Compassionate independence - should we be bothered?

As 2013 comes to a close, a gathering question for the year to come. 

Independence for Scotland: why bother?

2014 will bring all the same problems of brutal war, corporate rampaging, economic austerity, mass poverty and climate calamity. Amid all these global crises, what possible case can be made for a small entity like Scotland seeking separation? Isn't it so parochial? What's the point?

Well, here's a useful motive to consider.

Independence is not just about being 'free' of an England, a United Kingdom, a Union, a parliament, a flag, a national anthem and all the other ersatz iconography of statehood - those political fixtures and fittings which help maintain the elite artifice of 'togetherness'.

It's about seeking the compassionate society. 
 
In practical terms, it's about finding another direction, using this rare opportunity as a potential opening to real political, economic and social alternatives; a small but bold effort to craft a meaningful 'state' of release from harsh market life and the deepening vicissitudes of neoliberalism that lock human beings into a lifetime of worry, servitude and dependency.

It's also, however seemingly token, a way of advancing viable alternatives to corporate-driven warmongering, deranged nuclear weaponry and climate-killing policies. 

But isn't this all so overwhelming, beyond our reach to do anything about? Why even think there's any point or purpose in supporting independence to such effects? Why bother?  

This encouragement to apathetic resignation and dutiful acceptance is an essential part of Project Fear. Rather than lamely ask 'why bother?', why not welcome the chance to act, to care, to be compassionately bothered?

We've seen much media-fuelled fearmongering over 'issues' like borders, currencies, the 'loss of identity' and so on. Bother to ask yourself: are these really such insurmountable obstacles, unresolvable situations or terrifying scenarios? Are such changes and modifications likely to create chaos and anarchy?

Not only is this kind of 'debate' intended to frighten and perplex, it's, like so much ruling-class narrative, meant to disempower, to crush the public's expectations and hopes of a better society, any wished-for fuller existence. As Chomsky so often says, it's about authority reinforcing the vital notion of political helplessness.

All of which fuels our insecurities and fears of upsetting the status quo. Even many of those proposing independence are stuck in this narrowly-mired 'better together/apart' exchange, fixated on often petty minutiae.

What's never discussed here is the idea of independence in pursuit of the radically compassionate 'state'.

This is not just about promising things like better childcare and pensions. It's about finding a whole new moral engagement, about trying to construct the happier, healthier, enlightened community, something much more progressively ambitious for our children, old folk and most vulnerable, something which bothers about true compassionate interventions both within and beyond Scotia land. 

Beyond the bulk of White Paper policies and transitional arrangements, it's also an opportunity to promote and write our own constitution, rather than leaving it to a political class still potentially beholden to all those 'neoliberal realities'.

It's worth remembering here that all the major establishment institutions - financial, political and media - are very bothered about the prospect of any such alternative model, hence their vociferous opposition and spin. 

As more and more are battered by austerity and a rigid financial governance underwritten by the City of London, the question thus becomes: can we really afford not to be bothered?    

Greatly bothered by imperialism and capitalist denigration of society, the legendary Scottish internationalist John Maclean was also still bothered enough to support an independent socialist Scotland. I'm with Maclean.

Vote 'no' in 2014, if you please. But don't do it on the spuriously-spun 'worries' and siren claims of Project Fear.

And if you vote 'yes', please do so in the serious hope of building a politics of compassion, a state of mind, a state of kind, which cares primarily for people and planet rather than flags and anthems.

A happy and compassionately bothered new year to you all.

Mandela coverage - the urgent need for corporate-free media

As Nelson Mandela is finally laid to rest, it's worth reflecting not only on an historically significant figure, but the crucial truths an international media has sought to bury.

And, in the wake of that relentless distortion of Mandela's life and cause, it's an urgent reminder of the need for a radical new media, completely released from the constraints of corporate control. 
 
The treatment of Mandela's death and memorial has shown just what a vital service state-corporate journalism performs in disguising systemic crimes, whitewashing elite offenders and mythologising those deemed useful to that selective narrative.

Or, rather, it's shown precisely none of this to a public massively smothered by political and media groupthink.  
 
Notable here has been the focus on Mandela's 'capacity for forgiveness', an honourable character trait, of course. Yet, as pinpointedly shown by Media Lens, 'emotionally potent over-simplifications' have been used here to twisted effect. Thus:  

"many journalists have rightly praised Mandela's forgiveness. But the state-corporate system also has a generous capacity for excusing torturers, dictators, terrorists, and even former enemies like Mandela - anyone who serves the deep interests of power and profit in some way."

So, while in life and death Hugo Chavez - whose revolutionary movement sought to resist Western-corporate dictate - was damned and derided as an egotistical tyrant, Nelson Mandela - whose African National Congress embraced that neoliberal agenda - was 'forgiven' and hailed as a saintly liberator.  
 
Another welcome antidote to this choice media adulation can be found in Greg Palast's fine dissection of the rampant hypocrisy and 'dollification' of Mandela, laying bare the real story of how, beyond the standard media narrative, his 'triumph' over political apartheid came at the cost of a continued and deepening economic apartheid.

Like Media Lens, Palast also corrects the much-vaunted line on Mandela's 'ready forgiveness':

"The US and European press have focused on Mandela's saintly ability to abjure bitterness and all desire for revenge, and for his Christ-like forgiving of his captors. This is to reassure us all that "good" revolutionaries are ones who don't hold anyone to account for murder, plunder and blood-drenched horror - or demand compensation. That's Mandela in his Mahatma Gandhi doll outfit - turning the other cheek, kissing his prison wardens."

While duly noting his great humanitarian capacities and promotion of civil resistance, Palast reminds us of the considerable threat of force, including Cuban military backing, that Mandela and the ANC had marshalled against the regime by the crisis point of apartheid. Seeing both the economic and political writing on the wall, the regime was compelled to cultivate an inner ANC cabal, which, as Palast laments, were all-too-ready to accept its 'terms of surrender': in essence, political office in exchange for economic control.

Almost nothing of this forceful side, dirty realpolitik and sellout to neoliberalism has been covered by a media dutifully absorbed by the great celebritisation of Mandela and a who's who of memorial-grasping elites.  

Thus, we had Obama's 'wondrous' speech, Cameron's gushing praises, tittle-tattle over their 'selfies', Bush and Bono posing together like saintly partners, and, of course, Blair, the perennial interloper, treated as some grand visiting ex-statesman. A crass assembly of warmongers and 'war-on-wanters' mixing in self-serving 'homage'.     
 
At the graveside we had the media lauding of billionaires Richard Branson and Oprah Winfrey, while thousands of impoverished black South Africans watched from afar and beyond security cordons.  
 
At no point did a mainstream, or most liberal, media consider any of this intrusive spectacle odd, distasteful or conveniently distracting from the real story of continuing poverty and oppression.  

Other fine expositions on the great hypocrisy and economic apartheid came from dissident writers like Jonathan Cook, as with Media Lens, echoing John Pilger's long-standing articles and films on the Mandela mythology and great ANC sellout.
 
While any critical appraisal of Mandela and his legacy emerged mainly via an alternative media, the Guardian's Seumas Milne was a lone kind of dissenting voice amid the sentimental liberal chorus. Predictably, no one deemed that 'anomaly' worthy of critical comment.  Nor, indeed, did Milne.  
 
All of which confirms the media's own systematic role in perpetuating power through journalistic compromise, and the need for a serious media alternative.

In covering Mandela and the coverage of Mandela, did any of our 'searching' media even consider the kind of 'contract' with power it has also slavishly conceded to?    

The relinquishing of powers under the Freedom Charter by the ANC to an international business elite may be said to parallel the way in which so many 'left liberal' writers have reached an all-too-easy accommodation with their corporate media masters.

Yes, the proprietors and executive editors have said, you can have your 'critical' columns, which we can use to 'dollify' our own 'crusading' image, proving our own 'radical' purpose. You can have the role of 'internal dissident', which we will hail - all safely surrounded, of course, by multiple other safe and on-message writers - while we get to run our corporate operations. 

Deal done: you have your 'status', we have the profits, you get to say your token, 'controversial' piece, we get to say it's proof of a 'challenging' media.
 
And so, like the pernicious lie of a 'free South Africa', we have the fiction of a free and liberating media, all overseen by the real sovereignty of establishment interests and corporate forces.

A good example of compromised media can be seen in the current spiking of Whose Sarin? by Seymour Hersh, a landmark article alleging US manipulation of intelligence over chemical weapons in Syria and Obama's efforts to fabricate a case for intervention.

Hersh is a renowned Pulitzer Prize winning reporter with a fine track record of insider sourcing and damning exposes. Yet, none of this, it seems, could persuade our 'best radical' media - New York Times, Washington Post, Guardian or Independent - to run or support this key story.

While it now seems safe to note that Mandela's arrest had, all along, been assisted by the CIA, the idea of exposing dark US intel in present situations like Syria appears much more problematic for editors.     
 
This is not conspiracy. It's, more prosaically, a process of 'inside understanding', of what's deemed 'respectably radical' and 'safely publishable' - an editorial/journalistic subservience which Hersh himself recently damned and, in seeming 'respect to open comment', was published by the 'quality' media he criticises. 

Yet, that 'openness' is permissable because, unlike Hersh's more explosive claims of Western subterfuge over Syria, such comment is still deemed 'safely abstract', perhaps even the outpourings of a 'loveable media relic'.

Unlike the sanctification of Mandela's past life, or even token exposure of the dark cave-in to apartheid, any media amplifying of such current and contentious indictments brings much more immediate risks of elite exposure - and the corporate media's own part in marginalising it.

And so the media play of 'good guys' and 'bad guys', 'rogue' states and 'liberated' states, 'demons' and 'icons' continues. 
   
Already, Nelson Mandela and South Africa is a media story past, the job of contextualising and appropriating this 'icon' done.

As the curtain comes down on the great media circus, a select version of events behind Mandela's life, struggle and passing have been dutifully distilled and recorded for public consumption. And a crucial part of that distortion and charade involves the media's own power-serving role as chroniclers of the deception.

This is the enduring reality of how media linked into any state body or commercial web will always be potentially compromised, a timely reminder of the need for a true, unfettered journalism entirely liberated from corporate ownership, funding or other hidden alignments.
    

Mandela - appropriation of an icon

Nelson Mandela died last night.

RIP Tata Mandina.

 

His iconic part in bringing down South Africa's apartheid regime needs little elaboration. Watching Mandela emerge that momentous day in 1990 from years of penury remains one of the most abiding reminders that brutal oppression can be overcome.

But it's also a now more sobering reminder that true liberation involves the release of people from even higher forces of oppression.     

Today, Mandela's and South Africa's 'long walk to freedom' has been deeply compromised by the ANC's short stroll to neoliberal sellout.

It may seem somehow inappropriate at this sad moment to 'sully' Mandela's reputation with such truths. Yet, reflecting Mandela's own resistance to the system of apartheid, rather than any given leader of it, it's appropriate, likewise, that no one figure, however heroic, should be used to disguise any other oppressive system that comes to replace it.        

As John Pilger recently asserted, 'Mandela's greatness is assured, but not his legacy'. 

While a new black elite luxuriate in gated mansions, a still massive black underclass languish in abject poverty, excluded by an economic system deeply subservient to the global corporate order.

Following the recent murder of thirty four miners by South African police, Pilger reiterated his thoughts on the "illusion of post-apartheid democracy" and "the new worldwide apartheid of which South Africa is both an historic and contemporary model"; an abandonment of true economic liberation to the demands of privatisation and forces of international capital:   

Enveloped in the hot air of corporate-speak, the Mandela and Mbeki governments took their cues from the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund. While the gap between the majority living beneath tin roofs without running water and the newly wealthy black elite in their gated estates became a chasm, finance minister Trevor Manuel was lauded in Washington for his "macro-economic achievements". South Africa, noted George Soros in 2001, had been delivered into "the hands of international capital".

Amid the official eulogies, little of this inconvenient reality is up for discussion, conveniently lost in the narrow narrative of South Africa's 'great democratic emancipation'. 

Thus, an on-message media has seamlessly prioritised and approved those 'free world' voices so eager to mark and laud Mandela.

Between glowing commentaries on his life and struggle, the BBC has carried studious tributes from every other world leader, past and present, all desiring some association with the 'Mandela brand'.  

Barack Obama spoke of Mandela as a crucial formative influence, his conviction, incarceration and inspirational words helping to form Obama's own 'conviction' politics. Visiting Robben Island recently and posing inside Mandela's cell, Obama also spoke of Mandela's fortitude in the face of harsh imprisonment. This from the man still refusing to shut down Guantanamo and directing a murderous drone war.

David Cameron and William Hague have also issued unctuous statements on Mandela's passing, their cloying words still trying to deflect the shame of Thatcher's denunciation of Mandela and the ANC as criminal terrorists.

Predictably, Tony Blair has also 'honoured' Mandela, 'generously' recognising their 'disagreements' over Iraq, Afghanistan and other 'interventions'. Little, of course, will be made of Mandela's resolute denunciation of US/UK-led wars, or support for Palestinians, as the media continue their choice presentations. 

And so it goes on, every part of the establishment, every warmonger, every political wannabe grasping to the safe Mandela lore, many 'belatedly' finding their 'role' in the 'anti-apartheid cause'. 

Where do we see the same championing of the Palestinian cause, the castigation of 'friendly' apartheid states like Israel? The sins of Verwoerd, Vorster, Botha and De Klerk can now be safely exposed, but not, it seems, those of Ben Gurion, Sharon, Barak and Netanyahu. 

As the presidents, prime ministers, princes and royals prepare for Mandela's great funeral, consider just how suitable most of them are to be 'mourning' such a man. 

How easily, too, the patronage and words of such figures have displaced any true debate on Mandela's politics or associations to those like Ronnie Kasrils, Joe Slovo and other ANC subversives.   

This is the context within which Mandela has been adopted and sanctified; a 'safe' story and selective hagiography which can whitewash 'Mandela-moment' elites and harness liberal emotion over the evil of South African apartheid while avoiding much more awkward questions on its now imposed place in the global corporate apartheid.       

Nor, as Jonathan Cook writes, is it disrespectful to Mandela and his huge achievements to see the ways in which he became appropriated and neutralised: 

First, he was forced to become a bloodless icon, one that other leaders could appropriate to legitimise their own claims, as the figureheads of the “democratic west”, to integrity and moral superiority. After finally being allowed to join the western “club”, he could be regularly paraded as proof of the club’s democratic credentials and its ethical sensibility. Second, and even more tragically, this very status as icon became a trap in which he was forced to act the “responsible” elder statesman, careful in what he said and which causes he was seen to espouse. He was forced to become a kind of Princess Diana, someone we could be allowed to love because he rarely said anything too threatening to the interests of the corporate elite who run the planet.

In reflecting fondly on Nelson Mandela, this huge and defining figure, with his humanitarian gift for just forgiveness and reconciliation, we should remember the considerable 'walk' still facing impoverished South Africans, the dark collusion of their government and the ways in which this hypocritical deification of Mandela obscures the ongoing struggle to break the higher chains of oppression. 

Feeding the hate: Tom Harris MP vilifies the Roma

The shrill and dangerous castigation of Roma and other East European migrants continues with a nasty polemic from Glasgow South MP, Tom Harris.

I'd say Harris was 'my MP', being a constituent of said electoral area. But, in effect, I am without one, 'disenfranchised', choosing not to recognise or seek the usual 'services' of a parliamentarian who voted for the mass slaughter of Iraq and has been so relentless in his attacks on asylum seekers. 
 
Still supporting war criminal Tony Blair to this day (Twitter bio: 'Proud Blairite'), Harris, as prior correspondence shows, is also a long-standing apologist for Israel's occupation and crimes.

The problem in this case isn't just Harris's amplification of residents' fears, it's his promotion of irrational suspicion and effective hatred of an entire people.

Just in case we don't recognise his 'rational' side, Harris commences his piece with this faux 'acknowledgement' of 'worthy' immigrants:  

Do I need to add all the usual caveats and qualifications before I continue? Okay, let's get it over with: the vast majority of immigrants from all over the world make a massively positive financial as well as personal and cultural contribution to the UK. Britain is far better off today than it would have been without immigration. Okay? Can I continue now?

And continue he does, with reactionary gusto, turning constituents' reported concerns into a sharp indictment of Roma 'lifestyle':     

...filthy and vastly overcrowded living arrangements, organised aggressive begging, the ghetto-isation of local streets where women no longer feel safe to walk due to the presence of large groups of (workless) men, the rifling through domestic wheelie bins by groups of women pushing oddly child-free prams, and a worrying increase in the reporting of aggressive and violent behavior in local schools.

It's not that we should be blind to difficult conditions and tensions; they are patently obvious to most residents and observers of Glasgow's south-side Govanhill area, an historic locale for multiple races of economic migrants and conflict-fleeing peoples: Irish, Jews, Pakistanis, Poles, Slovakians, and, soon to come, perhaps, more Romanians and Bulgarians.
 
What's problematic is the pernicious categorisation of those deemed 'wholly responsible' for the hostility and social decay - just as the Irish once were - a targeted rhetoric that recognises neither the wider economic/social context of such migrants' arrival, or the need for constructive action to improve the situation for all concerned.  
 
While many front-line social agencies in Glasgow and other migrant-receiving cities have learned the benefits of patient and careful nurturing of mixed-race communities, Harris offers only inflammatory words, generating even greater fear and alienation:        

In the meantime, my constituents become angrier and more resentful, because the lives they have worked so hard to build for themselves and their families are being impinged upon by people whose culture, way of life and attitude to authority and those around them are utterly alien. [My emphasis.]

Again, whatever concerns some people may have over the social effects of new immigration, what's achieved by such spurious denigration of an entire culture?    
 
Again, bear in mind, this coming from someone who endorsed the murderous invasion of Iraq, with mass war crimes like Fallujah, devastating an entire people, culture and way of life.
 
With no apparent remorse over his part in that vast atrocity, Harris is still only concerned with what 'dangers' present themselves at 'our' door: it "would be absurd to claim that all foreign cultures are beneficial to the UK."
 
He cites here as an "extreme example: female genital mutilation." Why this particular, lone example? No doubt because it helps reinforce the heavily-implied distinction between 'our essentially good' cultural practices against 'their generalised bad and barbaric' ones.

All of which feeds the standard framing on the Roma's supposed 'cultural propensity to criminality', rather than generations of persecution, poverty and forced movement.  The current crackdown against Roma groups over 'baby-stealing' is but another facet of that false cultural determinism.  

A useful antidote to Harris's bleak fearmongering can be found in Peter Ross's more people-engaging view of the Roma and life around Govanhill, recognising not only the economic/cultural complexities and problematics of a highly-fluid community, but also that which binds and connects people, however adversarial their situation:

The first Roma in Glasgow were asylum seekers from Slovakia, escaping racial hatred. Most, now, are economic migrants, coming from villages in the region of Michalovce. In Glasgow, they have found casual work in potato and chicken processing factories, though, increasingly, jobs are hard to come by. Romanian nationals have very restricted access to the benefits system, and there is anecdotal evidence that some Roma from that country, now living in Govanhill, cannot afford to feed themselves and thus go through the bins of private residences and shops, looking for food.

In seeking understanding of the Roma's street presence, Ross speaks with Marcela Adamova, "a 32-year-old Roma woman who came to Glasgow five years ago from Pavlovce nad Uhom, a town in eastern Slovakia. She works as a Roma support worker with Oxfam and runs Romano Lav, a community group."

The Roma are the most visible ethnic group, due to their habit of standing around outside chatting on street corners in largeish numbers, some even after darkness has fallen. There is nothing sinister in this; it is a cultural practice from back in the villages, but many locals feel suspicious and sometimes intimidated. “I hear some racist remarks, you know, ‘All these gypsies living in Govanhill are not bringing anything to society’,” says Adamova. “But the racism is not so strong as in Slovakia.”

Nor, again, is there any denial here of the social dereliction and ethnic tension:  

Govanhill would not be to everyone’s taste. It is a district of old four-storey tenements, from which satellite dishes sprout like fungus. Fly-tipping is endemic, and it is quite common to see people sifting this mess, looking for anything they can use. There is poverty and overcrowding; you hear about 14 people in two-bedroom flats. The area, too, has a reputation for violence and theft. Serious violent crime incidents are reported to be 59 per cent above the Scottish average, though police insist the crime rate is, in fact, falling and that, given the high population density, there is actually less villainy than they would expect.

Recognition without castigation. Why can't Harris, at least, adopt a similar tone?

Ross concludes with a hopeful message from Donegal man Tony Mai Gallagher, 71, a patron of nearby Kelly's bar for many a year: 

“We’ve got to be gentle with them, because when we came in, people weren’t too gentle to us,” he says. “Let’s just hope our new neighbours, our New Irish, settle in just as fast as we did. Harmony is what we need.”

Laudable words, indeed.

We needn't be misty-eyed here in romanticising the problems in Govanhill and other such places. There are all-too-visible issues and anxieties on display, confirming an urgent need for wholesale socio-economic assistance. Yet, beneath all of this fear and distrust there's also the capacity for basic human connection.  
 
In dark contrast, people like Tom Harris spread only more negativity, fear and antagonism.

Such language also keeps people attuned to the perpetual myths and fallacies over immigration numbers and costs, notably the 'expected flood of welfare-seeking' Romanians and Bulgarians from 2014. 

Even the neoliberal Economist dismiss the hype behind such changes, "suggest[ing] that immigration is more a problem of perception than of reality." 

Yet, even these kind of clarifications lack something more elementary: compassionate concern. What, more fundamentally, should we be saying about the very presentation of an issue that routinely starts from the question 'what will they contribute' rather than 'what can we do to help'?

None of this is of seeming significance to Harris, who appears more intent on feeding animosity than helping people build bridges, more concerned with defending neoliberal politics than denouncing them as the prime reason behind Govanhill's social tensions, just as they are in the places such people come from in often desperate and disappointing search of something better.        
 
The growing persecution and terror of Roma people across Eastern Europe, as alarmingly seen in Hungary, should be a warning to all politicians and media here who peddle such populist poison.

Meanwhile, beyond Tom Harris's malicious columns and fake calls for 'serious debate' on immigration, take heart from the Roma children of Govanhill as they voice their small desire to be wanted, secure and happy.