Juha's Critical Pedagogy

U.S. – Canada Co-Op

2007-07-30T11:49:00.000-08:00

CBC News July 30, 2007

An American professor scheduled to teach at Carleton University this fall was denied a work permit because of his arrest during a protest 26 years ago — a move he says has chilling implications for activists and protesters on both sides of the border.

"I've not been convicted of a crime," said Tom Juravich, who teaches labour studies at the University of Massachusetts in Amherst. "But somehow now, simply because I was arrested 26 years ago, I seem to be a potential threat here in Canada."

He said that when he tried to cross the border at Cornwall, Ont., last week, Canadian border agents told him his file showed he was arrested by U.S. authorities in 1981. That was during a protest on a union picket
line, Juravich said.

He added that he was told he must provide further documentation about the arrest in order to be cleared for a work permit. Juravich said he visited Canada more than 50 times in the past two years to work and to spend time with his partner, Teresa Healey, who lives in Ottawa.

The situation implies that young activists and protesters may have trouble crossing the border in the future, he said, and that may discourage some people from engaging in activism or participating in protests.

"I think this is going to have a chilling impact on the kind of legitimate dissent that we consider as a part and parcel of the democratic process," he said.

He blamed his recent problem on the way information is now shared between Canada and the United States, as a result of terrorism fears.

Canadian border agents can't be expected to interpret decades old legal documents from another country, he added.

Patrizia Giolti, spokeswoman for the Canadian Border Services Agency, said in an e-mail that the agency cannot comment on Juravich's specific case. But she said information sharing between the two countries is nothing new and that people may be deemed inadmissible because of criminal charges laid in another country, even if those charges are later withdrawn.

"To allow an officer to determine their admissibility, they must provide complete details of the charges, convictions, court dispositions, pardons, photocopies of applicable sections of foreign law and court proceedings," she added.

Meanwhile, Juravich's situation is also causing problems for Carleton University.

"To lose two classes taught by a sort of internationally reputable scholar is a disaster," said Rianne Mahon, director of the university's Institute of Political Economy, which hired Juravich. She said the news that Juravich was denied a work permit came as a shock.

Vote Ségolène!

2007-04-30T12:44:00.000-08:00

Vote Ségolène Royal!

http://segolene-royal-videos.new.fr/

The Great Educational Trickle-Down Delusion

2007-04-06T08:35:00.000-08:00

The following text entitled "Educational Research" was published in Teachers College Record (Date Published: March 28, 2007 http://www.tcrecord.org ID Number: 13956, Date Accessed: 4/6/2007 3:32:41 AM). It is written by Robert McClintock, who, I believe, is John & Sue Ann Weinberg Chair in History & Philosophical Foundation of Education at Columbia University. But don't let the title scare you, but read his text below. And, please, visit his StudyPlace wiki dedicated to create "a global cultural commons — an engine of knowledge and thought, free and open to all." The wiki assembles and advances "the world's responses to the basic question, What educates?" But, yes, here's Robert McClintock's critical comments on educational research:

Educational research accumulates in great, growing bulk, with all manner of contradictory findings, and no leverage by which to effect practice in any significant way. Better schooling depends, less on research, but on adequate resources for the job, human and financial, and lots of hard work, day by day, in an ethos of support and high expectation, in school and out.

Don't take it personally—I'm sure your research is great, but taken all together, educational research has become absurd, out of harmony with sound judgment. Unfortunately, we have come to know too well that absurdity in the seat of power causes human harm.

Consider first the absurdity. Educational research has fattened horribly. Yes, that may offend, but sometimes a friend must be honest. Researchers don't notice the excess as they worry about too much here or too little there, over-extending the quantitative, too little qualitative, not enough of the triangulated, the doubly blinded. They rush too quickly after the method du jour, hoping to chomp data into another published roll of flab, by which the oleaginous field oozes up the ladder of promotion and tenure.

A gross exaggeration? AERA is accepting proposals for new handbooks of educational research and to get an inkling of what to expect, look closely, for instance, wondering with skeptical admiration, at the Handbook of Research on Teaching, since 2001 in its fourth edition. As AERA suggests, this "resource for students and scholars in education and beyond…will inform practice-policy, school administration, teaching, instruction, and parenting." Is it fit for the effort?

At $85, the member price, the Handbook offers value, but $15 for shipping tips us off. It has heft – circa 7 pounds, just under 1,300 pages, 8.5 by 11, double columns, set in 10 point Times Roman, ungenerous margins. Eighty-five distinguished authorities contribute 51 articles, each on average discussing 160 research studies. The subject index identifies over 4,000 topics of note; the name index cites 7,130 persons who merit attention. The Handbook covers the field, of course. Multiple articles on the intellectual foundations and the methodologies of research open it, and surveys of research on teaching key subjects, on the learner, on policy, on teachers and teaching, on the social and cultural contexts of teaching, and finally on the practice of instruction all follow. Indeed, the Handbook is an epitome of research on teaching, the concern at the heart of educational research writ large.

Does the Handbook represent an absurd effort? It epitomizes thousands of person-years of methodical inquiry, each piece of it fine fare, but in bulk indigestible. It assembles work, pointless in a deep, existential sense, for the research goes off in every direction, leaving those in "practice-policy, school administration, teaching, instruction, and parenting" without a clue what to do. Before them, a research landscape spreads out, a vast plain, with a hillock here and there among the dead (Dewey, Freire, Piaget, and Vygotsky) and the living (Shulman, Darling-Hammond, and a few others). The contributors cite their 7,000 plus researchers on average a little over twice each and mention the median researcher only 3 times. What is the message? How should the eager reader react to the 4,200 isolated studies, which the Handbook mentions only once in its million or so words? Which of them is the key unlocking whatever problem is at the reader's hand?

Can the policy maker at the federal, state, or local level use the Handbook, or the thousands of studies to which it points? Perhaps, for this or that, but in a helter-skelter manner. Will the Handbook help the harried school administrator, pressed to meet standards, eager for his school to shine on tests, struggling to keep things humming on a parsimonious budget, having to cope with the kids living at the margin and testing every boundary? And can those engaged in teaching and instruction work with the Handbook, and all the research it represents, as they engage daily 120 protean persons, each distinctly different, in the trial of mastering some skills, values, and knowledge? With the Handbook in hand, follow a teacher, good or bad, for a week, and try to offer sage advice from it as the teacher sees teachable moments flit forth for this pupil and that one. And then, can someone parenting use the Handbook well? Imagine him or her after a long day at work, settling into bed, 7 pounds of book resting on stomach muscles that have begun to sag from fatigue and age, intently squinting at the small-print on double-columned pages, and on 919 exclaiming suddenly, “Honey, here's the answer!"

In the lexicon of educational researchers, "education" denotes schooling and researchers must start asking to what degree their work can determine the realities of schooling. These realities are imperious, domineering, imperative. Schools work the same way the world around; they have powerful routines and massive institutional inertia. Tradition, ritual, convention, interest, bureaucratic procedure, folly, the lore of practice, and expedient intelligence determine the actualities of schools.

Let's be honest and humble: because educational researchers have proven unable to exercise rigorous control and account for the relevant variables in carefully designed inquiries, their studies have had notoriously conflicting results. If researchers cannot master the variables in controlled settings, why expect practitioners, caught in institutional cross-currents and daily coping with complexity, to be able to rationalize school activities according to the prescripts of research findings? They can't; they won't; the direct application of research will have no coherent effects.

Oh, yes—perhaps direct application has not been the point. Educational researchers also staff the professional schools of education as the faculty members who educate the educators. Perhaps as the researchers prepare pre-service novices and bring in-service practitioners up-to-date with newly proven techniques, their educational research will shape practice indirectly. This faith constitutes the educational version of the great trickle-down delusion. Do we believe the very rich when they assure us that their getting ever richer will soon improve all our pay, benefits, and security? Alas, the trickling down of educational research from the schools of education will have even less effect than do the leavings of great wealth upon the annual income of the ordinary person.

So, in sum, the absurdity: educational research accumulates in great, growing bulk, with all manner of contradictory findings, and no leverage by which to effect practice in any significant way. Better schooling depends, less on research, but on adequate resources for the job, human and financial, and lots of hard work, day by day, in an ethos of support and high expectation, in school and out.

Consider now the harm. The vast quantity of educational research produced year in, year out, serves no real need or opportunity in the workaday world of schools, of their management, or of parenting. It does not arise to meet a felt demand from these quarters. It exists because the system of schooling requires many teachers and they require a professional preparation, which occurs primarily in academic institutions. In turn, those academic institutions need a faculty and they assess the ability to conduct and publish research as their primary criterion for deciding who to recruit, promote, and tenure as faculty members. The vast bulk of educational research will have no effect on anything except the process of recruitment, promotion, and tenure in schools of education. It exists for the sole reason that both individual researchers and the institutions that employ them consistently use the research for this purpose.

This assertion will come as no surprise to anyone who has spent much time with eyes open in schools of education. But what harm does the practice do? Four injuries result.

• Skill in educational research often has little to do with the real educational work that should take place in the professional preparation of educators. By relying on the demonstration of extraneous research skills as the prime criterion for recruitment, promotion, and tenure, schools of education risk making bad decisions about the composition of their faculties.

• School improvement requires quotidian labor, many persons thinking hard on their feet, responding to an endless flux of concrete situations with knowledge, care, and insight. The myth that fixing the schools somehow depends on the magic of educational researchers deflects attention, material support, and respect from those charged with the real tasks of keeping school, diminishing their morale and confidence.

• Contemporary culture has a great need for thoughtful work that will inform the public consideration of education throughout life and not merely in schools. Relying on educational research for recruitment, promotion, and tenure leads to a great over-production of useless research about schooling, which throttles public communication about education in a din of nonsensical noise. Good schools work poorly in a culture enervated by pedagogical pollutants—excessive inequalities, mendacious leaders, grasping fiduciaries, narcotic entertainments, distorted ideals. Research should lay bare all that dampens educational aspiration, but it avoids this challenge, for it may anger this interest or that, prejudicing its value as a tool in recruitment, promotion, and tenure.

• By working primarily to secure their recruitment, promotion, and tenure, educational researchers become alienated and defensive. They avoid intellectual risks; they become imitative; they seek narrow, predictable specialties; they address a limited readership and nurture small ideas that others will find unexceptionable. In so doing, they educate themselves poorly and as poorly educated educators, they prove impotent as the educators of educators.

Causes of war death

2007-04-01T11:52:00.000-08:00

Causes of war death 1918 according to the political affiliation of the killed persons

The chart presents figures outlining causes of war death in 1918 in Finland's civil war according to the political affiliation of the killed persons.

As of 8 January 2002, the figures were as follows (http://vesta.narc.fi/cgi-bin/db2www/sotasurmaetusivu/stat2):

Cause of death	Reds	Whites	Others	Total
Killed in action	5 324	3 279	484	9 087
Executed, shot, murdered	7 207	1 321	392	8 920
Died in prison camps	11 785	6	500	12 291
Died after being released	597	-	2	599
Missing	1 818	42	116	1 976
Other causes of death	695	173	536	1 404
Total	27 426	4 821	2 030	34 277

Right-wing does it better...

2007-03-20T03:09:00.000-08:00

In Finnish Parliamentary Election 2007 the right-wing Coalition Party took the historical victory. Now Finland is 70 % white and blue. Right wing promised hope – doesn't we all want just that – whereas Social Democrats painted mere escatologies. Not only better off people, but also the middle class and even the poor voted the right wing candidates. It is said that Parliament represents people. But how is it?
"Income is the one variable that marks the greatest difference between candidates and voters. The 2003 taxable income of the candidates averaged EUR 34,200 - 74 per cent higher than the average income of the voters. The 2007 income of the candidates was EUR 38,000 - 80 per cent higher than the income of the voters. The average income of a voter was EUR 21,000. The EUR 70,000 average income of Coalition Party candidates was three times that of the voters. A Swedish People's Party candidate's average income was EUR 65,000, Centre Party candidates earned on average EUR 52,000." (Source: Statistic Finland)

Are we, too, experiencing the unspoken class divide in Finland? Longer than 15 minutes?

Student Protest in Moscow State

2007-03-19T05:08:00.000-08:00

Writes a group of students of the Sociology Department at Moscow State University: "We, a group of students of the Sociology Department at Moscow State University, have asked the department's administration to improve the quality of teaching, stop force-feeding us with ultranationalist propaganda, and ensure acceptable conditions of life and study. . . ."

... In recent years, fifteen recognized scholars have been forced out of the university, including Professor Vladimir Nikolayev, one of the few Russian experts on the Chicago School and translator of Robert Park, Everett Hughes, Alfred Schütz, Harold Garfinkel and Erving Goffman; Professor Elena Kukushkina, a well-known expert on pre-revolutionary Russian sociology; Professors Y.N. Tolstova and O.V. Ivanov, experts in the mathematical modeling of social processes; Professor V.V. Shtcherbina, a leading theorist of organization sociology and consultant to a number of large Russian companies; Professor Andrew Degtyarev, a well-known Russian expert in political sociology and member of the International Sociological Association’s research committees on Political Sociology and Urban and Regional Development; and Professor Helen Shestopal, a well-known social and political psychologist and vice-president of both the International and Russian Political Science Associations.

See more and give your support at http://www.od-group.org/node/114

The Despoiling of the American Mind

2007-03-16T22:40:00.000-08:00

The Despoiling of the American Mind
by Peter McLaren

The American mind is a turbulent canister of contradictions:
A blood-splotched Guantanamo prison cell floating delicately on a
lotus pond,
An unkempt bedroom strewn with silk undergarments
Where truth sits in comfortable exile,
A victim of extraordinary rendition stuffed into the drawer of an
adolescent's bed
Covered in locomotive quilting from Pottery Barn Kids,
A space-age panopticon of worldwide "humanitarian" surveillance
That's put the Muslim world on 24-hour suicide watch -- after first
driving it insane,
A dank paternity-ward incubator crammed with the corporate
war-party
Planning genocidal assaults against the next group of evil-doers,
An unexploded cluster bomblet in a Wedgewood Jasper vase,
A Norman Rockwell painting mounted in an overflowing septic tank,
Einstein's brain powering up Dick Cheney's bedside reading lamp,
Jesus's soul recharging the sand-encrusted battery of a disabled
Hummer,
A decomposed rat lying in state on the Lincoln catafalque in the
Capital Rotunda,
Blake's golden string wound into a ball
Lodged in Rove's rectal wall.

Peter McLaren is a political activist and the author and editor of over 40 books, including Che Guevara, Paulo Freire, and the Pedagogy of Revolution. He teaches at the University of California, Los Angeles. His writings have appeared in over twenty languages.

Source: http://mrzine.monthlyreview.org/mclaren160307.html

Neil Peitsamo / Kari Young

2007-03-07T11:23:00.001-08:00

Rock 'n' roll singer Kari Peitsamo (on the left) is Finland's Neil Young, or is it other way round?
Is Neil Young Canada's Kari Peitsamo?
Listen yourself at http://www.myspace.com/karipeitsamo

Download the Enemy

2007-03-02T02:37:00.000-08:00

A prominent adult educator and researcher in the field of adult education Michael Newman has established a website for his popular books, which are now downloadable for free from www.michaelnewman.info/, among them his Defining the Enemy, in which he cites Freire quite frequently.

Useful Sources

2007-02-19T08:58:00.000-08:00

Useful source for a critical mind is Journal for Critical Educational Policy Studies and the other one is Capital & Class.

And do not forget Tauno Saarela's paper "Oppressed worker versus communist hero".

A New Book on Critical Pedagogy

2007-02-17T13:02:00.000-08:00

There's a new title on critical pedagogy coming soon.

Critical Pedagogy: Where Are We Now by Peter McLaren and Joe Kincheloe will be out in AERA 2007 in Chicago.

Book's cover.

Authors include many well-known and not-yet-so-known scholars.

Paulo Freire in Finland

2007-02-16T01:59:00.000-08:00

Jan. 16 2007 –– Paulo Freire Center–Finland was founded today. It is not much yet, but it is a start and before all: we're in good company.

Bad to the Bone: US among worst places for children

2007-02-14T13:15:00.000-08:00

This shouldn't become as surprise: Hungary, Britain and the United States are the worst places in the industrialized world for children to live, according to a report by the United Nations Children's Fund (Unicef).

Child well-being is at its highest in the Netherlands, Sweden, Denmark and Finland. There is no strong or consistent relationship between per capita GDP and child well-being. The Czech Republic, for example, achieves a higher overall rank for child well-being than several much wealthier European countries including France and Austria.

The six dimensions were taken to measure the well- being of children – material well-being, health and safety, education, peer and family relationships, behaviours and risks, and young people’s own subjective sense of well-being.

Read more & download the report from http://www.unicef.org/media/media_38299.html

No Pain, No Gain: Vera de Milo's Way

2007-02-06T03:37:00.000-08:00

I cannot but believe in Vera de Milo's (played by my great favorite actor Jim Carey) new progressive body & fit program. It's so amazing! It's a truly revolutionary no-nonsense total body workout after which you can tear a telephone book in half with your bare two inches long fingernails. Seeing is believing, so please watch it here.

Freire in Finnish Broadcasting Company

2007-01-25T01:36:00.000-08:00

I had a pleasure to visit at the Philosopher's Reception, a radio program by Finnish Broadcasting Company. At the reception we discussed about critical pedagogy and Paulo Freire's Legacy with Ms. Terttu Lensu, a journalist and a producer of the program. – Freire's Oppressed was translated in Finnish only recently, in 2005 by Finnish publishing company Vastapaino (Counterweight). The dialogue - in Finnish - can be heard from FBC's website at http://www.yle.fi/radiosoitin/index.php?clip=22464&language=fi

Lesbian, Gay and Bisexual Workers

2007-01-18T04:40:00.000-08:00

How's LGB workers' equality, diversity and inclusion in the workplace? This is studied by Fiona Colgan et al., from the British organization, The Comparative Organisation and Equality Research Centre (COERC), which has published a report focusing on the experiences of LGB workers within sixteen 'good practice' employers, following the introduction of the Employment Equality (Sexual Orientation) Regulations 2003. This study addresses the gap in knowledge that exists regarding the experiences of LGB people within UK workplaces. A full copy of the qualitative research study can be accessed on www.workinglives.org/docs/ESF_LGB_Report_5_June_2006.pdf

President Speaks

2007-01-01T05:52:00.000-08:00

New Year's Speech by President of the Republic of Finland Tarja Halonen on 1 January 2007

Fellow citizens, The year now beginning marks the 90th anniversary of Finland’s independence. We became a sovereign nation at a time of great social upheaval in Europe, and the early years of our independence were turbulent, hard and fraught with peril.

But today we may be proud that over the decades our northern and impoverished nation has worked hard to develop into a Nordic welfare society that succeeds also in tough international competition. Finns today owe a great deal to the veterans of our wars, the generation that defended our independence and rebuilt our country.

It is my view that both our aptitude for overcoming adversity and our success are products of our democratic system. We were fortunate that Finland was able to avoid the authoritarian regimes and dictatorships that gained a foothold in several European countries. Democracy and the rule of law have reigned in Finland throughout our independence. We must continue to stand up for these values and discourage the rise of extremist movements.

Finland is a small nation and can only compete with quality. This calls for expertise and creativity. People of all ages, whatever their regional and social origins, must have equal access to education and training. It is important to give young people — girls and boys alike — a good educational foundation before they enter working life. But this alone is not enough: the rapidly changing world requires lifelong learning. Therefore we must also ensure that people who are already working have the opportunity to improve their professional skills and knowledge. Attitudes are also important in helping people cope. We can all play a part in making everyone feel that they are valued and meaningful members of their workplace community.

Mutual respect is very important in all our lives. The elderly are naturally important to their nearest and dearest, but society at large should also respect the legacy, which the life experience and accumulated knowledge of the elderly represent. Moreover, this respect should be manifested in practical action.

Ensuring the smooth running of all services is a great challenge in a situation where the structure of the population is changing. Local authorities, NGOs and citizens working together can provide us with opportunities to improve the quality of life not just of our elderly citizens but also of any of our fellow citizens in need of help. To succeed in this task, we must see this as a shared challenge.

Fellow citizens, The world is not a fair and just place naturally. It is up to us, the people in it, to make it so. Our efforts are needed both at home and abroad. In today’s world, peace, security and welfare of people are indivisible.

Everyday, the human rights of millions of people are violated all around the world through gender discrimination, ethnic discrimination or religious discrimination. Famine, extreme poverty, exploitation, armed conflicts and terrorism are a fact of life in today’s world. In many countries, the building of a dignified and sustainable development simply starts by combating hunger and contagious diseases and by providing education. The help of the more affluent countries and peoples is needed to realize these efforts.

Migration has rapidly become an important topic in public debate in Europe and in the world in general. Migration is always about people, and migrants should never be seen merely as a labour supply. Migration is a difficult and challenging thing for the migrants themselves and their families, as well as for the country of origin and the country of destination. Finland must reconsider its immigration policy, but more and better international cooperation is also needed. The work begun by the EU and the UN must be continued vigorously. People must be allowed free movement, but migration must be turned into a positive matter for all parties concerned.

I believe that everyone today is following with greater interest and seriousness what is happening in the natural environment. Climate change and its impacts affect all countries and all people on the planet. Experts predict that the consequences will be the most severe in the most impoverished countries, whose citizens are facing grave difficulties even in present circumstances. Climate change is linked to energy production and consumption. It will take worldwide action to combat the adverse effects of climate change, but personal choices can also make a difference. In environmental matters, we here in Finland and our neighbours have a special concern and responsibility for the state of the Baltic Sea. Cooperation in this area is off to a good start, and I myself will do my best to promote it.

Finland continues to enjoy rapid and robust economic growth. Productivity is up, unemployment is gradually decreasing, and the Government’s objective regarding the creation of new jobs is looking attainable. According to the World Bank, economic growth in the developing countries is also picking up, and globalization may well contribute to a reduction in poverty. Despite these positive messages, we are well aware that the benefits of globalization are still very unequally distributed, both between and within countries.

I have noted with pleasure that the Finnish debate on globalization strategy is continuing. We should not shun discussion, debate or even argument, as long as we keep our sights on our common interests and are able to shape our policies accordingly. Finland must be able to stand tall in international competition, and we must keep Finnish society fair and equitable.

Finland cannot observe world events from the sidelines. Achieving a fair global economy requires shared values and global ethics. Finland is, and should be, involved in building a more just world. This is morally appropriate and also in our own interests.

Finland has excellent relations with the Nordic countries and with our immediate neighbours Estonia and Russia. I consider it important to continue improving neighbourhood cooperation. Renewing the Northern Dimension partnership is a welcome development. With Finland’s membership in the EU, the whole of the EU has become our neighbourhood, and its Member States are not regarded as foreign countries in a traditional sense any more. EU matters have become part of our everyday lives, and people can move about freely within the EU. This will be made even easier when the Schengen zone is extended to the new Member States.

Yesterday marked the conclusion of Finland’s six-month Presidency of the European Union. We did a fine job. During Finland’s Presidency, the EU presented a more unified front than before in external affairs. We also helped attain many decisions that will have a favourable impact on the everyday lives of Europeans. I feel that Finland has every reason to be satisfied with our EU Presidency, and I would personally like to extend my thanks to the Government and to everyone who contributed to the success of the Presidency.

Our responsibilities in Europe and in the world have not gone away, however. As of today, Finland together with Germany and the Netherlands is in one of the two Battlegroups on standby as the EU rapid reaction crisis management force. The other Battlegroup now on standby is manned by France, Belgium and Luxemburg. Finnish soldiers have prepared carefully for this task. I am confident that they will perform any tasks assigned to them extraordinarily well, as indeed Finnish peacekeepers have been doing for the past 50 years in different parts of the world.

Fellow citizens, Finland is celebrating the centenary of universal suffrage. One hundred years ago, our nation became a pioneer in the cause of democracy and of equality between men and women. Even today, Finland remains at the cutting edge in many issues. Nevertheless, there is still much scope for improvement in gender equality, in working life and elsewhere in our society. We cannot afford to become complacent; we still have a lot of work to do to make our society fairer and more equitable.

Elections are an important component in a democracy. One year ago today, we were in the midst of a presidential election campaign, which brought up a number of important social issues and challenges. The essential message from you — my fellow citizens — was that the President must take an active role in the debate on matters in Finnish society. I have taken this to heart and have endeavoured to put it into practice.

I would like to thank you for the confidence you placed in me in the election and for the support you have given me in the past year. I would like to thank all the other candidates and their supporters too. The high level of activity during the elections gave it great social significance.

Now we are facing a choice again. A parliamentary election will be held in March, which is very soon. This election commemorates the 100th anniversary both of universal suffrage and of Finland’s Parliament. I strongly urge all Finnish citizens to take an active role. By asking the candidates about things that concern you, you make important issues out of them and you get to know the candidates in the process. Every vote counts. Make use of your right to vote.

I would like to wish you all a happy anniversary year of Finland’s independence 2007!

Democracy equals killing?

2006-12-30T02:34:00.000-08:00

As if I did not know that I am an idiot, but I just cannot figure out, how Saddam Hussein's hanging is, according to Georg W. Bush "an important milestone on Iraq's course on becoming a democracy". Or, maybe this animated story gives part of an answer.

Last victim of the IIWW

2006-12-21T00:18:00.000-08:00

A Finnish IIWW veteran, age 84, was killed under a tank during Finland’s Independence Day military parade in a city of Jyväskylä. The vet made a suicide by literally stepping straight under the tank’s tracks. His body was smashed immediately.
The Finnish media went almost totally silent on this tragic incident. Why? It did not fit to the hidden Finnish culture of militarism and our glorified picture of the IIWW against Soviet Union along with Nazi Germany.
The poor man's act was a spectacle and at the same time it broke some of the heavily guarded and praised spectacular representations of the Finnish society. It shed light to the traumas of the war, as it was a symbolic act of extreme pacifism and civil courage.

You tube have, of course, have video coverage on this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tsjOLvYcuTc

Erich Fromm had it

2006-12-20T23:49:00.000-08:00

"Doubletalk has become the rule in the free-enterprise countries, as well as among their opponents. The latter call dictatorship „people’s democracies,“ the former call dictatorships „freedom-loving people“ if they are political allies. Of the possibility of fifty million Americans being killed in an atomic attack, one speaks of the „hazards of war,“ and one talks of victory in a „showdown,“ when sane thinking makes it clear that there can be no victory for anyone in an atomic holocaust. Education, from primary to higher education, has reached a peak. Yet, while people get more education, they have less reason, judgment, and conviction. At best their intelligence is improved, but their reason-that is, their capacity to penetrate through the surface and to understand the underlying forces in individual and social life-is impoverished more and more. Thinking is increasingly split from feeling, and the very fact that people tolerate the threat of an atomic war hovering over all mankind, shows that modern man has come to a point where his sanity must be questioned. Man, instead of being the master of the machines he has built, has become their servant. But man is not made to be a thing, and with all the satisfactions of consumption, the life forces in man cannot be held in abeyance continuously. We have only one choice, and that is mastering the machine again, making production into a means and not an end, using it for the unfolding of man—or else the suppressed life energies will manifest themselves in chaotic and destructive forms. Man will want to destroy life rather than die of boredom." – Erich Fromm, Let Man Prevail

Salvation is here

2006-11-25T02:37:00.000-08:00

Finally, after years of soul searching and failed body fat reduction programs I have found what I've been looking for. Mr. Jim Tango is my new personal trainer and guru of millions like me and myself. I hope you'll find his message and his no-non-sense method as convincing as I have. Please check the following Ride the Snake video and be ready for dramatic change in your body and spirit.

A Short Film on Smash Asem in Helsinki

2006-11-18T01:40:00.000-08:00

Now you can have a look on Smash Asem demonstration in Helsinki, Finland, a demonstration which never actually happened because of the Finnish police's actions. A short film is filmed by Mr. Jere Leskinen, a student of journalism at Helsinki Polytechnic Stadia. Jere Leskinen says that You tube is perfect for social issues and it never occurred to him to offer the film to other media. See the film from here or go to You tube and find it under the name "omniholic".

In the end of the film there is a man in front of the police chain with his cell phone. He is Paavo Arhinmäki, a representative of Helsinki City Council and member of Finnish Left Alliance. There was accusation against him that he pushed the police and provoked them to arrest him, but as the film testifies such provocation did not happen.

The choice between barbarism or socialism

2006-10-29T01:16:00.000-08:00

"In traveling down the path of capitalist development, we have discovered, much to our alarm, that often it is the very political regimes that describe themselves as 'free market democracies' that have become unremittingly resistant to self-criticism. The struggle to build a world free from exploitation is a daunting one, and requires that we take path less traveled, that take us in directions less familiar, and toward destinations less certain. We make the path to freedom as we walk down it. And we remake ourselves in the process. Today, as in previous times when history has placed us at the dangerous crossroads, we face the ultimate choice between barbarism or socialism." - Peter McLaren, Professor of Education at UCLA

Reko Lundán, a Finnish Writer

2006-10-28T02:06:00.000-08:00

Reko Lundán April 2, 1969 – October 27, 2006

"Energy of one's thoughts will remain,
it will never fade away" – Reko L.

His short text can be read from here in English.

Take B-2 to the U

2006-10-22T12:50:00.000-08:00

To put the question of school funding in perspective, the cost of a single B-2 bomber employed in the war on Iraq is about the same as the cost of tuition, room, and board for every student in the Chicago Public Schools to attend the University of Wisconsin for four years (www.teachersforjustice.org).

Spy

2006-10-15T23:40:00.000-08:00

... and abolish the Islamic extremists from the UK universities, read the news at http://education.guardian.co.uk/higher/news/story/0,,1923325,00.html. What's next?

Useful sources...

2006-10-08T09:21:00.000-08:00

... for critical minds are Logos - a journal of modern society and culture (i.e. David Harvey's interview) & James Petras' - a revolutionary and anti-imperialist activist - articles on the web.

Happy Birthday Mr. Lighting!

2006-10-04T03:42:00.000-08:00

Today one of my favourite novelist, if not my secret hero, Hannu Salama ("Harry Lightning") celebrates his 70th birthday! There's a short description about his life and works in English (as well as in Finnish) Wikipedia (click here), so I won't go into details. Only a brief note about his burden. In the 1960's (during the years 1966-1968) he was hauled through the courts in a famous trial for blasphemy for his novel Juhannustanssit (Midsummer Dances, 1964). (In my Finnish blog I have inserted those controversial and censored lines from the book)

Aren Ruth states in his paper The Outsider as Insider that in his speech of defense in the court, "he defined the core of this position: that art should be judged in relation to its inner qualities". Ruth quotes Salama's speech as follows:

" 'As I see it, the outcome of any creative process leading to a work of art is by no means dependent on whatever my intentions may have been when I took up my pen, but on what that work of art – which pursues its own course – may require in order to assume the shape demanded by my sense of form and my capabilities, a shape from which the slightest deviation in one direction or another would necessitate changes in other parts of the work as well. In my personal opinion, I managed to write a work that corresponded to the demands placed on it by my sense of form. The fact that this work may not be of the highest quality is not due to any lowering of artistic standards on my part, for instance by interrupting the narrative to give free play to any blasphemous motives I may have had, but to my limitations as a human being.'"

In the recent interview he states that naturally it was hard to be in the centre of the debate, but it's nothing if compared to the present day global controversies about today's sacred values, and oil wars covered with religious fundamentalism.

Interestingly the year 1975, and a televised international meeting Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (in Helsinki, Finland) had a major impact on his thinking and writing. I'd call this as his 'postmodern turn'. After that meeting, he said, it was totally impossible to continue as nothing has happened. For something fundamental had changed permanently and dramatically in the international politics and also in the very preconditions of the worldly affairs. Something had turned into a new position, and the whole was seen in new light. Salama turned in his later works from so-called realistic prose into more sedimented and complicated texts, and so on...

Salama does not admit to be a working-class writer. In my interpretation this is mainly due to the late 1960s' and 1970s' orthodox views of Marxism. In Finland the debate was extremely intolerant, and one time after his novel Siinä näkijä, missä tekijä (1972) - a tale about an underground operating communist group during the IIWW - Salama was accused of being a class traitor because of the plain and straight, even naturalist views about the communists in the novel.

In my interpretation Salama fullfills Raoul Palmgren's (1912-1995), another critical leftist intellectual, a journalist and an academic, positive definition of a working-class writer as one "who has been brought up in working-class (proletarian) circumstances, who has done manual or some comparable labour for wages, and who is at least comparatively speaking self-taught." Their works "are coloured by the ideological wold of the workers' movement or at least the proletarian outlook on life; their subjects most often (thought) not necessarily are drawn from proletarian life, experiences, and feelings; their main sphere of influnence is most often (thought not necessarily) the working-class (the proletariat); and their (relatively) typical characteristics may be consireder exuberance and power of expression, freshness of language and observation, a tendency towards freedom of form." (Palmgren in 1965, p. 284-285.)

In the light of this broad, yet quite accurate definition, Hannu Salama still today meets the standard, which he himself also admitted. But he did not want to be politically committed, or a socialist realist. He saw them as idealists fooled by Soviet Union. To his leftist critics he responded in 1973 that 'make the revolution first, then I might write about it'. He hated all institutions whether religious, political, or cultural. At the same time he felt that antagonisms between the Finnish left were catastrophic.

Although he at his formative years wanted to draw a definitive line and make a permanent distinction between his developing artistic identity, and his experiences with the working-class at home and work (remember working men's roughness and all the dirty talk which provided him material, but somewhat also terrified him), he still to me is a working-class author.

Think as an example a large white canvas with a small red spot in it. What do you see? It is not the canvas, but the red spot which captures your mind. Now, the canvas is the ultra-orthodox interpretation of the Marxist doctrines, and the spot the writer himself. Today Hannu Salama remains as a working-class writer with too additional qualifications to those mentioned above. He has stayed true to his vocation as an artist, and always wrote truthfully and honestly.

Have a great workout at your local gym, Hannu!

Public Resistance

2006-09-27T02:26:00.000-08:00

A recent journal from the critical side worth to read: Public Resistance - An Academic Journal to Confront the Lies of the Right.

State Terrorism in Helsinki, Finland

2006-09-10T13:06:00.000-08:00

A huge police presence, almost unprecedented by Finnish standards, boxed in and stifled the planned anarchist "Smash Asem" demonstration and march on Saturday evening and restricted the movement of other people in the downtown area of Helsinki. Several dozen demonstrators were arrested on suspicion of malicious damage, rioting, and incitement to cause a riot. No serious injuries were reported, and the siege outside the Kiasma Contemporary Art Museum was lifted at around 11 p.m, although for some time after this there was still a heavy police presence.

The "Smash Asem" demonstration began peacefully at around 6 p.m., but was unable to move on from the gathering point in the square in front of Kiasma by the arrival of around 200 riot police equipped with shields, helmets, and truncheons. Not merely the 300 or so demonstrators were hemmed in, but also passers-by on their way home, journalists and cameramen, and people who had turned up out of curiosity to see what was happening, and whether the demonstrators would make good on their website pledge to "bring at least a bit of disorder to the streets of Helsinki". There were a further several hundred police officers behind the inner ring, as well as five Helsinki City Transport buses arranged as a wall.

Some of the protesters hurled themselves against the police cordon in an attempt to break through, and bottles and benches were thrown. The police reported that some of the demonstrators were armed with metal bars. The police justified the three-hour standoff situation by saying that the planned march would have presented a danger to local residents, with a risk of damage to property and the potential to disrupt the Ecofin gathering of EU ministers of finance, which was going on at the Pasila Fair Centre at the time. Initially the march was to have headed for Pasila.

Eventually the authorities announced they were interrupting the protest after violent incidents and a refusal from the organisers to negotiate. A senior officer said that they had made repeated vain attempts to contact the leader of the demonstrators and get details of the route for the march.

People were allowed out of the enclosed area gradually in small numbers after around an hour. Those coming out were photographed and their bags and rucksacks were inspected. Further scuffles with police took place close to the Lasipalatsi building and the Forum shopping mall. When police in the early stages urged the demonstrators to disperse there was immediate movement, and bottles and eggs were thrown. Apparently a firework rocket was also set off from outside the cordoned-off area. Those arrested, numbering in the several dozens, were taken to Töölö and Pasila police stations. Some demonstrators were carried or dragged away.

The demonstrators were clearly shocked by the size of the police response, which was in stark contrast to the situation a few weeks ago during the Helsinki Festival Night of the Arts, when a couple of hundred youths and graffiti enthusiasts had surprised police completely. This time the police remained composed and did not respond to provocation from the demonstrators, though there will be many who argue that the massive response was of itself a provocative act of structural violence.

At a press conference on Sunday morning, police officials reported that slightly more than 100 people had been held overnight for questioning. Most are Finnish, with one or two foreigners among their number.

Lenin

2006-09-08T08:54:00.000-08:00

As Lenin once put it, illiterates cannot be political subjects. Before they can become political subjects, they must learn the alphabet. Without words and sentences, and their proper use, there are only gossips, rumors, and prejudices, but no political thinking. That's why public schooling and public spheres must be destroyed in the US and its ally countries.

Local Journalist Genius, or the Beauty of the Post Mortem World

2006-08-20T05:42:00.000-08:00

I have to admit that I admire the genius of some the journalists in my local newspaper Aamulehti in Finnish, and Morning news in our Nokialand's second (almost) official language. Perhaps it could be renamed as Morning Star, for the brightness of some of its professional writers. If only for the sake of Mr. Kari Huoviala whose writings inspire me - even as I sit here in NYC's Bryant Park -, and who's always wise words tend to glue into my memory, who knows, maybe for good. This time he educates the regional public by telling us Northern gentle folks that President Bush has creted 3,5 million new jobs in the US, and asks ironically, how cannot we European have such a stupid President? Unfortunately he forgets to tell us more details about the quality of these created jobs, or are they really created by Mr. Bush and his efforts?

Besides that I would like to know, how come we Europeans are not blessed with a President, who seems to know so well what's right and wrong, and then is strong enough to make the necessary military moves? But maybe this annoying state of events will be improved sooner than we think as we Europeans are gathering our "fast action troops" for global crises. Then we the civilized European audience can have another doze of daily prime time military soap. Then I say "thank you" to our wise leaders, as our dear little friend Theron, although I know his parents have another opinion (and rightly so!).

And what it comes to the US politics I know that there is continually growing dissident voice in the country (US) that thinks and speaks against Bushian economic, military, educational and work policy but these voices are rarely heard in Europe, not to mention its remote Northern periphery entitled Nokialand, or Mörköland. One of clear-headed speakers and writers in the US is journalist Barbara Ehrenreich whose latest book Bait and Switch will be soon translated in Finnish by publisher Vastapaino, Counter Weight in our second tongue.

What can I say? I guess you can love your country, truth and humanity one at a time, lightly, contextually, what ever fills your current political, financial or any other purposes and moods. That's the beauty of postmodern, post mortem world.

O tempora, o mores!

2006-07-20T06:52:00.000-08:00

A Finnish regional newspaper Aamulehti (Morning Paper) had the following headline in its Saturday’s (July 15, 2006) front page: Israel’s Strikes Have an Impact on Driver’s Wallet. – Driver, of course, being a Finnish car driver, and wallet referring to the rising gas prices. A journalist behind the story was Antti Hatvala. Thank God for his kind of professionals as our critical journalists who see Israel-Lebanon/Hezbollah catastrophe in its proper context. And thank God, too, for the teachers of church school in Devon, UK, who banned John Lennon’s Imagine from their school’s end-of-term show. Read the story from here.

9/11 Truth is Out Here!

2006-07-12T08:22:00.000-08:00

If you thought you knew just about everything you needed to know about 9/11 attacks, you ain't seen nothing yet. Just have a look at Killtown's amazing contents! So don't waste your time on useless things, but start to do some serious research on 9/11! -- For the Finnish reader: start from here!

Chomsky on YouTube

2006-07-09T03:24:00.000-08:00

You need to see Chomsky's interviews and conversations, including one with Michel Foucault on YouTube!

All War All the Time

2006-07-01T05:56:00.000-08:00

Click here to read and listen the details !

Roads are made by walking

2006-07-01T03:50:00.000-08:00

Ivan Illich seemed to hit to the target in his analysis on modern era like in the following short text Silence is commons (1983). He starts off with an example of the commons: "An oak tree might be in the commons. Its shade, in summer, is reserved for the shepherd and his flock; its acorns are reserved for the pigs of the neighbouring peasants; its dry branches serve as fuel for the widows of the village; some of its fresh twigs in springtime are cut as ornaments for the church - and at sunset it might be the place for the village assembly. When people spoke about commons, ... they designated an aspect of the environment that was limited, that was necessary for the community's survival, that was necessary for different groups in different ways, but which, in a strictly economic sense, was not perceived as scarce."

But, then, everything was changed due to a violent structural transformation. "When today, in Europe, with university students I use the term "commons" (in German Almende or Gemeinheit, in Italian gli usi civici) my listeners immediately think of the eighteenth century. They think of those pastures in England on which villagers each kept a few sheep, and they think of the "enclosure of the pastures" which transformed the grassland from commons into a resource on which commercial flocks could be raised. Primarily, however, my students think of the innovation of poverty which came with enclosure: of the absolute impoverishment of the peasants, who were driven from the land and into wage labour, and they think of the commercial enrichment of the lords.
In their immediate reaction, my students think of the rise of a new capitalist order. Facing that painful newness, they forget that enclosure also stands for something more basic. The enclosure of the commons inaugurates a new ecological order: Enclosure did not just physically transfer the control over grasslands from the peasants to the lord. Enclosure marked a radical change in the attitudes of society towards the environment. Before, in any juridical system, most of the environment had been considered as commons from which most people could draw most of their sustenance without needing to take recourse to the market. After enclosure, the environment became primarily a resource at the service of "enterprises" which, by organizing wage-labor, transformed nature into the goods and services on which the satisfaction of basic needs by consumers depends. This transformation is in the blind spot of political economy.
This change of attitudes can be illustrated better if we think about roads rather than about grasslands. What a difference there was between the new and the old parts of Mexico City only 20 years ago. In the old parts of the city the streets were true commons. Some people sat on the road to sell vegetables and charcoal. Others put their chairs on the road to drink coffee or tequila. Others held their meetings on the road to decide on the new headman for the neighbourhood or to determine the price of a donkey. Others drove their donkeys through the crowd, walking next to the heavily loaded beast of burden; others sat in the saddle. Children played in the gutter, and still people walking could use the road to get from one place to another.
Such roads were not built for people. Like any true commons, the street itself was the result of people living there and making that space liveable. The dwellings that lined the roads were not private homes in the modern sense - garages for the overnight deposit of workers. The threshold still separated two living spaces, one intimate and one common. But neither homes in this intimate sense nor streets as commons survived economic development.
In the new sections of Mexico City, streets are no more for people. They are now roadways for automobiles, for buses, for taxis, cars, and trucks. People are barely tolerated on the streets unless they are on their way to a bus stop. If people now sat down or stopped on the street, they would become obstacles for traffic, and traffic would be dangerous to them. The road has been degraded from a commons to a simple resource for the circulation of vehicles. People can circulate no more on their own. Traffic has displaced their mobility. They can circulate only when they are strapped down and are moved."

Until recently these transformations has been going on without criticism: "The appropriation of the environment by the few was clearly recognized as an intolerable abuse. By contrast, the even more degrading transformation of people into members of an industrial labour force and into consumers was taken, until recently, for granted. For almost a hundred years the majority of political parties has challenged the accumulation of environmental resources in private hands. However, the issue was argued in terms of the private utilization of these resources, not the distinction of commons. Thus anticapitalist politics so far have bolstered the legitimacy of transforming commons into resources.
Only recently, at the base of society, a new kind of 'popular intellectual' is beginning to recognize what has been happening. Enclosure has denied the people the right to that kind of environment on which - throughout all of history - the moral economy of survival had been based. Enclosure, once accepted, redefines community. Enclosure undermines the local autonomy of community. Enclosure of the commons is thus as much in the interest of professionals and of state bureaucrats as it is in the interest of capitalists. Enclosure allows the bureaucrats to define local community as impotent ... to provide for its own survival. People become economic individuals that depend for their survival on commodities that are produced for them. Fundamentally, most citizens' movements represent a rebellion against this environmentally induced redefinition of people as consumers."

The same "progress" which concerns natural environment applies to digitalized environments: "As enclosure by the lords increased national productivity by denying the individual peasant to keep a few sheep, so the encroachment of the loudspeaker has destroyed that silence which so far had given each man and woman his or her proper and equal voice. Unless you have access to a loudspeaker, you now are silenced." ... "Just as the commons of space are vulnerable, and can be destroyed by the motorization of traffic, so the commons of speech are vulnerable, and can easily be destroyed by the encroachment of modern means of communication.
The issue which I propose for discussion should therefore be clear: how to counter the encroachment of new, electronic devices and systems upon commons that are more subtle and more intimate to our being than either grassland or roads - commons that are at least as valuable as silence. Silence, according to western and eastern tradition alike, is necessary for the emergence of persons. It is taken from us by machines that ape people. We could easily be made increasingly dependent on machines for speaking and for thinking, as we are already dependent on machines for moving.
Such a transformation of the environment from a commons to a productive resource constitutes the most fundamental form of environmental degradation. This degradation has a long history, which coincides with the history of capitalism but can in no way just be reduced to it. Unfortunately the importance of this transformation has been overlooked or belittled by political ecology so far. It needs to be recognized if we are to organize defense movements of what remains of the commons. This defense constitutes the crucial public task for political action during the eighties. The task must be undertaken urgently because commons can exist without police, but resources cannot. Just as traffic does, computers call for police, and for ever more of them, and in ever more subtle forms.
By definition, resources call for defense by police. Once they are defended, their recovery as commons becomes increasingly difficult. This is a special reason for urgency."

The Oak Tree (1991) by Ron B. Kitaj. Oil on canvas, 152.7 x 152.4 cm (60 1/8 x 60 in); Private collection.

How to get people do the dirty work without turning them into monsters?

2006-06-28T17:45:00.000-08:00

For years Slavoj Zizek has been faithful to the old maxim of cultural studies: watch a lot of television. But unlike most students of the art of cultural studies, Zizek gets good interpretations out of the tube. This time he's been watching the fifth season of the television drama '24' with the following outcomes reported in his Guardian column:

"24 should not be seen as a simple popular depiction of the sort of problematic methods the US resorts to in its "war on terror". Much more is at stake. Recall the lesson of Apocalypse Now. The figure of Kurtz is not a remnant of some barbaric past. He was the perfect soldier but, through his over-identification with the military, he turned into the embodiment of the system's excess and threatened the system itself.
The problem for those in power is how to get people do the dirty work without turning them into monsters. This was Heinrich Himmler's dilemma. When confronted with the task of killing the Jews of Europe, the SS chief adopted the attitude of "somebody has to do the dirty job". In Hannah Arendt's book, Eichmann in Jerusalem, the philosopher describes how Nazi executioners endured the horrible acts they performed. Most were well aware that they were doing things that brought humiliation, suffering and death to their victims. The way out of this predicament was that, instead of saying "What horrible things I did to people!" they would say "What horrible things I had to watch in the pursuance of my duties, how heavily the task weighed upon my shoulders!" In this way, they were able to turn around the logic of resisting temptation: the temptation to be resisted was pity and sympathy in the presence of human suffering, the temptation not to murder, torture and humiliate.
There was a further "ethical problem" for Himmler: how to make sure that the executioners, while performing these terrible acts, remained human and dignified. His answer was Krishna's message to Arjuna in the Bhagavad-Gita (Himmler always had in his pocket a leather-bound edition): act with inner distance; do not get fully involved.
Therein also resides the lie of 24: that it is not only possible to retain human dignity in performing acts of terror, but that if an honest person performs such an act as a grave duty, it confers on him a tragic-ethical grandeur. The parallel between the agents' and the terrorists' behaviour serves this lie.
But what if such a distance is possible? What if people do commit terrible acts as part of their job while being loving husbands, good parents and close friends? As Arendt says, the fact that they are able to retain any normality while committing such acts is the ultimate confirmation of moral depravity.
So what about the response to this hair-splitting? Some argue that at least the US is now more open and less hypocritical about its behaviour towards terrorist suspects. To this, one should reply: "If US representatives mean only this, why are they telling us? Why don't they silently go on doing it, as they did it until now?" What is proper to human speech is the gap between the enunciated content and its act of enunciation. Imagine a couple who have a tacit agreement that they can have discreet extramarital affairs; if, all of a sudden, the husband openly tells his wife about an affair, she would have good reason to wonder why he was telling her. The act of publicly revealing something is never neutral; it affects the reported content itself.
The same goes for the US's recent admission that it is using torture. When we hear people such as Dick Cheney making statements about the necessity of torture, we should ask ourselves why he has decided to make a public statement about it. The question to be raised is: what is there in this statement that made the speaker decide to enunciate it? This is 24's real problem: not the content itself but the fact that we are being told openly about it. And that is a sad indication of a deep change in our ethical and political standards."

Chomsky's Position

2006-06-27T06:04:00.000-08:00

Noam Chomsky connects himself overtly to the Enlightment, namely to "the left libertarian tradition" consisting such figures as progressive liberal John Dewey (whose educational books "Democracy and Education" and "Experience and Education" are yet to be translated in
Finnish!), independent socialist & philosopher Bertnard Russell, and the leading elements of the Marxist mainstream (mostly anti-Bolshevik), and, of course, libertarian socialist of various anarchist movements, not to speak of major parts of the labor movement and other popular sector.

It is worth to note, how Chomsky in his Democracy and Education connects the philosophical questions of empiricism (manifestated as a postulation of ‘empty organism’) versus rationalism (manifestated as a postulation of ‘innately creative organism’) to the issues of politics, moral judgment, and human freedom. He refers Ellen Wood, who, in turn, goes to Kant’s critique of empiricism, and interprets it as not only an epistemological quibble but also “a far-reaching argument about the nature of human freedom.” Thus, from the point of social choices, human freedom, and ultimately, reasonable society at large, it is not unimportant “whether the human mind is ‘a responsive cog in the mechanism of nature,’ as in empiricist doctrine, or ‘a creative, determinative force.’" (Otero 2003, 10.)

A Strange Feature of Our Times

2006-06-12T04:36:00.000-08:00

Why are women paid less than men? What is the significance of bloggers, or of the World Social Forum? Or why are right-wingers gaining momentum at the same time as economical, social, educational & cultural divisions of the poor and the rich are growing? - These question are asked by sociologist Geoff Mulgan in his Prospect article. And he goes on as follows:

"One of the strange features of our times is that well-educated people can get by with very little idea of how to answer questions like these. Over the last few decades, we have witnessed great progress in the public's level of scientific understanding, thanks to many brilliant expositors. In history, too, some of the most original minds are also first rate communicators. Much of economics has permeated into common sense, particularly of decision-makers around the world. But sociology has faded from view. Its heyday a generation ago feels like another era. As a result, many people rely on very simple interpretive frameworks to make sense of what they see around them or on the evening news. So conflicts between Muslims and Christians are attributed to culture or history. Gender pay gaps are seen as the result of misogyny. The internet is ascribed with magical powers to turn the tables on multinational corporations or governments."

The above image is designed by Ricardo Levins Morales who's part of Northland Poster Collective in Minneapolis.

Not a Bad Idea

2006-06-12T00:03:00.000-08:00

Just got off from Bruce Springsteen & The Seeger Sessions Band We Shall Overcome Concert. It was great to see craftsmanship in practice; almost in the sense Richard Sennett defines it in his The Culture of the New Capitalism: "doing something well for its own sake." From www.backstreets.com's discussions, a website dedicated to the Boss, I found "A JrsyGrl 04" comment which has nothing to do with tonight's music:

You should die first, start out dead and get it out of the way.
Then you wake up in a nursing home, feeling better every day.
You get kicked out for being too healthy, go collect your pension.
When you start work, you get a gold watch on your first day. You work 40 years
until you're young enough to enjoy your retirement.
You drink alcohol, you party, you're generally promiscuous and you get ready
for High School.
You go to primary school, you become a kid, you play, you have no
responsibilities, you become a baby.
Then, you spend your last 9 months floating
peacefully with luxuries like central heating, spa room service on tap, larger
quarter's everyday.
And finally you finish off as an orgasm.

---
When you feel like it, go to www.brucespringsteen.net/site.html, there's some music.

Random Act of Maturity

2006-06-11T23:23:00.000-08:00

On June 8 2006 CNN's Soledad O'Brien interviewed Michael Berg, father of Nick Berg, who's videoed beheading was attributed to al-Zarqawi.

O'BRIEN: Mr. Berg, thank you for talking with us again. It's nice to have an opportunity to talk to you. Of course, I'm curious to know your reaction, as it is now confirmed that Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the man who is widely credited and blamed for killing your son, Nicholas, is dead.

MICHAEL BERG: Well, my reaction is I'm sorry whenever any human being dies. Zarqawi is a human being. He has a family who are reacting just as my family reacted when Nick was killed, and I feel bad for that. I feel doubly bad, though, because Zarqawi is also a political figure, and his death will re-ignite yet another wave of revenge, and revenge is something that I do not follow, that I do want ask for, that I do not wish for against anybody. And it can't end the cycle. As long as people use violence to combat violence, we will always have violence.

O'BRIEN: I have to say, sir, I'm surprised. I know how devastated you and your family were, frankly, when Nick was killed in such a horrible, and brutal and public way.

BERG: Well, you shouldn't be surprised, because I have never indicated anything but forgiveness and peace in any interview on the air.

O'BRIEN: No, no. And we have spoken before, and I'm well aware of that. But at some point, one would think, is there a moment when you say, 'I'm glad he's dead, the man who killed my son'?

BERG: No. How can a human being be glad that another human being is dead? [...] Now, take someone who in 1991, who maybe had their family killed by an American bomb, their support system whisked away from them, someone who, instead of being 59, as I was when Nick died, was 5-years-old or 10-years-old. And then if I were that person, might I not learn how to fly a plane into a building or strap a bag of bombs to my back? That's what is happening every time we kill an Iraqi, every time we kill anyone, we are creating a large number of people who are going to want vengeance. And, you know, when are we ever going to learn that that doesn't work? [...]

O'BRIEN: There's a theory that a struggle for democracy, you know...

BERG: Democracy? Come on, you can't really believe that that's a democracy there when the people who are running the elections are holding guns. That's not democracy.

---

Interestingly, there are no transcripts available on CNN's website for the June 8th edition of America Morning. It goes right from June 7th to June 9th.

It's a long way from killing to democracy

2006-06-08T19:47:00.000-08:00

Today the world’s press went nuts on Abu Musab al-Zarqawi's death by U.S. air strike. Rumsfeld hailed his death, and Bush, sharp as always, said that al-Zarqawi wouldn’t kill anymore. But when will our smirking chimp and his British ally stop murdering? Not in the near future, for “we” cannot rest in "our" war on terror. “We” cannot think that terrorists would rest. “We” need to know that they will continue to kill, and ”we” need to know that they are many. Thus ”we” need to be clear in our mission and let them know that our determination to defeat them is total. - We do live dubious, fascists times. And, if something, we the people need to know that we need to be afraid of our leaders who celebrate death, for from there it’s a long way to democracy, it’s a long way from home.

Hope, Anger & Courage

2006-06-07T07:54:00.000-08:00

Radical adult educator Michael Newman writes extensively about anger in his book Teaching Defiance; distincting it from dismay and frustaration, and how to focus and use anger creatively, or what's the difference between anger and rage? But he does not mention St. Augustine to whom the following quote is attributed: "Hope has two beautiful daughters. Their names are anger and courage; anger at the way things are, and courage to see that they do not remain the way they are."

Workers and Intellectuals

2006-06-02T11:21:00.000-08:00

Said St. Foucault: "The workers don't need intellectuals to tell them what they are doing; they know perfectly well what they are doing. In my view, the intellectual is the guy who is plugged in to the information network, not the production network. He can make his voice heard. He can write in the newspapers, give his point of view. He is also plugged into an older information network. He has the knowledge acquired by reading a certain number of books, knowledge which other people do not have at their direct disposal. His role is therefore not to shape a working-class consciousness, as that consciousness already exists, but to allow that consciousness, that working class knowledge, to enter the information system (...) The intellectual's knowledge is always partial compared to working-class knowledge. What we know about the history of French society is very partial, compared to the massive experience that the working class has." (In Macey, David, The Lives of Michel Foucault, 1993, pp. 317-18)

Osama Bin Laden Teaches Bush a Lesson

2006-06-01T14:23:00.000-08:00

This quote is from Osama Bin Laden's speech released by the pan-Arab TV station al-Jazeera on May 19: "If Bush declines but to continue lying and practicing injustice [against us], it is useful for you to read the book of "The Rogue State" (by William Blum, my addition), the introduction of which reads: 'If I were a president, I would halt the operations against the United States. First, I will extend my apologies to the widows, orphans, and the persons who were tortured. Afterwards, I will announce that the US interference in the world's countries has ended for ever.' ... Finally, I would like to tell you that the war is for you or for us to win. If we win it, it means your defeat and disgrace forever as the wind blows in this direction with God's help. If you win it, you should read the history. We are a nation that does not tolerate injustice and seek revenge forever. Days and nights will not go by until we take revenge as we did on 11 September, God willing, and until your minds are exhausted and your lives become miserable and things turn [for the worse], which you detest. As for us, we do not have anything to lose. The swimmer in the sea does not fear rain. You have occupied our land, defiled our honour, violated our dignity, shed our blood, ransacked our money, demolished our houses, rendered us homeless, and tampered with our security. We will treat you in the same way." ... Read the full text news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/4628932.stm

After Theory

2006-05-31T04:57:00.000-08:00

Yes, I found Terry Eagleton's After Theory some time ago from the Waste Books in some remote shopping mall. In the book Eagleton traces the roots of cultural theory, and identifies three reasons why “cultural theory must start thinking ambitiously once again”: Capitalism has entered its most totalizing phase by becoming ruthless and global, “The gang of predatory, semi-literate philistines” and “semi-fanatical fundamentalists” who rule the United States are in danger of ending history as we know it, and, The West is under pressure to justify its way of life in the face of the Islamic fundamentalist challenge. And it is ironic, according to Eagleton, that “at just the point that we [as postmodern cultural theorists] have begun to think small, history has begun to act big.”

In reviewing Eagleton's book in Philosophy Now (http://www.philosophynow.org/issue55/55aoudjit.htm), Abdelkader Aoudjit writes as follows:

"After he has treated the fallacies of postmodernism, Eagleton proceeds to put forward his own version of cultural theory in the second part of the book. Drawing on both Aristotle and Marx, he argues that, like everything else in nature, man has a distinctive end to achieve or function to fulfill, which is to be good and happy. Eagleton also takes from Aristotle and Marx the idea that humans are political by nature, not only in the sense that one needs others to survive, but also in the sense that nothing one does has any meaning outside the human community. To fully realize one’s capacity as a human being therefore, Eagleton contends, one needs a ‘good society’, because “nobody can thrive when they are starving, miserable or oppressed.” It follows that only socialism ensures that everybody can develop their full potential, because socialism makes “human solidarity an end in itself,” and also because class division and exploitation undermine people’s abilities to live happy and fulfilling lives. “In class society,” he writes, “even those powers and capacities which belong to us as a species – labour, for example, or communication – are degraded into means to an end. They become instrumentalized for the advantage of others.” Eagleton finds support for his ethics in both Christianity and Islam.
Eagleton does a good job of introducing his readers to the current state of cultural theory, and in particular of laying out the historical and political elements which have shaped and continue to shape its development. Furthermore, his case for socialism is well argued and thoughtful. However, I think the most important insight of the book is the idea that morality emerges from corporeal weaknesses, needs and interests, so that if we had a different body, our experience of the world and morality would also be different."

freewayblogger.com/

2006-05-29T17:03:00.000-08:00

The Night Undisturbed by Dreams

2006-05-18T16:24:00.000-08:00

[...] Now if you suppose that there is no consciousness, but a sleep like the sleep of him who is undisturbed even by the sight of dreams, death will be an unspeakable gain. For if a person were to select the night in which his sleep was undisturbed even by dreams, and were to compare with this the other days and nights of his life, and then were to tell us how many days and nights he had passed in the course of his life better and more pleasantly than this one, I think that any man, I will not say a private man, but even the great king, will not find many such days or nights, when compared with the others. Now if death is like this, I say that to die is gain; for eternity is then only a single night. But if death is the journey to another place, and there, as men say, all the dead are, what good, O my friends and judges, can be greater than this? If indeed when the pilgrim arrives in the world below, he is delivered from the professors of justice in this world, and finds the true judges who are said to give judgment there, Minos and Rhadamanthus and Aeacus and Triptolemus, and other sons of God who were righteous in their own life, that pilgrimage will be worth making. What would not a man give if he might converse with Orpheus and Musaeus and Hesiod and Homer? Nay, if this be true, let me die again and again. I, too, shall have a wonderful interest in a place where I can converse with Palamedes, and Ajax the son of Telamon, and other heroes of old, who have suffered death through an unjust judgment; and there will be no small pleasure, as I think, in comparing my own sufferings with theirs. Above all, I shall be able to continue my search into true and false knowledge; as in this world, so also in that; I shall find out who is wise, and who pretends to be wise, and is not. What would not a man give, O judges, to be able to examine the leader of the great Trojan expedition; or Odysseus or Sisyphus, or numberless others, men and women too! What infinite delight would there be in conversing with them and asking them questions! For in that world they do not put a man to death for this; certainly not. For besides being happier in that world than in this, they will be immortal, if what is said is true. [...] - Plato, Apology, http://classics.mit.edu/Plato/apology.html

Unite

2006-05-16T12:00:00.000-08:00

Living With War

2006-05-09T15:20:00.000-08:00

Listen Neil Young's album from here, this address http://www.livingwithwar.blogspot.com

After the Garden of Eden, or Why Kent State is important today

2006-05-09T15:15:00.000-08:00

By Michael Corcoran | May 4, 2006

THIRTY-SIX years ago today, Ohio National Guardsmen shot 13 college students at Kent State University who were protesting US incursions into Cambodia as part of the Vietnam War. Nine victims survived, including one who is confined to a wheelchair for the rest of his life. Four students -- Jeffrey Miller, Allison Krause, Bill Schroeder, and Sandy Scheuer -- were killed.

The students were unarmed, and the closest was more than 60 feet away from the Guard at the time of the shooting. There was no warning shot; the National Guard never issued an apology; and no one ever spent a day in jail for the killings despite the fact that the President's Commission on Campus Unrest, appointed by President Nixon in 1970, found the shootings to be ''unwarranted and inexcusable."

Yearly, since the tragedy, Kent State students, alumni, and others have met on the anniversary of the shooting to reflect and remember. Alan Canfora, who was shot by the Guard, says, ''The students today act as the conscience of the college, and the country . . . just like the students did in 1970."

This year's memorial will come, as the last three have, in the midst of a war that has become increasingly divisive. While the memory of Kent State and other violent clashes from that time between protesters and authorities did not deter the incumbent president from leading the country into another unpopular war, it is important to honor Kent State's spirit of dissent and what it taught about the bloody consequences of intense division.

Halfway across the country, the lessons of Kent State are taught each semester in debate classes at Emerson College. J. Gregory Payne, associate professor of organizational and political communication and a Kent State historian, has been teaching students about history, advocacy, and rhetoric through the lens of Kent State for decades.

According to Payne, remembering this tragedy is important because ''Kent State is not about the past -- it's about the future."

Consider the similarities: In 1970, just as today, we had an unpopular president carrying out an unpopular war for questionable reasons.

Richard Nixon and George W. Bush embody many of the same divisive characteristics. Bush tells the world: ''You are with us or you are with the terrorists." Nixon's public statement after the shootings blamed the students: ''When dissent turns to violence it invites tragedy."

Again our civil liberties are being threatened. Bush has ordered the wiretapping of US citizens without a warrant and holds detainees indefinitely without trial; Nixon was spying on student activists and what he called ''domestic radicals."

But, perhaps the most telling comparison is the sharp division within the nation, both then and now. Americans are now, as we were then, split to the core on matters of war and peace, life and death, and cultural values. The President's Commission concluded it was ''the most divisive time in American history since the civil war." Bill Schroeder's parents received signed letters after the shooting saying, among other things, that their ''riot-making, communist son" deserved to die.

Today antiwar protesters are unfairly discredited by the administration as they were in 1970. When Cindy Sheehan took antiwar positions after her 24-year-old son, Casey Sheehan, died in Iraq, she was smeared by pundits like Bill O'Reilly, who said she was a pawn of ''far-left elements that are using her" and that Sheehan was ''dumb" enough to let them do it.

Of course, the absence of a draft now and its presence then may explain why the antiwar movement during the Vietnam War had a greater intensity then it does now. Still, as the protests in New York City last week indicate, the longer the war in Iraq drags on, the more vehement the opposition seems to get.

Musicians, once again, are singing songs of dissent. Last Friday Neil Young, who in 1970 wrote ''Ohio" in reaction to the shootings, began streaming a new antiwar album ''Living with War" for free on his website. Days later, Pearl Jam also released an album made up entirely of protest music.

My generation can't ignore the lessons of Kent State. The same mindset and failure in leadership that led National Guardsmen to fire at students of the same age and from the same Ohio hometowns is similar to what led US soldiers to torture detainees in Iraq.

Kent State should remind us of what happens when a grossly misguided war divides a country. If we can speak candidly and openly about our history and our present -- even the worst elements of it -- then we can ensure that the lives lost on May 4, 1970, were not in vain.

Michael Corcoran is a journalism major at Emerson College.

Red Sunset

2006-05-07T05:19:00.000-08:00

Police say arson was the cause of a major fire at the old Railway warehouses in central Helsinki on Friday May 5, 2006. The photo is taken by Petteri Sulonen and published here under the Creative Commons license www.creativecommons.org

Bringing Capitalism to an End

2006-05-01T17:11:00.000-08:00

"Radicals of every stripe believe that capitalist economies are incompatible with human liberation. That is, while human beings have enormous capacities to think and to do, capitalism prevents the vast majority of people from developing these capacities. Therefore if we want a society in which the full flowering of human competencies can become a reality, we will have to bring capitalism to an end and replace it with something radically different." Michael Yates -- http://monthlyreview.org/0304yates.htm

It's May 1 2006 and the Sun is Rising

2006-04-29T23:00:00.000-08:00

Bolivia's President Evo Morales has signed a decree placing his country's energy industry under state control. In a May Day speech, he said foreign energy firms must agree to channel all their sales through the Bolivian state, or else leave the country. He set the firms a six-month deadline, but the military and state energy officials have already started taking control of the oil fields. Bolivia has South America's second largest natural gas reserves. But the country has suffered years of political crises over how to develop and profit from the industry. The main foreign oil firms operating in Bolivia are Brazil's Petrobras, the Spanish-Argentine company Repsol YPF, British companies British Gas and British Petroleum and France's Total. "The time has come, the awaited day, a historic day in which Bolivia retakes absolute control of our natural resources," said Morales.

Arto Melleri: Comeback!

2006-04-29T06:11:00.000-08:00

Arto Melleri is in the ring again, 12 rounds, stronger and faster than ever. He does not do too much rope-a-dope, but moves smoothly, throwing jabs and punches and combinations always with universally humane irony waiting for the right moment for his left hook as if it came from nowhere to determine the match.

Arto Melleri, Poems (2006)

Always I have braced
roads with no turning back,
but in the evening light strained
sorrow does not belong to anyone.
The sunset is shared: bright sword
cut the light, gust of wind
is streamer’s rest; we’ve been hide and seek
with ourselves, and now there’s
only consequences, no reasons anymore.

Aina olen ylistänyt
teitä joilta ei ole paluuta,
mutta illan valossa siivilöityvä
suru ei ole enää kenenkään omaa.
Yhteistä on auringonlasku: kirkkaat miekat
halkaisevat valon, vihuri
on viirien lepo; me olemme olleet sokkosilla
itsemme kanssa, ja nyt on jäljellä
vain seurauksia, ei enää syitä.

When will we ever learn?

2006-04-26T18:01:00.000-08:00

The National Coalition Party’s (right wing)
image is going up tells the recent image survey.
The worst points went to The Left Alliance (left wing).
This is happening at the same time as Finland has divided into two:
the haves and the have nots.
Where have all the flowers gone?
Long time passing
Where have all the flowers gone?
Long time ago
Where have all the flowers gone?
Girls have picked them every one
When will they ever learn?
When will we ever learn?

“Thou shall not lie, thou shall not murder”

2006-04-25T16:00:00.000-08:00

In their polished and fine-tuned rhetoric the right wing spokesmen in Finland and perhaps elsewhere never answer the essential question concerning the relationship between the wealth produced by millions and millions of “laboring hands”, and the profits made by thousands and thousands of Executives, major share holders, and stockbrokers. Or, when asked the simplest question, where does the money go, they answer: "Of course, to finance the much too expensive and ineffective welfare structures (social security, education, pensions, health care etc.). And if you argue that “Oh no, that is not true, it goes to global corporations and international hustlers,” they use the “grandma argument”: “Don’t you know that those ‘big bad’ multinational organizations are owned by grannies living in the U.S. You want no hard for the elderly, do you?” They sort of seem to forget that a granny from Miami, Florida, might have her small share of funds in some corporation through her savings for the bad times, but who by no means belongs to the class of the super rich owning the world. So, how to reply to these demagogues who play their superficially manufactured “global competition demands that we need to cut workers'benefits and the public sector” -language games in the capitalist sandbox? What is your answer? “Thou shall not lie?” “Thou shall not murder?”

Critical Pedagogy for Free

2006-04-19T03:30:00.000-08:00

Now you can download a book on critical pedagogy entitled "Critical Theory and Critical Pedagogy Today" (2005) (edited by Ilan Gur-Ze'ev) for free by typing its title Critical Theory and Critical Pedagogy Today to Google, and you'll have it as pdf.

From the book's backcover:

For the first time ever, the leading figures in today's critical education join forces. The collection offers a project in which the leading figures in critical education meet young academics who dialogically relate to each other’s work and critically reflect on their own contribution to Critical Theory and Critical Pedagogy. In its nineteen chapters this book reconstructs the history of Critical Theory and Critical Pedagogy and presents various and conflicting responses to the possibility of a present-day counter-education. This collection offers a milestone and a new beginning in the relations between alternative (modern and postmodern) critical theories and critical pedagogies.

Pentti's enthusiasm

2006-04-18T14:31:00.000-08:00

These enthusiastic words of the Poet of Finland, Pentti Saarikoski, force me to think of summer and you making love and fucking at the same time:

"Minä pidän sinusta koska sinulla on kaunis suu ja neekerin nauru ja
iloiset silmät ja sinä olet epätoivoinen ja riehakas ja sinun tukkasi
menee sekaisin tuulessa ja sinun karvasi uivat vedenpinnalla kuin
vesiheinät ja sinun häpyluusi on silta jolta nuoret miehet hyppäävät
vaahtoavaan koskeen ja niiden äidit ja siskot huutavat rannalla sormet
levällään ja sinä naurat vain ja pappi ja psykiatri kiertävät sinua
kuin harmaat kissat ja sinun rintasi nauravat kuin orgaaniset vuoret
ja koko sinun ruumiisi nauraa ja kapakat tanssivat sinun ympärilläsi
ja minä putoan kuin taivas joka on täynnä jumalia ja enkeleitä ja
piruja ja minä putoan sinun päällesi ja me kierimme rullalta ja
peitämme maan ja kaiken mitä maan päällä on
Minä tulen villiksi kun minä ajattelen sinua kun minä ajattelen kun
minä ajattelen maailmaa ja sinua ja maailmaa maailmaa taivasta maata
ja ihanaa enkeliä joka vie minua kotiin maan korvessa kulkevi lapsosen
tie hänen vitullaan on seitsemän kertaa seitsemänkymmentä nimeä
Cuba! Cuba! Cuba! Cuba! La revolucion!!!!!!!"

"I like you for you have a beautiful mouth and the laughter of an African-American and bright eyes and you are desperate and cheerful and your hair gets tangled in the wind and swims in the surface of the lake and your pussy is a bridge from which young men jump into the foaming rapids and their mothers and sisters scream at the shore their fingers wide and you only laugh and a priest and a psychiatrist circumscribe you like grey cats and your tits laugh like organic mountains and your whole body laughs and pubs dance around you and I fall like the sky that is full of gods and angels and devils and I fall upon you and we roll and cover the ground and all there is..."
I become wild just thinking of you when I think when I think about the world the world and you and the world heaven earth and the lovely angel that takes me home in the forest is the path of the child her cunt has seven times seventy names Cuba! Cuba! Cuba! Cuba! La revolucion!!!!!!!"

This is not California

2006-04-09T09:57:00.000-08:00

«This is not America. We're not in California. We're not interested in self-expression! Make your statements short and substantial!» - Zizek

Bush is determined

2006-04-08T07:20:00.000-08:00

New Yorker magazine's journalist Seymour M. Hersh writes as follows: "The Bush Administration, while publicly advocating diplomacy in order to stop Iran from pursuing a nuclear weapon, has increased clandestine activities inside Iran and intensified planning for a possible major air attack. Current and former American military and intelligence officials said that Air Force planning groups are drawing up lists of targets, and teams of American combat troops have been ordered into Iran, under cover, to collect targeting data and to establish contact with anti-government ethnic-minority groups. The officials say that President Bush is determined to deny the Iranian regime the opportunity to begin a pilot program, planned for this spring, to enrich uranium."

New Yorker: http://www.newyorker.com/fact/content/articles/060417fa_fact

Once she asked

2006-04-07T23:25:00.000-08:00

Once she asked about her own honest view of these things. 'What do you think of these matters. What is to be done to get rid of the poverties and social injustices?' And after tens of conferences, and tens of articles in the most prestigious journals, she didn't have a clue of an answer. Then she decided to go on in her own, and leave the academy, which seemed to be a mere facade, a world of its own without any connection whatsoever to the weight of the world.

Poor Kids of Finland

2006-03-29T05:14:00.000-08:00

Told by Helsingin Sanomat (March 29, 2006):

Children and the youth are evermore clearly divided into the offspring of the well-off and the poor, says professor Veli-Matti Ritakallio from the University of Turku, Finland. Poverty in the family often reflects the child’s future. For example, the child drops out from upper secondary education (high school) simply because her or his parents cannot afford the textbooks. The children are also divided into groups through their hobbies.

Today, 100,000 Finnish children live below the poverty line. The situation for families dependent on subsistence support has worsened in the past ten years. A person on subsistence support has to get by with 11 euros per day. "Poverty gnaws at people’s minds day and night", Ritakallio suggests.

Many of the parents resort to ignoring their own needs in order to provide their offspring with what other children have. Consumption is part of the youth lifestyle, and a child without a mobile phone and fashionable clothes stands out.

The financial situation is usually good for families where both parents work. The most common poverty risk factors are unemployment, studying, a large number of children, and single parenthood. A family with children can usually cope with one risk factor, but each additional factor makes life more cumbersome, until "the burden gets so great that the back finally breaks", Ritakallio summarises.

Helsingin Sanomat reports that "on the European scale the Finnish poverty situation is still relatively good. For example in Portugal and Spain most children live below the poverty line. In Finland only one out of ten children shares the same fate." But be sure that with their joint efforts Finnish Social Democratic Party and the National Coalition Party -- which by and large are the same -- will do their utmost to balance the unequal situation, to 'bridge the gap,' so to speak. And in few years the poor kid ratio is six out of ten across the Europe.

Why They Fight

2006-03-20T19:56:00.000-08:00

Soon I got used to the growing deaths tolls, and “collateral damage,”
tens of thousands of victims in Iraq, and elsewhere.
But eventually body counts make no difference.

I used to think my grandfather, and his aged, as veteran, as old.
But the U.S.A. thought me new meaning.
A veteran is an eighteen-year old, a twenty-year old,
buried in silence, chained in pains.

Then I realized they put every generation to war
for glorious is the U.S.A., glory, glory Halleluja!

Story Time

2006-03-19T15:25:00.000-08:00

Robert Reich, the author of the following text, served as United States Secretary of Labor in Bill Clinton’s administration from 1993 to 1997. Currently he is Professor at the University of California, Berkeley. The text entitled The Lost Art of Democratic Narrative was first published in The New Republic (March 2005), and is placed here without permission. However, I take my changes that some clearhead from the Left Alliance in Finland (and perhaps elsewhere) would read Reich's text, and mutatis mutandis interpret it right in the 2006 Election Campaign.

”Democrats are finally waking up to the fact that Republicans have succeeded in framing the issues to their advantage. Tax "relief," tort "reform," regulatory "burden," and "opportunity society," for example, have all defined public debate in a way that benefitsthe GOP. But, though Democrats have finally started talking about how they can recast their ideas to best appeal to the public, they've failed to realize that the rhetorical challenge they face is deeper than simply finding the right words and phrases. For Democrats to win back the heart and soul of the electorate, they have to speak to the basic stories that have defined and animated the United States since its founding. For most of the last century, they did this instinctively, but, over the last ten years or so, they have tended to speak in technocratic terms while conservative Republicans have mastered the art of the political narrative and, in doing so, exiled Democrats from politics itself.

There are four essential American stories. The first two are about hope; the second two are about fear.

The Triumphant Individual. This is the familiar tale of the little guy who works hard, takes risks, believes in himself, and eventually gains wealth, fame, and honor. It's the story of the self-made man (or, more recently, woman) who bucks the odds, spurns the naysayers, and shows what can be done with enough gumption and guts. He's instantly recognizable: plainspoken, self-reliant, and uncompromising in his ideals--the underdog who makes it through hard work and faith in himself. Benjamin Franklin's Autobiography is the first in a long line of U.S. self-help manuals about how to make it through self-sacrifice and diligence. The story is epitomized in the life of Abe Lincoln, born in a log cabin, who believed that "the value of life is to improve one's condition." The theme was captured in Horatio Alger's hundred or so novellas, whose heroes all rise promptly and predictably from rags to riches. It's celebrated inthe tales of immigrant peddlers who become millionaire tycoons. And it's found in the manifold stories of downtrodden fighters who undertake dangerous quests and find money and glory. Think Rocky Balboa, Norma Rae, and Erin Brockovich.The moral: With enough effort and courage, anyone can make it in the United States.

The Benevolent Community. This is the story of neighbors and friends who roll up their sleeves and pitch in for the common good. Its earliest formulation was John Winthrop's "A Model of Christian Charity," delivered on board a ship in Salem Harbor just before the Puritans landed in 1630--a version of Matthew's Sermon on the Mount, in which the new settlers would be "as a City upon a Hill," "delight in each other," and be "of the same body." Similar communitarian and religious images were found among the abolitionists, suffragettes, and civil rights activists of the 1950s and 1960s. "I have a dream that every valley shall be exalted, every hill and mountain shall be made low," said Martin Luther King Jr., extolling the ideal of the national community. The story is captured in the iconic New England town meeting, in frontier settlers erecting one another's barns, in neighbors volunteering as firefighters and librarians, and in small towns sending their high school achievers to college and their boys off to fight foreign wars. It suffuses Norman Rockwell's paintings and Frank Capra's movies. Consider the last scene in It's a Wonderful Life, when George learns he can count on his neighbors' generosity and goodness, just as they had always counted on him.

The Mob at the Gates. In this story, the United States is a beacon light of virtue in a world of darkness, uniquely blessed but continuously endangered by foreign menaces. Hence our endless efforts to contain the barbarism and tyranny beyond our borders. Daniel Boone fought Indians--white America's first evil empire. Davy Crockett battled Mexicans.The story is found in the Whig's anti-English and pro-tariff histories of the United States, in the antiimmigration harangues of the late nineteenth century, and in World War II accounts of Nazi and Japanese barbarism. It animates modern epics about space explorers (often sporting the stars and stripes) battling alien creatures bent on destroying the world. The narrative gave special force to cold war tales during the '50s of an international communist plot to undermine U.S. democracy and subsequently of "evil" empires and axes. The underlying lesson: We must maintain vigilance, lest diabolical forces overwhelm us.

The Rot at the Top. The last story concerns the malevolence of powerful elites. It's a tale of corruption, decadence, and irresponsibility in high places--of conspiracy against the common citizen. It started with King George III, and, to this day, it shapes the way we view government--mostly with distrust. The great bullies of American fiction have often symbolized Rot at the Top: William Faulkner's Flem Snopes, Willie Stark as the Huey Long-like character in All the King's Men, Lionel Barrymore's demonic Mr. Potter in It's a Wonderful Life, and the antagonists that hound the Joad family in The Grapes of Wrath. Suspicions about Rot at the Top have inspired what historian Richard Hofstadter called the paranoid style in U.S. politics--from the pre-Civil War Know-Nothings and Anti-Masonic movements through the Ku Klux Klan and Senator Joseph McCarthy's witch hunts. The myth has also given force to the great populist movements of U.S. history, from Andrew Jackson's attack on the Bank of the United States in the 1830s through William Jennings Bryan's prairie populism of the 1890s.

Speak to these four stories and you resonate with the tales Americans have been telling each other since our founding--the two hopeful stories rendered more vivid by contrast to the two fearful ones. But the challenge isn't just to find a good speechwriter or a cunning political consultant, or to mine focus groups and polls. Candidates must say what they believe and speak the truth as they see it. (Americans can spot a fake thousands of miles away.)

These four mental boxes are always going to be filled somehow--if not by Democrats, then by Republicans--because people don't think in terms of isolated policies or issues. If they're to be understandable, policies and issues must fit into larger narratives about where we have been as a nation, what we are up against, and where we could be going. Major shifts in governance--in party alignments and political views--have been precipitated by one party or the other becoming better at telling these four stories.

In the early decades of the twentieth century, progressives and Democrats filled all four boxes. They accused leaders of big business of being the Rot at the Top. They argued that the large industrial concentrations of the era, the trusts, were stifling the upward mobility of millions of potential Triumphant Individuals and poisoning democracy. During his 1912 campaign, Woodrow Wilson promised to wage "a crusade against powers that have governed us ... that have limited our development, that have determined our lives, that have set us in a straightjacket to do asthey please." The struggle to break up the trusts would be nothing less than "a second struggle for emancipation," by a national Benevolent Community intent on restoring freedom and democracy. Wilson's Mob atthe Gates, meanwhile, was composed of the large, bellicose states of prewar Europe who posed similar challenges to democratic freedoms. Wilson grimly rallied Americans to "defeat once and for all ... the sinister forces" that rendered peace impossible.

Theodore Roosevelt, of course, shared Wilson's antipathy toward trusts, but, by the 1920s, Republicans were mostly apologists for big business and Wall Street. That was OK with Americans as long as the economy roared, but it left the Grand Old Party vulnerable in harder times, which soon came. Their approach to foreign policy was mainly to avoid the Mob at the Gates--close the doors to immigrants, erect tariff walls, and isolate the nation. They celebrated the wealth of Triumphant Individuals but didn't champion upward mobility or equal opportunity, and they offered no particular view of the United States as a Benevolent Community. As such, they stayed firmly in the minority most of the first half of the twentieth century.

Indeed, the Great Depression and World War II presented the United States with palpable illustrations of the Democratic stories. By the 1930s, the Rot at the Top included Wall Street as well as big business. In the 1936 presidential campaign, Franklin D. Roosevelt warned against "economic royalists" who had impressed the whole of society into service. "The hours men and women worked, the wages they received, the conditions of their labor ... these had passed beyond the control of the people, and were imposed by this new industrial dictatorship," he warned. What was at stake, he concluded, was nothing less thanthe "survival of democracy."

To cope with the Depression, Americans needed a national Benevolent Community. "I see one-third of our nation ill-housed, ill-clad, ill-nourished," FDR told a nation whose citizens clearly understood they were all in this together. He described the purpose of the New Deal as "extending to our national life the old principle of the local community." "We are determined," Roosevelt said, "to make every American citizen the subject of his country's interest and concern." The Social Security Act was not just a social insurance scheme, but the very symbol of national solidarity. Henceforth, all American families would share the risk of becoming unemployed or losing the family's breadwinner or retiring without adequate savings. And then, of course, came Adolf Hitler's war, which cemented this national unity as FDR led the country into battle with the most fearsome Mob at the Gates it had ever encountered, over the objections of Republican isolationists.

Democrats managed the transition from Depression and world war to postwar prosperity and the cold war with only slight alterations in story line. The Benevolent Community remained at the core of Harry S Truman's Fair Deal, John F. Kennedy's New Frontier, and Lyndon Johnson's Great Society. The upwardly mobile Triumphant Individual depended on federal provisions--the G.I. bill, government-backed mortgages, a guarantee of equal civil rights. Meanwhile, the Democrats continued their assault on the Mob at the Gates, but now the Mob was the dangerous and expansive Soviet Union. Truman stopped the communists in Korea. Kennedy stopped them in Berlin and during the Cuban missile crisis. And he tried to stop them in Vietnam, which he saw as "the finger in the dike" holding back the Soviets. Johnson, of course, tragically tried and failed to erect a dam against the North Vietnamese and their patrons. While Republicans continued to wrestle with the isolationists and nervous Nellies--such as Senator Robert Taft of Ohio--Democrats spoke of paying any price and bearing any burden to protect the United States.

But, in the '60s, the Rot at the Top gradually dropped out of the Democratic message. Gone were tales of greedy businessmen or unscrupulous financiers. This was partly because the economy had changed profoundly. Postwar prosperity allowed the middle class to explode in size and the gap between rich and poor to shrink. White-collar workers were now abundant, and blue-collar workers got generous wage increases that could be absorbed bythe huge postwar market. Rot at the Top rhetoric was also a casualty of the Vietnam War, which spawned an anti-establishment and antiauthoritarian New Left and split Democrats down the middle. For many liberals, the Rot came to be personified by Johnson, his defense secretary, Robert McNamara, and even the federal government itself. (Ironically, Richard Nixon's White House and the Watergate scandal would hurt the Democrats, too, by confirming that the Rot at the Top was to be found in government rather than among business elites.)

The Vietnam War also undermined Democrats' confidence about the Mob at the Gates. Soviet communism remained dangerous, to be sure, but the McGovern wing of the party had no clear plan of action. Indeed, its approach seemed redolent of the Republican isolationists of the earlier part of the century, who wanted the United States simply to turn its back on the Mob. And, after President Carter and the hostage crisis, even when Democrats did try to tell this story, they seemed uncertain of themselves. In short, Democrats and progressives came off as confused and conflicted about the dangers the United States faced. They stopped talking both about the Rot at the Top and about the Mob at the Gates, and thus ceased giving Americans convincing stories about what the nation was up against.

Enter Ronald Reagan, master storyteller, who jumped into the conceptual breach that Democrats had left open. For Reagan, the Mob at the Gates was not merely a Soviet Union that needed to be contained, but an Evil Empire that had to be destroyed. The Rot at the Top was big government--Washington insiders and arrogant bureaucrats who stifled Triumphant Individuals--and the Benevolent Community's foundation was not New Deal-style programs but small, traditional neighborhoods in which people voluntarily helped one another, free from government interference. (Social spending could be cut, therefore, without threatening the mythology of benevolence.) The Triumphant Individual, meanwhile, was no longer the little guy in need of a helping hand, but the business entrepreneur who would spawn new companies and industries if unencumbered by government regulations and taxes. Through the alchemy of supply-side ("trickle-down") economics, his self-enriching triumphs would, it was said, help us all. Reagan's overall message was as hopeful and upbeat as FDR's: "America is back and standing tall," Reagan said in 1984. "We've begun to restorethe great American values--the dignity of work, the warmth of family, the strength of neighborhood, and the nourishment of human freedom."

Democrats never regained the capacity to tell their versions of the stories. Even when the implosion of the Soviet Union ended one of the Republicans' most powerful stories and temporarily left the United States without a Mob at the Gates, the stories American politicians told remained Republican stories. The Rot at the Top was still big government. To be sure, Bill Clinton won the presidency in 1992 promising to "fight for the forgotten middle class" against the forces of "greed," but Clinton inherited such a huge budget deficit from George H.W. Bush that he couldn't put up much of a fight. And, after losing his bid for universal health care, Clinton himself announced that the era of big government was over--and he proved it by ending welfare. Clinton's Benevolent Community remained, as it was under his Republican predecessors, a nationof volunteers; Clinton appointed a commission on volunteerism and encouraged the private sector to of fer jobs to former welfare recipients. And he urged would-be Triumphant Individuals (who were working harder than ever with no appreciable increase in pay and benefits) to embrace a new covenantof personal "opportunity and responsibility."

Under George W. Bush, the stories have changed somewhat, but all continue to reflect Republican values, crowding out Democratic interpretations. The September 11 terrorist attacks, of course, powerfully revived the Mob at the Gates tale, and, although Bush never quite connected the dots between global terrorists and his Axis of Evil (including Saddam Hussein), the basic story line he offered was familiar enough to give the Bush presidency a compelling mission. By Bush's second inaugural, that mission had grown even larger--a battle against tyrants and oppressors all overthe world, similar to those Wilson had railed against almost 90 years before, and perfectly fitting the mental box Americans have always reserved for the Mob at the Gates.

Bush's Triumphant Individual, meanwhile, is a property owner who achieves the "dignity and security of economic independence" by getting rich off his assets, as Bush put it in his second inaugural. The "ownership society" is intended, as Bush explained, to make "every citizen an agent of his or her own destiny." In this universe, there is no more need for national benevolence. In fact, Social Security--which had been the very symbol of FDR's Benevolent Community--is to be turned into private accounts that Triumphant Individuals can use to gain personal wealth. In Bush's retelling, the Benevolent Community is found in religious congregations--in "faith-based" organizations that "rally the armies of compassion in our communities to fight a very different war against poverty and hopelessness, a daily battle waged house to house and heart to heart." Not even the Indian Ocean tsunami initially deserved much by way of official government aid. U.S. benevolence found expression instead in the voluntary contributions of corporations and private citizens. "The greatest source of America's generosity is not our government," Bush explained when he appointed his father and Clinton to head a relief commission. "It's the good heart of the American people."

But it is in the retelling of the story about the Rot at the Top that the younger Bush and his cohorts have departed most from preceding Republican versions. Rather than big government, their Rot is lodged in America's "cultural elites"--depicted as influential liberals in prestigious coastal universities, the upper strata of New York and Hollywood, and the media. This Rot disdains ordinary working Americans, rejects religion and patriotism, celebrates Hollywood's licentiousness, and seeks to impose sexual permissiveness--including abortion and gay marriage--on good, God-fearing Americans. A TV advertisement aired in 2003 by a conservative group duringthe Democratic primary campaign described this new Rot as a "tax-hiking, government-spending, latte-drinking, sushi-eating, Volvo-driving, New York Times-reading, body-piercing, Hollywood-loving, left-wing freak show," and, inthe general election campaign, Republicans repeatedly attacked John Kerry as a "Massachusetts liberal" who was part of the "Chardonnay-and-brie set." Bush mocked Kerry for finding a "new nuance" each day on Iraq, drawing out the word "nuance" to emphasize Kerry's French cultural elitism. "In Texas, we don't do nuance," he said, to laughter and applause. House Republican leader Tom DeLay opened his campaign speeches by saying "Good morning, or, as John Kerry would say, 'Bonjour.'"

What were Democrats to do? All their stories had been replaced. In the 2004 election, Kerry argued forcefully that Bush's Iraq policy would not succeed against terrorism and that Bush's tax cuts forthe wealthy should be repealed in order to generate enough revenue for a modest step toward universally affordable health care. But Kerry failed to placethese and his other policy prescriptions into the four stories that Americans had always heard and that made sense of the world they knew. As a result, Kerry's policies lacked context and meaning. Where did Kerry want to take the United States? What did he stand for? Absent a clear narrative about the Mob, the Rot, the Benevolent, and the Triumphant, his policies were just ... policies. As such, they were no match for Bush's convictions about what America should do--no match, in other words, for Bush's recasting of the Mob at the Gates as vicious terrorists that had to be killed or would kill us (and against whom, he said, Kerry could not be trusted to use force);of the Triumphant Individual as people free to pursue individual wealth (whom Kerry would smother with taxes); of the Benevolent Community as a collection of religious people with heart (of whom Kerry was contemptuous); and of the Rot at the Top as an arrogant cultural elite (of which Kerry himself was a member).

The challenge for Democrats and progressives is not simply to manufacture a new set of stories but to find and tell stories that match their convictions. The stories must also resonate with what Americans sense to be the truth. Democrats might say, for example, that the Mob at the Gates isn't global terrorism and it's not despotic tyrants. Terrorism is a technique, and tyrants exist all over the world (are we going to invade China?). There is a Mob out there, though. They are global gangs of thugs like Al Qaeda--and they are dangerous. They must be met by force. They must also be policed--their movements monitored, their access to dangerous weapons denied, their ranks infiltrated. But the United States can't police them alone. We need a new global alliance against terrorist organizations, led by the United States. (Democrats created nato; maybe now it's time for gato, a Global Anti-Terrorist Organization.) Meanwhile, America's potential Triumphant Individuals depend critically on two things to prosper inthe new economy: a good education and good medical care. (This was the subtext of the riveting story Senator Barack Obama told at the 2004 Democratic National Convention.) Almost every American family is struggling to obtain them. Yet, if we join together in a Benevolent Community to provide them to every American citizen, all of us stand to gain. The rising tide of productivity and wealth will lift the nation as a whole.

In this retelling, the main thing holding us back is the Rot at the Top--concentrated wealth and power to a degree we haven't seen in this nation since the late nineteenth century. Mammoth corporations and hugely rich individuals have abused their power and wealth to corrupt our democracy, take over much of our media, give executives stratospheric pay packages while firing workers, and pad their nests with special tax breaks and corporate welfare. In this, they have been helped by a Republican Congress and White House whose guiding ideology seems less capitalism than cronyism, as shown time and again through legislative sops to the pharmaceutical industry, the credit card companies, and Wall Street. (Indeed, with its mounting ethical troubles, the GOP's congressional leadership is fast becoming another example of Rot at the Top--an example the Democrats could seize on as Gingrich and company did in 1994.) Or, as Al Gore said in 2000, in a remarkably prescient speech, George W. Bush was bankrolled by "a new generation of special interest power brokers who would like nothing better than a pliant president who would bend public policy to suit their purposes and profits."

Gore came in for a lot of criticism after his defeat from Democrats who felt uncomfortable with his description of a nation divided between "the people" and "the powerful." But Al Gore was on to something. After all, he got the most votes.”

No rules

2006-03-17T17:48:00.000-08:00

"There are no rules for documentaries anymore," says Rupert Murray, director of the unruly Unknown White Male. "Five years ago, when I was making (documentaries) at (Britain's) Channel Four, they said, 'Oh, you can't have backstory.' Well, (Unknown White Male) is all backstory. That whole vérité thing came out of the '60s; now there's a new generation of filmmakers who are pissed about people telling them what they can and can't do in a documentary. 'I can't? Fuck off.' It's an exciting time for documentaries."

Says Mr. Chomsky:

2006-03-10T08:12:00.000-08:00

"The war against working people should be understood to be a real war. It's a new war, it's an old one. Furthermore, it's a perfectly conscious war everywhere, but specifically in the U.S., a very free country, but one which has a highly class-conscious business class, so you have a lot information about it. They talk; you have their record. They have long seen themselves as fighting a bitter class war, except they don't want anybody else to know it."

Besides that the other day forest industry told to slash 3,600 jobs over the next two years - 2,950 of these are in Finland. This should not come as surprise, for the tone is the same everywhere. But surely business-class knows what it's doing - and yes, it's all for the workers' benefit, of course. And all we wanna be right wingers agree that the course is right.

"The growing power of capital explains many of the economic stories of our day: why Wall Street has the whip hand over corporate performance; why the gap between executive and worker pay has widened to record levels; why even incompetent executives enjoy golden parachutes while high-performing employees can be laid off without apology," writes Michael Hirsh in The New York Times Book Review article "Dollars Without Borders" March 5, p. 6.

How to translate this?

2006-02-27T15:04:00.000-08:00

"Ehkä meillä on tällä hetkellä liian paljon liikkuvaa kuvaa tarjolla. Hyvä hukkuu paskan seassa." ("Perhaps we live in excess of moving images. Good sinks into shit.")

-- Jörn Donner
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jörn_Donner)
(Quote from http://www.sea.fi/filmintahden/)

Tlaxcala, the network for linguistic diversity

2006-02-23T18:08:00.000-08:00

Tlaxcala, the network for linguistic diversity, was founded on December 2005 by a small group of cyberactivists who knew one another through Internet and discovered that they shared common interests, common dreams and common problems. The network quickly grew, has today […] members, and translates into [...] languages. This Manifesto, approved by them all, expresses their common philosophy:

All languages of the world must, and do contribute to the brotherhood of mankind. Contrary to what many people used to believe, a language is not only a grammatical structure, a set of interconnected words, in agreement with a syntactic code, but also, and especially, a creation of meaning based upon our senses. Thus we observe, interpret and express our world from a specific personal, geographical and political context. Because of this, no language is neutral, and they all carry the “genetic code”, the imprint of the cultures to which they belong. Latin, the first imperial language, reached its high point by trampling on the remains of the languages it destroyed as the Roman legions extended their presence to the south of Europe, the north of Africa and the Middle East. It is not strange if at the beginning of the Renaissance it was the Spanish language, a genetic daughter of Latin, which brought about new devastation, this time among the conquered peoples of the American continent.

An empire and its language always go together and are predators by definition. They reject otherness. Any imperial language constitutes itself as the subject of History, narrates it from its point of view and annihilates (or tries to do so) the points of view of languages it considers inferior. The official History of any empire is never innocent, but motivated by the zeal to justify yesterday’s acts today in order to project its own version upon tomorrow.

Nobody knows what suffering the peoples conquered by the Roman Empire endured, since there is no written record of their defeat, which meant the disappearance of their cultures. Conversely, the languages of the American continent conquered by the Spanish Empire left their testimony. Towards the second half of the 16th Century, shortly after the conquest of Mexico, Brother Bernardino de Sahagún assembled what it is known today as The Florentine Codex, a mixture of Náhua tales (Náhuatl is the language of the most ancient Aztecs, still spoken in Mexico) and pictorial illustrations that describe pre-Hispanic society and culture. The second testimony, which contradicts the first one, is The Lienzo de Tlaxcala, also transcribed during the 16th Century by the mixed race Diego Muñoz de Camargo, who based his story upon the fresco paintings by his ancestors – the Tlaxcaltecan nobility – who described in images both Hernán Cortés’s arrival and the fall of Tenochtitlan, the capital of the Aztec Empire, destroyed by the Conquistadors who replaced it with the city of Mexico. Tlaxcala was at the time the Tenochtitlan Aztec empire’s rival city-state and aided Cortés in destroying it, an attitude that was akin to drawing up its own death sentence, since the new Spanish Empire which was born of that defeat subjugated all the native, so-called pre-Columbian peoples – whether they were allies or enemies of the Spanish Crown, resulting in an almost complete loss of their cultures and languages.

In our days, the imperial power is based in the United States of America, whose official language is English. Faithful to the behavioural characteristics of any empire, the English language now imposes its law. Under the influence of English, entire countries or territories have lost – or are in the process of losing – their communicational languages. The Philippines or Puerto Rico are only two examples among many. In sub-Saharan Africa the false prestige accorded to English, French, Portuguese or majority vernacular languages is killing one local mother tongue every two weeks according to UNESCO.

It is true that in these times of global communication there is nothing negative in having a lingua franca to facilitate mutual knowledge, but it becomes quite negative if it either consciously or unconsciously transmits the ideology of superiority that characterizes it, and does so by exhibiting its scorn for the “subordinate” languages, i.e., all the others. The superiority complex which always accompanies an imperial or imperially-dependent language is so consubstantial to its essence that today it even happens among Anglophone activists engaged in the struggle for a better world: their media is a tangible proof that the writings they publish translated from the “subordinate” languages constitute only an insignificant percentage of their contents. It is not only the fact that translations from English into other languages are so appallingly numerous in comparison, but a problem lies in that the same cannot be said in the opposite direction. We all are culprits of having accepted until now such inequality.

Tlaxcala, the network of translators for linguistic diversity, is born as a post-modern homage to the unfortunate city-state of the same name which committed the tragic mistake of trusting an empire – the Spanish one – in order to fight against another less powerful one – the Náhua – just to find out only too late that nobody should trust empires – none of them – because they use their subordinates only as a lever for their own purposes. The global translators of Tlaxcala seek to redress the ancient Tlaxcaltecan’s lost destiny.

The translators of Tlaxcala believe in otherness, in the goodness of approaching others’ points of view, and for that reason they take the stand to de-imperialise the English language by publishing in all possible languages (including English) the voices of writers, thinkers, cartoonists and activists who nowadays write their original texts in languages that the domineering empire’s influence do not permit to be heard. As well, the translators of Tlaxcala will allow non-English speakers to be exposed to ideas from English language writers who now are on the fringe, or who were published in really small, really hard to find places.

The English language in its position of institutional apparatus of knowledge functions as a global structure of power that presents the world’s languages and cultures in its image and likeness without bothering to seek the permission of the world it purports to represent. The translators of Tlaxcala are convinced that the masters of discourse can be defeated and hope to blur such an apparatus in the faith that the world becomes both multipolar and multilingual, as diverse as life itself.

The basis that Tlaxcala uses for text selection is that it reflects the core values of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, aiming for full respect for the rights and dignity of the human person. The translators of Tlaxcala are anti-militarists, anti-imperialists and stand against “neoliberal” corporate globalisation. They yearn for peace and equality among all languages and cultures. They believe neither in a clash of civilisations nor in the current imperial crusade against terrorism. They oppose racism and the building of walls or electrical fences – either physical or linguistic – that prevent the natural free movement and sharing between people and languages on the planet. They seek to promote esteem, recognition and respect for the Other, as well as to express the desire that she/he ceases to be an object of History and becomes a subject of it with full equality. This effort is voluntary and free. All the translations carried out by Tlaxcala are on Copyleft, i.e. free for reproduction for non-commercial purposes, as long as the source is cited.

Translators and interpreters of all languages, connect yourselves and unite! Webmasters and bloggers of all colours in the rainbow who share our concerns, contact us! E-mail: tlaxcala@tlaxcala.es

It is not a coincidence that we have chosen the date of 21 Februry to make our Manifesto public. During the years of the 50's, 60's and 70's, 21 February was celebrated as the world anti-colonialism and anti-imperialism day.

On that day in 1944, Paris awoke with its walls covered with big red posters that announced the execution at Mount Valérien of 23 “terrorist” members of the Snipers and Partisans-immigrant workers, the first organization of resistance to Nazism in the French territory. The leader of the group, Missak Manouchian, a 36-year-old Armenian, was a survivor of the Armenian genocide, an immigrant. To the French collaborators who attended his summary trial before the Nazi military court, and who labelled him a métèque, Manouchian answered: “You inherited French citizenship, I earned it.”

“The time of martyrs has come, and if I am one of them, it will be for the cause of brotherhood, the only thing that can save this country.” These were Malcolm X’s last words before being murdered during a meeting in Harlem on 21st February 1965 by three members of the Nation of Islam, which Malcolm had left in 1963 in order to create the Organization of the Afro-American Unity. In April 1966, his assassins were condemned to life imprisonment, but those who plotted his murder - the Masters of the Empire – remained, as in most cases, unpunished.

Malcolm X, alias El-Hajj Malik El-Shabazz, whose original name was Malcolm Little, was 39. He had returned from a pilgrimage to Mecca, where he discovered universality after meeting pilgrims of all origins. One of the reasons of his breaking with the Nation of Islam was that it had had contacts with the Ku Klux Klan to discuss the establishment of a black independent State in Southern USA, just as the founder of Zionism, Theodor Herzl, had done in requesting the support of the worst anti-Semites for his project of a Jewish State. For Malcolm, whose father had been a victim of the Ku Klux Klan, such collaboration was unthinkable.

On this day of remembrance we put Tlaxcala under the patronage of those two fighters for the struggle of peoples, Missak Manouchian and Malcolm X.

Cyberespace, 21 February, 2006

Signataries:

AIENA Caterina, ALMENDRAS Nancy Harb, ANGUIANO Rocío, BOCCHI Davide, BOULOS Zaki, BUEMI Valerio, CILLA Antonia, DÍEZ LERMA José Luis, GIUDICE Fausto, HADDAD Ramez, HAUN Agatha, HIRSCHMUGL Eva, INDA Elaine, JUÁREZ POLANCO Ulises, KALVELLIDO Juan
LECRIQUE Yves, MANAI Ahmed, MANNO Mauro, MARTÍNEZ, Miguel, PÁRAMO Ernesto, POUMIER Maria, RIZZO Mary, SANCHIS Carlos, TALENS Manuel, TARRADELLAS Àlex, VITTORELLI Manuela

E-mail:
tlaxcala@tlaxcala.es

Revolt, or a step-by-step model?

2006-02-23T11:40:00.000-08:00

Today I was once again reading from Moacir Gadotti’s Reading Paulo Freire (1994, p. 128) about the criticism according to which Paulo Freire -- one of the founding figures in international movement of critical pedagogy -- never explicated his view of decent society, or clarified the nature of the revolution needed to construct a decent society based on radical humanist values. Is this true? And if so, is it because his belief in dialectical thinking, or the idea that the ‘road is made by walking’? In other words, is it because his idea that “there are no finished models of society as the social structure is always in motion” (p. 130). Is it further so, like Gadotti points out, that there are at least two sorts of social change, those of mechanical and dialectical (or dialogical)? Mechanical change would mean that socio-economical change of society and its means of production would somehow directly affect psychological, social and educational spheres. Assumingly this was not Freire’s argument. Dialectical change would require overall, concerted change all the way from socio-economics base up to social, cultural, educational and spiritual superstructure. And, besides that, it would demand strict individual change in attitudes, and in ‘being-in-the-world.’ Here Gadotti interprets Freire: “Oppression does not take place only on the social plane but also on the individual level. And it is just on this level that authoritarianism can be seen. And it is just here that oppression must begin to be fought, that is, where it is nearest to us.” (p. 130.) Or as Freire writes it in his Pedagogy of the Oppressed: "we cannot say that in the process of revolution someone liberates someone else, nor yet that someone liberates himself, but rather that human beings in communion liberate each other" (p. 114).

So, what is Freire’s answer to the troubling question regarding the logic of societal change? How does it happen? I am quite convinced that Freire did not think that education and educators could make a change – not to mention a revolution – alone, all by themselves. -- Besides the fundamental question, I read the previous quotation in the context of higher education: How should we start building ‘organic learning alliances’, in which we would act not as antagonist teachers and students, but as co-operative allies in a resistance movement? I think the really hard part for most of the mandarins in the academia would the following: “The preservation of traditional methods of education in a revolutionary context signifies the distance between dream and practice. One of the revolutionary struggles is the struggle for the renovation of the methods and procedures at the same time as the content of education is renewed.” (p. 131-132.)

And talking about roads that are made by walking, here's Eduardo Galeano's testimonial: "I was wandering lost through the streets of Cádiz, thanks to my acute sense of disorientation, when a good man rescued me. He instructed me on how to get to the old market, and to any other destination in the wide world: "Let the road lead you." (http://progressive.org/mag_galeano0206) (-- By the way, I seem to have a talent of orientation; it is hard for me to get lost in the woods, or a big city...)

Winter Wonderland

2006-02-21T14:56:00.000-08:00

Poverty gap is rapidly widening in winter wonderland. Around 600,000 people in Finland are now living below the poverty line (by the European Union standards) according to statistics by STAKES (the Finnish National Research and Development Centre for Welfare and Health). The survey reveals that the recent boosts to incomes have done little for Finland's lower class. In fact, the country's poor are doing worse and worse every year.

By contrast, middle-class families with educated parents are doing relatively well. They're making the most of two incomes in typically white-collar jobs, with income tax breaks helping their money go further. But tax breaks have had little - if nothing - effects on the unemployed. The value of state supports and other benefits to the poor have not increased in step with incomes, which widens the gap even further.

Families with many children, or those with a single parent are sinking into poverty faster than any other demographic. The EU sets the poverty line for a single parent with three children at just 1,700 euros a month. Researchers in STAKES say there are things that can help. Tax breaks can be structured to benefit low-income households, for instance. The biggest boost would be to help people get jobs.

But I believe, as always, that right-wing have all the answers needed to overcome this problem.

Give Me a Revolution!

2006-02-19T17:46:00.000-08:00

"I should just like to formulate this: the main problem, as I see it, is how human energy is channelled and used by every given society for its own purposes, and how in turn the human needs thus produced have an influence on social development; sometimes a revolutionary one but very often a reactionary one, because the character structure as it has been formed in the past by tradition, culture, teaching, family, etc., changes more slowly than the socioeconomic factors. Indeed, the slowness of the historical processes is to a large extent to be explained by the fact of this lag, that is to say, by the fact that man psychologically lives several generations behind the new economic and technical possibilities. If that were not so, the birth of a new society would not be as painful and difficult as it is." -- From Erich Fromm's letter to the Soviet philosopher Vladimir Dobrenkov in 1969 at http://www.marxists.org/archive/fromm/works/1969/human.htm#ref01

Failed State

2006-02-18T19:00:00.000-08:00

Noam Chomsky states in his interview book Imperial Ambitions (2005) that "The United States is basically what is called a 'failed state.' It has formal democratic institutions, but they barely function." He further notes that from the point of view of the power elite "it doesn't matter that approximately three fourths of the population think" that people should "have some kind of government-funded health care system." It doesn't even matter for the all powerful "if a large majority regards health care as a moral value," for when social and political commentators in the US "rave about moral values, they're talking about banning gay marriage, not the idea that everyone should have decent health care. And the reason is that it's not in their interest." For they are like Chomsky (or me); we have a fine health care. "For the large majority of the population, though, lack of health care is a major issue, and it's becoming an even more serious one. When Medicaid [medical care available to low-income individuals and families in the US, JS] is destroyed, as it probably will be, that's going to really harm people. But those people are unorganized. They're not in unions, they're not in political associations, they don't participate in any political parties. The genius of American [that is, the US, JS] politics has been to marginalize and isolate people. In fact, one of the main reasons behind the passionate effort to destroy unions is that they are one of the few mechanisms by which ordinary people can get together and compensate for the concentration of capital and power." (pp. 198-199.)

And indeed, mediacare has to go, for Bush needs more money for the arms industry, that is, to his alleys in the war corporations. Bush and Cheney's 2007 budjet plan cuts spending on elderly, and poor people, and takes away social services and education from those who need them most while increasing spending on weapons. If not babies, maybe people will eat guns. See more: http://www.socialistworker.org/2006-1/576/576_03_EatGuns.shtml

But, one cannot forget Johan Galtung's prediction after Georg W. Bush had stolen the Presidental election in 2000. After the election this prominent peace researcher and cosmopolitan thinker cut his prediction of the fall of US imperium into half, from 40 to 20 years.

In a country, size of a fly's shit, called Finland, right-wing party leaders has same tones in their voice as their big brothers in the wild wild west, and elsewhere; at the heart of their sermon is an idea of 'trickle-down' effect of capital cumulation. It means that by growing economic gap between rich and poor, the wealth will eventually flow from the top of the food chain to the bottom. It would be fantastic to see some evidence for this plain claim, but for some reason I have not found any. I wonder why.

In addition, their rational of the good life based on continuous economic growth, entrepreneurship and individual as well as global competition is absolutely rocket science to me. I would say that they still build their worldview heavily on contradiction between those who own the world, and those of their servants as their historically eminent class enemy. Class etc. antagonisms are not over nor history in its end.

The Task of Critical Pedagogy

2006-02-18T18:26:00.000-08:00

The central task of critical pedagogy is to understand the oppressive aspects of education and overall society in order to generate pedagogical, individual and societal transformation while developing pedagogical and political strategies that work toward the elimination of various forms of subordination such as class, gender, race and sexual orientation, and strengthen peoples’ possibilities for organic learning, and powers to fight for inequalities of the world.

But "there is no unitary conception of critical pedagogy. There are as many critical pedagogies as there are critical educators, although there are certainly major points of intersection and commonality. There are the writings about critical pedagogy that occur in the academy, which are many and varied. And there is the dimension of critical pedagogy that is most important - that which emerges organically from the daily interactions between teachers and students." (Peter McLaren in an interview with Mashhood Rizvi, http://www.sef.org.pk/educatewebsite/educate5fol/uron5.asp)

"Critical pedagogy does not end with the idea of using student experiences to frame curricula. Rather, it proposes that education should always go beyond that point by encouraging students to become active participants in their education (Anderson & Irvine, 1993; Macedo, 1994; Shor, 1992). Students who are active participants are engaged with the teacher and the curriculum. They contribute their own ideas and learn to wrestle with ambiguities and challenge assumptions. Active participation also means that they cocreate curricula with the teacher to ensure that their needs and interests are given primary importance. Finally, it means taking action and transforming the world in order to eliminate disadvantage. Social transformation is the ultimate goal of critical education." (Sophie C. Degener, http://www.ncsall.net/?id=562)

Organic Learning

2006-02-11T16:33:00.000-08:00

Yes, what is it? Organic learning does not respect anything. Curriculum, plaah, policy programs, plaah, notes, text books. It is when something evolves, flows, changes into something strange, something other, which moves, and shakes, and unexpected happens. Without it only no-thing exists, as it so heavenly does.

Organic learning is linked to Leif Segerstam's idea of 'organic musical kaleidoscope', and to Gramsci's 'organic intellectual.' It has to do with the ultimate moment of human democratic creativity, that is, to say no to obedience to authority, and to various abusive (or so used) object-subject -relations.

"However, only in an emancipated society, whose members' autonomy and responsibility had been realized, would communication have developed into the non-authoritarian and universally practiced dialogue..." Jürgen Habermas, Knowledge and Human Interests, 1971, p. 314

But, how to build such a society? Some educational progressivists have claimed that this will happen by focusing on critical educational contents and political activism in different fronts and fields. Others have stated that in the end, it is the (pedagogical) process and social relations of learning and teaching that counts. Yet other educational theorists, such as Henry Giroux, have emphasized the integrated strategy where the contents meet the pedagogical forms in balance (see Youngman 1986, p. 5). Common to these two parties is the conviction that various collaborative study methods are needed to replace the widely shared idea of learning - stated here by Edwin Mason in his book Collaborative Learning (1972, p. 30) - "as a process in which an agent - the teacher - does 'the right things' to a client - the student - in a prearranged optimum environment designed for the performance of the operation."

Hollo translates...

2006-02-11T16:27:00.000-08:00

... Pentti Saarikoski (Asiaa tai ei [Something to Tell You, or Maybe Not]) as follows:

"The unexpected always happens, so unexpectedly that I have to pay attention every second: everything might suddenly shift into a new light. Nothing has changed, but everything's lit differently."

And then (Invitation to the Dance, XXXIV):

"Full moon late February and snow
brighter than midsummer nights."

The revolution will not be televised

2006-02-11T14:13:00.000-08:00

The revolution will not be televised
You will not be able to stay home, brother.
You will not be able to plug in, turn on and cop out.
You will not be able to lose yourself on skag and skip,
Skip out for beer during commercials,
Because the revolution will not be televised.

The revolution will not be televised.
The revolution will not be brought to you by Xerox
In 4 parts without commercial interruptions.
The revolution will not show you pictures of Nixon
blowing a bugle and leading a charge by John
Mitchell, General Abrams and Spiro Agnew to eat
hog maws confiscated from a Harlem sanctuary.

The revolution will not be televised.
The revolution will not be brought to you by the
Schaefer Award Theatre and will not star Natalie
Woods and Steve McQueen or Bullwinkle and Julia.
The revolution will not give your mouth sex appeal.
The revolution will not get rid of the nubs.
The revolution will not make you look five pounds
thinner, because the revolution will not be televised, Brother.

There will be no pictures of you and Willie May
pushing that shopping cart down the block on the dead run,
or trying to slide that color television into a stolen ambulance.
NBC will not be able predict the winner at 8:32
or report from 29 districts.
The revolution will not be televised.

There will be no pictures of pigs shooting down
brothers in the instant replay.
There will be no pictures of pigs shooting down
brothers in the instant replay.
There will be no pictures of Whitney Young being
run out of Harlem on a rail with a brand new process.
There will be no slow motion or still life of Roy
Wilkens strolling through Watts in a Red, Black and
Green liberation jumpsuit that he had been saving
For just the proper occasion.

Green Acres, The Beverly Hillbillies, and Hooterville
Junction will no longer be so damned relevant, and
women will not care if Dick finally gets down with
Jane on Search for Tomorrow because Black people
will be in the street looking for a brighter day.
The revolution will not be televised.

There will be no highlights on the eleven o'clock
news and no pictures of hairy armed women
liberationists and Jackie Onassis blowing her nose.
The theme song will not be written by Jim Webb,
Francis Scott Key, nor sung by Glen Campbell, Tom
Jones, Johnny Cash, Englebert Humperdink, or the Rare Earth.
The revolution will not be televised.

The revolution will not be right back
after a message about a white tornado, white lightning, or white people.
You will not have to worry about a dove in your
bedroom, a tiger in your tank, or the giant in your toilet bowl.
The revolution will not go better with Coke.
The revolution will not fight the germs that may cause bad breath.
The revolution will put you in the driver's seat.

The revolution will not be televised, will not be televised,
will not be televised, will not be televised.
The revolution will be no re-run brothers;
The revolution will be live.

- Gil Scott-Heron, 1974

In the Spring

2006-02-09T16:39:00.000-08:00

After years in Paris Grant Wood (Feb 13, 1891- Feb 13, 1942) returned to the Midwest. All the good ideas he'd ever had, those that really matter, came to him while milking a cow. "So I went back to Iowa."

¡Venceremos! Social Justive won in Finnish Presidential Elections 2006

2006-01-29T13:32:00.000-08:00

Left-wing Presidential candidate and current President of Finland Mrs. Tarja Halonen renewed her Presidency in the Finnish Presidential Election held in Sunday 28th 2006. She got 51,8 percent of the votes against right-winger, National Coalition and Centre Party’s candidate Mr. Sauli Niinistö who got 48,2 percent of the votes.

In her victory speech for the supporters, right after the election, President Halonen stated that the election were essentially about core political values in Finland. According to President Halonen there are four issues, which won in the Presidential Elections. Firstly, no one is left behind in the Finnish society, secondly, democracy won in the elections. Thirdly, she pointed out that people wanted to further social justice, and supported her overall emphasis on global justice. “The whole world in the heart,” she said, and sent her “¡Venceremos!” to Chile’s recently elected first woman President Verónica Michelle Bachelet Jeria.

Listen! Another World is Possible

2006-01-08T07:41:00.000-08:00

Listen here: www.rockpaperscissors.biz/index.cfm/fuseaction/current.press_release/project_id/233.cfm#additional_releases

Definition of Globalization?

2005-12-31T17:15:00.000-08:00

Globalization in lower case = a person born in Somalia, speaking Somali, English and Finnish, selling shoes in Minneapolis.

Art, Truth & Politics

2005-12-12T12:06:00.000-08:00

© THE NOBEL FOUNDATION 2005 General permission is granted for the publication in newspapers in any language after December 7, 2005, 5:30 p.m. (Swedish time). Publication in periodicals or books otherwise than in summary requires the consent of the Foundation. On all publications in full or in major parts the above underlined copyright notice must be applied.

Harold Pinter:
Art, Truth & Politics, Nobel Lecture, December 7, 2005

In 1958 I wrote the following:
‘There are no hard distinctions between what is real and what is unreal, nor between what is true and what is false. A thing is not necessarily either true or false; it can be both true and false.’
I believe that these assertions still make sense and do still apply to the exploration of reality through art. So as a writer I stand by them but as a citizen I cannot. As a citizen I must ask: What is true? What is false?
Truth in drama is forever elusive. You never quite find it but the search for it is compulsive. The search is clearly what drives the endeavour. The search is your task. More often than not you stumble upon the truth in the dark, colliding with it or just glimpsing an image or a shape which seems to correspond to the truth, often without realising that you have done so. But the real truth is that there never is any such thing as one truth to be found in dramatic art. There are many. These truths challenge each other, recoil from each other, reflect each other, ignore each other, tease each other, are blind to each other. Sometimes you feel you have the truth of a moment in your hand, then it slips through your fingers and is lost.
I have often been asked how my plays come about. I cannot say. Nor can I ever sum up my plays, except to say that this is what happened. That is what they said. That is what they did.
Most of the plays are engendered by a line, a word or an image. The given word is often shortly followed by the image. I shall give two examples of two lines which came right out of the blue into my head, followed by an image, followed by me.
The plays are The Homecoming and Old Times. The first line of The Homecoming is ‘What have you done with the scissors?’ The first line of Old Times is ‘Dark.’
In each case I had no further information.
In the first case someone was obviously looking for a pair of scissors and was demanding their whereabouts of someone else he suspected had probably stolen them. But I somehow knew that the person addressed didn’t give a damn about the scissors or about the questioner either, for that matter.
‘Dark’ I took to be a description of someone’s hair, the hair of a woman, and was the answer to a question. In each case I found myself compelled to pursue the matter. This happened visually, a very slow fade, through shadow into light.
I always start a play by calling the characters A, B and C.

page 2
In the play that became The Homecoming I saw a man enter a stark room and ask his question of a younger man sitting on an ugly sofa reading a racing paper. I somehow suspected that A was a father and that B was his son, but I had no proof. This was however confirmed a short time later when B (later to become Lenny) says to A (later to become Max), ‘Dad, do you mind if I change the subject? I want to ask you something. The dinner we had before, what was the name of it? What do you call it? Why don’t you buy a dog? You’re a dog cook. Honest. You think you’re cooking for a lot of dogs.’ So since B calls A ‘Dad’ it seemed to me reasonable to assume that they were father and son. A was also clearly the cook and his cooking did not seem to be held in high regard. Did this mean that there was no mother? I didn’t know. But, as I told myself at the time, our beginnings never know our ends.
‘Dark.’ A large window. Evening sky. A man, A (later to become Deeley), and a woman, B (later to become Kate), sitting with drinks. ‘Fat or thin?’ the man asks. Who are they talking about? But I then see, standing at the window, a woman, C (later to become Anna), in another condition of light, her back to them, her hair dark.
It’s a strange moment, the moment of creating characters who up to that moment have had no existence. What follows is fitful, uncertain, even hallucinatory, although sometimes it can be an unstoppable avalanche. The author’s position is an odd one. In a sense he is not welcomed by the characters. The characters resist him, they are not easy to live with, they are impossible to define. You certainly can’t dictate to them. To a certain extent you play a never-ending game with them, cat and mouse, blind man’s buff, hide and seek. But finally you find that you have people of flesh and blood on your hands, people with will and an individual sensibility of their own, made out of component parts you are unable to change, manipulate or distort.
So language in art remains a highly ambiguous transaction, a quicksand, a trampoline, a frozen pool which might give way under you, the author, at any time.
But as I have said, the search for the truth can never stop. It cannot be adjourned, it cannot be postponed. It has to be faced, right there, on the spot.
Political theatre presents an entirely different set of problems. Sermonising has to be avoided at all cost. Objectivity is essential. The characters must be allowed to breathe their own air. The author cannot confine and constrict them to satisfy his own taste or disposition or prejudice. He must be prepared to approach them from a variety of angles, from a full and uninhibited range of perspectives, take them by surprise, perhaps, occasionally, but nevertheless give them the freedom to go which way they will. This does not always work. And political satire, of course, adheres to none of these precepts, in fact does precisely the opposite, which is its proper function.

page 3
In my play The Birthday Party I think I allow a whole range of options to operate in a dense forest of possibility before finally focussing on an act of subjugation.
Mountain Language pretends to no such range of operation. It remains brutal, short and ugly. But the soldiers in the play do get some fun out of it. One sometimes forgets that torturers become easily bored. They need a bit of a laugh to keep their spirits up. This has been confirmed of course by the events at Abu Ghraib in Baghdad. Mountain Language lasts only 20 minutes, but it could go on for hour after hour, on and on and on, the same pattern repeated over and over again, on and on, hour after hour.
Ashes to Ashes, on the other hand, seems to me to be taking place under water. A drowning woman, her hand reaching up through the waves, dropping down out of sight, reaching for others, but finding nobody there, either above or under the water, finding only shadows, reflections, floating; the woman a lost figure in a drowning landscape, a woman unable to escape the doom that seemed to belong only to others.
But as they died, she must die too.
Political language, as used by politicians, does not venture into any of this territory since the majority of politicians, on the evidence available to us, are interested not in truth but in power and in the maintenance of that power. To maintain that power it is essential that people remain in ignorance, that they live in ignorance of the truth, even the truth of their own lives. What surrounds us therefore is a vast tapestry of lies, upon which we feed.
As every single person here knows, the justification for the invasion of Iraq was that Saddam Hussein possessed a highly dangerous body of weapons of mass destruction, some of which could be fired in 45 minutes, bringing about appalling devastation. We were assured that was true. It was not true. We were told that Iraq had a relationship with Al Quaeda and shared responsibility for the atrocity in New York of September 11th 2001. We were assured that this was true. It was not true. We were told that Iraq threatened the security of the world. We were assured it was true. It was not true.
The truth is something entirely different. The truth is to do with how the United States understands its role in the world and how it chooses to embody it.
But before I come back to the present I would like to look at the recent past, by which I mean United States foreign policy since the end of the Second World War. I believe it is obligatory upon us to subject this period to at least some kind of even limited scrutiny, which is all that time will allow here.
Everyone knows what happened in the Soviet Union and throughout Eastern Europe during the post-war period: the systematic brutality, the widespread atrocities, the

page 4
ruthless suppression of independent thought. All this has been fully documented and verified.
But my contention here is that the US crimes in the same period have only been superficially recorded, let alone documented, let alone acknowledged, let alone recognised as crimes at all. I believe this must be addressed and that the truth has considerable bearing on where the world stands now. Although constrained, to a certain extent, by the existence of the Soviet Union, the United States’ actions throughout the world made it clear that it had concluded it had carte blanche to do what it liked.
Direct invasion of a sovereign state has never in fact been America’s favoured method. In the main, it has preferred what it has described as ‘low intensity conflict’. Low intensity conflict means that thousands of people die but slower than if you dropped a bomb on them in one fell swoop. It means that you infect the heart of the country, that you establish a malignant growth and watch the gangrene bloom. When the populace has been subdued – or beaten to death – the same thing – and your own friends, the military and the great corporations, sit comfortably in power, you go before the camera and say that democracy has prevailed. This was a commonplace in US foreign policy in the years to which I refer.
The tragedy of Nicaragua was a highly significant case. I choose to offer it here as a potent example of America’s view of its role in the world, both then and now.
I was present at a meeting at the US embassy in London in the late 1980s.
The United States Congress was about to decide whether to give more money to the Contras in their campaign against the state of Nicaragua. I was a member of a delegation speaking on behalf of Nicaragua but the most important member of this delegation was a Father John Metcalf. The leader of the US body was Raymond Seitz (then number two to the ambassador, later ambassador himself). Father Metcalf said: ‘Sir, I am in charge of a parish in the north of Nicaragua. My parishioners built a school, a health centre, a cultural centre. We have lived in peace. A few months ago a Contra force attacked the parish. They destroyed everything: the school, the health centre, the cultural centre. They raped nurses and teachers, slaughtered doctors, in the most brutal manner. They behaved like savages. Please demand that the US government withdraw its support from this shocking terrorist activity.’
Raymond Seitz had a very good reputation as a rational, responsible and highly sophisticated man. He was greatly respected in diplomatic circles. He listened, paused and then spoke with some gravity. ‘Father,’ he said, ‘let me tell you something. In war, innocent people always suffer.’ There was a frozen silence. We stared at him. He did not flinch.

page 5
Innocent people, indeed, always suffer.
Finally somebody said: ‘But in this case “innocent people” were the victims of a gruesome atrocity subsidised by your government, one among many. If Congress allows the Contras more money further atrocities of this kind will take place. Is this not the case? Is your government not therefore guilty of supporting acts of murder and destruction upon the citizens of a sovereign state?’
Seitz was imperturbable. ‘I don’t agree that the facts as presented support your assertions,’ he said.
As we were leaving the Embassy a US aide told me that he enjoyed my plays. I did not reply.
I should remind you that at the time President Reagan made the following statement: ‘The Contras are the moral equivalent of our Founding Fathers.’
The United States supported the brutal Somoza dictatorship in Nicaragua for over 40 years. The Nicaraguan people, led by the Sandinistas, overthrew this regime in 1979, a breathtaking popular revolution.
The Sandinistas weren’t perfect. They possessed their fair share of arrogance and their political philosophy contained a number of contradictory elements. But they were intelligent, rational and civilised. They set out to establish a stable, decent, pluralistic society. The death penalty was abolished. Hundreds of thousands of poverty-stricken peasants were brought back from the dead. Over 100,000 families were given title to land. Two thousand schools were built. A quite remarkable literacy campaign reduced illiteracy in the country to less than one seventh. Free education was established and a free health service. Infant mortality was reduced by a third. Polio was eradicated.
The United States denounced these achievements as Marxist/Leninist subversion. In the view of the US government, a dangerous example was being set. If Nicaragua was allowed to establish basic norms of social and economic justice, if it was allowed to raise the standards of health care and education and achieve social unity and national self respect, neighbouring countries would ask the same questions and do the same things. There was of course at the time fierce resistance to the status quo in El Salvador.
I spoke earlier about ‘a tapestry of lies’ which surrounds us. President Reagan commonly described Nicaragua as a ‘totalitarian dungeon’. This was taken generally by the media, and certainly by the British government, as accurate and fair comment. But there was in fact no record of death squads under the Sandinista government. There was no record of torture. There was no record of systematic or official military brutality. No priests were ever murdered in Nicaragua. There were in fact three priests in the

page 6
government, two Jesuits and a Maryknoll missionary. The totalitarian dungeons were actually next door, in El Salvador and Guatemala. The United States had brought down the democratically elected government of Guatemala in 1954 and it is estimated that over 200,000 people had been victims of successive military dictatorships.
Six of the most distinguished Jesuits in the world were viciously murdered at the Central American University in San Salvador in 1989 by a battalion of the Alcatl regiment trained at Fort Benning, Georgia, USA. That extremely brave man Archbishop Romero was assassinated while saying mass. It is estimated that 75,000 people died. Why were they killed? They were killed because they believed a better life was possible and should be achieved. That belief immediately qualified them as communists. They died because they dared to question the status quo, the endless plateau of poverty, disease, degradation and oppression, which had been their birthright.
The United States finally brought down the Sandinista government. It took some years and considerable resistance but relentless economic persecution and 30,000 dead finally undermined the spirit of the Nicaraguan people. They were exhausted and poverty stricken once again. The casinos moved back into the country. Free health and free education were over. Big business returned with a vengeance. ‘Democracy’ had prevailed.
But this ‘policy’ was by no means restricted to Central America. It was conducted throughout the world. It was never-ending. And it is as if it never happened.
The United States supported and in many cases engendered every right wing military dictatorship in the world after the end of the Second World War. I refer to Indonesia, Greece, Uruguay, Brazil, Paraguay, Haiti, Turkey, the Philippines, Guatemala, El Salvador, and, of course, Chile. The horror the United States inflicted upon Chile in 1973 can never be purged and can never be forgiven.
Hundreds of thousands of deaths took place throughout these countries. Did they take place? And are they in all cases attributable to US foreign policy? The answer is yes they did take place and they are attributable to American foreign policy. But you wouldn’t know it.
It never happened. Nothing ever happened. Even while it was happening it wasn’t happening. It didn’t matter. It was of no interest. The crimes of the United States have been systematic, constant, vicious, remorseless, but very few people have actually talked about them. You have to hand it to America. It has exercised a quite clinical manipulation of power worldwide while masquerading as a force for universal good. It’s a brilliant, even witty, highly successful act of hypnosis.

page 7
I put to you that the United States is without doubt the greatest show on the road. Brutal, indifferent, scornful and ruthless it may be but it is also very clever. As a salesman it is out on its own and its most saleable commodity is self love. It’s a winner. Listen to all American presidents on television say the words, ‘the American people’, as in the sentence, ‘I say to the American people it is time to pray and to defend the rights of the American people and I ask the American people to trust their president in the action he is about to take on behalf of the American people.’
It’s a scintillating stratagem. Language is actually employed to keep thought at bay. The words ‘the American people’ provide a truly voluptuous cushion of reassurance. You don’t need to think. Just lie back on the cushion. The cushion may be suffocating your intelligence and your critical faculties but it’s very comfortable. This does not apply of course to the 40 million people living below the poverty line and the 2 million men and women imprisoned in the vast gulag of prisons, which extends across the US.
The United States no longer bothers about low intensity conflict. It no longer sees any point in being reticent or even devious. It puts its cards on the table without fear or favour. It quite simply doesn’t give a damn about the United Nations, international law or critical dissent, which it regards as impotent and irrelevant. It also has its own bleating little lamb tagging behind it on a lead, the pathetic and supine Great Britain.
What has happened to our moral sensibility? Did we ever have any? What do these words mean? Do they refer to a term very rarely employed these days – conscience? A conscience to do not only with our own acts but to do with our shared responsibility in the acts of others? Is all this dead? Look at Guantanamo Bay. Hundreds of people detained without charge for over three years, with no legal representation or due process, technically detained forever. This totally illegitimate structure is maintained in defiance of the Geneva Convention. It is not only tolerated but hardly thought about by what’s called the ‘international community’. This criminal outrage is being committed by a country, which declares itself to be ‘the leader of the free world’. Do we think about the inhabitants of Guantanamo Bay? What does the media say about them? They pop up occasionally – a small item on page six. They have been consigned to a no man’s land from which indeed they may never return. At present many are on hunger strike, being force-fed, including British residents. No niceties in these force-feeding procedures. No sedative or anaesthetic. Just a tube stuck up your nose and into your throat. You vomit blood. This is torture. What has the British Foreign Secretary said about this? Nothing. What has the British Prime Minister said about this? Nothing. Why not? Because the United States has said: to criticise our conduct in Guantanamo Bay constitutes an unfriendly act. You’re either with us or against us. So Blair shuts up.

page 8
The invasion of Iraq was a bandit act, an act of blatant state terrorism, demonstrating absolute contempt for the concept of international law. The invasion was an arbitrary military action inspired by a series of lies upon lies and gross manipulation of the media and therefore of the public; an act intended to consolidate American military and economic control of the Middle East masquerading – as a last resort – all other justifications having failed to justify themselves – as liberation. A formidable assertion of military force responsible for the death and mutilation of thousands and thousands of innocent people.
We have brought torture, cluster bombs, depleted uranium, innumerable acts of random murder, misery, degradation and death to the Iraqi people and call it ‘bringing freedom and democracy to the Middle East’.
How many people do you have to kill before you qualify to be described as a mass murderer and a war criminal? One hundred thousand? More than enough, I would have thought. Therefore it is just that Bush and Blair be arraigned before the International Criminal Court of Justice. But Bush has been clever. He has not ratified the International Criminal Court of Justice. Therefore if any American soldier or for that matter politician finds himself in the dock Bush has warned that he will send in the marines. But Tony Blair has ratified the Court and is therefore available for prosecution. We can let the Court have his address if they’re interested. It is Number 10, Downing Street, London.
Death in this context is irrelevant. Both Bush and Blair place death well away on the back burner. At least 100,000 Iraqis were killed by American bombs and missiles before the Iraq insurgency began. These people are of no moment. Their deaths don’t exist. They are blank. They are not even recorded as being dead. ‘We don’t do body counts,’ said the American general Tommy Franks.
Early in the invasion there was a photograph published on the front page of British newspapers of Tony Blair kissing the cheek of a little Iraqi boy. ‘A grateful child,’ said the caption. A few days later there was a story and photograph, on an inside page, of another four-year-old boy with no arms. His family had been blown up by a missile. He was the only survivor. ‘When do I get my arms back?’ he asked. The story was dropped. Well, Tony Blair wasn’t holding him in his arms, nor the body of any other mutilated child, nor the body of any bloody corpse. Blood is dirty. It dirties your shirt and tie when you’re making a sincere speech on television.
The 2,000 American dead are an embarrassment. They are transported to their graves in the dark. Funerals are unobtrusive, out of harm’s way. The mutilated rot in their beds, some for the rest of their lives. So the dead and the mutilated both rot, in different kinds of graves.

page 9
Here is an extract from a poem by Pablo Neruda, ‘I’m Explaining a Few Things’:

And one morning all that was burning,
one morning the bonfires
leapt out of the earth
devouring human beings
and from then on fire,
gunpowder from then on,
and from then on blood.
Bandits with planes and Moors,
bandits with finger-rings and duchesses,
bandits with black friars spattering blessings
came through the sky to kill children
and the blood of children ran through the streets
without fuss, like children’s blood.
Jackals that the jackals would despise
stones that the dry thistle would bite on and spit out,
vipers that the vipers would abominate.
Face to face with you I have seen the blood
of Spain tower like a tide
to drown you in one wave
of pride and knives.
Treacherous
generals:
see my dead house,
look at broken Spain:
from every house burning metal flows
instead of flowers
from every socket of Spain
Spain emerges
and from every dead child a rifle with eyes
and from every crime bullets are born
which will one day find
the bull’s eye of your hearts.
And you will ask: why doesn’t his poetry
speak of dreams and leaves
and the great volcanoes of his native land.
Come and see the blood in the streets.
Come and see
the blood in the streets.
Come and see the blood
in the streets!*

page 10
Let me make it quite clear that in quoting from Neruda’s poem I am in no way comparing Republican Spain to Saddam Hussein’s Iraq. I quote Neruda because nowhere in contemporary poetry have I read such a powerful visceral description of the bombing of civilians.
I have said earlier that the United States is now totally frank about putting its cards on the table. That is the case. Its official declared policy is now defined as ‘full spectrum dominance’. That is not my term, it is theirs. ‘Full spectrum dominance’ means control of land, sea, air and space and all attendant resources.
The United States now occupies 702 military installations throughout the world in 132 countries, with the honourable exception of Sweden, of course. We don’t quite know how they got there but they are there all right.
The United States possesses 8,000 active and operational nuclear warheads. Two thousand are on hair trigger alert, ready to be launched with 15 minutes warning. It is developing new systems of nuclear force, known as bunker busters. The British, ever cooperative, are intending to replace their own nuclear missile, Trident. Who, I wonder, are they aiming at? Osama bin Laden? You? Me? Joe Dokes? China? Paris? Who knows? What we do know is that this infantile insanity – the possession and threatened use of nuclear weapons – is at the heart of present American political philosophy. We must remind ourselves that the United States is on a permanent military footing and shows no sign of relaxing it.
Many thousands, if not millions, of people in the United States itself are demonstrably sickened, shamed and angered by their government’s actions, but as things stand they are not a coherent political force – yet. But the anxiety, uncertainty and fear which we can see growing daily in the United States is unlikely to diminish.
I know that President Bush has many extremely competent speech writers but I would like to volunteer for the job myself. I propose the following short address which he can make on television to the nation. I see him grave, hair carefully combed, serious, winning, sincere, often beguiling, sometimes employing a wry smile, curiously attractive, a man’s man.
‘God is good. God is great. God is good. My God is good. Bin Laden’s God is bad. His is a bad God. Saddam’s God was bad, except he didn’t have one. He was a barbarian. We are not barbarians. We don’t chop people’s heads off. We believe in freedom. So does God. I am not a barbarian. I am the democratically elected leader of a freedom-loving democracy. We are a compassionate society. We give compassionate electrocution and compassionate lethal injection. We are a great nation. I am not a

page 11
dictator. He is. I am not a barbarian. He is. And he is. They all are. I possess moral authority. You see this fist? This is my moral authority. And don’t you forget it.’
A writer’s life is a highly vulnerable, almost naked activity. We don’t have to weep about that. The writer makes his choice and is stuck with it. But it is true to say that you are open to all the winds, some of them icy indeed. You are out on your own, out on a limb. You find no shelter, no protection – unless you lie – in which case of course you have constructed your own protection and, it could be argued, become a politician.
I have referred to death quite a few times this evening. I shall now quote a poem of my own called ‘Death’.
Where was the dead body found? Who found the dead body? Was the dead body dead when found? How was the dead body found?
Who was the dead body?
Who was the father or daughter or brother Or uncle or sister or mother or son Of the dead and abandoned body?
Was the body dead when abandoned? Was the body abandoned? By whom had it been abandoned?
Was the dead body naked or dressed for a journey?
What made you declare the dead body dead? Did you declare the dead body dead? How well did you know the dead body? How did you know the dead body was dead?
Did you wash the dead body Did you close both its eyes Did you bury the body Did you leave it abandoned Did you kiss the dead body

page 12
When we look into a mirror we think the image that confronts us is accurate. But move a millimetre and the image changes. We are actually looking at a never-ending range of reflections. But sometimes a writer has to smash the mirror – for it is on the other side of that mirror that the truth stares at us.
I believe that despite the enormous odds which exist, unflinching, unswerving, fierce intellectual determination, as citizens, to define the real truth of our lives and our societies is a crucial obligation which devolves upon us all. It is in fact mandatory.
If such a determination is not embodied in our political vision we have no hope of restoring what is so nearly lost to us – the dignity of man.

* from Pablo Neruda Tercera Residencia, “Explico Algunas Cosas” in Selected Poems by Pablo Neruda. Edited and translated by Nathaniel Tarn. Jonathan Cape, London 1970.

Artistic Research

2005-12-06T16:20:00.000-08:00

The following text was given as a discussion paper in Research in Art, Art in Research -symposium held at the University of Minnesota Dec 6th, 2005.

"I think it is precisely the total absence of all false hopes that brings out the depth of the necessary change. It has been said that reality is only adequately represented in its most extreme forms. In its normal forms, it doesn't reveal what it actually is. You have, if you want to really judge a repressive society, to go to the mental institutions, the insane asylums, the prisons, whatever are the extreme manifestations. Can the same be said with respect to art?" -- Herbert Marcuse

"In 1958 I wrote the following: ‘There are no hard distinctions between what is real and what is unreal, nor between what is true and what is false. A thing is not necessarily either true or false; it can be both true and false.’ I believe that these assertions still make sense and do still apply to the exploration of reality through art. So as a writer I stand by them but as a citizen I cannot. As a citizen I must ask: What is true? What is false?" - H. Pinter (from his Nobel Lecture, read more: www.svenskaakademien.se)

"But in the measure that history moves forward, and with it the struggle of the proletariat assumes clearer outlines, they no longer need to seek science in their minds; they have only to take note of what is happening before their eyes and to become its mouthpiece. So long as they look for science and merely make systems, so long as they are at the beginning of the struggle, they see in poverty nothing but poverty, without seeing in it the revolutionary, subversive side, which will overthrow the old society. From this moment, science, which is a product of the historical movement, has associated itself consciously with it, has ceased to be doctrinaire and has become revolutionary." - Marx

In this presentation I would like to explicate the concept of artistic research from methodological point of view. That is, I am going to give you an idea what we mean by artistic research in our recently published book by the same name (Hannula et al. 2005). As we know art can be approach from numerous different angles be it history, aesthetics, philosophy, education, sociology, or something else. Our point of view is that of artistic experience and artistic practice. In other words we are proposing an approach in which an artist could study her own creative process and artistic work reflectively, and in a work-in-progress sort of way. Artistic research is a form of study in which experience reflectively changes itself, and in which all possible areas of experience are at play, even those, which do not lend themselves to easy conceptualization. This is a core meaning of the concept of artistic research. This also brings it close to such methodologies as action research, ethnography, participatory research, narrative research, life-history, and biographical methods, teachers-as-researchers approach, and so forth.

Our purpose was to develop an approach “from below”, that is, to encourage to research starting from personal experience, observations, and intuition, not from theories “from above”. This is not to suggest that theories could not be constructed, but that in artistic research they must be particular and describe specific phenomena at hand. We wanted to claim that by studying their work themselves, and developing understanding of artistic ways of being and existing, artist can serve the general interest in human sciences.

We published our book in the situation in which there are more and more demands for social and academic accountability – or effectiveness or results – of arts. If universities, especially research universities, and other institutions of higher education are worth of the name, research work should be their number one priority. In this situation an obvious fear was that if academic community in arts did not have an explicit idea of their research, or even some coordinates for developing and guiding their research practices, then someone else would set the standards for artistic research. Furthermore it was probable that without methodological openings arts would be in trouble both financially and substantially as parts of universities. That was the ugly side of the matter.

The more positive side was, and still is, that by writing a book and evoking conversation about research in art and art in research, we could try to keep the initiative in the hands of academic community. Thus in this respect the case of artistic research fills classical definition of hegemonic struggle, that is, who has a final say in the discussion, whose voice will be heard? In this struggle we wanted to have an advantage. And I predict that these demands will be here soon if not already. In Finland it is the government that is giving pressures for the research community, here in the US, I assume, it is the market. However, Michael Young (2005, 46), a famous British sociologist of education, has stated quite controversially that centralizing state might undermine high quality post-compulsory education, and discipline-based research “even more than an education system based on the market.”

Before introducing the two methodological principles what we are proposing for artistic research, let me say few words of my own position stemming from the tradition of critical pedagogy, which has its roots in the works of Marx, Gramsci, Freire, Marcuse and others.

To put it briefly, from the angle of critical pedagogy research as well as education and the arts are politics, and value neutral, apparently objective research from a bird’s eye view is a practical impossibility. From critical point of view arts represent an area of experiences “inaccessible to other experiences, a dimension in which human beings, nature, and things no longer stand under the law of the established reality principle” (Marcuse cit. in Brookfield 2005, 203) governed by the market. Art cannot represent revolution or social transformation without losing its own autonomy, or its value. But as it has its own freedom, and just because of this, and through its style and overall aesthetic dimension art can open eyes and ears, as well as venues of political liberation (ibid. 202). In the world of “advertising clutter and mood drugs, infotainment and virtual violence, endless spectacle and technologies of disconnection”, art is a necessary ingredient of “mental environmentalism” (see MacKinnon 2005).

In the human sciences there has been a lively conversation about the meaning of language, especially the meaning of narratives, representations, rhetoric, metaphors, and different styles of writing. These topics have also included the aesthetics of scientific work. As sociologist Robert Nisbet writes in his book length essay Sociology as an Art Form in 1976, “sociology is, without a question, one of the sciences, but it is also one of the arts – nourished, as I argue in this book, by precisely the same kinds of creative imagination which are to be found in such areas as music, painting, poetry, the novel, and drama” (p. 9). Nisbet is harsh critique of positivism, the idea of unified and universal scientific method since this blind faith represents not science but scientism, which, in Nisbet’s view, “is science with the spirit of discovery and creation left out” (p. 4).

In other words, researchers should not follow the narrowest, method-fetishist paths, but find their own routes that, in turn, could enrich other fields of human sciences. They should try to keep they minds and bodies open in reflecting their work without any ready-made theoretical frame of references.

TWO PRINCIPLES, DEMOCRACY OF EXPERIENCES FIRST

But let me now go to the two theoretical and methodological premises of artistic research, namely those of democracy of experiences, and methodological abundance.

By democracy of experiences we refer to the idea that in artistic research and elsewhere all experiences are potentially valuable, and in the same line: no demarcation, or hierarchy can be drawn between them in the first place. They represent the shared lifeworld in its richness, and therefore valuable source of both art and research. This holds true also in terms of different disciplines. There is no epistemological ground to keep some science more mature than other, for what is meant by scientific maturity? Is it better to have one paradigm, two competing paradigms, or perhaps three or more different paradigms? The more the better, would be our preference, for it is easy to inhale and exhale in such a situation.

Our concept of artistic experience springs from that of John Dewey who once pointed out that “art is is a particular quality of human experience that to some degree could be present in any interaction an individual had with the world.” According to Dewey art is a process that can be experienced when a certain quality of attentiveness and emotion are part of the engagement. (cited in Clandinin & Huber 2002, 162.) Thus it is a human potential, at least to some extent conceivable to all. This is another reason to think that every experience must count in doing artistic research. Accordingly, one must keep in mind that experience does not somehow “naturally” divide into the compartments of art and research.

Before the 19th century there was hardly any substantial separation between art and science. Both were treated as equal and parallel areas of human curiosity and inspiration. (Nisbet 1976, 9.) Thus we should not to confuse disciplinary politics and historically established institutional boundaries with genuine enthusiasm for arts and sciences. Too often we do just that hiding behind disciplinary boundaries, and taking a fixed position to rule out this or that as not scientific or artistic – at least not enough. This is not an attitude of researcher; it is an attitude of a bureaucrat, or as I would like to call it, after Jean Baudrillard ‘conspiracy of art and sciences’ (see Baudrillard 2005), or more aptly, in the spirit of Hans Christian Andersen – ‘the Emperor has no clothes-syndrome:

The emperor marched in the procession under the beautiful canopy, and all who saw him in the street and out of the windows exclaimed: “Indeed, the emperor’s new suit is incomparable! What a long train he has! How well it fits him!” Nobody wished to let others know he saw nothing, for then he would have been unfit for his office or too stupid. Never emperor’s clothes were more admired. “But he has nothing on at all,” said a little child at last. (hca.gilead.org.il/emperor.html 11/30/05)

This is often the case in the halls of academia when nobody dares to ask the obvious question. If we wanted to advance arts and sciences we should look for the similarities in arts and sciences, and not so much differences. Thus, just for the sake of play on words, I am proposing the idea of “methodology of similarities” that would study – not inter-disciplinary differences, but – inter-disciplinary similarities, and in contrast to logic of demonstration “underlying act of discovery or illumination or invention that is the clue to all genuine creative work” (Nisbet 1976, p. 5). Elliott Eisner, a prominent thinker in art education, has put the idea of similarities between art and science in brief by stating: “After all science at its best is an art. Artless science isn’t very pretty” (Eisner 2005). In Eisner’s view the same goes with art and education. At best education is art, and education without artistic touch isn’t very pretty either. (Various practices in the arts are theoretical, althought often in a tacit and hidden way, and research is also a certain practice with its own acts, habits, and rituals. To me the lesson is that it is crucial for the university students - not to mention university teachers - to learn to live in both of these worlds, to understand both languages of arts and science in developing their "inquiring minds".)

Search for and respect of similarities is familiar from many fields of study, and thinking traditions from philosophy to literacy and from sociology to educational studies. Robert Nisbet has the following position:

For a long time now, though only really since the early nineteenth century, we have perpetuated the delusion that art and science are by their nature very different from one another. It is high time this delusion is ended, and reluctant sociologist may take heart from the fact that for a good while the really great scientists of our century, in physics, mathematics, biology, and other spheres, have been emphasizing the basic unity of art and science. (p. 8)

Nisbet does not refer only to cognitive and formal similarities between arts and sciences, and their creative impulses, but also to their themes in a given historical era. For example in 19th century both artist and social theorist painted provocative and illuminative portraits of different social actors. Among the many exemplars of this conservative yet original social thinker are the influential writings of Karl Marx, and especially his Communist Manifesto written with Friedrich Engels. Nisbet expects that “no one who has ever read Communist Manifesto is likely to forget the portrait of the bourgeous. . . . In giving last rites, as it were, to the bourgeoisie, Marx created a portrait that has survived to this day.”

Umberto Eco, an Italian semiotic, and novelist, has come to the same conclusion in his short text on the style of Communist Manifesto. Writes Eco (2004, 26-27): “Even apart from it s genuinely poetic capacity to invent memorable metaphors, the Manifesto remains a masterpiece of political (but not only political) oratory, and it ought to be studied at school along with Cicero’s Invectives against Catiline and Mark Anthony’s speech over Julius Caesar’s body in Shakespeare, especially as it is not impossible, given Marx’s familiarity with classical culture, that he had in mind these very texts when writing it.”

Maybe it would be good to study at school the works of Friedrich Nietzsche too. Think his self-portrait Ecce Homo, not at all naturalistic story of his philosophical life, written in rhapsodic style how he is so wise, and so clever, why he writes such good books, and other such themes. His contemporaries doomed the work as a product of insane mind, but later it was considered as a masterpiece in its triumph of style, “a work of art” marking “one of the highest points of German prose” (Kaufman 1967, 201).

And talking about Nietzsche, we can think of creative process in art and sciences as an interplay between his Apollonian and Dionysian principles of being, and acting in the world (The Birth of Tragedy). The Apollonian refers to analytical principle, and to rationalization, classification, counting, forming and structuring. Thus, sculpture is the most Apollonian of the arts, since it relies entirely on form for its effects.

The Dionysian principle as opposed to the Apollonian breaks down individual identity and brings into surface something normally hidden. All forms of enthusiasm and ecstasy represent Dionysian principle, for in such states people are tented to give up their individuality, and submerge in a greater whole. Thus, music is the most Dionysian of the arts, since it appeals directly to instinctive emotions and not primarily to reasoning mind. Dionysian thinking has excessive characteristics; and such thinkers, educators, and researchers go beyond ordinary boundaries, and the normative guidelines found for example from research method textbooks.

In sum democracy of experiences in arts and sciences, and for that matter in education, describes the process whereby artist, researcher, or educator for that matter can find and acquire ideas, which are not closely related, from various sources, from the richness of experiences, artistic or otherwise. Democracy of experience is respecting the diversity in thinking and styles of doing research.

WHAT ABOUT THE SECOND PRINCIPLE, THAT OF METHODOLOGICAL ABUNDANCE?

The concept of methodological abundance comes from a German-born philosopher of science Paul Feyerabend (1924–1994) (The guy in the picture is not Feyerabend, but Lenin in his Mausoleum; Feyerabend did referred to Lenin in his Agaist Method). According to him, the world is too diverse to be reduced to a single method or even a single philosophy of science viewpoint (Feyerabend 1999). Behind the methodological abundance are also the political upheavals that have occurred in the real world, or the so-called risk society, and what one could call the war and catastrophe-proneness of Western nation states. Feyerabend felt the ugly consequences of monolithic real politics, and was wounded when serving in the German army during the Second World War.

In his magnum opus, Against Method (1975), Feyerabend argues that the world is so diverse, chaotic and surprising that the belief in one all-powerful and all-encompassing method is nothing more than self-delusion. The richness of the features of reality is not organized according to beautiful models but instead requires an anarchistic starting point. He writes: “Anarchism, while perhaps not the most attractive political philosophy, is certainly excellent medicine for epistemology and for the philosophy of science” (ibid., 9).

The frozen methods of positivism or theories about rationality are based on a reductivist view of the world. Therefore, the only principle that can be defended under all circumstances is “anything goes”. It means that all methods and ways of perception are in their basic premise possible and nothing is excluded when aiming to understand the world.

Why, then, does Feyerabend bother to overturn our belief in methodologies? In his autobiography Killing Time (1994, 179), he explains his motives as follows: “One of my motives for writing Against Method was to free people from the tyranny of philosophical obfuscators and abstract concepts such as ‘truth’, ‘reality’, or ‘objectivity’, which narrow people’s vision and ways of being in the world.” A second motive is the concern for scientific change, that which (having one direction and one goal) is called progress. Feyerabend, like many other post-60s philosophers of science, claims that following one method leads to a standstill in science, no matter what the discipline in question. Feyerabend's ideas are important in the field of art research: think about thruth in painting, in poem, or in melody. Where's the truth in them? I am tempted to think that there is no place for thruth at least in the sense of correspondence to some outer reality, or even as a coherence between other paintings, poems, or melodies. The whole idea is nothing more than absurd. Instead it is possible to think that pieces of art must be interpreted, and put to some context in order to have this or that meaning. Through these meanings they are part of our lifeworlds in different ways.

And, as Harold Pinter puts it in his 2005 Nobel Lecture "Art, Truth and Politics", truth in drama, and in the arts in general, is forever elusive. "You never quite find it but the search for it is compulsive. The search is clearly what drives the endeavour. The search is your task. More often than not you stumble upon the truth in the dark, colliding with it or just glimpsing an image or a shape which seems to correspond to the truth, often without realising that you have done so. But the real truth is that there never is any such thing as one truth to be found in dramatic art. There are many. These truths challenge each other, recoil from each other, reflect each other, ignore each other, tease each other, are blind to each other. Sometimes you feel you have the truth of a moment in your hand, then it slips through your fingers and is lost.

This demands that in art research - as well as in education - we should try write open texts, divergent texts, which not only inform but also speak consciously and reflectively to us at the scale of pleasure, as Feyerabend (1999, vii) says:

Writing has become a very pleasurable activity, almost like composing a work of art. There is some overall pattern, very vague at first, but sufficiently well-defined to provide me with a starting point. Then come the details – arranging the words in sentences and paragraphs. I choose my words very carefully – they must sound right, must have the right rhythm, and their meaning must be slightly off-centre; nothing dulls the mind so thoroughly as a sequence of familiar notions. Then comes the story. It should be interesting and comprehensible, and it should have some unusual twists. I avoid ‘systematic’ analysis: the elements hang together beautifully, but the argument itself is from outer space, as it were, unless it is connected with the lives and interests of individuals or special groups. Of course, it is already so connected, otherwise it would not be understood, but the connection is concealed, which means that strictly speaking, a ‘systematic’ analysis is a fraud. So why not avoid the fraud by using stories right away?

Bert Terpstra, the editor of Feyerabend’s posthumously-published book Conquest of Abundance. A Tale of Abstraction Versus the Richness of Being (1999), writes that during the editing he came to understood the worldview according to Feyerabend: “In place of a ‘frozen’, material universe, I could perceive an open and changeable reality, and I became able to see, and thus I was liberated from, all sorts of fixed ideas about ‘the way things are’.”

The idea of the “abundance of reality”, developed and emphasized continuously by Feyerabend, belongs to a tradition of thought, according to which the research objects in the human sciences – Feyerabend would undoubtedly also add the natural sciences – are constructed by writing about them rather than first discovering them and then writing about them. Writing is simultaneously thinking and doing, both observing the world and creating it.

When discussing artistic research, it is important to keep in mind that there are ways of perceiving the world other than writing – not least the rich languages of music and the wondrous sensations they produce. Feyerabend (1999, 268) argues: “Our surroundings, the entire physical universe included, are not simply given. They respond to our actions and ideas. Theories and principles must therefore be used with care. Most of them exclude specifics and personal matters; speaking bluntly (though not untruthfully), we can say that they are superficial and inhumane.”

SING TOGETHER, WALK TOGETHER

There is a lot of talk nowadays about the social, and even political relevance of art. For example the Department of Theatre Arts & Dance at the University of Minnesota states in its website (www.theatre.umn.edu/): “In keeping with the University’s three public purposes—research and discovery; teaching and learning; outreach and public service—our primary mission is to educate our students and our audiences about the performing arts, and about the social issues and human emotions the arts speak to so powerfully.” This statement refers to the ultimate power of artistic expression, its capability to offer different point of views. But if we take the idea of public engagement seriously, as I think we should, then it is all the more important to begin to develop ways to communicate with the public also in the area of art research. As a starting point this demands that we reject the positivistic ideals of research, and start to think research as an open and critical field of human invention.

By referring to an open and critical space in art research I am also speaking on behalf of strong and autonomic research community that guarantees the freedom to ask critically, think critically, speak critically, and write critically. It was Herbert Marcuse who suggested that all critical and creative thinking needs space and time; and that is why we have university. This also why I am sometimes struck by the fact that people seem to be so busy, always looking their schedules as if there is everything else in their academic life but time for serious thinking and creating. Nevertheless I am still dreaming of universities as safe havens for the ideals of critical scrutiny, and of truly democratic society. In this sense I am thinking of art as an area of both democracy of experiences, and methodological abundance. These principles refer to the idea of artistic research as a link between teaching, research and artistic practice, and to view art as a process from artists’ point of view.

Pretty much in this same tone, Erich Fromm, a German philosopher and critical social psychologist, emphasized the profound liberatory meaning of arts in people’s life. In his book The Sane Society published in 1955 Fromm criticized the modern distinction between the artist as a special profession, and people as mere consumers of art. In his view art belonged to everyone. He had difficulties in finding a proper word for describing his own position that stressed the importance of arts in fully comprehending and enjoying the world. In the lack of a better word he referred to ‘collective art’, which meant, “to respond to the world with our senses in a meaningful, skilled, productive, active, shared way” (italics in original, p. 347). He stressed the idea of sharing in contrast to the modern, individualistic conception of art. Collective and shared art experience and practice is something, which permits people to feel one with others; it is an integral part of life, and “corresponds to a basic human need” (p. 348). The transformation of society from destructively insane into life-sustaining and sane demands, in Fromm’s view, that people have opportunities to “sing together, walk together, dance together, admire together” (p. 349), together, and not as members of a lonely crowd in the Mall of America.

References

Baudrillard, Jean (2005). The Conspiracy of Art. New York: Semiotext(e).
Brookfield, Stephen (2005). The Power of Critical Theory. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.
Clandinin, Jean & Huber, Janice (2002). Narrative Inquiry: Toward Understanding Life’s Artistry. Curriculum Inquiry 32 (2), 161-169.
Eco, Umberto (2004). On Literature. Orlando: Harcourt.
Eisner, Elliot (2005). Two Visions of Education. Teachers College Record. Date Published: Nov. 07, 2005, http://www.tcrecord.org, ID Number: 12234, Date Accessed: 11/24/2005
Feyerabend, Paul (1975). Against Method. London: Verso.
Feyerabend, Paul (1994). Killing Time. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.
Feyerabend, Paul (1999). Conquest of Abundance. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.
Fromm, Erich (1990). The Sane Society. New York: Owl Book.
Hannula, Mika, Suoranta, Juha & Vadén, Tere 2005. Artistic Research – Theories, Methods, and Practices. Helsinki: Academy of Fine Arts & University of Gothenburg.
Kaufman,Walter (1967). Editor’s Introduction. In Nietzsche, Friedrich: On the Genealogy of Morals / Ecce Homo. New York: Vintage, 201-214.
MacKinnon, James (2005). The Mental Environmentalists Are Coming. Adbusters 14 (1).
Nisbet, Robert (1976). Sociology as an Art Form. London: Oxford University Press.
Pinter, Harold (2005). Arts, Politics and Truth. Nobel Lecture Dec. 7, 2005. www.svenskaakademien.se (10.12.2005)
Young, Michael (2005). Government Intervention and the Problem of Knowledge in Education Policy. In Koski, Leena & Sabour, M’hammed (Eds.). Koulutuksen merkitystä etsimässä / Searching for the Meaning of Education and Culture. Joensuu: Joensuu University Press, 39-48.

It is the First Advent, light a candle companéra!

2005-11-27T13:45:00.000-08:00

In the spring 1999 bishops of the Finnish Evangelical-Lutheran Church published the pamphlet entitled "Towards the Common Good. Comment on the Future of the Welfare State" (find the document in Finnish at www.evl.fi). Their thesis was rather liberal if not even progressive, and offered much to think about in critical pedagogy, too. No wonder that the rich, and their interest groups (including some of the media) felt at the time that the Church has moved into dangerous, leftist, even radical direction. It was not everyone's church anymore, meaning theirs', but only Social Democrats. Here is my draft translation of their core ideas:

“· Life is not about business and trading, consuming or market only, but giving and receiving, nursing and caring, keeping company and playing. (Elämä ei ole pelkästään kaupankäyntiä, kuluttamista ja markkinoita. Ihminen on myös lahjoittaja ja lahjojen vastaanottaja, hoitaja ja hoivaaja, seurustelija ja leikkijä.)
· Market is not faceless power, but consist of human beings who make economical decisions. (Markkinat eivät ole kasvottomia voimia. Ne muodostuvat ihmisistä, jotka tekevät taloudellisia päätöksiä.)
· Market has always a certain morality; it is the very moral that people actualize in using the power of market forces as buyers and sellers. (Markkinoilla on aina jokin moraali. Se on juuri se moraali, jota ihmiset toteuttavat käyttäessään markkinavoimien valtaa ostajina tai myyjinä.)
· Buyers and sellers should think the consequences of their actions and decisions to environment and society. (Myyjien ja ostajien on syytä arvioida, mitä seurauksia heidän toiminnastaan ja päätöksistään on ympäristölle ja yhteiskunnalle.)
· Competition cannot work properly without control by increasing market transparency, and giving customers better chances for conscious choices. (Kilpailu ei voi toimia hyvin, ellei sitä säädellä. Yksi tapa säädellä sitä on lisätä sen läpinäkyvyyttä ja antaa kuluttajille paremmat mahdollisuudet tehdä tietoisia valintoja.)
· Controlling global market need international resolution. In deciding global market regulations every parties need to be heard, and taken into account. At present ‘dollar and vote’ principle rules. (Kansainvälisten markkinoiden sääntelyyn tarvitaan ylikansallisia päätöksiä. Niitä tehtäessä on kuultava kaikkia osapuolia ja myös otettava kuultu huomioon. Tätä nykyä vallitsevana on "markka ja ääni" periaate.)
· International organizations must use pressure against those countries that accept immoral actions like child labor, environment damages, and feud of labor unions. (Kansainvälisten organisaatioiden tulee ottaa käyttöön painostuskeinoja sellaisia maita vastaan, jotka hyväksyvät moraalittoman toiminnan, esimerkiksi sen, että käytetään lapsityövoimaa, tuhotaan ympäristöä tai vainotaan ammattiyhdistysliikettä.)
· Finland can be an active partner in developing international legislation (like Tobin tax), which prevents various ill effects of the international money market, and crises due to speculation. (Kansainvälisten rahoitusmarkkinoiden haittavaikutuksia ja keinottelun aikaansaamia kriisejä voidaan ehkäistä valuuttakauppaveron kaltaisella kansainvälisellä lainsäädännöllä, jonka kehittämisessä Suomi voi olla aktiivinen osapuoli.)
· Socially responsible Nordic state is an achievement, which should not be eliminated. (Sosiaalista vastuuta kantava pohjoismainen yhteiskunta on saavutus, josta ei tule luopua.)
· Free market does not guarantee satisfactory living condition for all. Thus the state is needed, which protects the weak, and defends justice. (Vapaat markkinat eivät takaa kaikille ihmisille riittäviä elinmahdollisuuksia. Siksi tarvitaan valtiota, joka suojelee heikkoja ja puolustaa oikeudenmukaisuutta.)
· Abolishing poverty demands redistributing the wealth. Among other things this means that the strong and fortunate pay more taxes than the weak and poor. (Köyhyyden poistaminen edellyttää tulojen jakamista. Tämä tarkoittaa sitä, että vahvat ja hyväosaiset kantavat esimerkiksi verotuksessa suuremman taakan kuin heikot ja huono-osaiset.)
· We need various services invented by citizens’ themselves, and their driving power in concregations and in public sector. (Tarvitsemme kansalaisten itsensä kehittämiä palveluja ja heistä lähtevää uutta käyttövoimaa seurakuntiemme ja kuntiemme työhön.)
· The state has the overall responsibility for providing enough economical resources to municipalities in offering basic security for all inhabitants. (Valtiolla on kokonaisvastuu siitä, että kunnilla on taloudelliset mahdollisuudet tarjota riittävä perusturva kaikille asukkailleen.)
· Fair basic security should still cover living, education, and health for all regardless of their wealth and social status. (Perusturvan on edelleenkin ulotuttava toimeentuloon, koulutukseen ja terveydenhoitoon niin laajalti, että se palvelee kohtuullisesti kaikkia kansalaisia varallisuudesta ja yhteiskunnallisesta asemasta riippumatta.)

Helping the (First) World Poor

2005-11-23T22:22:00.000-08:00

Once upon a time there was a state-owned Venezuelan oil company, which decided to supply oil - well under market price - as a heating assistance to the poor US residents. ”The launch of the discounted heating oil program is meant to coincide with the Thanksgiving holiday and will benefit communities in poor communities of Boston, Massachusetts and of the Bronx, New York,” writes Global Exchange. And it is not only about helping the poor but also a nice victory for President Chavez in the media war between predatory capitalism and its contestants. (www.globalexchange.org/countries/americas/venezuela/3595.html).

Shit Theory

2005-11-17T09:06:00.000-08:00

Arto Salminen, a Finnish writer (22.10.1959-16.11.2005), lived at Hausjärvi, studied Finnish Language and Literature, worked as a journalist, and a taxi driver, wrote six novels (Refuge [1995], Warehouse [1998], Shit Theory [2001], No-envelope [2003], Slaughter [2004], and Fish Lie [2005]), suffered and was buried, but on the third day rose again in fulfillment of the Scriptures, ascended into heaven and is seated at the right hand of the Father. He will come again in glory to judge the living and the dead.

Lies, Damned Lies, and Statistics

2005-11-16T17:55:00.000-08:00

Mark Twain is reputed to have said: "There are lies, damned lies, and statistics.” This phenomenon is nicely captured by Darrell Huff in his little book entitled How to Lie with Statistics, but also by Finnish lady Kati Peltola in her commentary on the changes in Finnish taxation. Mrs. Peltola's Op-Ed in Finnish nation-wide newspaper Helsingin Sanomat’s (15.11.2005) is as follows:

“In November 2 Helsingin Sanomat reported how the Finnish rich made money out of their unearned incomes (incomes from capital). The newspaper tried to offer comfort by writing that the taxation of the wealthiest was cut only by the same amount as average wage earner’s. But this is true only in terms of taxation percent. The richest thousand with the biggest taxable income paid taxes 34,1 percent on an average, whereas an average wage earner paid 31,3 percent.
The richest’s tax rate decreased by 0,6 percent units from year 2003, an average wage earner’s tax rate dropped by 0,7 percent units. Even though I would not say that tax cut was concurrent. The richest thousand's average taxable incomes were two million euros. 0,6 percent tax cut makes 12 000 euros. It is not in pace with average tax cut that is 200 euros.
More proper would be to say that tax cut for the richest thousand happened 65 000 times faster than that of average wage earners.” -- My translation without permission.

Workers of the World: Unite! (Behind ‘Right Wing Worker’s’ Candidate)

2005-11-12T20:20:00.000-08:00

If you do not have an enemy, you must invent one. If you do not have a friend, engineer one. Among the big problems, and tasks of any political struggle, as Žižek points out, “is that of constructing the recognizable IMAGE of the enemy”. It is almost as big a problem as providing an image of a friend. “In short, the ‘enemy recognition’ is always a performative procedure which, in contrast to the deceiving appearances, brings to light/constructs the enemy’s ‘true face’.” Yes, and the same applies to the “friend recognition.”

Take the current Presidential campaign in Finland. The National Coalition (right wing) Party candidate Mr. Sauli Niinistö proclaims himself a President for the working class. He is EVERY WORKER’s president. To him there are no differences between works, but all work is equal; all work is without differences in quality, load, price, conditions, pay, or otherwise.

This wanna-be Worker’s Presidents’ rhetoric is killing in these times of political soap operas. It is as if he was consulted by some of the best propagandists of the times. You, Finnish blue- and white-collar workers, you, chain workers and representatives of precariat, and you without work – if you are wise, you better unite behind me.

Or, maybe Mr. Niinistö is not so very far from his Coalition party roots of the nineteenth century revolutions, and Romantic ideas, including the invention of the very concept of the worker? As another conservative, yet a sociologist, Robert Nisbet writes, during the nineteenth century “the image of the worker gradually became converted to that of an individual not only oppressed and exploited inhumanely but also possessed of a dignity, a worthiness, an underlying wisdom, and, in due time, a favored place in history.”

Will Mr. Niinistö succeed with his so-called defense of the working class? Will this appeal to the people, or does it sound a little too spurious when voiced by a right wing candidate, and an executive from European Central Bank? Or, is it an old Chinese (Sun Tzu’s) wisdom at work here: “Keep your friends close and your enemies closer?”

Mr. Niinistö’s twisted rhetoric is a logical extension of right wing’s hegemonic struggle against left’s last discursive resorts. It is almost up to a level of his comrade Mr. Antti Piippo, owner of Elqotec, who in Finnish journal Talouselämä (Economic Life) declared: “Globalization is the most important peace movement after the Second World War. It has helped hundreds of millions of people out of poverty. We bring common people work. Development money from Ministry for Foreign Affairs goes to buying luxury cars to the leaders of the people.”

If only there had not been that minor faux pas in the prime time news in front of one million Finnish voters. When asked, whom would he vote, if drop out of the second round, Mr. Niinistö’s replied: “Then I would vote the right wing worker’s candidate” (referring to the Center Party’s candidate). “Right wing worker’s candidate”? That slip of the tongue needs to be his last...

Protest

2005-11-06T18:53:00.000-08:00

More than a thousand high school and college student protested against war in Iraq, and Bush administration at the University of Minnesota campus in November 4th, 2005. At the same day thousands and thousands of other students were having their own marches and teach-ins in other campuses around the US. Protest are still sporadic, and the movement is relatively weak. Are the big questions drowning to too many points of view? What are the big questions?

Public Sociology

2005-10-31T15:12:00.000-08:00

In scratching the tenets of public sociology Michael Burawoy states, in his article The Critical Turn to Public Sociology (Critical Sociology 31 No 3), that public sociology’s “object and value are civil society and its resilience” (318). But civil society is an endangered species as “the national state becomes more socially irresponsible, as it becomes less concerned with its public mission and more with the private interest”, and “the welfare, caring, education, security burden is downloaded onto the locality” (321).

In this situation public sociologists need to stand with the people in their moral combat to reclaim the state, and make it “responsive to civil society, facilitating, promoting and protecting the conditions of participatory democracy” (325), welfare, and human society for all. Sociologist need to remember their disciplines ‘moral moment’ that was about to smother into paraded scientific professionalism.

Burawoy notes that the possibilities for public, engaged sociology varies by state. In the present US where government makes its utmost in escaping its duties in guaranteeing minimum welfare and universal medical benefits, protecting civil rights, or reducing racial segregation, public sociology can find its place in state rather than in federal level (321). In many third world countries sociology is public sociology almost by definition (319). In Scandinavia sociology has historically had relatively strong influence in governmental policymaking (321). (However, this has happened at the expense of critical autonomy, and certain moral sentiment. At least in Finland part of sociologist have conceived of living in the armpit of the regulatory state acting as “state intellectuals”, and served political elite with certain amount of policy power in themselves.)

“Thus, the necessity for public sociology comes from the ‘scissors’ movement – the disciplinary field of sociology drifting leftward as broader politics and economics moves rightward.” (324)

By any means necessary

2005-10-29T09:36:00.000-08:00

I wish I could agree with T. V. Reed's premise in his book The Art of Protest (2005) "that those forces labeled cultural may at times have a deeper and more widespread impact on most of our lives than political or economic forces." But maybe various forms of culture can advance social protest and political change alongside with other means. Picture by Eric Drooker www.Drooker.com

Protest as family activity

2005-10-28T10:09:00.000-08:00

Youth Against War and Racism (www.yawr.org) is organizing student walkouts in major cities on November 2, 2005 (Georg W. Bush's "re-election" anniversary), to demand an end to the war in Iraq, an end to military recruitment in schools, and to redirect war spending to education. Journalist Steve Brandt writes (www.startribune.com/stories/1592/5689671.html):

"Twin Cities-area high school students are being threatened with failing grades if they walk out next week to protest the Iraq war and military recruitment in schools, says a group known as Youth Against War and Racism. But school officials say that the students are OK if they get parental permission. (...)

In Minneapolis, for example, students under 18 need the permission of a parent or guardian to be excused for illness, religious purposes, recognized cultural observances, funerals or other family emergencies, or health or court appointments. But absences may also be excused with parental permission for "family activity" of up to five days. Collins said the district won't second-guess parents if they use this to excuse students for the walkout. And that entitles students to make up missed work or exams, he said.

The district said in a statement that although it's important for students to make their voices heard in a democratic society, it doesn't encourage walkouts for nonschool activities. It added that there are consequences for civil disobedience, and unexcused absences mean a student may not be able to make up work.

Youth Against War and Racism is asking students to walk out at 10:30 a.m. on Nov. 2. A noon protest is scheduled at the University of Minnesota's Coffman Memorial Union plaza, followed by a march to a nearby military recruiting station and a teach-in."

Cardenal's Case

2005-10-22T15:52:00.000-08:00

Last monday on Augsburg College Father Fernando Cardenal gave a speak as part of the Convocation Series titled "Global Citizens/Local Citizens." He joined the Jesuit order in 1952, was ordained a Catholic priest in 1967, and has led a life of service in Nicaragua. Cardenal became one of four priests in the Sandinista government during the revolution, leading their National Literacy Campaign. In 1984, the Jesuits expelled Cardenal from their order because of his work within the revolution. Despite his expulsion, he continued to live in his Jesuit community and to live out his vows. In 1997, after reviewing Cardenal’s case, the superior general reinstated him to the Jesuits, based on the fact that Cardenal’s actions were a clear example of conscientious objection. It is the only case in over 460 years of Jesuit history in which a priest expelled from the Jesuit’s was reinstated. Cardenal’s commitment and dedication to the poor continues. Today Cardenal is the director of Fé y Alegría (Faith and Happiness), a Jesuit project that teaches very poor children in Latin America.

Read here about the political conditions in Nicargua where he, among other revolutionaries for justice, has worked for decades: haw.yachana.org/resources/torture/grossman.html

Coragem de ser feliz

2005-10-19T12:36:00.000-08:00

During my early stay in University of Minnesota, I have had a change to meet wonderfully different people in terms of their interests, colors, sexual orientations, opinions, world views, ideas, aspirations, hopes, and sorrows. These encounters have convinced me, more and more, that in human sciences at large (in arts, and humanities as well as in social and educational sciences) we need to bring people together to share views, ideas, to collaborate. We need to see our work as unfinished, in the making, towards liberation.

As Augusto Boal, founder of the Theatre of the Oppressed, writes referring to Freire: “My fellow creature resembles me, but she is not me; she is similar to me, I resemble her. By engaging in dialogue we learn, the two of us gain, teacher and pupil, since we are all pupils, and all teachers. I exist because they exist. To write on a white sheet of paper one needs a black pen; to write on a blackboard the chalk must be a different colour. For to be, they must be.” --- And one wonders: does one need an occasional space of retreat, inwardness, for learning?

Fidernesto

2005-10-17T15:44:00.000-08:00

Encounters in the virtual world are sometimes surprising. The other day, chating in Skype, I suddenly realized to whom I was really talking to. Here is my interlocutor's picture.

At the Risk of Ridiculousness

2005-09-15T12:44:00.000-08:00

Here you can find something of interest to you to whom another world is possible, or to you, and to your students who want to facilitate liberatory discussions and action: www.newint.org. The no-nonsense series is especially interesting as is a book about Che Guevara: Che: Image of a Revolutionary. "Let me say, at the risk of seeming ridiculous, that the true revolutionary is guided by great feelings of love." -- El Che

In the Year of Catastrophy, Minnegrad, Aug. 15,

Yours Truly

J.S

Pena

2005-09-13T14:42:00.000-08:00

The following text is from the website (www.kirjasto.sci.fi/psaariko.htm) presenting Finnish poets and novelists. An introduction to Pentti Saarikoski - the leading Finnish poet of the 1960s, and later "the Best European Poet Alive" as he used to call himself, right before his death in 1983, - is reproduced here (without a permission) as a slightly edited and corrected version.

"Poet and a brilliant translator, the central figure in Finnish literature in the 1960s and 1970s. Saarikoski emerged into poetry somewhat like an enfant terrible, a combination of Dylan Thomas, Zorba the Greek, and Che Guevara. He wrote in simple, straight-forward language. He often used images from antiquity and contrasted everyday observations with philosophical insights, following free flow of thoughts.

Life is given to man
to make him consider carefully
the position he'd like to be dead in,

grey skies pass over,
the sky's a hanging garden
and earth comes into the mouth like bread.
(from Runot ja Hipponaksin runot, 1959)

Pentti Saarikoski was born in Impilahti into a family composed of civil servants, politicians, and small entrepreneurs. (...) Saarikoski studied literature and Greek at the University of Helsinki in the 1950s without receiving a degree. (...) In the early 1960s Saarikoski was already famous, not only as a poet and translator, but also as a bohemian. He had married about the time Runoja had appeared - it was his first marriage - but unable to settle down, he turned more and more to drink and by the autumn of 1962, he was on the brink of nervous breakdown. Saarikoski worked usually at home, in small apartments, where normal family life and writing intertwined, or conflicted: "These poems are written for her / under her eyes. (from En soisi sen päättyvän, 1968) Saarikoski was married four times, last time to Mia Berner, with whom he published the bilingual JA MEILLE JÄI KIIREETÖN ILTA / KVÄLLEN GÖR SIG INGEN BRÅDSKA (1975).

In the 1960s Saarikoski joined the Finnish Communist Party, as many other writers and artists. Politically Saarikoski was unorthodox, and in the magazine Aikalainen, which he edited and which was supported by the Finnish Communist Party, he published Mao Tse-tung's poems. (...) Saarikoski became one of the most visible intellectuals in the media, who was engaged in the front line of literary debates and political activities.

Partly to find peace for writing and to escape the publicity, Saarikoski made several journeys abroad. LAULU LAULULTA POIS (1966), a collection of poems, was born in Romania, where he was a quest of the local writers' association and participated in literature seminar on the works of Gheorghe Cosbuc. He had also an affair with the poet Sarah Kirsch, who moved in 1977 from German Democratic Republic to West Germany. AIKA PRAHASSA (1967) was written in Prague and in Tallin in Estonia, KIRJE VAIMOLLENI (1968, Swedish translation: Brev till hustrun), a stream-of-consciousness travel book, was mostly written in Dublin. It received poor critics in Finland but in Sweden Saarikoski was compared to such names as Strindberg and Henry Miller.

In Island Saarikoski started to work on KATSELEN STALININ PÄÄN YLI ULOS (1969), a collection of poems, where he took distance from the Communist movement and radicalism, stating that no revolution has overthrown the power. He is also afraid that in the new order there is no place for him: "What would happen to me / if there was a war and they closed the borders? I couldn't go anywhere, disqualified as I am / from soldiering; I suppose / I'd have to sit up nights, composing / orders for the day."

Saarikoski translated works from a number of authors into Finnish, among them J.D. Salinger, Euripides, Italo Calvino, Henry Miller, Allen Ginsberg, James Joyce, Sappho, and Philip Roth. The translation of Homer's Odyssey, based on Victor Bérard's edition, took only two years, which is a kind of world record. A number of translations appeared in the literary magazine Parnasso. James Joyce's Ulysses was one of Saarikoski's major works, which influenced also his other projects. Italo Calvino's humor left traces in his poems.

Saarikoski's favorite tool with English texts was Webster's Third New International Dictionary. Usually he did not follow slavishly the original writing. In The Odyssey by Homer he abandoned hexameter, which Otto Manninen had used in his unsurpassed translation from 1924, and developed a rhythmical prose style. Salinger's The Catcher in the Rye Saarikoski moulded into his own visionary Helsinki slang, not very faithfully to the world of Holden Caulfied. With J.P. Donleavy's famous novel The Ginger Man Saarikoski failed and another translator finished it. However, the work was credited to Saarikoski.

Because of heavy drinking, Saarikoski was hospitalized several times. Following disappointments in politics, Saarikoski become again interested in early Christianity, and started to translate Matthew's Gospel. Not very originally, he identified Jesus and his chosen followers with revolutionaries. Especially the character of Ernersto "Che" Guevara (1928-1967) fascinated him. After a catastrophic journey to London, Saarikoski was rushed to hospital. He weighted 57 kilos and was diagnosed with Alcoholismus chronicus, Epilepsia symtomatica, Chirrosis hepatis, and Encopresis. (...) Saarikoski's translation of the Gospel of St. Matthews, came out in 1969. The work was perhaps partly inspired by Pier Paolo Pasolini's film The Gospel According to St. Matthew (1964), a stark and sober retelling of the Gospel, which earned Pasolini the label of Catholic-Marxist.

Characteristic for Saarikoski's personal life was his nonconformist attitude to social conventions. At the same time his works showed influence from classical literature from Greece and Rome - this side in Saarikoski was not a sign of conservatism. He had a good nose for picking up dissident poets and philosophers of the classical world, such as Hipponax and Heraclitus, or drunkards, troublemakers, and sex maniacs, whose verses he presented in JALKAPOLKU (1977), a selection from The Greek Anthology.

In the 1970s Saarikoski retired from publicity. He moved with his wife to Kerava, where he become interested in Eino Leino (1878-1926), a poet, with whom he identified himself in the biography EINO LEINO (1974). His works showed resurgence of the Greek influence, and he became deeply preoccupied with contemporary science and the hazards of the nuclear age. In the essay 'Minun runoni ja minun aatteeni' (1978, my poems and my thoughts) he expressed hope that knowledge will win out over brute power.

Saarikoski moved to Sweden, where he lived from 1975 to 1983 with Mia Berner, a critic and university teacher, on the island of Tjörn near Valsäng. In 1975 they made a journey to Greece. Saarikoski, who did not drink as much as usually, fell asleep at the Acropolis.

In Sweden Saarikoski produced in his "second classical period" trilogy of verse, TANSSILATTIA VUORELLA, TANSSIINKUTSU and HÄMÄRÄN TANSSIT. The melancholy and ironic series, known as Tiarnia trilogy, shows Saarikoski's extensive knowledge of gnosticism, and viewed such mythological figures as Sisyphus, Ulysses, and Hercules in present-day political situations. The poet tells he can hear "the voice of the world", and he realizes that "Only when the minotaur has been destroyed / and the labyrinth transformed into dance / polity, politics / will be possible again". Saarikoski invitates the reader to dance, he has signed the invitation but he is also a dancer, a kind of pagan shaman, who has "eaten of the knowledge of good and evil".

EUROOPAN REUNA (1982), Saarikoski's last travel book, began on his stay in Brittany, France, where he studied Breton with Le breton sans peine. With Mia Berner he spent some days in Dublin. The city was celebrating the 100th anniversary of James Joyce. Saarikoski called Mia his 'Molly Bloom'. He had no regrets about moving to Sweden, but before his death he planned to return to Finland.

Pentti Saarikoski died of hepatic cirrhosis on August 24, in 1983, during his visit in Finland. His grave at the Orthodox monastery of Valamo in Heinävesi is a popular visiting place for his readers.

Several volumes of Saarikoski's diaries have appeared posthumously, the first from the years 1953-57. It reveals his sexual fantasies, and his religious and ideological struggle. Saarikoski did not hesitate to record intimate details of his life for posterity - on August 2, 1954 he has masturbated on the page. Saarikoski became a legend already during his life time, and was referred in works of such Finnish authors as Väinö Kirstinä, Tuomas Anhava, Kari Aronpuro, Matti Paavilainen, Pekka Kejonen, Hannu Salama, Jorma Ojaharju. In Sweden Werner Aspenström, Willy Granqvist, Bernt Rosengren, Tobias Berggren and Göran Sonnevi have written in their poems about Saarikoski. The Hungarian writer Sándor Csoóri mentions also Saarikoski in one poem. In Finland Väinö Kirstinä stated ironically in 1963: "jos lukee saarikoskea 10 minuuttia / alkaa henki haista viinalta (...)" (if you read Saarikoski for ten minutes / your breath starts to smell of liquor)."

Sowing Seeds of Peace

2005-09-09T10:22:00.000-08:00

As this picture "Sowing Seeds of Peace" by Eric Drooker nicely captures the essence and the power of education, it is also my loving response to "Brother". Visit www.Drooker.com

Now, and in the Days to Come

2005-09-06T12:25:00.000-08:00

As capitalism is gaining its new victories, we small people wake up, and once again are heading only God knows where. One thing is sure though. Anna Sofia starts her school with other kids today. She is a bit nervous, and so are we, as her mother and father. Erja follows her to the school, and will be there for few days in order to see how everything goes. In our 40-minutes city bus drive to the school, I whispered to Anna Sofia’s ear, that I am always with her: now and during the school day, in good and bad times.

I hope it goes well, and I do know one thing: Anna Sofia is a brave angel. Even if small in size, but strong in spirit, and in addition, she has got strong wings to carry her in the stormy weathers of the world..

In the beginning of the school year I am again and again relieved by the words of Paulo Freire. Now with his posthumously published book Pedagogy of Indignation (Paradigm, 2004). Sometimes I am about to lose my faith in education, especially when faced with the huge dilemmas of capitalist regime. Is there power in education? How about in educators themselves? Or is there power in us, small people? In these private, almost imperceptible and closed moments of desperation, Freire comes to help me. That is why I want to share some of his words with you, for, as he writes, “the possibility of dialogue with the author is to be found in the words themselves, in the curious manner the author writes them, being open to doubt and criticism.” And here are two excerpts:

“Education makes sense because the world is not necessary this or that, because human beings are as much projects themselves as they may have projects, or a vision, for the world. Education makes sense because women and men learn that through learning they can make and remake themselves, because women and men are able to take responsibility for themselves as beings capable of knowing – of knowing that they know and of knowing that they don’t. They are able to know what they already know better and to come to know what they do not yet know. Education makes sense because in order to be, women and men must keep on being. If women and men simply were, there would be no reason to speak of education.” (p. 15)

“The matrix of hope is the same as that of education – becoming conscious of themselves as unfinished beings. It would be a flagrant contradiction if human beings, while unfinished beings and ones conscious of their unfinished nature, did not insert themselves into a permanent process of hope-filled search. Education is that process.” (p. 100)