What's app .doc?
Re:LODE Radio, Re:LODE and LODE share a method and purpose, to present what's happening along the LODE Zone Line by "framing" the "actual" by virtue of the "informational". In this endeavour the quotation of news stories, in a mosaic of appositions, is aiming to reveal, and expose, the actual and material patterns that shape the "here and now" across the the ribbon of scrutiny and documentation that the LODE Zone Line provides, as it girds the planet. Many of these actual and material forces are only made visible through the "processing of information", be it art and/or science based, using examples from what's happening.
What is happening now in The News Cycle is of key significance in determining the way people synthesise an idea of the actual state of things in the world.
What used to apply at the time of the conceptual development of the LODE project in 1991 is very different to the situation today. The newspaper pages and the information used in the wrapping of the LODE cargo was characterised by the form as much as the content of the mosaic design of the printed newspaper page. This mosaic of different stories, juxtaposed in "apposition" on the newspaper page, and linked primarily by the date on which the stories "arrive" (at the speed of electricity since the invention of the electric telegraph), functions like a verbal-visual snapshot of what is going on that day, as the world turns (from the date line) every twenty-four hours.
With the launch of Re:LODE in 2017 the information environment for news has significantly changed, especially with the monetising of information, be it TRUE or FALSE, through advertising revenue, structured and driven by the algorithms of social media platforms and file sharing systems.
These algorithms have erased "public" discourse. These algorithms have replaced "public" spaces with "bubbles" of information and inward looking "privatised" spaces where hate speech, misinformation, conspiracy theories, real "fake news", fears about vaccines, self harming and suicide, racism etc, have all been monetised through the design of these algorithms to maximise profits. This is the maxim!
The privatisation of profit and the socialisation of loss!
The landscape of this information environment also contributes to the ongoing culturally and actually violent "Americanisation" of the world, and advertising functions to drive this process at both the centre and the margins.
This is ECHOLAND!
As referenced before in a number of information contexts and exploring "real life" situations along the LODE Zone Line, this term originates in an extraordinary work of fiction, the sort of place, these days, where it might just be possible to access the TRUTH!
Finnegans Wake
Echoland comes third in a series of exclamations that runs thus:
Hush! Caution! Echoland!
These three words, and their order stem from the initials of a particular character, known as HCE (these initials H and C and E recur in many triplets of words, that form echoes throughout the work, and sometimes in a reversal, as in ECHoland). For Re:LODE Radio it stands primarily for:
Here comes everybody
This work of literature and language has come to assume a preeminent place in English literature. Anthony Burgess has lauded Finnegans Wake as "a great comic vision, one of the few books of the world that can make us laugh aloud on nearly every page".
Fun for all (fun(f)eral) . . .
Although these are times, dark times (lol!), when being able to laugh aloud represents a viable therapeutic survival strategy, it has to be admitted that this work is radically demanding of its readers.
To best bring the work to life the black print on the white printed page requires translation into a world of sounds and meanings, cadences, as spoken, utterance as outerance, and listened to, as in the not so dark age of illuminated manuscripts when reading from the page was reading aloud making it possible to hear the word, and "grasp" (as in a tactile experience) the meaning. The images below show details from the opening page of St. John's Gospel as laid out in the textures that make out both decoration and letter form in the Book of Kells.
In the beginning was the word
The prominent literary academic Harold Bloom has called it Joyce's masterpiece, and, in The Western Canon (1994), wrote that "if aesthetic merit were ever again to center the canon, [Finnegans Wake] would be as close as our chaos could come to the heights of Shakespeare and Dante"
The book discusses the Earwicker family, comprising the father HCE, the mother ALP, and their three children Shem the Penman, Shaun the Postman, and Issy. Following an unspecified rumour about HCE, the book, in a nonlinear dream narrative, follows his wife's attempts to exonerate him with a letter, his sons' struggle to replace him, Shaun's rise to prominence, and a final monologue by ALP at the break of dawn. The opening line of the book is a sentence fragment which continues from the book's unfinished closing line, making the work a never-ending cycle, just like the LODE Zone Line.
The Re:LODE Radio post for Wednesday, 30 December 2020 deals with the monetisation of BIG LIES:
In November 2019, on one of his free days from the Chicago 7 film shoot, Sacha Baron Cohen made his first ever public speech "out of character".
Never Is Now 2019 . . .
. . . ADL International Leadership Award Presented to Sacha Baron Cohen
The INSIDER posted this story and analysis on Sacha Baron Cohen's speech.
Kevin Webb sets out Sacha Baron Cohen's theme and an analysis of the context for this singular public statement (Nov 22, 2019):Watch the viral clip of Sacha Baron Cohen tearing into Mark Zuckerberg over hate speech, violence, and political lies on Facebook
- Actor and comedian Sacha Baron Cohen had harsh words for the country's biggest tech companies while accepting the International Leadership Award from the Anti-Defamation League on Thursday.
- Cohen criticized online platforms like Facebook, Twitter, and Google for generating "the greatest propaganda machine in history," and giving violent extremists a platform to reach billions of people.
- Cohen called Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg's stance on free speech "ludicrous," referring to Facebook's unwillingness to remove political ads and other social media posts that contain intentional lies and misinformation.
- "Freedom of speech is not freedom of reach," Cohen said during the 25-minute speech aimed at some of the world's most powerful tech companies.
The "Borat" actor Sacha Baron Cohen launched a full-throated attack against tech companies and accused them of allowing hate speech to proliferate on their platforms in a 25-minute speech to the Anti-Defamation League on Thursday night.Cohen said a "handful of internet companies" were facilitating "the greatest propaganda machine in history."Though Cohen mentioned Google, Twitter, and Facebook in his speech, his sharpest criticism was reserved for Mark Zuckerberg.Cohen referred to a speech Zuckerberg gave at Georgetown University last month outlining where he thinks Facebook should draw the line on regulating free speech on its platform. Cohen dismantled Zuckerberg's speech point by point."First, Zuckerberg tried to portray this whole issue as 'choices around free expression.' That is ludicrous," Cohen said. "This is not about limiting anyone's free speech. This is about giving people, including some of the most reprehensible people on earth, the biggest platform in history to reach a third of the planet. Freedom of speech is not freedom of reach."The comedian added that while the First Amendment prevents the government from limiting free expression, private companies have control over what they allow."If a neo-Nazi comes goose-stepping into a restaurant and starts threatening other customers and saying he wants to kill Jews, would the owner of the restaurant, a private business, be required to serve him an elegant eight-course meal? Of course not. The restaurant owner has every legal right — and indeed, I would argue, a moral obligation — to kick the Nazi out, and so do these internet companies," he said.Cohen also took issue with Zuckerberg's interview with Kara Swisher last year in which he said that although he found posts denying the Holocaust "deeply offensive," he wouldn't remove them from Facebook because it could be someone's sincerely held belief."I think there are things that different people get wrong," Zuckerberg said. "I don't think that they're intentionally getting it wrong."Cohen said: "We have, unfortunately, millions of pieces of evidence for the Holocaust — it is an historical fact. And denying it is not some random opinion. Those who deny the Holocaust aim to encourage another one."Cohen also criticized Facebook's decision to allow political ads on its platform even if they contain misinformation."Fortunately, Twitter finally banned them, and Google, today I read, is making changes too," he said. "But if you pay them, Facebook will run any political ad you want, even if it's a lie."Cohen suggested that social-media platforms should not immediately publish content and that they should give themselves more time to scrutinize posts."The shooter who massacred Muslims in New Zealand livestreamed his atrocity on Facebook, where it then spread across the internet and was viewed likely millions of times. It was a snuff film, brought to you by social media," he said. "Why can't we have more of a delay so that this trauma-inducing filth can be caught and stopped before it's posted in the first place?"Following the shooting in Christchurch in March, Facebook rejected the idea that delaying streamed videos would be helpful, saying it would only "further slow down" the response to violent content.Cohen also floated the idea that the internet's treatment of "the rantings of a lunatic" as equally credible to statements made by a Nobel Prize winner meant a reduction in "a shared sense of basic facts" that everyone agrees on."Democracy, which depends on shared truths, is in retreat, and autocracy, which depends on shared lies, is on the march," he said.Cohen acknowledged that tech companies had made some attempts to combat bigotry on their platforms but said the measures had been "mainly superficial.""When discussing the difficulty of removing content, Zuckerberg, Mark Zuckerberg, asked, 'Where do you draw the line?'" Cohen said. "Yes, drawing the line can be difficult. But here's what he's really saying: Removing more of these lies and conspiracies is just too expensive."He added: "If these internet companies really want to make a difference, they should hire enough monitors to actually monitor, work closely with groups like the ADL and the NAACP, insist on facts, and purge these lies and conspiracies from their platforms."He also called for stricter regulation to allow the government to hold tech companies to account. But as the situation stands and the tech firms remain unregulated, tech CEOs can exert a kind of "ideological imperialism," he said."It's like we're living in the Roman empire and Mark Zuckerberg is Caesar — at least that would explain his haircut," he said. (Zuckerberg's haircut has recently been the subject of some speculation.)Ideological imperialism?
The Anti-Defamation League website
The Anti-Defamation League (ADL), formerly known as the Anti-Defamation League of B'nai B'rith, is a Jewish non-governmental organization based in the United States. It was founded in late September 1913 by the Independent Order of B'nai B'rith, and was partly a response prompted by, and in the wake of, the contentious conviction for murder of Leo Frank.
Leo Frank was an American factory superintendent who was convicted in 1913 of the murder of a 13-year-old employee, Mary Phagan, in Atlanta, Georgia. His trial, conviction, and appeals attracted national attention. His lynching two years later, in response to the commutation of his death sentence, became the focus of social, regional, political, and racial concerns, particularly regarding antisemitism. Today, the consensus of researchers is that Frank was wrongly convicted and Jim Conley was likely the actual murderer.
This detail of a photograph that shows the perpetrators of the lynch mob that murdered Leo Frank was clearly a blatant and unashamed declaration of a warped notion of "justice", and a crime that was committed with a sense of impunity.
Strange fruit . . .
. . . images of hate (see The Family of Man discussed in the post Out of Africa)!
When describing this public reaction in the southern state of Georgia to this miscarriage of justice in the case of Leo Frank, historians mention the class and ethnic tensions in play while acknowledging the complexity of the case and the difficulty in gauging the importance of his Jewishness, class, and northern background. Historian John Higham writes that "economic resentment, frustrated progressivism, and race consciousness combined to produce a classic case of lynch law. ... Hatred of organized wealth reaching into Georgia from outside became a hatred of Jewish wealth." Historian Nancy MacLean writes that some historians have argued that this was an American Dreyfus affair, which she said "[could] be explained only in light of the social tensions unleashed by the growth of industry and cities in the turn-of-the-century South. These circumstances made a Jewish employer a more fitting scapegoat for disgruntled whites than the other leading suspect in the case, a black worker." Albert Lindemann said that Frank on trial found himself "in a position of much latent tension and symbolism." Stating that it is impossible to determine the extent to which antisemitism affected his image, he concluded that "[Frank was seen as] a representative of Yankee capitalism in a southern city, with row upon row of southern women, often the daughters and wives of ruined farmers, 'at his mercy' – a rich, punctilious, northern Jew lording it over vulnerable and impoverished working women."
Media and community "leaders" monetising hate is NOT new!
This complex pattern of community resentment was exploited by certain sections of the contemporary press and local populist politicians. Two weeks after the lynching, in the September 2, 1915 issue of The Jeffersonian, Watson wrote, "the voice of the people is the voice of God", capitalising on his sensational coverage of the controversial trial. In 1914, when Watson began reporting his anti-Frank message, The Jeffersonian's circulation had been 25,000; by September 2, 1915, its circulation was 87,000.Leo Frank's case was mentioned by Adolf Kraus when he announced the creation of the Anti-Defamation League in October 1913. After Frank's lynching, around half of Georgia's 3,000 Jews left the state. According to author Steve Oney, "What it did to Southern Jews can't be discounted ... It drove them into a state of denial about their Judaism. They became even more assimilated, anti-Israel, Episcopalian. The Temple did away with chupahs at weddings – anything that would draw attention." Many American Jews saw Frank as an American Alfred Dreyfus, like Frank a victim of antisemitic persecution.
ADL subsequently split from B'nai B'rith and continued as an independent US section nonprofit organisation.
ADL's mission
ADL states that its mission is a dual one: "To stop the defamation of the Jewish people, and to secure justice and fair treatment to all," via the development of "new programs, policies and skills to expose and combat whatever holds us back." With a focus on combating antisemitism and other forms of hate, and fighting domestic extremism both online and off, ADL describes its "ultimate goal" as "a world in which no group or individual suffers from bias, discrimination or hate." In 2018, ADL rebranded itself as an "anti-hate" organisation, and adopted the logo: "Fighting Hate for Good".
Sacha Baron Cohen in his acceptance speech for the ADL award attacked the monetising of hate through ad revenues, singling out Facebook, Google, YouTube and Twitter as part of "the biggest propaganda machine in history" and claiming that their rules on hate speech meant:
"they would have let Hitler buy ads".
Welcome to ECHOLAND!
Re:LODE Radio reflects on a possible set of connections between this pushback on digital media platforms influence upon society, and the subject of the film The Chicago 7 that was being made at the time of Sacha Baron Cohen making his first ever public speech "out of character". The Black Lives Matter movement has been energised in significant ways during 2020, in a year that Re:LODE Radio has described as "the year of truth", prompted by the concerns of scientists on the climate change crisis in the run up to the COP 25 Madrid conference in November 2019. Whatever the causes are of this newly energised human and civil rights movement, it must include the capability of a citizen and her smartphone to video document the excruciating murder of George Floyd in public, and in broad daylight, by a law officer in Minneapolis. The protests that erupted onto the streets of cities across the world have revived an interest in echoes of the counterculture and civil rights protests of the 1960's, in terms of the looks, the feel and as a precedent. And what it comes down to is this:
"The whole world is watching"
For the 1968 Democratic Party Convention in Chicago the images were shown on television sets across the world, according to the editors and arbiters of judgement in the newsrooms across the world. Part of the police crackdown on protesters was captured by the cinematographer and director Haskell Wexler while shooting scenes for a film that, because of these scenes, became converted into another kind of narrative concept, and another film that Wexler called Medium Cool.
MEDIUM COOLThe film title is a reference to Marshall McLuhan's differentiation of media as either HOT or COOL, as he explains in his book Understanding Media in the chapter Media Cold and Hot:There is a basic principle that distinguishes a hot medium like radio from a cool one like the telephone, or a hot medium like the movie from a cool one like TV. A hot medium is one that extends one single sense in "high definition." High definition is the state of being well filled with data. A photograph is, visually, "high definition." A cartoon is "low definition," simply because very little visual information is provided. Telephone is a cool medium. or one of low definition, because the ear is given a meager amount of information. And speech is a cool medium of low definition, because so little is given and so much has to be filled in by the listener. On the other hand, ho, media do not leave so much to be filled in or completed by the audience. Hot media are, therefore, low in participation, and cool media are high in participation or completion by the audience.HOT & COOL
In an interview for Playboy Magazine Marshall McLuhan talks about media (McLuhan introduced this term we now use everyday) in terms of a "fallacy" (fallacy as concept NOT as a falsehood), that a medium such as photography, which is a high definition medium, is a "HOT" medium, while TV, as a low definition medium is a "COOL" medium.
Woody Allen has a bit of fun in his film Annie Hall with Marshall McLuhan correcting a typical cinema queue "bore" on a fundamental misunderstanding when it comes to media and to what's hot and what's cool. So, just to be clear, the title of the film Medium Cool points to the use of film or video reportage as imagery broadcast on TV, which is cool, while Wexler's film, when viewed in a cinema setting, is a medium that's hot.So Cool . . .
. . . if only life could be like this?Explaining his "fallacy" this is what McLuhan says in response to the Playboy interviewer's question:Interviewer: But isn’t television itself a primarily visual medium?
McLuhan: No, it’s quite the opposite, although the idea that TV is a visual extension is an understandable mistake. Unlike film or photograph, television is primarily an extension of the sense of touch rather than of sight, and it is the tactile sense that demands the greatest interplay of all the senses. The secret of TV’s tactile power is that the video image is one of low intensity or definition and thus, unlike either photograph or film, offers no detailed information about specific objects but instead involves the active participation of the viewer. The TV image is a mosaic mesh not only of horizontal lines but of millions of tiny dots, of which the viewer is physiologically able to pick up only 50 or 60 from which he shapes the image; thus he is constantly filling in vague and blurry images, bringing himself into in-depth involvement with the screen and acting out a constant creative dialog with the iconoscope. The contours of the resultant cartoonlike image are fleshed out within the imagination of the viewer, which necessitates great personal involvement and participation; the viewer, in fact, becomes the screen, whereas in film he becomes the camera.
By requiring us to constantly fill in the spaces of the mosaic mesh, the iconoscope is tattooing its message directly on our skins. Each viewer is thus an unconscious pointillist painter like Seurat, limning new shapes and images as the iconoscope washes over his entire body.
Since the point of focus for a TV set is the viewer, television is Orientalizing us by causing us all to begin to look within ourselves.
The essence of TV viewing is, in short, intense participation and low definition – what I call a “cool” experience, as opposed to an essentially “hot,” or high definition - low participation, medium like radio.Marshall McLuhan explains to the Playboy interviewer what the impact of TV upon those growing up in its illuminating effects saying:In the absence of such elementary awareness, I’m afraid that the television child has no future in our schools. You must remember that the TV child has been relentlessly exposed to all the “adult” news of the modern world — war, racial discrimination, rioting, crime, inflation, sexual revolution. The war in Vietnam has written its bloody message on his skin; he has witnessed the assassinations and funerals of the nation’s leaders; he’s been orbited through the TV screen into the astronaut’s dance in space, been inundated by information transmitted via radio, telephone, films, recordings and other people. His parents plopped him down in front of a TV set at the age of two to tranquilize him, and by the time he enters kindergarten, he’s clocked as much as 4000 hours of television. As an IBM executive told me, “My children had lived several lifetimes compared to their grandparents when they began grade one.”The whole world is watchingThe next video montage includes the title sequence of Haskell Wexler's film Medium Cool that begins with a television news crew documenting a car crash. The footage is handed to a courier to take to the TV news station. Wikipedia's plot summary runs thus:John Cassellis is a television news cameraman. He and his sound recorder dispassionately film images of car accidents rather than help the victims. Cassellis finds out that his news station has been providing the stories and information gathered by the cameramen and news journalists to the FBI, he becomes enraged. The news station creates an excuse to fire him, but he soon finds another job free-lancing at the Democratic National Convention.The video montage continues with a clip of the film where unplanned film footage of events unfolding around the actress Verna Bloom who plays the part of Eileen. Medium Cool is notable for Wexler's use of cinéma vérité-style documentary filmmaking techniques, as well as for combining fictional and non-fictional content. The Wikipedia plot summary continues:Cassellis meets Eileen, a single mother, and her son, Harold, who have moved from West Virginia to Chicago. Harold tells a woman canvassing the neighborhood that his father, Buddy, is "at Vietnam", but later tells Cassellis that he just took off one day and never came back. When Harold goes missing, Eileen goes to the site of the convention to ask Cassellis for help. She finds herself in the midst of the riots. After witnessing acts of police brutality, Eileen finds Cassellis.Medium Cool captures and incorporates a sense of witness to the reality of a brutal power ploy. This "making visible" of the violence of state power was a 1960's version of the documentation by smart phone video of the murder of George Floyd by a police officer. However, this imagery was published after the event and after the news, so contained in cinema as a critical commentary rather than a shared cause for action and response. The 1968 Chicago "police riot" was exercised in the interests of a military industrial complex essential to a globalised capitalist system seeking to maintain colonialist power relations against the tide of protest and people exercising their democratic and human rights. The focus was the Vietnam war.
Revisiting these events and the trial of the Chicago Eight in the 2020 film The Trial of the Chicago 7, with Sacha Baron Cohen playing the part of Abbie Hoffman is part of a way to recover a "history" that echoes present struggles fifty years on.
It's not real history it's politics and entertainment. But, this film could not have been made fifty years ago.
But today, clearly, the message is . . ."When the looting starts, the shooting starts""When the looting starts, the shooting starts" is a phrase originally used by Walter E. Headley, the police chief of Miami, Florida, in response to an outbreak of violent crime during the 1967 Christmas holiday season. He accused "young hoodlums, from 15 to 21", of taking "advantage of the civil rights campaign" that was then sweeping the United States. Having ordered his officers to combat the violence with shotguns, he told the press that "we don't mind being accused of police brutality".Mayor Richard J. Daley ordered police to shoot arsonists and looters during the 1968 Chicago riots that followed the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. in April 1968. Daley did not use the phrase "when the looting starts, the shooting starts", but stated to Police Superintendent James B. Conlisk "very emphatically and very definitely that an order be issued under [your] signature to shoot to kill any arsonist or anyone with a Molotov cocktail, and shoot anyone looting stores in our city". Upon hearing that Conlisk had directed patrolmen to use their own discretion, Daley remarked "I would assume any superintendent would issue orders to shoot any arsonist on sight ... an arsonist is a murderer and should be shot right on the spot. The looters — you wouldn't want to shoot the youngsters — but you can shoot them and detain them."Chief Headley supported Daley's position: "That could have been me talking." However, Headley was reprimanded for his remarks of support and later clarified that he was strictly talking about the response to riots in Chicago, not general policing in Miami, and said that his officers had been instructed to "shoot when necessary". Looters, he said "should be given the opportunity to surrender to arrest" and if the looter resists, "anything it takes, including death, [should be used] to apprehend them."Chicago under Daley also saw police violence soon after amid the 1968 Democratic National Convention protest activity.President Donald Trump used the phrase in a tweet on the evening of May 28–29, 2020, in response to increasingly violent nation-wide and international protests in response to the murder of George Floyd.Trump's tweet was flagged by Twitter with a "public interest notice" for "glorifying violence". As a result, the tweet could only be seen after users acknowledged a notice saying the tweet had violated Twitter's rules against encouraging violence, but otherwise it remained visible.The original tweet was shared again that afternoon in quotation marks by the White House Twitter account. The White House's tweet was also hidden and tagged by Twitter as "glorifying violence".
In the aftermath of Trump's tweet, the mayors of Chicago (Lori Lightfoot) and Atlanta (Keisha Lance Bottoms) stated that Trump was giving a dog whistle to what they considered his racist base, authorizing the use of vigilante violence to quell rioting. According to Lightfoot:"Nobody is gonna sit and condone looting and violence. But to blanketly say as the president of the United States that you're encouraging people to be shot in the street? That’s what I'm concerned about and, frankly, everyone should be concerned about that. That's not leadership. That's cowardice. That's playing to a base with the biggest dog whistle possible."Bottoms compared Trump's tweet to the ones Trump had made in the wake of the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, adding:"He speaks and he makes it worse. There are times when you should just be quiet and I wish that he would just be quiet."Kentucky governor Andy Beshear called on Trump to retract the original tweet.Trump later characterized the original tweet as a warning that looters pose the risk of being shot, not as a command to shoot looters.On the evening of May 29, after speaking with Floyd's family, he struck a more somber tone. He said that he was not aware of the phrase's "racially-charged history", adding that he did not know where the phrase had originated, and that his intent in using it was to say "when there's looting, people get shot and they die."
On June 11, 2020, Fox News' Harris Faulkner asked Trump if he knew who had originally said the phrase; Trump responded that he believed it had been the mayor of Philadelphia. Faulkner noted the correct origin (Headley, 1967) and meaning (shooting looters). Trump replied with a falsehood, that the phrase "also comes from a very tough mayor ... Frank Rizzo"; Faulkner did not correct him a second time.In the afternoon of May 29, Facebook's CEO Mark Zuckerberg said in a personal statement that he found the comments (which had been posted to Facebook as well) "deeply offensive", but he also believed the posts were different from those that threaten or incite violence because they were about the use of "state force". On June 1, hundreds of Facebook employees staged a virtual walk-out from work, in protest.'disappointed and stunned'That evening, after a call with Zuckerberg and Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg, three civil rights leaders, Rashad Robinson of Color of Change, Vanita Gupta of the Leadership Conference and Sherrilyn Ifill of LDF. They said:"We are disappointed and stunned by Mark's incomprehensible explanations for allowing the Trump posts to remain up . . .
. . . He did not demonstrate understanding of historic or modern-day voter suppression and he refuses to acknowledge how Facebook is facilitating Trump’s call for violence against protesters. Mark is setting a very dangerous precedent for other voices who would say similar harmful things on Facebook.”On June 2, Zuckerberg stated on an internal call with 25,000 Facebook employees that his review concluded;"the reference is clearly to aggressive policing — maybe excessive policing — but it has no history of being read as a dog whistle for vigilante supporters to take justice into their own hands."Thirty-three former employees posted an open letter to Facebook on June 3 disputing that conclusion:"President Trump's post on Friday not only threatens violence by the state against its citizens, it also sends a signal to millions who take cues from the President."Stop Hate for ProfitThe trigger for the Stop Hate for Profit campaign was Facebook's refusal to censor Donald Trump's "When the looting starts, the shooting starts" post, as well as another by Trump that criticised the Capitol Hill Occupied Protest, an occupation protest and self-declared autonomous zone in the Capitol Hill neighbourhood of Seattle, known as the Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone (CHAZ).Mark Zuckerberg's defence of this move led to immense criticism and later became one of the factors leading to the 2020 Facebook ad boycotts.According to Jonathan Greenblatt, one of the organizers behind the boycott, the idea for the boycott arose because his organization thought that Facebook was not doing enough to censor hate speech. He noted posts from Boogaloo boys that targeted the George Floyd protests. He requested a meeting with Facebook representatives but was turned down. After communicating with Rashad Robinson and Derrick Johnson, the three of them launched the campaign.On June 17, the Anti-Defamation League, the NAACP, Color of Change, Common Sense Media, Free Press and Sleeping Giants revealed the Stop Hate for Profit campaign through a full-page ad in the Los Angeles Times.The coalition of organizations grew to include the League of United Latin American Citizens, Mozilla and the National Hispanic Media Coalition.Stop Hate for ProfitThe Stop Hate for Profit campaign called for an ad pause in June 2020, asking companies to pause spending on Facebook and Instagram ads for July 2020.On June 19, The North Face and REI announced their plans to join the boycott. Shortly thereafter, Upwork and Patagonia announced that they would join the boycott. On June 24, Ben & Jerry's announced that it would join the boycott. The next day, Verizon announced that it would join the boycott. On June 26, Unilever announced that it would join the boycott. The next day, one of the organizers of the boycott announced that the boycott would now aim to include European companies. In addition, Coca-Cola announced that it would join the boycott.On July 7, the organizers of the boycott met with Facebook representatives as well as Zuckerberg. The organizers were unhappy with the meeting, especially how Facebook avoided setting any dates or sharing detailed plans.
Hate speech versus free speech?During the Re:LODE installation period 2017-18 at the Bluecoat, Liverpool a Re:LODE A Cargo of Questions page Hate Speech versus Free Speech provided a link to this article published on The Mole in the context of referencing hate speech legislation along the LODE Zone Line in Germany:How to Stop Hate Speech! Is this one way to tackle a growing social and psychological pathology?This article was also referenced:BERLIN — Sophie Passmann is an unlikely poster child for Germany’s new online hate speech laws.This story is by Mark Scott and Janosch Delcker (January 4, 2018):The 24-year-old comedian from Cologne posted a satirical message on Twitter early on New Year’s Day, mocking the German far right’s fear that the hundreds of thousands of immigrants that have entered the country in recent years would endanger Germany’s culture. Instead of entertaining her more than 14,000 Twitter followers, Passmann’s tweet was blocked within nine hours by the American social media giant, telling users in Germany that Passmann’s message had run afoul of local laws.Germany’s hate speech rules, known locally as NetzDG and which came into full force Monday, demand that social media giants promptly remove potentially illegal material, some of it within 24 hours of being notified, or face fines of up to €50 million. Enforcement of the rules has reignited debate about their practicality in an age when a tweet, Facebook post or YouTube video can spread virally around the globe within minutes.The law also highlights the problems that policymakers, in Berlin and elsewhere, now face when trying to police what can, and cannot, be posted online, as they try to balance people’s legitimate right to free speech with others’ desire to be protected against harmful material.“I would consider it a huge coincidence if this didn’t have to do with the new law,” Passmann said of being blocked, adding that during the last couple of months, she has “tweeted things that were significantly more extreme” without being blocked.Titanic, a German satirical magazine, was similarly barred after parodying anti-Muslim comments on its own Twitter account. At the other end of the political spectrum, Beatrix von Storch, a leading figure in the far-right Alternative for Germany party, was blocked on Twitter and Facebook after posting anti-immigrant messages. Twitter would not comment on either case, but said under certain circumstances, potentially harmful tweets may run against the company’s existing terms and conditions and not be linked to the new German hate speech rules.“It all comes down to conflicting rules with freedom of speech on one side, and human dignity on the other,” said Martin Drechsler, managing director of FSM, a nonprofit organization in Berlin that works with companies to tackle digital hate speech. “You have to balance those fundamental rights against each other.”German coalition effectThe controversial hate speech rules have come into the spotlight as Germany’s ruling political parties — Chancellor Angela Merkel’s Christian Democrats, their Bavarian ally the Christian Social Union (CSU) and the Social Democrats (SPD) — are trying to patch together another “grand coalition” and put an end to the country’s unprecedented coalition deadlock, almost four months after a general election.And although it was the political parties’ previous alliance that passed the hate speech law, the legislation will likely reemerge on the negotiation table during the upcoming talks.“To a certain degree, the concerns that we had back when we were negotiating the law with the Social Democrats now prove to be justified,” said Thomas Jarzombek “The core problem is that companies can play judges.”, a senior member of the German parliament for the CDU.Jarzombek said Germany should change the law to include more incentives for the tech companies to set up independent, third-party agencies to examine whether content should be blocked, instead of doing it themselves.“But I don’t have the impression that [the SPD’s] Justice Minister Heiko Maas is willing to change anything about the law,” he said.Maas — the country’s current federal justice minister, the law’s architect and its most prominent advocate — was quick to defend the rules in an interview with Bild newspaper Thursday, reiterating his position that the principle of freedom of opinion does not allow for spreading criminal content.“Facebook, Twitter and Co. should have no interest in their platforms being misused for crimes,” he told the German publication.The country’s demands that social media companies take greater responsibility for what is posted online follows a government report last year that shows Facebook managed to remove only 39 percent of illegal material within 24 hours of being notified by users. Twitter met the deadline in only 1 percent of cases, while Youtube, which removed 90 percent of flagged content within a day, was the only platform to meet the government’s targets.
Tech executives and lobbyists have repeatedly said Germany’s new hate speech rules have the potential to limit freedom of expression of the country’s citizens, and that it should not be left to private companies to determine what should be allowed online.The hate speech rules “put companies under tremendous time pressure when examining reported content,” said Bernhard Rohleder, chief executive of Bitkom, a German trade body. “The high fines reinforce this pressure. This will inevitably lead to the deletion of permitted content.”
Watching worldwide
Germany’s battle over how to tackle online hate speech — rules that are arguably the strictest anywhere in the Western world — will likely have repercussions across Europe and farther afield.
Germany's history and experience of anti semitism, racism and rightwing fascist ideology has found disturbing echoes in the recent rise of rightwing movements in Germany since German re-unification. Back in 2018 the AfD, a rightwing German political party, was accused of "unsubtle racism" in its election campaign posters.
This HUFFPOST report was posted 10/09/2018.
AfD is facing backlash after promising "Islam-free schools", reports Nick Robins-Early, HuffPost US
The far-right Alternative for Germany party released a new campaign poster last week with a slogan promising “Islam-free schools” beneath a photo of smiling white schoolchildren.
Alternative for Germany, also known as AfD, released the posters in the midst of its election campaign in the southern German state of Bavaria. Recent polls show the party is on track to win the third-largest share of the vote as it saps votes from the traditional conservative party aligned with German Chancellor Angela Merkel.
But as AfD rallies voters ahead of Bavaria’s elections next month, the party is under intense public and political scrutiny for its links to neo-Nazi organizations and role in encouraging far-right riots in recent weeks.
AfD’s Bavarian anti-Islam posters have added to the backlash against the party. A German teachers’ associations called the posters dangerous, and an Austrian member of the European Parliament accused the party of promoting fascist rhetoric and racially segregated schools. A British hate crime monitoring group also denounced the poster, tweeting, “Welcome to the new face of fascism.”
AfD claims that the posters are not calling for barring Muslim children from schools, Germany’s Der Spiegel reports, but are opposed to Islamic education in schools and face veils. But some Germans on social media criticized the posters for echoing Nazi-era discrimination against Jewish students, HuffPost Germany reported.
The party has a history of anti-Islamic propaganda, and during last year’s national elections it worked with a conservative American ad agency to create a controversial series of posters, including one reading “Burkas? We prefer bikinis” and another with a photo of a pregnant white woman with the tagline “New Germans? We’ll make them ourselves.”
Although AfD is often careful to distance itself from more politically toxic extremist groups and violent rhetoric, it has repeatedly provoked scandals after its officials made statements downplaying the Holocaust or siding with far-right activists. After anti-migrant riots erupted after the killing of a German man in the city of Chenmitz two weeks ago, a prominent AfD official marched with the founder of anti-Islamic extremist group PEGIDA in a demonstration against migration.
Meanwhile . . .
Pro-Israel group defends German far-right party's anti-Muslim campaign poster
This story was covered by The Times of Israel. The picture used in the poster, as well as the poster itself has been discussed on several Re:LODE A Cargo of Questions pages and here on the Re:LODE Radio posts.
Many of the racist projections of negative stereotypes covered in this article seem to miss the point that the painting used in the poster is not an historical truth.Jean-Léon Gérôme's painting The Slave Market represents a European and "male gaze" fantasy, and a type of psychological projection so typical of what is a western rather than eastern phenomenon - Orientalism.
The poster urges Germans to vote AfD “so that Europe doesn’t become ‘Eurabia.’”The Clark Art Institute of Massachusetts, which owns the painting, protested the use of the work, although it is in the public domain, saying:“We are strongly opposed to the use of this work to advance any political agenda.”
The aestheticization of politics?
Or clickbait?
Welcome to ECHOLAND!
A "freedom of expression" perspective?
Over the years, the Council of Europe has worked in multiple manners to counter hate speech. The media and internet division’s work in this area is based on a “freedom of expression perspective” which focuses on co-operation with member states in preparing, assessing, reviewing and bringing in line with the European Convention on Human Rights any laws and practices that place restrictions on freedom of expression.
The division also looks to foster media and internet literacy throughout all member states, to raise awareness about hate speech and the risks it poses for democracy and individuals, to reduce the levels of acceptance of hate speech as well as to develop consensus on European policy instruments combating hate speech.
The Faurisson affair
As linguist, philosopher and an outspoken opponent of U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War, which he saw as an act of American imperialism, in 1967 Noam Chomsky rose to national attention for his anti-war essay "The Responsibility of Intellectuals". Becoming associated with the New Left, he was arrested multiple times for his activism and placed on President Richard Nixon's Enemies List.
While expanding his work in linguistics over subsequent decades, he also became involved in the linguistics wars. In collaboration with Edward S. Herman, Chomsky later articulated the propaganda model of media criticism in Manufacturing Consent and worked to expose the Indonesian occupation of East Timor. His defense of unconditional freedom of speech, including that of Holocaust denial, generated significant controversy in the Faurisson affair of the 1980s.Chomsky had long publicly criticized Nazism, and totalitarianism more generally, but his commitment to freedom of speech led him to defend the right of French historian Robert Faurisson to advocate a position widely characterized as Holocaust denial. Without Chomsky's knowledge, his plea for Faurisson's freedom of speech was published as the preface to the latter's 1980 book Mémoire en défense contre ceux qui m'accusent de falsifier l'histoire. Chomsky was widely condemned for defending Faurisson, and France's mainstream press accused Chomsky of being a Holocaust denier himself, refusing to publish his rebuttals to their accusations.
Freedom of Speech . . .
Critiquing Chomsky's position, sociologist Werner Cohn later published an analysis of the affair titled Partners in Hate: Noam Chomsky and the Holocaust Deniers.
The Not-So-Hidden Inanities of Werner Cohn, by Dan Clore, Aug 20, 1998:
Here I look at just one of the major claims that Werner Cohn makes against Chomsky - what I consider the gravest and most serious claim - to discover just how accurately he has represented the facts.
Cohn alleges that Herman and Chomsky's Political Economy of Human Rights was published by a tiny French neo-Nazi press named La Vieille Taupe (hereafter abbreviated to VT), rather than by a reputable commercial publisher.
This is the charge that I will subject to scrutiny. Cohn tells us in the preface:
"He [Chomsky] went out of his way to have his books published by French neo-Nazis."
And again asserts, in his conclusion:
". . . . we found Chomsky publishing his own books with neo-Nazi publishers . . . ."
In the main text of his booklet, Cohn makes clear the precise nature of this charge, allegedly paraphrasing Pierre Guillaume of VT:
"At a time when the VT movement suffered from ostracism from all sides, when, moreover, Chomsky could have published a French version of his Political Economy of Human Rights (written with Edward Herman) with a French commercial firm, Chomsky nevertheless stood by his friends of the VT and published his book with them."
And again:
"Guillaume has told us .... how he [Chomsky] had sacrificed self-interest to political principle by publishing his book with VT rather than commercially ...."
And yet again:
"Not only did Chomsky publish his Political Economy of Human Rights with Guillaume's organization. He also ...."
I leave aside as irrelevant the issue of whether Cohn has accurately rendered Guillaume's claims, and on that score I only note that he provides no quotations to support his assertion regarding Guillaume's statements (I will make some comments on this matter later in regard to his reliance on Guillaume as his "crucial source").
Werner Cohn has decided to put forward this allegation as the truth, and he has the responsibility to make sure that such claims, even when he merely repeats them from another source, are accurate.
So, the fact at issue:
Did Chomsky publish The Political Economy of Human Rights with La Vieille Taupe instead of a commercial publisher?
The answer is: No.
The French translation of The Political Economy of Human Rights appeared as L'Economie politique des droits de l'homme in 1981, and was published by Albin-Michel, a mainstream, commercial publisher.
When confronted with this fact, Werner Cohn attempted to squirm out of his earlier claim as follows:
"Yes, I think it was Albin-Michel. But it was a 'collection' with Guillaume's name on it.
"In Guillaume's famous article he, Guillaume, boasts of his collaboration with Chomsky, and explains how he and VT were grateful to Chomsky for publishing with them."The truth is that LaVieille [sic] Taupe had a number of publication outlets, not always under its own name. But the leader of VT, Guillaume, used his own name as editor for one of Chomsky's books under some imprint other than VT. So in one sense one might say that this particular book was not published by VT under its own name."
So now Albin-Michel has become a mere "imprint" of the tiny fascist publisher VT.
This assertion can easily be put to the test: simply go to the On-Line French Books in Print: http://www.alapage.tm.fr/ and put "Albin-Michel" in the "Editeur / Publisher" slot.
Results that I have gotten have ranged from 6,900 to 7,500 or more books in print from this tiny fascist press.
Scrolling through them at random, I find a number of other authors that Werner Cohn might also like to examine for their "hidden alliances" with French neo-Nazis: Maggie Thatcher, Carl Jung, The Dalai Lama, Tom Clancy, Stephen King, Doris Lessing, James Herbert, Poppy Z. Brite, Clive Barker, Robin Cook, John Fowles, Dean Koontz, Whitley Strieber.
It will be seen that this neo-Nazi conspiracy is somewhat larger than at first appeared.
Dan Clore (Google Conversation)
Re:LODE Radio considers that bogus attacks upon Chomsky, such as in Werner Cohn's booklet, lazily misrepresenting the facts of the Faurisson affair, have had an unwarranted and lasting impact on how some regard the significance of Chomsky's political analysis over the decades, especially in France.
Next to freedom of thought . . .
This video montage presents a number of occasions, subsequent to the emergence of the Faurisson affair allegations, that Chomsky champions the importance of a principled stance on freedom of speech.
The Free Speech Movement
The Free Speech Movement (FSM) was a massive, long-lasting student protest which took place during the 1964–65 academic year on the campus of the University of California, Berkeley. The Movement was informally under the central leadership of Berkeley graduate student Mario Savio. Other student leaders include Jack Weinberg, Michael Rossman, George Barton, Brian Turner, Bettina Aptheker, Steve Weissman, Michael Teal, Art Goldberg, Jackie Goldberg, and others.
With the participation of thousands of students, the Free Speech Movement was the first mass act of civil disobedience on an American college campus in the 1960s. Students insisted that the university administration lift the ban of on-campus political activities and acknowledge the students' right to free speech and academic freedom.
The Free Speech Movement was influenced by the New Left, and was also related to the Civil Rights Movement and the Anti-Vietnam War Movement. To this day, the Movement's legacy continues to shape American political dialogue both on college campuses and in broader society, impacting on the political views and values of college students and the general public.
The "geography" of echoland, the information environment of the all-at-onceness of a digital now, has connections too to the media environment of the 1960's, and the politicisation of many in the civil rights, freedom to speak and protest activism taking place in settings such as the anti-Vietnam war protests and May '68 in Paris.
Q. How many films have been made about the Vietnam War since 1968?
A. 71!
The Wikipedia page on Vietnam War in film has a list that includes the 1968 US film The Green Berets, the third film in a list of 74, and ending the list with the 2020 US film Da 5 Bloods by Spike Lee.
This is a trailer for the film Da 5 Bloods.
The film tells the story of four African-American Vets who return to Vietnam. Searching for the remains of their fallen Squad Leader and the promise of buried treasure, they are confronted by the lasting ravages of the immorality of the Vietnam War. The realism contributes to a degree of poetic justice and a fairytale ending where a share of the recovered treasure is given to the Black Lives Matter movement. For a part of the truth to be told, even with a distance of nearly half a century, it requires a "feel good" ending.
When the Vietnam (or Indochina) war ended in 1975 Noam Chomsky said:
“American imperialism has suffered a stunning defeat in Indochina. But the same forces are engaged In another war against a much less resilient enemy, the American people. Here, the prospects for success are much greater. The battleground is ideological, not military. At stake are the lessons to be drawn from the American war in Indochina; the outcome will determine the course and character of new imperial ventures.”This quote is used as a header for:
Noam Chomsky interviewed by Paul Shannon in the Indochina Newsletter, Issue 18, November – December, 1982, pp. 1-5
QUESTION: When the Indochina war ended in 1975 you wrote that our nation’s “official” opinion makers would engage in distortion of the lessons to be drawn from the war so that the same basic foreign policy goals could be pursued after the war. You felt then that in order to keep the real meaning of the war from penetrating the general public they faced two major tasks: First, they would have to disguise the fact that the war “was basically an American attack on South Vietnam — a war of annihilation that spilled over to the rest of Indochina”. And secondly, they would have to obscure the fact that the military effort in Vietnam “was restrained by a mass movement of protest and resistance here at home which engaged in effective direct action outside the bounds of propriety long before established spokesmen proclaimed themselves to be its leaders”. Where do we stand now on these two issues, seven years later?
CHOMSKY: As far as the opinion makers are concerned, they have been doing exactly what it was obvious they would do. Every book that comes out, every article that comes out, talks about how — while it may have been a “mistake” or an “unwise effort” — the United States was defending South Vietnam from North Vietnamese aggression. And they portray those who opposed the war as apologists for North Vietnam. That’s standard to say.
The purpose is obvious: to obscure the fact that the United States did attack South Vietnam and the major war was fought against South Vietnam. The real invasion of South Vietnam which was directed largely against the rural society began directly in 1962 after many years of working through mercenaries and client groups. And that fact simply does not exist in official American history. There is no such event in American history as the attack on South Vietnam. That’s gone. Of course, It is a part of real history. But it’s not a part of official history.
And most of us who were opposed to the war, especially in the early ’60’s — the war we were opposed to was the war on South Vietnam which destroyed South Vietnam’s rural society. The South was devastated. But now anyone who opposed this atrocity is regarded as having defended North Vietnam. And that’s part of the effort to present the war as if it were a war between South Vietnam and North Vietnam with the United States helping the South. Of course it’s fabrication. But it’s “official truth” now.
QUESTION: This question of who the United States was fighting in Vietnam is pretty basic in terms of coming to any understanding of the war. But why would the U.S. attack South Vietnam, if the problem was not an attack from North Vietnam?
CHOMSKY: First of all, let’s make absolutely certain that was the fact: that the U.S. directed the war against South Vietnam. There was a political settlement in 1954. But in the late ’50’s the United States organized an internal repression in South Vietnam, not using its troops, but using the local apparatus it was constructing. This was a very significant and very effective campaign of violence and terrorism against the Vietminh — which was the communist-led nationalist force that fought the French. And the Vietminh at that time was adhering to the Geneva Accords, hoping that the political settlement would work out in South Vietnam. [The Geneva Accords of 1954 temporarily divided Northern and Southern Vietnam with the ultimate aim of reunification through elections. — editor’s note]
And so, not only were they not conducting any terrorism, but in fact, they were not even responding to the violence against them. It reached the point where by 1959 the Vietminh leadership — the communist party leadership — was being decimated. Cadres were being murdered extensively. Finally in May of 1959 there was an authorization to use violence in self-defense, after years of murder, with thousands of people killed in this campaign organized by the United States. As soon as they began to use violence in self-defense, the whole Saigon government apparatus fell apart at once because it was an apparatus based on nothing but a monopoly of violence. And once it lost that monopoly of violence it was finished. And that’s what led the United States to move in. There were no North Vietnamese around.
Then the National Liberation Front of South Vietnam was formed. And its founding program called for the neutralization of South Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia. And it’s very striking that the National Liberation Front was the only group that ever called for the independence of South Vietnam. The so-called South Vietnamese government (GVN) did not, but rather, claimed to be the government of all Vietnam. The National Liberation Front was the only South Vietnamese group that ever talked about South Vietnamese independence. They called for the neutralization of South Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia as a kind of neutral block, working toward some type of integration of the South with North Vietnam ultimately.
Now that proposal in 1962 caused panic in American ruling circles. From 1962 to 1965 the US was dedicated to try to prevent the independence of South Vietnam, the reason was of course that Kennedy and Johnson knew that if any political solution was permitted in the south, the National Liberation Front would effectively come to power, so strong was its political support in comparison with the political support of the so-called South Vietnamese government.
And in fact Kennedy and later Johnson tried to block every attempt at neutralization, every attempt at political settlement. This is all documented. There’s just no doubt about it. I mean, it’s wiped out of history, but the documentation is just unquestionable — in the internal government sources and everywhere else.
And so there’s just no question that the United States was trying desperately to prevent the independence of South Vietnam and to prevent a political settlement inside South Vietnam. And in fact it went to war precisely to prevent that. It finally bombed the North in 1965 with the purpose of trying to get the North to use its influence to call off the insurgency in the South. There were no North Vietnamese troops in South Vietnam then as far as anybody knew. And they anticipated of course when they began bombing the North from South Vietnamese bases that it would bring North Vietnamese troops into the South. And then it became possible to pretend it was aggression from the North. It was ludicrous, but that’s what they claimed.
Well, why did they do it? Why was the United States so afraid of an independent South Vietnam? Well, I think the reason again is pretty clear from the internal government documents. Precisely what they were afraid of was that the “takeover” of South Vietnam by nationalist forces would not be brutal. They feared it would be conciliatory and that there would be successful social and economic development — and that the whole region might work.
This was clearly a nationalist movement — and in fact a radical nationalist movement which would separate Vietnam from the American orbit. It would not allow Vietnam to become another Philippines. It would trade with the United States but it would not be an American semi-colony.
And suppose it worked. Suppose the country could separate itself from the American dominated global system and carry out a successful social and economic development. Then that is very dangerous because then it could be a model to other movements and groups in neighboring countries. And gradually there could be an erosion from within by indigenous forces of American domination of the region. So this was no small thing. It was assumed that the key to the problem was preventing any successful national movement from carrying out serious social and economic development inside Indochina. So the United States had to destroy it through a process which would become the war against South Vietnam. And, it should be pointed out that on a lower level we were doing the same things in Laos and Cambodia.
QUESTION: So the irony is that the very reason given in the United States for fighting the war — the independence of South Vietnam — is exactly what had to be destroyed.
CHOMSKY: Exactly.
Wikipedia points out that: Chomsky's far-reaching criticisms of U.S. foreign policy and the legitimacy of U.S. power have raised controversy. Chomsky's status as the "most-quoted living author" is credited to his political writings, which vastly outnumber his writings on linguistics.
Chomsky biographer Wolfgang B. Sperlich characterizes him as "one of the most notable contemporary champions of the people"; journalist John Pilger has described him as a "genuine people's hero; an inspiration for struggles all over the world for that basic decency known as freedom. To a lot of people in the margins — activists and movements — he's unfailingly supportive."
Arundhati Roy has called him "one of the greatest, most radical public thinkers of our time", and Edward Said thought him "one of the most significant challengers of unjust power and delusions". Fred Halliday has said that by the start of the 21st century Chomsky had become a "guru" for the world's anti-capitalist and anti-imperialist movements. The propaganda model of media criticism that he and Edward S. Herman developed has been widely accepted in radical media critiques and adopted to some level in mainstream criticism of the media, also exerting a significant influence on the growth of alternative media, including radio, publishers, and the Internet, which in turn have helped to disseminate his work.
Chomsky has attracted controversy for calling established political and academic figures "corrupt", "fascist", and "fraudulent". His colleague Steven Pinker has said that he "portrays people who disagree with him as stupid or evil, using withering scorn in his rhetoric", and that this contributes to the extreme reactions he receives from critics. Chomsky avoids attending academic conferences, including left-oriented ones such as the Socialist Scholars Conference, preferring to speak to activist groups or hold university seminars for mass audiences.
His approach to academic freedom has led him to support MIT academics whose actions he deplores; in 1969, when Chomsky heard that Walt Rostow, a major architect of the Vietnam war, wanted to return to work at MIT, Chomsky threatened "to protest publicly" if Rostow were denied a position at MIT. In 1989, when Pentagon adviser John Deutch applied to be president of MIT, Chomsky supported his candidacy. Later, when Deutch became head of the CIA, The New York Times quoted Chomsky as saying, "He has more honesty and integrity than anyone I've ever met. ... If somebody's got to be running the CIA, I'm glad it's him."
Chomsky's biographer Sperlich also notes that Chomsky has been vilified by corporate interests, particularly in the mainstream press. University departments devoted to history and political science rarely include Chomsky's work on their undergraduate syllabi. Critics have argued that despite publishing widely on social and political issues, Chomsky has no formal expertise in these areas; he has responded that such issues are not as complex as many social scientists claim and that almost everyone is able to comprehend them regardless of whether they have been academically trained to do so.
According to James McGilvray, many of Chomsky's critics "do not bother quoting his work or quote out of context, distort, and create straw men that cannot be supported by Chomsky's text".
A document obtained pursuant to a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request from the U.S. government revealed that the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) monitored his activities and for years denied doing so. The CIA also destroyed its files on Chomsky at some point, possibly in violation of federal law. He has often received undercover police protection at MIT and when speaking on the Middle East, but has refused uniformed police protection. German newspaper Der Spiegel described Chomsky as "the Ayatollah of anti-American hatred", while American conservative commentator David Horowitz called him "the most devious, the most dishonest and ... the most treacherous intellect in America", whose work is infused with "anti-American dementia" and evidences his "pathological hatred of his own country".
Writing in Commentary magazine, the journalist Jonathan Kay described Chomsky as "a hard-boiled anti-American monomaniac who simply refuses to believe anything that any American leader says".
Chomsky's criticism of Israel has led to his being called a traitor to the Jewish people and an anti-Semite. Criticising Chomsky's defence of the right of individuals to engage in Holocaust denial on the grounds that freedom of speech must be extended to all viewpoints, Werner Cohn called Chomsky "the most important patron" of the neo-Nazi movement.
Hate speech versus free speech?
The Anti-Defamation League (ADL) called him a Holocaust denier, describing him as a "dupe of intellectual pride so overweening that he is incapable of making distinctions between totalitarian and democratic societies, between oppressors and victims". In turn, Chomsky has claimed that the ADL is dominated by "Stalinist types" who oppose democracy in Israel.
In a piece called:
Noam Chomsky stated his case for this assessment of ADL in an article for the Daily Camera, September, 1985.
Re:LODE Radio presents these two paragraphs from the larger case Chomsky made regarding the Faurisson Affair:
Suppression of critical comment on Israel of a sort that is easily expressed in Israel itself is readily demonstrable. To mention only one case, my book Fateful Triangle (1983) was reviewed in major (and minor) newspapers and news weeklies in Canada, Britain, Australia (even on national TV), and in exactly two local newspapers in the United States (and in the New York Review of Books, after a long review had appeared in its sister journal in London, which is widely read here), though its contents are far more relevant to U.S. concerns. This is quite typical, for others as well. While I am asked to write regularly on the Middle East in major journals in Israel, Europe and elsewhere, that is virtually inconceivable here. My experience is not all that unusual in this regard. It should be noted that the U.S. is a highly ideological society in which dissenting opinion is effectively marginalized as compared with other industrial democracies, but nevertheless, the case of the Middle East is unique. As has been observed in press commentary in Israel — a more democratic society than ours, at least for its Jewish majority — this is a serious danger for American democracy, for the Middle East, and indeed for world peace.
Again let me stress that no one is raising an issue of the “political rights” of critics of Israeli policies. To take another case, my “political rights” are not violated when the Anti-Defamation League of B’nai B’rith keeps a 150-page file on my activities, including surveillance of my talks and grossly falsified accounts of these talks and other matters, which the League then circulates to people with whom I am to have debates (e.g., Harvard Law Professor Alan Dershowitz) or to groups in universities where I am to speak so that they can extract defamatory and slanderous lies from this material. The issues, rather, are quite different. I have agreed to provide these files (leaked to me from the ADL office) to the people who find the Stalinist-style mentality and behavior of the ADL scandalous, and who question whether a tax-exempt organization should devote itself to surveillance and defamation of critics of the state it serves, but I accept no further responsibility to concern myself with the matter, contrary to Smokler’s absurd claim, any more than I waste time over the behavior of Communist Party hacks. For those who may be interested in the disreputable and dangerous activities of these groups, there is ample evidence in Paul Findley’s recent book, They Dare to Speak Out, Naseer Aruri’s “The Middle East on the U.S. Campus,” (Link, published by Americans for Middle East Understanding), and other works.
Hush! Caution! Echoland!This is where we are, but one of the aims and purposes of Re:LODE Radio is to massage and to tease out from the mess of messages, in a mass age, a few navigational techniques designed for operating in an essentially new kind of human and physical geography.
Marshall McLuhan in his influential analysis on the impact of communication technologies upon societies, Understanding Media, includes a chapter on Radio and that includes some challenging reflections on how this medium created an "echo chamber" that the national socialists in Germany exploited ruthlessly to gain power in 1933.
The question now is; how do contemporary media impact on the psychological and perceptual matrix among the societies across the world now?
Radio: The Tribal Drum
This is the title of a chapter on Radio in Marshall Mcluhan's groundbreaking book Understanding Media, and is referenced here in exploring how the impact of different and combined media may well have created an environment where nationalism, and shared identity, begins to translate from the concept of nation and merges with the mobilization of tribalism and ethnocentrism in the socio-cultural-political context of Europe, modern Germany and in North America in the 20th century. He is at pains to distinguish the differential impact of Radio as a medium in the anglophone world as compared with Europe.
This is what McLuhan says:
England and America had had their "shots" against radio in the form of long exposure to literacy and industrialism. These forms involve an intense visual organization of experience. The more earthy and less visual European cultures were not immune to radio. Its tribal magic was not lost on them, and the old web of kinship began to resonate once more with the note of fascism.
In a radio speech in Munich, March 14, 1936, Hitler said "I go my way with the assurance of a somnambulist." His victims and his critics have been equally somnambulistic.
They danced entranced to the tribal drum of radio that extended their central nervous system to create depth involvement for everybody.
A Nazi School Map of Europe including newly acquired lebensraum
"I live right inside radio when I listen. I more easily lose myself in radio than in a book," said a voice from a radio poll. The power of radio to involve people in depth is manifested in its use during homework by youngsters and by many other people who carry transistor sets in order to provide a private world for themselves amidst crowds.One of the many effects of television on radio has been to shift radio from an entertainment medium into a kind of nervous information system. News bulletins, time signals, traffic data, and above all weather reports now serve to enhance the native power of radio to involve people in one another. Weather is that medium that involves all people equally. It is the top item on radio, showering us with fountains of auditory space or lebensraum.
Nikita Khrushchev's 1959 visit to Iowa, USA "Now there's a real American!" Nikita Khrushchev says as he pats Iowan Christensen's belly
Had TV occurred on a large scale during Hitler's reign he would have vanished quickly. Had TV come first there would have been no Hitler at all. When Khrushchev appeared on American TV he was more acceptable than Nixon, as a clown and a lovable sort of old boy. His appearance is rendered by TV as a comic cartoon. Radio, however, is a hot medium and takes cartoon characters seriously. Mr. K. on radio would be a different proposition.
One hot . . .
In the Kennedy-Nixon debates, those who heard them on radio received an overwhelming idea of Nixon's superiority. It was Nixon's fate to provide a sharp, high definition image and action for the cool TV medium that translated that sharp image into the impression of a phony. I suppose "phony" is something that resonates wrong, that doesn't ring true.
Re:LODE Radio notes that translating this media analysis from the 1960's to the present and recent populist politicking in the UK, the "comic cartoon" image "par excellence" has proved an unsurpassed success for Boris Johnson. The German public service broadcaster NDR came up with a story called . . .
Die Serie zum Brexit: "The Clown"
. . . and uploaded to YouTube with English subtitles 13 Dec 2020.
Marshall McLuhan includes Franklin Delano Roosevelt's communication style during the the First New Deal as part of this analysis:
It might well be that F.D.R. would not have done well on TV. He had learned, at least, how to use the hot radio medium for his very cool job of fireside chatting. He first, however, had had to hot up the press media against himself in order to create the right atmosphere for his radio chats. He learned how to use the press in close relation to radio. TV would have presented him with an entirely different political and social mix of components and problems. He would possibly have enjoyed solving them, for he had the kind of playful approach necessary for tackling new and obscure relationships.
Policy explained . . .
Radio affects most people intimately, person-to-person, offering a world of unspoken communication between writer-speaker and the listener. That is the immediate aspect of radio A private experience. The subliminal depths of radio are charged with the resonating echoes of tribal horns and antique drums. This is inherent in the very nature of this medium, with its power to turn the psyche and society into a single echo chamber. The resonating dimension of radio is unheeded by the script writers, with few exceptions.
Fake 'WAR'?
The famous Orson Welles broadcast about the invasion from Mars was a simple demonstration of the all-inclusive, completely involving scope of the auditory image of radio. It was Hitler who gave radio the Orson Welles treatment for real. That Hitler came into political existence at all is directly owing to radio and public-address systems. This is not to say that these media relayed his thoughts effectively to the German people. His thoughts were of very little consequence. Radio provided the first massive experience of electronic implosion, that reversal of the entire direction and meaning of literate Western civilization.
Highly literate societies, that have long subordinated family life to individualist stress in business and politics, have managed to absorb and to neutralize the radio implosion without revolution. Not so, those communities that have had only brief or superficial experience of literacy. For them, radio is utterly explosive.
I want peace! A little piece of Poland . . .
Just prior to 1914, the Germans had become obsessed with the menace of "encirclement." Their neighbors had all developed elaborate railway systems that facilitated mobilization of manpower resources. Encirclement is a highly visual image that had great novelty for this newly industrialized nation. In the 1930s, by contrast,the German obsession was with lebensraum.This is not a visual concern, at all. It is a claustrophobia, engendered by the radio implosion and compression of space. The German defeat had thrust them back from visual obsession into brooding upon the resonating Africa within. The tribal past has never ceased to be a reality for the German psyche.
Equals Infinity by Paul KleeIt was the ready access of the German and middle-European world to the rich nonvisual resources of auditory and tactile form that enabled them to enrich the world of music and dance and sculpture. Above all their tribal mode gave them easy access to the new nonvisual world of subatomic physics, in which long-literate and long-industrialized societies are decidedly handicapped. The rich area of preliterate vitality felt the hot impact of radio.
Tradition, in a word, is the sense of the total past as now. Its awakening is a natural result of radio impact and of electric information, in general. For the intensely literate population, however, radio engendered a profound unrealizable sense of guilt that sometimes expressed itself in the fellow-traveler attitude.
Madonna of the Ear by Salvador Dali
The Gutenberg technology had produced a new kind of visual, national entity in the sixteenth century that was gradually meshed with industrial production and expansion. Telegraph and radio neutralized nationalism but evoked archaic tribal ghosts of the most vigorous brand. This is exactly the meeting of eye and ear, of explosion and implosion, or as Joyce puts it in the Wake, "In that earopean end meets Ind." The opening of the European ear brought to an end the open society and reintroduced the Indie world of tribal man to West End woman.
Radio is provided with its cloak of invisibility, like any other medium. It comes to us ostensibly with person-to-person directness that is private and intimate, while in more urgent fact, it is really a subliminal echo chamber of magical power to touch remote and forgotten chords. All technological extensions of ourselves must be numb and subliminal, else we could not endure the leverage exerted upon us by such extension. Even more than telephone or telegraph, radio is that extension of the central nervous system that is matched only by human speech itself. Is it not worthy of our meditation that radio should be specially attuned to that primitive extension of our central nervous system, that aboriginal mass medium, the vernacular tongue? The crossing of these two most intimate and potent of human technologies could not possibly have failed to provide some extraordinary new shapes for human experience. So it proved with Hitler, the somnambulist.
But does the detribalized and literate West imagine that it has earned immunity to the tribal magic of radio as a permanent possession? Our teenagers in the 1950s began to manifest many of the tribal stigmata. The adolescent, as opposed to the teenager, can now be classified as a phenomenon of literacy. Is it not significant that the adolescent was indigenous only to those areas of England and America where literacy had invested even food with abstract visual values?
Europe never had adolescents. It had chaperones. Now, to the teenager, radio gives privacy, and at the same time it provides the tight tribal bond of the world of the common market, of song, and of resonance. The ear is hyperesthetic compared to the neutral eye. The ear is intolerant, closed, and exclusive, whereas the eye is open, neutral, and associative. Ideas of tolerance came to the West only after two or three centuries of literacy and visual Gutenberg culture. No such saturation with visual values had occurred in Germany by 1930.To the student of media . . .
. . . it is difficult to explain the human indifference to social effects of these radical forces. The phonetic alphabet and the printed word that exploded the closed tribal world into the open society of fragmented functions and specialist knowledge and action have never been studied in their roles as a magical transformer. The antithetic electric power of instant information that reverses social explosion into implosion, private enterprise into organization man, and expanding empires into common markets, has obtained as little recognition as the written word.
The power of radio . . .
. . . to retribalize mankind, its almost instant reversal of individualism into collectivism, Fascist or Marxist, has gone unnoticed. So extraordinary is this unawareness that it is what needs to be explained. The transforming power of media is easy to explain, but the ignoring of this power is not at all easy to explain. It goes without saying that the universal ignoring of the psychic action of technology bespeaks some inherent function, some essential numbing of consciousness such as occurs under stress and shock conditions. The history of radio is instructive as an indicator of the bias and blindness induced in any society by its pre-existent technology.
Radio provides a speed-up of information that also causes acceleration in other media. It certainly contracts the world to village size, and creates insatiable village tastes for gossip, rumor, and personal malice. But while radio contracts the world to village dimensions, it hasn't the effect of homogenizing the village quarters. Quite the contrary. In India, where radio is the supreme form of communication, there are more than a dozen official languages and the same number of official radio networks.
The effect of radio as a reviver of archaism and ancient memories is not limited to Hitler's Germany. Ireland, Scotland, and Wales have undergone resurgence of their ancient tongues since the coming of radio, and the Israeli present an even more extreme instance of linguistic revival. They now speak a language which has been dead in books for centuries. Radio is not only a mighty awakener of archaic memories, forces, and animosities, but a decentralizing, pluralistic force, as is really the case with all electric power and media.
Centralism of organization is based on the continuous, visual, lineal structuring that arises from phonetic literacy. At first, therefore, electric media merely followed the established patterns of literate structures. Radio was released from these centralist network pressures by TV. TV then took up the burden of centralism, from which it may be released by Telstar. With TV accepting the central network burden derived from our centralized industrial organization, radio was free to diversify, and to begin a regional and local community service that it had not known, even in the earliest days of the radio "hams."
Since TV, radio has turned to the individual needs of people at different times of the day, a fact that goes with the multiplicity of receiving sets in bedrooms, bathrooms, kitchens, cars, and now in pockets. Different programs are provided for those engaged in divers activities.
Radio, once a form of group listening that emptied churches, has reverted to private and individual uses since TV The teenager withdraws from the TV group to his private radio. This natural bias of radio to a close tie-in with diversified community groups is best manifested in the disk-jockey cults and in radio's use of the telephone in a glorified form of the old trunkline wire-tapping.
The School of Athens is a fresco in the Vatican, Rome, by the Italian Renaissance artist Raphael.
1: Zeno of Citium 2: Epicurus 3: unknown 4: Boethius or Anaximander? 5: Averroes 6: Pythagoras 7: Alcibiades or Alexander the Great? 8: Antisthenes or Xenophon? 9: unknown or Fornarina as a personification of Love (Francesco Maria della Rovere?) 10: Aeschines 11: Parmenides or Nicomachus? 12: Socrates 13: Heraclitus (Michelangelo?)
14: Plato (Leonardo da Vinci?) 15: Aristotle (Giuliano da Sangallo?) 16: Diogenes of Sinope 17: Plotinus? 18: Euclid or Archimedes (Bramante?) 19: Strabo or Zoroaster? (Baldassare Castiglione?) 20: Ptolemy R: Apelles (Raphael) 21: Protogenes (Il Sodoma or Timoteo Viti)
Plato, who had old-fashioned tribal ideas of political structure, said that the proper size of a city was indicated by the number of people who could hear the voice of a public speaker. Even the printed book, let alone radio, renders the political assumptions of Plato quite irrelevant for practical purposes. Yet radio, because of its ease of decentralized intimate relation with both private and small communities, could easily implement the Platonic political dream on a world scale.
Weather report . . .
The uniting of radio with phonograph that constitutes the average radio program yields a very special pattern quite superior in power to the combination of radio and telegraph press that yields our news and weather programs. It is curious how much more arresting are the weather reports than the news, on both radio and TV. Is not this because "weather" is now entirely an electronic form of information, whereas news retains much of the pattern of the printed word?
. . . excerpt from the chapter Radio: The Tribal Drum, Understanding Media by Marshall McLuhan (1964)
The Wolfman connection and . . .
This video montage of scenes from American Graffiti has a retrospective take on the times and changes that McLuhan's navigations illuminate. This is a context that is explored in the Re:LODE Radio page:
How Playboy explains Vietnam and the Americanisation of the World
This is ECHOLAND . . .
How Playboy explains Vietnam and the Americanisation of the World
This is ECHOLAND . . .
. . . Weather + War = The Way It Is Now!
Russian TV and weather forecast for Russian Bombers in Syria and the Twitterstorm that followed . . . .
When it comes to the question:
Q. Who are buying the Ads/Fake News spreading fear, anxiety and hate?
A. The answer will be found in the question of who is monetising fear, anxiety and hate?
Considering a theme and . . .
. . . the application of a method . . .
. . . for Re:LODE Radio in 2021 a strategy adopted in an installation and performance work by F. Bossisio, M. Butler, P. Courtenay and K. Stutter called One Month Later at the London Film-makers Co-op in 1991 offers Re:LODE Radio a possible solution.
Thirty years later . . .
What's app .doc?
Re:LODE Radio, Re:LODE and the original LODE project takes a spatially synchronic view of what is happening in moments of time along the LODE Zone Line that unfolds diachronically, to reveal patterns in a mosaic of stories. The patterns in LODE posted to the way increases in productive power in the context of a colonial and post-colonial capitalist world, rather than benefiting populations across the world, presses upon population. More recently with Re:LODE the patterns that emerge from the information environment clearly point to the impact of industrial capitalism and productive power upon global climate. While global heating continues Re:LODE Radio is looking for patterns that provide clear points for policy change across the world ahead of COP 26 in Glasgow this coming November. In the run up to this already postponed event, the global pandemic has revealed how broken governance across the world turns out to be in the face of a global crisis. Many promises for radical solutions are being made ahead of COP 26, but they are still promises rather than actions for change and, more often than not, deferred to a near or distant future.
Accountability for existing powers is only possible if powers are held to account for promises made. Time is not on the side of a climate heading right now for three degrees Celsius of global temperature rise. Climate crisis campaigners, supported by science are telling us that One point five degrees Celsius would result, in practical terms, to allow for people and the economies across the world to manage and adapt to inevitable climate changes. The need for action is urgent.
The trouble is the mobilisation of information into political discourse is hampered by the fact of the monetisation of this information to bolster limited and commercial interests. The privatisation of profit and the socialisation of loss is now compounded by the environmentalisation of loss.
Surveillance capitalism requires conditions where democracy ceases to work. So far, it seems, this recent phenomenon is secure in the knowledge that the many peoples of the world, in the nations where power is located, are preoccupied with other stuff, distracted from distraction by distraction . . .
. . . and bamboozled!
One Month Later as an art project was based on the idea that looking at the pattern of connections in the information environment as a present moment affords, could gain increased and immediate contrast, enough contrast to wake up somnambulists, by way of a juxtaposition with what was happening in this very same information environment one month before.
Is this method potentially capable of exposing how the "news cycle" often hides "the truth" from those distracted from distraction by distraction? Re:LODE Radio asks the question:
Q. Is it worth conducting an experiment?
A. Yes !
Meanwhile surveillance capitalism continues to roll itself out, blanketing the horizon with the ideological fog in an ideological war!
One month later . . .
This article in AND Magazine intended to prepare a context for the installation work One Month Later at the London Film-makers Co-op, was prompted in the aftermath of the Gulf War by a tendency in the arts of protest to fall into the trap of re-presenting the tragedy of war, rather than expose the causes of this misadventure and the kind of global politics it was intending to support.
The war was not just about OIL!
It was about maintaining a whole system that, even today, continues to support extractive and polluting industrial "big" business. The war was about maintaining "business as usual".
So? What's in the news in 2021?
Re:LODE Radio returns to the original LODE concept of the creation of LODE Cargo, assembled in a place along the LODE Zone Line, and the wrapped in the paper sheets of a local newspaper with the dateline corresponding to the date of the cargo's creation.In the digital versions of Re:LODE, Re:LODE A Cargo of Questions, and Re:LODE Radio, the newspaper sheets with printed matter have been substituted by a so-called Information Wrap, sourced from the world wide web, but assembled as a mosaic of stories linked to places along the LODE Zone Line.This video includes the famous Beatles track "A Day in the Life" and Super8 film of views from the top deck of bus journeys taken Merseyside and ending at some traffic lights close to the Bootle Docks. This film originates in the LODE Legacy page LODE Legacy '94 for the "Guestworkers" project at Westwerk in Hamburg, Germany.
I read the news today . . .
. . . Oh boy!
Information Wrap
Today's Guardian front page, and many of this paper's inside pages, focus on the significance of Brexit and the pandemic.
John Harris, contributing to today's Guardian front page with this article/story, with the heading:
For all that has changed, there is so much still to be settled.
The article/story is headlined on the Guardian webpage (Fri 1 Jan 2021):
Fear, mistrust – and hope: Britain's long walk away from the EU
For many, Friday marks a departure as mind-boggling as it is heartbreaking. But the path to Brexit was laid years before the referendum
"For many, Friday marks a departure as mind-boggling as it is heartbreaking. But the path to Brexit was laid years before the referendum"
As a previous Tory prime minister trying to find his way through difficult times once said: this is not the end. It is not even the beginning of the end. But it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning.Brexit is hardly complete. The last-minute nature of the UK’s trade deal with the EU and the fact that it barely covers whole swaths of the economy – financial services are a good example – means some negotiations will have to grind on. The new bodies set up to arbitrate between the two sides will soon have work to do. Northern Ireland remains part of the single market for goods and will be enforcing EU customs rules, the most vivid example of the deal’s contorted provisions, which may have no end of political consequences. Certainly, given that public opinion in Scotland now suggests unprecedented levels of support for independence and that elections to the Scottish parliament will take place in May, what Brexit means for the increasingly fragile union between the UK’s four countries will now start to become clearer.Over the past week, the British government and its cheerleaders have implied that in averting a no-deal exit, we have avoided all the chaos and disruption that would have come with it. But this is not exactly the view of people at the sharp end. After the deal was announced, I spoke to Rob Hollyman, the director of a haulage firm based in Purfleet in Essex, which in normal times would be doing 25 runs a week to the continent, transporting prepackaged “non-essential foodstuffs” back to the UK via the port of Dover and the Eurotunnel.“Deal or no-deal makes very little difference to where we’ll be on 1 January,” he said. He and his drivers still do not know how long new export and customs clearances for loads from Britain will take in EU countries, and what that will mean for queues of lorries on the UK side of the English channel. The worst-case scenario of the government’s border and protocol delivery group, let us not forget, involves queues of 7,000 lorries in Kent; to put that in perspective, the recent chaos when France closed its border to hauliers coming in from the UK involved half that number.
“Is it going to take minutes, or hours, or days?” Hollyman said. “The general sense is that it’s going to be chaotic for … a period. But we don’t know how long that will last.”
The practicalities of Britain’s exit from the EU, then, remain full of uncertainty. Besides, proclaiming the first day of 2021 as some shining new dawn hardly suits our current reality. With the Covid pandemic reaching new peaks, hospitals reaching breaking point and most of the UK adjusting to life under increasingly stifling restrictions, this is hardly an occasion for union jack bunting and tributes to the bulldog spirit.But we should not underestimate today’s bracing significance. Our step away from the EU confirms that any idea of Britain as a country with an essentially European destiny is over, for a generation at least. The UK’s institutional arrangements are now in line with the vision of Britain that narrowly won the 2016 referendum – what Brexiters see as a proudly sovereign country, and their adversaries malign as an inward-looking, crabby place, eternally fixated on its past. If you ever had a hopeful vision of a UK that might be liberated from its history, culturally vibrant, and at last fully European (you can find it in some early Tony Blair speeches – he believed we could somehow be “a young country”), this is a moment of undeniable sadness.And there is another, even more profound reason to mourn, lost amid all that recent talk about fish species and lorry parks. What became the EU was, at heart, a response to centuries of conflict, and two wars in the 20th century whose aftershocks have still to die down. In eventually joining, the UK served notice that, whatever its innate scepticism, its people and politicians just about understood that close mutual ties were the best means of maintaining peace and stability. But after 47 years of membership and an often surreal period of politics, we are walking away.What is perhaps most mind-boggling is how unlikely this would once have seemed. Twenty or so years ago, I can recall driving around the country to interview an assortment of people who wanted Britain to leave the EU: maverick Tory backbenchers, pamphleteers, eccentric academics. At a social event in Blackpool organised by the UK Independence party’s north-west branch, I listened to long soliloquies about secret plots to end parliamentary democracy, before being asked to draw the raffle, and handing the winner a banana plant. This was a reference to the briefly famous “metric martyr” Steve Thoburn, a market trader from Sunderland who had refused to sell fruit and veg in the metric units as required by an EU directive, and been taken to court by his local council.
Back then, it was still de rigueur to write about stories like these in a tone of gentle mockery. But what people like me didn’t realise was how much hostility to Britain’s membership of the EU had already permeated the culture. As the writer and Guardian columnist Hugo Young had pointed out, British discourse about Europe “seldom moved beyond the narrow modes of complaint, lecture and demand”. Tory Euroscepticism was edging towards support for a clean break. The rightwing press was now a monolithic source of hostility to the imagined monsters collapsed into the word “Brussels”, amplifying the voices of people who – to quote a 1988 article in the Sun – had “no desire whatsoever to become politically involved with foreigners with whom we have nothing in common”. Even Blair, hailed as the first truly European British prime minister, would sometimes play to the Eurosceptic gallery (“I will have no truck with a European superstate – if there are moves to create that dragon, I will slay it,” he once told Sun readers), and was fond of expressing British exceptionalism: “Not for us the malaise of France or the angst of Germany,” he said in 2005.
Anti-EU prejudices had long since gripped the kind of voters who leaned Tory, and expressed their antipathy towards the EU from a position of relative affluence. But in 2016, that alone would not have been enough bring the leave side victory and set off the fitful chain of events that led to today. What made the difference was the mistrust and resentment sown by 35 years of rising insecurity and inequality, the effects of austerity, and the way that many people’s anger and dismay was focused on immigration. In 1998, Young said it was doubtful whether Euroscepticism had “any special connection with some embittered, unrepresented, forcibly silent majority”. But as the decade that began in 2010 rolled on, this was roughly what the forces behind Brexit pulled off.For six years, as I worked with my colleague John Domokos on the Guardian’s video series Anywhere But Westminster, I heard endless voices following much the same script, all over England and Wales (in Scotland they were noticeably thinner on the ground). Just before the referendum, I was in Southway, a somewhat pinched housing development on the northern edge of Plymouth. A man in a red hatchback saw we had a camera, rolled down his window and let rip. “This country’s dying on its knees, right?” he said. “I’d come out of the common market. I’d come out of the European court of human rights. I’d cut overseas aid. I’d abolish the licence fee. I’d kick out all the illegal immigrants. I’d sort out health, education, transport, defence, law and order.”
A month or so later, I visited Kidsgrove, near Stoke-on-Trent. I was with the local Labour MP, Ruth Smeeth, and 20 or so Labour activists who were knocking on doors and trying to persuade people to back remain. The fact that I had been invited along proved that they had no idea what was about to hit them. When it did, it was sometimes shrill, and ugly – but in retrospect, this was the sound of the country’s subsequent course being set. Of 24 households they canvassed in 30 short minutes, 23 were voting leave; in 2019, all three of Stoke’s parliamentary seats were won by the Tories. “We want to be British,” said one woman. “We want our government to run our country, not someone we’ve not elected in another bloody country. And that’s it. I want my country back. I’m scared for my country. Scared.”
Some people were indeed scared. If they expressed fears about immigration, it was often impossible to separate their anxieties from worries about housing, work and the effects on their immediate environment of the cuts. But equally, time spent in any town or city would usually uncover a smattering of obvious racists and bigots. And whether their opinions were expressed hesitantly or with full force, some people’s readiness to make sweeping judgments about people from other cultures and countries seemed to be plumbing new depths – not least when it came to new arrivals from the key countries that had joined the EU in 2004: the Czech Republic, Estonia, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Slovakia, and Slovenia.
In 2013, I spent time in Peterborough, a growing city in the east of England whose large Polish population and Eurosceptic Tory MP seemed to make it a perfect place to explore where the country might be heading. “There’s too many people in the country [for us] to cope, to be honest,” one man told me. “Turf ’em out. Turf as many out as they can. Not in a bad way; I’m not a racist of any sort. But if they turf ’em out, we’ll all be better off.” He was mixed race.Occasionally, it started to feel as if a certain unease about immigration had become a strange token of integration: no longer the sole preserve of the irate white men who would soon be known as “gammon”, but beyond the progressive middle class, something that felt discomfitingly universal.Yet who were the people so many had decided should not have come here? The story of people from the so-called accession countries was the same essential story of newcomers to Britain down the ages. In Peterborough and the parts of eastern England that extended from Norfolk to Lincolnshire, thousands had arrived from eastern and central Europe and stoically taken jobs as shelf-stackers, crop-pickers and warehouse workers, often working impossible hours for woefully poor wages, and ensuring that large swathes of the consumer economy ticked over. Even if such towns as Wisbech and Boston often felt divided and uneasy, the children of Poles, Latvians and Lithuanians had enrolled at local schools, and begin to develop new hybrid identities. Among the people I met who had progressed to being managers, supervisors and homeowners, there seemed to be more faith in this country’s openings for the upwardly mobile than you would find among most British people.The fact that so many voters then opted to slam the door still seems grim, not least in the age of warm tributes to “key workers”. But the anti-immigrant rhetoric and sentiment that cohered around Brexit are now embodied in even more legislation. The new Immigration Act comes into force on 1 January , and replaces free movement with a points-based system that looks like it may drastically affect care work, warehousing, agriculture, food processing, and more: another likely source of problems that will soon start to reveal themselves.
All this may suggest that Brexit was almost entirely reducible to a great spasm of nastiness and loathing, something that suits an age of political polarisation. But we should not forget that, whatever else swirled around the referendum, votes for leaving the EU were also founded in optimism and hope – something brought home to me by a visit in March 2019 to Wigan in Greater Manchester, where 64% of local voters had backed Brexit and the intervening three years hardly seemed to have changed anyone’s opinion.
On a cold Wednesday morning, I had a long conversation with Ian, an Amazon driver, who was beginning to wonder if Brexit would ever happen. “We voted out,” he said. “To get out and repair the country … They’ve done a lot of damage in the last few years, our government. They always do. They need to pay a bit more attention to what we need. Provide the money for policing, the NHS … Let’s bring it back, [and] build this country up again.” To all intents and purposes, this is the same vision of post-Brexit “levelling up” that will be at the heart of the immediate political future.
While I was there, I also met Charlie Dale, who was doing voluntary work at a local food project, having recently lost his job as a team leader with Asda. He was on universal credit, and regularly down to his last pennies. He told me he had voted leave, and would do so again. “Hopefully, we can get some jobs back in,” he said. When I said that Brexit was surely likely to make the country poorer, he replied without missing a beat: “How can I be poorer?”
We met again six months later, when taking a job on zero-hours contract that delivered precious little work had worsened his predicament. He was living on soup and powdered milk and facing eviction, and had taken to staying in his house all day to preserve calories. On the TV in his ground-floor flat, Sky News was showing increasingly ugly demonstrations outside parliament as Theresa May’s withdrawal agreement once again hit the skids. In some inarticulable way, the noise and discord on the TV seemed to be of a piece with the impossibility of his day-to-day existence. “I think somebody’s going to get killed,” he said. “I wanted to leave, but the leave I wanted has been twisted.” Gesturing at the TV, he said that if he was asked again, he would vote remain, “just for all this to stop”.Four days after Christmas, I spoke to Charlie again. Since we last met, his lot had improved; he had a job with a local firm making ready meals, and had recently gone back to work after months of being furloughed. The government’s record on the pandemic and Boris Johnson’s leadership style, he said, had sustained his sense of regret about voting for Brexit, and the trade deal had not changed his mind. “I think Boris has been stitched up, with everything being decided at the last minute,” he said. “I don’t think the EU’s going to make it any easier for us. We’re in for a tricky year, aren’t we?”
John Harris's account of Brexit Britain for the Guardian today is balanced by a report on the inside pages (Thu 31 Dec 2020) by the Europe correspondent for the Guardian, Jon Henley with the headline:
View from the EU: Britain 'taken over by gamblers, liars, clowns and their cheerleaders'
European commentators weigh in on what Britain's departure from the EU means
The image used for this Guardian webpage is of a mural by British artist Banksy, painted on the wall of a prominent building close to the harbour at Dover, depicting a worker chipping away at one of the stars on a European Union flag.
Jon Henley writes:
Britain faces an uncertain future as it finally pulls clear of the EU’s orbit, continental commentators have predicted, its reputation for pragmatism and probity shredded by a Brexit process most see as profoundly populist and dangerously dishonest.
“For us, the UK has always been seen as like-minded: economically progressive, politically stable, respect for the rule of law – a beacon of western liberal democracy,” said Rem Korteweg, of the Clingendael Institute thinktank in the Netherlands.“I’m afraid that’s been seriously hit by the past four years. The Dutch have seen a country in a deep identity crisis; it’s been like watching a close friend go through a really, really difficult time. Brexit is an exercise in emotion, not rationality; in choosing your own facts. And it’s not clear how it will end.”Britain’s long-polished pragmatic image had been “seriously tarnished”, agreed Nicolai von Ondarza, of the German Institute for International and Security Affairs. But trust in the UK, too, had taken a heavy battering on the Brexit rollercoaster.“That’s particularly been the case over the past year,” Von Ondarza said. “Boris Johnson has always been seen as a bit of a gambler, displaying a certain … flexibility with the truth. But observing him him as prime minister has only made that worse.”Germans tended to view international politics “very much through the prism of international law”, Von Ondarza said, so Johnson’s willingness to ignore it – in the form, particularly, of the internal market bill – was deeply shocking.“The idea that you’d willingly violate an international treaty that you’d negotiated and signed barely eight months previously … That’s just not something you do among allies,” he said. “That whole episode really damaged Britain’s credibility.”Others were more brutal still. In Der Spiegel, Nikolaus Blome said there was “absolutely nothing good about Brexit … which would never have happened had Conservative politicians not, to a quite unprecedented degree, deceived and lied to their people”.Much of the British media, Blome said, “were complicit, constantly trampling on fairness and facts”, leaving Britain “captured by gambling liars, frivolous clowns and their paid cheerleaders. They have destroyed my Europe, to which the UK belonged as much as France or Germany.”But Johnson’s lies were the biggest of all, he said: “‘Take back control,’ Johnson lied to his citizens. But all the British government will finally have achieved is to have taken back control of a little shovel and a little sand castle.”The “sovereignty” in whose name Brexit was done remained, essentially, a myth, said Jean-Dominique Giuliani, of the Robert Schuman Foundation in France. “It is history, geography, culture, language and traditions that make up the identity of a people,” Giuliani said, “not their political organisation.”It is “wrong to believe peoples and states can permanently free themselves from each other, or take decisions without considering the consequences for their citizens and partners. ‘Take back control’ is a nationalist, populist slogan that ignores the reality of an interdependent world … Our maritime neighbour will be much weakened.”The German historian Helene von Bismarck doubted Brexit would end what she described as a very British brand of populism. “British populism is a political method, not an ideology, and it does not become redundant with Brexit,” she said.Von Bismarck identified two key elements in this method: an emotionalisation and over-simplification of highly complex issues, such as Brexit, the Covid pandemic or migration, and a reliance on bogeymen or enemies at home and abroad.“Populists depend on enemies, real or imagined, to legitimise their actions and deflect from their own shortcomings,” she said. If the EU has been the “enemy abroad” since 2016, it will steadily be replaced by “enemies within”: MPs, civil servants, judges, lawyers, experts, the BBC.“Individuals and institutions who dare to limit the power of the executive, even if it is just by asking questions, are at constant risk of being denounced as ‘activists’” by the Johnson government, Von Bismarck said. “Everyone has political motives – except for the government, which seeks to define ‘neutrality’.”Brexit itself is being framed as “the grand departure, the moment the UK is finally free and sovereign, when all problems can be solved with common sense and optimism – justifying a more ‘pragmatic’ approach to rules, constitutional conventions and institutions” that actually amounts to a “worrying disregard for the rule of law”.“British populism” would continue, she said, especially when the real, hard consequences of the pandemic and Brexit started to bite.“It is naive to expect a political style which ridicules complexity, presents people with bogeymen to despise, and prides itself on ‘doing what it necessary’ even if ‘elites’ and institutions get in the way, to lose its appeal in times of hardship,” she said.Elvire Fabry, of France’s Institut Jacques Delors, said the past four years had shown Europeans and Britons “just how little we really knew each other”. They had also revealed, she said, the fragility of a parliamentary system seen by many on the continent as a point of reference.“It’s been difficult for us to anticipate, at times even to interpret, what’s happened” in the UK, Fabry said. “The direction Johnson has taken the Conservative party in – we didn’t see that coming. The course he’s setting for the country. The polarisation. And the way MPs have been bypassed since he became prime minister ….”Most striking of all, she said, was how the politics prevailing in Britain had become “detached from geopolitical reality – from the way the world is developing. It’s a political vision turned towards yesterday’s world. Ideological. The way the trade deal focused on goods at the expense of services … It’s not the way the world’s going.”Painful as the Brexit process may have been for Europeans, however, it had at least demonstrated “the reality and value of the single market, its rules and norms, and of the EU’s basis in law”, Fabry said. “Those are at the heart of the European identity – and defending them has given the union a new political maturity.”It had also, concluded Korteweg, served as a warning. “I think it’s taught us all just how vulnerable our political processes are,” he said. “Just eight years ago, leaving the EU was a seriously fringe proposition in British politics, and now look where you are. So we’ve seen how fragile it all is, what we’ve built – and how worth defending.”
Along with the image of the signed UK Brexit trade deal, union flags and Boris Johnson, yesterdays front page of the Guardian headlined two stories concerning the Covid-19 pandemic, one on the continuing impact of the rising rate of coronavirus cases and the highest daily toll of virus fatalities since April. The other story is about the Oxford vaccine roll out.
The national and international policy, action and behaviour of governments along the LODE Zone Line is likely to be a significant theme in the coming months. After all, it is the willingness of national governments to act internationally and constructively, and together to address the global challenges of the health of humanity and the planet, upon which the future depends.
Lets see in a months time how this news stacks up against the headlines.
How will the gamblers, liars and clowns be behaving down the LODE Zone Line?
What's app .doc?
What's up doc? More Fake News? More obfuscation? More distraction from distraction by distraction?
Hush! Caution! Echoland!
