Out of Africa? Human kind in 2020 "THE YEAR OF TRUTH"

Homo sapiens (wise)?

“Human” comes to us, via French humain, from the Latin humanus, which is related to homo as in sapiens (wise). In English, “human” and “humane” used to be the same word, as though it were a particular quality of human beings to act with kindness; the modern distinction was not made until the 18th century.  

Out of Africa 

The LODE Zone Line does not traverse the continent of Africa, but the LODE Zone Line crosses many histories that are connected to this vast continent at the centre of human kind's origins. There is a famous ancient Latin adage (credited to sages from Aristotle to Pliny to Erasmus) Ex Africa semper aliquid novi, which translates as “Out of Africa, always something new.”

According to the Wikipedia article on human evolution Homo sapiens (the adjective sapiens is Latin for "wise" or "intelligent") emerged in Africa around 300,000 years ago, likely derived from Homo heidelbergensis or a related lineage. In September 2019, scientists reported the computerized determination, based on 260 CT scans, of a virtual skull shape of the last common human ancestor to modern humans/H. sapiens, representative of the earliest modern humans, and suggested that modern humans arose between 260,000 and 350,000 years ago through a merging of populations in East and South Africa.

Between 400,000 years ago and the second interglacial period in the Middle Pleistocene, around 250,000 years ago, the trend in intra-cranial volume expansion and the elaboration of stone tool technologies developed, providing evidence for a transition from H. erectus to H. sapiens. The direct evidence suggests there was a migration of H. erectus out of Africa, then a further speciation of H. sapiens from H. erectus in Africa. A subsequent migration (both within and out of Africa) eventually replaced the earlier dispersed H. erectus. This migration and origin theory is usually referred to as the "recent single-origin hypothesis" or "out of Africa" theory. H. sapiens interbred with archaic humans both in Africa and in Eurasia, in Eurasia notably with Neanderthals and Denisovans. 

The map below charts the migration of modern humans out of Africa, based on mitochondrial DNA. Coloured rings indicate thousand years before present.

Out of Africa and a colonial perspective

Re:LODE Radio is prompted to reference the notion of "Out of Africa" primarily by an Opinion piece in the Guardian that, in turn, references a cinematic sequence from the film Out of Africa.

The Opinion piece referenced is by Laura Spinney, a science journalist and author of Pale Rider: the Spanish Flu of 1918 and How it Changed the World. Laura Spinney's piece was published in the print edition of the Guardian Tuesday 22 December 2020 with the headline:

The colonialist thinking that skews our view of deforestation

Re:LODE Radio acknowledges that it is this notion of "colonialist thinking" that, as an "organising idea", shapes some of the thinking running through this post.

The photo used in the Guardian webpage is of Bioko island, Equatorial Guinea. ‘In much of west Africa, forest cover actually increased over the course of the 20th century.’ 

Laura Spinney writes: 

To prevent future pandemics, we must stop deforestation and end the illegal wildlife trade. Do you agree? Of course you do, because what’s not to like? The buck stops with the evil other. The question is, will doing those things solve the problem? And the answer is, probably not. They will help, but there’s another, potentially bigger problem closer to home: the global north’s use of natural resources, especially its reliance on livestock.

The story that epidemics are punishment for upsetting the natural order of things is not new. But it’s a peculiarly modern, postcolonial twist on it to imagine that the source of that upset is somewhere far away from most of us – to wit, the parts of the world that were forested, until recently, and that conveniently coincide with the poorer bits. And it turns out that this narrative may be interfering with our attempts to protect ourselves from novel diseases, as well as with efforts to tackle climate change and the erosion of biodiversity.

As the French environmental historian Guillaume Blanc argues in a new book that has yet to be translated into English, L’invention du colonialisme vert (The Invention of Green Colonialism), the idea that Africa was once covered by a vast, primary forest is a myth invented by colonialists in the early 20th century. Over a period of several million years, the continent’s tree cover waxed and waned as the climate warmed and cooled. After humans came along, they cleared some trees and planted others, such that by the time Denys Finch Hatton took Karen Blixen for a spin in his Gipsy Moth – a scene immortalised in Sydney Pollack’s 1985 film Out of Africa – the Kenyan landscapes they soared over were thoroughly human-sculpted.

Nature . . .

. . . or culture? 

Starting in the 1930s, colonialists created national parks to protect the forests from the locals who were supposedly destroying them as their populations grew. But the hypocrisy is double-barrelled, because by then it was the colonialists who were responsible for large-scale destruction. Between 1850 and 1920, across Africa and Asia, Europeans and their descendants cut down 95m hectares of forest to make way for their farms – between four and five times more than was destroyed in the previous century.

The myth of the vanished forest persists. As the American environmental historian James McCann has shown, the former US vice-president Al Gore’s laudable and Nobel prize-winning fight to alert the world to climate change – in part through his 1992 book Earth in the Balance – borrowed spurious statistics according to which Ethiopia’s forest cover shrank from 40% in the 1950s to 1% in the 1990s (Ethiopia was never colonised). The 40% figure is based on breezy guesstimates put out by Europeans in the 1960s; no systematic study of that country’s forests has ever been conducted. In much of west Africa, meanwhile, the British anthropologists Melissa Leach and James Fairhead have shown that forest cover actually increased over the course of the 20th century. In Asia, too, research has cast doubt on the assumed link between local population growth and deforestation.

So powerful is the myth, we simply accept the inconsistencies that flow from it. The fact, for example, that the carbon footprint of a tourist from the global north visiting an African or Asian national park dwarfs that of a local farmer who travels on foot and uses no electricity. Though there is no evidence of major human-induced destruction of Africa’s flora and fauna until the arrival of colonialists, we have internalised their distinction between “good” and “bad” hunters. When Thomas Cholmondeley, scion of a well-known white settler family in Kenya, was convicted of the manslaughter in 2006 of Robert Njoya, many journalists observed that Britain’s colonial past had been on trial with him, but few questioned his description of himself as a sports hunter and conservationist, while Njoya, a black man, was a “poacher”.

Conservation and over-exploitation of the world’s resources were born in the same time and place, Blanc argues – Europe during the Industrial Revolution – and have proceeded in parallel ever since. Both spring from Europeans’ search for Eden after they had destroyed it at home. And the myth of that other Eden has returned with a vengeance, now that we find ourselves in the midst of a pandemic.

We know that greater intensity of human-animal contact is accelerating the emergence of new human diseases of animal origin, some of which have pandemic potential, and we know that in many cases – including coronaviruses – the virus reaches us from a wild bat or rodent (the natural reservoir) via a farmed animal (the intermediate host). We blame the wildlife trade – the bad hunters – and deforestation for increasing encounters between people and natural reservoirs, but say nothing about the bridge. The elephant – or rather the cow, camel or civet in the room – is livestock.

Here self-delusion segues into cynicism, because industrial-scale farming businesses, many of which are located in the global north, know very well the risk they represent – that’s why they conduct surveillance of their flocks and herds for new pathogens. So far, they happen to be better at it in the US and Europe than in China. But all over the world, those businesses are pushing their smaller-scale counterparts closer to the forest. Sometimes they even push the small-scale farmers out of business and into the wildlife trade.

Deforestation is real, in some places, but where it is happening the capital and the mindset driving it can often be traced back to the global north – as it could a century ago. It’s our rapacious consumption that is the problem – and that applies to climate change and biodiversity loss, too. The global south is well aware of this. That’s why it took 20 years from the 1992 Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro for an international organisation to be created to address the biodiversity problem. North and south were wrangling over whose values should dominate the conservation agenda. It’s also why there is an ongoing struggle over ownership of the world’s genetic resources.

Sometimes, as Blanc notes, the south makes the north’s hypocrisy work for it, as in the case of the African governments that treat national parks as cash cows. But nobody is fooled. From aid to conservation, the south knows to be wary of the white saviour complex, because of the ugly truths it hides.

Finding solutions to our genuine problems is going to be fiendishly difficult, but the process has to start with a recognition that nature is one big interconnected skein, of which we in the global north form a part, and that we’re the ones currently pulling it out of shape. We’re not all white – and we can argue about where the global north begins and ends – but if a northerner is writing this, and citing another northerner called, appropriately, Monsieur Blanc, it’s because it’s our myth that’s making the world sick – and we should bust it.

Out of Africa is the title of the memoir by Danish author Karen Blixen, and inspired Sydney Pollack’s 1985 film. The book, first published in 1937, recounts events of the seventeen years when Blixen made her home in Kenya, then called British East Africa.

The cover design of the first edition is of a pristine natural state, an Eden, unsullied and devoid of a human presence. In subtle ways the romanticised version and vision of nature is essentially anti-human.

Hieronymous Bosch's version of the Millennium or what is now called the Garden of Earthy Delights, includes a surreal, prickly, active and fluid interface between: 

human beings and "nature" . . . 

. . . along with the complex interface between different people coming together.

A snapshot of colonial thinking . . .

The book is a lyric meditation on Blixen's life on her coffee plantation, as well as a tribute to some of the people who touched her life there. It provides a vivid snapshot of African colonial life in the last decades of the British Empire.

Karen Blixen moved to British East Africa in late 1913, at the age of 28, to marry her second cousin, the Swedish Baron Bror von Blixen-Finecke, and make a life in the British colony. The young Baron and Baroness bought farmland below the Ngong Hills about ten miles (16 km) southwest of Nairobi, which at the time was still shaking off its rough origins as a supply depot on the Uganda Railway.

The Blixens had planned to raise dairy cattle, but Bror developed their farm as a coffee plantation instead. It was managed by Europeans, including, at the start, Karen's brother Thomas – but most of the labour was provided by “squatters.” This was the colonial term for local Kikuyu tribespeople who guaranteed the owners 180 days of labour in exchange for wages and the right to live and farm on the uncultivated lands which, in many cases, had simply been theirs before the British arrived and stole them.

Much of Blixen's energy in Out of Africa is spent trying to capture for the reader the character of the Africans who lived on or near her farm, and the efforts of European colonists (herself included) to co-exist with them.

Although she was unavoidably in the position of landholder, and wielded great power over her tenants, Blixen was known in her day for her respectful and admiring relationships with Africans – a connection that made her increasingly suspect among the other colonists as tensions grew between Europeans and Africans. “We were good friends,” she writes about her staff and workers. “I reconciled myself to the fact that while I should never quite know or understand them, they knew me through and through.”

But Blixen does understand – and thoughtfully delineates – the differences between the culture of the Kikuyu who work her farm and who raise and trade their own sheep and cattle, and that of the Maasai, a volatile warrior culture of nomadic cattle-drovers who live on a designated tribal reservation south of the farm's property. Blixen also describes in some detail the lives of the Somali Muslims who emigrated south from Somaliland to work in Kenya, and a few members of the substantial Indian merchant minority which played a large role in the colony's early development.

Her descriptions of Africans and their behaviour or customs sometimes employ some of the racial language of her time, deemed now to be abrasive, but her portraits are frank and accepting, and are generally free of perceptions of Africans as savages or simpletons. She transmits a sense of logic and dignity of ancient tribal customs. Some of those customs, such as the valuation of daughters based on the dowry they will bring at marriage, are perceived as ugly to Western eyes; Blixen's voice in describing these traditions is largely free of judgment.

She was admired in return by many of her African employees and acquaintances, who saw her as a thoughtful and wise figure, and turned to her for the resolution of many disputes and conflicts.

A "decent person", but shaped by an immanent colonialist perspective nonetheless . . .

. . . and a perspective that continues to be institutionalised to this day, and to such an extent that for those who "see" in this way (psychological projection), it's normal! The LODE project purpose, above all, is to enable the withdrawal of those distorted psychological projections people make onto a "wonderful world", that's sadly misshapen in our age of the capitalocene.

For example . . . 

This video can be seen on YouTube and is one of many examples of the work undertaken by Playing For Change, a multimedia music project, co-founded in 2002 by American music engineer/producer Mark Johnson and film producer/philanthropist Whitney Kroenke. Playing For Change also created a separate non-profit organization called the Playing For Change Foundation, which builds music and art schools for children around the world.

Playing For Change was founded in 2002 by Mark Johnson and Whitney Kroenke. Producers Johnson and Enzo Buono traveled around the world to places including New Orleans, Barcelona, South Africa, India, Nepal, the Middle East and Ireland. Using mobile recording equipment, the duo recorded local musicians performing the same song, interpreted in their own style. Among the artists participating or openly involved in the project are Vusi Mahlasela, Louis Mhlanga, Clarence Bekker, David Guido Pietroni, Tal Ben Ari (Tula), Bono, Keb' Mo', David Broza, Manu Chao, Grandpa Elliott, Keith Richards, Toots Hibbert from Toots & the Maytals, Taj Mahal and Stephen Marley. This resulted in the documentary A Cinematic Discovery of Street Musicians that won the Audience Award at the Woodstock Film Festival in September 2008.

Mark Johnson was walking in Santa Monica, California, when he heard the voice of Roger Ridley (deceased in 2005) singing "Stand By Me"; it was this experience that sent Playing For Change on its mission to connect the world through music.

The founders of Playing For Change created the Playing For Change Foundation, a separate 501(c)3 nonprofit organisation.

In 2011, the Playing For Change Foundation established an annual Playing For Change Day. The goal of Playing For Change Day is to "unite a global community through the power of music to affect positive social change".In 2019, the Playing For Change Foundation was awarded the Polar Music Prize. The Polar Music Prize is a Swedish international award founded in 1989 by Stig Anderson, best known as the manager of the Swedish band ABBA, with a donation to the Royal Swedish Academy of Music. The award is annually given to one contemporary musician and one classical musician. In 2019 the classical music recipient was Anne-Sophie Mutter.

The text accompanying this video of What a Wonderful World (Louis Armstrong), Playing For Change Song, Around The World (20 Nov 2012), on YouTube explains:  

Playing For Change is proud to present this video of the song "What A Wonderful World" featuring Grandpa Elliott with children's choirs across the globe. In these hard times, children and music bring us hope for a better future. Today we celebrate life and change the world one heart and one song at a time!!

This video was produced in partnership with Okaïdi children's clothing stores. Okaidi designed a special line of PFC T-Shirts to be sold in over 700 Okaïdi stores worldwide this holiday season. Okaïdi has committed 1 euro per T-Shirt sold to go to supporting the PFC Musicians and PFC Foundation's music education programs. We thank them for their generous support of the Playing For Change Movement!

Re:LODE Radio wonders:

Is this marketing? Framing economic activity with smiling children, black children, white children, brown children, human kind? 

Or, a noble cause, problematised by a colonial mind/culture-set?

A video, a film, a photograph, in each of these forms of media we do not simply encounter a document of one kind of reality or another. Mediated images generated from the material of reality do not describe reality, they, in effect, substitute themselves for reality. This is our information environment, increasingly immersive, and that shapes our perception of the world and all its inhabitants, including human kind.

Take this advertisement for example, an image produced by the Italian global fashion brand Benetton. As Kate Collins says, writing for the blog of the David M. Rubenstein Rare Book & Manuscript Library at Duke University (April 8 2019): 

These ads, like the one seen above that was featured in the magazine Mademoiselle in 1983, were part of a campaign called “All the Colors of the World.” With their messages of global harmony, these ads would take on dozens of different iterations in the next two decades. They became such a staple in Benetton’s marketing repertoire that in the 1990s, the expression “a Benetton ad” was sometimes used to refer to an image with a diverse group of people.  

Q. Where did the template for this image come from? 

A. From photography itself.

The message was in the medium. The medium was the message, and squaring the circle of difference and global harmony was immanent in the medium of photography itself. This potentiality was exemplified significantly in the 1955 exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art New York, that was titled The Family of Man. This was an ambitious photography exhibition curated by Edward Steichen, the director of the Museum of Modern Art's (MoMA) Department of Photography. According to Steichen, the exhibition represented the "culmination of his career."

The Family of Man was first shown in 1955 from January 24 to May 8 at the New York MoMA, then toured, making stops in thirty-seven countries on six continents. More than 9 million people viewed the exhibit, which is still in excess of the largest audience for any photographic exhibition since. The tour schedule lasted for eight years and that assured these record-breaking audience numbers. Commenting on its appeal, Steichen said the people "looked at the pictures, and the people in the pictures looked back at them. They recognized each other."

The title of the exhibition was taken from a line in a Carl Sandburg poem, The Long Shadow of Lincoln: A Litany (1944):

There is dust alive 

With dreams of the Republic, 

With dreams of the family of man

Flung wide on a shrinking globe

The exhibition opened with an entrance archway papered with a blow-up of a crowd in London by Pat English framing Wyn Bullock's Chinese landscape of sunlight on water into which was inset an image of a truncated nude of a pregnant woman in an evocation of creation myths. Subjects then ranged in sequence from lovers, to childbirth, to household, and careers, then to death and on a topical portentous note, the hydrogen bomb.

Finally, full cycle, visitors returned once more to children in a room in which the last picture was W. Eugene Smith's iconic 1946 A Walk to Paradise Garden. As the centrepiece of the exhibition a hanging sculptural installation of photographs including Vito Fiorenza's Sicilian family group and Carl Mydans' of a Japanese family (both from nations which were recent enemies of the Allies in WW2), another from Bechuanaland by Nat Farbman and a rural family of the United States by Nina Leen, encouraged circulation to view double-sided prints and invited reflection on the universal nature of the family beyond cultural differences. 

The enlarged prints by the multiple photographers were displayed without explanatory captions, and instead were intermingled with quotations by, among others, James Joyce, Thomas Paine, Lillian Smith, and William Shakespeare, chosen by photographer and social activist Dorothy Norman. These texts, however effective in their creative challenge to the audience, the juxtaposition of such texts in apposition to the images reflects a not unexpected eurocentric bias.

The inclusion of quotes from the work of Lillian Smith, a writer and social critic of the Southern United States, and known most prominently for her best-selling novel Strange Fruit (1944), is noteworthy. A white woman who openly embraced controversial positions on matters of race and gender equality, she was a southern liberal unafraid to criticize segregation and work toward the dismantling of Jim Crow laws, at a time when such actions virtually guaranteed social ostracism. 

Also included in the exhibition and in the exhibition publication was a poetic commentary by Carl Sandburg. The Wikipedia article on The Family of Man provides some quotations from the publication:

There is only one man in the world and his name is All Men. There is only one woman in the world and her name is All Women. There is only one child in the world and the child's name is All Children.

People! flung wide and far, born into toil, struggle, blood and dreams, among lovers, eaters, drinkers, workers, loafers, fighters, players, gamblers. Here are ironworkers, bridge men, musicians, sandhogs, miners, builders of huts and skyscrapers, jungle hunters, landlords, and the landless, the loved and the unloved, the lonely and abandoned, the brutal and the compassionate — one big family hugging close to the ball of Earth for its life and being. Everywhere is love and love-making, weddings and babies from generation to generation keeping the Family of Man alive and continuing.

If the human face is "the masterpiece of God" it is here then in a thousand fateful registrations. Often the faces speak that words can never say. Some tell of eternity and others only the latest tattings. Child faces of blossom smiles or mouths of hunger are followed by homely faces of majesty carved and worn by love, prayer and hope, along with others light and carefree as thistledown in a late summer wing. Faces have land and sea on them, faces honest as the morning sun flooding a clean kitchen with light, faces crooked and lost and wondering where to go this afternoon or tomorrow morning. Faces in crowds, laughing and windblown leaf faces, profiles in an instant of agony, mouths in a dumbshow mockery lacking speech, faces of music in gay song or a twist of pain, a hate ready to kill, or calm and ready-for-death faces. Some of them are worth a long look now and deep contemplation later.

A restored version of the historically significant photography exhibition The Family of Man has been installed permanently at Clervaux castle in Luxembourg, where the physical collection is archived and displayed. It was first opened to the public in 1994, following the restoration of the prints.

The exhibition restored

In 2003 the Family of Man photographic collection was added to UNESCO's Memory of the World Register in recognition of its historical value.

. . . Clasp the hands and know

the thoughts of men in other lands . . . 

John Masefield

The Family of Man, the afterlife . . .

Jerry Mason contemporaneously edited and published a complimentary book of the exhibition through Ridge Press. This book, which has never been out of print, was designed by Leo Lionni. Lionni’s book cover for The Family of Man, incorporate playful modernist collages of apparently cut or torn coloured paper, which he repeats, for example in his 1962 design for The American Character and for children’s books, an aesthetic also used in exhibitions from his parallel career as a fine artist. 

The publication was reproduced in a variety of formats (most popularly a soft-cover volume) in the 1950s, and reprinted in large format for its 40th anniversary, and in its various editions has sold more than four million copies. Most images from the exhibition were reproduced with an introduction by Carl Sandburg, whose prologue reads, in part:

The first cry of a baby in Chicago, or Zamboango, in Amsterdam or Rangoon, has the same pitch and key, each saying, "I am! I have come through! I belong! I am a member of the Family. Many the babies and grownup here from photographs made in sixty-eight nations round our planet Earth. You travel and see what the camera saw. The wonder of human mind, heart wit and instinct is here. You might catch yourself saying, 'I'm not a stranger here.'

However, an omission from the book, highly significant and contrary to Steichen's stated pacifist aim, was the image of a hydrogen bomb test explosion; audiences of the time were highly sensitive to the threat of universal nuclear annihilation.

 

In place of the huge colour transparency to which a space was devoted in the MoMA exhibition, and the black-and-white mural print that toured countries other than Japan, only this quotation of Bertrand Russell's anti-nuclear warning, in white type on a black page, appears in the book;

[...] The best authorities are unanimous in saying that a war with hydrogen bombs is quite likely to put an end to the human race [...] There will be universal death — sudden for only a minority, but for the majority a slow torture of disease and disintegration.

Absent also from the book, and removed by week eleven of the initial MoMA exhibition, was the distressing photograph of the aftermath of a lynching, of a dead young African American man, Robert McDaniels, tied to a tree with his bound arms tautly tethered with a rope that stretches out of frame. McDaniels, together with Roosevelt Townes, were lynched on April 13, 1937, in Duck Hill, Mississippi by a white mob after being labeled as the murderers of a white storekeeper. 

Slow torture 

McDaniels and Townes had only been legally accused of the crime a few minutes before they were kidnapped from the courthouse, chained to trees, and tortured with a blow torch. Following the torture, McDaniels was shot to death and Townes was burned alive. 

On April 26, 1937, Time and Life magazines published a photograph of McDaniels' body chained to a tree. It was the first time an image of lynching had been published nationally. Other newspapers later published the image. 

There was condemnation expressed across the country against the lynchings. 

"Statesmen Quibble While a Mob Kills"

So the headline ran! Long Branch, New Jersey: The Daily Record. 22 April 1937. Excerpts from the story:

"The lynchers, of course, are the worse variety –– fiends for the hour committing mob murder with such maniacal brutality one wonders if they can be human.

It is a crime peculiar to the United States –– a crime that has kept the people of other lands debating over what sort of brute is ranging upon the American continent. We can accuse the Nazi's of persecution, of bigotry and intolerance if we wish...but the Nazis can curse us a 'lynchers' and we must take it and like it.

Lynching is ofttimes intolerance and hatred at its worse; there is nothing in foreign countries to approach it. What is more, the Congress of the United States –– the representatives of the people –– have defeated every attempt so far to wipe out the horror...and as their mad brethren in Mississippi were torturing these two citizens to death, the Congress was arguing whether there should be a law against it."

Internationally, German newspapers publicized the murders to support Nazi government propaganda, contrasting the violence of the lynchings to the "humane" Nuremberg racial laws that the Reich had passed against Jewish citizens.

The lynchings had also occurred at the moment that the House of Representatives was debating Rep. Joseph Gavagan's (Democrat -New York) anti-lynching legislation. The outrage helped gain support for anti-lynching legislation that he introduced. The legislation was supported in the Senate by Democrats Robert F. Wagner (New York) and Frederick Van Nuys (Indiana). 

The legislation eventually passed in the House, despite 85 percent of the 123 Representatives from the South, voting against it. However, the powerful Solid South of white Democrats blocked it in the Senate, as they had blocked all previous anti-lynching bills. 

Senator Allen Ellender (Democrat - Louisiana) proclaimed:

"We shall at all cost preserve the white supremacy of America."

Re:LODE Radio considers that the removal of this particular photo image is significant. It seems that this decision exposes how just one photo is potentially capable of disrupting the purpose of the project. The presence of this image, along with its connotative history, interrupts the ideological narrative.

It was an image with a specific history! And that specific history was (and is) an inconvenient truth! 

The photo appeared under the title: "Death Slump at Mississippi Lynching (1937)." It was estimated to have been seen by more than 180,000 visitors in New York, however after receiving criticism of the photo for being "too powerful, too striking and causing visitors to pause and gaze, thus interrupting the flow of the movement and the flow of the message," curator Edward Steichen withdrew the image eleven weeks after the show opened:

"[I] felt that this violent picture might become a focal point in the reception of The Family of Man...[It] provided a form of dissonance to the theme, so we removed it for that purpose." 

But what was this theme? The visual and spatial design of this spectacular exhibition of what looks to be, from the perspective of the end of 2020, a nascent type of conceptual art installation, and a modernist triumph, but, as Alise Tīfentāle says in her article for FKmagazine (2 Jul 2018) headlined:

The Family of Man: The Photography Exhibition that Everybody Loves to Hate

Alise Tīfentāle writes:

The U.S. Information Agency popularized The Family of Man as an achievement of American culture by presenting ten different versions of the show in 91 cities in 38 countries between 1955 and 1962, seen by an estimated nine million people But, contrary to its popular reception, scholarly criticism of the exhibition was – and continues to be – scathing.

Re:LODE Radio chooses to re-present some of Alise Tīfentāle's article as it frames a problem that is familiar to the LODE project, when it comes to the question of how:

Colonialist thinking is skewing our view of everything?

The Family of Man was much more than the sum of all the images it featured. It offered an unusual visual experience. Made-to-order enlargements of various sizes were arranged as if on a magazine page, contrasting large images with smaller ones. The spatial arrangement of the exhibition added a distinct architectural aspect. The different sizes of the prints provided a dynamic rhythm of distinct emphases and background.

The unframed prints were mounted directly on panels, some of which were free-standing and removed from the wall, some others – hanging from the ceiling or arranged on a circular platform. These panels extended into the viewers’ space and created a visually interesting landscape that visitors were invited to explore. Their progress through the exhibition was limited to the route planned by the organizers because the panels were arranged in a maze-like way that guided visitors through the thematic sections from the entrance to the exit.

The scholarly reception of The Family of Man is greatly influenced by Roland Barthes who in 1957 criticized the exhibition for an essentialist depiction of human experiences such as birth, death, and work, and the removal of any historical specificity from this depiction. (Roland Barthes, “The Great Family of Man,” in Mythologies, transl. by Annette Lavers (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1972), 100-102.) 

Re:LODE Radio notes the relevance of these paragraphs from The Nuclear Family of Man by John O'Brian published July 2, 2008, in Volume 6, Issue 7, of the Asia Pacific Journal, Japan Focus:

The Family of Man exhibition was greeted with wide critical approbation, both for the story it told as well as for how it told it. Although a few American commentators offered dissenting views – the photographer Walker Evans, for instance, whose work was not included in the show, wrote disdainfully of its “human familyhood [and] bogus heartfeeling” – the vast majority agreed with Carl Sandburg, brother-in-law of Steichen and author of the prologue to the catalogue, that here was “A camera testament, a drama of the grand canyon of humanity, an epic.”

It was these same qualities in the exhibition that drew the attention of Roland Barthes, The Family of Man’s most frequently cited early commentator. After seeing the exhibition in Paris in 1956, he declared it to be a product of “classic humanism,” a collection of photographs in which everyone lives and “dies everywhere in the same way.” “[T]o reproduce death or birth tells us, literally, nothing,” he wrote acerbically. The show suppressed “the determining weight of History” (Barthes’s capitalization), and thereby succumbed to sentimentality. 

Barthes dismissed what he considered to be the exhibition’s repetitive banalities and its moralizing representation of world cultures, a view he correctly observed to have been drawn from American picture magazines. In fact, a sizeable part of the exhibition was chosen from back issues of Life and Look at a time when Europe, to say nothing of Japan, was being heavily subjected to the forces of Americanization.

Six months after the opening of The Family of Man, Emmett Till, a 14-year-old African-American boy, was lynched in Mississippi for whistling at a white woman. The photographs of Till’s open coffin and mutilated face after he was pulled from the Tallahatchie River received international media coverage and was an early impetus for the American Civil Rights movement. 

In his article for Paris Match, Barthes referred specifically to the lynching. “[W]hy not ask the parents of Emmett Till, the young Negro assassinated by Whites what they think about The Great Family of Man?” There was no place in the exhibition, Barthes implied, for historically specific photographs like those taken of Till at his open-coffin funeral.

Alise Tīfentāle's article continues: 

Later, Allan Sekula viewed the exhibition as a populist ethnographic archive and “the epitome of American cold war liberalism” that “universalizes the bourgeois nuclear family” and therefore serves as an instrument of cultural colonialism. (Allan Sekula, “The Traffic in Photographs,” Art Journal 41, no. 1 (1981), 15-25.) 

Christopher Phillips, on the other hand, criticized Steichen for silencing the voice of individual photographers by decontextualizing their photographs and imposing his own narrative. (Christopher Phillips, “The Judgment Seat of Photography,” October 22 (1982), 27-63.4)

Since the late 1990s, however, new and more nuanced readings of The Family of Man have emerged. Lili Corbus Bezner’s analysis of individual images included in the show reveals the heterogeneous visual content that was forced to fit into the framework of the populist surface and Steichen’s overarching narrative. (Lili Corbus Bezner, “Subtle Subterfuge: The Flawed Nobility of Edward Steichen’s Family of Man,” in Photography and Politics in America: From the New Deal into the Cold War (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999), 121–174.) 

Ariella Azoulay has argued that the exhibition can be viewed a visual equivalent to the United Nations Declaration of Human Rights. (Ariella Azoulay, “The Family of Man: A Visual Universal Declaration of Human Rights” in Thomas Keenan and Tirdad Zolghadr, eds., The Human Snapshot (Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2013), 19–48.) 

New articles and book chapters are published on a regular basis. The approach that is the least exploited so far involves focusing our attention on individual images from the show and trying to figure out what they can tell us about the power relations in postwar photography.

Alise Tīfentāle's article then addresses the question of resistance and objection to the deformations and cultural violence that result from the colonial mindset. When it comes to the apparently straightforward task of framing images and information about the world and the people who inhabit this world, it's problematic!

Outsider Perspective

Although the prints in The Family of Man were not meant to be looked at as individual art works, they were still meant to be looked at. When audiences encountered the exhibition, not all viewers were pleased all the time. Some of the images turned out to be controversial and outraged some visitors. These cases reveal the chasm between the curator’s worldview and numerous other perspectives coming from cultures different than the U.S.

One instance of violent public outrage took place at the Moscow instalment of The Family of Man in 1959. Theophilus Neokonkwo from Nigeria slashed and tore down prints by Polish-born American Life photographer Nat Farbman (1907–1988), taken in Bechuanaland (then a U.K. protectorate, since 1966 the Republic of Botswana). (Louis Kaplan, American Exposures: Photography and Community in the Twentieth Century (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2005), 76. The sources do not specify exactly which prints were slashed by Theophilus Neokonkwo. The Family of Man featured five images by Nat Farbman from Bechuanaland. They appeared in different sections of the exhibition.)

One of the five images from The Family of Man, captioned “Bechuanaland. Nat Farbman. Life.”

Neokonkwo protested against the way in which the exhibition, according to his statement, depicted all non-Europeans, and especially Africans, “either half clothed or naked” and as “social inferiors” – as victims of illness, poverty, and despair, while white Americans and Europeans were represented mostly “in dignified cultural states – wealthy, healthy and wise.” (Theophilus Neokonkwo’s statement appeared in Afro-American (Washington, DC), August 22, 1959. Quoted from: Eric J. Sandeen, Picturing an Exhibition: The Family of Man and 1950s America (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1995), 155.)

This action was an attempt to critique the Western photojournalists’ tendency to exoticize all non-Western cultures – they were outsiders who visited for a short time and with the task of bringing back reportages as shocking as possible. Neokonkwo’s protest was an attempt to point to the power inequality that permitted the global circulation of images made by outsiders such as Farbman and his Life colleagues, but never provided equal space for photographs made by the insiders of non-Western cultures.

One might ask – but were there any? Why don’t we know about them? Paraphrasing the title of the seminal article by second-wave feminist art historian Linda Nochlin, one might ask – Why have there been no famous non-Western photographers in the 1950s? (Linda Nochlin, “Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?,” ARTnews (January 1971)

There is no doubt that talented and skillful photographers lived and worked in many countries across the world. Among the reasons we do not know that much about their lives and work is that they never had such powerful employers as Life magazine and such mighty promoters as The Family of Man, whose world tour was backed by the U.S. government. The cultural clout, money, and professional development opportunities of a Life photojournalist who was carrying a U.S. passport in the 1950s could not be compared with the resources available to his fellow photographers from Bechuanaland, Nigeria, or many other countries.

With LODE Zone Line in mind, as it crosses the Indian sub-continent, Re:LODE Radio is particularly interested in how Alise Tīfentāle's article then looks at how life in India is presented in The Family of Man exhibition.

Alise Tīfentāle writes: 

For example, in The Family of Man, thirteen images depict India. 

Out of these thirteen, seven images explicitly focus on the suffering, the starving, the insane, the sick, and the dying. These images belong to the sensationalist shock-journalism of the human crisis that the illustrated magazines proliferated. A naked baby whose stomach is bloated from malnutrition sits on the floor and eagerly eats rice in an image by American photographer William Vandivert (1912–1989) working for Life magazine.

 

A group of elderly, starving, and desperately, dramatically grimacing women wrapped in rags are observed in close-up in an image by Magnum member, Swiss photographer Werner Bischof (1916–1954).

An emaciated, apparently severely ill or dying man with an empty stare and open mouth is laying on the ground in an image by Russia-born American photographer Constantin Joffé (1910–1992) working for Vogue magazine.

 

Out of the thirteen images depicting India in The Family of Man, only one was made by an Indian photographer – it is an image attributed to the film director Satyajit Ray (1921–1992) showing seemingly healthy and well-off children.

Unlike the majority of images in the exhibition, however, this image is not a documentary reportage, but a film still. The still is from Ray’s first and internationally highly acclaimed film Pather Panchali (1955). Because Ray was not known to be a photographer, and a designated photographer’s name does not appear in the film’s crew list, it is reasonable to assume that the author of this photograph was the film’s cinematographer, Subrata Mitra (1931–2001). This image was also used in one version of the film’s promotional poster. 

 

Alise Tīfentāle's article then looks at how the FIAP Biennial, an idealistic project of the International Federation of Photographic Art (Fédération internationale de l’art photographique, FIAP) provided some redress during this period. 

This organization was founded in Switzerland in 1950 with an aim to unite the world’s national associations of photographers. FIAP continues to exist to the present day. However, Alise Tīfentāle's article refers only to the work of FIAP during the 1950s and does not consider the later developments in the organization’s history and its changing role throughout the second half of the twentieth century. She writes about this under the heading:

Insider Perspective

Around the time of the world tour of The Family of Man, however, there was at least one organized attempt to bring to light work made by a more inclusive transnational group of photographers. It was the FIAP Biennial – an international exhibition of creative photography of an unprecedented scope at the time. The biennial, established in 1950, was conceived as a world survey of contemporary photographic art, displaying an equal number of works from each participating country. By 1955, FIAP represented photographers from thirty-six countries throughout the world: eighteen countries in Western Europe, eight countries in Latin America, five in Eastern Europe, four in Asia, one in Africa, and Australia. 

Even with the best intentions, the Western photographers at times reproduced the worst cultural stereotypes of the colonial era. Meanwhile, Indian photographers who participated in FIAP aimed at creating a more positive view of their country. They tried to communicate that their country was not only impoverished, suffering, tumultuous, bizarre, cruel, “exotic,” “surrealistic” or whatever other adjectives Western journalists ascribed to it, but also a place where regular, dignified everyday life went on and where many people lived peacefully according to their religious beliefs and cultural traditions. When these Indian photographers presented their work in international forums, they wanted to tell different stories about life in independent India than those non-Indian photographers who traveled the world and produced images of “exotic” locations for consumption in Western European and U.S. illustrated magazines.

K. L. Kothary. No Work. Exhibited in the 1958 FIAP Biennial. Reproduction from the FIAP Yearbook 1960. 

For example, in an image by Indian photographer K. L. Kothary, No Work, included in the 1958 FIAP Biennial, the frame includes the ends of four narrow boats, cutting them off on the left. The viewpoint is from above, and the frame is filled with an even surface of water. The horizon line or any other signifiers of the location of the scene are not visible. Two male figures occupy the two boats farthest away from the camera. One man has turned his back while the other is seen in profile. Their body language suggests that they may be engaged in a conversation with each other. The title suggests an awareness of the social circumstances they share. Yet the source of their unemployment is not specified – the viewers do not learn if the men have no work because the fishing season is over or has not started, or because of other, unknown reasons. Whether the two figures on their boats are fully employed or not, does not influence the perception of the image. Its main content is the rhythm of geometric shapes and an exploration of the flatness effect of the photographic image. 

Vidyavrata. Music. Exhibited in the 1962 FIAP Biennial. Reproduction from the FIAP Yearbook 1964. 

Another example is Music by Indian photographer Vidyavrata (1920–1999), included in the 1962 FIAP Biennial. Besides being a depiction of everyday life in a school, Music is a sophisticated study of photographic composition. From an elevated and quite distant viewpoint, the camera is looking down toward a row of ten children wearing white tank-top shirts and shorts. The children are aligned along a circle drawn on the floor. Inside the circle, there are nine empty chairs. Outside the circle, in the upper left corner of the frame, an adult oversees the proceeding of what likely is to be a game of musical chairs, a common gym activity in schools. The source of light is outside the frame, coming from the upper-left corner and positioned extremely low, suggesting either early morning or late evening light. The main visual feature of this image is the elongated shadows cast by the children that stretch diagonally to the lower-right corner. The dark shadows create a strong diagonal that intersects with the narrow white lines on the ground. Although children at play is one of the typical tropes of postwar humanist photography, here the author avoids superficial sentiment by keeping the children, the location, and circumstances of their play anonymous. Vidyavrata turns a potentially humanist subject matter into an exercise in modernist aesthetics. The compositional arrangement of bodies in space, distinct geometrical shapes and lines – not the children who are playing a game – become the main elements of the work.

Shreedam Bhatt. Listening to the Scriptures. Exhibited in the 1958 FIAP Biennial. Reproduction from the FIAP Yearobok 1960. 

Another example is Listening to the Scriptures by Shreedam Bhatt (life dates unknown), a photographer from the Ahmedabad area. This image, featured in the 1958 FIAP Biennial, captures a group of bearded men sitting on the ground and attentively looking at another man on the left side of the frame who appears to be reading from a book. The group of men takes up most of the frame, and the photograph does not provide much detail to describe the location more specifically apart from a fragment of a low, makeshift rural building in the background. The men sit on top of a special platform in the center of a village – this kind of elevated seating was used for religious holidays, reading ordinances, and funerals. The situation may be part of a funeral ritual or a public reading of an ordinance. The image depicts the life of ordinary people as observed in their natural settings and in an un-posed manner. The photograph is taken at the eye level of the sitting men, thus positioning the viewer among them. This is a very intimate insight into the life of a small village deep in the countryside, which, likely, would not be so easily available for traveling Western photographers – and they would not be interested in capturing a scene of everyday life without any “exotic” practices going on and without anybody visibly sick, starving, or dying.

Through their choice of photographic form – thoughtful compositions, careful arrangement of figures, mastery of unusually positioned light sources and capturing of shadows – Indian photographers attempted to communicate some of their ideals about an independent India in a visual language that they hoped would be understood and appreciated by their peers across the world. Their images attempted to position normalcy and everydayness against Western exoticization and the reporters’ interest in finding chaos, poverty, famine, illness, and misery. Indian photographers responded to the negative cultural stereotypes nurtured by exhibitions such as The Family of Man. Their images attempted to communicate that India was more than starving babies and the dying poor. But, of course, their story is not the one that has so far been central to the history of photography.

Alise Tīfentāle's article takes a view of the difference between outsiders and insiders where power relations in a post-war setting, described as a cold war, produced quite different versions of a photography that, as photography always does, substituted itself for the realities being documented. She writes:   

The FIAP Biennial and The Family of Man shared a global ambition and aim to represent the world through photography. However, the ways in which both exhibitions envisioned such representation were quite different. The Family of Man demonstrated how the world looked like through the eyes of – mostly – U.S.-based professional photojournalists who traveled to all corners of the globe. The FIAP Biennials, meanwhile, demonstrated how the world looked like through the eyes of photographers who actually lived and worked in all corners of the world. The Family of Man offered a uniform outsider perspective of a vast range of cultures and nations, while the FIAP Biennials provided a vast range of insider perspectives coming from within these cultures. FIAP’s idealistic attempt to give voice to the world’s photographers eventually went unnoticed, largely because of lacking funding and support from the narrow elite of Western European and U.S. professionals.

Was "The Family of Man" another moment in the ongoing Americanisation of the world?

Out of Africa - A group of Afro-Colombian women along the LODE Zone Line 

The Americanisation of the World, and the false consciousness inherent in a "eurocentric" world view of things, is discussed in the ReLODE article Eurocentrism found in the Re:LODE Methods & Purposes section.

When it comes to it, Re:LODE Radio concurs with Allan Sekula in 'The Traffic in Photographs' (1981) where he considers The Family of Man functions as a capitalist cultural tool levering world domination at the height of the Cold War; "My main point here is that The Family of Man, more than any other single photographic project, was a massive and ostentatious bureaucratic attempt to universalize photographic discourse," an exercise in hegemony which, "In the foreign showings of the exhibition, arranged by the United Scates Information Agency and co-sponsoring corporations like Coca-Cola, the discourse was explicitly that of American multinational capital and government–the new global management team–cloaked in the familiar and musty garb of patriarchy." Sekula revises and expands this notion in relation to his ideas about economic globalisation in an article in October entitled "Between the Net and the Deep Blue Sea: Rethinking the Traffic in Photographs". 

To quote again from The Nuclear Family of Man by John O'Brian published July 2, 2008, in Volume 6, Issue 7, of the Asia Pacific Journal, Japan Focus:

Under the auspices of the United States Information Agency the exhibition traveled the world, beginning its European tour in West Berlin and a second tour in Guatemala City. The logic of these two cities as the initial points of departure was dictated by Cold War diplomacy. Berlin was divided into competing Communist and Western sectors, and in Guatemala CIA-backed forces had recently overthrown the democratically elected pro-Communist government of Jacobo Arbenz Guzmán. Four different versions of the exhibition were produced for Japan alone. By the end of 1956 almost a million people in Japan had seen it, roughly 10% of the audience for the exhibition worldwide. 

In deference to the experience of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, however, a large black-and-white photographic image of a mushroom cloud included in other traveling versions of the exhibition was omitted.

Instead, photographs taken by Yamahata in Nagasaki on the day following the explosion were substituted. These images showed, as the photographs in The Family of Man did not, the human toll and devastation caused by the bomb. Soon, however, they were censored as well. When the emperor visited The Family of Man in Tokyo, Yamahata’s photographs were curtained off and then removed altogether from the exhibition.

The Family of Man was a benign cultural demonstration of American political values. From the point of view of cultural diplomacy it was a spectacular success, even traveling to Moscow in 1959. The exhibition formed part of the American National Exhibition in Sokol’niki Park, the site of the infamous Krushchev-Nixon kitchen debate, occupying its own building adjacent to pavilions housing displays of automobiles, refrigerators, model homes, stereo equipment, vacuum cleaners, color televisions, air conditioners, Pepsi-Cola and other commodities of capitalist prosperity provided by American corporations for the occasion.

As part of the bureaucracy charged with advancing American foreign policy, the role of the United States Information Agency was to help to undermine Communism, promote capitalism and spread democracy – and to do so quietly. “[W]here USIA output resembles the lurid style of communist propaganda,” a directive warned, “it must be unattributed.” The United States had to appear to be going about its business softly. The Official Training Book for Guides at Sokol’niki Park makes no mention of Communism, capitalism or democracy and says only that the United States hopes to demonstrate “how America lives, works, learns, produces, consumes, and plays.” This anodyne string of verbs parallels those used to describe, in press releases and news reports, the intentions of The Family of Man. The exhibition’s message of commonality meshed seamlessly with the global ambitions of American liberalism and multinational capital. People are everywhere the same, so the slogans of universality and corporate desire go, and every house must have a refrigerator. The photographer Tomatsu Shomei, a critic of both the Occupation and the accompanying rush towards Americanization, later commented: 

“The message is that everyone is happy – but is everyone really that happy?”

The United Colors of Benetton 

Is everyone really that happy? Perhaps this question should underscore the "United Colors" advertising campaign for Benetton and its slogan of the early 1980's:

"All the colors of the world"

The aesthetic of Benetton's ad campaigns changed, along with the activist intentions of Oliviero Toscani,  the Italian photographer known worldwide for designing a series of controversial advertising campaigns for Italian brand Benetton, from 1982 to 2000. As part of an anti-racism campaign in 1996 these ‘human’ hearts were later to be revealed to be pig’s hearts. But that didn’t stop people all over the world calling the image, taken by Oliviero Toscani himself, racist. Toscani has used his advertising to address racism on numerous occasions. 

UNHATE

This image was used in a Guardian Fashion piece (Thu 17 Nov 2011) on: Benetton's most controversial adverts

Will a picture of the Pope kissing Ahmed el-Tayeb, Sheikh of the al-Azhar mosque, encourage fashion savvy shoppers to ditch Uniqlo and buy their brightly coloured jumpers from Benetton instead? Probably not. But it does remind the public that the Italian brand has quite a history of provocative campaigns. 

A still from the James and other apes campaign, 2004: Benetton says: 

'This campaign was made with the support of the Jane Goodall Institute, founded by the renowned primatologist who is a committed defender of the environment and a UN Messenger of Peace. Through this initiative, Benetton continued its exploration of diversity as a 'wealth' of our world, extending it from the variety of human races to embrace the living beings that are our closest cousins. The portraits of these great apes make us ponder the fundamental questions of mankind, reflected in the enigmatic gaze of races so close to us on the evolutionary ladder'.

Human kind

When it comes to ideas about human kind, Hilton Kramer, then managing editor of the magazine Arts, was quick to assert a negative view that The Family of Man exhibition was a;

"self-congratulatory means for obscuring the urgency of real problems under a blanket of ideology which takes for granted the essential goodness, innocence, and moral superiority of the international 'little man'; 'the man in the street': the active, disembodied hero of a world-view which regards itself as superior to mere politics."

Rutger Bregman would, perhaps, offer the thought that maybe such a view of human kind plays into the hands of those who would prefer that "things stay the way they are"?

Rutger Bregman is familiar to Re:LODE Radio as the Dutch popular historian and author, who in January 2019 took part in a panel debate at the World Economic Forum in Davos, where he criticised the event for its focus on philanthropy rather than tax avoidance and the need for fair taxation. His intervention was widely reported and followed on social media.

During a February 2019 interview in Amsterdam with Fox News anchor and journalist, Tucker Carlson after Davos, Bregman told Carlson that the United States "could easily crack down on tax paradises" if they wanted to and that Fox News would not cover stories about tax evasion by the wealthy. He said that Carlson himself, had been taking "dirty money" for years from the CATO Institute where he was senior fellow and which is "funded by Koch billionaires" — Charles Koch and David Koch. He said that Carlson and other Fox News anchors are "millionaires paid by billionaires" — referring to the Murdochs and, in Carlson's case, the Koch brothers. Bregman told Carlson that "what the Murdochs want you to do [on Fox News] is scapegoat immigrants instead of talking about tax avoidance". Carlson was angered by Bregman's comments. Bregman posted a video of his unaired interview with Carlson on NowThis News on YouTube on 20 February 2019. By July the video had received 2,349,846 views.

Rutger Bregman begins the first chapter of his book:

Human kind: A Hopeful History, “A New Realism”,

with this short sentence: 

“This book is about a radical idea”.

The next sentence in the following paragraph begins with an observation concerning this idea:

"An idea that’s long been known to make rulers nervous."

An idea denied by religions and ideologies, ignored by the news media and erased from the annals of world history. At the same time, it's an idea that’s legitimised by virtually every branch of science. one that is corroborated by evolution and confirmed by everyday life. An idea so intrinsic to human nature that it goes unnoticed and gets overlooked.

If only we had the courage to take it more seriously, it an idea that might just start a revolution. Turn society on its head. Because once you grasp what it really means, it’s nothing less than a mind-bending drug that ensures you’ll never look at the world the same again.

So what is this radical idea?

That most people, deep down, are pretty decent.

Steven Poole, reviewing Bregman's book Human kind: A Hopeful History, for the Guardian (Wed 10 Jun 2020), points out that the thesis that relies on a basic quality of human decency, is as much a fairytale as the notion of human wickedness. He writes:

But plainly the attempt to replace a story about humans’ essential wickedness with a contrasting story about humans’ essential loveliness has already run aground – as it was bound to, since any claim that complex human beings are essentially one single thing or another is a fairytale. “I’ve argued that humans have evolved to be fundamentally sociable creatures,” Bregman writes – as though this is a brave thing to argue, though absolutely no one in the world disagrees with it – “but sometimes our sociability is the problem.” Well, sure. Gun-toting anti-lockdown protesters in the US are being sociable; so are criminal gangs and far-right activists. On the other hand, because things are more complicated than such books allow, sometimes being anti-social is the problem. 

Re:LODE Radio prefers Marshall McLuhan's fallacy, a fallacy that rests on the foundational importance of the modes of communication between people. Modes of communication create the environment that shapes both the behaviours and attitudes of humankind, to everything. A fallacy is normally understood as the use of an invalid or otherwise faulty reasoning, or "wrong moves" in the construction of an argument. When McLuhan uses the term in the film Annie Hall, he is using the term in a way that relates more to argumentation theory. 

Woody Allen says . . .

. . . if only life could be like this?

Argumentation theory provides a different approach to understanding and classifying fallacies. In this approach, an argument is regarded as an interactive protocol between individuals that attempts to resolve their disagreements. The protocol is regulated by certain rules of interaction, so violations of these rules are fallacies.

Fallacies are used in place of valid reasoning to communicate a point with the intention to persuade. Examples in the mass media today include but are not limited to propaganda, advertisements, politics, newspaper editorials and opinion-based “news” shows.

Colonial thinking, the theme that runs through this text/image piece, is a hybrid form, coming out of print technology, print culture, and the exchangeable, and movable "types" of capitalism, and the commodification of everything.  

One of the examples Bregman uses in the first pages of his book to illustrate this hidden truth is taken from the crisis faced by the people of Louisiana and New Orleans as Hurricane Katrina, one of the now increasingly frequent extreme weather events in the Caribbean and Atlantic caused by global heating, blew in across the coast and caused catastrophic damage to the poorly engineered flood defences of the city.

On 29 August 2005, Hurricane Katrina tore over New orleans. The levees and flood walls that were supposed to protect the city failed. In the wake of the storm, 80 per cent of area homes flooded and at least 1,836 people lost their lives. It was one of the most devastating natural disasters in US history.

That whole week newspapers were filled with accounts of rapes and shootings across New Orleans. There were terrifying reports of roving gangs, looting and of a sniper taking aim at rescue helicopters. 

Inside the Superdome, which served as the city’s largest storm shelter, some 25,000 people were packed in together, with no electricity and no water. Two infants’ throats had been slit, journalists reported, and a seven-year-old had been raped and murdered.

The chief of police said the city the city was slipping into anarchy, and the governor of Louisiana feared the same. ‘What angers me the most,’ she said, ‘is that disasters like this often bring out the worst in people.’

This conclusion went viral. In the British newspaper the Guardian, acclaimed historian Timothy Garton Ash articulated what so many were thinking. ‘Remove the elementary staples of organised, civilised life - food, shelter, drinkable water, minimal personal security - and we go back within hours to a Hobbesian state of nature, a war of all against all. [ . . . ] A few become temporary angels, most revert to being apes.’

There it was again, in all its glory: veneer theory. New Orleans, to Garton Ash, had opened a small hole in ‘the thin crust we lay across the seething magma of nature’.

Re:LODE Radio considers the language quoted here from Garton Ash’s Guardian opinion piece is loaded with a matrix of the mixed meanings that can found in the use of the word “nature”, that is, according to Raymond Williams, perhaps the most complex word in use in the English language. For Re:LODE Radio the particular example reveals more than a tinge of a colonialist, even racist colour. Re:LODE Radio is not pointing the finger of racism at Tim Garton Ash, but is pointing to the use of language, as part of a constructed ideological overlay, that is highly functional in obscuring the actuality, the truth!

Rutger Bregman then exposes this alternative reality, with its alternative facts, as part of the myth;

that by their very nature humans are selfish, aggressive, and quick to panic. It’s what Dutch biologist Frans de Waal likes to call veneer theory: the notion that civilisation is nothing more than a thin veneer that will crack at the merest provocation. In actuality, the opposite is true. It’s when crisis hits - when the bombs fall or the floodwaters rise - that we humans become our best selves.

Re:LODE Radio comments that these particular qualities attributed to “human kind”, of selfishness, of aggressiveness, of a tendency to panic, are qualities that reflect the typical capitalist response to anything that threatens the global capitalist world order.

Rutger Bregman continues.

It wasn’t until months later, when the journalists cleared out, the floodwaters drained away and the columnists moved on to their next opinion, that researchers uncovered what had really happened in New Orleans.

What sounded like gunfire had actually been a popping relief valve on a gas tank. In the Superdome, six people had died: four of natural causes, one from an overdose and one by suicide. The police chief was forced to concede that he couldn’t point to a single officially reported rape or murder. True, there had been looting, but mostly by groups that had teamed up to survive, in some cases even banding with police.

Researchers from the Disaster Research Center at the University of Delaware concluded that the ‘overwhelming majority of the emergent activity was prosocial in nature’. A veritable armada of boats from as far away as Texas came to save people from the rising waters. Hundreds of civilians formed rescue squads, like the self-styled Robin Hood Looters - a group of eleven friends who went around looking for food, clothing and medicine and then handing it out to those in need.

Katrina, in short, didn’t see New Orleans overrun with self-interest and anarchy. Rather, the city was inundated with courage and charity.

The hurricane confirmed the science on how human beings respond to disasters. Contrary to what we normally see in the movies, the Disaster Research Center at the University of Delaware has established that in nearly seven hundred field studies since 1963, there’s never total mayhem. It’s never every man for himself. Crime - murder, burglary, rape - usually drops. people don’t go into shock, they stay calm and spring into action. ‘Whatever the extent of the looting,’ a disaster researcher points out, ‘it always pales in significance to the widespread altruism that leads to free and massive giving and sharing of goods and services.’

Hurricane Katrina, in 7 essential facts

This Vox article by German Lopez, ten years after the hurricane hit New Orleans, sets out the facts.

Hurricane Katrina was not a natural disaster, it was a disaster of rightwing political arms length, "hands off" style and administrative incompetence, and paranoia. This administrative disaster was compounded by the mobilisation of essentially racist and classist psychological projections, dumped onto a largely entirely innocent, law abiding, but poor, Afro American population. 

This article by Laura Lein for THE CONVERSATION, writing ten years on from the hurricane, draws attention to the fact that this urban population is: 

Still waiting for help

This article by Nicholas Lemann for The New Yorker, August 26 2020, on the occasion of the publication of a new history of the event, "Katrina" by the historian Andy Horowitz of Tulane University.

Nicholas Lemann writes: 

When we came home to New Orleans for the first time after Hurricane Katrina, over Thanksgiving weekend of 2005, my then three-year-old son, looking out the window on the drive in from the airport, said, “You told me we were going to New Orleans, but now we’re in Iraq.” This was three months after the storm hit. The floodwaters had receded, the Superdome had emptied, the national press had left, and we weren’t anywhere near the city’s most famous devastated neighborhood, the Lower Ninth Ward—but still what you saw was a landscape of abandoned buildings, moldy refrigerators set out on sidewalks, downed trees and electrical wires, and a thick impasto of mud covering everything. Even now, fifteen years after Katrina, New Orleans has not fully recovered, in population and otherwise. 

By the standards of one’s middle-school geography class, New Orleans ought to be one of America’s most prosperous cities, instead of one of its poorest. It is the natural port for the vast interior of the country, from the Rockies to the Appalachians. In its immediate vicinity are many natural resources: rich soil for growing rice and sugarcane, and plenty of cotton, sulfur, seafood, and, beginning in the early twentieth century, oil. Then there are the city’s celebrated charms—the food, the music, the generally soft, seductive atmosphere. But New Orleans peaked, relative to other American cities, back in 1840, and has been losing ground ever since. It looks today like an especially severe example of the resource curse, because its economy of extraction was based originally on slavery—antebellum New Orleans was the country’s leading marketplace for the buying and selling of humans—and then on Jim Crow, which generated a system of exploitation that pervades every local institution, as well as a deep, evidently permanent mistrust between the races.

And then there is New Orleans’s relationship to nature. Half of the city is below sea level; only a relatively small portion, the section that was originally settled, is habitable by traditional definitions. The city is surrounded by an endless borderland that shifts between river, marsh, swamp, and ocean. Katrina was only one of a long series of hurricanes that have struck near the mouth of the Mississippi. In New Orleans, civic monumentalism was always bound up in the racial order—consider the Confederate statues that the city built, in the early twentieth century, and only recently removed—but not every expression of it was explicitly racial. Another important project, from the same period, was the creation of an elaborate system of drains and pumps, supervised by an engineer named A. Baldwin Wood, which was supposed to make the entire area within the great crescent bend of the river, all the way to the shore of Lake Pontchartrain, permanently flood-proof. As Andy Horowitz, a young historian at Tulane University, writes in “Katrina,” his new history of the event, it was twentieth-century New Orleans—the part built after the drainage system was constructed—that flooded in the late summer of 2005.

Bad news sells . . .

. . . in the society of the spectacle!  

Re:LODE Radio points to The Society of the Spectacle (French: La société du spectacle), the 1967 work of philosophy and Marxist critical theory by Guy Debord, in which the author develops and presents the concept of the Spectacle. The book is considered a seminal text for the Situationist International movement. 

The work is set out as a series of 221 short theses in the form of aphorisms. Each thesis contains one paragraph. Here quoted are the first ten theses from Chapter 1: The Culmination of Separation, preceded by a quote from Feuerbach, in his Preface to the second edition of The Essence of Christianity.

“But for the present age, which prefers the sign to the thing signified, the copy to the original, representation to reality, appearance to essence ... truth is considered profane, and only illusion is sacred. Sacredness is in fact held to be enhanced in pro- portion as truth decreases and illusion increases, so that the highest degree of illusion comes to be the highest degree of sacredness.”

Feuerbach, Preface to the second edition of The Essence of Christianity.

1

In societies dominated by modern conditions of production, life is presented as an immense accumulation of spectacles. Everything that was directly lived has receded into a representation.

2

The images detached from every aspect of life merge into a common stream in which the unity of that life can no longer be recovered. Fragmented views of reality regroup themselves into a new unity as a separate pseudoworld that can only be looked at. The specialization of images of the world evolves into a world of autonomized images where even the deceivers are deceived. The spectacle is a concrete inversion of life, an autonomous movement of the nonliving.

3

The spectacle presents itself simultaneously as society itself, as a part of society, and as a means of unification. As a part of society, it is the focal point of all vision and all consciousness. But due to the very fact that this sector is separate, it is in reality the domain of delusion and false consciousness: the unification it achieves is nothing but an official language of universal separation.

4

The spectacle is not a collection of images; it is a social relation between people that is mediated by images.

5

The spectacle cannot be understood as a mere visual excess produced by mass-media tech- nologies. It is a worldview that has actually been materialized, a view of a world that has become objective.

6

Understood in its totality, the spectacle is both the result and the project of the dominant mode of production. It is not a mere decoration added to the real world. It is the very heart of this real society’s unreality. In all of its particular manifestations — news, propaganda, advertis- ing, entertainment — the spectacle represents the dominant model of life. It is the omnipresent affirmation of the choices that have already been made in the sphere of production and in the consumption implied by that production. In both form and content the spectacle serves as a total justification of the conditions and goals of the existing system. The spectacle also represents the constant presence of this justification since it monopolizes the majority of the time spent outside the production process.

7

Separation is itself an integral part of the unity of this world, of a global social practice split into reality and image. The social practice confronted by an autonomous spectacle is at the same time the real totality which contains that spectacle. But the split within this totality mutilates it to the point that the spectacle seems to be its goal. The language of the spectacle consists of signs of the dominant system of production — signs which are at the same time the ultimate end-products of that system.

8

The spectacle cannot be abstractly contrasted to concrete social activity. Each side of such a duality is itself divided. The spectacle that falsifies reality is nevertheless a real product of that reality. Conversely, real life is materially invaded by the contemplation of the spectacle, and ends up absorbing it and aligning itself with it. Objective reality is present on both sides. Each of these seemingly fixed concepts has no other basis than its transformation into its opposite: reality emerges within the spectacle, and the spectacle is real. This reciprocal alienation is the essence and support of the existing society.

9

In a world that is really upside down, the true is a moment of the false.

10

The concept of “the spectacle” interrelates and explains a wide range of seemingly unconnected phenomena. The apparent diversities and contrasts of these phenomena stem from the social organization of appearances, whose essential nature must itself be recognized. Considered in its own terms, the spectacle is an affirmation of appearances and an identification of all human social life with appearances. But a critique that grasps the spectacle’s essential character reveals it to be a visible negation of life — a negation that has taken on a visible form.

Degradation of human life

Debord traces the development of a modern society in which authentic social life has been replaced with its representation. as he writes in thesis 1: "All that once was directly lived has become mere representation." Debord argues that the history of social life can be understood as "the decline of being into having, and having into merely appearing." (thesis 17) This condition, according to Debord, is the "historical moment at which the commodity completes its colonization of social life." (thesis 42)

The spectacle is the inverted image of society in which relations between commodities have supplanted relations between people, in which "passive identification with the spectacle supplants genuine activity". "The spectacle is not a collection of images," Debord writes, "rather, it is a social relation among people, mediated by images." (thesis 4)

In his analysis of the spectacular society, Debord notes that the quality of life is impoverished. For example:

. . . from Debord (1977) thesis 19: "The concrete life of everyone has been degraded into a speculative universe."

. . . from thesis 17: "The first phase of the domination of the economy over social life brought into the definition of all human realisation the obvious degradation of being into having" and now "of having into appearing"

. . . from thesis 10: The Spectacle is "affirmation of all human life, namely social life, as mere appearance"

. . . from thesis 6: "The spectacle ... occupies the main part of the time lived outside of modern production."

. . . thesis 30: "The alienation of the spectator to the profit of the contemplated object (which is the result of his own unconscious activity) is expressed in the following way: the more he contemplates the less he lives; the more he accepts recognizing himself in the dominant images of need, the less he understands his own existence and his own desires. The externality of the spectacle in relation to the active man appears in the fact that his own gestures are no longer his but those of another who represents them to him. This is why the spectator feels at home nowhere, because the spectacle is everywhere."

. . . from thesis 8: "Lived reality is materially invaded by the contemplation of the spectacle"

. . . from thesis 16: "The spectacle subjugates living men to itself to the extent that the economy has totally subjugated them."

. . . from thesis 134: "Only those who do not work live."

. . . from thesis 37: "the world of the commodity dominating all that is lived"

. . . from thesis 60: "The celebrity, the spectacular representation of a living human being, embodies this banality by embodying the image of a possible role. Being a star means specializing in the seemingly lived; the star is the object of identification with the shallow seeming life that has to compensate for the fragmented productive specializations which are actually lived."

. . . thesis 68: "The pseudoneeds imposed by modern consumerism cannot be opposed by any genuine needs or desires that are not themselves also shaped by society and its history. But commodity abun- dance represents a total break in the organic development of social needs. Its mechanical accu- mulation unleashes an unlimited artificiality which overpowers any living desire. The cumulative power of this autonomous artificiality ends up by falsifying all social life."

. . . from thesis 192: "The critical truth of this destruction the real life of modern poetry and art is obviously hidden, since the spectacle, whose function is to make history forgotten within culture"

. . . from thesis 114: in the "intensified alienation of modern capitalism", "the immense majority of workers" "have lost all power over the use of their lives." 

. . . and with such a lack of authenticity that human perceptions are affected, and an attendant degradation of knowledge, which in turn hinders critical thought. From thesis 25: "All community and all critical sense are dissolved."

Debord analyses the use of knowledge to assuage reality: the spectacle obfuscates the past, imploding it with the future into an undifferentiated mass, a type of never-ending present; in this way the spectacle prevents individuals from realizing that the society of spectacle is only a moment in history, one that can be overturned through revolution. Thesis 11: "In order to describe the spectacle, its formation, its functions, and the forces that work against it, it is necessary to make some artificial distinctions. In analyzing the spectacle we are obliged to a certain extent to use the spectacle’s own language, in the sense that we have to operate on the methodological terrain of the society that expresses itself in the spectacle. For the spectacle is both the meaning and the agenda of our particular socio-economic formation. It is the historical moment in which we are caught." And thesis 143: "The bourgeoisie has thus made irreversible historical time known and has imposed it on society, but it has prevented society from using it. “Once there was history, but not any more,” because the class of owners of the economy, which is inextricably tied to economic history, must repress every other irreversible use of time because it is directly threatened by them all. The ruling class, made up of specialists in the possession of things who are themselves therefore possessed by things, is forced to link its fate with the preservation of this reified history, that is, with the preservation of a new immobility within history. Meanwhile the worker at the base of society is for the first time not materially estranged from history, because the irreversible movement is now generated from that base. By demanding to live the historical time that it produces, the proletariat discovers the simple, unforgettable core of its revolutionary project; and each previously defeated attempt to carry out this project represents a possible point of departure for a new historical life."

Debord's aim and proposal is "to wake up the spectator who has been drugged by spectacular images...through radical action in the form of the construction of situations...situations that bring a revolutionary reordering of life, politics, and art." In the Situationist view, situations are actively created moments characterised by "a sense of self-consciousness of existence within a particular environment or ambience."

Debord encouraged the use of détournement, "which involves using spectacular images and language to disrupt the flow of the spectacle."

"The colonisation of social life." (thesis 42) Is this the answer, the explanation?

Entr'acte

If 42 is the answer . . .

. . . what was the question? 

This scene is from The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, the 1978 comedy science fiction radio comedy series created by Douglas Adams, originally broadcast on BBC Radio 4. It was later adapted to other formats, including a 2005 feature film. The video clip ends with the hapless hitchhikers discovering that the information about what followed from Deep Thought's creation of a giant supercomputer had been deleted. 

The BBC TV version of the cover of the hitchhiker's guide to the galaxy

The broad narrative of Hitchhiker follows the misadventures of the last surviving man, Arthur Dent, following the demolition of the Earth by a Vogon constructor fleet to make way for a hyperspace bypass. 

They are about to demolish the Earth, but . . .

. . . DON'T PANIC!

Dent is rescued from Earth's destruction by Ford Prefect — a human-like alien writer for the eccentric, electronic travel guide The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy — by hitchhiking onto a passing Vogon spacecraft. 

Following his rescue, Dent explores the galaxy with Prefect and encounters Trillian, another human who had been taken from Earth (prior to its destruction) by the two-headed President of the Galaxy Zaphod Beeblebrox and the depressed Marvin, the Paranoid Android. 

In their travels, Arthur comes to learn that the Earth was actually a giant supercomputer, created by another supercomputer, Deep Thought. Deep Thought had been built by its creators to give the answer to the "Ultimate Question of Life, the Universe, and Everything", which, after eons of calculations, was given simply as "42". Deep Thought was then instructed to design the Earth supercomputer to determine what the Question actually is. The Earth was subsequently destroyed by the Vogons moments before its calculations were completed, and Arthur becomes the target of the descendants of the Deep Thought creators, believing his mind must hold the Question.

For Guy Debord's readers, thesis 42 states it clearly:

The spectacle is the stage at which the commodity has succeeded in totally colonizing social life. Commodification is not only visible, we no longer see anything else; the world we see is the world of the commodity. Modern economic production extends its dictatorship both extensively and intensively. In the less industrialized regions, its reign is already manifested by the presence of a few star commodities and by the imperialist domination imposed by the more industrially advanced regions. In the latter, social space is blanketed with ever-new layers of commodities. With the “second industrial revolution,” alienated consumption has become just as much a duty for the masses as alienated production. The society’s entire sold labor has become a total commodity whose constant turnover must be maintained at all cost. To accomplish this, this total commodity has to be returned in fragmented form to fragmented individuals who are completely cut off from the overall operation of the productive forces. To this end the specialized science of domination is broken down into further specialties such as sociology, applied psychology, cybernetics, and semiology, which oversee the self-regulation of every phase of the process.

The commodification of everything has resulted in the colonisation of the entire social environment. And all thanks to capitalism!

Time for a détournement, meaning "rerouting, hijacking" in French, the technique developed in the 1950s by the Letterist International, and later adapted by the Situationist International (SI), and defined in the SI's inaugural 1958 journal as; 

"the integration of present or past artistic productions into a superior construction of a milieu. In this sense there can be no situationist painting or music, but only a situationist use of those means. In a more elementary sense, détournement within the old cultural spheres is a method of propaganda, a method which reveals the wearing out and loss of importance of those spheres."

It has also been defined elsewhere as "turning expressions of the capitalist system and its media culture against itself" — as when slogans and logos are turned against their advertisers or the political status quo. 

Philip Courtenay (Here Comes Everyone) of Re:LODE Radio inserts this photo of the founding members of the Situationist International at Cosio d'Arroscia, Italy, April 1957. From left to right: Guiseppe Pinot Gallizio, Piero Simondo, Elena Verrone, Michele Bernstein, Guy Debord, Asger Jorn, and Walter Olmo. 

But who took the picture?

Re:LODE Radio wonders if it was Ralph Rumney, present at the founding of the Situationist International in the Italian village of Cosio d'Arroscia, as the sole member of the London Psychogeographical Association, along with the others in the photo including Michèle Bernstein, later his second wife. Documentation has become everything in the society of the spectacle, and yet the document maker, the recorder and co-founder, is for obvious reasons here, not in the picture! Within seven months Rumney had been 'amiably' expelled from the SI by Debord for allegedly "failing to hand in a psychogeography report about Venice on time." 

The London Psychogeographical Association was first mentioned by Ralph Rumney in 1957 in the context of the First Exhibition of Psychogeography (Feb 2-24), presented by the International Movement for an Imaginist Bauhaus, the Lettrist International and the London Psychogeographical Committee at Taptoe Gallery in Brussels. The catalogue lists paintings and ceramics by G. Debord, Asger Jorn, Yves Klein, Ralph Rumney, Michèle Bernstein, Mohamed Dahou and a "mad psychogeographer", but only Jorn, Klein and Rumney participated. In the 1990s, the LPA was reinvoked as the LPA East London Section by Fabian Tompsett, using the pseudonym Richard Essex, who published a series of newsletters and pamphlets under its name, as well as the writers grouped around the multiple user name Luther Blissett (see Q NOT QAnon).

This video montage is, by way of the Situationist International, this post's first example of a  détournement. The video also uses a technique known as catachresis, the application of a "deliberate discrepancy".

So, time to give the Earth a chance so it could become . . .

. . . a wonderful world!

"Some of you young folks been saying to me . .  

. . . "Hey Pops, what you mean 'What a wonderful world'? How about all them wars all over the place? You call them wonderful? And how about hunger and pollution?  That ain't so wonderful either."

Well how about listening to old Pops for a minute. Seems to me, it aint the world that's so bad but what we're doin' to it. And all I'm saying is see what a wonderful world it would be if only we'd give it a chance. Love baby, love. That's the secret, yeah. If lots more of us loved each other we'd solve lots more problems. And then this world would be gasser. That's wha' ol' Pops keeps saying."

Louis Armstrong 

The Re:LODE Radio post for Wednesday, 17 June 2020 looks at the Katrina aftermath and the capitalocene phenomenon of cheap lives, Black Lives Matter, and the Americanization of the World and a response that includes: 

Beyoncé’s “Formation”

Fast Company breaks down exactly why Beyonce's "Formation" is (non traditional) ear-crack.

02-29-16 MASTER CLASS

Police boycotts be damned. Beyoncé’s “Formation” isn’t just good–it’s an evolution of song form.

BY KC IFEANYI

It’s been a few weeks since Beyoncé dropped the flaming hot single “Formation” in our laps, upstaged Coldplay (naturally) at the Super Bowl performing said single, and then clenched the weekend of the century by announcing a world tour starting this summer.

But, apparently, because black people can’t have nice things (yeah, I said it), a certain breed of exceptionally salty haters immediately cried foul over the pro-black lyrics and video imagery for “Formation.” And no wailing has been louder than police forces across the country.

Since Beyoncé and her squad’s nod to the Black Panthers during the Super Bowl Halftime Show, police officers in Florida, New York, Tennessee, and beyond have gone full-tilt Bey bashing, claiming her political message with “Formation” is anti-police.

To quote Queen Bey herself, “You know you that bitch when you cause all this conversation.” 

Instead of misinterpreting the lyrics of “Formation,” how about we focus on how the song itself is verified ear crack. And it’s not just because it’s Beyoncé – the structure of “Formation” breaks from the norm of contemporary pop, tripping the listener up in the most glorious way possible.

“It feels new because you get a little bit lost in the form–you’re not being catered to,” says Mike Errico, a singer-songwriter and adjunct instructor at New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts. 

“[Producer/songwriter] Max Martin is very much a caterer–he’s a good escort and he’s a reliable narrator, musically. But this is actually pushing it. You don’t have control of the plane. That’s something that’s exciting about this.”

What’s happening in “Formation” is what Errico describes as not necessarily a break from the traditional verse-chorus form, but an evolution of it.

“I do suspect that the way present-day songs are conceived does impact the ways writers chose to innovate,” Errico says. “For instance, if you are writing a melody over a groove that is static, looped, and extended out–a process referred to as ‘toplining’–a creative mind will accept the track as an unmovable parameter and generate interest by changing up the melodies and hooks. At the end of a topline session, the writing team may have several sections they love, but instead of tossing them out in order to preserve preconceived notions of song form, they will line them up and make multiple hook-laden sections out of each.”

The switching beats and snippet-like lyrics seem to condition our brains to listen a little harder–you hit replay over and over because you feel like you missed something the first, second, or third time.

Errico gave “Formation” a thorough listen – like everyone else in the world – and annotated the lyrics, highlighting elements of the song’s unique structure. So hit play and get “information” – see what I did there?

VERSE 1 

Y’all haters corny with that Illuminati mess

Paparazzi, catch my fly and my cocky fresh

I’m so reckless when I rock my Givenchy dress

I’m so possessive so I rock his Roc necklaces

PRE-CHORUS 

My daddy Alabama, my ma Louisiana

You mix that negro with that Creole make a Texas bama

CHORUS 

[Errico: “While this is not repeated (a characteristic of choruses) it is set up like a normal chorus would be–it’s a kind of deception. When you think you’ve reached the summit, guess what…you haven’t.”]

I like my baby heir with baby hair and afros

I like my negro nose with Jackson Five nostrils

Earned all this money but they never take the country out me

I got a hot sauce in my bag, swag

THE “SUPER-CHORUS” 

[Errico: “One could simply call it the second half of the chorus and not be ‘wrong,’ but to my ear, it’s a new plateau that could exist on its own. Unlike a bridge, which functions in relation to sections that precede it, this section blows what we thought was the chorus out of the water. Hence, the name ‘super-chorus.’”]

I see it, I want it, I stunt, yellow-bone it

I dream it, I work hard, I grind ’til I own it

I twirl on them haters, albino alligators

El Camino with the seat low, sippin’ Cuervo with no chaser

THE POST-SUPER-CHORUS 

[Errico: “If you buy the term ‘super-chorus,’ then logically, this is the post-super-chorus. It serves the same function that many Max Martin/Dr. Luke ‘post-choruses’ do–Katy perry’s ‘Roar’ being a particularly sticky example. It’s characterized by a de-emphasis on actual words and a stress on infectious repetition for its own sake. In this way, a section like this ‘internationalizes’ a song, since knowing the language is not required in order to jump in and participate. This works for K-Pop, Beyoncé, or any soccer-stadium anthem with lyrics that basically read like a string of ‘whoa’s.’”]

Sometimes I go off (I go off), I go hard (I go hard)

Get what’s mine (take what’s mine), I’m a star (I’m a star)

Cause I slay (slay), I slay (hey), I slay (okay), I slay (okay)

All day (okay), I slay (okay), I slay (okay), I slay (okay)

We gon’ slay (slay), gon’ slay (okay), we slay (okay), I slay (okay)

I slay (okay), okay (okay), I slay (okay), okay, okay, okay, okay

VERSE 2.1 

[Errico: “The second verse often builds variations on the themes of verse one, and we see that here. Basic verse elements remain and the rhyme scheme stays close to the ‘AAAA’ of verse one. However, she retains the ‘cause I slay’ hook from the post-super-chorus. I know, that sounds crazy to me, too. In short, at this point we’re getting some repetition, but it’s also being recast.”]

Okay, okay, ladies, now let’s get in formation, cause I slay

Okay, ladies, now let’s get in formation, cause I slay

Prove to me you got some coordination, cause I slay

Slay trick, or you get eliminated

VERSE 2.2 

[Errico: “I’m calling it ‘2.2’ and not simply verse three because it’s building off verse two and retaining the post-super-chorus hook at the end of the lines. Rhyme scheme remains ‘AAAA,’ although liberties are being taken with ‘chopper’/‘shop up.’”]

When he fuck me good I take his ass to Red Lobster, cause I slay

When he fuck me good I take his ass to Red Lobster, cause I slay

If he hit it right, I might take him on a flight on my chopper, cause I slay

Drop him off at the mall, let him buy some J’s, let him shop up, cause I slay

VERSE 2.3 

[Errico: “This retains qualities of verses 2.1 and 2.2, but the arrangement is scaled back. The breakdown is a new look at the verse form we’re hearing for the third time in a row, and her stripped vocal delivery serves as a callback to verse one. Breaking the arrangement down also creates contrast, and the following super-chorus will sound that much louder because of the relative quiet that preceded it. This technique was used to great effect by Nirvana in ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit,’ and by Max Martin/Dr. Luke–among others–in the breakdown after the bridge of Kelly Clarkson’s ‘Since U Been Gone.’ These three verses in a row are not common, and I think it’s a symptom of the topline writing style.”]

I might get your song played on the radio station, cause I slay

I might get your song played on the radio station, cause I slay

You just might be a black Bill Gates in the making, cause I slay

I just might be a black Bill Gates in the making

SUPER-CHORUS 

I see it, I want it, I stunt, yellow-bone it

I dream it, I work hard, I grind ’til I own it

I twirl on them haters, albino alligators

El Camino with the seat low, sippin’ Cuervo with no chaser

POST-SUPER-CHORUS 

Sometimes I go off (I go off), I go hard (I go hard)

Get what’s mine (take what’s mine), I’m a star (I’m a star)

Cause I slay (slay), I slay (hey), I slay (okay), I slay (okay)

All day (okay), I slay (okay), I slay (okay), I slay (okay)

We gon’ slay (slay), gon’ slay (okay), we slay (okay), I slay (okay)

I slay (okay), okay (okay), I slay (okay), okay, okay, okay, okay

VERSE 2.1B 

[Errico: “Very traditional, and sung in the style of the verse at the top of the song. A kind of bookend is created, and the song lands with a summarizing bit of wisdom/advice. From a songwriting standpoint, this is practically Dylanesque.”]

Okay, ladies, now let’s get in formation, I slay

Okay, ladies, now let’s get in formation

You know you that bitch when you cause all this conversation

Always stay gracious, best revenge is your paper

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

KC covers entertainment and pop culture for Fast Company. Previously, KC was part of the Emmy Award-winning team at "Good Morning America," where he was the social media producer. 

Entr'acte

Time for another détournement?

Louis Armstrong - What a Wonderful World (Good Morning, Vietnam)

The setting for the film Good Morning, Vietnam is 1965, but Louis Armstrong's release of the recording of What a Wonderful World took place in 1967. Quel dommage!

"Beyoncé uses gossip and anticipation masterfully, teasing the world with the truth!"

This is a quote from the paper (presented here in full) by Alicia Wallace on Beyoncé's "Formation" and the complex contradictions concerning authenticity and artistic endeavour in the age of the capitalocene and the society of the spectacle. 

A Critical View of Beyonce’s “Formation” by Alicia Wallace 

Lauded a media genius, unmatched performer, and iconic symbol of black success, Beyoncé has become many things for many people. She has transformed from a booty-shaking single lady to a ring-flashing wife to a belly-rubbing fertility goddess, bringing joy and waves of confidence to countless fans. She has managed to make a powerful connection — whether real or perceived — with them without compromising her own privacy. Hers is a controlled flow of information, with even “leaks” seeming to be fully orchestrated. Rarely giving interviews or revealing the details of her personal life, Beyoncé ignores rumors, does not correct inaccurate reports, and allows the Beyhive — her fan base and machinery — to function independently. The Beyhive is a force of its own, unflinching in its support, dedicated to the study of her life and work, and privy to hints and tips from former and current members of her team. They are the first to know when a new album will be released, or an announcement will be made. Just enough information seems to seep out to lead them to fairly plausible conclusions, but not enough to fully corroborate any particular hypothesis. While they must wait for the full reveal, they revel in the mystery and the fun that comes with trying to anticipate her next move. Beyoncé uses gossip and anticipation masterfully, teasing the world with the truth. 

This elaborate tease highlights the question of her authenticity. Beyoncé is more than a person; she is a public figure, entertainer, and brand. People struggle to limn the distinction between the person and the brand, and this confusion may be her greatest success as it feeds intrigue and enthusiasm. She is able to enjoy a private life while giving the illusion that she shares it, if only in part, with the people who closely identify — or want to identify — with her. No one can be sure they know the real Beyoncé, but it is easy to believe such intimacy is possible. While personal issues regarding the actual nature of her tumultuous relationship with Jay-Z may ultimately be the stuff of gossip magazines, the truth of her political positions are more consequential. Is Beyonce only donning the radicalism of the Black Panthers to create national headlines or is there something real to the call for activism implicit in her demand, “Okay, ladies, now let’s get in formation”?

Beyoncé’s fans feel like they know her. They imagine her conversations with Jay-Z, have clear ideas of how they think she is raising Blue Ivy, and take one look at a photograph and believe they know exactly what she is thinking. Her stage persona is a large part of who they see in their minds’ eyes, strutting through her mansion in a bodysuit and fishnets. With the release of Lemonade, audiences believed they had received even more intimate knowledge of Beyoncé, the private person. Grounded with the pain and struggles of ordinary people, she became more human and relatable. However, such conclusions are premised upon the assumption that Lemonade is autobiographical. In fact, we have no way of knowing which parts, if any, tell of her own experience, and we will probably never have that insight. The magic is in the invisibility of the line between performer and person. We don’t know where one ends and the other begins, or if they are one and the same. Because of this, members of the Beyhive can maintain their individual and collective perceptions of understanding of Beyoncé even as such intimacy may be wholly fabricated.

Lemonade exemplifies this blurred line. Does the public know the details of Beyoncé’s personal life, or does she know theirs? Does she endure the same struggles as many of her fans, or is only using them to forge a deeper bond? Has Beyoncé invited them to peek through the curtains, or are people simply projecting their desires onto her? And most importantly, is her most “political” album, in any way progressive? In what follows, I provide a close reading of “Formation,” the last song on the album, but the first to be released and draw commentary. Hailed as a black anthem, it in fact graciously exploits black struggles, like the devastation following Hurricane Katrina. Despite its seemingly pro-black lyrics, it is best understood as a vehicle for Beyonce’s reckless self-promotion.

Lemonade was released during a time of struggle and resistance. The rise of global conservatism has drawn the attention of people from all backgrounds, but has had the greatest impact on marginalized people. Over the past few years, the U.S. has born its share of the burden, enduring an insufferable presidential race while coming to terms with the end of Barack Obama’s presidency. The necessity and importance of the #BlackLivesMatter movement steadily increased as the number of black people killed in police custody climbed. Fear and exhaustion bled people dry, and joy seemed almost impossible. Many people in these communities were in dire need of sustenance. 

The release of “Formation” was perfectly timed, bringing a new wave of energy, encouragement, and excitement to black people fighting for justice, and fighting for their lives. The release of Lemonade seemed to affirm black women who have endured countless personal struggles in addition to the political and social warfare inherent in existing in white-dominated spaces. Contemporary society was flooded with anger, sadness, and fear, and there was a clear need for joy and hope. Lemonade filled that need. The truth in Lemonade, whether Beyoncé’s or her audience’s, brought freedom and healing. Was this a strategic marketing tactic? Or a genuine act of resistance? Either way, its power cannot be denied. 

The video imagery coupled with her 2016 Super Bowl performance colored perspectives on “Formation.” In her Super Bowl performance, Beyoncé and her dancers dressed as Black Panthers. Formed in 1966 in California, the Black Panther Party called for revolutionary war in their commitment to fight for equal education, housing, employment, and civil rights. The Party was destroyed through a number of FBI-led tactics including propaganda coloring it as a threat to national security. People continue to hold negative views of the Black Panther Party, and the presence of black women dressed in berets and with raised fists was read as an incitement to violence, leading to calls to “boycott Beyonce.” This radical display fed a national discussion of Beyonce’s controversial song and performance that confirmed her status as the most influential living artist! 

The “Formation” video opens with Beyoncé atop a sinking police car in New Orleans, and uses scenes of the devastation caused by Hurricane Katrina. The jarring image of the pop star posing comfortably on damaged public property in the wake of a natural disaster has largely gone unaddressed. The exploitation of New Orleans and its misfortune, and the failure to acknowledge its widespread impact on the lives of the people who lived and continue to live there is an affront to anyone who has endured such an experience. The use of images from that time is cheap, especially since they are wholly unrelated to the subject matter of the song. In her essay for Slate, Shantrelle Lewis cut right to the point.           

In “Formation,” which invokes both Katrina and the Black Lives Matter movement, Beyoncé attempts to politicize black tragedy and black death by using them as props for popular consumption. That isn’t advocacy… From an outsider’s perspective, it would !!seem as if Beyoncé, by returning to the devastation of Katrina, is centering New Orleans, but she is not. She’s rather exacerbating a trauma.

Even if we ignore the setting and re-creation of a traumatic event, the scene where Beyoncé’s long blonde weave is flaunted, hanging out of a car window, cannot be reconciled with the supposed pro-black theme of “Formation,” or the line that suggests she reveres the afro: “I like my baby heir with baby hair and afros.” Her song lyrics and video content are profoundly divergent; they send two different messages, and lack sensitivity toward survivors of traumatic events. The song itself continues to center Beyoncé, alluding to haters, paparazzi, and designer clothing. She ultimately places her stamp of approval on the same capitalist system that has oppressed generations of the same black people the song is said to empower.

The visuals — both in the music video and the Super Bowl performance of 2016 — take us away from the feel-good interpretation of the song. The “Formation” music video seems to position Beyoncé above trauma and tragedy as she is photographed sitting on a sinking police car. It has a general “fuck you” vibe, complete with Beyoncé flipping the bird, that doesn’t connect with the Hurricane Katrina imagery. The Super Bowl performance of 2016, however, forges an emotional connection between “Formation” and the Black Panthers, representing and advocating for the resistance of black people. For some, this is positive and inspiring. For others, it is terrifying and unacceptable. Its apparent radicalism could be fuel for a sustained pro-black consciousness and series of actions. A closer look at the lyrics, however, betrays the confidence many have in “Formation,” Lemonade, and Beyoncé.

My daddy Alabama, Momma Louisiana 

You mix that negro with that Creole make a Texas bama 

These lines are specific to Beyoncé’s racial identity and the way she sees herself. However, the emphasis on her mixed genetic makeup is misplaced in the context of a pro-black song. In a world where many black people work toward whiteness, try to find familial connections to whiteness, and internalize racism in ways that require alterations in language, cadence of speech, body, hair texture, and complexion, it is troubling to draw attention to anything that may neutralize blackness or make it more palatable. Can you celebrate your blackness, and call on other black people to celebrate with you while drawing a line between your father’s blackness and your mother’s creole identity? This is compounded by Blue Ivy’s appearance in the video. She wears  a summer dress while flanked between two dark-skinned girls dressed like elderly women going to church on Easter Sunday. This image echoes the statement, steeped in colorism known all-too-well in New Orleans, that light-skin is better than dark-skin. Moreover, this image highlights the imbalance of power between “creole” people and other black people.

I like my baby heir with baby hair and afros

On the surface, this line speaks to pride in roots, both literal and figurative. For black people with natural hair and those who do not chemically process their children's hair, this is validation. It is a rejection of respectability politics and a refusal to move toward whiteness, or even to see it as a goal. It could also be read as a tongue-in-cheek response to early criticism of Blue Ivy’s hair which was said to be ungroomed. This pride and reverence for Blue Ivy’s hair, however, does not seem to extend to Beyoncé herself. She continues to wear blonde weaves, now a part of her signature, and never reveals her own hair. This raises questions about her relationship with her own blackness. Is blackness only good enough for other people? Can it be good enough for her husband and her child, but not for her? Does she believe her success is dependent on the looseness of her hair’s curl?

When he fuck me good I take his ass to Red Lobster 

One of the most popular lines on the entire album, this verse was a gift to Red Lobster. It’s inexplicable that, in a song celebrating blackness, Beyoncé — known to be a media mogul and shrewd businesswoman — would boost profits of a white-owned business. Red Lobster reportedly saw a 33% increase in sales over Super Bowl Sunday in 2015. On the weekend of the performance, there were over 300,000 tweets about Red Lobster. Why would a pro-black, business-savvy woman with millions of avid followers promote a white-owned business in a song meant to empower black people? Thinking critically about this line alone, it stands to reason that either this song is not about black empowerment, or Beyoncé is less astute in business and media than we suspect.

You just might be a black Bill Gates in the making 

This line shares the problematic sentiment expressed in the phrase “pretty for a black girl.” The supposed compliment is underhanded. For someone to be rising to the top, they must be aspiring to whiteness. There are black men of significant means, finances, and popularity, but the song lyric positions a white man as both inspiration and a symbol of greatness. At the very least, this is a sloppy line that does not empower black people, but seems to support the idea that whiteness is the ideal.

Always stay gracious, best revenge is your paper

On the surface, this lyric reads like motherly advice. Truthfully, it perpetuates respectability politics, calling on black people to remain within the confines of “good behavior,” work toward a comfortable financial position, and accept it as recompense. Being compensated for work is not a gift or a matter of luck. It is not revenge, but payment. This line is an odd statement to make in a song when its performance sent a different message — one that was upsetting to white supremacy and defied respectability politics. Marginalized communities are plagued by respectability politics which requires them to match their values and behaviors to those of a dominant group. A relevant example of this is the painstaking effort parents of black children put into teaching them how to behave around and in response to police officers. While this is a life-saving tactic, it does not address the root of the problem which is the systemic racism within police departments. Now, more than ever, black people are beyond the point of graciousness, politeness, or genteelness. The time has come to rise together, and demand that systems change. Regular income is not revenge. That is not what reparations looks like, and the suggestion that money is enough is at odds with the reputed “radicalism” of “Formation.”

Okay, ladies, now let's get in formation

Resonating with the women who have been on the front lines of movements like Black Lives Matter, this is a powerful statement. It calls upon women, the pillars of strength in any society, to take action, and do so together. This seems to be in direct opposition to “Always stay gracious, best revenge is your paper.” Here, there is no alternative to standing together, joining forces, and bringing about the change that is needed. It is a clear call to action that does not limit people to any specific activities. It leaves room for consideration, interpretation, and performance. This line of the song, more than any other, brought excitement and determination to black women in the U.S. and even all over the world. This idea has emboldened activists and organizers to build community and co-create movements and strategies. If this is the message people receive from “Formation,” it cannot be dismissed or undervalued though it bears emphasizing that we must not follow Beyonce’s formulation of formation with its problematic racial politics and capitalist agenda. We must instead define our own. 

Beyoncé is, first and foremost, a brand. No matter how connected people feel to her and all she represents, she is a businesswoman. In addition, she is a capitalist, and uses issues of the day to propel herself to further greatness. As feminism got a wave of renewed popularity, Beyoncé quickly affixed the title of “feminist” to herself. She did not go to great lengths to live it, but chose to perform it. However, there is no way to know that it is real. When #BoycottBeyoncé  started, she was quick to produce t-shirts fitting the theme. Of course, this is a way to display her indifference and respond with humor to the ridiculous call.  But ultimately, the sale of t-shirts is yet another way to earn dollars off her fan base. Given this, it is difficult to accept that she would do anything for altruistic reasons when there is money to be made. Lemonade came when people were impatiently waiting for the announcement of a new album, and black women have been raving about representation in the media through television shows and music. The mothers of the slain were used in the visual album, but to what end?. Black women of import were featured throughout the album, drawing the attention of their fans. Was it an act of solidarity? Or a tool used to capitalize on the pro-black movements across the U.S. and sweeping across the world? Is she sharing her spirituality through depictions and representations of Oshun, or is the goddess a new way to solidify her own position as a god to members of the hive? 

Beyoncé is a fascinating phenomenon. Her brilliance is undeniable and her fan base is unmatched. She holds a position of authority. More than an entertainer or a businesswoman, she is seen as a friend. She has created a world where people can feel connected to her — through the identities she purports to have — without having access to her personal life. For this reason, she leaves more questions than she gives answers. Lemonade has been an extension of an already perplexing individual, putting feminism, pro-blackness, politics, and activism on center stage with minimal direct engagement. 

It is unfortunate that people are so starved for relatable and aspirational content that they are prepared to buy in, literally, to capitalist brands of social justice. In our desperate search for empowerment and solace, we are finding things that are not there, prepared to see leadership where instead there is just another way to make a profit. Lemonade has certainly been a salve for black women everywhere, and “Formation” has made black people feel powerful and called to act, but it is important to investigate the possibility that this was not the primary goal. Beyoncé is a master of her art form, and the Beyhive continues to consider itself her primary interpreter, always portraying her in the most positive light. In a perfect world, Beyoncé would endeavor be the person and brand the world needs so badly, but in fact she is just making “her paper.”

Another president, another hurricane . . .

"He don't give a damn . . ." 

. . . another man-made disaster in the face of climate change! 

Re:LODE Radio draws attention to the plight of the people in Puerto Rico, struggling in the aftermath of Hurricane Maria to care for those affected, only to experience the disaster of the United States administration’s response. Under the thumb of Donald Trump’s laissez faire approach to facing Puerto Rico’s critical need for immediate state aid, the response typified the capitalist and "Scrooge-like" tendency of capitalist interests, to go for short term tactics, including brutal abandonment, along with a “blame game” abdication of responsibility and accountability.

The Re:LODE Radio post for Wednesday, 17 June 2020 covers the inadequate response of the US government under Donald Trump to the consequences of climate change and yet another tropical storm impacting upon the lives of the people of Puerto Rico:

Cheap lives, Black and White, and the Americanization of the World in 2020 "THE YEAR OF TRUTH"? 

The Raft of the Medusa scandal of 1816 encapsulates the tactic employed by the arrogantly self-entitled, and randomly empowered, elite stake holders in maintaining the status quo on "the cheap". One of the greatest works of European art of the nineteenth century took up the challenge of what became a cause célèbre.

Le Radeau de la Méduse, originally titled Scène de Naufrage (Shipwreck Scene), is an oil painting of 1818–19 by the French Romantic painter and lithographer Théodore Géricault (1791–1824). Completed when the artist was 27, the work has become an icon of French Romanticism. 

At 491 by 716 cm (16 ft 1 in by 23 ft 6 in), it is an over-life-size painting that depicts a moment from the aftermath of the wreck of the French naval frigate Méduse, which ran aground off the African coast of today's Mauritania on 2 July 1816. On 5 July 1816, at least 147 people were set adrift on a hurriedly constructed raft; all but 15 died in the 13 days before their rescue, and those who survived endured starvation and dehydration and practiced cannibalism. The event became an international scandal, in part because its cause was widely attributed to the incompetence of the French captain. 

People and the raft

The subject of Gericault's composition is not the moment of desertion and abandonment for the 147 souls set adrift by incompetent political appointees. Gericault chooses to depict a moment when hopes of rescue are raised and then dashed. 

This detail from Gericault's painting was used in by the project People and the raft in 2016, to follow in the aftermath of the tragedy and scandal 200 years on . . . 

It shows a ship on the distant horizon as the raft is buffeted in an ocean swell. This sight offered those on the raft the hope of rescue, a hope that was dashed as the ship disappeared from view. This is the moment Gericault selects for a project that turns the genre of "shipwrecks" into history painting.

So what happened?

For Philip Courtenay, instigator of The Raft and People and the Raft projects at Kettles Yard, Cambridge, the ICA, London, and Edgware secondary school, the account of what occurred following the wreck of the Méduse points to the condition of humanity in an age of capitalism/colonialism/commodification and counter revolution.

Tuesday, 5 July 2016: The raft and the first day

The construction of a raft from an ad hoc assembly of timbers garnered from the wreck of the Méduse was the only way all the crew and passengers could be safely brought ashore. Those involved in its construction called it "the machine". 

The frigate's mission was to accept the British return of Senegal under the terms of France's acceptance of the Peace of Paris. The appointed French governor of Senegal, Colonel Julien-Désiré Schmaltz, and his wife and daughter were among the passengers.

In an effort to make good time, the Méduse overtook the other ships in the small fleet, but due to poor navigation it drifted 100 miles (161 km) off course. On 2 July, it ran aground on a sandbank off the West African coast, near today's Mauritania. This disaster was probably due to the incompetence of De Chaumereys, the leader of this expedition, a returned émigré who lacked experience and ability, but had been granted his commission as a result of an act of political preferment.

Efforts to free the ship failed, so, on 5 July, the frightened passengers and crew started an attempt to travel the 60 miles (97 km) to the African coast in the frigate's six boats. Although the Méduse was carrying 400 people, including 160 crew, there was space for only about 250 in the boats. The remainder of the ship's complement—at least 146 men and one woman—were piled onto a hastily built raft. 

One by one as they boarded the raft, and as this complement of this remainder of people grew in number and weight, the raft although still floating was gradually submerged. When all these people were standing on the raft the level of the sea and its waves came up to most peoples waists.

The surgeon Savigny, one of the survivors, later recalled that "it had sunk at least a metre, and so closely were we huddled together that it was impossible to move a single step. Fore and aft, we had the water up to your middle."

Seventeen crew members opted to stay aboard the grounded Méduse. The captain and crew aboard the other boats intended to tow the raft, but after only a few miles the raft was turned loose as the enormous weight of the raft and its human cargo meant that making headway to the safety of the shore seemed impossible.

The raft and the first night

An agreement had been made beforehand that all the boats should stay with the raft and together tow it to the nearby shore. But in their haste to reach land, the men in the boats soon cut the cables which held them to the heavy raft, leaving its crew to the mercy of currents and winds, without means of navigation, without sufficient drink for even a short voyage, and so desperately crowded on their flooded timbers as to make every movement an affliction.

"We were not convinced", Savigny recalled, "that we were entirely abandoned until the boats were almost out of sight. Our consternation was then extreme: all the horrors of famine and thirst were then depicted to our imaginations; and we had also to struggle with a treacherous element, which already covered one-half of our bodies. All the sailors and soldiers gave themselves up to despair, and it was with great difficulty that we succeeded in calming them."

The first day passed quietly, with talk of rescue and revenge, but during the night the wind freshened and the waves rose higher. "A great number of our passengers who had not a seaman's foot tumbled over one another; in fine, after ten hours of the most cruel sufferings, day arrived."

The raft and the second day

"What a spectacle presented itself to our view! ten or twelve unfortunate creatures having their lower extremities entangled in the interstices left between the planks of the raft, had been unable to disengage themselves and had lost their lives. Several others had been carried off the raft by the violence of the sea; so that by morning we were already twenty fewer in number."

The next day, a mood of depression settled over the men on the raft. Mutiny was in the air.

"Night came on: the sky was covered with thick clouds; the sea was still more terrible than on the preceding night; and the men, being unable to hold fast to the raft, either fore or aft, crowded towards the centre, the most solid part."

The raft and the second night and the third day

Almost all those perished who were unable to reach the centre; the crowding of the people was such, that some were stifled by the weight of their comrades, who were falling upon them every moment.

Then; "the soldiers and sailors, giving themselves up for lost, fell a-drinking until they lost their reason. In this state they carried their delirium so far as to display the intention of murdering their chiefs, and destroying the raft, by cutting the ropes which united its different parts. one of them advanced, armed with a hatchet, to cut the ligaments, which was the signal of revolt. The officers came forward to restrain these madmen: that one who was armed with a hatchet, with which he dared to threaten them, was killed with a stroke of a sabre. Many of the officers and some passengers joined us for the preservation of the raft. the revolted drew their sabres, and those who had none armed themselves with knives. We put ourselves in a posture of defence, and the combat commenced. One of the rebels raised his weapon against an officer; he fell that moment pierced with wounds. This firmness appeared for a moment to intimidate the mutineers; but they closed in with one another and retired aft, to execute their plan. One of them, feigning to repose himself, had begun to cut the ropes with a knife, when, being advertised of it by a domestic, we darted upon him: a soldier, wishing to defend him, threatened an officer with his knife, and aiming a blow at him, struck only his coat. The officer, turning about, floored his adversary, and threw him into the sea, as well as his comrade."

"The battle soon became general: the mast broke, and falling upon Captain Dupont, who remained senseless, nearly broke his thigh. He was seized by the soldiers, who threw him into the sea. We perceived this, and were in time to save him; we placed him on a barrel, whence he was torn by the mutineers, who wished to dig his eyes out with a knife. Roused by such ferocity, we charged them with fury, dashed through the lines which the soldiers had formed, sabre in hand, and many of them paid with their lives for their madness."

"The passengers seconded us. After a second charge, the fury of the rebels was subdued, and gave place to the most marked cowardice; the greater part threw themselves on their knees, and asked pardon, which was unanimously granted."

Some sixty-five men died during the night. On the following day, the third of the raft's voyage, raging hunger drove some of the survivors to cannibalism. "Those whom death had spared in the disastrous night which I have described," wrote Savigny, "threw themselves ravenously on the dead bodies with which the raft was covered, cut them up in slices, which some even in that instant devoured. A great number of us at first refused to touch the horrible food; but at last, yielding to a want still more pressing than that of humanity, we saw in this frightful repast only deplorable means of prolonging existence; and I proposed, I acknowledge it, to dry these bleeding limbs, in order to render them a little more supportable to the taste. Some, however, had still courage enough to abstain from it, and to them a larger quantity of wine was granted."

The raft and the fourth day

As the days passed, hunger and thirst, exposure, murder, and insanity took their toll of the remaining men. From the fourth day on, all practised cannibalism and supplemented their small ration of wine with sea water or urine.

The raft and the sixth day

On the sixth day of the raft's voyage, only twenty-eight survivors remained. "Of this number," in the opinion of Savigny, the ship's surgeon, "fifteen alone appeared able to exist for some days longer; all the others, covered with large wounds, had wholly lost their reason. However they had a share of our rations, and might, before their death, consume forty bottles of wine; those forty bottles of wine were to us of inestimable value. We held a council; to put the sick on half rations was to delay their death by a few moments; to leave them without provisions was to put them to a slow death. After a long deliberation, we resolved the throw them into the sea. this mode, however repugnant to our feelings, would procure to the survivors provisions for six days, at the rate of three quarts of wine a day.... Three seaman and a soldier took upon themselves this cruel execution. We averted our eyes, and shed tears of blood over the fate of these unhappy creatures... After this catastrophe we threw all the arms into the sea; they inspired us with a horror we could not conquer."

The raft and the seventh day

The fifteen hardy and ruthless men who were now in sole command of the Raft managed to suffer through another seven days without further loss of life.

The raft and the thirteenth day 

On the thirteenth day . . .

. . . On the morning of the 17th July, "Capatain Dupont, casting his eye towards the horizon, perceived a ship, and announced it to us by a cry of joy; we perceived it to be a brig, but it was at a very great distance; we could only distinguish the top of its masts. The sight of this vessel spread amongst us a joy which it would be difficult to describe. Fears, however, soon mixed with our hopes; we began to perceive that our raft, having very little elevation above the water, it was impossible to distinguish it at such a distance. We did all we could to make ourselves observed; we piled up our casks, at the top of which we fixed handkerchiefs of different colours. unfortunately, in spite of all these signals, the brig disappeared. From the delirium of joy we passed to that of dejection and grief."

The brig which the men on the raft had sighted was the Argus, part of the Medusa's original convoy. When the Argus disappeared again, the shipwrecked men lost all hope; they lay down together in the tent which they had rigged beneath the mast and awaited death.

Two hours later, they were surprised by the Argus's sudden return. of the fifteen survivors who were taken from the raft, half-starved, bearded, sunburnt, and covered in wounds, five died shortly after reaching land.

A spectacular disaster?  

Or, a spectacular crime of self interest?

Those in charge of what was at the outset a dubious colonialist venture, chose to act in self preservation rather than the common good. This is a recurring behaviour of the powers that be in a society deformed by the self-interests of a racist and classist capitalist profit machine.

The Raft of the Medusa was first shown at the 1819 Paris Salon, under the title Scène de Naufrage (Shipwreck Scene). The museum director orchestrating the Salon, the Comte de Forbin, altered the title in the catalog to a generic shipwreck subject. Critics were also dismayed by the focus on death and human suffering. However, the painting was a popular success and received one of 32 gold medals, and its real subject would have been unmistakable for contemporary viewers. 

The art of spectacle and the spectacle of art 

Christine Riding in her article Staging The Raft of the Medusa, draws attention to the immediate afterlife of the painting of the Raft of the Medusa, in exhibitions of the work in London in 1820, and in Dublin in 1821, where the exhibition had to compete for an audience with a spectacular moving panorama "The Wreck of the Medusa" by the Marshall brothers firm, which was said to have been painted under the direction of one of the survivors of the disaster. In London the painting was shown at William Bullock's Egyptian Hall in Piccadilly, London, from 10 June until the end of the year, and viewed by about 40,000 visitors.

The reception of Gericault's work in London was more positive than that in Paris, and the painting was hailed as representative of a new direction in French art. It received more positive reviews than when it was shown at the Salon. In part, this was due to the physical situation of the painting's exhibition: in Paris it had initially been hung high in the Salon Carré — a mistake that Géricault recognised when he saw the work installed — but in London, the spatial limitations of the exhibition space at the Egyptian Hall, it was placed close to the ground, emphasising a connection and continuity of the space of audience, with space of the painting almost tipping into the space of the audience. Was this an immersive experience? Was this a dramatic experience, or sentimental, melodramatic even? The society of the spectacle is all about the consumption of experience itself as a commodity. To quote Guy Debord once more: 

The spectacle is the stage at which the commodity has succeeded in totally colonizing social life. 

The Raft of the Medusa as spectacle

These snippets from Christine Riding's article will help contextualise the modern history of the use of spectacle in the art of the academy as well as in popular, or mass culture:  

. . . the exhibition at the Egyptian Hall – a diverse gallery cum auction house – has been appraised by historians as ‘a fairly prosaic opportunity’, with the proprietor William Bullock characterized as an entrepreneur and showman, ‘une espèce de Barnum’ to use Henri Houssaye’s description from 1879.

. . . ‘from the start, the exhibition was planned on a popular level’, and promoted ‘to attract a large and undiscriminating clientèle’,

. . . the newspaper advertisements which focused on the size of the canvas and the subject’s ‘anecdotal value’ 

. . . the ‘undistinguished character’ of the lithograph produced by Géricault and his friend Nicolas-Toussaint Charlet as ‘a souvenir illustration’. 

Of course exhibiting fine art as a commercial venture in rented spaces such as the Egyptian Hall had its detractors at the time.

Accusations of crass commercialism were supported by . . . 

. . . the London Magazine described the artist as reduced to advertising himself like a ‘quack doctor’ through ‘Descriptive catalogues, advertisements, and posting bills’ in order to ‘squeeze support from the shillings of the people’. 

This standpoint, transferred to the London exhibition of The Raft of the Medusa, has important repercussions for examining the concurrent exhibitions in Dublin of the painting and panorama. 

. . . the ‘[Egyptian Hall] exhibition was organized like a panorama’ the result of which was ‘huge crowds, among whom few were connoisseurs of art’. 

. . . in its relatively short existence (i.e. from 1812), William Bullock had taken steps to establish the Egyptian Hall as a venue for displaying fine art, including the creation of a purpose-built exhibiting gallery (the Roman Gallery) and temporary exhibitions of large-scale history paintings, the first example being The Judgment of Brutus by the French artist Guillaume Guillon-Lethière, in 1816.

Crucially, not one review of Géricault’s painting in London betrays any confusion or concern about public perceptions of the work (or indeed fine art in general) in the context of this particular venue. On the contrary, the reviewer in the Globe noted that The Raft of the Medusa was the third ‘historical work from the continental school’ exhibited at the Hall, each ‘a favourable specimen to convey ... the modern station of French art’; and the Literary Gazette went further, stating that ‘great praise’ was due to Bullock ‘for procuring us such opportunities for examination and comparison of the two national schools; if he continues to bring over chefs d’ouvre [sic] of French painters, he will do as good a thing as could be done to advance British art. Emulation is a noble teacher.’  

. . . despite Bullock’s ‘popularist agenda’  

. . . ‘there is strong evidence that ... the [Raft of the Medusa] exhibition attracted the most distinguished attention from critics and the higher ranks of society’. 

Johnson’s article (Lee Johnson, ‘The Raft of the Medusa in Great Britain’, Burlington Magazine, vol.XCVI, August 1954) also established the assumption that the exhibition of Géricault’s painting was a relative failure (in visitor numbers) in Dublin because of the competition posed by the Marshalls’ panorama, which, the argument goes, presented a more comprehensive entertainment of 10,000 square feet of painted canvas, a printed description, seating, music, artificial lighting and heating. 

Perhaps most significant for this interpretation . . . 

. . . was that the Marshalls ‘had the inestimable advantage over Géricault of providing a running pictorial narrative of the dreadful sequence of events, whereas the French painter could portray only one moment’. Thus, given that the ‘majority of people still knew the difference between an ordinary painting and panorama’, . . . 

. . . ‘they instinctively preferred the latter’. But the exhibition in Dublin was not a straightforward competition between a painting and a panorama on the same subject, which admittedly may have dissuaded some visitors from viewing both. The peristrephic or moving panorama used by the Marshalls was a huge piece of painted canvas rolled onto a spool, which was fed vertically across a proscenium onto an empty spool on the other side. Each scene (or ‘view’, as they are described in the accompanying description) in isolation and, in effect, framed by the proscenium, would have had the appearance, in very general terms, of a large-scale easel painting such as Géricault’s Medusa. ‘View V’, the final scene of the panorama, showed the sighting of a ship by the remaining raft survivors, that is, the same moment depicted in The Raft of the Medusa. While Géricault considered a number of events in Savigny and Corréard’s narrative, he focused on the passage describing the first sighting of the brig the Argus, which occurred only hours prior to the actual rescue.

Géricault’s choice of moment was relatively obscure in the context of both Savigny and Corréard’s lengthy and eventful text and the political ramifications of the Medusa shipwreck and was not, I would suggest, the obvious selection for the final scene of a panorama purporting to narrate the story. Why not paint the actual rescue, or the arrival of the raft’s survivors in Senegal, which includes a description of the courtesy and compassion of a group of British officers, in direct contrast to the behaviour of the French? 

Surely this would be a gratifying conclusion for a British audience? 

Good question!

The "classic" and "romantic" image that Gericault constructed for his Raft of the Medusa, and the moment in the narrative account that he chooses to depict, continues to reverberate and function as both a cliché and as an archetype. 

Tom Seymour interviewed Joel-Peter Witkin for the Guardian (Thu 18 Feb 2016) on what, as a photographer, he considers his best shot:

George W Bush in The Raft of the Medusa

In this pre-Trump era interview Joel-Peter Witkin explains: 

This was based on Théodore Géricault’s painting The Raft of the Medusa, which recorded a great tragedy in French history. Géricault depicted the aftermath of a terrible act of cowardice by the Medusa’s captain and his officers. They ran the ship aground off the coast of what is now Mauritania in 1816. When they couldn’t set the frigate free, they took all of the small boats and left more than 140 passengers to fend for themselves on a raft. Only 15 survived, having resorted to cannibalism.

When I saw the painting in the Louvre, I noticed a correlation between that tragedy and the eight years of George W Bush’s administration. I think Bush would have been a wonderful president of the Baseball Association. But he had no talent for the job of president of my country.

The photograph took a month to put together. It’s a tableau, based on a series of my drawings. I believe in building photographs. I don’t like the unpredictable – I have a clear idea of what I want long before I click the shutter.

First I needed a double for Bush. I contacted an agency for famous lookalikes in Los Angeles. They had a bunch, but the rates were enormous. This one chap, who looked and sounded exactly like Bush, wanted $20,000. Another guy, who worked in Malibu zoo, only charged $1,000. I live in Albuquerque, New Mexico, so had to fly him in. My Barbara Bush – George’s mother, who can be seen above him – was a retired nurse. She caught the same flight, though they’d never met before, and I put them both up in a hotel.

I spent a long time looking at the original painting, but decided to add something: a crown of lights on Bush’s head, to represent his little thoughts. And I had his hand fondling the breast of someone who I thought might be Condoleezza Rice, his secretary of state.

The other people were all locals. The day before the shoot, I had them gather in my studio. I showed them a reproduction of Géricault’s painting, reiterated my reasons for making the photograph, then told them to try out their places. The next day, I took the photograph with a Linhof 4x5 camera. I printed it myself because that, for me, is the decisive moment: you can change the meaning of a photograph by how you print it. I have to be part of that process.

I’ve been making photographs since I was 11. When I was 16, the New York Museum of Modern Art chose one of my photographs for its permanent exhibition. From that point on, I knew what I wanted to do. I finished high school, worked in photography studios, then joined the army as a photographer.

I remember we put brownish makeup on the Rice model and wax on her nostrils, to make her look more like her real-life counterpart, who was always a mysterious figure. Rice was obviously very smart, but a Republican. To me, anyone who is a Republican – it’s a spiritual problem rather than a mental one.

Star of the show

The Paris Salon of 1819 was sponsored by Louis XVIII and featured nearly 1,300 paintings, 208 sculptures and numerous other engravings and architectural designs. Géricault's canvas was the star at the exhibition: "It strikes and attracts all eyes" (Le Journal de Paris). Louis XVIII visited three days before the opening and said: 

"Monsieur, vous venez de faire un naufrage qui n'en est pas un pour vous"

"Monsieur Géricault, you've painted a shipwreck, but it's not one for you"

"Nor for you, Monsieur Ai!"  

Re:LODE Radio asks: 

What are the positive and practical roles for art, and artists, in these present times?

The Re:LODE project of 2017 Methods & Purposes section asks and answers a question with a quote from Marshall McLuhan and Harley Parker's Through the Vanishing Point: Space and Poetry in Painting (1969):

Q. Is it possible to deal with the entire environment as a work of art?

A. Marshall McLuhan says: 

"Electronic Man approaches the condition in which it is possible to deal with the entire environment as a work of art."

"This presents no solution to the previous problem of decorating the environment."

"Quite the contrary."

"The new possibility demands total understanding of the artistic function in society."

"It will no longer be possible merely to add art to the environment."

Re:LODE Radio points to Ai Weiwei as an example of someone who is "giving it a go" when it comes to a positive and practical way of making provocative work "happen", in critical times. But that doesn't mean he doesn't "get some stick" for all his efforts. Making "provocative" work, if we return to the origins and meanings of the word, includes the present sense of "causing anger or another strong reaction, especially deliberately". The word comes to us from the late Middle English: from Old French provocatif, -ive, from late Latin provocativus, from provocat- ‘called forth, challenged’, from the verb provocare. And, similarly, to provoke is to "stimulate or give rise to (a reaction or emotion, typically a strong or unwelcome one) in someone". This origin is again from late Middle English usage (also in the sense ‘invoke, summon’): from Old French provoquer, from Latin provocare ‘challenge’, from pro- ‘forth’ + vocare ‘to call’. So, provocative, as in an action, as for example:

to call (something) out . . . 

. . . like currently existing power, corruption, etc! . . . 

. . . which some will find annoying, irritating and infuriating. As, take for example, this article in artnetnews by Henri Neuendorf, February 15, 2016.  

The article is headlined: 

Ai Weiwei Commemorates Drowned Refugees with Public Installation during Berlin Film Festival 

And followed by the question:

But is he missing the point?

Seemingly undisturbed by the huge backlash caused by his recreation of the tragic image of the the drowned three-year-old Syrian refugee Alan Kurdi, in his latest public artwork Chinese artist and activist Ai Weiwei has returned to the subject and attached 14,000 life jackets used by refugees to Berlin’s Konzerthaus concert hall.

The fluorescent orange vests, which are tightly wrapped around the columns of the 19th century music venue, were collected by the artist on his frequent recent trips to the Greek island of Lesbos, where hundreds of refugees land every day after completing the treacherous sea journey from Turkey.

According to the Der Standard, the installation is a tribute to the refugees that died at sea in an attempt to escape war and poverty in the Middle East and North Africa.

Berlin is currently halfway through the annual Berlinale film festival, which attracts Hollywood stars and major film industry figures to the German capital. The intervention at the Konzerthaus was installed to coincide with the Cinema for Peace gala, which takes place at the venue tonight.

aiww 

The calculating and media-savvy artist doubtlessly chose the timing deliberately to maximize media exposure of his project, coinciding with a time when the attention of the international press is focused on Berlin and its film festival. But not everyone has celebrated the installation. Commenting on the Der Standard article, one reader said: “It would have been more useful to send and distribute them [the life jackets] in north Africa.” 

Another reader wrote: “Art is in the eye of the beholder.”

The choice of place is certainly perplexing. Staging an installation of this nature in Germany is somewhat akin to preaching to the choir. According to the New York Times, Germany took in over 1 million refugees last year, more than any other European Union member state.

aiww 

Moreover, the Konzerthaus is located at Berlin’s Gendarmenmarkt, the focal point of the Huguenot population that fled religious persecution in Catholic France in the 17th century and was granted refuge in Berlin by Frederick the Great in 1685. According to Berlin.de, about 20,000 Huguenots emigrated to Berlin and, at the start of the 18th century, it was estimated that 1 in 5 Berliners were of Huguenot origin.

In other words, Ai’s installation—while retaining critical undertones—is located in the center of what has been a symbol of Germany’s tolerance and embrace of refugees since the 17th century.

Why not stage the installation in countries that have taken in few, or no refugees? The UK, the US, or Hungary are just three examples of places where Ai’s important message would be far more evocative.

The message is important, however the ill-placement leaves the bitter aftertaste that Ai’s intention is not to raise awareness and draw attention to the plight of refugees, but rather to draw attention to himself.

To himself? Or to others? Or to himself and others?

When you say "others", do you mean . . .

. . . others?  

Re:LODE Radio considers these questions as part of a necessary institutional critique and are substantially related to the conditions of the art market (which is NOT a free market, as there are NO free markets), as part and parcel of the madness of actually existing global capitalism.

Along the LODE Zone Line in India, The Indian Express ran this interview with Ai Weiwei earlier this year on the 14 June 2020. The artist talks about how the pandemic has strengthened state powers, why the west struggles to understand China an how he lost his voice in solitary confinement. The interview was written up by Vandana Kalra under the headline:

Ai Weiwei:'This is a battle about the future'

In a post on Instagram, accompanying a picture of a mask from the Ai Weiwei MASK project, you wrote: “The COVID-19 pandemic is a humanitarian crisis. It challenges our understanding of the 21st century and warns of dangers ahead.” Could you elaborate?

The coronavirus pandemic has revealed some very specific characteristics of this time. First, this is a global issue. It was triggered and spread early on by China and then spread everywhere else. Similar outbreaks have happened before in China and in other regions, such as in Africa and Europe, but never has it spread all over in such a fashion. Second, the disease has locked down the global economy and has put all other discussions aside.

No country has come out with the right or clear response to this disease. The consequences of this global pandemic are still unknown. We are still in the middle of it. We also do not know if it will come back, or whether another similar crisis might occur during or after Covid-19 — what is ongoing in the United States is an example. That is why I say it is a humanitarian crisis, rather than being a simple virus.

Masks from the Ai Weiwei Mask project 

The motifs on the masks come from your iconic works — including the rebellious middle-finger, handcuffs and a surveillance camera. Do you feel the scale of the pandemic is also impacted by the infringement on free speech and human rights, particularly with regard to how China has responded to the crisis?

Any kind of crisis may bring about different outcomes, but almost all crises allow those in power to increase their strength in controlling the people. During times of crisis, those in power expand their control in the name of maintaining stability and the people become even weaker. Often, the first task of any power after strengthening their control—whether democratic, authoritarian or otherwise—is to cover up or control the information, to suppress free speech, independent voices and the independent press. Now, more than ever, the freedom of speech and human rights are under attack globally. State surveillance has become much more sophisticated, such as what is happening in China where every citizen has been logged into the system and identified through big data. In human history, we have never had such a well-tuned and widespread system, where nobody is exempt from surveillance.

I lived under the pressure of a society that lacks justice and free speech. As an artist, I have fought for freedom of expression and against authoritarian societies. That is why my so-called iconic works still reflect the current condition.

In February, you were in Rome, working on the direction of a production of Giacomo Puccini’s Turandot, when things began shutting down in Italy. What was your experience? In one of your Instagram posts, you said: “Coronavirus is like pasta: the Chinese invented it, but the Italians will spread it all over the world.”

That was a joke an Italian friend told me. It reflects an interesting point: the Italian government was the first European nation to sign onto China’s Belt and Road initiative. That policy has bound the Italian political situation tightly to China. The reason is understandable. It is not because both nations love pasta, but rather because they both have to survive. China provides an opportunity and this has worked well, ensuring its ideology is shared alongside the divided and broken values of the European foundation.

The Italians were the most badly affected before the UK, France, Spain, and other nations in Europe. We were at the end stages of rehearsals for Turandot. Ironically, the opera is about a Chinese princess who attracts admirers from all over the world, intent on marrying her. It reflects the current condition so well. China is so beautiful, but also cruel. None of the suitors succeed, but one man still tries.

At the last moment of rehearsal, all the actors on stage were dressed in white full-body suits, such as the ones worn by those combatting the pandemic. I struggled with this. Did I go too far to reflect the current political situation in this classic opera? My production also reflected the global migration crisis, the Hong Kong uprisings, and, at the end, it touched on the coronavirus. During that last rehearsal, the opera’s superintendent came and told me we had to shut down. 

With your team members in Wuhan, you are working on a documentary on Covid-19. Tell us about it.

My first documentary was made long before I became a political or cultural figure. It was called Eat, Drink, and Be Merry (2003) and filmed during the SARS outbreak. That film gave me the pleasure of recording human society’s behaviour, including its politics and daily life, how society reacts to danger, death, loved ones taken away and never seen again. So those things you would never see during peaceful or “normal” times, but always clearly reflected in times of crisis. That is the most attractive for anyone who is trying to understand more about themselves and their relation to their time and environment.

We started to make the documentary about Wuhan while concurrently producing the opera. The large time difference between China and Europe resulted in us working day and night. During the day, we rehearsed the opera. At night, we watched new footage, gave notes on direction, such as what to shoot and how to shoot. This was very intense, but it worked out well.

The film is not a political statement. There is no argument in the film. It is the most honest presentation I can make about Wuhan. I am Chinese and I know China very well. My mom and relatives are still in China. By no means, do I want China to be hurt, but at the same time I really want China to learn what kind of mistakes it has made during this whole pandemic.

Re:LODE Radio inserts this video montage to illustrate these points. It begins with a trailer for Ai Weiwei's documentary Coronation followed by an interview on Ai Weiwei's take on understandings, and misunderstandings, concerning modern China as a global actor. 

To be political . . .

. . . or not political? That is the question!

While the trade war between the US and China has been ongoing, do you think the feud over coronavirus and the global backlash building against China will alter the world order or even bring a change inside China?

That is very difficult to predict. Things should change with or without the virus. China is a fast rising political and economic power, in strong competition with the West and especially the United States. The US has sensed the challenge. China has clearly denounced the Western values established during the last century. China employs a state-capitalist system with communist tactics. China is a Transformer-like creature that the West cannot fully imagine. It is multifunctional, impossible to describe, and cannot be measured with the same standards. At the same time, it is under the most restricted control and driven by a clear vision and purpose.

If the West continues to play in the same manner as before, by exploiting China’s weakness to profit, that it can deal with the China of today.

It’s very hard to say how much the US and the West have learned because the answer is very clear. They likely knew long ago, because the West, and especially the US, is led by ruthless capitalists. The so-called new world order is a corporate-authoritarian ideology. Under this kind of thought, China, India, Brazil, Mexico and many other places are necessary for the growth of the so-called global economy, but really it is about vicious capitalism, greed, and a lack of principles.

The US, under the current administration, has clearly illustrated the possible danger with China, but again the argument is: Who is first? Under this idea of “America First,” the only thing they are still trying to protect is the superiority of one super power over another. There is no philosophical thinking, no humanitarian values discussed, rather they are simply using it as a tactic to attack one another.

Today, with the most unimaginably capital-manipulated world, China is no longer China, just as the United States is no longer the United States. China has successfully integrated deeply into the world economy. China has invested heavily in future technology and their interests are represented in the US government and on Wall Street. That will not change as long as there is profit to be made, and China will continue to offer profit to the investor class. This is not an import-export tax issue, it is not even about who is first or who will dominate, but rather a battlefield about what kind of future we are stepping into and what kind of crises await us.

What is the role that artists should play at a time like now?

Who is the artist? A real artist should question that role, if that role exists. The artist should question that role every day. An artist is not a firefighter, or a doctor working in the intensive-care unit. An artist is concerned with human awareness, emotion, and imagination. Any artist who doesn’t care about the crisis our society is facing is not an artist, but someone decorating and trying to profit from the existing rotten system.

You have been working on a documentary about the protests in Hong Kong. How do you perceive China’s newly passed national-security bill on Hong Kong?

I have been repeating the same message since I left China in 2015 and began to pay attention to the global flow of refugees. That is when I put China on the map of the global political condition. China’s existence is proof of subversive principles toward Western values. Hong Kong is part of that Western bloc. Its promised 50 years of autonomy under One Country, Two Systems guarantees that it still enjoys its protected freedoms. China will never give up Hong Kong. It is not a matter of honour or pride, but one of deep principle. Just as China will also never give up Taiwan. That means it will take control by any means necessary. It is an authoritarian state so it has propaganda and the military, but besides that China has no other skills to achieve this. It just so happens those two things are often enough. I don’t think the international outcry will affect China. If it did, China’s brutal regime would have been stopped during the clash at Tiananmen Square 31 years ago. Both the West and China understand this.

You have announced a new book based on the 2017 documentary Human Flow, which recorded your interactions with over 600 refugees and aid workers across 23 countries. Several of your recent works, including Laundromat (2016) and Law of the Journey (2017) have also reflected on the global migrant crisis. You have mentioned how “the refugee crisis is not about refugees, rather, it is about us.” Do you feel our failure to understand or accept this has worsened the crisis?

Any human crisis from the past, present, or future requires the stupidity of humans. We are the only ones creating these crises, leading to tragedies like the more than 70 million global refugees, a number continuing to grow due to all kinds of environmental issues, disease, and famine. I don’t think that those living in privilege, such as those in the West, give a damn about people elsewhere suffering inhumane conditions. 

Law of the Journey (2016)

Re:LODE Radio inserts this video on Ai Weiwei's work that is concerned with the consequences of pressures on human population that result in migration.

What is the price, and what is the cost of . . .

. . . the human community?

Last year, you shared your experience of racism in Germany, where you stayed for four years, before moving to Britain in 2019. What direction will increasing neo-nationalism and xenophobia being reported across the world lead to in the near future, according to you?

I left Germany not because I didn’t like German taxi drivers as the German media liked to say. That is a perfect example of how that media operates. They said taxi drivers are not Berliners and Berliners are not Germans, which was a ridiculous and racist argument. Germany is deeply immersed in an authoritarian mindset. They have an unforgettable and unforgivable history. Still, while that ideology has strong boundaries, they shift that ideology with regard to China.

If you don’t understand Germany, you should look at China. It is a mirror to Germany, and the Germans have stated clearly that the future of German industry is in China. China even bought 30 per cent of Deutsche Bank. Huge companies such as Volkswagen depend on the Chinese market. That tells you why German politicians shy away from any problems raised about China, such as the coronavirus or the Hong Kong and Taiwan issues.

They have played this skillfully. Annually, they host a human rights talk between the two nations behind closed doors that satisfies both sides and gives a fake image to the world. But I think both nations underestimate the judgement of the people. It is shameful to give up principles, to sacrifice human rights and freedom of speech, in order for corporations to profit. We all know it and it has to be clearly stated. It will be written in history, another shameful page in German history.

You, too, have been displaced from your own country; as a political dissident it is rather unsafe for you to go back, but do you ever feel the urge? You were also displaced during childhood, when your father (poet Ai Qing) was declared an enemy of the people and sent to a labour camp for reform, where your mother, you and your brother also stayed with him. How did that experience shape you?

Safety, a sense of family and social distance were never issues for me. I was born in danger and grew up in it. I don’t know what safety is. The only unsafe areas are when I see corruption and blindness in humanity’s intellectual state. That presents a clear danger. Not the virus, not mafias, not international corporations or political structures. I am perfectly safe in my mind. Nothing can destroy that.

I don’t think it is unsafe for me to go back to China. I did feel unsafe when they put me in solitary confinement and my voice disappeared. It is not that I want others to hear my voice, but that I need to hear my voice, to see the social response, and to recognise my life as a human being. Very often this is misunderstood. We are not talking about this at the same level. If they arrest me, I don’t think I would be unsafe. My understanding of well-being is also different.

Re:LODE Radio inserts this video of a conversation between Ai Weiwei and Edward Snowden, the American whistleblower, that includes a commentary relevant to the modern conditions of dissent.

Sharing . . .

. . . the experience of exile!

In 2011, you were arrested and held for 81 days without charge. I believe when you told your interrogators that you are an artist, they did not believe it. Why was that the case? 

I don’t blame the interrogators because they come from a military background. They would not believe that someone making sunflower seeds is an artist. With most of my works, it is not only the interrogators who don’t believe they are artworks, but my own mother doesn’t believe it either. Every time she mentions my work, she can’t hold in her laughter. She is proud that I have been brave and fought for those who have no voice, but she can’t believe what I have done is art.

The natural conclusion that the Chinese authorities reached was that I was made popular because I represent Western ideology and anti-China forces were trying to promote me. I tried to explain to them that there was no such thing as anti-China forces because everyone was busy, they were doing things practical. Being anti-China was not practical as China was getting bigger and stronger.

With that said, in the West, many in the established contemporary art system are either critical or hesitant toward someone like me because I am not playing the same game as they understand it. That is easy to accept. I am not one of their soldiers and proud not to be.

In 1979, you were part of one of the earliest contemporary avant-garde movements in China called the Stars Group. Soon after, you went to study at Parsons in New York, where you were exposed to Western art for the first time. You were in the US for more than a decade. How did that influence your art and notion of freedom?

My experiences in New York and the West taught me a lot. Not only about modern ethics or political conditions, but about what problems they reflect. It helped me to realise that personal freedom is essential for any so-called creativity.

Since 2005, you have actively used digital media platforms to communicate with your viewers. The lockdown, too, has seen several posts from you, including an image of a new sculpture. What role does social media play for you as an artist-activist?

Good question, it seems you know me well. Few would name 2005 as my starting point. Before that, I was doing architecture and was well-known in that circle. And before architecture, I was collecting Chinese antiquities, publishing underground books and curating art exhibitions.

2005 is the most important year. I can consider it my birth year. I touched a computer and learned how to type. Today, I spend more than 60 per cent of my energy online; 90 per cent of my interest is in social media. Even so, I still know very little. I’ve never used Weibo, for instance, but still social media consumes so much of my energy and imagination. It is about expression and communication. These two are the fundamental structures of my existence. Through expression, I see my existence. Through communication, I see an individual, someone you can identify with or oppose. That is my total environment and nothing is more important than what social media has given to my identity, existence and recognition of the self. 

Human Flow

Human Flow is a 2017 German documentary film co-produced and directed by Ai Weiwei about the current global refugee crisis. In the film the viewer is taken to over 20 countries to understand both the scale and the personal impact of this massive human migration. It was shot using various technologies, including drones, cameras and iPhones.

Ai tells how the film began after he got his passport back from Chinese authorities and went on vacation to the Greek island of Lesbos. There he saw refugees coming on shore and began shooting footage on his iPhone. The shocking experience inspired him to make a film about refugees and their harrowing journeys.

In the Director's statement of the screening program for Venice Biennale Ai says: 

"Human Flow is a personal journey, an attempt to understand the conditions of humanity in our days. The film is made with deep belief in the value of human rights. In this time of uncertainty, we need more tolerance, compassion and trust for each other since we all are one. Otherwise, humanity will face an even bigger crisis."

He notes that his film is extremely personal to him, relating to his past experiences of inhumane treatment after being forced out of his home in Beijing during China's Cultural Revolution. He goes on to say that his experiences help him understand why he identifies with the refugees in the film and with the external forces they are often powerlessly facing. 

Ai also explains the significance of his title, Human Flow, and how it relates to flooding. With an analogy he makes the point of either building a dam to stop the flood, which would not solve the issue entirely and could intensify the outcomes, or finding a path to let the flow continue. Relating dams to physical borders and walls, he encourages the understanding of the causes behind why people become refugees and how we should work to solve those conditions so to stem the flow at its source.

Ai Weiwei's position is that, as individuals . . .

. . . we all bear responsibility!

Re:LODE Radio considers, and understands, Ai Weiwei's position, but reserves the right to question Ai Weiwei's strategy, a strategy that, in no uncertain terms, reinforces the role of the artist as actor, and "able to represent" those who are "unable to represent themselves".

"They cannot represent themselves; they must be represented."

This quote comes from a passage in Marx’s Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, where he speaks of the poverty-stricken smallholding peasants of France at a particular juncture in the mid-19th century. Since these peasants could not unite, they were; 

"incapable of enforcing their class interest in their own name, whether through a parliament or through a convention. They cannot represent themselves, they must be represented. Their representative must at the same time appear as their master . . ."

(K Marx and F Engels, Selected Works, Moscow, 1950, vol I, p303).

The problem, in the case of these French peasants in the nineteenth century, is their inability as individuals to unite in a movement for social and political change through action. 

The notion of the individualisation of responsibility therefore is also problematic, to the extent it remains individual rather than collective. Ai Weiwei is surely thinking that, as an artist, seeking to reveal our collective responsibility, has to start somewhere. This is a huge task, and a massive problem however, especially in the places that involves the reception of art in an institutional context, and which is predominantly understood as being an "individual experience", and at the same time an example of the state apparatuses peddling "pure ideology". 

Re:LODE Radio is interested in strategies that produce collective response and collective action. Perhaps it seems strange, that art as a discourse tends to reflect collective action rather than produce it, except of course, an art that produces collective action then becomes a problem. A problem for those who require business, and art, to run as usual.

Backlash?

Henri Neuendorf for artnetnews takes a view on Ai Weiwei's work, and a headline seemingly prompted by Twitter posts and reports in the Washington Post and the Guardian.

Crass recreation or a personal act?

This is the story according to INDIA TODAY:

In a tribute to the tragic and everlasting image of three-year-old Syrian refugee Aylan Kurdi, dissident Chinese artist Ai Weiwei lay down on the beach to pose for a powerful image highlighting the plight of refugees.

INDIA TODAY used the image of the dead body of Aylan Kurdi in this story. Re:LODE Radio chooses not to reproduce this image, an image that is available at multiple sources on the internet.

A refusal to represent is itself an act of representation!

The image that Re:LODE Radio refuses to represent has value, but in the case of this post the risk is that the re-presentation of the image is integral to a process that guarantees that the image will at some point be reduced to a cliché. 

Re:LODE Radio is content to allow Ai Weiwei's image to stand for both the tragedy and a personal and spontaneous act of solidarity with a victim of present day borders and barriers. 

These same borders and barriers  that hinder the free movement of people, allow for the free movement of capital. 

aylan kurdi and the photos that changed history

When it comes to considering the photos that changed history history may well have changed but it is still a history of the capitalocene!

In this report by Monica Tan for the Guardian (Mon 1 Feb 2016) Ai Weiwei is quoted, in the clearest of terms, as explaining that: 

“The way I can protest is that I can withdraw my works from that country. It is very simple, very symbolic – I cannot co-exist, I cannot stand in front of these people, and see these policies. It is a personal act, very simple; an artist trying not just to watch events but to act, and I made this decision spontaneously.”

Ad nauseam (pun intended)?

This Benetton advertisement using a picture of migrants being rescued in the Mediterranean, generated criticism too, and for similar reasons, and/or fallacious arguments, including the exploitation of human tragedy for publicity purposes, and lack of respect for the plight of refugees, and so on, ad nauseam. Ad nauseam is a Latin term for argument or other discussion that has continued to the point of nausea. For example, "this has been discussed ad nauseam" indicates that the topic has been discussed extensively and those involved have grown sick of it. The fallacy of dragging the conversation to an ad nauseam state in order to then assert one's position as correct due to it not having been contradicted is also called argumentum ad infinitum (to infinity) and argument from repetition. 

The New York Times report by Ceylan Yeginsu is headlined: 

Benetton ‘Migrants’ Ads Draw Outrage for Using Photos of Real Migrants 

The walls, hard borders and boundaries Ai Weiwei abhors, exist for the benefit of the developed capitalist economies of the NORTH, including so-called Communist China. For example, it is national government immigration policies that distort the economic realities of so-called "economic productivity", guaranteed to result in the difference in levels of income of our bus driver in Liverpool and our bus driver in Jakarta. And obscuring the lack of productivity, and responsibility, of capitalist elites, especially in the developing economies of the SOUTH.

The Information Wrap for the Re:LODE 2017 cargo created in Maribaya, Java, Indonesia explains in the article:  

A working class, a political class, a capitalist class, landowners and a theocracy!

Actor network theory, the antibody to the virus of passivity in the face of spectacle  . . . 

. . . allows for the idea that the roles of audience and artist can be swapped, exchanged, upended, merged even, to counter the colonisation of our consciousness through spectacle. And, go some way to counter the unconscious processing of information that shapes the differing perceptions of the world we inhabit. It's no longer "audience participation" that is required in a potentially emancipated cultural sphere, while the framework for enabling a viable mobilisation of a Brechtian alienation effect is now completely broken. 

The distancing effect, more commonly known as the alienation effect or (more recently) as the estrangement effect (Verfremdungseffekt), is a performing arts term used by Bertolt Brecht.

Brecht first used the term in an essay on "Alienation Effects in Chinese Acting" published in 1936, in which he described it as "playing in such a way that the audience was hindered from simply identifying itself with the characters in the play. Acceptance or rejection of their actions and utterances was meant to take place on a conscious plane, instead of, as hitherto, in the audience's subconscious".

The term Verfremdungseffekt is rooted in the Russian Formalist notion of the device of making strange (приём отстранения priyom otstraneniya), which literary critic Viktor Shklovsky claimed is the essence of all art.

What we need now! 

The participant observer, as artist or audience, may be transformed into its doppelgänger, the observant participant. So, the artist's and audience's roles merge. 

Here comes everybody . . . 

. . . as  actors, and, as in George McKane's revolutionary method and practice (see the Yellow House and LODE Legacy), become spect-actors. 

But even "HCE" is ripe for commodification!

The copy runs: 

I belong to you and you belong to me

“H.C.E.” collection is made up of 10 fragrances marked by special words coming from the novel “finnegans wake” written by James Joyce.

The main character of “finnegans wake” is a middle-aged man owner of a tavern, named Humphrey Chimpden Earwicker, often shortened to “H.C.E.“, which means also “here comes everybody”, the expression that identifies the “everyman” of Joyce.

He is both an ordinary man and Father at the same time.

Nice smells? 

The messengers 

In actor-network theory, to quote from Blackwells Dictionary of Human Geography (fourth edition, 2000); 

“the world is made up of diverse networks of association which are constituted by that association - by the links rather than the nodes of the network and, more than this, by the traffic through the links.” Taking a leaf from the work of Michel Serres, “the most important elements of the world are counted as the messengers which do the work of keeping networks connected and folding networks into each other. These most prominent performers of association stitch the world together.”

Actor Network Theory was first developed at the Centre de Sociologie de l'Innovation (CSI) of the École nationale supérieure des mines de Paris in the early 1980s by staff (Michel Callon, Madeleine Akrich, Bruno Latour) and visitors (including John Law). The 1984 book co-authored by John Law and fellow-sociologist Peter Lodge (Science for Social Scientists; London: Macmillan Press Ltd.) is a good example of early explorations of how the growth and structure of knowledge could be analysed and interpreted through the interactions of actors and networks. Initially created in an attempt to understand processes of innovation and knowledge-creation in science and technology, the approach drew on existing work in Science and Technology Studies, on studies of large technological systems, and on a range of French intellectual resources including the semiotics of Algirdas Julien Greimas, the writing of philosopher Michel Serres, and the Annales School of history.

A material-semiotic method 

Although it is called a "theory", ANT does not usually explain "why" a network takes the form that it does. Rather, ANT is a way of thoroughly exploring the relational ties within a network (which can be a multitude of different things). As Latour notes, "explanation does not follow from description; it is description taken that much further." It is not, in other words, a theory "of" anything, but rather a method, or a "how-to book" as Latour puts it.

The approach is related to other versions of material-semiotics (notably the work of philosophers Gilles Deleuze, Michel Foucault, and feminist scholar Donna Haraway). It can also be seen as a way of being faithful to the insights of ethnomethodology and its detailed descriptions of how common activities, habits and procedures sustain themselves. Similarities between ANT and symbolic interactionist approaches such as the newer forms of grounded theory like situational analysis, exist, although Latour objects to such a comparison.

Although ANT is mostly associated with studies of science and technology and with the sociology of science, it has been making steady progress in other fields of sociology as well. ANT is adamantly empirical, and as such yields useful insights and tools for sociological inquiry in general. ANT has been deployed in studies of identity and subjectivity, urban transportation systems, and passion and addiction. It also makes steady progress in political and historical sociology.

The spectacle (and spectre) of migration in the "age of the capitalocene".   

When the 21st Biennale of Sydney, in the Australian state of New South Wales, included Ai Weiwei in 2018 as the "star attraction", the Biennale webpage included these images . . .

. . . and this text: 

Ai Weiwei

Born 1957 in Beijing, China

Lives and works in Berlin, Germany

Arguably the most famous Chinese artist living today, much of Ai Weiwei’s work exists in the space between art and activism, often blurring the boundaries between the two. Politically outspoken and an avid user of social media, Ai creates works rich with symbolism and metaphor that draw attention to social injustice. In recent years Ai has focused his practice on advocating for refugees’ human rights, documenting the experiences and conditions faced by millions of people who have been forcibly displaced from their homes. Speaking about the situation, Ai states: ‘There’s no refugee crisis, only a human crisis… In dealing with refugees we’ve lost our very basic values. In this time of uncertainty, we need more tolerance, compassion and trust for each other, since we are all one, otherwise humanity will face an even bigger crisis.’

For the 21st Biennale of Sydney, Ai presents a series of interconnected works across multiple locations. In the Industrial Precinct of Cockatoo Island, Ai’s Law of the Journey, 2017, creates an imposing statement. Featuring a 60-metre-long boat crowded with hundreds of anonymous refugee figures, the work brings the monumental scale of the humanitarian crisis sharply into focus. The inflatable boat and figures are made from black rubber and fabricated in a Chinese factory that also manufactures the precarious vessels used by thousands of refugees attempting to cross the Mediterranean Sea.

Accompanying Law of the Journey is a wallpaper featuring photographs taken by Ai on an iPhone while making the documentary film Human Flow, 2017. Also displayed as part of the installation are four video works. Filmed over several days, At Sea, 2016, shows overcrowded, inflatable rafts delivering a constant flow of people to the shores of the Greek Island of Lesvos. In On the Boat, 2016, Ai stands alone on an partially submerged, inflatable vessel discovered floating in the Mediterranean Sea, the fates of its passengers unknown. Floating, 2016, features footage of the same raft, abandoned to the seemingly limitless expanse of the ocean. Ai Weiwei Drifting, 2017, is a documentary film that follows Ai over the course of one year as he created a series of works focused on the refugee crisis.

Exhibited at Artspace, Crystal Ball, 2017, is a sculptural installation that consists of a large glass sphere cradled by a nest of life jackets. Associated with fortune telling and clairvoyance, a crystal ball or orbuculum is thought to show images that predict the future. Ai’s Crystal Ball reveals a world inverted; a chaotic reality in which millions of people have been forced to leave their homes to escape war and conflict, their futures now uncertain.

Ai’s feature-length documentary, Human Flow, 2017, will also be premiered in Sydney as part of the Biennale program. The film chronicles the global refugee crisis through footage and interviews filmed in more than 23 countries including Greece, Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Sweden and Italy. Human Flow articulates the massive scale of migration while focusing on some of the individual experiences of refugees, humanising a crisis of almost incomprehensible scale.

As the 21st Biennale of Sydney, opened this story appeared in the SBS News website:

Ai Weiwei: Detention centres give Australia a 'bad image' 

Rosemary Bolger writes 13 March 2018: 

Ai Weiwei, one of the world’s leading contemporary artists, has installed a 60-metre inflatable life raft crammed with 300 figures on Cockatoo Island in Sydney.

It’s a giant replica of the perilous journey thousands of refugees have made across the Mediterranean Sea and his contribution to this year’s Biennale of Sydney.

As ‘Law of the Journey’ was unveiled on Monday, Ai called on Australia to take a more compassionate approach towards refugees and criticised the country’s use of detention centres.

"It gives Australia such a bad image, about who Australia is, what the Australian culture really is about," he told SBS News. 

"You often hear politicians say 'stop the boats' or 'build the wall', to build it longer and higher, to create tremendous obstacles for people trying to survive."

Ai has spent the last two years focused on human migration, visiting 40 refugee camps in the making of his documentary ‘Human Flow, a film by Ai Weiwei’.

"They don't want to leave their home, they only leave their home because they are pushed away. We cannot say ‘stop the boats’, ‘build the wall’. We should stop the war, stop the famine, we should educate the young people to have a better future," he said.  

While the installation is bleak, Ai says the reality is far more brutal.

"In this piece, you don't hear the ocean waves, the dangers, the darkness, the coldness of the water. You don't see children, babies crying with no parents ... You don't see older people 80, 90 years, trying to survive the journey, trying to come to a land in which nobody even accepts them."

Life in exile

Ai is himself a refugee of China and known for his criticism of the country’s government. He was detained in China for 81 days without charge in 2011 over “economic crimes” and says his experience gives him an insight into the plight of refugees.

"I was born as a dissident because my father was exiled. I grew up in exile camps far from home, being neglected and discriminated. That prepared me for understanding those people who are voiceless and discriminated."

The Australian government's policy towards refugees includes negative optics! Deliberately!

Brutal treatment of migrants is supposed to function as a deterrent, but in the end, it is just brutal treatment!

This short history of Nauru is an example of the Capitalocene in miniature. Rapacious mining stripped 80% of Nauru, leaving its land unusable. Its government is in no position to refuse the money Australia provides, and the jobs that the offshore detention facility for refugees brings to the population.

This article for the Guardian (Tue 9 Aug 2016) by Ben Doherty is headlined:

A short history of Nauru, Australia's dumping ground for refugees

The article begins with this stark statement as a subheading: 

Its phosphate reserves once made a speck in the Pacific one of the richest countries on Earth. Today Nauru is broke, barren and beholden to its neighbour.

Australia has twice used Nauru – and its beholden and broke government – as a remote site for the “offshore processing” of people who seek asylum and protection. What began as a hurried political response to the arrival of one boat, the MV Tampa, on Australia’s northern horizon has metamorphosed over a decade and a half into a standing permanent policy, with the support of both the country’s major political parties.

It is current government policy that no person who arrives in the country by boat seeking asylum (plane arrivals are not subject to “mandatory detention”) is ever settled in Australia. Instead, they are sent to Nauru, or to Papua New Guinea’s Manus Island, for “offshore processing”, a bleak dysphemism because no genuine resettlement ever takes place.

In effect, people accused of no crime are warehoused in appalling conditions in arbitrary and indefinite detention. Dozens of countries, the United Nations, and rights groups including Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch, have documented and condemned the illegal detention.

In comparison with the size of the world’s forced migration challenge, the numbers are tiny. The latest statistics, for the end of June, show there are 442 asylum seekers and refugees living in the Nauru “regional processing centre”, including 49 children. Several hundred more live “in the community” of Nauru. They fall outside the scope of the government’s statistics but remain stuck on the tiny island. The “travel documents” some have been issued are not travel documents at all. They do not allow their holders to travel anywhere.

More than three-quarters (77%) of those forcibly sent by Australia to Nauru whose asylum claims have been assessed have been found to be refugees. They have a “well-founded fear of persecution” and are legally owed protection. But no refugees will be resettled permanently on Nauru. The island’s government has avowedly refused to let anyone stay longer than five years. Other places will need to be found. So far the Australian government has found only one other country willing to take part in this state-sponsored “country shopping”: Cambodia. At a cost of more than $40m, it has managed to resettle one person. A single Rohingyan man.

The first Nauru experiment began in 2001, after the Tampa crisis, when a Norwegian freighter that had rescued more than 400 mainly Afghan Hazara refugees from their sinking vessel in international waters 140km north of Christmas Island was refused entry into Australian waters, in defiance of international law. With boats carrying asylum seekers arriving consistently – as they have on and off since the mid-1970s – and with immigration proving a divisive, possibly critical issue in a federal election campaign, the MV Tampa provided the conservative Coalition government with a catalyst for action. That was the establishment of “offshore detention” camps on Nauru and on Papua New Guinea, the so-called Pacific solution.

Rescued asylum seekers on board the MV Tampa, north of Christmas Island, in August 2001. The Norwegian freighter was denied entry to Australian waters in a standoff that led to the establishment of offshore detention camps on Nauru and Manus Island. 

The camps were designed to be punitive and were widely promoted as a deterrent, to discourage anybody from seeking sanctuary in Australia by boat. “We will decide who comes to this country and the manner in which they come,” John Howard said as he made this policy the centrepiece of his re-election campaign. He was returned with an increased majority.

The first Nauru regime ran until 2007. The camp was bedevilled by problems: overcrowded tents and a shortage of water were the most pressing. Slowly it was established that, overwhelmingly, those who had come by boat were not “queue jumpers” or criminals or terrorists (a claim regularly made by ministers, despite being refuted by the government’s own national security chief) but rather people fleeing genuine persecution and who were owed protection. Most were resettled, and mostly in Australia. The Nauru detention regime ended in farce, with Australia at one point paying for the massive bureaucracy of an entire incarceration centre housing just two Iraqi men, both of whom were found to be refugees and were resettled.

Nauru’s second iteration as an isle of detention, instituted by a Labor government and carried on with unswerving determination by the current Liberal-National Coalition government, began in 2012. Again, an increase in the number of boats arriving – this time allied to concern about deaths at sea (not a rationale cited in 2001) – sparked a return to the former policy. Nauru and Manus, both of which had been mothballed, and condemned by the then immigration minister, Chris Evans, as “a cynical, costly and ultimately unsuccessful exercise”, were redeveloped at a cost of billions of dollars.

The problems are undiminished. But the second Nauru detention regime has been kept carefully hidden. Foreign journalists – save for a handful of selected reporters – are forbidden entry to the island. A media visa is a theoretical possibility – at the inflated price of $8,000 an application – but requests from the Guardian and other independent media organisations, even for the visa application form, are met with stony silence.

Still, some information leaks out. Refugees and asylum seekers have their communications closely monitored but still they speak out, in letters and electronic messages, in shaky, hand-held phone videos – such as the horrific footage of Omid Masoumali who, in protest against the conditions under which he is held, doused himself in petrol and set himself alight, burning to death.

Dr Peter Young, formerly the chief psychiatrist responsible for the care of asylum seekers in detention on Manus and Nauru, described the camps as “inherently toxic” and said the immigration department deliberately harmed vulnerable detainees in a process akin to torture.

Last year the government passed the Australian Border Force Act, which carries a prison sentence of up to two years for any staff member within offshore detention who makes an “unauthorised disclosure” – that is, speaks publicly about conditions inside the camps.

While the new law has had a chilling effect on some, many former and current staff continue to speak out in defiance of the law.

In June the traumatologist and psychologist Paul Stevenson told the Guardian that in 40 years working with the victims of terrorist attacks and natural disasters, the conditions in Nauru and Manus camps were the worst “atrocity” he had ever seen.

Wealth squandered

Nauru has its own complex history, a past it is trying to disentangle itself from.

The smallest island nation in the world is a bare 21 sq km – the size of an international airport – in the middle of the Pacific. Inhabited for at least 3,000 years, originally by 12 Polynesian and Micronesian tribes, its nearest neighbour, Kirabati, is 300km of empty ocean away.

A German colony in the 19th century and an Australian protectorate until the middle of the 20th, Nauru was once one of the richest places on Earth.

The island is largely made up of phosphate and in the “glory days” of the 1960s and 70s almost the entire country was stripmined for the valuable commodity, which was packed up and shipped off to be used as fertiliser around the world.

In the years post-independence in 1968, Nauru had the second-highest per-capita GDP in the world, behind only oil-rich Saudi Arabia. But the resource curse bit, and bit hard, and the money is now gone, squandered by a series of corrupt and incompetent governments who found extravagant and spectacular ways to lose the country’s wealth (including, notoriously, funding a disastrous West End musical based on the life of Leonardo da Vinci).

Nauru spent years in desperate penury. The country literally ran out of money. Its central bank went broke, its real estate overseas was repossessed, its planes seized off airport runways.

The outpost nation became a haven for money launderers – a billion dollars of Russian mafia money is estimated to have been washed through it – and its officials were reduced to selling passports.

Nauru even used its membership of the UN general assembly as a money-making exercise, accepting tens of millions of dollars in exchange for “recognising” countries, such as the Russian-backed breakaway republics Abkhazia and South Ossetia.

Its government was debased but it was Nauru’s people who suffered. Rapacious mining stripped 80% of the country, leaving it a barren moonscape of jagged rock, entirely unsuitable for agriculture, industry, forestry or even sport and recreation. When the phosphate ran out, unemployment hit 90% and the school system collapsed almost entirely, cruelling the futures of a generation.

Nauru’s land was left unusable and its people unwell – the population of 9,000 suffers extreme levels of diabetes, heart disease and obesity.

Twenty-first century Nauru, with scarce indigenous industry, is now overwhelmingly reliant on foreign aid for its economic survival. Australia is its chief and most unquestioning benefactor.

But it is not an easy relationship. Australia has rarely treated its weaker neighbour benignly. In 1993, for instance, Australia agreed to pay reparations for its mismanagement of the mining that destroyed Nauru’s natural environment (but only after Nauru took Australia to the international court of justice).

Nauru’s is a painful position for a country to be in, and vulnerability attends its weakness. The country needs Australia. As much as it might like to, it cannot say no to Australia’s comparative economic might.

It has become an archetypal “client state”.

Australia’s “proposal” of offshore processing is heard in Nauru as insistence. The government is in no position to refuse, and besides, the massive stimulus of hundreds of millions of Australian dollars, and jobs for an under-employed workforce, outweighs the fierce hostility that many – not all – in the Nauruan community hold for the refugees imposed upon their island.

Australia and Nauru, by dint of geography and history, have pasts and presents intertwined. But it is through a shared interest in the detention of asylum seekers that the two countries are now so inextricably bound.

Nauru and Australia need each other, they need the detention centre and those detained therein: one for economic survival, the other for the political expediency of “sending a message” about seeking sanctuary in this part of the world.

But both are diminished by what happens in that place. And both know it.

Nauru briefing . . .

. . . the casual brutality of Australia's offshore detention regime!

This recent Opinion piece, published in the Guardian (Fri 2 Oct 2020) by Jane McAdam, scientia professor of law and director of the Kaldor Centre for International Refugee Law, UNSW Sydney, and Madeline Gleeson, senior research associate at the Kaldor Centre and the author of Offshore: Behind the Wire on Manus and Nauru (NewSouth Publishing, 2016), broadens the critique of government policy on the Australian treatment of refugees to the rightwing, ideologically inspired, aspirations of the UK government. But this goes back much further in the record of its predecessors, including Tony Blair's Labour government. 

The Opinion piece runs under the headline and subheading:

Australia's offshore asylum centres have been a cruel disaster. They must not be replicated by the UK

Offshore processing has caused extreme trauma and cost billions that could have gone towards more effective, humane alternatives

For most of the past two decades, Australia has run “offshore processing centres” in the small Pacific countries of Nauru and Papua New Guinea (PNG). These centres – described as “torture” by refugees and asylum seekers who have been forced to live in them – have been condemned in countless independent reports from doctors, human rights experts, UN agencies and parliamentary inquiries. So news that the UK government may develop its own offshore system is alarming. Australia’s experience demonstrates that offshore processing breaks people, destroys lives and shatters the possibility of hope for the future.

The idea of externalised asylum processing has been debated in Europe for the past 35 years. The UK has been a key proponent (alongside Denmark, the Netherlands, Italy and Spain) under both Tory and Labour governments, with the Australian model – and its US precedent – providing direct inspiration. In 2003, the Blair government proposed to establish refugee processing centres outside Europe, but these were ultimately rejected by other European Union (EU) member states – not least given their non-compliance with international law. The UK government itself acknowledged it would need to withdraw from both the UN Refugee Convention and the European Convention on Human Rights to avoid violating the law.

The current UK government is wrong to imply that Brexit (and release from the EU asylum directives) would greenlight offshore processing. The UK’s obligations under international law and European human rights law remain.

For any offshore processing scheme to be lawful, the human rights and protection needs of all asylum seekers, refugees and migrants who encounter it must be respected. This includes procedures to identify – case by case – whether people will be at risk of persecution or other serious harm in the country where the centre is located (or in any other place to which that country might send them). This can be very time-consuming and resource-intensive. EU experience shows that it can take longer for a transfer decision to be made than for a substantive asylum claim to be considered.

As a matter of international law, governments cannot outsource legal responsibility for asylum seekers simply by moving them somewhere else. At a minimum, asylum seekers must not be sent back to serious harm, and must have access to a fair, impartial refugee status determination procedure and be able to find a safe, durable solution to their plight. Special attention must be given to children, the elderly, pregnant women, and sufferers of torture or trauma.

Far from providing answers to these legal complications, Australia’s offshore processing arrangements underscore the problems.

First, the model does not work. When Australia reintroduced offshore processing in 2012, it was intended to be a “circuit breaker” to deter increasing numbers of asylum seekers coming by boat. But the opposite happened: more people arrived in the first 10 months of the policy than at any other time in Australian history. Within three months, the forecasted capacity of the offshore detention centres had been exceeded, meaning the majority of those who came would never be sent offshore.

Second, the model kicks the problem down the road. Of the 3,127 people sent to PNG and Nauru, about 360 remain in limbo – even though most of them have officially been recognised as refugees. Some have been languishing there for as long as seven years. More than a thousand others were medically evacuated back to Australia on account of critical health concerns that could not be treated offshore. The Australian government refuses to allow any offshore refugee to settle permanently in Australia, and neither Nauru nor PNG offers long-term options, which means Australia needs other countries to come to the rescue. More than 700 refugees have been resettled in the United States under a one-off deal brokered by Barack Obama, but that option is not available to all.

Third, people held offshore have been subjected to cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment – even torture, according to former detainee and writer Behrouz Boochani. When the first groups of people were forcibly transferred to Nauru and PNG’s Manus Island, they were forced to live in hot tents, ill-suited to the climate, infested with insects and rats, subject to blistering heating in the day, flooding in tropical storms, and no privacy.

A steady deterioration in people’s mental and physical health ensued. Their suffering has been described by medical experts as the worst they have seen – worse than in war zones and refugee camps around the world. The cumulative rate of mental illness is more than 80%. Refugee children as young as seven have displayed suicidal behaviour. Many have been exposed to physical and sexual abuse; some have self-harmed. With no hopes for the future, they display signs of traumatic withdrawal (or resignation) syndrome. One affected child was finally evacuated from Nauru unconscious, having gradually stopped speaking, eating and drinking.

Indeed, despite – or in fact, because of – Australia’s hardline approach, thousands of refugees have had to be medically evacuated to Australia. Many refugees have been more traumatised by the hopeless conditions offshore than by the trauma occasioned by the persecutors they fled.

Finally, offshore processing costs Australian taxpayers more than 50 times as much as letting asylum seekers live in the community. For a time, this expenditure rose at a rate of 129% annually. The government has spent A$7.6bn to keep 3,000 people confined in abysmal conditions – a costly warning to others who might dare to seek Australia’s sanctuary.

Australia has “gotten away” with successive and continuing human rights violations because it has no constitutionally guaranteed charter of rights, nor any regional human rights treaty or court against or by which its conduct can be assessed. The UK, as a party to the European Convention on Human Rights, would not be able to evade its legal responsibilities in the same way.

A successful refugee policy not only manages national borders, but it also protects people who need safety. Australia’s offshore processing regime has caused extreme trauma. It has cost billions of dollars that could have gone towards more effective and humane alternatives. 

It should not be replicated. Ever.

On the day preceding the publication of this column (Thu 1 Oct 2020) another Opinion piece in the Guardian by Robert Verkaik was headlined:

British plans to 'offshore' asylum seekers have a long and grubby history

Under the subheading: 

Emulating the controversial Australian policy would treat refugees as criminals with no right to a fair hearing in the UK

Robert Verkaik writes: 

The home secretary, Priti Patel, has reportedly been exploring a range of outlandish plans for sending refugees who arrive on British shores to very faraway places.

The week began with a Whitehall leak that revealed officials had been asked to consider setting up an immigration centre on Ascension Island, over 4,000 miles away in the South Atlantic. When that idea was kiboshed, further leaks identified other territories being considered for extraterritorial processing, including Moldova, Morocco and Papua New Guinea.

Britain has a long and rather grubby history of sending people to faraway territories in order to solve political problems. The principle that out of sight is out of mind first underpinned the establishment of penal colonies where hundreds of thousands of criminals and other “undesirables” were banished throughout the British empire.

Other European states have followed suit, the most famous example of such a place being Devil’s Island, in French Guiana. More recently, in 2002, the United States started using Guantánamo Bay, a US naval base on the southern tip of Cuba, as a detention centre for handling hundreds of “unlawful combatants” that it refused to put on trial in the US.

In the past two decades governments have toyed with this extraterritorial solution to try to “look tough” in the face of small numbers of desperate people arriving in Britain. In so doing, asylum seekers – who share with you and me the legal right to seek refuge – are being treated as criminals.

It was a Labour government in 2003 that first came up with the idea of using offshore immigration processing centres. The context was a rise in asylum applications to the UK, which had seen a 20-fold increase over 15 years. Having already considered both harsh clampdowns and amnesties for deterring asylum seekers, the then home secretary, David Blunkett, enthusiastically supported by Tony Blair, floated a number of proposals for immigration centres outside the UK.

He suggested creating “regional protection zones”, which would be in, or next to, areas witnessing major flows of people. These zones would offer a safe haven to those fleeing persecution but keep them within touch of their home countries.

His second proposal was to create “transit centres” on the fringes of the European Union, which would hold all applicants heading west and handle applications for those seeking to enter the UK. The list of proposed sites for these centres has a rather familiar ring, and included nations on the major transit routes such as Turkey, Somalia and Morocco.

Blunkett’s ideas received the welcome backing of a number of thinktanks, including Demos. But, not to be outdone by New Labour, the Tories followed up a few months later with their own proposals.

The then shadow home secretary, Oliver Letwin, went to the Conservative party conference in October 2003 promising that all asylum seekers arriving in Britain would be immediately deported to a “far-offshore processing” island. Letwin told the conference in Blackpool: “We will replace the present asylum system, in its entirety, with a system of quotas for genuine refugees and the offshore processing of all claims, to deter all but genuine claims for protection from persecution.”

And he made clear that under this policy all asylum seekers who reached Britain would find the door closed firmly in their faces. “There will be no applications in the United Kingdom,” he said.

Asylum welfare groups reacted to the plan with horror ,and there followed an instant chorus of disapproval on human rights grounds. The Refugee Council said it was “unlawful, inhumane and ridiculous”. Its deputy chief executive, Margaret Lally, said: “The UK is committed under international law to providing a safe haven for those fleeing persecution.” Others compared the policy to plans more associated with wartime emergencies

But the Tory idea turned out to be half-baked when Letwin admitted that he did not “have the slightest idea” where the island would be.

However, it is the immigration policy of a former British colony that has given new life to the current home secretary’s offshoring designs. Asylum seekers stopped in boats in Australian waters are held in facilities on the offshore islands of Nauru and Manus Island under a policy called Operation Sovereign Borders. There is another one, on Christmas Island. The government seems to believe that if this can work for Australia, there is no reason to stop Britain doing the same.

But these notorious facilities have been a source of much controversy during their time of operation. There have been a number of riots and escapes, as well as accusations of human rights abuses from organisations including Amnesty International, the Australian Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission, Human Rights Watch and the United Nations.

The British government’s reliance on the Australian “solution” to a refugee crisis risks once again dangerously muddling refugees’ rights with those of people convicted of criminal offences. This is a slippery constitutional slope that could cast us adrift from well-established international law. 

Instead of adopting humane policies for the processing of asylum seekers, the government seems keen to create legal black holes for people who have the right to a fair hearing on British soil. 

The LODE project of 1992 references the background to the present situation in the questions and Information Wrap relating to the LODE cargo created in Port Adelaide, South Australia and a news story in the THE WESTERN AUSTRALIAN, March 25, 1992, referring to events unfolding in another Australian location for the creation of LODE cargo - Port Hedland:

Boat people detained at a Port Hedland detention centre continued their hunger strike yesterday. Immigration Department officials had expected the protest to end on Monday night. The protest began last Friday after the 56 boat people who arrived on WA's far north coast earlier this year were told their applications for refugee status had been rejected. Earlier this week, a Roman Catholic priest, father Larry Reitmeyer, said the boat people told him the protest would end on Monday night.

Port Adelaide 

LODE 1992 and Re:LODE 2017 Cargo of Questions - Port Adelaide 

Adelaide, established in 1837, was initially an experiment in free enterprise colonisation. It failed due to bad management and the British government had to take over from the bankrupt organisers and bail the settlement out of trouble. 

Port Adelaide was the disembarkation point for thousands of immigrants from Europe, and not just from Great Britain. 

In the aftermath of the Pacific war against the Japanese in WWII, Australian politicians became acutely fearful of the country's security, the perceived threat coming from Communist Asia. This ethnocentric anxiety was translated into an immigration programme from eastern Europe. 

'Populate or Perish' was the slogan that accompanied an influx of 800,000 non-British immigrants.  

They joined a population that already represented diverse origins, including the Lutherans of Hahndorf who formed a settlement in 1839, 29 km south-east of Adelaide. They had left Prussia to escape religious persecution. The town took its name from the ship's captain Hahn.

The original questions posed in the LODE Artliner leaflet included:

What is a boat person?

Where do they come from?

Is a boat person less than a person?

In a country where most of the population originated in lands all over the Earth, isn't everyone descended from a boat person?

There are two museums along the LODE Zone Line in Australia that document and present the stories of migration and the history of Australia. One is in Melbourne, Victoria, and is called the Immigration Museum, and is located on Flinders Street, in the Old Customs House. 

The other museum is the Migration Museum located in Adelaide. 

Migration? Immigration? Emigration? What's in a word? 

Re:LODE Radio considers this a question worth asking, especially in the case of either the raw or nuanced differences in the use of these words, words that are applied to different histories that turn out to be ALL OUR SHARED HISTORIES!

Why do people migrate?

A big question! And there are billions of answers, probably approaching a greater proportion of the number of people who have ever lived (See NOTE below). This is because migration is undertaken by people when necessary, and at the most basic level, for survival. 

Migration is a survival strategy!

NOTE: 100 billion

Recent estimates of the "total number of people who have ever lived" are in the order of 100 billion. This number is equal to  the number of dollars, falling in value, on this banknote issued by the Reserve Bank of Zimbabwe on 21 July 2008. 

Hyperinflation and unemployment has driven millions of Zimbabweans to cross the border into South Africa and risk abuse and exploitation.

This is emigration! 

The categorisation of classes of movement by people as "migration", "immigration" and "emigration", ends up being the result of establishing "a point of view". In Samir Amin's work on Eurocentrism he points to the fact that European populations and societies have benefitted from the power (manifested in ruthless military capability and violence) to "export the surplus population" to the "American" continents of the "New World" (and Australasia), lands where the Indigenous People were, to use the terminology of gangsterism, "rubbed out", 1940's slang for murder, and/or erasure of text, that is by extension, an erasure from history. 

Migrants? Refugees? 

Then there is the distinction that governments and international organisations make between migrants and refugees. Migrants are defined as those people who migrate voluntarily from their countries of origin to another country, as for example, Australia, for a variety of reasons – economic, political, religious and/or social – but, essentially, their migration is one of choice. By contrast, refugees are defined initially according to the United Nations’ 1951 Convention and the 1967 Protocol relating to the Status of Refugees. 

These state that a refugee is

. . . someone, who owing to a well-founded fear of being persecuted for reasons of race, religion, nationality, membership of a particular social group or political opinion, is outside the country of his nationality and is unable, or, owing to such fear, is unwilling to avail himself of the protection of that country, or who, not having a nationality and being outside the country of his former habitual residence, is unable or, owing to such a fear, unwilling to return to it.

Implied in this definition is the involuntary nature of migration for a refugee, i.e. the lack of choice. As with the term “migrant”, the refugee may be an adult or a child, the latter being accompanied with family or kin or else alone. However, it is generally agreed that the 1951 and 1967 definitions of a refugee are now too limiting in relation to “the diversity and complexity of forced population movements that are occurring today” and which are not necessarily the result of persecution. Consequently, the United Nations has made amendments to this basic definition to allow for situations outside of the Second World War “displaced persons” scenario. The first of these amendments came in 1969 with the African Convention on Refugee Problems and the second in 1984 with the Cartagena Declaration. Both widen the criteria on which the definition is based to relate to changing global and national circumstances.

The African Convention on Refugee Problems amended the 1951 Convention by including “people fleeing external aggression, internal strife or events seriously disturbing public order” within their countries of origin, while the Cartagena Declaration included “persons who have fled their countries because their lives, safety or freedom have been threatened by generalised violence, foreign aggression, internal conflicts, massive violations of human rights, or other circumstances which have seriously disturbed public order”.

Other definitional issues arise out of the generic use of both terms. The term “migrant” often includes “refugee” and it should be recognised that most “refugees”, if they settle permanently in the country of asylum, will become migrant citizens of refugee origin. 

The term “refugee” itself is used also to cover a broad range of specific terms which come under the UNCHR’s phrase “persons of concern.” Such people include not just refugees but also asylum-seekers, returnees, internally displaced persons and others such as stateless persons. Overall, the UNHCR argues that “any person who [has] applied to be granted refugee status” should be termed an “asylum-seeker whether they are in the country in which they have sought asylum lawfully or unlawfully.” It should be noted that the UNHCR definition of “asylum-seeker” contrasts markedly with the popular view, often expressed in the Australian media and also shared by certain government personnel, especially of the government under Prime Minister John Howard, which viewed asylum-seekers as “illegal immigrants.”

More useful in the Australian context is the definition of “asylum-seeker” given by Sandie Cornish – “asylum-seeker has come to be used to delineate those refugees whose status is still undetermined." 

Her definition relates to the need in Australia since c.1980 to distinguish between refugees and overseas visitors who arrived in Australia legally but who have overstayed their visas and become genuinely illegal. They need to be distinguished from off-shore refugees in transit camps and other locations outside Australia who are applying formally for refugee status and resettlement, and on-shore asylum-seekers placed in detention camps within Australia while their applications for refugee status are being processed.

Another controversial definitional category is that of “economic refugees”, i.e. those who flee economic conditions that threaten their lives and physical safety. 

The popular idea that such people need to be treated differently from those who emigrate simply to improve their economic and social position, needs to be challenged. This idea is, as far as Re:LODE Radio is concerned is;  

the ultimate hypocrisy!

More recently, this category has come to be associated with the relatively new category of “climate change” or “environmental refugees”, the number of whom are growing in response to the effects of climate change.

Museums and migration . . .

It is not surprising that the list of Migration Museums on the MUSEUMS AND MIGRATION website reflects a European world view of migration, with only a couple of museums offering a different world view perspective. One is in India, the Partition Museum, Amritsar, Punjab, and along the LODE Zone Line . . .

. . . presenting the huge scale, colonial trauma and migratory phenomenon of 1947 in India and Pakistan, repeated in 2020 during this the year of the pandemic. 

Re:LODE Radio article: India's biggest internal migration . . . 

The only other museum with a clearly non-eurocentric view is to be found  in Japan, the Japanese Overseas Migration Museum, Yokohama.

Along the LODE Zone Line there are a number of "Emigration" museums that, unavoidably, represent a eurocentric context, but those museums that tell the stories about leaving, departure, emigration, shape a different story, however nuanced, from those that are about the stories of arrivals.

Museums and the narratives of diaspora and departure along the LODE Zone Line

The Migration Museum Adelaide is the oldest museum of its kind in Australia. Opening in November 1986, the museum aims to promote cultural diversity and multiculturalism, which they define as including aspects of ethnicity, class, gender, age and region. 

In 1993 the Migration Museum published its aims:

• To preserve, document and interpret the history and cultural diversity of the people of South Australia.
• To create greater awareness in the community of the history and cultural traditions of the many groups who have immigrated to and settled in South Australia since 1836.

In 1992 the LODE project referenced the hunger strike of refugees, reported to be taking place by THE WESTERN AUSTRALIAN on March 25, in the detention centre that had been set up in Port Hedland by the Australian government on 5 May the previous year. By 1992 it was far from being an acceptable place for refugees fleeing civil conflict in Cambodia, people labelled by the media, and therefore by everyone, as "boat people", a term first used for the thousands of Vietnamese who fled their country by sea following the collapse of the South Vietnamese government in 1975. Crowded into small vessels, they were prey to pirates, and many suffered dehydration, starvation, and death by drowning. The particular irony of the use of such a term in Australia is the way this definition of the undesirable "other" is as if the European and white population of Australia had arrived some generations before by some means of transportation other than by a boat or ship of some kind or another. The history of the British American colonies, and later, following American independence, the British Australian colony of New South Wales, is entirely enmeshed in the British policy of penal transportation or transportation, the relocation of convicted criminals, or other persons regarded as undesirable, to a distant place. 

The Labor government of Australia, under Bob Hawke (born in Bordertown, the site of the creation of LODE cargo), introduced the Migration Legislation Amendment Act in 1989 to change the system of processing boat arrivals. It allowed immigration officials, at their discretion, to detain anyone suspected of being an ‘illegal entrant’.

The Act was intended to address the uncontrolled arrival of large numbers of Cambodian refugees, although only 26 Cambodians arrived by boat that year.

Cooke Point, Port Hedland when the buildings were still owned by BHP

On 5 May 1991 the Australian Government requisitioned BHP’s defunct single men’s quarters in Port Hedland to use as a detention centre for refugees fleeing civil conflict in Cambodia.

This significant moment in Australian history was a key step in the development of a policy of mandatory detention applied to people arriving in Australia without a visa, regardless of their method of arrival. 

Purchased from the archetypal Australian transnational mining company BHP for $1 million, the centre was divided into nine accommodation blocks. Designed originally to house single workers employed by BHP Iron Ore, the rooms are no larger than jail cells. BHP workers often referred to them as “dog boxes”.

Refugees escape to the roof top of one of the blocks at the Port Hedland detention facility. 

By the time of the 1992 press report of the hunger strike protests by refugees detained in the most appalling conditions, that were lasting for months, months that would become years for some, the Roman Catholic Father Larry Reitmeyer was gaining a reputation for being a troublesome priest as far as the authorities were concerned. For others he was becoming a powerful advocate for the refugees, supporting their rights and interests, and gaining an increasingly influential public profile as a rights activist. 

Senator McKiernan, a virulent anti-refugee in his approach, speaking under parliamentary privilege said of Father Reitmeyer:

". . . the Catholic Priest who purports to look after things for the refugees in Port Hedland. Recently he was barred from any further contact with the people in the Port Hedland detention centre. I do not think Australia, with its 17 million or 18 million people, needs citizens of the United States of America to tell us how we should handle our affairs. If anything grates the public of this country, it is foreigners coming here telling us how to do things and how they could do it better" 

(Parliamentary Debates, Senate, 7 December 1992, No. 20 1992, p. 4299). 

The high dudgeon and resentment expressed by Senator McKiernan at this "foreigner" interfering in Australian matters of policy, when moral and ethical issues were raised concerning the inhumane treatment of desperate refugees, says it all.

Reitmeyer was generally highly regarded for his work at Port Hedland and, of course, he suffered the same criticism as others who had the audacity to criticise the Government and the Department on refugee matters.

The role of an American Catholic Priest is partly explained by the Catholic Church in Australia's social justice policy. On the last Sunday in September 1991, on what is known in the Catholic Church as 'Social Justice Sunday,' an issues paper was produced by the Australian Catholic Social Justice Council. It dealt with the social justice and immigration and was entitled:  

'I am a stranger Will you welcome me?'

 

Barbed comments followed by barbed-wire . . . 

The nine blocks in the detention facility were separated from each other in 1995 by barbed-wire internal fences. By 1999 three of the blocks served as isolation units for new arrivals in order to prevent the refugees from communicating with each other. By 1999 the treatment and conditions of accommodation in the Port Hedland detention facility were so appalling that it led to desperate attempts by refugees to seek escape from conditions that amount to "incarceration" as a form of punishment.  

This report from 1999 by Joe Lopez (12 Aug 1999) published by the World Socialist Web Site for the International Committee of the Fourth International casts a critical perspective on an inhumane government policy. The headline for Joe Lopez's report ran:  

Refugees mount protests and escapes at remote Australian detention centre

Overcrowding and inhumane conditions have led to a series of escapes and protests at the Australian government's Immigration Detention Centre at Port Hedland. As of last month, over 690 refugees were being detained at the 700-bed centre, in the country's remote northwest.

The facility resembles a military-style concentration camp. In a rare media report, the West Australian provided a glimpse of the conditions. “Usually it is two to a room, but with overcrowding, up to four men live in a room designed for one person,” the newspaper related. “Fences are lined with barbed wire and the cyclone screens which cover the windows give the centre a military air.”

Since June there have been three separate escapes and two major protests reported in the media. In June, 11 refugees escaped. In July about 30 Chinese refugees, who were being kept in isolation, barricaded themselves in a common room in an hour-long standoff with security officers. They were protesting their impending deportation. They had also been denied access to telephones.

In late July, 26 refugees, believed to be from China, escaped less than 24 hours after a breakout by four refugees in the early hours of the previous morning. Immigration security officials and local police were mobilised and most escapees were quickly caught.

Marion Le, from the Independent Council for Refugee Advocacy, said the centre had become a flashpoint for violence. “Overcrowding in this sort of situation when people are already highly stressed is going to lead to some really serious problems. These people don't speak the same language and have different backgrounds, and they're in the middle of a stressful process which they don't always understand.”

But the response of the Howard government, backed by the opposition Labor Party immigration spokesman Con Sciacca, has been to call for the establishment of a new facility to cater for a further 200 refugees.

According to media reports, the town of Kambalda in Western Australia's eastern goldfields has expressed interest in providing a facility, in the hope of creating employment following the loss of hundreds of jobs due to the falling price of gold and the subsequent closure of a number of mines.

The previous Labor government established the Port Hedland detention centre in the early 1990s. Purchased from Australian transnational company BHP for $1 million, the centre is divided into nine accommodation blocks. Designed originally to house single workers employed by BHP Iron Ore, the rooms are no larger than jail cells. BHP workers often referred to them as “dog boxes”. The nine blocks were separated from each other in 1995 by barbed-wire internal fences. Three of the blocks now serve as isolation units for new arrivals in order to prevent the refugees from communicating with each other.

Port Hedland is situated 1,641 kilometres north-west of Perth, on the edge of the Great Sandy Desert. The region has a mean maximum temperature in the summer months of 45 degrees celsius. The facility was privatised by the Howard government in December 1997 and is managed and operated by Australasian Correctional Management, a subsidiary of the American security giant Wackenhut Corporation. Wackenhut manages more than 30 detention centres and jails worldwide, including prisons in the Australian states of New South Wales, Queensland and Victoria.

The refugees currently imprisoned at Port Hedland come from a number of countries. Although many are from China, others have arrived from Afghanistan, Turkey, Algeria, Iraq, Iran, Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, Indonesia, Thailand, Vietnam, Cambodia and Somalia—countries ravaged by war, political persecution, ethnic cleansing, mass unemployment, poverty and starvation.

Aside from the intolerable overcrowded conditions that the refugees — men, women and children — have had to endure, reports have emerged describing the physical and psychological impact of detention.

In May this year the Senate Legal and Constitutional References Committee commenced an inquiry into the operation of Australia's refugee and humanitarian programs. The inquiry was begun after the government's Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission (HREOC) had received 58 complaints since 1990 of human rights abuses from refugees and individuals and groups representing them. From January 1996, complaints relating to Port Hedland increased by 1,000 percent.

As part of the inquiry, HREOC produced a report titled, Those who've come across the seas: detention of unauthorised arrivals, tabled in federal parliament in May 1998. The report begins by quoting the experiences of a Chinese refugee awaiting deportation:

“In the last year of my detention at Port Hedland I was in a bad state emotionally. Most nights I would lie in bed feeling nervous wondering about what would happen to us. We had not heard anything for a long time about our court case and felt we could be deported any day. The guards checking on us every night also disturbed our sleep. I would prefer to stay in Australia but it has taken so long to get a response from the department I have lost heart. That is why I requested to go back to China. I don't want to go back to China because of what happened to me there and because my son would have to be cared for by someone else as I will be imprisoned... I have been in detention for one year and still do not know what is happening.”

The main issues raised in the complaints were:

• the length and indefinite nature of the period of detention and the effects of this on detainees' physical and mental health
• people not being told of their right to request access to legal advice when they are taken into detention
• delays in prisoners receiving responses to requests for legal assistance to make applications to stay in Australia
• people being held in isolation from other parts of the immigration detention centre and the world outside
• the use of force to control disturbances and restrain people
• the general conditions of detention, such as food, medical services, education, recreation facilities, the level of security, privacy, sleeping arrangements and accommodation of detainees of different religions

The most serious findings of human rights violations related to the segregation of new prisoners and the inappropriate management of detainees' behavior, including the misuse of observation rooms, physical and chemical restraints and transfers to police cells and prisons.

One Vietnamese refugee held since July 1994 wrote: “Unlimited time of the imprisonment and other problems make us feel like we are dangerous criminals. Luckily we are not. The more we are staying, the more our spirit is going to be worse seriously. At last my friend ... tried to commit suicide by taking tablets on 13 May 1997. Luckily he was rescued on time...

“We are not [allowed] to take excursion normally ... [and inside] the camp fences are everywhere so that we cannot go back and forth comfortably. In Galang camp (Indonesia) I had been on the beach every Sunday and public holiday for the whole day without police watching.”

A Chinese woman who had arrived in 1995 in Darwin by boat lodged a complaint that she was attacked by security guards after taking an extra piece of fruit from the compound's dining room. Despite the Cantonese speaking woman's attempts to explain to the security guards that she was given the piece of fruit by one of the kitchen staff and repeated requests for an interpreter, she was escorted to an observation room. There, according to the guards, she removed her clothing and attempted to hang herself with her clothes. A mental health nurse working at the centre was called on to administer intravenous sedatives to her.

In another case, a group of 22 hunger strikers facing deportation attempted mass suicide by slashing their wrists after taunts and verbal abuse by a manager. They were handcuffed by security guards, put in solitary confinement and some were injected with sedatives. The use of sedatives is said to be commonplace when detainees are being prepared for deportation.

HREOC was told by security guards that the Department of Immigration's policy for those involved in hunger strikes and protests was to confine them to isolation and withdraw privileges.

Port Hedland is not the only cause for concern. The HREOC report found serious human rights violations with the use of Villawood Stage One and Perth detention centres for long-term imprisonment. It condemned the lack of privacy, inadequate recreation facilities, poor educational opportunities and restrictions on movement.

The Villawood centre is located on the site of the disused Westbridge Migrant hostel in south-western Sydney. It is made up of two segregated blocks — Stage One and Stage Two. Stage One is described as a purpose-built medium security detention centre. Stage Two is referred to as a low security facility. According to the HREOC report, refugees are transferred from Stage Two to Stage One if their behavior becomes difficult to manage, they have a medical condition or they are awaiting deportation. Villawood is used primarily for the detention of people arriving at airports or who have overstayed their visas.

One Iraqi refugee in Villawood Stage One wrote the following in his complaint to HREOC:

“I came to Australia for protection and they treat me like a dog. It is not right. Here now at Stage One, they do not have private rooms, no library, no system at all. Especially for the Muslim persons, they get up at 4 o'clock in the morning to pray.... So after that I cannot sleep, cannot think properly and in the end they have no human rights here.”

The Perth centre is located at the airport. It is described as a medium security facility, designed like a police lockup, utilised for overnight and short-term detention. It has a tiny exercise yard and no grassed areas. The report describes it as very unpleasant in the hot summer months.

HREOC received complaints on behalf of detainees who had been held at the Perth centre for four or five years. One letter described what had happened to a Chinese refugee held in Perth from August 1992 to November 1997: “The long term jailing has made (him) mad sometimes. Once he used a stick to break many windows in the detention centre.”

Protests were lodged by a Liberian refugee and an 18-year-old Iraqi youth detained in Perth. The Liberian said he had been held from April 22 to May 26, 1997. He described the centre as a gaol and asked for assistance, indicating he had contemplated suicide by hanging. The Iraqi protested about the use of surveillance cameras and the lack of a park in which to sit.

These barbaric conditions are maintained deliberately in order to deter refugees from seeking asylum in Australia. People are locked up in concentration camps with no legal rights and then deported in order to send a message abroad. As overcrowding increases at Port Hedland, these conditions are becoming more repressive.

At present, this policy is applied to unwanted refugees—designated as “unlawful non-citizens”. But as economic and social inequality grows, it can be extended to other vulnerable layers of society.

The Pacific Solution - Australia exporting accountability for human rights violations

At Port Hedland between 1992 and 2001 there were protests, both peaceful and violent, and escape attempts by detainees in response to their detention.

Similarly at Woomera between 2000 and 2002 detainees were active and vocal in protesting against their situation, using such methods as escape, hunger strikes, riots and sewing their lips together.

A number of refugee advocacy groups formed in response to growing community concerns, and many existing organisations developed policies against mandatory detention. For example, the Royal Australian and New Zealand College of Psychiatrists specifically called attention to the impact of detention on children.

Church and welfare groups took a broader approach in opposing the policy, questioning both the ethics of detention and its high human cost, and arguing against its effectiveness as a deterrent.

In order to avoid direct accountability the so-called "Pacific Solution" was introduced and implemented from 2001, whereby the Australian Government excised certain places, such as Christmas Island, from the Australian migration zone and removed asylum seekers to detention centres in Nauru and Papua New Guinea.

This policy of excision and use of third-party territories for detention and processing had bipartisan support from the Liberal–National government and Labor opposition.

As a result of the so-called "Pacific Solution" in the "processing" of refugees, by the end of 2003 there was a significant fall in numbers of detainees in detention centres around Australia, with only 1176 around Australia and 145 at Port Hedland. No new asylum seekers had arrived illegally on the mainland since August 2001, and none offshore since December 2001. In May 2004, the last 17 detainees were removed from Port Hedland Detention Centre. In 2007 it is no longer a detention centre.

The timeline from 2013 . . . 

Australia's PM Kevin Rudd announced in 2013 that asylum seekers who came to Australia by boat would never be settled in Australia, 3,127 asylum seekers and refugees have passed through – or are still in – Australia’s offshore immigration system.

Guardian Australia reporters Hannah Ryan, Nick Evershed, Andy Ball, Nell Geraets, and Alexandra Spring have trawled through government data to compile the most complete picture yet of the fate of the asylum seekers who arrived by boat since 2013. 

This interactive timeline was published online Wed 9 Dec 2020. 

What has been revealed is the fact of 1,500 people placed in limbo under Australia’s ‘bizarre and cruel’ refugee deterrence policy.

In 2014 The Irish Times published this picture of refugees having escaped onto the roof of one of the accommodation blocks at the now closed Port Hedland detention facility.

This was on the occasion of reporting the annual Keith Cameron Lecture at the UCD School of History and Archives, by Prof Frank Brennan. Frank Brennan chaired the 2009 National Human Rights Consultation and is CEO of Catholic Social Services Australia. He is a Jesuit priest, professor of law at Australian Catholic University and adjunct professor at the Australian Centre for Christianity and Culture, the Australian National University College of Law and the National Centre for Indigenous Studies, and the National Director of Human Rights and Social Justice for Jesuit Social Services. He is an Officer of the Order of Australia (AO) for services to Aboriginal Australians, particularly as an advocate in the areas of law, social justice and reconciliation. He is known for his 1998 involvement in the Wik debate when Paul Keating called him; 

"the meddling priest"; 

and the National Trust classified him as a Living National Treasure. 

An acknowledgement . . .

. . . at last!

In 2012 ABC News Australia reported on the occasion of the historic resolution of an outstanding injustice brought about by the Cape York land agreement. The occasion was also marked by the apology offered by the Queensland Premier to the Wik Mungkan People, who had struggled over four decades to regain their land rights. 

The Wik People are an Indigenous Australian group of people from an extensive zone on western Cape York Peninsula in northern Queensland, speaking several different languages. 

Under the early British colonisation and settlement in northern Queensland it was widely thought that the indigenous peoples were; 

"less than worthless, vermin which should be exterminated".

Neva Collins writes in the Indigenous Law Bulletin 29, 1997 on the:  

"The Wik: a History of their 400 Year Struggle".  

Neva Collins began her professional career working with the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Social Justice Commissioner at the Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission in 1995 whilst completing a Bachelor of Economics/Laws at Sydney University. In June 2000 Neva was posted to Geneva as the International Projects Officer for the Foundation for Aboriginal and Islander Research Action. Neva has worked as a solicitor at the NSW Environmental Defenders Office where she coordinated the Caring for Country Project, including the publication of a Guide to Environmental Law for Aboriginal Communities in NSW. This is what she tells her readers about the history of the Wik Indigenous People:

Certainty, like the convenience of terra nullius (empty land, or nobody's land), is something many Australians have taken for granted in light of the hysterical reaction to Wik Peoples v State of Queensland & Ors. Yet it is this distorted obsession with certainty, coupled with efforts to polish Australia's tainted history, that provoked the High Court decision in the first place. If it weren't for the 200 years of uncertainty Indigenous peoples have endured, `Wik' would not be a household name.

Apparently uncertainty, flowing from this most recent native title decision, will erode the fabric of our society. What about the erosion of Indigenous society? The hypocrisy of this position indicates either complete ignorance of the uncertainty experienced by generations of Wik peoples, or guilt-ridden denial. Do people know the history of the Wik? Do people realise how ridiculous it is to demand certainty when current generations of Wik peoples have never even tasted it? Do people understand that the pastoral leases in question have never been permanently occupied or even fenced by white people?

The fact that the history of the Wik is largely unknown, like the history of all Indigenous peoples, is the result of concerted efforts to sanitise our colonial history and patronise us with some polished facade. Today the only "acceptable" history is one that is pleasing to the senses and allows "all of us" to feel united as one. But this is to overlook the truth of Australia's collective past. Voices calling for the truth are branded "black armband". These are voices which demand that a factual platform underpin Australian society. History is not something that can be audited or whittled away. If Australians loudly celebrate the colonisation of Australia on that day in 1788, they should all celebrate and applaud the tenacious struggle of the Wik peoples for their survival and for their country.

Out of Africa?

Neva Collins then asks the question: 

Who are the Wik?

Re:LODE Radio chooses to frame this explanation with a reference to theories on the origins of the Indigenous Peoples of Australia: 

It is generally believed that Aboriginal people are the descendants of a single migration into the continent, a people that split from the first modern human populations to leave Africa 64,000 to 75,000 years ago, although others support an earlier theory that there were three waves of migration, most likely island hopping by boat during periods of low sea levels. Recent work with mitochondrial DNA suggests a founder population of between 1,000 and 3,000 women to produce the genetic diversity observed, which suggests "that initial colonisation of the continent would have required deliberate organised sea travel, involving hundreds of people". 

Neva Collins answers her question:

The Wik are a nation of peoples comprised of Wik-Ompom, Wik-Mungkana, Wik-Paacha, Wik-Thinta, Wik-Ngathara, Wik-Epa, Wik-Me'anha, Wik-Nganthara, Wik-Nganychara, and Wik-Liyanh. Their traditional lands are located on the western coast of Cape York, from around the Archer River to the Edward River, and inland to the centre of the Cape. The Wik have occupied this land since at least the Pleistocene period, when these rivers would have run across a great plain with a huge inland lake, later to be filled with salt water as sea levels rose at the end of the last ice age.

For Wik peoples, this land has always been, and still is, their native title land. Their own Indigenous law and custom requires the Wik to be responsible for their country and take care of it. "To be taken away is like being removed from the very source of your being."

British colonisation hijacked the certainty of title for the Wik to their country, a process aided by overtly racist government policy and the passage of legislation. In creating such obstructions the tenacious vigour of Wik peoples was underestimated. "Wik" may mean "small", but it does not mean they take dispossession lying down, hence their "fiery" reputation.

This reputation is supported by the spiritual ancestry and dreaming of the Wik peoples. Cape York is a region at the mercy of the "Wet" and the "Dry". The Wet brings heavy rains and fierce storms, and to the Wik-Klakan people lightning is the mighty work of the sky - serpent - the rainbow, Taipan the rainbow serpent - whose agents, the voice of thunder and knife of lightning, are greatly feared. The child of the lightening is Wild Bush Fire Dreaming - a strong totem and dreaming story for the Wik peoples.

Whether by virtue of this spiritual armoury, or the scars of time, the Wik have vehemently defended their country. First, with bloodshed. Then, in the spirit of their new-found Christian faith, with strikes and demonstration. Then, when this failed, they turned to the legal system of their oppressors hoping to use it to further their fight for justice. Finally, after thirty years battling within the court system, the Wik decision has emerged as a small victory after over 100 years of uncertainty, and even this rests on shaky ground. 

Encounters with the Dutch

The first to encounter the tenacity of Wik peoples were Dutch explorers amongst whom they had a reputation as `fierce, treacherous and bloodthirsty'. In 1605 the Dutch crew of the Duyfhen landed on the west coast of Cape York, only to be driven away at spear point by Wik warriors. Several other Dutch explorers visited Cape York in the wake of the Duyfhen, again resulting in bloodshed. Indeed, proponents of the British monarchy should be grateful for the Wik's tenacity, without which we could all be speaking Dutch and saluting Queen Beatrix!

The British documented a similar experience of the Wik in an English journal in 1625: `In sending their men to shoare [sic] to intreate [sic] the Trade there were nine of them killed by the Heathens, which are man-eaters'.

Through their traditions of oral histories and dance, the Wik still pass on the story of the first encounter with Dutch explorers, over four hundred years ago. The story has been passed down through generations and is still told largely in the form of `first person'. The telling is in three parts and takes three days. It is the story of the taking of Aboriginal women, the killing of Wik people, and finally the meeting of the Dutch.

While Wik warriors drove the Dutch away in 1605, almost two centuries later the geographically dispersed Indigenous population were unable to defeat the practised British military. As a result, colonisation forged ahead upon the presumption of terra nullius, a presumption since overturned by the High Court in Mabo v Queensland (No 2).

The Colonial administration

Ironically, in the same breath that terra nullius justified colonisation, colonists found themselves with a `moral obligation of the most sacred kind to make all necessary provision for the instruction and improvement of the Natives'. It was presumed that the Wik could not possibly know what was best for themselves and, given a taste of the British way of life, would quickly abandon the old ways. In the eyes of the British, Aboriginal culture was `living and dying in misery like the beast of the field'.

Beneath this facade of altruism and morality was a desire to proceed with the exploitation of acquired territory and its resources. It was believed that:

`the advancement of the Natives would do a good deal towards supplying that want of labour which is so much complained of as one of the Chief difficulties of the Colony'.

For the Wik, the `benefits' of `civilisation' had more to do with slave labour and disease than upward mobility and, like other Indigenous groups under direct government control, Wik peoples suffered immeasurably.

The Church played a significant role in the `advancement' of the `Natives'. However this involvement was fiercely condemned by a large proportion of the North Queensland non-Indigenous community who regarded Wik peoples as `less than worthless, vermin which should be exterminated' (One Blood, Harris, Albatross Books, Sydney, 1990, p 486.).

In the face of harsh criticism the missionaries persisted and established missions on the west coast of Cape York at Old Mapoon and Aurukun, the latter situated in the middle of a swamp. The site of Old Mapoon marks the location of the Presbyterian mission to which peoples from numerous communities of the Peninsula were moved from the 1890s, after the intrusion of explorers, miners, gold-diggers and pastoralists in the mid-1800s. Perhaps the lives of many were indeed saved, as at the time hundreds of Aboriginal people were being slaughtered by pastoralists travelling up through the Cape York region. By conservative estimates, 20,000 people died in the fighting, in addition to the tens of thousands who died from disease and starvation.

`They were killing peoples all the way up. At Dingle Dingle Creek they killed most of the tribe. That's the Batavia River People. Billy Miller and Andrew Archie are of that tribe. Only fifty left out of three hundred'.

While life under missionary rule was not ideal Mapoon was home: it was the Wik's traditional home and it was their Christian home. Despite the unfortunate location of the neighbouring Aurukun mission in a swamp, the Wik went on to survive measles (1875), and then tuberculosis (1930s), hookworms and the most virulent form of scabies in the world.

Those who survived disease and the gunfire of pastoralists provided labour for pastoralists, the mining industry, and the pearl shell, bêche-de-mer and turtle shell industries. Some were abducted, others went voluntarily seeking adventure, and some were sold by tribal elders in exchange for flour. During 1897, 100 young men from Old Mapoon were to work in the pearling industry, and only one third survived. Many died from lung complaints, emaciation and venereal diseases.

The problem facing missionaries at Old Mapoon was that while they opposed the conditions which brought about the high mortality of the Wik, the mission financially benefited from it. Rather than oppose what they felt they couldn't change, the mission co-operated by supplying labour in exchange for half the earnings. Finally, in 1897, Reverend Hey spoke out and expressed grave concern for Aborigines, whom he feared would `soon have disappeared from the face of the earth'. Further, he condemned recruitment of Indigenous peoples to the pearling industry:

`I believe only by absolutely prohibiting the employment of Aborigines in the pearl shell, turtle and bêche-de-mer industry can the evils be remedied and further evils prevented'.

The actions of the Queensland government

Time and time again economic motives took precedence over concern for humanity. As if the slave labour trade were not appaling enough, when the world's richest deposits of bauxite were discovered beneath Weipa and Old Mapoon in the 1960s, the Queensland Government forced Wik peoples away from their country at gunpoint, away from their homes. They were then relocated to the Northern Peninsula, to an area named by the Queensland Government `New Mapoon'. This is not some relic dug up from ancient history. It is fresh in both time and life.

The Queensland Government assisted Comalco, which discovered bauxite, by passing the Comalco Act (Commonwealth Aluminium Corporation Pty Ltd Agreement Act 1957 (Qld)). Nearly 8,000 square kilometres were excised from the mission reserve. After a joint decision between the Queensland Government and Comalco to move the residents off the mission, the Queensland police forcibly removed the remaining residents from Old Mapoon to New Mapoon on 15 November 1963.

`We're the ones that were moved out by police, by gunpoint, [on] that boat they sent for us ... sneaked in on us in the night ... they came from Thursday Island. We were really sad, but we just had to go because they told us we were going for questioning. At the Bamaga wharf they told us there were seven houses waiting for us to walk in and light the stoves. And when we arrived in Bamaga there were no homes. We were just standing out in the streets like a mob of cattle with nowhere to go'.

`This is what they do, but the world doesn't know. People don't know how we were treated. They destroyed the homes, burnt them down you know. And I seen all the burning down of the homes, the church ... it was destroying our culture, our lives.'

But the Wik did not go quietly, they never have. In opposition to intense pressure to abandon the mission, they demonstrated and went on strike, only to be put down with threats to deprive them of the mere services they received. Many were punished by expulsion, then prevented from returning to Old Mapoon, and people who left legitimately for employment, medical or other purposes were not allowed back, so that families were divided. When the missionaries eventually abandoned Old Mapoon, over 70 Aboriginal residents remained and lived off the bush, as they had always done. However, their refusal to go quietly was the last straw for the Queensland Government, just as relocation was the last straw for the Wik, who swapped spears for strike action and then litigation in the courts.

The Wik protect their rights in the courts

The first High Court challenge was Peinkinna & Ors v Director of Aboriginal and Islander Advancement, which the Church facilitated by providing Old Man Peinkinna with access to legal advice. In this case, the Wik peoples of Aurukun challenged an agreement by the Queensland Director of Aboriginal and Islanders Advancement, consenting to bauxite mining under which profits would be paid to him on behalf of Aborigines.

Old Man Peinkinna, on behalf of his people, won in the Supreme Court on the grounds that the agreement was in breach of trust. However, this decision was overturned on appeal by the conservative judicial committee of the Privy Council in 1978, on the basis that the Director of Aboriginal and Islander Advancement was under no obligation to make any particular provision for the community. Subsequent to this appeal the Federal Government, under Malcolm Fraser, passed an Act to assert control over the reserve, which the Bjelke-Petersen Government sidestepped by reclassifying the reserve as a shire. What the Premier overlooked, in his haste, was that the Wik were significantly empowered by this decision, which permitted them to make their own rules as a shire. However, self-determination was meaningless without certainty of title over their traditional lands.

Four years later (Tarpage) Old Man Koowarta, an Aboriginal man, challenged a decision of the Queensland Government in the High Court after he was prevented from owning land because of his race. In Koowarta v Bjelke-Petersen the Aboriginal Development Council contracted with the lessees of Crown land to purchase leasehold land on behalf of the Wik people. However Government policy opposed `proposals to acquire large areas of additional freehold land or leasehold land for development by Aborigines or Aboriginal groups in isolation'. In other words, the Winychanam people were not allowed to own land, their traditional homelands!

When Old Man Koowarta won this case, the Queensland Government moved swiftly to frustrate this victory. Their tactic was to proclaim a string of national parks on what was previously environmentally degraded pastoral properties that Aboriginal peoples had expressed interest in buying, to prevent these people from legally purchasing the land. The Wik peoples' law was put beyond their reach through conversion of their land into a national park.

Old Man Koowarta died during the late 1980s, leaving the fight for the recognition of his peoples' property rights to his relations. He is a symbol of the spirit of Winychanam people, and although his spirit has returned to his Homeland, he lives on in the struggle of his people for their property rights. This is the kind of justice so often experienced by Australia's Indigenous peoples.

More recently, the historic wrangling of Koowarta has been revisited following the decision of the High Court in Wik Peoples v State of Queensland & Ors. The Queensland Government, among others, is fighting to avoid a decision it doesn't happen to like. What next? Will the Queensland Government be calling for repeal of the Australia Act 1986 (Cth) to facilitate appeals to the Privy Council? Rather than progressing, the Queensland Government is once again attempting to deny the Wik and other Indigenous peoples the right to own their traditional lands, despite the fact that the Australian common law now expressly recognises the property rights of native title holders.

After over thirty years fighting for justice within the Australian legal system, the experience of the Wik is that law can no more offer certainty than the government. Every time the Wik attain a legal victory, the fruits of their victory are removed. Even Australia's domestically-entrenched international treaty obligations, like the Racial Discrimination Act 1975 (Cth), are not safe:

`Having agreed to play the game by our rules and take on the arduous task of arguing their case in the courts, they now face the prospect of seeing their gains snatched away by the passage of new laws'.

Reconciliation

There is no question that the Wik people have been dished out a raw deal, despite earlier rhetoric describing the colonists' moral obligation to `do the right thing'. That's the same sort of lip service Indigenous peoples with which have always been patronised. In the face of perpetual oppression, the Wik have demonstrated incredible patience and courage. However, if the legal system can't help, what comes next? Everyone else is demanding certainty, while Indigenous peoples are expected to embrace their own uncertainty in the spirit of so-called reconciliation.

The underlying irony of the debate surrounding native title is that `extinguishment' and `reconciliation' are bandied around in the same breath, which reflects where we are at as a nation and just how far we have to go. True commitment to reconciliation would see the public's heart-felt empathy for pastoralists extending to Indigenous peoples dispossessed of their land. Calls for certainty of title would be embraced not only by pastoralists and miners, but Indigenous peoples as well.

However reconciliation cannot proceed without acknowledging the place of Indigenous peoples in Australia's history, instead of pretending they will go away. Embracing our collective past will unveil the injustice of extinguishment for the sake of certainty, when this certainty was only made possible by inflicting uncertainty upon Indigenous peoples. Instead, as a people, we are expected to remember nothing, forgive everything, and graciously accept what we are given. 

Wik Peoples v The State of Queensland 

Commonly known as the Wik decision, Wik Peoples v The State of Queensland is a decision of the High Court of Australia delivered on 23 December 1996 on whether statutory leases extinguish native title rights. The court found that the statutory pastoral leases under consideration by the court did not bestow rights of exclusive possession on the leaseholder. As a result, native title rights could co-exist depending on the terms and nature of the particular pastoral lease. Where there was a conflict of rights, the rights under the pastoral lease would extinguish the remaining native title rights.

The decision provoked a significant debate in Australian politics. It led to intense discussions on the validity of land holdings in Australia. Some political leaders criticised the court for being out of touch and for introducing uncertainty into Australian life. The Howard Government formulated a “10 point plan” to bring certainty to land ownership in Australia. This plan led to the longest debate in the Australian Senate’s history. 

The Howard Government promised a response to the decision and came up with the “Wik 10 Point Plan”. Howard argued the decision "pushed the pendulum back too far in the Aboriginal direction (and) the 10 Point Plan will return the pendulum to the centre". The Native Title Amendment Bill 1997 (Cth) was drawn up to implement the plan. It was introduced into the Commonwealth Parliament on 4 September 1997. It was passed by the House of Representatives, however, the Senate made 217 amendments to the bill and returned it to the lower house for reconsideration. The House of Representatives agreed to half of the changes but returned the bill to the Senate again. It was eventually passed one year later on 8 July 1998 by the Senate after the longest debate in the history of the Senate. One commentator described the amendments to native title law as using a "legal sledge hammer to crack a political nut".

Legal commentary on the decision

Maureen Tehan describes the Wik decision as the high point in law for native title in Australia. The decision balanced the rights of the pastoralists and the rights of Aboriginals, but placed the primacy of pastoral title over native title. Richard Bartlett argues that the decision placed great significance on the principle of equality at common law. Philip Hunter notes that criticism of the High Court was "totally unjustified". He states that the High Court recognised that native title was in no way destructive of the title of pastoralists. He points out that where native title clashed with pastoral interests, pastoral interests would always override native title.

Gim Del Villar argues that the Wik judgment is "flawed" from a historical perspective. He argues that the court used questionable historical material to reach its conclusion that pastoral leases were not common law leases. He notes that in 1870 the Supreme Court of Queensland held that pastoral leases did confer a right of exclusive possession which reflected a common belief at that time that leases did extinguish native title. Del Villar points to despatches from Earl Grey in which there is the clear implication that native title was not to be respected when granting pastoral leases. 

Frank Brennan concurs, describing the approach of the court as taking into account an;  

"incomplete reading of the history".

Re:LODE Radio reflects on how so much of the human condition, and the understanding of the human story, has been, and remains, shaped by an "incomplete reading of the history". 

The Irish Times report on the annual Keith Cameron Lecture at the UCD School of History and Archives, by Prof Frank Brennan references a history all too familiar in Ireland and to the Irish diaspora, as well as in Australia. Perhaps so familiar, too familiar even, that the paragraphs in this story end up omitting much that may or may not be taken as granted. The end result, as in most story telling, involves an incomplete re-telling of history. 

Minding the gap . . . 

Ireland was England's first colony and Australia a substitute for the American colonies when their independence meant new lands were required to send those considered undesirable, and part of the population surplus to the needs of the British state, but crucial to development of a colonial enterprise. 

Given the role of Catholicism in  Ireland's history is all together different to its role in the history of Australia, the people of Ireland and Australia are connected through a phenomenon of a capitalist system that when there is an increase in productive power it presses upon the population rather than enabling it. Profit, profit, and more profit, always comes first.

One of the consequences of such a pressure upon people, as shown in the social and economic history of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland (that is, the state of things in the British Isles from 1801 to 1922) was, like as not, migration.

For the Re:LODE Cargo of Questions 2017 the Information Wrap for Ceann Sleibhe (Slea Head), the western point of the Dingle peninsula has a couple of articles that sets out what might be considered the common theme from along the LODE Zone Line identified in the original LODE project of 1992.

Migration and the madness of economic reason!

The surplus population and the end of work!

These articles pointed to the way globalised capital, while increasing productive power, retains all the benefit as profit, while leaving the weakest in society to bear the brunt of changes to employment levels and modes of subsistence. 

The people of Ireland are no strangers to the experience of migration, and the Re:LODE Methods & Purposes section has an article on Economism that sets out the context for the importance of this history in the LODE project.

What is Economism?

The Wikipedia article on Economism is relatively brief and sets out three contexts to explain the use of the term. Firstly:

Economism is a term in Marxist discourse. The charge of economism is frequently brought against revisionists by anti-revisionists when economics, instead of politics, is placed in command of society; and when primacy of the development of the productive forces is held over concerns for the nature and relations surrounding those productive forces. This debate was most notable upon Deng Xiaoping assuming leadership of the Communist Party of China, criticising the Maoist line as ultra-leftist and accusing them of building socialism before the economy was ready. In turn, Maoists criticised Deng Xiaoping for abandoning socialism in favour of opening up the Chinese economy to capitalist reforms in a needless pursuit of expertise and recognition from capitalist nations to fuel growth.

Secondly:

For bourgeois capitalist economists, "economism" is reduction of all social facts to economic dimensions. The term is often used to criticize economics as an ideology in which supply and demand are the only important factors in decisions and outstrip or permit ignoring all other factors. It is believed to be a side effect of neoclassical economics and blind faith in an "invisible hand" or laissez-faire means of making decisions, extended far beyond controlled and regulated markets and used to make political and military decisions. Conventional ethics would play no role in decisions under pure economism, except insofar as supply would be withheld, demand curtailed, by moral choices of individuals. Thus, critics of economism insist on political and other cultural dimensions in society.

And, thirdly:

Old Right social critic Albert Jay Nock used the term more broadly, denoting a moral and social philosophy "which interprets the whole sum of human life in terms of the production, acquisition, and distribution of wealth", adding: "I have sometimes thought that here may be the rock on which Western civilization will finally shatter itself. Economism can build a society which is rich, prosperous, powerful, even one which has a reasonably wide diffusion of material well-being. It can not build one which is lovely, one which has savor and depth, and which exercises the irresistible power of attraction that loveliness wields. Perhaps by the time economism has run its course the society it has built may be tired of itself, bored of its own hideousness, and may despairingly consent to annihilation, aware that it is too ugly to be let live any longer".

It is this second context and use of the term economism that informs the LODE and Re:LODE projects, an economism that leads to the absurd value system where the economy takes precedence over population.      

In 1992 the journeys to each of the places where the LODE cargo was assembled were organised in the context of logistics rather than a continuous space and time sequence, and that is why the newspaper stories datelines are as they are. In returning to Europe from Colombia in early May 1992, the next journey following the LODE Line to the west coast of Ireland took place in late June and early July 1992.

The video representation of the LODE Line below begins a digital journey over Google Earth in Hull and crosses the continents of Europe, Asia, Australia and South America, returning to the physical geographic western boundaries of Europe at a place known as Slea Head, or in Gaelic, Ceann Sleibhe. 

The LODE line girds the planet 

The contextualisations offered in the LODE Artliner pamphlets followed on from the journeys along the LODE Line from the west coast of northern Germany to Szczecin in northern Poland, and that took place during August 1992, were to lead to the recognition of patterns that emerged from all the previous journeys and the 22 places for making cargo and film documentation along the LODE Line. However, the search for a contemporary story to carry this recognition to any audience of the LODE Artliner project, the only newspaper text that proved capable of encapsulating this understanding was a letter to THE NEW YORK DAILY TRIBUNE, written by Karl Marx and published on 22 March, 1853.

Offshore across the Blasket Sound lie the uninhabited Blasket Islands. The last islanders were moved to the mainland in 1953. The life of the island used to include a rich tradition of the telling of stories, Gaelic folktales. Now, the Great Blasket is a national historic park, but only the ruined buildings are being restored.

This text of this letter to the editor of THE NEW YORK DAILY TRIBUNE (see below) was found in the book Marx Engels Ireland and the Irish Question published in 1971 by Lawrence and Wishart (pages 64-68). This find occurred whilst researching the background historical analysis of the conditions in Ireland that led to the vast numbers of Irish who were forced by circumstance to emigrate to far distant shores of Canada, the United States and Australia. 

One of the many Irish ports of embarkation for Irish emigrants was Tralee's old port of Blennerville. Blennerville is shown on the Ceann Sleibhe film documentation towards the end of the Super8 film sequence (see above - YouTube Ceann Sleibhe 1992 and look out for the white windmill by the Tralee - Blennervile canal). It was this connection that led to this text and further supported by the fact of recent historical periods of significant emigration and the de-population of the Blasket Islands visible from the beaches beside the headland of Slea Head (see the Super8 film looking out to the Atlantic from the LODE compass assemblage).  

"Begin with pauperising the inhabitants of a country, and when there is no more profit to be ground out of them, when they have become a burden to the revenue, drive them away, and sum up your Net Revenue!"

"It is not population that presses on productive power; it is productive power that presses on population." 

Karl Marx, THE NEW YORK DAILY TRIBUNE, 22 March, 1853.

Tralee, the county town of County Kerry, was the port of embarkation for thousands of people leaving Ireland for the very reason given above.

If there is a pressing upon population, then the emigration of population will follow.

The abiding story of the emigration of hundreds of thousands of Irish people across the world is well known, and especially in those societies where those connected to the Irish diaspora maintain a sense of identity in the re-telling of this story.
    
The phenomenon of migration from Ireland is recorded since early Medieval times, but it is only possible to quantify it from around 1700: since then between 9 and 10 million people born in Ireland have emigrated. This is more than the population of Ireland at its historical peak in the 1840s of 8.5 million. The poorest of them went to Great Britain, especially Liverpool; those who could afford it went further, including almost 5 million to the United States.
    
After 1840, emigration from Ireland became a massive, relentless, and efficiently managed national enterprise. In 1890 40% of Irish-born people were living abroad. By the 21st century, an estimated 80 million people worldwide claimed some Irish descent, which includes more than 36 million Americans who claim Irish as their primary ethnicity.

Writ large in the story of the Irish diaspora is the Great Famine    

The Great Famine (Irish: an Gorta Mór) or the Great Hunger was a period of mass starvation, disease, and emigration in Ireland between 1845 and 1849. It is sometimes referred to, mostly outside Ireland, as the Irish Potato Famine, because about two-fifths of the population was solely reliant on this cheap crop for a number of historical reasons. During the famine, about one million people died and a million more emigrated from Ireland, causing the island's population to fall by between 20% and 25%.
    
The proximate cause of famine was potato blight, which ravaged potato crops throughout Europe during the 1840s. However, the impact in Ireland was disproportionate, as one third of the population was dependent on the potato for a range of ethnic, religious, political, social, and economic reasons, such as land acquisition, absentee landlords, and the Corn Laws, which all contributed to the disaster to varying degrees and remain the subject of intense historical debate.
    
The famine was a watershed in the history of Ireland, which was then part of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland. The famine and its effects permanently changed the island's demographic, political, and cultural landscape. 

For both the native Irish and those in the resulting diaspora, the famine entered folk memory and became a rallying point for Irish nationalist movements. The already strained relations between many Irish and the British Crown soured further, heightening ethnic and sectarian tensions, and boosting Irish nationalism and republicanism in Ireland and among Irish emigrants in the United States and elsewhere.

The madness of trade, pricing and the market

Perhaps the most shocking aspect of this historic humanitarian crisis is that during the famine Ireland was a next exporter of food.
    
Throughout the entire period of the Famine, Ireland was exporting enormous quantities of food. In the magazine History Ireland (1997, issue 5, pp. 32–36), Christine Kinealy, a Great Hunger scholar, lecturer, and Drew University professor, relates her findings: 

Almost 4,000 vessels carried food from Ireland to the ports of Bristol, Glasgow, Liverpool, and London during 1847, when 400,000 Irish men, women, and children died of starvation and related diseases. She also writes that Irish exports of calves, livestock (except pigs), bacon, and ham actually increased during the Famine. This food was shipped under British military guard from the most famine-stricken parts of Ireland; Ballina, Ballyshannon, Bantry, Dingle, Killala, Kilrush, Limerick, Sligo, Tralee, and Westport. A wide variety of commodities left Ireland during 1847, including peas, beans, onions, rabbits, salmon, oysters, herring, lard, honey, tongues, animal skins, rags, shoes, soap, glue, and seed. The most shocking export figures concern butter. Butter was shipped in firkins, each one holding 9 imperial gallons; 41 litres. In the first nine months of 1847, 56,557 firkins (509,010 imperial gallons; 2,314,000 litres) were exported from Ireland to Bristol, and 34,852 firkins (313,670 imperial gallons; 1,426,000 litres) were shipped to Liverpool, which correlates with 822,681 imperial gallons (3,739,980 litres) of butter exported to England from Ireland during nine months of the worst year of the Famine. 

The problem in Ireland was not lack of food, which was plentiful, but the price of it, which was beyond the reach of the poor.

The Economist magazine opposed the provision of aid to the Irish during the Great Famine of 1845-49. The Economist argued for laissez-faire policies, in which self-sufficiency, anti-protectionism and free trade, not food aid, were in the opinion of the magazine the key to helping the Irish live through the famine which killed approximately one million people.

The Economist was founded to oppose the British Corn Laws. The Anti-Corn Law League was a large, nationwide middle-class moral crusade with a Utopian vision; its leading advocate Richard Cobden promised that repeal would settle four great problems simultaneously:

First, it would guarantee the prosperity of the manufacturer by affording him outlets for his products. Second, it would relieve the Condition of England question by cheapening the price of food and ensuring more regular employment. Third, it would make English agriculture more efficient by stimulating demand for its products in urban and industrial areas. Fourth, it would introduce through mutually advantageous international trade a new era of international fellowship and peace. The only barrier to these four beneficent solutions was the ignorant self-interest of the landlords, the "bread-taxing oligarchy, unprincipled, unfeeling, rapacious and plundering."

The landlords claimed that manufacturers like Cobden wanted cheap food so that they could reduce wages and thus maximise their profits, an opinion shared by socialist Chartists.

Karl Marx's letter

From the accounts relating to trade and navigation for the years 1851 and 1852, published in Feb. last, we see that the total declared value of exports amounted to £68,531,601 in 1851, and to £71, 429, 548 in 1852; of the latter amount £47,209,000 go to the export of cotton, wool, linen and silk manufactures. The quantity of imports for 1852is below that for the year 1851. The proportion of imports  entered for home consumption not having diminished, but rather increased, it follows that England has re-exported, instead of the usual quantity of colonial produce, a certain amount of gold and silver.

The Colonial Land Emigration Office gives the following return of the emigration from England, Scotland, and Ireland, to all parts of the world, from Jan 1, 1847 to June 30, 1852: English 335,330; Scotch 82,610; Irish 1,200,136. "Nine tenths" remarks the Office "of the emigrants from Liverpool are assumed to be Irish. About three-fourths of the emigrants from Scotland are Celts, either from the Highlands, or from Ireland through Glasgow." Nearly four fifths of the whole emigration are, accordingly, to be regarded as belonging to the Celtic population of Ireland and of the Highlands and islands of Scotland. 

The London ECONOMIST says of this emigration: "It is consequent on the breaking down of the system of a society founded on small holdings and potato cultivation"; and adds "The departure of the redundant part of the population of Ireland and the Highlands of Scotland is an indispensable preliminary to every kind of improvement. The revenue in Ireland has not suffered in any degree from the famine of 1846-47, or from the emigration that has since taken place. On the contrary, her net revenue amounted in 1851 to £4,281,999, being about £184,000 greater than in 1843."

Begin with pauperising the inhabitants of a country, and when there is no more profit to be ground out of them, when they have grown a burden on the revenue, drive them away, and sum up your Net Revenue! Such is the doctrine laid down by Ricardo in his celebrated work, The Principles of Political Economy. The annual profits of a capitalist amounting to 2000, what does it matter to him whether he employs 100 men or 1,000 men? "Is not," says Ricardo, "the real income of a nation similar?" The net real income of a nation, rents and profits, remaining the same, it is no subject of consideration whether it is derived from ten millions of people or from twelve millions. Sismondi, in his Nouveau Principes d'Economie Politique, answers that, according to his view of the matter, the English nation would not be interested at all in the disappearance of the whole population, the King (at that time it was no Queen, but a King) remaining alone in the midst of the island, supposing only that automatic machinery enabled him to procure the amount of Net Revenue now produced by a population of twenty millions. Indeed, that grammatical entity, "the national wealth", would in this case not be diminished.

In a former letter I have given an instance of the clearing of the estates in the Highlands of Scotland. That emigration continues to be forced upon Ireland by the same process you may see from the following quotation from THE GALWAY MERCURY:

"The people are fast passing away from the land in the West of Ireland. The landlords of Connaught are tacitly combined to weed out all the smaller occupiers, against whom a regular systematic war of extermination is being waged. the most heart-rending cruelties are daily practised in this province, of which the public are not at all aware."

But it is not only the pauperised inhabitants of Green Erin and of the Highlands of Scotland that are swept away by agricultural improvements, and by the "breaking down of the antiquated system of society". It is not only the able bodied agricultural labourers from England, Wales, and Lower Scotland, whose passages are paid by the Emigration Commissioners. The wheel of "improvement" is now seizing another class, the most stationary class in England. A startling emigration movement has sprung up among the smaller English farmers, especially those holding heavy clay soils, who, with bad prospects for the coming harvest and in want of sufficient capital to make the great improvements on their farms which would enable them to pay their old rents, have no alternative but to cross the sea in search of a new country and of new lands. I am not speaking now of the emigration caused by the gold mania, but only of the compulsory emigration produced by landlordism, concentration of farms, application of machinery to the soil, and introduction of the modern system of agriculture on a great scale. 

In the ancient States, in Greece and Rome, compulsory emigration, assuming the shape of the periodic establishment of colonies, formed a regular link in the structure of society. The whole system of those States was founded on certain limits to the numbers of the population, which could not be surpassed without endangering the condition of the antique civilisation itself. But why was it so? Because the application of science to material production was utterly unknown to them. To remain civilised they were forced to remain few. Otherwise they would have had to submit to the bodily drudgery which transformed the free citizen into a slave. The want of productive power made citizenship dependent on a certain proportion in numbers not to be disturbed. Forced emigration was the only remedy.

It was the same pressure of population on the powers of production, that drove the barbarians from the high plains of Asia to invade the Old World. the same cause acted there, although under a different form. To remain barbarians they were forced to remain few.they were pastoral, hunting, war waging tribes, whose manner of production required a large space for every individual, as is now the case with the Indian tribes in North-America. By augmenting in numbers they curtailed each other's field of production. thus the surplus population was forced to undertake those great adventurous migratory movements which laid the foundations of the peoples of ancient and modern Europe. 

But with modern compulsory emigration the case stands quite the opposite. Here it is not the want of productive power which demands a diminution of population: it is the increase of productive power which demands a diminution of population, and drives away the surplus by famine or emigration.

It is not population that presses on productive power; it is productive power that presses on population. 

Now I share neither in the opinion of Ricardo, who regards "Net Revenue" as the Moloch to whom entire populations must be sacrificed, without even so much as complaint, nor in the opinion of Sismondi, who, in his hypochondriacal philanthropy, would forcibly retain the superannuated methods of agriculture and proscribe science from industry, as Plato expelled poets from his Republic. 

Society is undergoing a silent revolution, which must be submitted to, and which takes no more notice of the human existence it breaks down than an earthquake regards the house that it subverts. The classes and the races, too weak to master the new conditions of life, must give way.

But can there be anything more puerile, more short sighted, than the view of those Economists who believe in all earnest that this woeful transitory state means nothing but adapting society to the acquisitive propensities of capitalists, both landlords and money-lords? In Great Britain the working of that process is most transparent. The application of modern science to production clears the land of its inhabitants, but it concentrates people in manufacturing towns. 

"No manufacturing workmen," says The Economist "have been assisted by the Emigration Commisioners, except a few Spitalfields and Paisley hand-loom weavers, and few or none have emigrated at their own expense." 

The Economist knows very well that they could not emigrate at their own expense, and that the industrial middle-class would not assist them in emigrating. Now, to what does this lead? The rural population, the most stationary and conservative element of modern society, disappears while the industrial proletariat, by the very working of modern production, finds itself gathered in mighty centres, around the great productive forces, whose history of creation has hitherto been martyrology of the labourers. Who will prevent them from going a step further, and appropriating these forces, to which they have been appropriated before? Where will be the power of resisting them? Nowhere! Then it will be of no use to appeal to the "rights of property". The modern changes in the art of production have, according to the Bourgeois Economists themselves, broken down the antiquated system of society and its modes of appropriation. They have expropriated the Scotch clansman, the Irish cottier and tenant, the English yeoman, the hand-loom weaver, numberless handicrafts, whole generations of factory children and women; they will expropriate, in due time, the landlord and the cotton-lord. 

On the Continent heaven is fulminating, but in England the earth itself is trembling. 

England is the country where the real revulsion of modern society begins.

Karl Marx, THE NEW YORK DAILY TRIBUNE, 22 March, 1853

The sacrifice of populations to the Moloch

Metropolis by Fritz Lang 1927

The absurdity of the ideas of Ricardo and Sismondi regarding the nature of wealth and the nation is just one of the elements Marx was highlighting. The fact that then, and now, actually existing capitalism increases in productive power inevitably ends up pressing on population is because it is a topsy-turvy, upside down version of social reality, an inverted, deformed state of affairs. Instead of ensuring the prime purpose of the economy is about benefiting population, the reverse is the case, then and now. 

Fritz Lang's Metropolis includes this scene where the "power plant" is transformed into a monster Moloch and the productive workers consumed and/or "sacrificed" to the needs of productive power, and the wealth outcomes consumed as the particular and individual "properties" of a select elite.  

Q. What about those who hold the belief that "free trade" is better than food aid during a famine?

A. "Well," they say, "leave it to us".   

During a meeting that took place around 1681 between the powerful French Controller-General of Finances Jean-Baptiste Colbert and a group of French businessmen headed by M. Le Gendre, the eager mercantilist minister asked how the French state could be of service to the merchants and help promote their commerce. Le Gendre replied;

"laissez-nous faire" ("leave it to us")

This anecdote provided the phrase laissez-faire, and that became a maxim for a new enterprise, the development of economic theory, and those who practice this theory, the economists. It was the Physiocrats in France who came up with this notion, a notion that, as in the etymological source of Physiocratie from the Greek, economy was a natural form of organising, and that control of the economy should be let go, and the economy set free, and left to business and businessmen.

Laissez-faire, a product of the Enlightenment, was "conceived as the way to unleash human potential through the restoration of a natural system, a system unhindered by the restrictions of government". In a similar vein, Adam Smith viewed the economy as a natural system and the market as an organic part of that system. Smith saw laissez-faire as a moral program and the market its instrument to ensure men the rights of natural law. By extension, free markets become a reflection of the natural system of liberty. For Smith, laissez-faire was "a program for the abolition of laws constraining the market, a program for the restoration of order and for the activation of potential growth".

However, Adam Smith and the notable classical economists, such as Thomas Malthus and David Ricardo, did not use the phrase. Jeremy Bentham used the term, but it was James Mill's reference to the laissez-faire maxim (together with "pas trop gouverner") in an 1824 entry for the Encyclopædia Britannica that really brought the term into wider English usage. 

With the advent of the Anti-Corn Law League (founded 1838), the term received much of its English meaning, and which brings us back to The Economist.

LODE 1992 and Re:LODE 2017 A Cargo of Questions - Gwalior 

The Information Wrap for the LODE location Gwalior in India, as found on A Cargo of Questions webpages, has a page headed: 

State planning versus liberalisation - Economic policies in modern India

Here, you will find, The Economist Magazine is quoted by Ajit Singh in his 2008 paper THE PAST, PRESENT AND FUTURE OF INDUSTRIAL POLICY IN INDIA: ADAPTING TO THE CHANGING DOMESTIC AND INTERNATIONAL ENVIRONMENT for the Centre for Business Research, University of Cambridge. 

The paper takes a considered overview of industrial policy in India from the time India gained independence from British colonial rule in 1947, to 2008. Things have changed over the last ten years but the analysis of industrial policy and economic performance in this period is very helpful in contextualizing liberalisation of the Indian economy in the early 1990's. 

The Economist judges the first four decades of economic policy in modern India since independence from British rule thus:

‘The  hopes  of  1947  have  been  betrayed.  India,  despite  all  its advantages and a generous supply of aid from the capitalist West (whose ‘wasteful’ societies  it  deplored), has achieved less than virtually any comparable third-world country. The cost in human terms has been staggering. Why has Indian development gone so tragically wrong? The short answer is this: the state has done far too much and far too little.  It has  crippled the economy,  and burdened itself nearly to breaking point, by taking on jobs it has no business doing.’ 

Is The Economist right?

Ajit Singh references The Economist quotation from 1991 to help us understand what had actually been happening with the Indian economy in a globalized economic context, and this is somewhat different than The Economist's version of events that was being used in a way that amounted to a clearly ideological tirade. In fact, as Ajit Singh points out that in a long-term view  of  Indian economic development over the last four decades as a whole, contrary to The Economist quote, the  record  was  far  from  being  disastrous. His judgement is the following:

It was clearly not outstanding - it was about average for the developing countries of Asia (the most successful  of  the  three  developing  continents).  Importantly,  further  analysis suggested  that  the  mediocrity  of  the  outcome  was  mostly  due  to  the extraordinary  and  far-reaching  economic  shocks  sustained  by  the  economy during the decade 1965-75. These shocks included the effects of the two wars with Pakistan in 1965 and 1971, suspension of foreign aid for various periods following each of the wars in 1965 and 1971, the economic effects of the earlier war  with  China  in  1962,  drought  in  the  late  1960s, maxi-devaluation  of  the rupee around the same time and oil price-rise in 1973-74. In this context, it is a credit to the Indian system that these shocks were contained by prudent macro-economic policies even though it resulted in slower long-term growth for almost ten  years,  1965-75.  India  ended  the  1970s  with  low inflation and  a  healthy balance  of  payments  position.  Indian  economic  management  of  these shocks compares favourably with the experience of Latin American countries during the debt-crisis of the 1980s.

So, yes, The Economist is right, but "right" as opposed to "left", and just can't bear the fact that the Indian state had up until the early 1990's attempted to manage the economy in the interests of India's population. The Economist is a great place to go for information, but it is governed in its economic and political positioning by right-wing libertarian ideology.

Art and ideology are, to some extent, always intertwined, and that is why in this art project there is a purpose and an attempt to reveal the connections rather than hide them, or invert them, as for example in British artworks of the 18th and 19th centuries where we can see a depiction of the rural poor where a reality is presented that denies other realities. 

The Cornfield, by John Constable (1826) National Gallery, London

The depiction of the realities for the rural poor, the rural dispossessed, the rural homeless, on their way to the slums of industrial urban centres, was for many artists a depiction constrained by the requirement to accommodate the tastes and interests of those who could afford to purchase such artworks. John Barrell's book The Dark Side of the Landscape: The Rural Poor in English Painting 1730-1840 looks at why the poor began to be of such interest to painters, and examines the ways in which they could be represented so as to be an acceptable part of the décor of the salons of the rich. His discussion focuses on the work of three painters: Thomas Gainsborough, George Morland and John Constable. 

It remains apposite to quote Althusser on ideology, and to reflect on what The Economist publishes, and/or, what an artist represents, is part of the purpose and methodology of this particular art project:

Those who are in ideology believe themselves by definition outside ideology: one of the effects of ideology is the practical denegation of the ideological character of ideology by ideology: ideology never says, ‘I am ideological’. It is necessary to be outside ideology, i.e. in scientific knowledge, to be able to say: I am in ideology (a quite exceptional case) or (the general case): I was in ideology. As is well known, the accusation of being in ideology only applies to others, never to oneself (unless one is really a Spinozist or a Marxist, which, in this matter, is to be exactly the same thing). Which amounts to saying that ideology has no outside (for itself), but at the same time that it is nothing but outside (for science and reality).  

Below the slide of one of the LODE-zone Eire A Cargo of Questions 2017, another article on the Ceann Sleibhe Information Wrap considers this situation in relation to the polemic delivered by Yanis Varoufakis in his book And The Weak Suffer What They Must?: Europe, Austerity and the Threat to Global Stability. 

And The Weak Suffer What They Must?

Today, Catholicism's role in Ireland is adjusting to the way Irish society is being increasingly secularised, while in Australia the role of the Catholic Church has developed in relation to changing patterns of demographics, a result of over two centuries of immigration since the First Fleet arrived on Australia's fatal shore at Botany Bay. 

The first permanent presence of Catholicism in Australia came with the arrival of the First Fleet of British convict ships at Sydney in 1788. One-tenth of all the convicts who came to Australia on the First Fleet were Catholic, and at least half of them were born in Ireland. A small proportion of the British marines were also Catholic.  

Some of the Irish convicts had been transported to Australia for political crimes or social rebellion in Ireland, so the authorities were suspicious of Catholicism for the first three decades of settlement. Catholic convicts were compelled to attend Church of England services and their children and orphans were raised by the authorities as Anglicans. 

The first Catholic priests arrived in Australia as convicts in 1800 – James Harold, James Dixon and Peter O'Neill, who had been convicted for "complicity" in the Irish 1798 Rebellion. 

Fr Dixon was conditionally emancipated and permitted to celebrate Mass. On 15 May 1803, in vestments made from curtains and with a chalice made of tin, he conducted the first Catholic Mass in "New South Wales". 

The Irish-led Castle Hill Rebellion of 1804 alarmed the British authorities and Dixon's permission to celebrate Mass was revoked. 

Fr Jeremiah O' Flinn, an Irish Cistercian monk, was appointed as Prefect Apostolic of New Holland and set out from Britain for the colony, uninvited. Watched by authorities, Flynn secretly performed priestly duties before being arrested and deported to London. 

Reaction to the affair in Britain led to two further priests being allowed to travel to the colony in 1820 – John Joseph Therry and Philip Connolly. The foundation stone for the first St Mary's Cathedral, Sydney, was laid on 29 October 1821 by Governor Lachlan Macquarie. 

Until about 1950, the Catholic Church in Australia was overwhelmingly Irish in its ethos. Most Catholics were descendants of Irish immigrants and the church was mostly led by Irish-born priests and bishops. From 1950 the ethnic composition of the church began to change, with the assimilation of Irish Australians and the arrival of Eastern European Displaced Persons from 1948 and more than one million Catholics from countries such as Italy, Malta, the Netherlands, Germany, Croatia and Hungary, and later Filipinos, Vietnamese, Lebanese and Poles around the 1980s. There are now also strong Chinese, Korean and Latin American Catholic communities. 

Today the Catholic church is the largest non-government provider of welfare and education services in Australia. Catholic Social Services Australia aids some 450,000 people annually, while the St Vincent de Paul Society's 40,000 members form the largest volunteer welfare network in the country. In 2016, the church had some 760,000 students in more than 1,700 schools.

The Irish Times report on the treatment of asylum seekers in Ireland and Australia, like all news stories, picks facts to make the story interesting to readers as well as providing newsworthy information. It's an edit! What is contained in the story and what is left out of the story is another story. Here is the chosen headline:

'Moral' policy urged for refugees

The report by Peter Murtagh (Tue, Sep 23, 2014) runs under the subheading:

Speaker compares Irish and Australian treatment of asylum seekers

Governments and communities trying to deal with the problem of refugees and asylum seekers should focus less on the minutiae of international laws and conventions and more on working out what was the “decent” and “moral” thing to do, an Australian professor of law and immigration expert suggested last night.

Prof Frank Brennan said that the United Nations refugee convention had become a substitute, for both governments and what he described as the refugee lobby, for a necessary discussion on appropriate ethical, moral and legal ways of dealing with the problem. “This is not just about the letter of the law,” he said. “It is about finding out what is decent.”

He was delivering the annual Keith Cameron Lecture at the UCD School of History and Archives. Prof Brennan, who is a Jesuit, comes from Australian immigrant stock. An Irish predecessor, a widow named Annie Brennan, left Ireland in 1863 for Queensland with her five children. Prof Brennan told how two aboriginal people helped her ship, and its immigrant passengers, find safe port when they arrived.

Less helpful welcome

Australia

Responding to a question about the direct provision system here, he said his understanding of its origin was that people were to be housed for perhaps six months while their applications were dealt with. In that regard, it was better than the Australian system of detaining people. However, he said, when people were left in limbo for indeterminate periods, it was unjust. “When it goes on for five years, you are actually starting to destroy people’s lives.”

At the same time, governments faced real problems with mass movements of people fleeing war or persecution, or seeking better lives.

“When dealing with this issue, what we have seen in Australia is that, particularly at election time, governments see that it is very easy to demonise these people and to demonise the political leaders who have created a policy situation which resulted in this sort of situation,” he said. “But when it comes to what is to be done, my general advice to refugee groups has been ‘softly, softly . . .’”

Decent? Moral?

The help offered to Frank Brennan's predecessor by unnamed Indigenous People on the shore of a continent (named Australia, and derived from the Latin Terra Australis ("southern land"), a name used for a hypothetical continent in the Southern Hemisphere since ancient times, and used when Europeans first began visiting and mapping Australia in the 17th century), has NOT been reciprocated. Either towards Indigenous "Australian" People, such as the Wik, or to contemporary arrivals. 

From Manus Island to Melbourne: we do not even know what we are being punished for

Mardin Arvin writes an Opinion piece for the Guardian (Fri 7 Aug 2020) on his experience of detainment as a refugee by Australian authorities since 2013: Manus Island (2013-2019), Port Moresby (2019), and Melbourne (2019, ongoing). He works in four languages: Kurdish, Farsi, English and Tok Pisin; and he is conducting research and writing a book while incarcerated. 

And Melbourne is situated along the LODE Zone Line . . .

The image used on this Guardian webpage pictures refugees waving from their windows at protesters participating in a ‘Free the Refugees’ rally at the Mantra Hotel in Melbourne in June. The refugees detained at the hotel have been medically evacuated from Australian detention in Papua New Guinea and Nauru. 

Mardin Arvin writes:

I wanted to escape war, I wanted a peaceful life. I still have these dreams

With patience and perseverance a mother bird holds food from her mouth and shares it with her baby birds. The babies are raising their heads and poking out their little beaks for something to eat.

I do not know which insect she had caught. I cannot see from here. From where I stand I see the little bird and the nest she has made, but they are far away. It is as far away from behind the tall fences that keep people imprisoned.

In my opinion motherhood is a symbol of sacrifice, whether it is a mother bird or the mother of a human being. It is difficult, and it is rare, to care for someone more than you care for yourself.

The mother of Alan Kurdi, the Kurdish Syrian child, must have loved him in the same way. Just imagine – it makes me choke with sorrow. In order to escape war, and in hope for a decent future for her child, that mother had to flee her homeland. She left the rest of her family behind in Syria and confronted the sea, she journeyed on a decaying boat that split apart along the way. Everyone in the boat ended up in the water. Alan lost his future, and his father will never see him grow up. The mother also perished.

She had promised him a future as she packed his belongings, no doubt while the bombs were dropping and the bullets were firing. She had told him about a better place, a place where Alan would be happy. But the final images Alan saw before his life ended were the massive and furious waves that merciless swallowed him.

I think to myself that if Alan were to have survived would he be leading a happy life now?

War never brings happiness; in my view it is terrible for both sides. No one wins in the end. A good victory is one where no lives are lost in the process; no one wins when either superpowers or smaller nations sacrifice lives.

Refugees lose their lives to war, political persecution or economic exploitation – they flee their homelands and no one knows whether they end up living a happy life or not. The future is unknown, no one knows what the future holds.

Like me, I have not been able to feel the touch of my mother’s hands. I have not been able to hold her for all these years. It has been years since I have had the chance to see her wrinkled face, to see her fading smile, to see her staring back at me. This is what I dream for while incarcerated, locked up without ever having committed a crime. I have been imprisoned without charge, just like the young Arab man who used to sit on the dirty floor. Or the Afghan man who used to lean on the palm tree looking at the photo of his child; he would spend his time like this for six years. His child is growing up and probably does not recognise his father.

The story of each refugee is a tragedy in itself. None of these stories have an ending. Sometimes when we board those boats – those floating coffins – they never reach their destination.

I do not understand the contradictions, this discrimination. The land that God has bestowed on us and which we struggle over, lands from which me and people like me are banished. I am a prisoner now because I dared to dream; these dreams I will never realise.

I wanted to escape war, I wanted to flee hardship – I had these dreams, I at least wanted to avoid these things in life. These are not luxuries or fancy things. I wanted a peaceful life. I still have these dreams.

The mother bird takes flight. The baby birds are still eating. Life continues. Out there, beyond the fences, where we could be leading a life of our own. But we are still in here.

A remote and isolated island surrounded by water as far as the eye can see. Where else could we go from here? I remember when we left the prison camp the sun was shining. We were restless as we sat in the bus, we were smiling. We had a reason to smile.

We thought that after six years we would be able to live a free life. That was not to be the case. We entered a city, but we would not experience freedom. Instead, we entered a multistory hotel – Mantra Bell City hotel in Melbourne. This is our latest prison.

I always think to myself, what crime did I commit that I have to pay with this form of punishment? I am a simple person who just wants to live my life. I want a good life. But after what I have gone through I now have to spend months confined to a single floor, in a hotel and in a room with a few people; my world is limited to the narrow corridor of the third floor of this hotel.

Just imagine it, that your whole life and all your interactions are restricted to that one floor and that one corridor. I just want you to picture this life for yourself. You cannot go for a walk, you cannot go on a trip. Oh God, what does going for a walk even mean?

In my view, it is easier for a prisoner who knows they are making amends in prison for their wrongdoing in contrast to us who do not even know what we are being punished for.

This Opinion piece was translated by Omid Tofighian, an award-winning lecturer, researcher and community advocate. He is adjunct lecturer in the School of the Arts and Media at the University of New South Wales and honorary research associate for the Department of Philosophy, University of Sydney. His published works include Myth and Philosophy in Platonic Dialogues (Palgrave 2016) and he is the translator of Behrouz Boochani’s multi-award-winning book No Friend But the Mountains: Writing From Manus Prison (Picador 2018).

Today another Opinion piece by Mardin Arvin was published (Wed 23 Dec 2020) in the Guardian. He says: 

I am writing to make people aware of the difficult situation refugees have to endure

This is my eighth Christmas locked up in immigration detention. Next year I hope to celebrate as a free man

December 2017

An article posted on Facebook occupied my thoughts for days. It was about the Manus Island detention centre for refugees and the horrific conditions there. I was exiled to that prison in August 2013. The comments underneath were full of hate towards refugees. Do the people writing this know that this place was a torture camp? Have those people ever asked themselves why refugees leave their families and flee their homelands?

This article inspired me to start writing. I did not want to respond to them by adding a comment, so I started writing a short fictional story based on real events called "Close the Eyes of Your Conscience.” It ended up getting published by Meanjin this September. I was not fluent in English so I wrote the story in Farsi. In January 2019 I met Omid Tofighian on Manus Island and I spoke to him about my writing. He was keen to translate it. This was the beginning of my collaboration with Omid, and we have produced a lot of work together since. We have plans to do a lot more. All the writing, translations and research is done on a mobile phone.

September 2020

The people of Melbourne were protesting the Covid-19 quarantine laws: one month lockdown and restricted movement within 5km. Many were arrested by police. For me, it had been a year since I was incarcerated in the Mantra hotel, imprisoned in a room with only the corridor of the hotel to walk along. Could people in Melbourne’s lockdown understand what I am going through? I wrote an article about this for the Guardian.

After it was published I was curious to read the comments. I wanted to read people’s opinions. It seemed they really sympathised with me. In fact, some said they considered themselves lucky they were not in my situation. Many commented by saying they would no longer complain about quarantine. These comments encouraged me to continue writing about the plight of refugees. But what do these comments really mean? How is one to interpret them? I think about these online interactions deeply as I move ahead to 2021, my eighth year in immigration detention.

My aim in writing is to make people aware of the difficult situation imprisoned refugees have to endure. I have been successful to a certain extent. My articles have had a good response and for this reason I continue writing them. I also continue to write my book after a long break. I have decided to start working on it again and I have hopes that I will finish it in 2021.

December 2020

In 2021 I hope no one is forced to leave their family and flee their homeland. When I was in Iran I was never able to celebrate Christmas. Christmas 2021 will be my eighth Christmas since I fled Iran. I spent six Christmases locked up in the Manus Island detention centre. I was locked up in the Mantra hotel in Melbourne for my seventh Christmas in 2019. And this year I am still locked up. My wish is that I celebrate Christmas in 2021 as a free man; to celebrate the day out of detention; to celebrate a proper Christmas for the first time in my life. I also wish I could see my mother again after eight years.

On 17 December I was forcibly transferred to another prison – from incarceration in the Mantra Bell City hotel to the Park Hotel in Melbourne. This is the 12th time I have been moved against my will. I am an exile – every removal and relocation to another prison is another form of exile.

I hope this will be my last site of detention before freedom. I hope I will not be transferred for the 13th time, or more, in 2021.

Hotel or prison? 

In August this year, in the City of Hull, a nodal point, together with the City of Liverpool, in defining the pathway of the LODE Zone Line, refugees were housed in The Royal Hotel, in a 'private arrangement' between the Home Office, Britannia Hotels and Mears, without any agreement with Hull City Council having taken place.

 

James Campbell reports for the Hull Daily Mail, Hull Live, on 12 August 2020 with the headline:  

Hull City Council criticises Home Office decision to house asylum seekers in Royal Hotel

James Campbell writes: 

Hull City Council has criticised the decision to house asylum seekers in a city centre hotel. Backed by the city's three MPs it said it had objected to the 'private arrangement' between the Home Office, Britannia Hotels and Mears.

The Royal Hotel in Ferensway has been housing dozens of asylum seekers during lockdown as part of a Home Office contract. Hull, like many other cities, has been told by the Government they must take their fair share of asylum seekers while their applications to remain in the country are processed.

But Hull City Council has been left frustrated by the lack of consultation over the numbers the city should take and where they are being housed. In a strongly worded statement sent to Hull Live for publication, Councillor Rosemary Pantelakis said it was 'not acceptable' that the Government could ignore 'those with administrative duties for the city'.

While accepting Hull should welcome and help those seeking asylum in the UK, the council says the Royal Hotel is not a suitable venue. Hull Live understands the council objected to Home Office plans to take in 200 asylum seekers - which was later reduced to 130. We understand the number of asylum seekers in the hotel is now much lower than that.

Cllr Rosemary Pantelakis, portfolio holder for corporate services, said: "We are keen that asylum seekers see Hull in the positive light that its residents do, as a friendly, welcoming city.

“The use of the Royal Hotel is nothing to do with Hull City Council. It is a private arrangement between Britannia Hotels, the Home Office and Mears. The council does not receive any financial income relating to these measures.

“We were informed of their plans and raised our objections to the use this site which we do not feel is appropriate, or has all the facilities.

“Supported by the three Hull MPs we raised these objections directly with ministers. The Home Office pressed ahead with their plans, with minor amendments.”

Cllr Pantelakis believes it was a mistake to ignore many of the concerns raised by the local authority. She said: “It is not acceptable that the views of those with administrative responsibilities for the city as well as the local knowledge and insight, can just be ignored by Government.

“Hull City Council is seeking to engage and meet with the provider and the hotelier to ensure we can be supportive. Our issues are with the Home Office and it is not the fault of those seeking asylum.”

Emma Hardy, MP for Hull West and Hessle, which includes the city centre, has been working with the council and her fellow Hull MPs, Karl Turner and Diana Johnson.

She said: “Hull is a city of sanctuary and we have always offered support to asylum seekers, both through supporting formal national programmes and establishing local charities who support refugees facing persecution abroad.

"This government has given no consideration to this inappropriate placement. The number of people needing support has been increased without any thought of the wider impact on community cohesion and the resources needed to adequately help them.

"The city centre is totally unsuitable for the vulnerable individuals concerned and for the city because of the ongoing control measures required by Covid-19. 

"The Government made this decision even when Hull City Council and Diana Johnson, Karl Turner and I voiced our concerns about the suitability of the location for the vulnerable individuals concerned and for our city but the Government refused to listen.”

Hull takes pride in its diversity and promoting freedom and tolerance. The asylum seekers are being kept in the hotel and other venues while their applications are processed which usually takes around three months. If they can stay, they may be moved to any part of the country and may not necessarily remain in Hull.

A spokeswoman for Hull Help for Refugees hopes there will not be a backlash over the housing of asylum seekers at the hotel. 'Most have harrowing stories to tell'. She says people need to understand why refugees are fleeing their own countries.

She said: “Asylum seekers come here illegally as that is the only way they can arrive. They then apply for asylum and go through the process to legally stay in the UK.

“A small percentage may come here for economic reasons but they are usually turned away through the thorough process we have in the UK.

“But most have harrowing stories to tell. I have spoken to people who have come to Hull from Libya and have been tortured.

“There are those who have arrived from Syria whose homes have been bombed and they will be killed if they return.

“It has also been a hell of a journey for them to get here, often hiding in lorries or crossing the dangerous English Channel.

“Some are stuck in refugee camps for years and many are separated from their families.”

Contrary to some beliefs, asylum seekers and refugees are not lavished with benefits as soon as they arrive. The spokeswoman said: “I went to visit a family who have been housed in Hull and they asked me for food.

“They have a roof over their head but nothing else. No clothes and no furniture.

“We support refugees who have nothing. They are not supported or given handouts.

“I have been to the hotel and the staff are very kind but these people are not living a life of luxury. There is no room service and they cannot leave the hotel.

“There have been asylum seekers put up at the hotel before but since lockdown there have been more as the hotel has been closed.”

The spokeswoman says any belief that the asylum seekers would create more crime is very wide of the mark. She said: “The refugees I speak to are decent, polite and very genuine. It is more likely they would be victims of crime.

“But I can understand people being fearful and there are those in Hull who don’t have much themselves which can cause resentment.

“But if people take the time to speak to refugees they will see them in a different light."

The Royal Hotel has not confirmed it is housing asylum seekers but says it is not taking bookings or hosting any events until November.

A spokesman said: “The Royal Hotel is proud to have been one of the few hotels in the region to remain open throughout the duration of the Covid-19 lockdown in order to support NHS, medical professionals and key workers during an unprecedented time.

“However due to recent Government guidelines we have taken the decision to reschedule all meetings, conferences and events until November 2020, when this will be reviewed again.

“It is not our policy to comment on any individual or group bookings that come into the hotel and this will remain the case going forward.

“We look forward to welcoming back our guests old and new in the very near future.”

The Home Office says the pandemic means the use of hotels to house asylum seekers has become necessary.

A spokesman said: “It is a fact that because of the coronavirus pandemic, the Home Office has to make alternative provision for asylum seekers.

“We have had to work with public health advisors throughout the coronavirus outbreak to inform a national approach on how asylum seekers are accommodated.

“It has been necessary to temporarily house a proportion of asylum seekers in hotels to make sure they are able to follow social distancing guidelines.

“Since March, the number of people within the asylum system has risen. This is because we temporarily ceased ending asylum support for those whose claims have been either granted or refused.

“This is to ensure people were not made homeless during lockdown and able to follow social distancing guidelines. As a result, we have temporarily housed a number of people in hotels.”

Social care and housing provider Mears has been contracted to house the asylum seekers on behalf of the Home Office.

A spokesperson said: “Hotel accommodation has been used since March across the UK to house asylum seekers as a contingency during Covid-19.

“The decision to use hotel accommodation was approved by the Home Office and is in line with the measures taken across the country for accommodating and supporting asylum seekers and is not unique to Hull.

“Indeed many local authorities have used similar hotel accommodation for homeless people during the crisis.”

Hull Live comment

Hull is proud to be a city of sanctuary. As Emma Hardy says, we have a history of offering help to those most in need.

Many asylum seekers in the UK have been through unimaginable horror and we have a duty to ensure they are treated with dignity as they go through the processes in place once they arrive.

But by placing asylum seekers in the Royal Hotel, the Government has ignored the legitimate concerns of those who know our city the best - the council and our MPs.

They say the facilities and location of the hotel mean it is an inappropriate choice. The Government must listen to these concerns and find an alternative. 

This is not about politics. It is about human beings.

Re:LODE Radio considers a more realistic view about the ethics involved in the treatment of the poor and vulnerable by government authorities across the world, helps in an understanding of what's going on. While it is about human beings . . . 

. . . it is about politics, rightwing populist politics, protecting capitalist interests!

Earlier this month the shocking death toll of asylum seekers in the care of the UK government and the Home Office was revealed following a Freedom of Information request lodged by the Guardian.

Diane Taylor for the Guardian reports (Tue 15 Dec 2020) under the subheading: 

FoI response shows 29 people died – five times as many as lost their lives in perilous Channel crossings 

Twenty-nine asylum seekers have died in Home Office accommodation so far this year – five times as many as those who have lost their lives on perilous Channel small boat crossings over the same period.

The Guardian obtained the figure in a freedom of information response from the Home Office, which does not publish deaths data. The identities of the majority of those who died have not been made public and the circumstances of their deaths are unclear.

Many asylum seekers are in the 20-40 age group and are fit and healthy when they embark on what are often physically and emotionally gruelling journeys to the UK. 

One of the most recent deaths was that of Mohamed Camera, 27, from Ivory Coast. He was found dead in his room in Home Office accommodation in a north London hotel on 9 November.

Camera had been complaining of back pain shortly before he died and had travelled through Libya en route to the UK. He had recently arrived from Calais on a small boat.

One of his friends who travelled from Calais with him told the Guardian: “He was a nice, sociable person. He was smiling when we reached the UK because he believed that now he was going to have another life.”

A Home Office spokesperson confirmed the death and officials said they were “saddened” by it.

Another man, 41-year-old Abdullah Ahmed Abdullah Alhabib, who fled war-torn Yemen, was found dead in a Manchester hotel room on 6 August.

Alhabib travelled on a small boat with 15 other people from Yemen, Syria and Iran. After they were picked up by Border Force, Home Office officials detained a group at Yarl’s Wood immigration removal centre in Bedfordshire for three days before moving them to the hotel in Manchester.

One of the asylum seekers who was in the boat with Alhabib told the Guardian at the time: “All of us on these journeys, we have lost our country, lost our family, lost our future. When we got into the boat in Calais we felt the sea was the only place left for us to go.”

An inquest jury found on 30 November that the death of Oscar Okwurime, a Nigerian man, as a result of a subarachnoid haemorrhage was considered “unnatural” and that neglect contributed to his death.

The Scottish Refugee Council has called for all 29 deaths to be fully and independently investigated. In September, a group of Glasgow MPs also called for a fatal accident inquiry into three deaths that occurred in the city.

The people who died were Mercy Baguma, from Uganda, who was found dead with her toddler by her side, Adnan Olbeh, from Syria, and Badreddin Abadlla Adam, who was shot dead by police, after he stabbed six people including a police officer.

Meanwhile, those who lost their lives in the Channel included Abdulfatah Hamdallah, a young Sudanese refugee, as well as a family of five – Rasul Iran Nezhad, Shiva Mohammad Panahi and their children Anita, nine, Armin, six, and 15-month-old Artin, who drowned trying to cross to the UK in October 2020.

Clare Moseley, the founder of the Care4Calais charity, said: “It’s shameful that more refugees die here in the UK, in Home Office accommodation, than do so in Calais or trying to cross the Channel. Refugees are the world’s most resilient people. Many have crossed the Sahara desert and made it through the hell of Libya, facing unimaginable hardship to get this far. But the way we treat them in this country is cruel.

“Our government doesn’t give them the basics of life like adequate food and clothing. It locks them up in military barracks and keeps them isolated and depressed in hotels. It keeps them under constant threat of deportation, instead of processing their asylum applications promptly.”

Graham O’Neill, the policy manager for the Scottish Refugee Council, said: “After the recent tragedies in Glasgow we are not shocked many have died in the UK asylum support system.”

He added that there was no Home Office public policy on deaths or support for funeral costs or repatriation of the body, nor any discernible learning process to prevent sudden or unexplained deaths. “The Home Office must rectify this and home affairs select committee and the chief inspector ensure they do,” he said.

A Home Office spokesperson said: “We are always saddened to hear of the death of any individual in asylum accommodation. This can be for a number of reasons, including natural causes or as the result of a terminal illness.

“The health and wellbeing of asylum seekers has and always will be our priority. We will continue to work closely with a range of organisations to provide support to those that need it and where necessary we will always cooperate fully in any investigation into the cause of an individual death.”

The revelation comes as a high court judge ruled on Monday that the Home Office was in breach of its duties to protect the human rights of asylum seekers against homelessness.

Judge Robin Knowles also found the Home Office was responsible for wholesale failure to monitor and implement a £4bn contract awarded to several private companies over a 10-year period leading to unlawful delays in provision of accommodation.

Freedom of information responses from the Home Office obtained by the Scottish Refugee Council found that, between January and March 2020, 83% of Home Office properties to accommodate asylum seekers had defects and 40% of the defects were so serious that they made the properties uninhabitable.

The defects were identified by the Home Office’s own inspectors.

Britain is at breaking point . . .

. . . as far as immigration is concerned, according to Nigel Farage, and some on the extreme rightwing of the Brexit brigade. UKIP was effectively "inciting racial hatred" with the unveiling of this poster and part of UKIP's "project fear" in the lead up to the UK EU referendum in 2016. 

Heather Stewart and Rowena Mason, reporting for the Guardian (Thu 16 Jun 2016) on complaints about this poster that was said to breach UK race laws. They reported under the headline and subheading:

Nigel Farage's anti-migrant poster reported to police

Unison’s Dave Prentis said poster showing a queue of migrants and refugees incites racial hatred

An anti-migrant poster unveiled by Nigel Farage has been reported to the police with a complaint that it incites racial hatred and breaches UK race laws. On Thursday night Dave Prentis, of the Unison union, said he had written to the Metropolitan police about the poster, which shows a queue of mostly non-white migrants and refugees with the slogan “Breaking point: the EU has failed us all.”

Prentis described the Ukip poster as a “blatant attempt to incite racial hatred”. He said: “This is scaremongering in its most extreme and vile form. Leave campaigners have descended into the gutter with their latest attempt to frighten working people into voting to leave the EU. 

“To pretend that migration to the UK is only about people who are not white is to peddle the racism that has no place in a modern, caring society. That’s why Unison has complained about this blatant attempt to incite racial hatred and breach UK race laws.”

Earlier, controversy over the poster had prompted Boris Johnson to distance the official leave campaign from Ukip. A string of politicians from Nicola Sturgeon to Yvette Cooper also condemned the poster.

Within hours, Twitter users had pointed out the image’s inadvertent similarity to Nazi propaganda footage of migrants shown in a BBC documentary from 2005.  

Johnson, who leads the official Vote Leave campaign, said the poster was “not our campaign” and “not my politics”. Drawing a distinction between his own view and those of Farage, he suggested that leaving the EU would be a way of “spiking the guns” of anti-immigrant feeling. “If you take back control, you do a great deal to neutralise anti-immigrant feeling generally,” he said, after reporters showed him a picture of the poster. “I am passionately pro-immigration and pro-immigrants.”

Farage has repeatedly praised Johnson in recent weeks, going so far as to suggest that he would take a job in a government led by Johnson if he took over after a vote to leave. The official campaign, however, has been less than happy to be associated with Ukip and Leave.EU, which have repeatedly been accused of stoking anti-immigrant feeling and using racist tropes. Vote Leave is campaigning separately from Ukip, but it does include the party’s only MP, Douglas Carswell, who shared a platform with Johnson last week.

Farage unveiled the poster in Westminster with the subheading: “We must break free of the EU and take back control of our borders.” The photograph used was of migrants crossing the Croatia-Slovenia border in 2015, with the only prominent white person in the photograph obscured by a box of text.

Challenged about its message, Farage said: “This is a photograph – an accurate, undoctored photograph – taken on 15 October last year following Angela Merkel’s call in the summer and, frankly, if you believe, as I have always believed, that we should open our hearts to genuine refugees, that’s one thing.

“But, frankly, as you can see from this picture, most of the people coming are young males and, yes, they may be coming from countries that are not in a very happy state, they may be coming from places that are poorer than us, but the EU has made a fundamental error that risks the security of everybody.”

When it was suggested to him that the people were refugees, he said: “You don’t know that. They are coming from all over the world. If you get back to the Geneva convention definition, you will find very few people that came into Europe last year would actually qualify as genuine refugees.

“We have just had – in the last two weeks, the Dusseldorf bomb plot has been uncovered – a very, very worrying plan for mass attacks along the style of Paris or Brussels. All of those people came into Germany last year posing as refugees. When Isis say they will use the migrant crisis to flood the continent with their jihadi terrorists, they probably mean it.” 

A Ukip spokesman said the comparison with Nazi propaganda was invidious and “those making them should remember Godwin’s law”, an internet adage that heated discussions tend eventually towards someone bringing up the Nazis, and that those who do have lost the argument.

Cooper, the Labour MP for Pontefract and Castleford, who has campaigned on behalf of refugees, said: “Just when you thought leave campaigners couldn’t stoop any lower, they are now exploiting the misery of the Syrian refugee crisis in the most dishonest and immoral way.”

Caroline Lucas, the Green party MP for Brighton Pavilion, said: “Using the innocent victims of a human tragedy for political propaganda is utterly disgusting. Farage is engaging in the politics of the gutter.” Nicola Sturgeon, the SNP leader, said the poster was disgusting.

Neil Carmichael, the Conservative MP for Stroud, said: “It’s disappointing to see Ukip jumping on the refugee crisis to further their own political aims. Britain can only deal with the issue of immigration by working together with European countries that face the same challenges.”

A spokesperson for Getty Images confirmed that the picture had been licensed from them and was taken in Slovenia in 2015 by its staff photographer Jeff Mitchell. “It is always uncomfortable when an objective news photograph is used to deliver any political message or subjective agenda. However, the image in question has been licensed legitimately,” they said.

“Editorial integrity is of the utmost importance to Getty Images, and our photographers are passionate about documenting the global news agenda and covering issues from an objective and impartial standpoint. Our images are syndicated to almost 1 million customers around the world – whether that be to media, business and brands, or in this case, political parties.”

Farage has made a series of interventions in the referendum campaign, including leading a flotilla of fishing boats up the Thames to Westminster on Wednesday to promote Brexit. Remain campaigners, however, have repeatedly criticised Ukip for the anti-migrant tone of some of its material, particularly in relation to the possibility of Turkey joining the EU.

The archbishop of Canterbury, Justin Welby, told MPs on the home affairs select committee this month that he utterly condemned Farage’s comment that sexual assaults by migrants were the “nuclear bomb” of the EU referendum. He said Farage was guilty of “inexcusable pandering to people’s worries and prejudices, that is, giving legitimisation to racism”. The Ukip leader was “accentuating [people’s] fear for political gain, and that is absolutely unacceptable,” he said.

Asked about the archbishop’s criticism, Farage dismissed his comments about migrants as a minor issue in the wider context of the referendum.

Leave.EU, which is funded by Ukip’s biggest donor, Arron Banks, has been repeatedly criticised for the tone of its campaign material regarding immigrants, which includes a video that remain campaigners said demonised Turkish people.

The family of man?

Photographer Matt Cardy, a colleague Jeff Mitchell who took the original photo, shot in October 2015, says the depicted refugees were in this unusually large cohort because they were being marched by a guard every morning after crossing the Croatian border into Slovenia after having assembled in a waiting area.

“That was quite a controversial image in some ways, the way it was used. It suggested thousands of people were coming. Actually that was something that was happening once a day, which was an extraordinary time and is now no longer happening,” he says.

“You go back there now and it’s just a pleasant nature trail with a lady cycling her bicycle along it.”

"Farage", what's in a name?

It has been suggested that the Farage name comes from a distant Huguenot ancestor. Both parents of one of Farage's great-grandfathers were German who emigrated to London from the Frankfurt area shortly after 1861. 

Farage, on the road again, and stalking refugees (or "illegal migrants" according to Farage) along the LODE Zone Line!

Sandbach, Warrington, Ellesmere Port ("shouldn't be laughing, really"), Hoylake ("they've all got great phones") ("you have to wonder, don't you") ("the taxpayers are paying for all this") ("you come here illegally and this is the kind of thing you get"). These quotations in brackets are some of the distorted and poisonous nonsense peddled by Farage as he plays on the false consciousness constructed in the ideological space (back seat of a Range Rover in this case) of the entitled, mean spirited and angry of "those that have".  

Disappointingly, Farage didn't seem to actually make it to Anfield . . . 

. . . but Mohamed Salah Hamed Mahrous Ghaly did!

Born in Nagrig, Egypt, in 1992, Mo Salah is considered one of the best players in the world, he is known for his finishing, dribbling, and speed.

Salah started his senior career with Egyptian club Al Mokawloon, departing shortly thereafter to join Swiss side Basel for an undisclosed fee. In Switzerland, his performances attracted Premier League side Chelsea, who signed him in 2014 for a reported fee of £11 million. 

However, he was used sparingly in his debut season and was allowed to leave on loan to Serie A clubs Fiorentina and Roma, with the latter eventually signing him permanently for €15 million. 

Following his role in helping Roma to a second-placed finish and a club record points-tally in 2017, Salah returned to the Premier League to sign for Liverpool for a then club-record fee of £36.9 million. 

Out of Africa, always something new (Ex Africa semper aliquid novi)

Mohamed Salah meets the High Commissioner and refugee students to discuss the importance of education for refugees.

Mohamed Salah takes messages from young refugees to the UN  

Mohamed Salah, Ambassador for UNHCR and Vodafone’s Instant School Network (INS) heard from the refugee students about the tremendous impact technology can have on their education and urged world leaders to not forget refugee children whose education has been particularly hard hit by the coronavirus pandemic. 

Back in 2018 . . . 

In 2018 Liverpool Football Club fans came up with a new Mo Salah chant: 

If he's good enough for you . . .

. . . he's good enough for me!

In May 2018 Middle East Eye produced the video shown in this video montage asking the question: 

Is Mohamed Salah changing the way Muslims are seen in Liverpool and beyond?

In Egypt, he is a national hero known as the "Fourth Pyramid". In Liverpool, football fans now simply call him the "Egyptian King".

In the space of a single record-breaking season, Mohamed Salah has emerged as a global superstar whose goals have helped carry Liverpool to Saturday's Champions League final against Real Madrid in Kiev, and Egypt to next month's World Cup finals in Russia.

But some see the 25-year-old's influence extending beyond the football pitch. In an era of rising Islamophobia and hate crime in the UK, Salah is also challenging prejudice and changing attitudes, with his Muslim identity celebrated in songs by Liverpool fans.

Middle East Eye went to fish and chip shops, mosques and to Liverpool's famous Anfield stadium to investigate the impact that Salah has had on a port city that has always celebrated its independent identity and openness to the world.

Ending the video montage is the June 2019 report from the BBC News North West that covered the impact of Mo Salah's positive influence upon incidents of racism in Liverpool, following the results of recent research. 

Liverpool and migration

A present day population demography of Liverpool reflects its maritime history, and the part that migration has played in that history, especially the migration of people from nearby Ireland, following the start of the Great Irish Famine. 

Two million Irish people migrated to Liverpool in the space of one decade, many of them subsequently departing for the United States. By 1851, more than 20% of the population of Liverpool was Irish. At the 2001 Census, 0.75% of the population were born in the Republic of Ireland, while 0.54% were born in Northern Ireland, but up to 50% of Liverpudlians are thought to have Irish ancestry.

While more than 90% of Liverpool's population is white, the city is one of the most important sites in the history of multiculturalism in the United Kingdom. Liverpool is home to Britain's oldest black community, dating to at least the 1730s, and some Liverpudlians are able to trace their black ancestors in the city back ten generations. Early black settlers in the city included seamen, the children of traders sent to be educated, and freed slaves, since slaves arriving on English and Welsh shores after 1722 were deemed free men, as a result of a judgement by Lord Mansfield in a court case. 

This case, known as  Somerset v Stewart (1772), and also known as Somersett's case, is a judgment of the English Court of King's Bench in 1772, relating to the right of an enslaved person on English soil not to be forcibly removed from the country and sent to Jamaica for sale. Lord Mansfield decided that:

The state of slavery is of such a nature that it is incapable of being introduced on any reasons, moral or political, but only by positive law, which preserves its force long after the reasons, occasions, and time itself from whence it was created, is erased from memory. It is so odious, that nothing can be suffered to support it, but positive law. Whatever inconveniences, therefore, may follow from the decision, I cannot say this case is allowed or approved by the law of England; and therefore the black must be discharged.

Slavery had never been authorized by statute within England and Wales, and Lord Mansfield found it also to be unsupported within England by the common law, although he made no comment on the position in the overseas territories of the British Empire. Lord Mansfield's judgment was deliberately expressed in narrow terms, and scholars and later judges have disagreed over precisely what legal precedent the case set.

The city of Liverpool is also home to the oldest Chinese community in Europe; the first residents of the city's Chinatown arrived as seamen in the 19th century. The gateway in Chinatown is also the largest gateway outside of China.

The city is also historically known for its large Welsh population. In 1813, 10% of Liverpool's population was Welsh, leading to the city becoming known as "the capital of North Wales". 120,000 Welsh people migrated from Wales to Liverpool between 1851 and 1911. At the 2001 Census, 1.17% of the population were Welsh-born. There are a number of people who use the Welsh language as their first language in Liverpool. The Liverpool accent, Scouse, is thought to have been influenced by the arrival of Irish and Welsh immigrants. 

Today, up to 50% of Liverpool's population is believed to have Irish ancestry. The influences of Irish and Welsh culture have given Liverpool's people traits usually associated with the Celtic fringes of the British Isles.

The vast majority of Liverpool's ethnic minorities live within the inner city area, particularly in and around Toxteth. According to the 2001 census, 38% of the population of Granby, 37% of Princes Park, and 27% of Central were from ethnic groups other than White British.

Reduced to a list? 

As part of Liverpool Biennial 2018, a list of the 34,361 refugees and migrants who lost their lives trying to reach Europe was installed on a 280-metre hoarding on Great George Street, Liverpool on 12 July 2018. The List, that according to the artist Banu Cennetoğlu, is not an artwork but a database, whose distribution is facilitated by the artist, and subsequent to the installation, has been vandalised and torn down on two occasions. Helen Pidd, North of England editor for the Guardian reported on this story (Wed 15 Aug 2018) with the headline:

List of refugee deaths displayed by artist in Liverpool torn down again 

Helen Pidd writes: 

A list of the 34,361 refugees and migrants who lost their lives trying to reach Europe has been torn down for the second time in Liverpool.

The artist who placed it there, Banu Cennetoğlu, has decided not to install it for a third time, leaving the ripped remains as a “reminder of this systematic violence exercised against people”.

The most recent version of list, which the Guardian published as a special supplement in June, has been displayed in cities including Berlin, Istanbul, Basel and Athens and last month was installed on a 280 metre-long hoarding on Great George Street in Liverpool as part of the city’s Biennial art festival.

Cennetoğlu said it had been torn down “very violently” on Sunday. She said she had decided, “sadly”, to leave the site as it was. The artwork had never been damaged in other cities, she said.

She said: “The List was installed on a 280-metre hoarding on Great George Street, Liverpool on 12 July 2018. It has been repeatedly damaged, removed and targeted since it was installed.

“We have decided to leave it in this current ‘state’ as a manifestation and reminder of this systematic violence exercised against people.”

Festival organisers said they still did not know who had torn the list down or why. Some of the names are still legible, and they plan to install a notice explaining why the others are missing and directing visitors to the website showing the full list.

It was first ripped down on 28 July. At the time, a festival spokeswoman said: “It is timely and important to make the List public during a global refugee crisis. We were dismayed to see it had been removed … and would like to know why. The List has been met with critical acclaim and we are doing everything we can to reinstate it.”

Compiled and updated each year by United for Intercultural Action, a European network of 550 anti-racist organisations in 48 countries, the list traces information relating to the deaths of 34,361 refugees and migrants who have lost their lives within, or on the borders of Europe since 1993.

Since 2007, in collaboration with art workers and institutions, Cennetoğlu has facilitated updated versions of the list using public spaces such as billboards, transport networks and newspapers in cities across Europe.

The List

34,361 and rising - (Wednesday 20 June 2018) 

Charlotte Higgins of the Guardian tells how Banu Cennetoğlu became involved with The List, in this article published on the Guardian website (Wed 20 Jun 2018) in the month preceding the installation offer work for Liverpool Biennial. The headline runs:

Banu Cennetoğlu: As long as I have resources, I will make The List more visible

The artist Banu Cennetoğlu can remember precisely the moment she was overwhelmed by the List, a catalogue, made by volunteers, of those who had died in their attempt to make a new life in Europe. It was 2002. She was based at the Rijksakademie in Amsterdam, studying photography. Researching the architecture of border posts for a project, she stumbled across it on the website of United for Intercultural Action, a network of NGOs supporting migrants and refugees. Back then, it was a document of 15 pages and 6,000 names; now it has over 30,000. “I started to read, and that was it,” she says. It was the start of a relationship that still continues in all its original fervour. “I know,” she adds, “that as long as I have resources as an artist I will continue to make this list more visible.”

Cennetoğlu, an intense, warm woman in her mid-40s, immediately realised that she wanted – needed – people to encounter the List, in all its terrible rawness and cumulative power. She printed it out and pressed it on to people she met, left copies in cafes, made stickers and stuck them on ATMs around the city. It didn’t seem enough. She liked the idea of hiring billboards – not enormous hoardings but the kind of eye-level, poster-size advertising sites that were dotted around Amsterdam. The question was where to get the money, though that seemed easy enough – the Netherlands, at the time, had plenty of money for artists. “But then there were five years of constant attempts and they all failed,” she says. The conversations with potential funders played out repetitively. “People would ask me, ‘Is it an artwork?’ I would reply that it wasn’t. And they would say, ‘Well, if it’s not art, we cannot give you the money.’”

Finally, in 2007, support came from a foundation in the US. She had already moved away from the Netherlands, back home to Istanbul, where she works as an artist and runs a non-profit organisation devoted to publishing and collecting artists’ books. There was funding enough to publish sections of the List on 150 poster sites, and to hold discussions and events at the Stedelijk Museum. The night before the posters went up, she says, she felt the world would change. She remembers hovering nonchalantly near the billboards in a park, waiting to see how people would react. “I got angry when I saw people walking by. I’d judge them. Or if a woman was going to her yoga class instead of coming to our talk. In the end I had to say to myself, ‘Banu, chill. The main thing is it’s out there in the world.’”

Since then, the List has appeared in Greece, Bulgaria, the US, Germany, Switzerland, Italy, Turkey and now the UK. It has been distributed in a variety of forms – poster campaigns in railway stations, printed in newspapers, emblazoned on hoardings. There is a particular power, she thinks, to the List presented as a physical object. “When you can hold it there’s a way to relate to it that’s better than an infinite scrolling experience. When there is a screen, you have somehow the power to isolate yourself.” As a printed document, there is the idea that someone might pick it up, or randomly come across it years from now. Or you might start to read it out loud, in all its appalling repetitiveness. “Because of politics, of course there are similarities in the way people die – through suicide in detention centres, or in boats.” But its power, she believes, is actually really in the way that it forces the reader to confront the fact that each of these deaths is singular. And that perhaps one’s own personal choices might be implicated in the complicated web of politics that causes these individual tragedies.

“I still think about why,” she says. “Why the List has been with me for the past 16 years and why I cannot stop, why I carry it with me.” It is even more inextricably entwined with the life of her young daughter, for whom there has never been a time before the List. There are two aspects to it, she thinks – the first is deep and instinctive and is entwined with its emotional force as a lament, an act of mourning. “The other side is very pragmatic. It’s a database, compiled by an NGO since 1993 and it’s done only by volunteer work – but it needs to be visible. Governments don’t keep these records for the public; they don’t want the public to see these records because it exposes their policies. So you have NGOs trying to put the data together, and that data is incomplete and fragile, but there again someone has to do it. And I want to contribute to that with what I have and what I do – but not by aestheticising it. You cannot represent this kind of darkness through art.”

Charlotte Higgins follows up the List's destruction in Liverpool in an article in the Guardian (Thu 16 Aug 2018). Re:LODE Radio considers that there's a set of questionable assumptions that are mobilised throughout the article and exemplified in the statement that: 

The list of dead migrants demands nothing from passersby apart from compassion. Its defacement is proof that art has become a political battleground

Charlotte Higgins piece is headlined: 

The refugee list's destruction in Liverpool has a chilling significance

Following an introduction to the reader on Banu Cennetoğlu's inspiration for the List project Charlotte Higgins widens the context of this act of wanton destruction to include far-right inspired culture wars. She writes: 

Over the past dozen years she (Banu Cennetoğlu) has published the list, updated, on poster sites in the Netherlands, in newspapers in Greece and Germany, on billboards in the US. It was published on 20 June in a special supplement of the Guardian. It was then pasted on hoardings along Great George Street, Liverpool, as part of the city’s art biennial. It has been ripped down from that location, twice, most recently on Sunday. The motives of the vandals can only be speculated upon.

The list has never been defaced or damaged in this way before, in any part of the world it has been seen, and there is something immeasurably depressing and shaming that this should happen on its first showing in Britain. It is hard to imagine the failure of compassion that would impel any individual or group to do this, especially as the list is so modest: it asks nothing of passersby other than that it should be seen. But then, we are living in dangerously fraught times. The arts, in their broadest sense, can no longer be regarded as a dull backwater some distance away from the real business of politics. Culture is the new front line. Those within the “alt-right” are training their big guns on fresh targets: “liberal Hollywood”; the press; that defensively constructed catch-all, political correctness.

Steve Bannon, Donald Trump’s former communications chief, “believes that politics is downstream from culture”, observed the Cambridge Analytica whistleblower, Christopher Wylie, when addressing the US Senate in May. Bannon, he added, had been seeking to “build an arsenal of weapons to fight a culture war”. Battles are being fought on dozens of fronts – from politically targeted messaging on Facebook to nakedly far-right “news” services with little regard for the truth, to the Hungarian government’s current draft decree banning gender studies MAs from the country’s universities.

It is a war sometimes fought with insidious cunning: think of Boris Johnson’s recent insulting remarks about Muslim women who cover their faces, all shielded within the neat carapace of an apparently “liberal” argument – a calculated example of “alt-right unvirtue signalling”, as the commentator Anne McElvoy put it. It is a war that can be fought through the bland proxy of a deadening, obstructive bureaucracy: think of the Home Office’s “hostile environment” and the refusal of visas to writers invited to the Edinburgh international book festival to offer an hour’s entertainment and enlightenment to a (largely) British audience. It is a war often fought crudely, as it has been in Great George Street – and as it was this month, when masked attackers entered Bookmarks, a leftwing bookshop in London, upturning displays and damaging books.

Facist thugs? 

On Sep 7, 2018, Joe Anderson, the mayor of Liverpool responded to the defacement and destruction of a "memorial", pledging to restore the work, and asking volunteers to protect it, and ending with the hashtag hopenothate.

So, why is it that the List remained unscathed in its previous and various manifestations and locations  (including poster sites in the Netherlands, in newspapers in Greece and Germany, on billboards in the US), but on the long hoarding along Great George Street, Liverpool, as part of the city’s art biennial, and has been ripped down from that location, twice?

Re:LODE Radio does not have an answer to this question, but considers a number of questions are relevant, questions that connect directly to the larger question of considering what is happening in different places.

The destruction of urban fabric, the destruction of social fabric, and the remaining wastelands, urban and social, has social and political consequences. Even in places that are not necessarily contested, the experience of urban and social wasteland has its effects. For example: Great George Street, Liverpool. This is what the neighbourhoods of Great George Street looked like in this ariel view taken in the 1930's and found on the Streets of Liverpool webpage: The Destruction of Great George Street. 

Compare the rich texture of urban fabric in the image above to the patches of urban wasteland found in the Google Earth screenshot of the land to be "developed" for the  so-called "New China Town Project".

This is a view of the future residential-led project designed by Brock Carmichael for the southern gateway to Liverpool’s Chinatown district, and that will include 500 homes, a hotel and office and retail space, a scheme that was granted planning consent in December 2019. 

All the planning proposals are glossy, bright and shiny but the contemporary reality is more often "planning blight"!

But this is the reality now, and for many years past! 

There are other culture wars being fought on Great George Street, local and global! The planning blight here was caused by the banking and financial crisis of 2007 - 2008, that put a stop to incoming capital investment in Liverpool's property market. 

Freedom of movement for capital has its ups and downs. The ups mean the rich get richer, the downs mean the rich still get richer but there needs to be bailouts, rescue plans, et cetera. These restorative actions are usually financed by the taxpayer, but in the system of global capitalism the taxpayer rarely shares in the profits, when they occur. 

Privatisation of profit! Socialisation of loss!

Under a a cloud?

This report is by Tom Duffy of the Liverpool ECHO, 21 APR 2020 that runs beneath the headline:

Director at New Chinatown developers leaves the project 

A director at the company behind the New Chinatown site in Liverpool city centre has left the business. Neal Hunter, who was development director at Great George Street Developments, (GGSD) has moved on to take up a new role with a Cheshire based property company.

GGSD is currently behind plans to transform land off Great George Street into a successful residential and commercial development. The original scheme was sponsored by the Chinatown Development Company (CDC). But CDC failed to deliver following negative publicity and a raft of logistical and legal disputes.

Tom Duffy's journalism links to one of his earlier reports (8 Mar 2020) with a hypertext link: negative publicity; on a matter which is now subject to a major investigation by the Serious Fraud Office (SFO).

Howard Nicholson, finance director at GGSD, has now been appointed the company's managing director.

Mr Hunter confirmed his departure from the scheme to the ECHO. He said: "“I had a fantastic time leading the pre- planning stages of The Great George Street Project for two and a half years. Achieving planning consent in December was the realisation of a fantastic team effort from expert consultants, who will now form part of the delivery team.

“When another opportunity came along it was too good to turn down, and I left with the full support of the GGSD team, in the knowledge that the project is in the great hands of Howard Nicholson as MD, to see it through to completion. I remain proud of all that we have achieved to date and look forward to visiting when the hotel, restaurants and bars are full and this is a thriving community space with Baltic Farm at its heart.”

READ MORE  

Links to: Boulevard of broken dreams: Inside the New Chinatown 'nightmare', an earlier report by Tom Duffy (23 Feb 2020).

Tom Duffy writes: Confusion surrounds the status of the leases at a controversial stalled development in Liverpool which could affect the future of the site.

Great George Street Developments (GGSD) says it has signed a legally-binding “heads of terms” with Liverpool Council to build on a major part of the former New Chinatown site between Liverpool Cathedral and the Baltic Triangle.

But the council says a lease for phase two of the site is still subject to a dispute because the council is owed nearly £1m.

In 2015, the China Town Development Company unveiled stunning proposals to transform the prime site through a £200m scheme involving shops and apartments, but those plans failed to materialise.

In early April (4 April 2020) Tom Duffy reported for the Liverpool ECHO on a businessman who was a director of several companies linked to Liverpool's stalled sites has been disqualified as a company director for seven years.

Tom Duffy reports: David Choules, 51, was a director of Baltic House Developments, North Point Global, North Point Pall Mall, Chinatown Development Company and Warwick Road Developments.

The connected companies were behind stalled sites such as Baltic House, North Point Pall Mall and Chinatown.

Investors who put down deposits on the schemes are feared to have lost millions of pounds.

The ECHO can now reveal that Mr Choules has been banned as a company director in relation to his tenure at Baltic House Developments and Warwick Road Developments.

Re:LODE Radio notes that David Choules is pictured for the report in the ECHO present in a 2016 "photo opportunity" at the launch of the New Chinatown project with "performance artists"  involved in a Chinese Dragon dance. The China connection is as much about the history of the oldest Chinatown in the UK as it is about inward investment from Chinese investors.

Promises made . . . 

. . . but not delivered! 

A New Chinatown was promised in 2016, with much fanfare. The plans have changed, but what still remains of the Old Chinatown? Not much! A patchwork of wastelands!

In December 2019 (19 December 2019) Tom Duffy and Liam Thorp reported for the ECHO on the arrest of a well known Liverpool property developer and the city council's regeneration chief on suspicion of fraud following a dramatic police raid. 

The ECHO can now reveal the identities of the two arrested men. They are Liverpool property developer Elliot Lawless and Liverpool City Council's Director of Regeneration Nick Kavanagh.

While Mr Lawless was arrested after the apartment raid, the ECHO understands Mr Kavanagh was pulled out of a meeting in the Cunard Building by officers.

Responding to the arrests today, Liverpool Mayor Joe Anderson said: "We will co-operate with the police unequivocally and will assist them in any way that we can.

"If there is anything the police needs access to or help with then we will of course do that."

Just short of a year later . . . 

. . . Liverpool mayor Joe Anderson bailed in fraud investigation

Kevin Rawlinson reported for the Guardian (Thu 10 Dec 2020) under the subheading:

Anderson to take period of unpaid leave while police investigate claims of bribery and witness intimidation

Kevin Rawlinson writes:

The mayor of Liverpool, Joe Anderson, is to step aside after he was arrested by detectives investigating allegations of bribery and witness intimidation linked to building deals in the city.

Anderson, who is on police bail, announced the decision on Thursday, saying he would stay away until the end of 2020, when he expects to hear how the police intend to proceed. He said his deputy, Wendy Simon, would act as mayor in his place.

“I have always done what I believe is best for the city, and I am taking the following action with those best intentions in mind,” he said. “It is important that everyone in Liverpool knows that our leaders are focused on what is most important to the people: their livelihoods and, with a pandemic still in force, their lives.

“For this reason I believe it is important that the city, and government, are reassured that our city is indeed operating in the correct way. I am therefore stepping away from decision-making within the council through a period of unpaid leave, until the police make clear their intentions with the investigation on 31 December.”

Simon said: “I would like to reassure you that the city council is concentrating on creating a path of recovery through the Covid crisis.”

Tom Crone, the leader of the council’s Green group, welcomed Anderson’s decision, saying: “His continued presence as police investigations continue is a distraction at an already challenging time for the city.”

Anderson was arrested on suspicion of conspiracy to commit bribery and witness intimidation. He described it as a “painful shock for me and my family, following a difficult few months” during which his brother died after contracting coronavirus and Anderson himself had to shield at home because of underlying health conditions.

He said he wanted to focus on his family and on “returning to a normal they can recognise, with the reassurance that I am no longer under suspicion”.

Anderson added: “Therefore, I am going to focus on cooperating with the police in their ongoing inquiry, as I believe time will make it clear that I have no case to answer.

“This situation has not dampened my passion for our city and the inspiring people who live and work here, most particularly the dedicated public servants who work within the council and the cabinet. They will continue their incredible work, as we would expect, against the challenging circumstances we find ourselves in.

“But I am not prepared to contribute my own circumstances to those challenges, so I have reached this decision for that reason alone.”

Four other men from the city were also arrested as part of the investigation into building and development contracts. Anderson was interviewed by officers on Friday and was suspended from the Labour party.

The others arrested were a 72-year-old man from Aigburth, on suspicion of witness intimidation; a 33-year-old man from West Derby, on suspicion of conspiracy to commit bribery and witness intimidation; a 46-year-old man from Ainsdale, on suspicion of conspiracy to commit bribery and witness intimidation; and a 25-year-old man from Ormskirk, on suspicion of witness intimidation.

Labour declined to comment, saying it was an ongoing police matter.

Innocent, until proved guilty?

The buoyancy of the property market before 2008 has helped in the regeneration of the the City of Liverpool, but so has "investment in culture", the world class museums, galleries, theatres and universities, that reflect a local/global creativity. Hence, Liverpool's succesful bid to become  European Capital of Culture in 2008. However, Re:LODE Radio has questions about what such investments entail, and what are the benefits to the local population, if any? Capital investment utilises the freedom of movement of capital in any way necessary to maximising profit. 

Until Brexit so did UK citizens, in Europe at at least. Perhaps there is a tendency to take for granted these double standards, where capital can parachute into the spaces of of urban and social fabric, and leave as abruptly, in a private jet? These movements are governed by the algorithm "the maximisation of capital growth". There is no need for capital to put down roots in a place. Capital remains in places as long as these places generate reasonable returns on investment. 

Property development schemes don't just "pop up", they get built and construction firms make profits and paid work for construction workers, and this takes time. But it is often the case that the local experience is that it feels like a portion of urban fabric has been "dropped" or "plonked" (from "plonk", the sound of something heavy landing) into the street plan, or even more radically, "dropped" in a new street plan and erase the old, along with our memory, as in the Liverpool One development.

City planners have destroyed as much of the city fabric, and more, than the Luftwaffe managed to in the Liverpool Blitz of 1939-41.

As Paul Virilio says in the City Of Panic, reminiscing on his experience of the Allied bombing of his home city, Nantes, and the consequent devastation, while destroying the city fabric, the shambles could not erase the street plan, and so navigation, through the rubble, was possible, guided by memory: 

When it comes down to it, only reconstruction could really disorient me by demolishing the constructions of my memory.

Paul Virilio, City of Panic, page 7.

Old photos of Liverpool's streets, lovingly assembled, showing memories of a Great George Street in previous decades. These images are from times when the organic form of the urban and social fabric, warts and all, was immanent in all of the varied human and bodily experience of growing up and being in the city. The video montage includes a Channel 4 Time Team Special uncovering layers of history revealed in a process of reconstruction at the heart of Liverpool's story.

Nostalgia, or an archaeology . . .

. . . of the present? 

It is also the case that these schemes are designed and built by creative teams serving the interests, and aesthetics of a class of global capitalists, even if they are locally based (but local skills and creativity are often underemployed).

So it is with art, artists, art institutions, public and private funding of the arts. Liverpool Biennial is the UK’s largest festival of contemporary visual art. Every two years, it commissions artists from around the world to make and present work in public spaces, galleries and museums around the city. 

Art: "Pop up" and/or "Plonked"?

On a grey winter's day the hoarding along Great George Street New Chinatown prospect looks like this from above the property speculators non-construction site.

Back in 2018 it provided Liverpool Biennial with a "ready made" opportunity for the siting of the List project. The existing structure could be used to to paste up the the entire printed list of the 34,361 refugees and migrants who lost their lives trying to reach Europe, and displayed in a public space for public perusal. Some would encounter the work in the context of being an audience for the Liverpool Biennial. Others would encounter the work as part of a larger and incidental audience. Some would see the work as an "intervention", a "pop-up" work. Others would wonder why it was there. Some would feel that this was an interesting placement, using the existing hoarding for a support for the art, or non-art project. Others would feel that the work was "plonked" there by the arts festival, as something happening on Merseyside, but determined by "others".  

When you say "others", do you mean . . .

. . . others? 

Re:LODE Radio extrapolates from a general understanding of the make-up of "incidental audience" in Liverpool, that many would see the list of names of refugees who have lost their lives coming to Europe as "others", just as there are many in a significant minority more likely to identify with those caught up in a litany of tragedy. 

Re:LODE Radio knows the benefit to artists working and showing work in Liverpool includes the fact that the audience for art will say what it thinks and feels, spontaneously and publicly, "no holds barred". This goes for the incidental audience too. 

In the EU referendum of 2016 58.2% of the vote in Liverpool was to remain in the EU, but the poisonous spectres of racism and hatred of "the other" have, since then, stalked the land and streets of England, even in the multicultural and global city of Liverpool. This is thanks to Farage and his ilk, who demonise the convenient and vulnerable "other" as the cause of all evil in society. This is sheer camouflage, hiding the real causes of concern, inequality and the economic environment in the Capitalocene.

Tearing down the list, spraying graffiti, is a small part of angry Britain, focussing on targets already demonised by politicians and the privately owned media of rightwing interests. The public situation and location for the List provided a perfect opportunity to mount an attack, and then hide. 

This attack exposes, in a material way, the hidden attitudes present in society. The fact that the work was untouched in Berlin does not mean that these attitudes don't exist within the population. Being presented with a list of perceived "others" as "victims" does not  engender empathy. Instead it might be seen, resentfully, as "virtue signalling"? Seeing the names on the list as fellow human beings, striving to survive in a difficult world, probably means that those able to engage with this human kind of "seeing" are probably in a position that allows for the viability of such a perception.

Maslow's hierarchy of needs

In Liverpool human kind is found everywhere, especially where people are sharing the struggle, or those with the material and/or psychological resources to see this shared humanity. 

The image, used by Joe Anderson in his tweet back in 2018, prompts Re:LODE Radio to identify, and underline, a potential irony in the messaging. In the society of the spectacle, where ideology turns reality upside down, this image provides for a potential détournement.

Invaders? 

Who are the invaders? The refugees? The arts festival and the artists? An international class of global capitalists? 

Not Refugees? 

Who are not refugees? The communities struggling to survive in areas of social and economic deprivation? The investors who have lost their capital in speculative ventures?

The generations of "Scousers" of Afro-Caribbean origin? 

The Chinese community, the oldest Chinese community in Europe? 

The strong presence of Ghanaians in Liverpool, with an estimated 9,000 individuals originating in the African nation living in the city? 

The Liverpool Greek community that dates back over 180 years to the first large wave of Greeks arriving in 1821 after massacres of Greeks by Turkish invaders on the island of Chios? 

Half the population of Liverpool whose ancestors came from Ireland?

The descendants of significant numbers of Italians who first arrived in Liverpool in the 19th century, coming to the city to embark on a journey from the port of Liverpool to the 'New World' in hope of a better life than in their native Italy, but failing to complete the journey and remaining in Liverpool? 

The people from Bolivia, Colombia, Brazil and Peru in Latin America who came to Liverpool in the 1970s, at a time of much political turmoil and civil unrest in Latin America, and followed by many more during the mid-2000's? 

The 9,000 Malaysians who live in the city making it one of the largest such communities in the country? 

The estimated 1,500 Vietnamese residing in the city?  

The Somalis, numbered in the thousands, and one of the city's longest established ethnic minority groups, that began in the 19th century, when many came to Liverpool to work for the British Navy, often by way of the former British Somaliland protectorate? 

And those Somali's that followed, seeking asylum after the outbreak of the Somali Civil War in 1991?  

The people from India whose presence in Liverpool dates back to the 1860s, with sailors and tradesmen, followed around 1910 by a group of Indian men from the Punjab?   

The many people from India during World War I, who came to Liverpool to look for work while numerous more came to the city after India was granted independence in 1947? 

The people who migrated to Liverpool from the catastrophe of the partition of India, and later from Pakistan and Bangladesh? 

The people who arrived following the mass exodus of Indians from Kenya and Uganda in the 1970s? 

The people who have come to Liverpool from Wales over the last two hundred years?  

The many Yemenis in the city who are noted for running newsagents and corner shops, and those Yemenis that came from Aden after the opening of the Suez Canal in 1869, working on ships with the increase of trade between Britain and the Far East, and settling in Liverpool? 

The Real Thing - 4 from 8? 

Liverpool Medley: Liverpool Eight / Children of the Ghetto / Stanhope Street

Ed Vulliamy, writing on Soul for the Observer (Sun 3 Jul 2011) writes about this music, and in particular 'Children of the Ghetto', the song that the black British group from Toxteth, The Real Thing, and was stifled by pop bosses from getting their message across at home.

Re:LODE Radio chooses to quote the first two paragraphs of Ed Vulliamy's piece, but you can read more here. The article is headlined: 

The Real Thing: soundtrack to the Toxteth riots

Ed Vulliamy writes: 

The insurgencies across black America during the 1960s had a soundtrack, and I remember those same songs – "Stand" by Sly Stone, Marvin Gaye's "What's Going On?" and "People Get Ready" by Curtis Mayfield – blaring out of the windows of Liverpool 8 before and during the "riots". But there was another song on the summer breeze in 1981, broadcast everywhere too, including out of my own bedroom windows in Catharine Street at the edge of the riot zone, in the so-called "Piggeries" flats in Everton and even off leafy Lark Lane, behind Sefton Park. A special Liverpool 8 song which would, many years later, become a huge hit for Phil Bailey of Earth, Wind and Fire, Courtney Pine and latterly Mary J Blige. 

But not many people in America (nor many in England either) know that "Children of the Ghetto" was written as part of a trilogy in and about Liverpool 8, on Stanhope Street, which connects Toxteth to the docks. Even fewer know that it was composed by the same band – the Real Thing — that gave the world "You To Me Are Everything" and "Can't Get By Without You", to which teenagers have shaken their bones across disco floors around the planet.

Cheating death and learning scouse

The incredible story of Jacob Viera, a refugee from Kenya, as reported by Andy Hunter for the Guardian (Wed 7 Oct 2020).

Andy Hunter writes: 

An upcoming trial for Newcastle was on Jacob Viera’s mind when he returned home from training with Kenyan Premier League team Tena United on 10 June 2014. As he reached for the front door handle on his Nairobi apartment, life was also about to turn. “I opened the door and ‘Bang!’” he says. “I was electrocuted.” Live wires had been connected to the handle from an electrical socket. A few years earlier he had refused to smuggle drugs into Tanzania while playing for Kenya’s Under-16s national team. The electric shock was punishment from the gang he defied.

Somehow, after being unconscious, in hospital for a month and with his face, neck and arm all scorched, Viera made that trial in August 2014. “There’s no way you turn a trial down with Newcastle, even after all this. My visa and flights had all been sorted,” he says, incredulous at the thought he might have passed up the opportunity.

“My dad always feared something like this would happen because it had happened to other players who refused to cooperate with the drugs gangs. They will assault you or kill you. But I went to Newcastle’s academy and one of the managers wanted to know why I had pink skin on my face, my neck and my arm. I didn’t look like that on any of the pictures or videos they had when they invited me for the trial.

“I gave him all the details of what happened and he felt sorry for me. He said that even if Newcastle signed me I would have to go back to Kenya for a month but he didn’t want me to go back. It was too dangerous. He said I would be safer if I claimed asylum but that meant I wasn’t allowed to sign a professional contract until I was granted UK residency.

“A week later the Home Office got me a Megabus ticket to London. I stayed in a hotel with 600 other asylum seekers for two weeks and then I was in Hammersmith detention centre for three weeks.”

Six years and many ordeals later, the 24-year-old remains in football and grateful for the doors it opened, although the career is not what he had envisaged in Kenya. His chance with Newcastle went while in London, where another arose when he was spotted by a Tottenham scout.

On the day of his scheduled trial for Spurs, Viera was summoned for a second screening interview at the Home Office. He was detained and his phone confiscated. Another chance gone. Next, he was driven in the middle of the night to Liverpool for a medical to assess whether his scars were consistent with an electric shock.

He trained with Everton Under-18s and played for local sides while awaiting the Home Office’s decision. During that time he ruptured his ACL. Third strike and out. But thanks to friendships made at Everton, chiefly with Stuart Carrington, a former academy coach who now works for Liverpool County FA (LCFA), Viera is now a level four referee on the FA’s Core programme, which provides training and education for those with “clear potential and opportunity to progress”. He is a UK resident too.

We meet at Walton Hall Park, headquarters of LCFA, where Viera is officiating a match between former refugees from Syria, Somalia, Egypt, Eritrea, Iran and Sudan. LCFA works closely with Asylum Link Merseyside to help refugees and asylum seekers – organising teams, offering coaching qualifications and the referees’ course Viera started out on – but today’s game is to promote the work of Klabu, an organisation that builds clubhouses and provides sports equipment in refugee camps across Africa.

Klabu, which means club in Swahili, built its first clubhouse in the Kalobeyei Refugee Settlement in Kenya in 2019. The settlement is home to 36,000 refugees from 13 African countries. The Klabu Foundation operates on a non-profit basis and funds are raised through donations and the sale of its own merchandise, which is to receive a significant publicity boost from Fifa 21. The latest edition of the game will feature the Klabu Kalobeyei Spirit kit for players to unlock – they can also buy the physical version – and Trent Alexander-Arnold, Alexandre Lacazette and César Azpilicueta have pledged to give their support to the initiative on social media. The kit’s sponsor, the sportswear labelling manufacturer Avery Dennison, have helped ensure refugees can play the game in the settlement by providing new consoles and TVs.

On the sidelines at Walton Hall Park stands Klabu’s new ambassador, Fabrice Muamba. The queue of players asking for selfies is a reminder there is more to Muamba’s story than the cardiac arrest that ended his career in 2012. For these former refugees in Liverpool, the former Bolton midfielder and the referee Viera are beacons of hope.

“I was a refugee,” says Muamba, who moved to England from the Democratic Republic of Congo aged 11. “My father was a refugee who came to England seeking asylum for himself and his family so it was a no-brainer for me to support these guys and to show there is a positive end to the story.

Fabrice Muamba, who is an ambassador for Klabu, and Jacob Viera 

“Football gives you the environment to meet new people. When I started going to school, all they knew me as was the big African boy. That’s what I was called. Football paved the way for me to make friends, to improve my English, to socialise and to break a lot of barriers.”

Muamba, now a PFA delegate, admits the difficulties facing refugees are greater now than his own experience given the political climate. “I can see why people feel they are coming over to take their jobs but these people are coming here for opportunities,” he says. “And if these people had better opportunities in their own country I’m sure they would stay there. If I didn’t come to Britain it would have been very difficult for me to achieve what I did.”

Football, through the friendships made and the courses provided by LCFA, has given Viera the opportunity to do just that. As a level-four referee he will officiate in the North West Counties League, the Cheshire League and the Liverpool County Premier League this season. The ultimate ambition is to fulfil a promise made to an immigration officer at the detention centre. “He was called Michael Kanyako and he’d tell me: ‘If you stay in the UK I will definitely see you in the professional league’,” Viera says. “One day I want to make Michael proud by refereeing in the professional league.

“Someone said to me I should try to be a player because there are no black referees in the Premier League and the Football League, but I enjoy this, I want to do this. I have been nominated to go on the FA Core programme, which is a centre of excellence for referees. You are given proper training on positioning, movement and managing the game. And you get opportunities. I refereed England under-16s at Port Vale, which I will always value.

“I won’t let this go. I was prevented from going on a playing career but this path is even better for me. Everything happens for a reason. I always say I was given two lives, just like Fabrice. I remember watching that game at White Hart Lane when I was 16. When I was electrocuted, I wasn’t meant to survive, but I recovered within a month. I came here and now I meet people who I used to see on TV. It is not where I expected to be but I am so grateful.”

The biggest barrier Muamba faced when settling in London was language. “The only words I knew were ‘Hello, how are you?’ and I was dreading my first week at school,” he says. “But football helped massively.” That is another experience he shares with Viera, although the charismatic referee’s problem was not with English but the more localised challenges of scouse.

“Am I allowed to swear?” he asks before recalling one episode. “I was new to Liverpool and asked if I could join a seven-a-side game in Wavertree. Right at the end I scored a rabona. Top bin. I’m only 5ft 6 and one of my teammates was massive, about 6ft 7. He came running at me shouting: ‘You’re fucking sick lad, come and play for us lad.’ I was scared. He was aggressive and I didn’t know what he meant.

“I was quite down afterwards and explained to my social worker what had happened. He started laughing. ‘Welcome to Liverpool lad,’ he said and told me that sick meant great or fantastic. After that I started to learn scouse but I didn’t pick up the accent. Scousers can’t finish a sentence without swearing and I don’t swear, but I love Scousers and I love this place." 

"Now I am going to be a sick referee."

To quote again the famous ancient Latin adage (credited to sages from Aristotle to Pliny to Erasmus) Ex Africa semper aliquid novi, which translates as: 

“Out of Africa, always something new."

Capitalism! 

The LODE project and the LODE Zone Line includes the two original and principal nodal locations that define the LODE Line pathway that Re:LODE Radio follows as it girds the planet, the maritime cities of Liverpool and Hull. 

These two maritime cities share a significant part in the shameful history of the profit making business of commodifying and enslaving fellow human kind. The Atlantic slave trade forcibly abducted more than 12 million Africans from their homes, and transporting them to be sold, as commodities, into future lives of slavery. 

Karl Marx, in his influential economic history of capitalism, Das Kapital, wrote that; 

". . . the turning of Africa into a warren for the commercial hunting of black-skins, signaled the rosy dawn of the era of capitalist production".

He argued that the slave trade was part of what he termed the "primitive accumulation" of capital, the 'non-capitalist' accumulation of wealth that preceded and created the financial conditions for Britain's industrialisation. 

When it comes to Liverpool's slave trade legacy, Hull's legacy is shared with Liverpool in the history of the Abolitionist movement.

These historical connections are discussed in the Re:LODE Radio post: 

Wednesday, 15 July 2020

From racism to rock dust; by way of "cancel culture", a "reparations ecology" and fossil fuel subsidies; in 2020 "THE YEAR OF TRUTH"

See also the Re:LODE Radio page:

Slavery, the slave trade, wealth, poverty and the maritime histories of Liverpool and Hull

Re:LODE Radio references this story from BBC NEWS on the DNA study that reveals the genetic impact of the African slave trade.

A major DNA study has shed new light on the fate of millions of Africans who were traded as slaves to the Americas between the 16th and 19th centuries.

More than 50,000 people took part in the study, which was able to identify more details of the "genetic impact" the trade has had on present-day populations in the Americas.

It lays bare the consequences of rape, maltreatment, disease and racism.

More than 12.5m Africans were traded between 1515 and the mid-19th Century.

Some two million of the enslaved men, women and children died en route to the Americas.

The DNA study was led by consumer genetics company 23andMe and included 30,000 people of African ancestry on both sides of the Atlantic. The findings were published in the American Journal of Human Genetics.

Steven Micheletti, a population geneticist at 23andMe told AFP news agency that the aim was to compare the genetic results with the manifests of slave ships "to see how they agreed and how they disagree".

While much of their findings agreed with historical documentation about where people were taken from in Africa and where they were enslaved in the Americas, "in some cases, we see that they disagree, quite strikingly", he added.

The study found, in line with the major slave route, that most Americans of African descent have roots in territories now located in Angola and the Democratic Republic of Congo.

What was surprising was the over-representation of Nigerian ancestry in the US and Latin America when compared with the recorded number of enslaved people from that region.

Researchers say this can be explained by the "intercolonial trade that occurred primarily between 1619 and 1807".

 

They believe enslaved Nigerians were transported from the British Caribbean to other areas, "presumably to maintain the slave economy as transatlantic slave-trading was increasingly prohibited".

Likewise, the researchers were surprised to find an underrepresentation from Senegal and The Gambia - one of the first regions from where slaves were deported.

Researchers put this down to two grim factors: many were sent to work in rice plantations where malaria and other dangerous conditions were rampant; and in later years larger numbers of children were sent, many of whom did not survive the crossing.

In another gruesome discovery, the study found that the treatment of enslaved women across the Americas had had an impact on the modern gene pool.

Researchers said a strong bias towards African female contributions in the gene pool - even though the majority of slaves were male - could be attributed to "the rape of enslaved African women by slave owners and other sexual exploitation".

In Latin America, up to 17 African women for every African man contributed to the gene pool. Researchers put this down in part to a policy of "branqueamento", racial whitening, in a number of countries, which actively encouraged the immigration of European men "with the intention to dilute African ancestry through reproduction".

Although the bias in British colonised America was just two African women to one African man, it was no less exploitative.

The study highlighted the "practice of coercing enslaved people to having children as a means of maintaining an enslaved workforce nearing the abolition of the transatlantic trade". In the US, women were often promised freedom in return for reproducing and racist policies opposed the mixing of different races, researchers note.  

History wars? 

History wars are breaking out in Britain with the same poisonous rhetoric evident in the way it panned out in Australia. 

Martin Rowson on Priti Patel and toppling statues — cartoon

Martin Rowson's cartoon for the Guardian (Mon 8 Jun 2020) was a response to Priti Patel's condemnation of Black Lives Matter protesters. 

John Crace's politics sketch a week later (Mon 15 Jun 2020) exposes the crass and ignorant rhetoric employed by this reactionary Conservative government seeking a denial of history and a denial of the present.

John Crace writes with the headline that runs: 

Priti looks vacant as Tories take a stand for the statues

And the subheading:

Equality is far too important a subject for change to come at anything but glacial pace

You could feel Boris Johnson’s pain. There was a time when he could make a quick £5,000 for knocking out barely considered articles for the Daily Telegraph. But now he’s prime minister he’s rather obliged to bash them out for free. The only good news for him is that his pieces are kept behind a paywall, so the vast majority of the country can easily manage to avoid them and don’t get to find out just how incoherent they are.

While rightwing extremists were making Nazi salutes and causing aggro with the police, and a man was caught pissing next to a memorial to terrorism victim PC Keith Palmer, Boris was more interested in fighting last week’s battle over statues. Count on me, he promised. He wasn’t going to allow anyone to take down a statue of Winston Churchill. Not least because almost no one had called on him to do so.

Nor was he going to allow anyone to Photoshop British history. Quite apart from a staggering inability to understand the difference between eradicating the difficult and complicated nature of the country’s past and actively memorialising and celebrating it, this was quite some cheek. Because few politicians have done more to Photoshop their own past than Boris. The lies, the deceit and the lack of morality that have been the bedrock of both his personal and professional life are all expected to be forgotten on a daily basis. After all, if he can find it so easy to forgive himself why shouldn’t everyone else?

So it was left to Priti Patel to comment on last weekend’s violent protests in London in a ministerial statement to the Commons. And to begin with she didn’t do too badly. The home secretary is clearly a lot more comfortable in condemning violence from leftwing and Black Lives Matter activists, but she somehow managed to get through her opening remarks without saying that the rightwing racists were due a little leeway to let off steam after being provoked by the demonstrations of the previous weekend, which had seen some violence against police and statues being torn down and defaced. The desire to make the link was clearly there but somehow she managed to restrain herself. Credit where credit is due.

Labour’s Nick Thomas-Symonds, the shadow home secretary, initially appeared to endorse Patel’s comments. He deplored the actions of the demonstrators, praised the police and more or less backed her demands for 10-year jail sentences for anyone defacing public monuments. Only in the UK could you expect to get banged up longer for public disorder offences than rape. But then just as it looked as if he was going to try to outcompete the Tories in the “lock ’em up” stakes, Thomas-Symonds started to twist the knife.

The BLM demonstrations had been of a different category to Saturday’s racist protests. While violence on both sides could not be condoned, there had been a moral purpose to BLM. Longstanding injustices and inequalities that had been consistently ignored.

So how was it that in the prime minister’s 1,000-word defence of the statue of Winston Churchill, he had only managed to squeeze in a couple of sentences as an afterthought about his plans to establish a new Commission on Race and Ethnic Disparities, while saying it was about time black people stopped playing the victim card? Besides, hadn’t there already been enough reports into racial inequality and wouldn’t the government be a lot better off implementing some of their recommendations instead?

Patel was genuinely outraged. At times like this, her innate hopelessness is her saving grace as she doesn’t have to go through the bother of even feigning stupidity. Black lives mattered so much that it would be entirely wrong for the prime minister to implement the recommendations of previous reports without wasting time on setting up an entirely pointless new commission that was almost certain to come to exactly the same conclusions as before.

If you read the Macpherson, Lammy and Williams reports carefully, you would know that their overarching subtext was that what black and minority ethnic people wanted more than anything was for nothing to change until the government had checked whether the recommendations could be recommended. Equality was far too important a subject for change to be introduced at anything but glacial pace.

A few Tories tried to bring the debate back to what they believed to be the key topics. The desecration of statues and the racist abuse that they had received for daring to criticise the violence against the police at the BLM demonstrations. Patel was suitably grateful for the breather.

But there was no respite from opposition MPs. Yes, they could all agree violence was bad but could we move back to the real issues of inequality? Priti just looked Priti Vacant. She seemed genuinely surprised to learn that there were so many Windrush cases still unresolved and no one had told her there were recommendations about the effect of the coronavirus on BAME communities that had yet to be published. There again, she hadn’t asked. After all, she was only the home secretary.

Out of Africa?

Who are our . . . 

. . . ancestors?