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By Walden Bello (Foreign Policy in Focus)

Will China be the “growth pole” that will snatch the world from the jaws of depression?
This question has become a favorite topic as the heroic American middle class consumer, weighed down by massive debt, ceases to be the key stimulus for global production.

Although China’s GDP growth rate fell to 6.1% in the first quarter — the lowest in almost a decade — optimists see “shoots of recovery” in a 30% surge in urban fixed-asset investment and a jump in industrial output in March. These indicators are proof, some say, that China’s stimulus program of $586 billion — which, in relation to GDP, is much larger proportionally than the Obama administration’s $787 billion package–is working.

Countryside as Launching Pad for Recovery?
With China’s export-oriented urban coastal areas suffering from the collapse of global demand, many inside and outside China are pinning their hopes for global recovery on the Chinese countryside. A significant portion of Beijing’s stimulus package is destined for infrastructure and social spending in the rural areas. The government is allocating 20 billion yuan ($3 billion) in subsidies to help rural residents buy televisions, refrigerators, and other electrical appliances.

But with export demand down, will this strategy of propping up rural demand work as an engine for the country’s massive industrial machine?
There are grounds for skepticism. For one, even when export demand was high, 75% of China’s industries were already plagued with overcapacity. Before the crisis, for instance, the automobile industry’s installed capacity was projected to turn out 100% more vehicles than could be absorbed by a growing market. In the last few years, overcapacity problems have resulted in the halving of the annual profit growth rate for all major enterprises.

There is another, greater problem with the strategy of making rural demand a substitute for export markets. Even if Beijing throws in another hundred billion dollars, the stimulus package is not likely to counteract in any significant way the depressive impact of a 25-year policy of sacrificing the countryside for export-oriented urban-based industrial growth. The implications for the global economy are considerable.

Subordinating Agriculture to Industry
Ironically, China’s ascent during the last 30 years began with the rural reforms Deng Xiaoping initiated in 1978. The peasants wanted an end to the Mao-era communes, and Deng and his reformers obliged them by introducing the “household-contract responsibility system.” Under this scheme, each household received a piece of land to farm. The household was allowed to retain what was left over of the produce after selling to the state a fixed proportion at a state-determined price, or by simply paying a tax in cash. The rest it could consume or sell on the market. These were the halcyon years of the peasantry. Rural income grew by over 15% a year on average, and rural poverty declined from 33% to 11% of the population.

This golden age of the peasantry came to an end, however, when the government adopted a strategy of coast-based, export-oriented industrialization premised on rapid integration into the global capitalist economy. This strategy, which was launched at the 12th National Party Congress in 1984, essentially built the urban industrial economy on “the shoulders of peasants,” as rural specialists Chen Guidi and Wu Chantao put it. The government pursued primitive capital accumulation mainly through policies that cut heavily into the peasant surplus.

The consequences of this urban-oriented industrial development strategy were stark. Peasant income, which had grown by 15.2% a year from 1978 to 1984, dropped to 2.8% a year from 1986 to 1991. Some recovery occurred in the early 1990s, but stagnation of rural income marked the latter part of the decade. In contrast, urban income, already higher than that of peasants in the mid-1980s, was on average six times the income of peasants by 2000.

The stagnation of rural income was caused by policies promoting rising costs of industrial inputs into agriculture, falling prices for agricultural products, and increased taxes, all of which combined to transfer income from the countryside to the city. But the main mechanism for the extraction of surplus from the peasantry was taxation. By 1991, central state agencies levied taxes on peasants for 149 agricultural products, but this proved to be but part of a much bigger bite, as the lower levels of government began to levy their own taxes, fees, and charges. Currently, the various tiers of rural government impose a total of 269 types of tax, along with all sorts of often arbitrarily imposed administrative charges.

Taxes and fees are not supposed to exceed 5% of a farmer’s income, but the actual amount is often much greater. Some Ministry of Agriculture surveys have reported that the peasant tax burden is 15% — three times the official national limit.

Expanded taxation would perhaps have been bearable had peasants experienced returns such as improved public health and education and more agricultural infrastructure. In the absence of such tangible benefits, the peasants saw their incomes as subsidizing what Chen and Wu describe as the “monstrous growth of the bureaucracy and the metastasizing number of officials” who seemed to have no other function than to extract more and more from them.

Aside from being subjected to higher input prices, lower prices for their goods, and more intensive taxation, peasants have borne the brunt of the urban-industrial focus of economic strategy in other ways. According to one report, “40 million peasants have been forced off their land to make way for roads, airports, dams, factories, and other public and private investments, with an additional two million to be displaced each year.” Other researchers cite a much higher figure of 70 million households, meaning that, calculating 4.5 persons per household, by 2004, land grabs have displaced as many as 315 million people.

Impact of Trade Liberalization
China’s commitment to eliminate agricultural quotas and reduce tariffs, made when it joined the World Trade Organization in 2001, may yet dwarf the impact of all the previous changes experienced by peasants. The cost of admission for China is proving to be huge and disproportionate. The government slashed the average agricultural tariff from 54 to 15.3%, compared with the world average of 62%, prompting the commerce minister to boast (or complain): “Not a single member in the WTO history has made such a huge cut [in tariffs] in such a short period of time.”

The WTO deal reflects China’s current priorities. If the government has chosen to put at risk large sections of its agriculture, such as soybeans and cotton, it has done so to open up or keep open global markets for its industrial exports. The social consequences of this trade-off are still to be fully felt, but the immediate effects have been alarming. In 2004, after years of being a net food exporter, China registered a deficit in its agricultural trade. Cotton imports skyrocketed from 11,300 tons in 2001 to 1.98 million tons in 2004, a 175-fold increase. Chinese sugarcane, soybean, and most of all, cotton farmers were devastated. In 2005, according to Oxfam Hong Kong, imports of cheap U.S. cotton resulted in a loss of $208 million in income for Chinese peasants, along with 720,000 jobs. Trade liberalization is also likely to have contributed to the dramatic slowdown in poverty reduction between 2000 and 2004.
Foreign Policy in Focus for more

By Fija Bairon, Matthias Brenzinger and Patrick Heinrich

Luchuan (Ryukyuan) languages are no longer Japanese dialects.

On 21 February 2009, the international mother language day, UNESCO launched the online version of its ‘Atlas of the world’s languages in danger’. This electronic version that will also be published as the third edition of the UNESCO Atlas in May 2009, now includes the Luchuan [Ryukyuan] languages of Japan (UNESCO 2009). ‘Luchuan’ is the Uchinaaguchi (Okinawan language) term for the Japanese ‘Ryukyu’. Likewise ‘Okinawa’ is ‘Uchinaa’ in Uchinaaguchi. Well taken, UNESCO recognizes six languages of the Luchu Islands [Ryukyu Islands] of which two are severely endangered, Yaeyama and Yonaguni, and four are classified as definitely endangered, Amami, Kunigami, Uchinaa [Okinawa] and Miyako (see UNESCO 2003 for assessing language vitality and endangerment).
Through publication of the atlas, UNESCO recognizes the linguistic diversity in present-day Japan and, by that, challenges the long-standing misconception of a monolingual Japanese nation state that has its roots in the linguistic and colonizing policies of the Meiji period. The formation of a Japanese nation state with one unifying language triggered the assimilation of regional varieties (hogen) under the newly created standard ‘national language’ (kokugo) all over the country (Carroll 2001). What is more, through these processes, distinct languages were downgraded to hogen, i.e. mere ‘dialects’ in accordance with the dominant national ideology (Fija & Heinrich 2007).
The entire group of the Luchuan languages – linguistic relatives of the otherwise isolated Japanese language – is about to disappear. These languages are being replaced by standard Japanese (hyojungo or kyotsugo) as a result of the Japanization of the Luchuan Islands, which started with the Japanese annexation of these islands in 1872 and was more purposefully carried out after the establishment of Okinawa Prefecture in 1879. In public schools, Luchuan children were educated to become Japanese and they were no longer allowed to speak their own language at schools following the ‘Ordinance of dialect regulation’ (hogen torishimari-rei) in 1907 (ODJKJ 1983, vol. III: 443-444). Spreading Standard Japanese was a key measure for transforming Luchu Islanders into Japanese nationals and for concealing the fact that Japanese was multilingual and multicultural (Heinrich 2004).
The US occupation of Uchinaa after World War II, which – at least formally – ended in 1972, marks the final stage in the fading of the Luchuan languages. In their attempts to separate Uchinaa from mainland Japan, Americans emphasized the distinctiveness of the Luchuan languages and cultures and encouraged their development. This US policy of dividing Luchuan from Japan, however, backfired and gave rise to a Luchuan Japanization movement. Today, even the remaining – mainly elderly – Luchuan language speakers generally refer to their languages as hogen, i.e. Japanese ‘dialects’, accepting in so doing the downgrading of their heritage languages for the assumed sake of national unity.
In support of the UNESCO approach, Sakiyama Osamu, professor emeritus of linguistics at the National Museum of Ethnology, stated that “a dialect should be treated as an independent language if its speakers have a distinct culture” (Kunisue 2009). However, linguistic studies also prove that these speech forms should be treated as languages in their own right (e.g. Miyara 2008), distinct both from Japanese as well as from one another. According to results employing the lexicostatistics method (Hattori 1954), the Luchuan languages share only between 59 and 68 percent cognates with Tokyo Japanese. These figures are lower than those between German and English. Scholars, as well as speakers, agree that there is no mutual intelligibility between these languages (Matsumori 1995). Thus calling them hogen (dialects of Japanese) may satisfy national demands of obedience but is problematic on linguistic and historical grounds.
…

Figure 1: Who do you address in local language? (448 consultants)

This chart reveals different degrees of language vitality, with the local language being most widely used in Yonaguni and Miyako. Yonaguni stands out because the local language is widely used in the neighbourhood, due to the Gemeinschaft (community) character of an isolated island with 1.600 inhabitants. Also worthy of notice is the frequent local language use among work colleagues, which is largely due to the lack of development of the secondary and tertiary economic sector in Yonaguni. Note, however, that the local language in Yonaguni is just as rarely used towards children as elsewhere. As a matter of fact, the restraint on use of local language towards children is the most consistent result across the five speech communities of Amami, Uchinaa, Miyako, Yaeyama and Yonaguni. (The sixth Luchuan language according to the UNESCO atlas, i.e. Kunigami, was at that time unfortunately not recognized as an independent language by Heinrich). On the lower end of language vitality, we find the Yaeyama language. Since endangered languages are always spoken in multilingual communities, specific domains of local language use must be maintained to secure their continued use. The most crucial domains for local language are the family and the local neighbourhood (shima or chima in the Luchuan languages, hence the term shimakutuba, ‘community language’). On the basis of the results presented in Figure 1, we see that the prospects for language maintenance are, at present, most favourable on Miyako Island. For more detailed discussions on language shift in the Luchu islands see Heinrich and Matsuo (2009).

Japan Focus

SANSAD News Release, May 27, 2009

South Asian Network for Secularism and Democracy (SANSAD) held a Public Forum on Genocide of Tamils in Sri Lanka on Sunday, May 24 at Cafe Kathmandu, 2779 Commercial Drive, Vancouver.
A gathering of South Asians originating in various countries and other Canadians that filled the café in Vancouver – well known as a site for intellectual and rights-based discussions -, heard from Hari Sharma, President of SANSAD, Chelliah Premrajah, a Tamil community, Labour, and Church activist, C. Pathmayohan, an activist in the Tamil community, Raj Chouhan, MLA, Peter Julian, MP, and Don Davies, MP. Indran Amrithanayagam, a Tamil poet and a member of the US Foreign Service, read some of his new poetry dealing with the current situation in Sri Lanka – both at the beginning and at the end of the forum. The presentations were followed by a vigorous discussion and collection of funds for humanitarian relief of the victims of war in Sri Lanka. The funds will be directed through appropriate agencies to ensure that they reach the people in need.

The following resolution was adopted by the gathering:

Whereas the Tamils in Sri Lanka have been systematically deprived of their rights since the adoption of the constitution of 1956,

Whereas their attempts to seek political and social justice has been repeatedly and systematically thwarted, compelling many of them to take up arms in a struggle for liberation,

Whereas the current military victory of the Government of Sri Lanka over the LTTE has been achieved at the cost of immense loss of civilian lives against the appeal of the international community, including the United Nations for restraint and the complete denial of access to the press and relief agencies,

And whereas hundreds of thousands of displaced people, a large percentage of whom are severely injured, are currently confined in camps without adequate supply of food, clothing and medicines and denied relief from international agencies,

Therefore be it resolved that we express our commitment to provide what relief we can for the victims of war in Sri Lanka and demand that the Government of Canada contribute generously to humanitarian relief in Sri Lanka and demand that international agencies be allowed to deliver it to the needy.

We further demand that the Government of Canada use its diplomatic power to champion the establishment of political and social justice for Tamils in Sri Lanka because without such justice there is no possibility of a secure peace in Sri Lanka.

We express our solidarity with the Tamil diaspora in Canada and demand that the Government of Canada remove and desist from any labeling of the community that discriminates against them.

By: Ernesto Che Guevara

978-81-87496-85-4, LeftWord, May 2009 Paperback.pp. vi+79
Categories: Latin American Studies/Politics/Biography
List price: Rs 150.00 / $ 8.00
Book Club Members price: Rs 105.00 / $ 5.60

http://www.leftword.com/bookdetails.php?BkId=232&type=PB

About the Book:
A hitherto unpublished work by Che Guevara

“Now St. Karl is paramount, the axis, as he will be for all the years I remain on the face of the earth…” So wrote young Ernesto Guevara referring to Karl Marx in a letter to his mother from Mexico in October 1956.

Che learned from the German revolutionary, and in his extensive travels never ceased immersing himself in the classic works of Marxism. Many of Che’s comments about Marx might also refer to Che himself, such as his observation:

“Such a humane man whose capacity for affection extended to all those suffering throughout the world, offering a message of committed struggle and indomitable optimism, has been distorted by history and turned into a stone idol.”

Written after Che’s 1965 mission to Africa, this unpublished biographical introduction to Marx and Engels will assist a new generation to understand not just the key concepts of Marxism but also to learn more about the author himself, whose image and example continues to inspire rebels on every continent.

Contents

Editors’ note
Marx & Engels: A biographical introduction Notes
Che’s reading list on Marx and Engels

GUERRILLA WARFARE

By: Ernesto Che Guevara

978-81-87496-84-7, LeftWord, May 2009 Paperback. pp.xiv+157
Categories: Marxist Classics/History/Latin American Studies
List price: Rs 250.00 / $ 12.00
Book Club Members price: Rs 175.00 / $ 8.40

http://www.leftword.com/bookdetails.php?BkId=233&type=PB

About the Book:
A classic text on revolution by Che Guevara

A bestselling classic for decades, this is Che Guevara’s own incisive analysis of the Cuban revolution — a text studied by his admirers and adversaries alike. This is an account of what happened in Cuba and why, explaining how a small group of dedicated fighters grew in strength with
the support of the Cuban people, overcoming their limitations to defeat a dictator’s army.

This new edition features a revised translation and a foreword by Harry “Pombo” Villegas, Che’s comrade in Bolivia and Africa, who was one of the few survivors of Che’s Bolivian campaign.

“The positive feature of guerrilla warfare is that each guerrilla fighter is ready to die not just to defend an idea but to make that idea a reality.
That is the essence of the guerrilla struggle. The miracle is that a small nucleus, the armed vanguard of a great popular movement that supports them, can proceed to realize that idea, to establish a new society, to break the old patterns of the past, to achieve, ultimately, the social justice for which they fight.” — Che Guevara

Contents:

Editorial Note
Ernesto Che Guevara
Foreword by Harry “Pombo” Villegas
Dedication to Camilo by Ernesto Che Guevara

I. GENERAL PRINCIPLES OF GUERRILLA WARFARE
1 The Essence of Guerrilla Warfare
2 Guerrilla Strategy
3 Guerrilla Tactics
4 Warfare on Favorable Terrain
5 Warfare on Unfavorable Terrain
6 Urban Warfare

II. THE GUERRILLA BAND
1 The Guerrilla Fighter: Social Reformer
2 The Guerrilla Fighter as Combatant
3 Organization of a Guerrilla Band
4 Combat
5 Beginning, Development, and End of a Guerrilla War

III. ORGANIZATION OF THE GUERRILLA FRONT
1 Supply
2 Civil Organization
3 The Role of Women
4 Health
5 Sabotage
6 War Industry
7 Propaganda
8 Intelligence
9 Training and Indoctrination
10 The Organizational Structure of the Army of a Revolutionary Movement

IV. APPENDICES
1 Underground Organization of the First Guerrilla Band
2 Holding Power
3 Epilogue: Analysis of the Situation in Cuba,Present and Future

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By Katie Hafner (New York Times)

They do it late at night when their parents are asleep. They do it in restaurants and while crossing busy streets. They do it in the classroom with their hands behind their back. They do it so much their thumbs hurt.

Spurred by the unlimited texting plans offered by carriers like AT&T Mobility and Verizon Wireless, American teenagers sent and received an average of 2,272 text messages per month in the fourth quarter of 2008, according to the Nielsen Company — almost 80 messages a day, more than double the average of a year earlier.

The phenomenon is beginning to worry physicians and psychologists, who say it is leading to anxiety, distraction in school, falling grades, repetitive stress injury and sleep deprivation.

Dr. Martin Joffe, a pediatrician in Greenbrae, Calif., recently surveyed students at two local high schools and said he found that many were routinely sending hundreds of texts every day.

“That’s one every few minutes,” he said. “Then you hear that these kids are responding to texts late at night. That’s going to cause sleep issues in an age group that’s already plagued with sleep issues.”

The rise in texting is too recent to have produced any conclusive data on health effects. But Sherry Turkle, a psychologist who is director of the Initiative on Technology and Self at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and who has studied texting among teenagers in the Boston area for three years, said it might be causing a shift in the way adolescents develop.

“Among the jobs of adolescence are to separate from your parents, and to find the peace and quiet to become the person you decide you want to be,” she said. “Texting hits directly at both those jobs.”
Psychologists expect to see teenagers break free from their parents as they grow into autonomous adults, Professor Turkle went on, “but if technology makes something like staying in touch very, very easy, that’s harder to do; now you have adolescents who are texting their mothers 15 times a day, asking things like, ‘Should I get the red shoes or the blue shoes?’ ”

As for peace and quiet, she said, “if something next to you is vibrating every couple of minutes, it makes it very difficult to be in that state of mind.

“If you’re being deluged by constant communication, the pressure to answer immediately is quite high,” she added. “So if you’re in the middle of a thought, forget it.”

Michael Hausauer, a psychotherapist in Oakland, Calif., said teenagers had a “terrific interest in knowing what’s going on in the lives of their peers, coupled with a terrific anxiety about being out of the loop.” For that reason, he said, the rapid rise in texting has potential for great benefit and great harm.
New York Times for more

(Le Monde Diplomatique)

Wikipedia’s egalitarian ethic and cooperative process have led to accusations that ‘verifiability’ is replacing accuracy. But expertise is alive and well on the online encyclopaedia – as long as you know where to look.

by Mathieu O’Neil

The internet was invented by “hackers” – computer engineers and students influenced by the counter-culture, and therefore resistant to traditional forms of authority and hierarchy. The only status sought by hackers was the recognition of excellence in coding, freely granted by their peers. That expertise should be autonomous from state or business contexts was confirmed by the development of free software, where remunerations are wholly symbolic. The opening up of online production to non-hackers – Web 2.0 – has expanded the challenge to conventional expertise to a mass scale, with some troubling consequences. But it also opens up new possibilities for political engagement.

In online collaborative projects, information, just like computer code, is produced independently. In weblogs and wikis, respect and responsibilities are not attributed to participants because of a diploma or a professional identity accredited by an institution. Respect and responsibilities derive entirely from the work accomplished for the project. On Wikipedia, the wildly successful free encyclopaedia which anyone can edit, contributors (“editors”) classify themselves according to their edit or article counts, to the type of articles or sub-projects to which they have contributed, to the accolades they have received from their peers and other statistically quantifiable criteria.

The rejection of classical expertise assumes a second form on the internet. If everyone can have a say, but accreditations are banned, how will the digital wheat be distinguished from the chaff? For free software aficionados on the Slashdot community weblog, as for the users of commercial powerhouses Amazon and eBay, the solution is to calculate the average opinion of participants regarding the reputation of posters and commenters on Slashdot, and of reviewers and sellers on Amazon and eBay. The same goes for the popularity of shared information or links in “social media” such as Reddit and Digg, as well as for the PageRank algorithm which generates Google’s search results (1). The “wisdom of the crowd” – the automated aggregation of multiple individual choices – will quasi-magically produce an ideal result. That’s how things are supposed to happen, at any rate.

The Wikipedia project shares this faith in the epistemic correction of the multitude, sparking talk of a “hive mind” (2). Wiki means “quick” in Hawaiian. The core principle of a wiki is that anyone can create a page on the website, modify an existing page or change the site’s structure by creating or removing hyperlinks. Editors who register an identity on Wikipedia, even if it is pseudonymous, can create a personal page listing their contributions and the marks of appreciation they have received from their peers; like every page on the wiki, personal pages comprise a “talk” or discussion page which in this case serves as a personal message board. In addition, registered editors can create a “watch list”, a page which automatically lists any changes made to articles they are interested in.

This capability stems from a wiki’s built-in failsafe mechanism: any modification to a page generates a new version of the page and archives previous ones. Editors can consult the history of an article’s creation as well as easily revert to an earlier version if problems arise. The result is a vast proliferation of articles, known as “mainspace” and underlaid by a submerged layer, the “talk” or “meta” pages where editors discuss article content and site policy. Articles are never signed, unlike the debates on talk pages.

Ruthless precision in thinking
The Wikipedia development model, defined as “commons-based peer production” by Yochai Benkler, requires a high degree of autonomy of participants, who self-attribute their tasks. Some participants may deceive others, or deceive themselves, as to their true level of competence; but Benkler reckons that peer review or the law of statistical averages (provided the number of participants is high enough) will be sufficient to regulate flawed self-assessments (3).

Mass peer production, based on transparent communication between participants, cannot abide the isolated stance of the traditional expert. Wikipedia’s co-founder and chief spokesperson, Jimmy Wales, wrote in June 2008 that an open encyclopaedia requires a “ruthless precision in thinking” because, in contrast to the “comfortable writers of a classic top-down encyclopaedia”, people working in open projects are liable to be “contacted and challenged if they have made a flawed argument or based [their] conclusions on faulty premises” (4). What this boils down to is that in Wikipedia expertise is no longer embodied in a person but in a process, in the aggregation of many points of view, the wisdom of the crowd.
This is why the inclusion of draft articles, known as “stubs”, no matter how rough, is encouraged: there is always a chance that they could be collectively edited and become pearls of wisdom. For wisdom to emerge, the crowd needed to be there in the first place. To ensure that recruitment was massive and remained constant, the Wikipedia experience had to be fun and immediate: the key concept is “You can edit this page right now”. The advantage of this development model is that projects can improve very rapidly. For example, it has been empirically shown that the rigour and diversity of a Wikipedia article improves following a reference to it in the mass media, which brings in new contributors.
Le Monde Diplomatique for more

By Santaro Rey (Asia Times Online)

North Korea’s decision to carry out its second nuclear test on Monday could have far-reaching consequences, if South Korea and Japan conclude that nothing can be done to persuade Pyongyang to denuclearize. Under such circumstances, developing their own nuclear weapons might become increasingly desirable for Seoul and Tokyo.

North Korea shook the world – literally – in the early hours of May 25, carrying out its second nuclear test, at a site in the northeast of the country. Significantly, the latest detonation was much more powerful than its first nuclear test, carried out on October 9, 2006, which was widely believed to have fizzled. The Russian military and the South’s Defense Ministry estimated Monday’s blast to have yielded 20 kilotons, or roughly the same as the American atomic bomb that destroyed the Japanese city of Nagasaki at the end of World War II in 1945.

That North Korea decided to conduct a second nuclear test was not surprising. Pyongyang’s official media had been warning since April 29 that it might conduct a test, as an expression of its displeasure at the United Nations Security Council’s criticism of its failed satellite launch (in reality a test of its long-range Taepodong 2 missile) on April 5. Nonetheless, the test came sooner than expected, and unlike its predecessor, Pyongyang did not provide official advance notice in its state-controlled media.

Factors driving the test
North Korea’s decision to test the bomb likely had several motivations. Firstly, given that the October 2006 test was widely considered to have fizzled, yielding less than 1 kiloton, Pyongyang needed its own reassurances that it had a fully functioning nuclear weapon. The North’s official Korean Central News Agency (KCNA) confirmed as much, when it stated, “The test helped satisfactorily settle the scientific and technological problems arising in further increasing the power of nuclear weapons.”

Asia Times Online for more

De-baptism organisers say the initiative is a response to what they see as increasing stridency from churches – for instance Pope Benedict XVI’s recent comment to AIDS-ravaged Africa that condom use could further spread of the disease.

Do you disagree with your parents over religion?

In Britain, some people clearly do: more than 100,000 Britons have recently downloaded “certificates of de-baptism” from the Internet to renounce their Christian faith.

The initiative launched by a group called the National Secular Society (NSS) follows atheist campaigns here and elsewhere, including a London bus poster which triggered protests by proclaiming, “There’s probably no God.”

“We now produce a certificate on parchment and we have sold 1,500 units at three pounds (4.35 dollars, 3.20 euros) a pop,” said NSS president Terry Sanderson, 58.
John Hunt, a 58-year-old from London and one of the first to try to be “de-baptised,” held that he was too young to make any decision when he was christened at five months old.

The male nurse said he approached the Church of England to ask it to remove his name.

“They said they had sought legal advice and that I should place an announcement in the London Gazette,” said Hunt, referring to one of the official journals of record of the British government.

So that’s what he did — his notice of renouncement was published in the Gazette in May 2008 and other Britons have followed suit.

Michael Evans, 66, branded baptising children as “a form of child abuse” — and said that when he complained to the church where he was christened he was told to contact the European Court of Human Rights.

Expatica France for more