The Bookseller of Kabul

Posted on 30 July 2010 by Robert

Åsne Seierstad, a Norwegian author, has been successfully sued in Norway over her book Bookseller of Kabul.  It is a fictionalised account of her time staying with a family in Afghanistan, and much of the family’s private life is laid bare for the reader in unflattering detail.

On Comment is Free, journalist Conor Foley lays in to Seierstad, outlining the social faux pas she has committed:

Some may argue that freedom of artistic expression should be completely divorced from such political considerations. However, a writer who chooses to use a conflict as the background for their work cannot plead cultural immunity when real life intrudes on the result.

Indeed.  But being stung, criticised and discredited for failing to respect cultural norms should not be punished in a civil or criminal court.   Jonathan Heawood, director of English PEN, explains in the Independent why this development is a worry:

That’s not to say that Seierstad has not broken an unwritten code of hospitality, or that the Rais family has not faced problems as a result of the book’s publication. Although Rais himself continues to operate a successful business out of Kabul, his first wife has sought asylum in Canada and other members of the family are now living in Pakistan. But is this discrepancy in the fates of the male and female members of the family the fault of a Norwegian journalist – or Afghan society? Is it appropriate for a Norwegian court to punish the messenger? Is a court of law the place to determine how a book treats the “honour” of an entire society?

The example that such cases set is a very bad one.  What happens when an investigative journalist wants to deliberately abuse the hospitality of an Afghan businessman, in order to expose corruption?  What if an Afghani journalist wants to make similar, off-message commentary about his countrymen.  Seierstad should certainly suffer the reputational and social hit of her insensitivity, but dragging this sort of roman a clef into the court-room is a terrible precedent for free expression.

Posted in Books, Human Rights, Middle East, Political Correctness | 2 Comments

WOMAD and Multiculturalism

Posted on 29 July 2010 by Robert
Afro-Celt

Moussa Sissiokho, Johnny Kalsi and James McNally at WOMAD 2010. Photo by yrstrly

One of the highlights of WOMAD last weekend was watching a comeback performance by the Afro-Celt Sound System, who rocked the tent on Sunday evening with a tight blend of two cultures. The undoubted crowd-pleaser was a three-way drum duel between James McNally on the bodhran, Johnny Kalsi on the dhol, and Moussa Sissiokho on the tamma (‘talking drum’).  Underlay a little bit of electronica and some pipes, and the result is something that cannot fail to move you, both physically and emotionally. Its great to see musicians do that to an audience – and its even better to be a part of such primeval happenings yourself.  In such moments, the rising pace of the drums causes your mind to wander and wonder.

Here, I thought, we have a group of disparate musicians bringing their different traditions together to create something new.  Indeed, ‘fusion’ music is one of the festival’s specialities, and the Afro-Celt Soundsystem are very musch a creature of WOMAD.  But in watching the McNally/Kalsi/Sissiokho three-way, I was reminded that such music only works if the individual members have a (shall we say) traditional music upbringing.  Perhaps the discipline, and the distincitiveness of their separate musical heritages, are actually pre-requisites for their fusion music to work.

If true, it is an argument for a fairly rigourous form of multiculturalism.  Perhaps there is a value in encouraging not the fusion of cultures itself, but instead a promotion of the more traditional practices on which that fusion is based?  Only with a mature understanding of one’s culture can you confidently engage with others, and thereby play a proper part in creating something global, transcendental.

In a diverse country like Britain, this means supporting projects which pedestalise both the minority cultures, and the deeper roots of English and Celtic cultures.  This approach implies division, and the creation cultural silos, and has come in for much criticism in recent years.  But watching the talents of the musicians at WOMAD, you cannot help but percieve the long, accumulated embedded within each artist.  When you do, its natural to want to preserve and protect that history.

WOMAD flags by Wolfgang Haak on Flickr

WOMAD flags by Wolfgang Haak on Flickr

Posted in Diary, Multiculturalism, Music | 1 Comment

Mieville on Teleporting

Posted on 23 July 2010 by Robert

At the event on Tuesday night, I remarked that China Mieville and Cory Doctorow share an irritating trait, which is to lathe my own ideas into science fiction books, many years before I even have the thought for the first time!

One example of this is on the important science-fiction problem of teleporting, and the possibility of transferring of one’s mind between matter.  I scribbled some concerns about this earlier this year, but now I find that Mieville got there first, in Kraken (p.221):

This is why I wouldn’t travel that way,” Dane said.  “This is my point.  For a piece of rock or clothes or something dead, who cares?  But take something living and do that?  Beam it up?  What you done is ripped a man apart then stuck his bits back together and made them walk around.  He died.  Get me?  The man’s dead.  And the manat the other end only thinks he is the same man. He ain’t. He only just got born.  He’s got the other’s memories, yeah, but he’s newborn.  That Enterprise, they keep killing themselves and replacing themselves with clones of dead people.  That is some macabre shit.  That ship’s full of Xerox copies for people who died.”

I love this kind of esoteric debate.  Teleportation might never become a reality, but the questions raised by science fiction are essential when we consider the nature of the mind and artificial intelligence.

Teleport road sign. Photo by mercurialn on Flickr. Creative Commons Licence.

Teleport road sign. Photo by mercurialn on Flickr. Creative Commons.

Posted in Books, Science, Space Travel | 3 Comments

Nick Clegg: Accidentally-on-Purpose

Posted on 22 July 2010 by Robert

Reading the reports of Nick Clegg’s unsteady Deputy Prime Minister’s Question Time performance yesterday, I wonder if his gaffes were as accidental as is being reported.

He ‘mispoke’ on two occasions:  First, he announced that the Yarl’s Wood detention centre will be closed down, only to have to clarify that it would only be the (horrendous) familiy detention unit that will be abolished.  Second, he referred to the “illegal invasion of Iraq” at the despatch-box in the House of Commons.  Government press officers spent the rest of the day trying to conjour up a new constitutional convention that would distinguish between Clegg’s “personal” view and the government line.

Everyone is discussing Clegg’s political ineptitude, but I wonder if he has pulled off a clever feint that shifts the political debate on these two issues firmly in favour of his long held views.  Closing Yarls Wood is surely a Liberal priority, so I suppose that his words could be described as a Freudian slip.  But clarifying that an unpopular or morally questionable government policy will continue, rather has the effect of re-opening the debate as to whether it should continue.  Clegg has given this question much greater prominence, and surely both Liberals and liberals will welcome that.

I am reminded of the fantastic stunt pulled by The Yes Men a few years ago.  Adopting a tactic of “impersonating big-time criminals in order to publicly humiliate them” the group went on TV pretending to be representatives of Dow/Union Carbide, and took full responsibility for the Bhopal Disaster.  Dow had to issue a retraction, saying that they would not take responsibility for the disaster.

Meanwhile, Clegg’s “illegal” gaffe reminds me of a tactic employed by Josiah Bartlett, the West Wing‘s fictional President.  In Season 3, Bartlett accidentally-on-purpose calls his election opponent an idiot.  He takes the political flack and issues an apology, but questions over the other candidate’s intelligence begin to dominate the news cycles for the rest of the week.  Back in real-life, the Deputy Prime Minister is certainly being criticised, but I do not see how it will dent his political capital among the Liberal Democrat MPs and party members.  They believe that the 2003 invasion of Iraq was illegal and it is in their interests to establish this as consensus.  Clegg’s comment unquestionably advances this aim.

So while the conventional wisdom is that Nick Clegg stumbled at his first appearance at the despatch box, it looks to me that he has advanced the Liberal Democrat agenda – at the first available opportunity, no less.

http://theyesmen.org/
Posted in Iraq, Liberal Democrats, Media | Leave a comment

Doctorow/Mieville

Posted on 22 July 2010 by Robert

Neither of my Twitter followers would have been in any doubt as to what I was up to on Tuesday evening – interviewing sci-fi authors China Mieville and Cory Doctorow for Clerkenwell Tales book shop.  I had relentlessly plugged the event and solicited questions.
Here is Dougal Wallace’s Flickr photoset for the event.

Tom Baynham will put up an audio podcast soon, and I will certainly write some afterthoughts on the discussion… including Mieville’s well-reasoned worry that blogging means we now have very few unpublished thoughts.

Posted in Books, Diary | Leave a comment

Trouble Looming over Burqa Ban

Posted on 14 July 2010 by Robert

So, French MPs have voted to ban the burka.

We know where this story will go next.  Somewhere in France, a woman will engage in a piece of civil disobediance and enter a public space wearing her veil.  She will draw attention, crowds, the press.  She will be asked to leave, but she will not leave.  Eventually, she will be deported from the area by the gendarmerie or other state agency.  Worse, someone may try to pull off the offending strip of cloth.

This event will be photgraphed and videoed by more than one person, and the footage will be on YouTube within the hour.  It will then become a staple of anti-secular propaganda, proving the intolerance of the European mind and the inherent anti-Islamic sentiment sweeping the West.

Siome might suggest that my worries about this inevitable end-point are purely pragmatic.  They might agree that the new French law is counter-productive in the PR war against fundamentalist Islam… but then go on to argue that sometimes, the right decisions are not popular and that we cannot allow short-term realpolitik to trump the principle of the thing.

Here, I have to disagree.  I think that the question over policing what people wear is the principle at stake here.  Dictating dress codes is an incursion on an individual’s free expression.  If we condemn a misogynistic religion or a patriarchal culture when it proscribes what women wear, then how can we support a government that intervenes (and sets prohibitions) in precisely the same arena?  It is appalling.

I often hear the argument that women who wear the veil are “brainwashed”, an assertion that certainly makes sense to me.1 But such a claim is unfalsifiable, impossible to verify.  It is therefore a useless and illegitimate argument to put forward in the political arena, and not a good enough reason to legislate.  If we are truly convinced that brainwashing has taken place, then we must engage in “reverse-brainwashing”, putting forward alternative arguments, explaining the theory and the history of patriarchy, in the hope that people make different choices.  We might begin by discussing the value of facial expressions in communication, while taking an honest look at the idea of the “male gaze” and the undoubted objectification and sexualisation of the female form that is endemic in all cultures.

This is a longer and more frustrating approach, but far better than one which says that you are empowered by being criminalised.  Unfortunately, such long-term thinking rarely appeals to politicians, who favour the heavy-hand of legislation over deeper, cultural approaches.  A burqa ban is also a convenient dog-whistle for the far-right groups, who mainstream politicians are happy to pander to at the expense of a minority with no discernible political power.

If the burqa and the niqab are oppressive to women, then the only people who can shrug off that oppression is the women themselves.  Ripping off that ‘oppression’, by force and at a time of our own choosing, does not look like liberation at all.  It merely substitutes one form of dictatorship for another, returns no autonomy to the women themselves, and unwittingly endorses intolerance.  The philosopher Alain Badiou has a great formulation:

Basically put: these girls or women are oppressed. Hence, they shall be punished. It’s a little like saying: “This woman has been raped: throw her in jail.”

Interesting articles taking a similar view at the F-Word and Oye Times.

'Her Eyes' by Ranoush on Flickr. Creative Commons Licence.

'Her Eyes' by Ranoush on Flickr. Creative Commons Licence.

1. One might also suggest that women who wear too little are similarly brainwashed. After all, are they not persuaded to do so by the dictats of the celebrity gossip magazines?

 
Posted in Human Rights, Multiculturalism | Leave a comment

Free Speech in Parliament Square

Posted on 13 July 2010 by Robert
Democracy Camp, Parliament Square. Photo by Yrstrly on Flickr.

Democracy Camp, Parliament Square. Photo by Yrstrly on Flickr.

Earlier, I posted the Democracy Camp’s Press Release.  I confess I probably would not have worded the statement as they did -  “let he who is without sin cast the first stone” may be good rhetoric, but it is also a tacit admission that the camp is indeed seriously unhygenic!  Since those who oppose the protestare using a public health argument against the campers, I worry that this admission only gives more ammunition to the authorities.

My understanding of the peace camp is that it is primarily a protest against the British presence in Afghanistan, with a dash of the anarchic “Don’t vote” message thrown in for good measure.  However, the eviction controversy has replaced these demands with a version of Marshall Macluan’s “The Medium is the Message”.   More important than anything they say, is the fact that they are there.  As Westminister Council and the GLA seek to remove the protesters, the issue of the right to protest becomes paramount.

Making your point outside the seat of government is an essential component of any democracy, however unsightly it looks, and however inconvenient it is for everyone else. It is right and good that the tourists who come to photograph and tour the so-called Mother of Parliaments should also see people openly dissenting against the decisions of that parliament.  I have ambled around Parliament Square a few times in recent weeks, and the contrast between the grandeur of the Palace of Westminster, and the ramshackle protest camp, says something important about free speech and democracy.  Even the poorest and most humble of us can challenge what happens in the most ornate and powerful of places.  This is an image we should promote and propagate.

If the authorities are genuinely concerned about hygeine then they should provide modest facilities for ablutions and waste disposal… thereby facilitating the protest, not hampering it.  It would be unfair for residents of the City of Westminster, or Greater London, to foot the bill for this.  Instead, UK taxpayers should pick up the tab.

Update 19th July

Here is the Court of Appeal judgement against the Democracy Village.  I think the key paragraph is here (hat-tip to Intifada Kid):

48.  It is important to bear in mind that this was not a case where there is any suggestion that the defendants should not be allowed to express their opinions or to assemble together. The claim against them only relates to their activities on PSG. It is not even a case where they have been absolutely prohibited from expressing themselves and assembling where, or in the manner, in which they choose. They have been allowed to express their views and assemble together at the location of their choice, PSG, for over two months on an effectively exclusive basis. It is not even as if they will necessarily be excluded from mounting an orthodox demonstration at PSG in the future. Plainly, these points are not necessarily determinative of their case, but, when it comes to balancing their rights against the rights of others, they are obviously significant factors.

Taken together with points in the comments from MattGB and David, I would probably back away from my uncompromising stance in favour of the camp.  If the activities of the protesters turn Parliament Square into a no-go area for other demonstrators, then they are engaging in the denial of other people’s freedom of expression, as they excercise their right to their own.

Such an argument makes me uneasy, because similar arguments are used mendaciously in other instances – For example arguments of the “your right to free expression impedes my right to freedom of religion” kind (c.f. Behzti, Satanic Verses, Jerry Springer The Opera).  In this case however I think this formulation just about holds up – not least because the example of Brian Haw shows how someone can mount a permenant protest on Parliament Square without making it a no-go area for other.

Memo to Democracy Camp:  Next time, pick one small quadrant of lawn and stick to it!

Posted in Human Rights, London | 4 Comments

Press Release from the Democracy Camp

Posted on 13 July 2010 by Robert

Here’s a statement released by the folks from the Democracy Camp at Parliament Square.  Tomorrow they’ll be hosting a picnic.

Democracy Village has been an experiment in peaceful protest.  We’ve achieved a huge amount.  We’ve also made mistakes. The media has portrayed us as drunks, drug addicts, fighters and layabouts.

Here’s the truth.

We all are.

Whether you like a drink on a Friday night, smoke cigarettes, drink coffee, get angry, or can’t be bothered to tidy up, none of us are perfect. Let him who is without sin cast the first stone.

What we’ve done is put a microcosm of our society under the microscope, and many of you (and some of us) don’t like what we see.

Too many of us look the other way when we see something we don’t like; complacency is not an option anymore, we need to unite and face our problems together.

Here’s the situation that lead us to set up the camp in the first place:

Our taxes are currently financing war in Afghanistan, a country which has never attacked us, to the tune of £11bn. In so doing we’re reinforcing extremism and perpetuating the cycle of violence in an already unstable the world.

On top of that, our troops, young men and women who are working to protect us, are coming home in ruins – those that survive their injuries are hidden from view, can’t find work and are generally forgotten; chewed up and spat out by the very country they are fighting for.

An anecdote: At the end of one of our recent Talking Circles, where all our camp members have their chance to speak up about what’s on their mind, a young man from Rotherham took the floor and told us about his brother who was in the Army.  He’d been serving in Afghanistan and had returned to the UK last December at the end of his tour of duty, only to be told he had to return to the front line due to lack of reserve troops.  A week later, this guys brother got a phone call saying his brother’s jeep had been blown up by an IED  – the guy almost cried as he explained how he’d had to identify his brother from a tattoo on his back as that was all that was left of him.  He came up to me at the end of the meeting and said, ‘This is the only place where I feel anyone cares about how my brother died.’

Whilst we sit in our living rooms watching this distant conflict rage on, we’re also facing massive cuts in public services whilst big business and government rewards themselves with our money.

We’re losing our civil rights day by day, and have sleep-walked ourselves into the world’s most surveilled society,  where anyone can be locked up with no charge for 30 days in the name of national security and peaceful demonstrators are arrested for sitting outside Downing Street.

Our parliamentarians, whether they start out with good intentions or not, are standing by or actively supporting terrible injustices at home and abroad, which have been pre-planned by undemocratic think tanks and unelected Whitehall mandarins.

Tony Benn recently said, “the politics of the present is in Parliament, the politics of the future is in Democracy Village and on the streets.”

Instead of sitting around complaining when things go wrong, let’s actually make a change. We believe it’s our duty to resist injustice, and permanently protesting outside parliament is the way we choose to do that.

We want to learn how to become more passionate and compassionate, heal the rifts that seem to be widening between our communities, and ultimately be proud of our country again.

We can do it.  We must do it.  We will do it.

Posted in Politics | Leave a comment

Anti-Bribes

Posted on 1 July 2010 by Robert

Kabul artist Aman Mojadidi dressed up in a policeman’s uniform, set-up his own check-point, and began offering bribes to passing motorists.  The stunt was a protest against the high-levels of corruption in the city:

“On behalf of the city of Kabul and the Kabul police, if you have paid a bribe or ‘tip’ to someone in the past, I apologize,” the officer says in Dari to the disbelieving driver. “Please take 100 Afghanis,” or about $2.
…
Mojadidi wanted to draw attention to the pervasive misuse of power in Afghanistan and to see how Afghan drivers would react when he apologized on behalf of the widely scorned police force.

H/T @RohanJay (whom fans of media freedoms should follow).  The stunt reminded me of the story earlier this year about the Zero Rupee note, an innovation by 5th Pillar designed to combat bribe culture in India.  From the CommGap report:

Fed up with requests for bribes and equipped with a zero rupee note, the old lady handed the note to the official. He was stunned. Remarkably, the official stood up from his seat, offered her a chair, offered her tea and gave her the title she had been seeking for the last year and a half to obtain without success.

The problem of bribe-culture of course begins when public officials are paid too little in the first place.  One hopes that these high-profile, amusing-yet-persuasive interventions inspire the politicians of those countries to address the underlying issues, if they can.  Charter Cities are one way of guaranteeing standards of pay and public standards, though I recoil at the colonialist mindset such projects seem to promote.  Are there more internationalist, left-wing versions of the underlying idea, I wonder?

Zero Rupee Note

Posted in India, Law and Order | Leave a comment

Its Only A Game

Posted on 28 June 2010 by Robert

My thoughts on why the World Cup is not xenophobic caused a good debate, here and at Liberal Conspiracy.  I think the public response to our national team’s dire performance yesterday backs up my view that football fans (even England fans) know all too well that “its only a game” and that xenophobia is rare, unwelcome and marginalised.

In particular, the consensus that Germany were by far the better team and deserved to win, despite Frank Lampard’s disallowed goal.  The ignorant patriot would hold that this mistake by the referee cost England the game, but apart from our Italian manager Fabio Capello, no-one is advancing that argument.  In fact, the effect of the denied goal has actually been to remind us of the 1966 goal-mouth incident, where Geoff Hirst was awarded a goal by the Azerbaijani (not Russian) linesman.  The merest hint of a suggestion that maybe there is a possibility that perhaps Hirst’s ricochet did not actually entirely cross the line used to be one of our nation’s most cherished shibboleths.  Yet after the game, the idea that Lampard’s bad luck was karmic payback for Hirst’s good fortune is common currency: Richard Williams analysis in The Guardian takes this line, and echos may of the tweets I read yesterday evening.  This is not the attitude of a xenophobic nation.  Rather, it is an aquiesence to Law 5 of the game that says that the referee’s decision is final, even if it is wrong.  A commitment to the Rule of Law that would make any civil libertarian proud.

England fans looking glum, culled from @qwghlm's Tumblr

England fans looking glum (culled from @qwghlm's Tumblr)

Posted in Sport | 3 Comments