of this process. He is a consequence, not a cause. He is the consequence of a revolutionary process that has been maturing for many years. And where other processes of capitalism and neoliberal processes were failing. And because this neoliberal process failed, it gave as a consequence the proposal of socialism. And now in our case, in the Venezuelan case, Chávez forms part of a process, but not the central part of the process. He is not the revolutionary process. He forms part of it because he put forward a proposal. Now it is the people who are the owners of the process because today there are social organizations everywhere that are developing that process. So then, for us, it has been very important that this government is not stopped. It put forward this process, and whether the radical sectors take out Chávez or not, nobody is going to stop it. There is already a process of change where there is a high level of consciousness regarding what this means to the country and what it has meant for many countries in Latin America. And this proposal of Socialism of the Twenty-First Century, what is its central part? Well, that we are more humanitarian, more human, that we share things, that property is equally distributed, that everyone has rights, and that money is not put above human beings but rather human beings are put above money. Money is neither the last end nor the principal end. Rather, the central end is man and after man, if there is time to think about money, then money. This, for me, this is the proposal of Socialism of the Twenty-First Century.
E.E.: Do you believe in private property?
M.B.: There is not a system that doesn’t know private property. In every system there needs to be private property. And there has been private property. But what happens? This property has to be limited in some way. Why limited? Because it cannot pass above a policy of the state. It cannot be put above man. It has to be limited to the needs of society. And this is the proposal that is being presented by the President of the Republic – limited private property for the interests of society where the interests of the community are put ahead of those of the individual. Private property has to be subject to social interest, something that the constitution of Venezuela says very clearly. It must be subject to the collective interest. We believe in private property and we are respectful of private property but the collective interest needs to be put first.
E.E.: Here in Bevere, what have been your biggest successes and/or failures?
M.B.: I would say that in my case, we have not had any failures. Why? Because these are new experiences that we are living. In all processes, of course, there are ups and downs, but in my case the collective work has been a success. This organization, a new experience for me, has been a success. Our organization works. All of the directors work, all of the teams work. The production that we have is not the production that we should have, but neither has it been a failure. The participation of our associates is effective and the support from the state has been very good with some limitations. But they are not limitations that mean it has been a failure because it is subject to a lot of bureaucracy. So, I would tell you that for me it has been a very positive experience and certainly not a failure. It would be impossible for it to be considered a failure. There are difficult moments, yes. But because we have difficult moments, to call it a failure? Absolutely not. Because this includes, as a social organization, a contribution that we are making. Sure, we would like other organizations to also advance rapidly but unfortunately that process has been slow. It hasn’t advanced as fast as we have in a few things because we have received certain training that has allowed us to clarify doubts and clarify ideas. The experiences that we have had have been really interesting for us all and for me it has been successful.
By Edward Ellis
Land has always been a touchstone political issue in South America, and land reform is an identifier of leftist politics. So it is no surprise that it forms a key component in the populist appeal of Hugo Chávez. However the murder of campesinos, allegedly by hired mercenaries, and the involvement of the army, rather than the police, in protecting commune workers, shows how a touchstone might become a touch paper if not handled very carefully indeed. Unfortunately for Venezuela, much of Basabe’s language reflects precisely the kind of romantic revolutionism that has scarred the region’s history; the personality cult of leadership, even going so far as to connect Chávez to Christ; the moral absolutism implied by describing the opponents of Chávez as ‘squalid ones’; and the rhetoric of social transformation that suggests people need to learn how to think differently. There is also something interesting about his humility and his acknowledgment of the many difficulties they have faced, but then again, nobody claimed that revolution was easy.
An important set of questions revolve around what place land reform has in the broader process of social transformation in Venezuela. Whatever problems they face it is not easy to forget that politics in Venezuela tends to revolve around the price of oil, not the ownership of land, and that the real engine of popularity for Chávez consists in his ability to keep spending. But despite this, land reform has its own rationale. Whether the talk of ‘endogenous development’ is really anything more than old style self-sufficiency remains to be seen, and whether land reform in Venezuela represents a serious threat to neo-liberalism depends upon whether it establishes a working model of an effective and popular alternative. The implicit recognition that a ‘certain amount’ of private property is acceptable suggests that in the end land reform is motivated by a demand for land redistribution. And given that land redistribution might simply reproduce neo-liberalism, the case against neo-liberalism has yet to be properly made.
Basabe readily admits that the real struggle is still ahead of them, and that they have a lot to learn about life without neo-liberalism. The challenge remains for them to show that they are learning new things rather than repeating the lessons of the past. In the past, revolutions turned into coup d’etats, drug wars, dictatorships and disappearances. It is to be hoped that Basabe’s optimism and activism are enough to light the way towards a more egalitarian society, but we shouldn’t underestimate the risks of losing the way. Chávez has placed himself at the centre of his country’s Bolivarian revolution, it falls to him to ensure that his revolution will both outlast him, and continue to serve his people. As Christ himself might have put it ‘Venezuela cannot live on anti-Americanism alone, and oil won’t last forever, particularly if you keep giving it away’.
The recent elections gave Chávez more than 60% of the vote, which is certainly a democratic endorsement of his vision. It also means that nearly 40% of the population voted against him. Chávez casts his victory as if he has just beaten George Bush, but the 40% of Venezuelans who voted against him did not vote for George Bush, they voted for Manuel Rosales, another Venezuelan with a different vision for the future for Venezuela. However, the longer opposition to Chávez is equated with opposition to Venezuela, the more divided the country will become. So Basabe’s work is of the utmost importance for Venezuela, for if the political program of Hugo Chávez is not to be understood as just another kind of rentier populism fuelled by oil profits, substantive measures such as land redistribution must become a sustainable and robust element of a new Venezuelan economy. Trebuchet, and the world, are watching.
By Douglas Bulloch
Stop the War: Or what?
By Douglas Bulloch
An Interview with Lindsey German, Convenor of the Stop the War coalition.
The War on Terror is unquestionably the dominant security discourse of our times. It has reshaped our worldwide strategic perspective, reoriented our approach to policing and airport security, and provoked debates about social cohesion. British troops are fighting daily battles in the Middle East and Central Asia, and world leaders everywhere, from China to Canada claim to be doing their bit. Yet it remains a problem. Terrorism is not a country like the Soviet Union, nor a specific group of people like Al Qaeda, nor a thing like drugs. Fundamentally terrorism is a choice, and the War on Terror is an attempt to calibrate the consequences of making that choice. Whether it will succeed or fail depends upon many things, but it is undeniably transformative, and one of its effects has been to further undermine the old left/right consensus with old political enemies becoming new found friends. Douglas Bulloch struck a path to the King’s Cross headquarters of the Stop the War coalition and interviewed their convenor – Lindsey German – to find out what happens when the War on Terror stops.
Douglas Bulloch: What does Stop the War understand by the term ‘War on Terror’?
Lindsey German: We see it as a systemic change in the way the world operates, which is as important as the Cold War. It will probably last as long and reach out to all sorts of countries. Nothing is really excluded from it. We see it as more than a series of isolated incidents, but as one whole, affecting situations as diverse as North Korea, Lebanon and the murder of Anna Politkovskaya. We tend to focus on the Middle East and South Asia because we feel those are the areas where we can do something because of the involvement of our government.
DB: Is there anything about the War on Terror that you think is necessary?
LG: No, the whole War on Terror is a culmination of American foreign policy from the first Gulf War, the Balkan wars, the sanctions on Iraq in the 1990’s. We don’t excuse terrorism, but the War on Terror simply makes it worse.
DB: What does the world according to Stop the War look like?
LG: The world has to be against new forms of empire and based on the principle of sovereign equality. Developing countries should have the same rights as everyone else and should have their rights and borders respected. I would like to see a genuinely ethical foreign policy, concerned to rid the world of war and deal with the many grievances that cause political tensions, and efforts directed towards raising standards of living rather than spending vast amounts on weapons.
DB: The coalition itself is broadly comprised of old style left wing organisations – SWP, the Unions, CND – and theocratic conservative Muslim organisations. Has the progressive idealism of some of these left wing organisations given way a little?
LG: I don’t think so. We started organising jointly with Muslim organisations in 2002, mainly the Muslim Association of Britain, which I wouldn’t describe as a theocratic conservative organisation. They and the other Muslim organisations we deal with are concerned to develop a Muslim politics in Britain. They are very integrationist not fundamentalist in the way that most people would popularly understand fundamentalism. If you look at the Communists and the Jews in the 1930’s you would have found the same thing, or CND in the 1960’s, working very closely with the church.
DB: What about the tensions within the coalition itself? Because the Muslim Association of Britain are often associated with the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, and they have made statements supporting Hamas,
LG: That’s true, but if you compare Hamas with the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, the Muslim Brotherhood is an extremely respectable, constitutional form of organisation. It is only the dictatorial nature of the Egyptian regime that pushes it into prison and opposition. Its natural inclination would put it somewhere around the Lib Dems if you can imagine that in Egyptian politics.
DB: What do you think of the Euston Manifesto?
LG: Simple, they are pro-war, we are against war. The Euston Manifesto are a bunch of people who claim to be ‘left wingers’ who essentially make their money out of defending the war. That’s what Nick Cohen has done in the last five years. Before that, he wasn’t a bad campaigning journalist. The war has become for them, the defining issue, which creates huge problems when they want to be critical of the government on domestic issues. Nick Cohen wants to be critical about privatisation, but the war keeps getting in the way because it’s lined everybody up – for or against the war. Norman Geras was an extreme left-winger in his youth. I feel they have abandoned any criticism of Imperialism under the guise of disquiet with Muslims and worries about theocracy and all this kind of thing. So I would say we have very little in common.
DB: Both organisations claim to be left wing yet have a different position on the war. Do you think this is the real significance of the War on Terror? That it has created a new cleavage around which people organise politically?
LG: But how can you be left wing and be pro-war? This is a serious question. This is not an ideological battle of any value. People went and fought and died in Spain in 1936 because they believed they were fighting for a higher principle. The Euston Manifesto don’t have a higher principle. There isn’t one. They can claim they are left wing as much as they want, but they are the mouthpieces of the right, and they don’t like to admit that. Also, we’re a mass organisation which has all these affiliated bodies, they are a tiny number of self appointed journalists and media people. If they are confident they have left wing following which is pro-war, perhaps they’d like to organise a demonstration at some point. We’ll see how many people turn up, I guess it might fill a phone box.
DB: How does the United Nations feature in the world view of Stop the War?
LG: We would agree with many of the aims of the UN, but we have people with different views on the extent to which it only ends up representing the views of the great powers.
DB: The two most live issues at the moment are Iraq and Afghanistan. Do you see them as different?
LG: Yes, they are different. Afghanistan was an easy target – one of the poorest countries in the world, a very weak government – which was a pariah by world standards – and no effective army or air force. Iraq was obviously different in many respects but the biggest difference was how much the Iraq occupation was contested.
DB: So both strategic and principled differences?
LG: Yes, but although more people would say Afghanistan was justified than would for Iraq, people are very rapidly coming to the conclusion that it was always a war we couldn’t win and certainly can’t win now.
DB: Are there potential interventions that Stop the War would be ambivalent about or even supportive towards?
LG: We’re not opposed in principle, but I can’t imagine a British or American intervention that we would support.
DB: Kuwait 1991?
LG: No, I was very much opposed to the war over Kuwait. Most Iraqis even today regard Kuwait as part of Iraq.
DB: But that doesn’t square with the idea of sovereign equality?
LG: But then you have to ask how you deal with breaches of sovereignty, do you deal with breaches of sovereignty by a bigger power coming along and bombing the hell out of a country? or by diplomacy and other means of pressure? And after all, the best way to deal with dictators like Saddam Hussein is not to create them in the first place.
DB: Don’t you think that the collapse of the Soviet Union, and the collapse of the bipolar world order, shifted the moral spectrum by which these alliances came to be measured?
LG: Yes, but rather than the moral spectrum shifting, I think suddenly the Americans thought they could get away with invading, when previously this hadn’t been possible.
DB: So when George Bush Snr. proclaimed a New World Order, and that it was no longer appropriate to support dictators just because they are friendly dictators, you think he wasn’t serious?
LG: The Cold War balance of power kept more of a peace than we have now. But I acknowledge that wasn’t a great situation for many people on the ground.
DB: If you had to position yourself politically within that bipolar order, were they both as bad as each other?
LG: I always supported Robert Mugabe and ZANU, although I wouldn’t now. They were more effective than ZAPU in terms of overthrowing Ian Smith. I supported the NPLA in Angola, which was the pro Russian liberation movement because I thought UNITA and the FNLA were really acting on behalf of the imperialist powers, so no, we did take sides.
DB: But in terms of Bosnia, Serbia/Kosovo, East Timor, Lebanon as examples of intervention, you wouldn’t support them?
LG: No I didn’t support them. I think you have to look at the motives, and examine whether it will increase the power of the imperialists or the rich and powerful, or if it will increase the power of the ordinary people of the country, and I would say that in all of those above cases, it didn’t. I know a lot of people who disagrees with me, even in Stop the War, but I feel they were wrong.
DB: So, in terms of the detail of UN resolution 1701 governing intervention in Lebanon, do you think it is problematic to begin with?
LG: Yes, I think that Israel shouldn’t have invaded in the first place. I believe that the initial kidnap of the two soldiers was not sufficient reason for going to war. If you read Seymour Hersh he believes this was planned in advance with the collusion of the Americans, and if he’s right then it was a deliberate attempt to take out Hezbollah as a prelude for an attack on Iran. And with the UN at Beirut airport and along the Syrian border, UN resolution 1701 is an aggressive act really.
DB: Which is why you think the UN will eventually end up in some confrontation with Hezbollah?
LG: It will end up with the UN completely powerless or in confrontation with Hezbollah and with other Lebanese.
DB: The Euston Manifesto explicitly supports a two state solution. Is that something Stop the War can support?
LG: Stop the War does not endorse one position over any other. We take a position of freedom for Palestine, Justice for Palestine. I’d like to see one secular state, where Jews, Christians and Muslims live together, but that depends on Israel accepting the Arabs as equal to them. The reason Stop the War doesn’t take a position on this is obviously because it’s divisive and we try to avoid taking positions which will stop us campaigning, but I would say it is more divisive among non-Muslims. It’s a divisive question on the left. We have Jews in Stop the War who are in favour of one state. We have Palestinians who are in favour of two states, and we certainly have plenty of white English people who are in favour of two states. But one thing Stop the War was agreed on was in supporting an immediate ceasefire.
DB: In the case of Darfur, is there a general suspicion you have concerning the motives of intervention?
LG: Yes, I certainly do have a suspicion of it. I think it’s a terrible situation but I don’t see what the hell it has got to do with Britain or Germany or the United States, or indeed a bunch of newspaper columnists sitting in London. Surely this is a matter, for African countries?
DB: Who are to some extent involved already.
LG: I think the last people who should be talking about an intervention in Darfur are the people who were gung-ho about intervening in Iraq, particularly in the light of this figure of 655,000 people killed in Iraq. What happens if we intervene, and there are still thousands of people dying?
DB: CND is a member of Stop the War, and Trident has a clear focus in your campaigns. Is Stop the War committed to unilateral disarmament?
LG: One of the slogans of our demonstration in Manchester was ‘No Trident Replacement’ which CND were very keen on, but we all support it.
DB: So it’s a principled position that we shouldn’t have nuclear weapons. But when you talk about North Korea for instance or Iran, how do you talk about their attempts to develop nuclear weapons?
LG: You should speak to CND just in case I quote them unfairly on this. What we say is that we’re against nuclear weapons but there is an awful lot of hypocrisy in the international community. I don’t like the argument very much, but I can see the logic of Iran or North Korea trying to acquire them to ward off an American attack. The Iranians see this as a matter of national pride. It is about getting electricity in Teheran, about Iran being a modern world player, North Korea similarly.
DB: If a British politician makes the case that as long as Russia has nuclear weapons we should keep ours, you would regard that as wrong, but in terms of Iran or North Korea developing nuclear weapons, you can understand the case that they make. Is that an entirely consistent position?
LG: I don’t think you can regard British acquisition of Trident in the same way that countries like Iran seek to acquire nuclear power, which is just one of the terrible logics of nuclear armaments. This is the world we have and the one we have to sort out, and we’re not going to do it by asking ‘should x country a nuclear bomb or not?’ The whole notion of war and competition has to be overthrown.
DB: So Trident is connected to the War on Terror?
LG: It is part of Britain’s commitment to America who would go absolutely crazy if Britain dropped Trident.
DB: Is the wearing of the veil connected to the War on Terror?
LG: Definitely. The last respectable racism in Europe is against Muslims. They are being treated in the way that Afro-Caribbeans were treated 30 years ago, that Jews were treated before the Second World War. They are being treated in this discriminatory way. Jack Straw says he is only raising a debate. That is exactly what Enoch Powell said in the sixties.
DB: Jack Straw did also say that he is against the wearing of the veil.
LG: That’s right. Only 5% of Muslim women in Britain wear the veil. I’m not in favour of women wearing the veil if they don’t want to, but in a democratic society it should be their choice. Imagine if a Muslim MP refused to speak to a young woman because she was wearing a mini-skirt? It is not the job of an MP to do this. More importantly it’s shifting the political atmosphere to the right where the main beneficiaries will be the far right, who are making big gains in lots of parts of continental Europe. None of this would be happening without the War on Terror, which has developed out the last 20 years of American foreign policy to do with Israel, Palestine, Saudi Arabia and Iraq.
DB: Are many issues that affect Muslim individuals anywhere in the world also connected to the War on Terror?
LG: Yes. We live in a very small world, and I would say that most Muslims in this country want to integrate into British society. They are desperate to be treated equally and their kids to get a good education and a future.
DB: And you don’t think the veil stands in the way of integration?
LG: No I don’t. Lots of women have started wearing the headscarf, not the veil, as a statement of identity. So no I don’t think it plays a role.
DB: So you don’t think the veil – and I am talking specifically about the veil not the headscarf – and Jack Straw was also talking about the veil – interferes with integration? You made a reference to Jack Straw’s comments and said that ‘he should hide his face in shame’. Do you not see the irony of criticising Jack Straw’s comments by using a metaphor that associates the hiding of the face with shame?
LG: No, not really. I was using it in the way that people would hide their face in Britain. People don’t traditionally wear the veil in Britain and it would be rather surprising if I or anybody else started wearing the veil.
DB: But that gets to the heart of the question. Is there not some wider point illustrated by supporting a woman’s right to wear a veil as a personal choice, rather than commenting on the social institution of the wearing of the veil?
LG: I think the distinction here is not whether you would do it yourself, but that people should have the right to do it. There are a small number of young educated women who’ve taken a political decision to wear the veil, but for most of them it is a cultural thing. Is it really right to pick on these people and provoke incidents like in Liverpool, where a woman had her veil snatched from her face? This isn’t a civilised dinner party debate, it will be used by people who want to attack Muslims. I think it has very tangible consequences, which are highly regrettable.
DB: What kind of statement do you think the women who wear the veil as a political choice are making?
LG: I think it’s entirely up to them. I probably wouldn’t agree with some of their politics, because some of them would want a separate Islamic state, but you can’t even assume that. It is absolutely their choice, and if we want to win young Muslim women towards being part of our society, then we have to treat them with respect and dignity.
DB: The War on Terror continues, have Stop the War had any successes so far?
LG: Our success so far has been that Blair is going. The war has done for him. Lebanon was the straw that broke the camel’s back.
DB: And a further success would be withdrawal of Western troops from Afghanistan and Iraq?
LG: Yes, a success would be withdrawal of Western troops, particularly British troops from Iraq and Afghanistan, but we will continue to campaign against the War on Terror even after that.
DB: And the aftermath of withdrawal?
LG: If someone wrecked your house and killed your family, then stayed to put it back together again, what would you think? 92% of Iraqis want us to leave and surely it’s their decision. If 92% of us wanted foreign troops to leave we’d hope they would go and certainly would fight them until they went.
DB: So you do see it as a liberation movement?
LG: Not necessarily, there are different elements, but the Iraqi people have got the right to resist a foreign invader, and that’s what they’re doing.
DB: Thank-you very much for you time.
Clearly Stop the War is a deliberate compromise. It represents a group of campaigning organisations who reject the terms of the War on Terror, believing it to be a quasi imperialist pretext for the extension of American power. They do not attempt to justify terrorist attacks, but they assess the cause of terrorism to be the aggressive expansion of American influence since the end of the Cold War. But this also illustrates a problem. They acknowledge the importance of the War on Terror, but oppose it on the grounds that there is only one side fighting it. If America and the West would simply stop intervening in situations that are none of their business, there would be no terrorism. They see continuity between the old Cold War bipolarity and contemporary resistance to America, but part of that continuity is found in their own sympathies, both past and present. The central logic of their alliance is opposition to America, which explains their hostility to Blair, to Trident, and to Israel, and it explains their ambivalence towards the UN, North Korea, and Iran. There is no room in their analysis for the changed logics of a post Cold War world, and in their yearning for the certainties of the past they still see Saddam as an American puppet, Al Qaeda as the natural product of American interference, and nuclear weapons as the regrettable but understandable aspiration of all threatened states, except our own.
The End of the Cold War is often thought to have precipitated a search in America for a new enemy. But while America searched for a new enemy, the old left quietly searched for a new friend, a new ideological counterpart to triumphant liberal capitalism, and with the advent of the War on Terror, they found one. But in lumping everything from the wearing of the veil, to Trident, to North Korea all within the War on Terror they can oppose everything from perceived racism at home, to the prospect of humanitarian intervention anywhere. It becomes a way to view every political choice through the exclusionary dynamics of opposition to imperialist America and turns legitimate questions of politics and social relations into grievous insults. It is ironic that Stop the War depend for their popularity on the strength of the very discourse they oppose, but it is perhaps more troubling that their vision of the future is just another tired vision of the past. Stop the War may align itself with wider sentiments concerning the war in Iraq, but it is not about Iraq, it is about America. And it is not about Stopping the War, but Stopping the World, and getting off.
Douglas Bulloch
www.stopwar.org.uk
