Y Safle

Anyone reading this blog over a long period will be aware that I have always been opposed to the War in Iraq, and perhaps that I am deeply unhappy with the assumptions of our capitalist systems, with their introspective politics and their global reach. I think that in a world of gross injustice and suffering, it is the richest nations that have the most to be ashamed about.

But when we analyze the problem, we need to beware the spin of people we agree with just as much as the spin of those we oppose. Indeed moreso, as we are inclined to challenge those we disagree with, but to allow spin to pass unchallenged by those with whom we agree.

So I was reading a post on the AcrimoniouZ blog, attempting to disect all that is wrong in American politics (and lay the blame for it squarely at the feet of George Bush), when I read this:

Today more than half of the top 100 economies of the world are corporations.

http://acrimoniouz.blogspot.com/2006/12/corporate-america-has-taken-control.html

That claim is bogus.

Firstly I am deeply suspicious of any measure of sizes of economies that appears to be double counting. If we are to count the size of, say, Microsoft corporation and treat this as a seperate economy, then shouldn’t we subtract that size from the US economy in which its profits are accounted? And if we did this for all such corporations, how much would be left to actually count in the national economies? You would clearly expect corporations to be the largest economic units, because you have deliberately broken down national economies into smaller units.

But the other reason this is bogus is because of the way we count the size of an economy. National economies are accounted by GDP. Thus the US has the largest national GDP in the world, followed by Japan, Germany, the UK and France (although if you treat the EU as a single entity, that is the largest economy in the world).

But what does GDP measure? perhaps a little simplistically, it is a measure of the value added by an economy. If we were to find a similar measure of value added by corporations, then we would not be using the figures that people have been using to report them in the top 100 economies. We would not use annual turnover of the corporations, or capitalisation, but rather a measure of added value - i.e. profits.

By this measure these corporations are no longer of equal size to national economies in the top 100 economies of the world.

That does not mean we should not be concerned about how policy in our nations is being shaped time and again for the benefit of corporations, rather than for the people.

But facts matter, and if we are to taken seriously when we have a point to make; if we are to persuade those who disagree with us of our point of view, then we must understand and be careful about facts.

This is why Noam Chomsky commands respect, even from people who disagree with him. Because he is so careful to accumulate, check and document facts.

But we should not leave that to the professionals. If you find yourself agreeing with everything someone says (be it on a blog, in a speech, on television or whatever), then be warned - you may be allowing spin to pass as fact.

Far too under-reported is the news that the Liberal Democrats have come up with a policy that would undo the creeping fascism of Labour’s assault on civil rights.

The policy in question proposes a freedom bill, with a mass repeal of legislation such as ID cards (and the hugely expensive, unsafe and improbable national database that goes with it), control orders, detention without trial, extradition to the US without presentation of any evidence by US authorities and other such terrible terrible legislation that this government has foisted upon an unwilling populace on the say of its yes men (like Rebecca Wade).

It also proposes a streamlined process for the repeal of bad legislation - and that is not before time.

It is nearly 200 years since the evangelical revival in Britain led to the abolition of the transatlantic slave trade. This trade was a nasty piece of our history, and it is right that we are aware of our nation’s role in the trade and that we know deep regret that it ever happened.

But some people want to go further. Yesterday mornings 8.00 O’clock interview on the BBC Radio 4 “Today” programme included an interview with one Esther Stanford, co-chair of the Rendezvous of Victory campaign that seeks repartions for the descendents of those affected by the trade.

Esther Stanford is a lawyer, and it seems that lawyers are afflicted by a belief that the best way to affect reconciliation is to make someone pay. But her reasoning was astounding.

Asked by the interviewer to comment on the fact that there were African leaders involved in the trafficing of people for this trade, Stanford argued that we cannot hold such people to account in the same way that we would not hold Jewish collaborators with the Nazis to account. That the only people we hold to account are those involved in the systematic genocide of a nation.

But the slave trade was not a genocide. It was a crime against humanity in much the same way, but the only genocide caused by the slave trade was the genocide of the native Americans that originally inhabited the West Indies.

So if we are paying for a genocide, we have no decendents left to pay. Those people were wiped out.

What of the African slave trade? Who pays whom?

This is an impossible task. Does someone of mixed ancestry pay on behalf of slaver ancestors to themself on behalf of enslaved ancestors?

And where do we stop? We should ask all who profited from the trade to make reparation, shouldn’t we? So that is inidigenous Africans as well as Europeans and Americans.

On the other hand, should descendents of abolitionists be held to account in the same way?

The whole issue is a nonsense and really very unhelpful.

There are very real issues with regard to under-representation of Africa in international politics, and the plight of millions in poverty because of Western protectionist policies. It is right that western nations should invest enormously in Africa. I believe that if the UN is to persist in having permanent members on its security council, then Africa must be somehow represented in the same way on the council.

But the exploitation of Africa has not stopped. Slavery is not the issue. The issue is our inhumanity to one another, and our deliberate ignorance of the plight of those beyond our petty little borders.

But back to the issue of reparations: Should Norway and Denmark pay reparations to the UK and Ireland for Viking raiding and its slave trade? Should the French government pay reparations for the Norman invasion and enslavement of the Anglo Saxon peoples? (Or maybe that should be Norway again - the Normans being of Norse descent).

I have a simple rule of thumb for such issues: A man is responsible for his own actions and choices, but not for those of anyone else.

I have some very interesting ancestors (as do we all, no doubt).

One of my ancestors was apparently a village constable, and confessed on his death bed to committing two murders, and then failing to investigate them (as would have been his duty).

But I am not responsible for that ancestor’s actions.

On the other hand, I have Scottish highland ancestry (apparently an ancestor who fought for the Jacobites at Culloden), and the highlanders suffered under the ensuing clearances as people enriched themselves at the expense of the people they displaced and dispossessed. Should the government pay me recompence for this?

No. Because no one alive to day was responsible for this act.

Society has often been violent, immoral and unjust. We rightly seek a more just society now - and that is our right contribution and response to the lessons of history.

As for woolly headed thinkers such as Esther Stanford, that simplistically wants people of European descent only to pay people of African descent only - too many people mistake that point of view for liberalism. In fact it is historical fascism. If we cannot move beyond that debate then we have learned nothing from history.

The right to roam in the countryside has at last bee established in law in the UK, and thus far there have been none of the devastating invasions of ramblers, forming ant-like colonies across farmed land, stripping crops and causing mayhem. It all seems quite successful.

It seems to me that the right was a long time in coming, and owes much to an antiquated view of land as property, which owes more to the generation of Locke, and those who stole the common land from the commoners.

That is to say: we should not need a “right to roam”, if we had a more sensible view of the land on which we live as inherently common.

My view is that people should not be able to own land as property, but rather they should be allowed to own a package of rights on the land. One could deal with the right to roam by decoupling the right to sole access from the other rights, except in certain circumstances (e.g., around dwellings).

This would allow a much more sensible aproach to walkers on land. As in Scotland, people would not be guilty of an offence unless they actually caused damage on land over which they roamed. Why is it that England and Wales are so backward on this topic? European laws on the subject tend to be much more liberal (the advantages of having revolutions maybe?)

At first sight this may seem like a no-brainer: that killing for vengeance is nowhere near as immoral as killing for some other reason.

However, after a particularly nasty murder in the UK, I noticed one person, Blewyn, wrote to say that to kill the murderer would make us as bad as the original murderer.

Now I take it that Blewyn is alluding to some deeper understanding of human motive and the human condition, which we really ought to try and understand before firing off the first ad hominem that comes to mind.

Why should we consider the issue? Well it is clear to me that Blewyn is an intelligent person, who thinks differently from others on this issue. By granting that he is clearly intelligent, we must suppose there is intelligent reason for his comparison above, and until we understand that reasoning, we cannot hope to accept or refute it.

That alone is an important principle of critical thinking that would do so much to promote understanding in our society.

Now for this discussion, I intend to use a hypothetical example so as not to distress anyone familiar with real cases who may happen to find this message.

So let us suppose that someone, Cornelius, murders another person - Aurelia. Let us suppose that Aurelia is an accomplished archer, and that Cornelius hates archers.

Now to get inside the head of Cornelius is difficult, and not wholly desireable, but let us suppose that his hatred for archers has consumed him to some extent. It stems perhaps from a childhood event where his father stood him by a tree and shot an apple from above his head; but over the years his nightmares of that event turned to hatred, and his hatred was repressed until eventually he came to the point where he could not look at an archer without feeling a mix of hatred and a longing for his father (who left him alone shortly after the apple event).

Thus whenever Cornelius sees Aurelia he is consumed by normally repressed emotions, and on one occasion, given the opportunity, he lapses into a kind of insanity and seeks to gratify his repressed emotions in the murder of Aurelia.

Now anyone who knows all this about Cornelius will perhaps see that there is a curious tension here between his neurosis, in which he is a victim of his own life circumstances, the product of his up bringing, and between his own personal responsibility and choice, which he exercised many times - both in failing to address his base instincts, and also when he deliberately chose to gratify his deepest repressed desires.

Note this carefully: we do not hold Cornelius to be free from personal responsibility simply because of his upbringing and neurosis. He is very much at fault in the matter of Aurelia’s death.

But now, what is our response to Cornelius? Most people who knew and loved Aurelia, and many more besides will instinctively wish for the death of Cornelius. Deep down we all have a desire for retribution when wrong is done against us, or those we love. Such emotions are not a neurosis, but they are an emotional, not a rational response.

If we give in to those emotions and deliberately allow the torture or killing of Cornelius, then we have made exactly the same choice that Cornelius made. We have chosen to kill (or torture) simply to sate our base instincts.

We should not hold Cornelius responsible fo his neurosis - that is beyond his control, but we rightly hold him responsible for his choices, and thus his actions. But if we make the same choices as he did, then we really are no better than he is. If we were in his shoes, we must conclude we would have done what he did.

Thus when we punish Cornelius, we must hold to some higher ideal for the punishment than simply that it sates our inate desire for vengeance. Punishment may hold an element of retribution, but a restrained retribution that allows for some measure of healing.

Punishment should be a deterrant, but also with the hope that the offender may be rehabilitated too.

This is what I understand Blewyn to be saying when he says that killing the offender makes us as bad as he, and this is why we need a rather more rational debate on the whole concept of punishment than can be found following straight after various deradful tragedies.

Note that killing Cornelius will not bring Aurelia back, nor heal the hurt that her beloved Marcus feels deep inside.

Someone might say:

Actually it solves the danger of the perpetrator doing it again, and it solves the financial burden of keeping them in jail. And it sends the message that if you cross the line, you go down, permanently.

The message seems to be lost, if the U.S. is anything to go by. The issue of cost should not be a factor - what price our humanity? As for the danger of the perpetrator doing it again? Life sentences can achieve this.

You would think that if the world was going to end then people would want to spread the world. Moreso if in so doing they might actually avert the impending catastrophe.

Not so, it seems, American “liberals”.

Okay - that is unfair. I am probably (hopefully) only talking about a small fraction of American “liberals”. No doubt my stereotype is wrong. But here is what I’m talking about.

There is a blog posting titled You just don’t want to die of starvation because you’re jealous I have a Hummer and you don’t, where the writer wishes to rail against the thesis of one Jonah Goldberg that people would question global warming science if it turned out that global warming was entirely natural (a strange counterfactual in any case).

The writer puts words into the mouths of conservatives thus:

[they want to continue] the conservative theme that people who like nature are so abhorrent that it’s worth it to fry the planet just to [tee] us off

And then goes on with an ad hominem line that suggests we can ignore the ramblings of conservatives because they are the same people that gave us the pro life movement.

You can check out the feedback on the site above. I pointed out that it is illegitimate to conflate these issues, whatever one thinks of them. I was immediately attacked on my views on what it means to understand humanity of a foetus, and at the same time for bringing abortion into a thread ostensibly about global warming! Worse, as I tried to give reasoned arguments, I was attacked by a string of ad hominem arguments of the form “you are too stupid to understand”, “All your country men are mad” and such like.

Now call me stupid (clearly many have taken me up on that already), but my point was that when an issue is as important as global warming - where the whole world is being affected, and where society consensus is required to effect a lasting and workable change, it seems to make no sense to me to snap and bite at someone who agrees with you, simply because they disagree on some other issue.

What seems to be happening is that American “liberals” are adopting a package of beliefs that define their community. If one is a “liberal” in America, one must be pro-choice, believe global warming is a problem, and who knows what else.

You may not pick one belief and be admitted. It is all or nothing. Accept the package or be mauled by the self professed sentry dogs to the ivory tower of “liberalism”.

But this is just nuts. If we really care about global warming, and we really care about our environment then it makes absolutely no difference what our other beliefs are. We can work together to effect a change. Indeed, one way that more advanced countries in this field are making progress is to use the market to control emissions. Right wingers have something to add to the resolution of this issue, and whatever our political stripe, we must accept that help gladly.

After the lack of engagement in the thread above, and the appalling string of ad hominem arguments, I find myself as just the kind of person who would like to go out and buy a Hummer just to annoy the woolly thinking self styled “liberals”.

Fortunately for the world, I won’t do this. Partly because I feel to strongly on global warming, partly because I probably can’t afford to do so, and partly because I have no idea what a Hummer is!

But what do I make of these “liberals”? Well I think they are downright dangerous. If a pro lifer, (or any other right winger) were wavering on the global warming issue, these people would push them right back into the comforting arms of the Jonah Goldbergs of this world.

Worse, they have misappropriated the term “liberal” here. That is why I have been applying it in quotation marks to them. An essential tenet of liberalism is respect for the freedoms of each other, including freedoms of belief and speech. These people have no respect for such freedoms. They demonstrate just the type of small minded human behaviour that makes global warming such a threat to us. They perpetuate the idea that communities of which one is a member are better than those of which one is not. They believe conservatives are all stupid and mad, and afford the same judgement to anyone who does not accept their designated package of “liberal” beliefs.

This is ghetto thinking.

If we want to save the world we need to step out of the ghettos and start shouting about what really concerns us.