Pelshval

Antropologiske betraktninger om pelshvaldrift

Month: June 2023

Prayer for Africa

24.06.2023 /

What are the headlines in your country?

I bet one of today’s biggest headlines in your country is the same as in my country: about the implosion of a small vessel somewhere off the coast of Canada. It had a handful of passengers, it is true, and to their families, we of course offer our condolences. I’m sure that being imploded is a disagreeable way of dying.

Mind you, I watched Titanic, too – the film, that is – and I admit I was impressed by the luxurious tableware and the music and the grandeur of the disaster. Goodness, yes!

But frankly, looking back now, I realise that Titanic was nothing – even visually nothing – compared to the grandeur that meets the eye if you run a Google images search for climate+disaster+Africa. Try it.

I wonder, I honestly do, how it is that while few Europeans, and maybe even US Americans, remain dry-eyed at the edge of any one of the innumerable and endless French fields decked with plain white crosses over nameless humans who fell there in WWI, we turn our backs to what is going on in Africa. There are doubtless many and complex reasons, but I will mention two, for rhetorical purposes:

1) Could it be that we feel guilty, that we suspect that – although we never meant to hurt them, oh no! – that we suspect that our welfare (let’s be honest and admit that anyone who is reading this enjoys conditions of life far superior to the average African living in Africa) somehow, to some degree, for obscure reasons beyond us, has contributed to their plight? Through no fault of our own, of course.

2) Could it be that in spite of all our activism for Black rights, women’s rights, LGBTQ+ rights and whatnot rights, we are just a wee bit, you know – just a tiny bit – um, I hardly dare use the word – racist?

Those who fell in WWI are unknown to most of us, but they were white. Those who are dying in the Mediterranean are also unknown to us, but they are not white. I hear there is much talk of anti-Semitism again. I resent such talk, not – I repeat NOT – because I condone what is real anti-Semitism in any way, shape or form, but because the term “anti-Semitism” is being abused with impunity to commit horrendous racist crimes against Palestinians, whose skin is just a touch darker than the former Europeans who moved to Israel after WWII.

So how, I wonder, do Africans feel about all this? Most of them are much darker, even, than Palestinians. Are we all, in the West (and Israel undoubtedly belongs to the West) a bunch of closet racists?

A good photographer can take stunningly beautiful photos of despair, while hinting at even more stunningly precarious human existence shrouded in mist or sand, somehow alive under unbelievably difficult conditions. David Attenborough has shown us that there are tiny animals that survive miraculously in the Sahara. Maybe we shall see him in a final scene, telling us about how the unbelievably brave and resistant sapiens sapiens is miraculously surviving in, yes, a spreading-like-wildfire-desert, in Africa. That would be his crowning masterpiece.

Many don’t survive of course. Another 39 just drowned, trying to cross the Mediterranean. But we don’t want to hear about starving Africans. It’s their own fault, isn’t it? They’re corrupt, aren’t they, and they’re ignorant. We, of course, in the West, are neither corrupt nor ignorant.

Sci-fi authors regularly write about how the entire planet has been destroyed by weapons of mass destruction, greed and climate disasters. I put to the community of sci-fi authors: Let Africans survive. The rest of us are useless.

I’M NOT FINISHED!

I check the news from the Norwegian National Broadcasting company every single day without fail. So I can assure you that we do hear about Africa from time to time. Listening to or reading the news from the Norwegian National Broadcasting Company, you will get the impression that the only problem in Africa is a few warlords. There are, indeed, a few horrible warlords in Africa, in Sudan, for instance, and in Congo. There is one fundamental difference, however, between a warlord from the global south and a warlord from the filthy-rich “West”: Warlords from the Global South would not be able to start WWIII. Our warlords, however, in the filthy-rich West, seem determined to do just that. After all, their kids will not be the ones to serve and die on the battle fields.

Warlords are an irresponsible psychopathic lot, agreed, be they white, black or green. Hegemon warlords, however, are the very, very worst.

Obedience

12.06.2023 /

To be honest, I know next to nothing about conditions for the press in Russia. I expect there is little if any room for dissent. Would-be critical journalists are up against not only powerful people, but also Government, as the Navalnyj example has demonstrated so dramatically. But then again, Russians don’t expect a free press. Critics were brutally persecuted under the czars (e.g. Dostoevskij was sentenced to death) less so under Lenin, it is true, but certainly under Stalin. Then there was a brief “thaw”, before business as usual resumed with Leonid Brezhnev, as dreadfully dreary a chap as you ever saw. Russians don’t expect a free press. They never had it and they doubt they ever will. People in Russia find out, somehow, what they need to know.

That’s the difference between here and there: knowing what you need to know.

In Five Eyes countries and Europe, people honestly believe they enjoy a free press. All over the world, we watch and ridicule the circus of US politics with its plethora of partisan media outlets, dissent, vitriolic criticism of the currently ruling Democratic Party and even the President, on all sorts of issues. Yet, US citizens can’t seem to find out what they need to know. Else, why is 50–90 per cent of the population there just getting poorer? Why is the top decile just getting very much richer, year by year, regardless of whether the president is from one or the other party?

Have I quoted this guy before?:

The smart way to keep people passive and obedient is to strictly limit the spectrum of acceptable opinion, but allow very lively debate within that spectrum — even encourage the more critical and dissident views. That gives people the sense that there’s free thinking going on, while all the time the presuppositions of the system are being reinforced by the limits put on the range of the debate.

Chomsky, of course. Not that I agree with everything he has written – far from it! In the field of linguistics, for instance…. be that as it may

Take the issue of abortion as an example, a tremendously hot topic in the USA. In effect, if abortions are prohibited, premarital sex will basically be off bounds. Think about it, that is really hot stuff! True, there are contraceptives, but they are not fool-proof or without side-effects. For the Democratic Party, the assault on abortion rights (supported almost exclusively by voters of the Republican Party) must be conceived as a blessing, because many traditionally Republican voters will secretly cast their ballots for the “other side”, the Dems, not least since the two parties no longer differ all that much on key issues.

Both parties are, after all, neo-liberal to the core and basically also militaristic. How much of US tax payers’ money has disappeared, under Biden, into the abyss of an extremely corrupt Ukraine, with support from most of the Republican Party? I am not going to look it up for you. I’m tired of producing facts that are blithely disregarded.

Why do I go on and on, you ask, about the USA? I keep harping, you say, about US iniquities although I live in Europe. True. Guilty as charged. WHY? Because European NATO member states are US vassals, that’s why.

So yes, let’s look at those of us who live in Europe? Do we know what we need to know? “As long as it takes,” Biden said, but what he seems to have meant was: “no matter what it takes”. Do we, in Europe, understand Biden’s and Stoltenberg’s gamble? Have we, in all our European Democracies, been asked what we think about being the playthings of US attempts to crush a rival? We were told only that:

1) “Every country must be allowed to decide what kids to invite to its birthday party” and

2) “He punched first.”

Repeated every day, many times a day, over I-have-lost-count-of-the-number of days, these two puerile arguments have turned Europe into a gigantic kindergarten.

Do we who live in Europe know that we would be well advised to enjoy every last drop of what may prove to be our last months or maybe even weeks? Do we realise we should be making peace with family members we haven’t spoken to for years? Do we understand that we should imagine ourselves terminally ill? In plain words: What would you do, if you knew you might die within the next six months?

In the late 1970-s, I ridiculed USSR animosity to US chewing gum and Levies. Now I understand that the USSR had every reason to fear what we now understand as US “soft power”. Europe flew right into the net of soft power and is now – forgive my French – a Eunuch.

I put to you, though I may be wrong, that holding dissenting views here, in Norway, is now more personally damning than it is in Russia. A friend of mine who has actually survived being a dissenter in a dictatorship, said: This is worse than in a dictatorship, because, there, you had at least fellow-dissenters. Here, in Norway, none are visible. Here, in Norway, if you disagree with the US/NATO destruction of Europe, you shut up.

In this country, Norway, nobody who is not suicidal will dare publish, in any paper – academic, journalistic or otherwise – any criticism of the US/NATO proxy war against Russia.

You will know, by now, that I maintain that the Ukraine issue is not as simple as the New York Times or Klassekampen would have us believe.

So I end my diatribe with a link to a source I happen to trust more than I trust the CIA or even the New York Times:

The article is called: “Where do you get your Ukraine news?”

The Great Divide

04.06.2023 /

The other night I had a terrible argument with a couple whom I consider particularly close friends. They were spending the weekend at my place, and we had enjoyed two lovely days, when in the evening, I unwittingly stepped on a sore toe. Now, I had been very careful not to even mention Ukraine; in this country we are told in no uncertain terms that we are defending democracy against fascism and that the war is being waged between good and evil. Moreover, those who exclusively read the New York Times and Guardian – and my friends consider them the ultimate sources of information about current events – will “know for a fact” that such is the case. So no, not a word about Ukraine.

Assuming that we would probably agree about “cancelling”, I joked about this growing trend. There are all sorts of views that qualify as grounds for cancelling these days, and I happen to believe – and assumed that my academic friends would agree – that rather than cancel views we don’t like, we should discuss them. Well, my friends, didn’t agree. They were in fact furious with me: 1) The very concept “cancelling”, they maintained, was invented by the ignorati such as Trump and his followers. There was no such thing as cancelling. 2) Misinformation, however, deserved to be suppressed (i.e. cancelled). “People need to check their facts,” they insisted, and they repeated the word again and again: facts. facts. facts.

Admittedly, a few facts, such as many but far from all historic dates, are more or less incontrovertible (except, perhaps, among philosophers). Conversely, in a war, most “facts” are contentious and a great number go on to be debated for centuries.

Even within the exact sciences, calculations are often debatable, if for no other reason because the figures on which they are based,which in turn rely on other figures based on figures, etc. are open to debate. Most social scientists do not even pretend that their “facts” are conclusive. Historians, however, tend to cheat a bit. After all, when all is said and done, history is anything but a-political.

I forget who said that history is always written by the victors, be they Roman or British or US American, not by the Galls, the African peoples or the indigenous (North, Central and South) Americans. Historians live in the victors’ society and their world view will inevitably reflect that of their surroundings. True there will be the occasional deviant interpretation of past events, but in the end, the version that is accepted science and generally agreed upon is the one that gives the best possible impression of “our actions”,”our country”, “us”.

The breakup of the Soviet Union represented the demise of Communism in Europe. Yet, the North Atlantic Treaty Alliance (NATO) which had been established to “defend” Europe against Communism, was not disbanded (why?) and the Great Divide persisted. Why? Why did we not throttle the growth of the monster that was quietly being groomed in our midst? Was there a real threat or was there something else going on? In 2021, Russian military expenditure was fairly modest, whereas the US controlled about 750 bases in at least 80 countries and spent more on its military than the next 10 countries combined. How could anybody imagine that Russia would wish or be able to threaten Europe with such puny means? Even in 2022, the country’s military expenses amounted to a mere 4% of global military expenditure, compared to the USA’s 39%.

Now a SIPRI headline from April 2023 reads: “World military expenditure reaches new record high as European spending surges”. Whom does this absurd military build-up benefit? Certainly not the population of Ukraine! Certainly not the populations of Europe!

The information war waged between the so-called blocks is no less terrifying: the battle for hearts and minds. Remember Vietnam? The Pentagon Papers and the persecution of Daniel Ellsberg? And that was just the beginning.

Before the breakup, during the first Cold War between what the West called Communist states and what so-called Communists called Capitalist states, the stories told on each side were grossly inaccurate. I happen to be familiar with both of them.

Take, for instance, DDR, East Germany, a country which is, with reason, indelibly linked in our minds with “repression”, “fear”, “Stasi”. With reason, yes, but we never heard the whole story. We will probably never know how misinformed we were, because East Germany is gone, subsumed into a greater Germany, and those who lived there have nothing but flighty memories to go by when evoking the past. The German writer Jenny Erpenbeck is one who recalls beautiful fragments of what is gone. True, even in the worst of places you find happy people, just as even in Beverly Hills there are lots of suicides. So I agree, fragments of memory are not reliable.

Analysing quality of life is no joke anywhere, let alone in an entire country, now non-existant, yet still reviled, both by the West and by the East. The only defenders of what was once East Germany are people who actually lived there.

If NATO “wins” Ukraine, as that horrible man at the top insists it will, will the Ukrainians weep for joy? Weep, they will, you may be sure.

The Great Divide runs not only between East and West, but straight down the middle of our societies, splitting families and friendships, spreading distrust, even hate — as welfare states are mangled by military budgets. And fear, yes, because the absurd contradictions imbedded in the concept of waging war as a deterrent to war confuse and frighten us. We suspect we’re being had. We all know that unless these spiralling excesses stop, there will be war for us all. We blame the Russians, but that does not make us feel better.

Formerly respected news outlets, which used to argue about political issues, now all clamour for more weaponry. All who try to paint a fuller picture of the situation are vilified, though I have not yet seen them referred to as “traitors” – just a question of time, you may be sure. Here is a short video explaining what happens to “the fuller picture“.

In short, I very much doubt that the press is much freer in the West than in Russia. In fact I suspect that here, the battle for hearts and minds (in short, indoctrination) has been more successful. Nevertheless it is growing ever more aggressive (in short, authoritarian), not least in the UK, which after Brexit appears to be accountable only to the US administration, not to the EU and certainly not to the British people.

I recommend a conversation between Glenn Greenwald, Laura Poitras and Edward Snowden — remember him and the “No Such Agency” story that broke exactly ten years ago on 6 June. The conversation, on Glenn Greenwald’s site, starts at about 21 minutes into the video.

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