Month: November 2009

A speech by François Houtart, a Belgian sociologist, the winner of 2009 UNESCO-Madanjeet Singh Prize

Millions of people deserve the Madansheet Singh prize: all those who, by combining their efforts in spite of their differences of culture, religion and philosophical convictions, have not lost their hope of transforming a world subjected to the logic of the market. In response to the cries of the oppressed and those of the earth, they are trying to build societies in which justice becomes a central value and spirituality regains its rightful place. This is the reason why it is worthwhile reflecting, in the spirit of this prize, on tolerance and non-violence in a world that needs to be transformed.

To put tolerance into practice presupposes the recognition that there are situations that cannot be tolerated. The financial speculation, which is largely responsible for the food crises in 2007 and 2008, thrust more than 100 million people below the poverty threshold, into destitution and hunger. That is intolerable.

To emit increasing greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, while devastating the places that absorb them like the forests and oceans, is also just as intolerable. Lobbying the international organizations, at the European and world level, like the United Nations Conference on Climate Change, in order that the rights of the market prevail over the rights to life, is intolerable. To establish networks of military bases over the planet to control natural resources, especially of energy, and not to hesitate in launching war to guarantee such control: this also is intolerable.

To promote and reproduce an economy that creates immense wealth that ignores externalities – that is, the ecological and social destruction that is not taken into account in economic calculations – is intolerable. To accept that the distribution of assets serves as a source of inequality never attained before in history is no less intolerable. True, millions of people have also risen out of poverty but at the same time hundreds of millions of others have stayed there or been precipitated into destitution, which is intolerable.

As for non-violence being a basic element in human relationships, this requires tackling the causes of violence, that is, the economic, social and political structures that oppress people and groups, to the point of denying them the right to exist. The advance of humanity is strewn with struggles and their violence or non-violence testifies to the refusal of the dominant classes to cede their power and their privileges. Today, the convergence of social resistance has become the means of creating a new historical subject in the progress towards emancipation. The movements of landless peasants, worker unions, indigenous peoples’ movements, women’s movements, religious organizations, committed intellectuals, political regroupings can tilt the balance of power, thus making it possible to build other kinds of society.

ALAI for more

reviewed by Hammond Guthrie

# ISBN-10: 0879309865
# ISBN-13: 978-0879309862

I first experienced what would eventually be called “Jam Band” music when I attended one of Ken Kesey’s Acid Tests in 1965. In order to get into the place you had to first walk literally through the Acid Test band then playing a warped rendition of Wilson Pickett’s “Midnight Hour.” The first person I locked eyes with was Jerry Garcia, lead guitarist of the then nascent Grateful Dead [nee: The Warlocks], who went right on playing “Midnight Hour” for the next two and half hours! Later I would listen to this same band of misfits hammering away at an electrified “Viola Lee Blues” from a truck bed in Panhandle Park in the Haight Ashbury district, yet rather oddly, I did not then, nor do I now, think of myself as a actual “Deadhead.” To me the Dead were the City’s “house band,” infinitely reliable and creative. Reliable in the sense that you could count on them to be an hour or two late to the gig, and then spend the next 20-30 min. tuning their guitars onstage before launching into (e.g.) a mind-blowing sixty minute version of their improvisational epic “Cryptical Envelopment.” If I was any sort of “head” musically in those days I usually turned to the Quicksilver Messenger Service when it came to getting a good dose of psychedelic music. John Cipollina and the QMS took the early stages of the “extended jam,” and their enraptured fans to aural spaces even a good dose of LSD couldn’t reach.

In those days I was an aspiring writer and artist living in the City, a bit of a rouser at times, and when the bumper stickers began screaming that I should “Love It [the USA] Or Leave It!” I bought a one way ticket to London and split for the greater unknown. When finally I returned some nine years later the Vietnam war was over, Jimmy Carter was in the White House and to my great surprise there was a glossy magazine on the racks devoted to the bands and the music that had created the essential if not cellular sound track for my younger life. Needless to say I became a devoted fan of RELIX magazine, which I would later learn was initially founded when Les Kippel started it in 1974 as a communication tool for tapers. The interviews alone (Robert Hunter, Ned Lagin, Dan Healy, Tom Constanten and of course, the Dead), were priceless gems of insight and nostalgia regarding how this music was being created, and equally so if not more importantly, how it was being recorded. The evolution of recording techniques as well as the music itself had moved light years from where it had been just nine years prior, and I was fascinated, if not enlightened by what I found in the pages of RELIX.

As fascinated and intrigued as you may well be reading “RELIX The Book,” Toni Brown and Lee Abraham’s exceptional collection of in depth interviews, insightful articles (highlights include: “R. Crumb,” “Willie Dixon – Blues Giant,” and “The Beat Road Never Ends” regarding Neal Cassady, hero of Kerouac’s “On The Road” and one of the most original Pranksters), along with engaging photographs and letters documenting and finally representing this wonderfully experimental time in the history of rock and roll.

“RELIX – The Book” is a wonderful addition to any collection.

Buy the Book

Signed copies are available at www.tonibrownband.com, [$29.99 + $4.95 shipping]. Includes a FREE copy of the CD, “State Of Mind” from the Toni Brown Band.

You can also buy the book at a discount at Amazon.com.

Hammond Guthrie is the author of “AsEverWas..Memoirs of a Beat Survivor” and archivist for The 3rd Page: A Journal of Ongrowing Natures.

Empty Mirror Books

He’s the darling of the dance world, and beyond, with artists such as Anish Kapoor and Antony Gormley lining up to work with him

The Big Interview by Christina Patterson

Photo/Susannah Ireland

“In Asian culture,” says Akram Khan, “you don’t have a voice. You just accept what everybody says.” It is, I have to say, rather hard to believe now. The darling of the dance world has a reputation for pushing the boundaries of his form, tossing in a visual artist here, a musician there, a writer there, and then maybe adding, just for fun, an actress who’s never danced in her life. Hailed as “the great new hope” and “wunderkind” of contemporary dance, “a phenomenon” and “a marvel”, he’s an (extremely muscular) human whirlwind, leaping from project to project, and travelling the world on an endless, exhaustive, exhausting quest for new ideas, new creative partnerships, new marriages of story and feeling and form. For a man obsessed with the idea of stillness, he’s remarkably bad at it. Brilliant on stage, but not so good in life.

Here, on a Saturday night at Sadler’s Wells (the only spare hour, apparently, in his entire week) he is all coiled energy and focus. Perched on a plastic chair in a giant rehearsal room that’s eerily quiet, this short, bald, brown man has a poised presence that radiates through the room. His voice is quiet and his manner is gentle. “In my community, it was really tough,” he says. “I disagreed all the time, but it was in my head.” What, this man who has worked with Anish Kapoor, and Hanif Kureishi, and Juliette Binoche, and Kylie Minogue, never stood up to anyone in his community? Ever? “No,” he says in that half-whisper, “because it’s a form of disrespect.”

No wonder, then, that he understands that different kind of respect, the gang culture in which any minuscule signal of the lack of it is enough to pay for with your life. In his new solo work, Gnosis, which opens Svapnagata, a two-week festival of Indian music and dance at Sadler’s Wells (co-curated with his friend and regular collaborator, Nitin Sawhney), he plays a hoodie, to a musical background of Dizzee Rascal. “It’s something familiar in me,” he says, “because that’s how I was when I was young. I was a big fan of Michael Jackson and I was really into hip-hop.”

That, however, is the second half. The first half is kathak, the classical Indian form that Khan trained in from the age of seven. It’s a form that goes back to the nomadic bards of ancient northern India, and one which uses stylised gestures to tell mythological tales. It’s the first time he has combined classical and contemporary work in one evening, and the aim, he says, is to explore the story of the Mahabharata in both a traditional and a contemporary context. “I was talking to my wife,” he says (the South African dancer Shanell Winlock), “and trying to explain to her about Gandhari, the blind queen in the Mahabharata, but for her to understand I had to tell her everything about it. So that,” he adds, “is the beginning of Gnosis. I wanted to talk about inner knowledge, and for me knowledge wasn’t in books, because I was pushed to read books.”

Independent for more

Akram Khan Company and National Ballet of China – Bahok

(Submitted by reader)

Notebook of a nobody

By Shanie

We have captured all the positions
And on the heights we have planted
The banners of our revolution
You imagined that that was all we wanted
We need more
We want all
Your hearts are our goal
It is your souls we want.

A fascist regime requires more than outward obedience to its commands; it seeks to control the inner person, to shape thoughts, feelings and attitudes in accordance with its own ideology. It demands total allegiance and submission. It was this goal that was expressed by an anonymous Nazi poet in the words quoted above. The Third Reich was organised on the basis that the leader (the Fuehrer) embodied and expressed the will of the German people and commanded their supreme loyalty. A Nazi political theorist stated at that time: “The authority of the Fuehrer is total and all-embracing…..The Fuehrer’s authority is subject to no checks or controls; it is circumscribed by no ….individual rights; it is ….overriding and unfettered.”

Sri Lanka has had a long history of liberal democracy; the authoritarianism of the present political system is of recent origin. We were one of first countries in the world to introduce full universal suffrage in 1931, with every adult citizen having an equal and unfettered right to elect a representative to the country’s legislature. Even out then colonial rulers had introduced full universal suffrage only three years earlier. These liberal democratic principles were enshrined in our 1931 Donoughmore Constitution as well as in Soulbury Constitution which we adopted for independent Ceylon in 1947. Both Constitutions were drafted by the colonial rulers. The 1947 Constitution was contained in a White Paper presented by the colonial government passed by the then State Council.

The values of a liberal democracy – a free and vibrant Media, an independent Public Service, Police and Judiciary, free and fair Elections – were gradually being eroded in independent Ceylon. At the 1970 Election, the United Front had secured a two-third majority in Parliament. They promptly set about drafting a new Constitution basically on their own terms. The views of the minorities and the opposition were given little credence but the essentials of a liberal democratic government were still retained – though the abolition of institutions like the Public Services Commission and bringing the public services directly under the political authorities has led to the politicisation of these institutions.

But worse was to come when at the 1977 Election, the UNP also secured a two-third majority and proceeded to draft yet another new constitution. That Constitution created the monster of the Executive Presidency with authoritarian powers similar to what the Fuehrer enjoyed in the Third Reich. The President’s authority is also total and all-embracing with no checks and balances and is not circumscribed by any individual or group rights for the citizens. J R Jayewardene once famously boasted about powers – that he enjoyed total authority and the only power he lacked was to make a man a woman. Presidents who came after him, including the present incumbent, have acknowledged the absurdity of investing the Head of State in a democracy with the authoritarian powers of a Nazi dictatorship. But once comfortably ensconced in position, they have not only been reluctant to let go these powers, but have happily exercised them, even blatantly violating the provisions of the Constitution, knowing they enjoyed legal immunity. It must however be said to the credit of President Chandrika Kumaratunga that she was the only President who had the vision and the courage to bring forward in 2000, soon after her re-election to a second term, constitutional proposals to abolish the Executive Presidency. Sadly, this was lost in controversy over her devolution proposals brought up after consensus had been reached. But that is another story.

The need for constitutional reform

Island for more

Mini-skirts and plunging necklines forbidden as Libyan leader tries to convert Roman ‘hostesses’ to Islam

By Michael Day

Photo EPA
Hundreds of Rome’s beautiful escort girls flock to the Libyan Embassy in Rome for a meeting with Col Muammar Gaddafi

The mysterious host asked the Italian hospitality agency for “500 attractive girls between 18 and 35 years of age, at least 1.7 metre high”, and if the women who answered the call were in the dark about their duties, they must have felt confident that the event would be an interesting one.

As it turned out, they were right – but not, perhaps, in a way they might have expected. The host was none other than Colonel Muammar Gaddafi. Miniskirts and plunging necklines were forbidden. And the purpose of the gathering was to convert them to Islam.

The eccentric Libyan leader was in Rome for the World Food Summit, but apparently his interest in the event’s famine relief programme was matched by his determination that Italy’s most glamorous hostesses be fired with religious zeal. Reports in the Italian press relate how soon after the dictator’s arrival in the Italian capital, Gaddafi’s aides had contacted an agency that supplies attractive young women as hospitality. They were asked to come to the home of Hafed Gaddur, the Libyan ambassador in Rome over three evenings this week, beginning on Sunday.

Independent for more

(Submitted by reader)

By Frederic E. Bloomquist (from San Pedro)

As typical American journalists, Miller and Samuels ignore the gorilla in the room. When the George W. Bush administration decided to unilaterally invade Iraq based on a falsehood, we also acted as an extremist group, killing thousands of innocents. Similarly, in Afghanistan, as we continue to blunder through a misguided war, innocents die.

Thus we too are extremists, only in our case it is “quality of life” that is our cult. It is a lifestyle dependent on artificially cheap fossil fuels and submissive foreign governments sustained by a weary workforce gypped by trickle-down promises.

Let’s be clear: Jingoism is not an excuse for wanton death and bloodshed; nor is our own “ideological virus,” the notion that Americans have the right to maintain a lifestyle subsidized by poverty. Certainly if a terrorist cult is defined as an extremist group moved to murderous violence because of an insane fanatical belief, Walt Kelly was right: “We have met the enemy, and he is us.”

Los Angeles Times

(Submitted by Asghar Vasanwala)

By Deborah Brewster

When the Red Crescent set up a health clinic in the town of Anabta, in the Palestinian West Bank, the charitable organisation began asking its local Muslim residents for donations. A contribution to the clinic, it suggested, could fulfil their religious obligation to give zakat, an annual gift to those less fortunate.

For a non-profit group operating in the west, this would all be standard practice. But in the Muslim world the clinic’s moves were part of a small but significant shift in the way philanthropy is carried out.

Rather than giving traditional personal handouts, Muslim donors are becoming increasingly interested in more institutionalised forms of philanthropy. The impetus for this change comes both from charitable organisations soliciting money, and from wealthy individuals who want to see their donations make a wider impact.

Financial Times for more

(Submitted by reader)

By Uri Avnery

When the TV news starts with a murder, people are relieved.
This means that no war has broken out, no suicide bomb has exploded, no Qassam rocket has been launched at Sderot. Ahmadinejad has not test-fired a new missile that can reach Tel Aviv. Just another murder.

Not that Israel is the world’s murder capital. We shall have to work much harder to reach the heights of New York or Moscow, not to mention Johannesburg. Statistics even show our murder rate is declining.

But lately Israel has been shocked by a series of exceptionally brutal murders. A husband took revenge on his wife by killing his little daughter and burying her in a forest. A man who lived with the wife of his son killed her daughter, his own granddaughter, put her little body in a suitcase and threw it into Tel Aviv’s Yarkon river. A son who quarreled with his wife killed her and her mother, cut up both bodies and dispersed the parts in garbage bins. A young man who had a quarrel with his mother killed her, and then went off to kill his brother, too. A man in his 70s killed his wife in her sleep with a hammer.
In recent weeks, there were two cases that trumped even these atrocities.

Damian Karlik, an immigrant from Russia who worked as head waiter in a Russian restaurant, was dismissed for theft and decided to take revenge on the owners, Russian immigrants like him. He went to their apartment and stabbed to death six people, one after another – the owner and his wife, their son and his wife and their two small grandchildren.

An immigrant from the US called Jack Teitel, an inhabitant of one of the most extreme West Bank settlements, has now confessed to the killing some years ago of two random Palestinians. He returned briefly to America, and, after coming back, put bombs into police cars. Why? Because the police were protecting gays and lesbians. He is also suspected of killing two traffic policemen for the same reason. He also claimed responsibility for the mass killing of gays in a Tel Aviv club (though that may be empty bragging). He planted a bomb in the home of some Messianic Jews (Jews who regard Jesus as the Messiah) and grievously injured a 15-year-old. He tried to kill the leftist professor Ze’ev Sternhell with another bomb which wounded him.

* * *

WHAT IS so special about these two cases is that they involved new immigrants who were allowed into Israel in spite of already being under investigation for crimes in their homelands.

The Law of Return accords every Jew the right to immigrate (“make Aliyah”) to Israel, where he or she automatically receives Israeli citizenship on arrival. But even according to this law, the Minister of the Interior can reject people suspected of serious crimes.

This makes the case of Karlik especially interesting. He was suspected in Russia of armed robbery, but the organization in charge of issuing Israeli immigration permits in Russia asserts that they did not know about it.

This organization, Nativ (“path”), was active in the Soviet Union as one of the Israeli secret services, like the Mossad and Shin Bet. Its particular job was to infiltrate Jewish communities and induce Jews to come to Israel.

Counterpunch for more

Cost of war to your community

…

About The Cost of War:
To date, $915.1 billion dollars have been allocated to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. The national, state, and local numbers we provide are based on the total approved amounts through the end of Fiscal Year 2009.

In addition to this approved amount, the FY2010 budget shows a $130 billion request for more war spending. This would bring total war spending in Iraq and Afghanistan to more than $1 trillion. When all FY2010 war-related amounts are approved, we will adjust the counter so that it reaches the new total at the end of FY2010.

If you should compare the amount displayed on the numbers in our information sheets with the Cost of War counter, please note that the information sheets include all war spending approved to date, the same number that the counter will reach at the end of the 2009 fiscal year.

National Priorities Project for more

If climate change is to be negated women in developing countries must be empowered to have means and right to family planning, says minister

Family planning and access to contraception are key proponents of fighting climate change, according to Minister for Development Cooperation Ulla Tørnæs.

Tørnæs was speaking at the University of Copenhagen on Tuesday in connection with the launch of the latest ‘State of World Population’ report from the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA).

The seminar focused on the correlations among climate change, population growth and gender equality in developing countries.
According to the report, the poor are ‘especially vulnerable’ to the effects of climate change and the majority of the 1.5 billion people living on $1 a day or less are women.

‘Poor women in poor countries are among the hardest hit by climate change, even though they contribute the least to it,’ said UNFPA Executive Director Thoraya Ahmed Obaid.

And Tørnæs was quick to agree, adding that she had the backing of the prime minister in her call for more family planning rights for women.
‘Denmark has for many years now been a strong advocate for a woman’s right to decide how many children she wants and when she wants them. Improving women’s right to choose will be crucial in stabilising population growth, sustaining development and reducing poverty,’ she said.

‘In my view the key is to accelerate access to modern contraception and family planning.’

The UNFPA report highlighted the negative effect of climate change in achieving Millennium Development Goals such as eradicating poverty and disease. It also looked at how a rapidly increasing world population, especially in low lying costal areas, is at particular risk from changing climates.

According to Tørnæs, more than 200 million women in developing countries lack access to modern contraception, leading to 76 million unintended pregnancies each year.

Copenhagen Post