The Attack on Memory (from Gwangju News, June ’09, two drafts)

[1]

As readers of GN probably know, the old Provincial Office has recently been the site of demonstrations against a plan to knock down part of the southern flank of the building, with many protestors now occupying this section of the building (their message being that the building is a vital part of Gwangju’s history; a direct physical link to the massacre that occurred twenty nine years ago).

On Sunday May 10th at approximately 9pm GN came across an interesting spectacle outside the old Provincial Office, at the end of Geumnamno, in downtown Gwangju.

On this particular evening anyone strolling through this area would have been confronted with a small group of protestors, mostly men aged between 40-60, shouting and swearing loudly in front of a large line of police that divided them from entering the area in front of the Provincial Office.

A large number of onlookers were also present (150-200 people) and a couple of video cameras filming the entire episode. What was said by the protestors was fairly brief; a lot of swear words and a threat of violence (toward whom?) when the group next visited the area.

At first glance the anger seemed to be directed at the police, and GN wrongly assumed that these protestors were wanting to enter the Provincial Office, and were being stopped by the police. The truth, however, is a lot more complicated.

[insert first photo of May 10th]

A second visit to the Provincial Office, a few days later, proved more illuminating. After reading the leaflets for the movement against the destruction the picture became clearer, and GN stayed awhile to chat to the protestors. We then learned that the group of protestors seen on Sunday night were actually a protest group that are for the destruction of the south side of the building, and their anger was directed at the other protest groups who are currently occupying the contested section of the building (in fact it was the other protest groups inside who, worried about their own safety, had called the police to the Provincial Office in the first place).

It seems that, originally, there were three groups of protestors occupying the building, as of June ’08:

1/ Members of Those Wounded in 5.18
2/ Members of Those Whose Family Members and Relatives Died in 5.18
3/ Members of Those Wounded and Imprisoned as of 5.18

…in explaining, a demonstrator said that this third group, the Members of Those Wounded and Imprisoned in 5.18, had split from the other two groups late last year in mysterious circumstances.

This group (many members of which fought right through to the end of the uprising, and who the GN came into contact with on Sunday 10th) now wholeheartedly support the destruction of the Provincial Office, thus undermining the efforts of the other groups.

To explain this strange about-face in their attitudes the demonstrator GN spoke to offered that there were unconfirmed rumours of bribery and/or state interference, and, looking at the two groups internet website, we found out that they allege that the group that split from them had been pursuaded round to a new opinion by the Ministry of Culture and Tourism.

Chu Hae Song (53) is the Welfare Division Leader for the first group; the Members of Those Wounded in 5.18.

In an interview with GN she further illucidated the struggle, and the message of the protestors currently occupying the Provincial Office –

[insert C.U pic of Chu Hae Song, woman in purple]

“The entire protest started in June, last year. At that time the three major groups started their protest to protect the Provincial Office, which they view as what we call ‘The Heart of Korea’s National History’

These two groups of people, still remaining at the Provincial Office, want to protect the Provincial Office no matter what happens to them because they’ve lost their husbands and children here.

The resistance that began 29 years ago has to have a symbol for Democratization, not only in Gwangju but also as a nationwide movement.

Even though it’s only the destruction of half the building which will be right next to [the newly named] ‘Sanctuary of Culture’ the meaning of this building, as symbol, will be lessened.

This leads to a poor impression of the struggle for democracy for the upcoming generations. It’s sure that the spirit of reverence for our memory has to be protected for future generations.

Government has a plan to destroy the Provincial Office in order to build a ‘Sanctuary of Culture’ and bring business back to Dong-gu (East Gwangju). After moving the Provincial Office [to Muan] a lot of business left the area. The government also distorted the facts in a questionnaire on public opinion regarding the new plan. Many foreign reporters helped us on May 18th 29 years ago. Support us to protect this historical landmark of the democratic movement.”

When the film of the events of the night of May 10th were viewed on the internet we see members of the third group (or those representing the third group) storming the line of police and trying to break through the cordon, swearing and threatening violence on those inside the building. At one point one of the protestors is seen repeatedly slapping the head of a policeman over the top of a riot shield without being arrested or detained.

GN currently has no way of knowing whether these men are actual members of the third group that fought through to the end of the uprising in Gwangju in 1980.

When asked about the split with the Members of Those Wounded and Subsequently Imprisoned in 5.18 Chu Hae Song expressed sorrow and a sense of betrayal at the solidarity not yet echieved in the struggle to keep such a vital part of the city’s heritage alive.

At this time the Members of Those Wounded and Imprisoned in 5.18 have been unavailable for comment. The GN would very much like to serialize this article in order to interview any members of this group in order to understand why there was a turnabout in opinion late last year.

For more information visit the website of the first two groups here:

http://bbs2.agora.media.daum.net/gaia/do/kin/read?bbsId=K150&articleId=551111

…and the film of May 10th (courtesy of Captain Harok) is here:

http://blog.daum.net/m61menegun/18328402?srchid=BR1http%3A%2F%2Fblog.daum.net%2Fm61menegun%2F18328402

Thanks to Jang Kyong Ho for the pictures of the interiors and exteriors of the old Provincial Office

Andrew O’Donnell will be speaking on Climate Change at the YMCA on June 29th

http://www.myspace.com/ajodonnell
http://www.openseasonpress.com
ajodonnell.wordpress.com

[draft submitted 26th May ’09]

[2]

[Insert pic of Provincial Office exterior]

On Sunday May 10th at approximately 9pm I came across an interesting spectacle outside the old Provincial Office, at the end of Geumnamno, in downtown Gwangju.

I was confronted with a small group of protestors, mostly men aged between 40-60, shouting and swearing loudly in front of a large line of police that divided them from entering the area in front of the Provincial Office.

A large number of onlookers were also present (150-200 people) and a couple of video cameras filming the entire episode. What was said by the protestors was fairly brief; a lot of swear words and a threat of violence (toward whom?) when the group next visited the area.

The anger seemed to be directed at the police, and I wrongly assumed that these protestors were wanting to enter the Provincial Office, and were being stopped by the police. The truth, however, was a lot more complicated.

[insert first photo of May 10th]

A second visit to the Provincial Office, a few days later, proved more illuminating. After reading the leaflets for the movement against the destruction the picture became clearer, and I stayed awhile to chat to the protestors. I then learned that Sunday’s protestors were actually there to protest  for the destruction of the south side of the building, and their anger was directed at the other protest groups who are currently occupying the contested section of the building (in fact it was the other protest groups inside, who, worried about their own safety, had called the police to the Provincial Office).

Originally, there were three groups of protestors occupying the building, as of June ’08:

1) Members of Those Wounded in 5.18
2) Members of Those Whose Family Members and Relatives Died in 5.18
3) Members of Those Wounded and Imprisoned as of 5.18

…in explaining, a demonstrator said that this third group, the Members of Those Wounded and Imprisoned as of 5.18, had split from the other two groups late last year in mysterious circumstances.

This group (many members of which fought right through to the end of the uprising, and who the I came into contact with on Sunday 10th) now wholeheartedly support the destruction of the Provincial Office, thus undermining the efforts of the other groups.

To explain this strange about-face, the demonstrator I spoke to said that there were unconfirmed rumors of bribery and/or state interference, and, looking at the two groups internet website, we found out that they allege that the group that split from them had been coaxed into a new opinion by the Ministry of Culture and Tourism.

Chu Hae Song (53) is the Welfare Division Leader for the Members of Those Wounded in 5.18.

In an interview she further explained the struggle, and the message of the protestors currently occupying the Provincial Office –

[insert C.U pic of Chu Hae Song, woman in purple]

“The entire protest started in June, last year. At that time the three major groups started their protest to protect the Provincial Office, which they view as what we call ‘The Heart of Korea’s National History.’”

The two groups of people still remaining at the Provincial Office want to protect the Provincial Office no matter what happens to them because they’ve lost their husbands and children here. (See May GN p.30)

The resistance that began 29 years ago has to have a symbol for Democratization, not only in Gwangju but also as a nationwide movement.

Even though it’s only the destruction of half the building which will be right next to [the newly named] ‘Sanctuary of Culture’ the meaning of what remains will be lessened as a symbol.

This leads to a poor impression of the struggle for democracy for the upcoming generations. It’s sure that the spirit of reverence for our memory has to be protected for future generations. (See May GN p.30)

“Government has a plan to destroy the Provincial Office in order to build a ‘Sanctuary of Culture’ and bring business back to Dong-gu (East Gwangju). After moving the Provincial Office [to Muan] a lot of business left the area. The government also distorted the facts in a questionnaire on public opinion regarding the new plan. Many foreign reporters helped us on May 18th 29 years ago. Support us to protect this historical landmark of the democratic movement,” Chu said.

Viewing film of the May 10 events on the internet we see members of the third group (or those representing the third group) storming the line of police and trying to break through the cordon, swearing and threatening violence on those inside the building. At one point one of the protestors is seen repeatedly slapping the head of a policeman over the top of a riot shield without being arrested or detained.

I currently have no way of knowing whether these men are actual members of the third group that fought through to the end of the uprising in Gwangju in 1980.

When asked about the split with the members of Those Wounded and Subsequently Imprisoned in 5.18 Chu Hae Song expressed sorrow and a sense of betrayal at the solidarity not yet achieved in the struggle to keep such a vital part of the city’s heritage alive.

At this time the Members of Those Wounded and Imprisoned in 5.18 have been unavailable for comment. I plan to interview members of this group in order to understand why there was a turnabout in opinion late last year.

For more information visit the website of the first two groups here:

http://bbs2.agora.media.daum.net/gaia/do/kin/read?bbsId=K150&articleId=551111

…and the film of May 10th (courtesy of Captain Harok) here:

http://blog.daum.net/m61menegun/18328402?srchid=BR1http%3A%2F%2Fblog.daum.net%2Fm61menegun%2F18328402

Thanks to Jang Kyong Ho for the pictures of the interiors and exteriors of the old Provincial Office

Andrew O’Donnell will be speaking on Climate Change at the YMCA on June 29th

www.myspace.com/ajodonnell
www.openseasonpress.com
ajodonnell.wordpress.com

[draft after proofing by Doug Stuber]

1 January 1924 / Ouspensky Links, G.Edward Griffin, Communism and the Zionist Construction of Western Power

Whoever has been kissing time’s tortured crown

Shall recall later, with filial tenderness,

How time lay down to sleep

In the snowdrift of wheat beyond the window

Whoever lifted the sick eyelids of the age –

Two vast and sleepy eye-balls –

Hears everlastingly the roaring of the rivers

Of false and desolate times

The potentate-era has orbs like sleepy apples

And a lovely earthenware mouth

But it shall fall, expiring

On the overwhelmed arm of its ageing son

I know life’s exhalations weaken everyday

A little more, and the simple songs of palpable injury

Will have been cut short,

Lips sealed with tin

An earthenware life! A dying era!

What I dread is this: that you will be understood

Only by someone whose smile is helpless,

By someone who is lost.

What anguish – to search for a lost word,

To lift sick eyelids,

And with lime-corroded blood

Gather night grasses for an alien tribe

What an era: layers of lime in the sick son’s blood

Harden; Moscow sleeps, like a wooden box,

And there’s nowhere to run to from the tyrant-epoch…

Snow, as of old, smells of apples

I want to escape from my own threshold

Where to? The street is dark

And conscience shows up ahead of me, white,

Like salt scattered for pavements

How could I ever betray to scandalmongers –

Again the frost smells of apples –

That marvellous pledge to the Fourth Estate

And vows solemn enough for tears?

Who else shall you kill? Who else extol?

What lie invent?

The Underwood’s cartilege – quick, wrench out its key

And you’ll find the little bone of a pike;

And, layers of lime thawing in the sick son’s blood,

Blissful laughter shall splash out

But the typewriters’ mere sonatina

Is only a shadow of former, mighty sonatas

1924

Osip Mandelshtam, trans. James Greene

P.S – Happy New Year!

*

Ever get the feeling your blog/facebook entries have been stalked? I guess I should take this borrowed connection of the Eshleman material/Olson film as a compliment?

Oh, I also found P.D Ouspensky’s In Search of the Miraculous online, and even a vid …this book is a long-time favourite

*

G. Edward Griffin, Communism, & the Zionist Construction of Western Power

Men occasionally stumble over the truth, but most of them pick themselves up and hurry off as if nothing ever happened

-Winston Churchill

The next bunch of documentaries may take a while to upload but they’re worth it. A very different take on the U.N and on conceptions of communism within U.S state control over the mid-twentieth century. Download it here and, if you can burn it onto CDs. I’d definitely suggest passing it on to as many people as possible.

Anyone with the established view of McCarthy-ism may well be challenged by this stuff (I know I was!) What we seem to be dealing with is incredibly sophisticated levels of manipulation in the form of media control… something tried and tested to produce a very exacted outcome. When Aldous Huxley states (in my last bunch of links) that television, by 1961, was not a tool of state manipulation we may well question his authority (as a humanist, along the lines of the philosopher John Grey?)… we may also question where, in fact, this authority came from.

Often, I’m finding more and more, that those from powerful families push the neo-liberal agenda only because of the status that society somehow places on them; a result of their family ties. In reality The Intellectual, as Chomsky points out, may hint at a break from the status quo, but he’s essentially gambling with his survivalist and, for the most part, cowardly instinct when it comes to producing real break-through statements about the present. This is most probably why the occasional child in these higher-up families do themselves in, or distance themselves from the family that has nurtured them. They find that they perhaps have blood running through their veins or the shred of a conception of compassion rattling around their being somewhere. In relation to Huxley I’d love to know the circumstances in which his brother killed himself, and am too much of a sceptic to imagine I’ll get the truth from a biography. Who knows, for now there’s other stuff to read. But surely there’s no coincidence that the two most well known dystopian fantasies of that era are both novels. Surely it’s the novel; its ease of metaphor, that was the (highly interpretive) channel that told more truth at that time than it does now. Poetry’s use lost its way sometime after Pope but I’m beginning to think it is finding its sphere of influence widening as each freedom gets whisked away. Let’s only hope that an equilibrium is found where poetry can play a fundamental social part of the present (I’d at least like to throw a few books into that arena while I can!)

But, going back to Huxley, it seems to be what The Intellectual infers*, within a heavily interpretive sphere, that is what his listeners most appreciate… we might call this the ‘dumbing-down’ of language as a communicative force in Britain and I know it’s something Auden railed against at one point (although he got lazy in his later years). I’d like to call it this: The Theatre of Interpretation. You might even call it The Circus of Interpretation, something Orwell understood.

There’s a fundamental shift of discourse that has occurred, particularly in Britain, where we really have to look at the way Tense is manipulated. We allow certain esteemed Intellectuals more leeway, perhaps, in what they predict than in the definite statements they make about the present. And so the future can easily inhibit the present. But, then again, we can infer a certain amount from the present that will tell us the future. If there was a ever a crisis in the individual (with the help of television and big media) it is precisely in that sense of what the present actually is.

This seems to be when the general survivalist fear that looms its head. Not for nothing, I imagine, is Griffin’s book on the U.N entitled ‘The Fearful Master’. Having said that, I think it is something that we’re slowly opening ourselves up to.

Perhaps the great shift will come when we make that connection between the seemingly philanthropic help the U.N, and other ‘roving institutions’ (I’d prefer to call them ‘strangling institutions’) are still pictured as, in the mainstream press, and the powers they have, not to enable, BUT to limit. A lot of people, hopefully, are already sceptical because of the more-well advertised genocide in Rwanda. There is absolutely no philanthropy though, and I think we’ll discover that fairly quickly if we choose to do our own research into these issues.

The powers that be, of course, know this (and are incredibly fearful of it) and that is why think-tanks with seemingly charitable aims are forever multiplying within institutions, or within arms of institutions, so as to counter the genuine enquiries of the individual student. It is humanism’s way of consistently create counter-intelligence in order the curb the genuine curiosity of students and others in public life.

I’d suggest that nine times out of ten if you’re offered funding for a project in which you would like to research I would be immediately sceptical of why such funding is being offered. It’s important for the individual student to feel themselves as master of their own fate, and so funding will come to those more inclined towards indoctrination. In the mean time of course the libraries and the commons internet, the commons law, and legal procedure followed by citizens, will allow people to really dig into why we are in the situation we are at present.

In the same way the arts will die without independant enquiry and independant ways of information-gathering**. Just at the moment when magazines should be printed and circulated using the funds of the people at large, i.e- massive steps away from central government control we see people moving toward govt funding (well, if the bankers tighten the purse strings and alienate the masses from one another then perhaps we can see that this is a highly calculated outcome). This is not to criticise local government too heavily… there are forms of communal encouragement people can gain from within local arts projects, particularly if elected representatives are actually talked to and assessed on a one-to-one basis, and not hastened into authority by large media campaigns backed by conglomerates and developers.

There don’t seem to be any problems there. What is to be thought about is the more encouraged societal shift of esteem one gets from the ‘outside’ rather than the local. Which is another societal mirage to be aware of.

What I mean by ‘the outside’ is the continual indoctrination that has occurred over the last fifty years, that ‘acknowledgement’, of any endeavour must somehow be on an excessive (or globalist!) scale. Here, we’re definitely in Olson and Ferrini territory. The student of the nineties is asked to reverse many of the notions that were exceptable at that time, for example; the plunge into debt and the urge toward effecting one’s fellow man via the adoption of some kind of nomadism that belied that, at least in England, there were still funds available to build community explorations in art… the point, here, is to use that money in the best way possible (and definitely because it may well be whipped away from us and replaced by a computer chip if we don’t rail against it).

Do we totally ‘do away’ with the present system? Well, it sure feels like one might want to much of the time. The fact that it doesn’t work for us at present is all the more reason to make it work for us in the future. Certain anarchist tendencies I have seem to rest with a feeling that the democratic process is still, in itself, essentially sound… the fact that it’s broken is only a result of the fact that the people are struggling, at every level of society, to make it work for them. Britain , particularly, needs to use that right of public assembly to really produce politicians of sound mind rather than those who will, consciously or unconsciously, fall into the bracket of expansionists or isolationists. I guess, in this, John Grey*** makes sense to me. He’s the only scholar within the mainstream that understands the most essential problems of society as we see them now (I have certain issues with his solutions but I’ll let the reader make up their own mind by reading his book).

Although I can’t corroborate it right now I suspect Grey, like most scholars, Chomsky too, vastly underestimates the human rights abuses that’ve occurred in Britain and the U.S collectively since 9/11 and the London bombings in ’05 (the first incident which is more-and-more being seen as an inside job… something I’ve been saying for years… with the London bombings looking to be the consequence of a similar modus operandi). It is hard to pursuade people of something ludicrous, or course, if they still have all the comforts of property, freedom of assembly, and access to a wide plethora of information (often, sadly unaccessed). If one did have the control of populations as their imperative it makes very good sense that incidents would have to be ‘conjured’. The ‘war on terror’, as is now well documented IS an absolutely ingenious idea… a war that can never be won commited by an invisible enemy, to continue the justification of continual loss of liberties.

Again (and, as I’ve said before here) the one lesson to be learnt from Nadezhda Mandelshtam’s books is that simple fact she talks of, the one of people, at a given point in Stalin’s terror, simply ‘not talking to each other’. This is the real weapon of the true global powers; isolating the populous, then subsequently taking their money away (people are more inclined to fight for any cause you’ll give them if they’re starving). The will to not fight, even when starving, must be the goal of future generations if we are to break out of the multiple manipulations we’ve been subjected to.

The genius of the U.N, of all these globalist organisations, is the ability to send soldiers who know absolutely nothing about a given problem into an area to ‘solve’ that problem. These are obviously not wars in any ‘noble’ sense (as we may have had it in the past)… they are controlled slaughters solicited by the lethal urge of the global monetary system, controlled by a tiny number of elite figures. In order to solve this issue we need to drop our inherent set of conceptions concerning ‘money’ and ‘value’. If it is not nations that control the money supply then we need to confront those that control the money supply. This is so obvious that it is the first thing that we miss. Just as the few control so it is the cowardice of the few (those populations closest to the true seats of power) that have enabled their plans to go unchecked for so long.

I also suspect that one’s feeling of events’ accelerating, in terms of how one engages with the sense of ‘public life’, as receivers of News on all levels, is directly related to the level of mutual and Actual enquiry the public is involving itself with, re: the internet etc. Again, not for no reason was another Rockefeller talking negatively about it recently. These guys know, at many levels, that the public is finally catching onto them, and they’re shitting their pants.

Listening to some of Chomsky’s recent speeches I still see that he is shirking issues regarding high finance and different approaches to finance within the western world. All the good he has to say (and there is much good to say on matters of international politics… I regard him, still, as simply a great source of genuine ‘news’ over the mainstream media) still does not touch on the problem of organising ourselves differently, in terms of finances.

This issue is one of habit and conceived ‘gain’. The reason Americans are more ready to respond to it is because, historically, they are closer to the ground, in years… in terms of living without a currency, or forging new ways of exchange. The British, historically, live, distance-wise, a long way away from alternative monetary systems and alternative ways of exchanging goods (this is not to say that this doesn’t go on marginally). It’s the distance between 1694 (the establishment of the Bank of England) and 1913 (the establishment of the Federal Reserve).

The amount of information along these lines, in these documentaries of Griffin’s, I think, are perhaps still a testament to the level of freedom of speech available in the U.S.

What’s interesting about the first two films is that they take the established ‘Republican hysteria’ line that’s been long entrenched in the mainstream and subject it to some very new conceptions. How many of us who lived through the sixties will be able to give creedence to the idea that the black civil rights movement in the U.S was a tool of communist control mechanisms, possibly affiliated with government? I would have to read a lot more to see how these reflections play against the more dominant conceptions of that time (a re-appraisal of the folk music movement, even? I’m thinking of Dylan singing about Medgar Evers for example).

What is at least plausible now for us to dwell on is that the ‘T.V epoch’ in the West was definitely the beginning of efforts on the part of the very few to control the many, and it’s the sixties in which you’d want to delve more deeply if you truly wanted to gain any overwhelming insight into how social control on a large scale found its feet.

This notion of a ‘secret communism’ definitely plays into much of the literature on the Bilderberg group and the Council on Foreign Relations****. It feels like an interesting stopgap between Eustace Mullins’ publishing Secrets of the Federal Reserve in 1958 and more recent analysts… so that we can see possible themes emerging over the last fifty years or so.

Envoi

It’s interesting to look through the resistance movements of the U.S and Britain in the 60s and see what the faults were. A perception of the problems was obviously fairly sophisticated, but a consistent entire view of the power structure that governed intelligence services in both nations after WWII? I don’t think so. There was justified rage and passion, but little knowledge of the leaders of the perceived leaders, and what their goals were, and are.

Other strands continue to open up. I just stumbled on this guardian report on the MI5, and its funding Mussolini in the twenties. As one commentator on this thread points toward; when will we see that our secret services have had a hand in helping oh-so-many despots of the twentieth century, and that this is consistently carried out as ‘policy’?

I think, at this point, that Mullins will be proved right in the end. He’s already conclusively entered into the historic record that Stalin’s regime was heavily funded by the money from private banking institutions in the U.S, and most probably Europe. Look closely at Stalin’s rule during the war. Mullins posits that, for a two year period, the American banker Averell Harriman actually oversaw Stalin’s rule when Stalin suffered a nervous breakdown. If this is true (and I believe it to be so) it ties a major private banker with a history of funding the nazi party to both the American private banking network and the Stalin regime. Remember, also, Harriman’s connection with Churchill and to other banking institutions in Europe.

Given further debate and further hunting around for news sources it isn’t impossible to ask that if there was a ‘silent hand’ within Europe (probably closely affiliated with the Rothschild’s and the Bank of England) that had the power to create a scare of such magnitude within Europe (which included the deaths of millions of Jews) then a ‘given race’, provided with land elsewhere (modern ‘Israel’), would happily flee Europe and populate the ‘promised land’ engineered by these few members of the elite structure of finance in Europe. What we are essentially getting at is the inner workings of a Zionist plot within Europe before, during and after the playing out of WWII as manipulated into occurring by these powers.

While I don’t deny the holocaust (as Mullins and his ‘friend’ Ernst Zundel do) we do need to see the sufferings of those in Europe during the war as part of a ‘widescreen view’ that particularly should pay much closer attention to these same secret service involvements in the middle east (particularly in early-mid twentieth century), the ‘gradualist holocaust’ of modern Israel and the Palestinian resistance.

What is important about Mullins’ testimony is that he notes, as one of the few to have lived through this time, that the Jewish holocaust, as ‘legend’ or ‘mythology’, did not come into being (in terms of public debate) until a good decade after the war ended. There are many ways in which we can view this. Is it simply that the public did not dare investigate too much into the facts of what actually occurred at the time? Were they emotionally drained by the brutal facts of the terror? Or was time needed to manipulate the holocaust mythology by the powers that be into a ‘history’ that would benefit those same few into the mass populating of Israel?… there are many degrees of possibility that straddle all these perspectives. I’ll leave it up to the reader to investigate for themselves.

In relation to this we must conceive of two forms of Jewry, the benign honest and peaceful type of the masses, and the warlike, manipulative characteristics of those in high finance (of which many Jews all over the world protest against as every day rolls by) without reverting to the mind-controlled stasis of labelling anything that looks again at the history of the holocaust with new eyes as racist/anti-semitic etc.

Notes:

* Susan Sontag’s Against Interpretation might enlighten in this sense of inference.

**In relation to this you might question whether the rise of oral poetry in England over the past few decades is a conscious/unconscious response to the limited way in which poetry is officialised within the culture of book publishing, and the limiting way much of these pressures fuel problems of poetry in relation to the truth of self-expression in everyday life.

***I’m refering to Grey’s book; Black Mass: Apocalyptic Religion and the Death of Utopia

****You can have a look at CFR’s Foreign Affairs magazine here. CFR developed out of Britain’s Royal Institute for International Affairs early on in the 20th Century. It’s now known as Chatham House. Even from a cursory glance you can see how the agenda of these organisations is consistently expansionist and globalist. They really represent the true face of modern power in their respective countries. Each has members either in government or closely affiliated with government, and they often have close connections with big media, either overtly or covertly, and are frequently graced by royalty in the case of CH. Have a look at the list of members/directors for a sense of what these people do when they’re not speculating on control/possible-control, or interference with, foreign regions.

I’d definitely suggest reading this recent pdf from Chatham House on financial reform. My hunch is that they’re preparing the way for a World Central Bank with possible eventual control within Europe. When this happens they can chip everyone and reel in all currency. It will take a lot of media manipulation, however, for them to achieve this without civilian protest. It’s important for them to make the process of enslavement sexy and cool (facebook?) so it will probably start with massive campaigns for people to transfer their money into a central pool. We’ll soon see what they’ll try to come up with.

Review of Pier Paolo Pasolini’s ‘La Rabbia’ for Amazon

with Notes on Expression and Technology

This film (translated as ‘Rage’ in English) directed by two directors; Pier Paolo Pasolini (most famous in Britain for Salo, Oedipus Rex, The Canterbury Tales and Mamma Roma) and Giovanni Guareschi (whom I know very little about) confused me slightly as I wasn’t sure which spoken parts were written by Pasolini and which were Guareschi’s.

At the opening of the film the speaker (a young Pasolini?) tells us that the film will present two distinguishable viewpoints on post-war life in the west. What follows doesn’t not seem to fall into two separable perspectives. But perhaps this is to do with my familiarity with only one of the two directors?

Regardless, this documentary-style piece that covers most of what has concerned the west from the end of the war to the time of filming seems to be covered, often in an incredibly poetic and rightfully severe way (if I know anything of Pasolini’s world views I suspect he was behind much/all of the spoken overdub?).

Pasolini is a communist who reviles the materialism and warmongering that has been carried out since the outbreak of the second world war, particuarly by the U.S and Britain… (his own brand of communism must also be understood in relation to the fascism of the Italy that he grew up under, and his brother died under… he was also later expelled from the communist party due to his being homosexual)

The narrator in this film also understands how power is silently allowed to stifle expression by the political lethargy of the populous, this goes from the bottom of society with the working classes to the respected intellectuals who unknowingly/unthinkingly work to preserve the status quo (as somebody like Noam Chomsky has talked a lot about more recently).

To younger eyes (particularly less aware younger eyes trained under North American education?) this film may initially seem like a piece of propaganda but I think this is most probably a result of how all-pervasive modern consumerist capitalist principles have invaded the individual’s ability to think and act for themselves (and to work towards a common good as part of a local community… which perhaps is beginning to change presently) and not particularly much to do with any extremism in the directors’ views.

In fact the film is probably most striking in its ability to successfully isolate most of the cultural neuroses that have grown from that era to our own. Are we better equipped intellectually nowadays? Perhaps… the spread of the internet, while controlist in certain areas, can still act as a tool for expression, bringing people together, against the powers that be, in a creative way… however it is also a narrow channel that if only allowed to flourish by itself*, with all signs of protest wiped out from our streets by zealous and cruel state authorities, cannot solely be the instrument for social change. In fact, these days, much expression (regardless of merit) seems to have been relegated to the internet because of the all pervasive interests of media powers.

However, the perspective on the events shown here, and the vision that guides them, regardless of one’s own personal opinion, prove to be incredibly affecting, eloquent and painfully poetic… as much truth now is.

Notes:

Thoughts on Expression and Technology

*The philosopher John Zerzan warns that the homogenising of modern culture around the PC is one of its most dangerous facets. He states, in relation to this, how it is now impossible to apply for a job without a printed CV or resume… thus showing how technology only provides an open or shut case when it comes to entering civil life, with those who cannot afford a PC disallowed access to the most basic of civil procedures. This is an affect of the total bureaucratization of the individual. The final step will be the total bureaucratization of the mind, which is increasingly well developed in the west… a mental state where kindness, communally, is bureaucratized so that to do good is actually less acceptable than doing evil. A concern for the ability of human beings to co-operate and work together towards positive ends is, at every turned, threatened by the bureaucratization of the mind. Technology is still the most potent symbol of this… but, along with television, it has achieved much to encourage the individual towards apathy and inertia (as Noam Chomsky points out that, with populations increased, the only effective form of social control now has to be the control of the mind… since it is less recognisable than the violence of past centuries). This form of social control is more insidious than any other since it creates a feeling, globally, that all is well to a certain extent… this while whole populations are ensconced in the drama of themselves as represented by the television which has, and always has had, the effect of creating in the viewer a sense of the whole of humanity being a certain way (i.e hopeless… existentialism and postmodern feelings of angst play directly into this).

The dilemma, however (particularly for the young) is that, outside of the ‘blog format’ print journalism, for the most part, offers no freedom of speech whatsoever, and so again technology provides a new avenue for expression. There is good reason that the blog format may well be so popular exactly because of humanity’s inability to organise itself socially/communally… because the individual has been cut off from his fellow man to such a degree that ‘common ground’ (or his/her own sense of ‘common ground’) is no longer possible (this, also, could well have been the human urge toward the internet… a need to find a similar opinion somewhere ‘out there’ in the world beyond one’s immediate surroundings, a restlessness regarding these surroundings, provided by a deep spiritual dissatisfaction). The internet allows one access to ideas that are ‘similar’ to one’s own but damages the local in that western man’s sense of ‘divergent’ attitudes, socially, are now so broken as to only be quenched by access to the internet and the world beyond one’s immediate surroundings, and not altogether sought in the real world one immediately is in contact with.

The fact that the problem of CVs (or indeed the ability for people to enter written work in competitions?) is a mark of how unaware ‘developed’ cultures are of the divisions that technology is reaping, with the internet barely two decades old.

Response to ‘Freethinkers’ Website Regarding Comments of Government Conspiracy Over 7/7 London Bombings

http://freethinker.co.uk/2009/07/08/birmingham-mosque-leader-told-to-resign-over-77-conspiracy-remarks/

I’m beginning to wonder what on earth has happened over the relatively short time since the 2005 bombings in London.

Any view that does not peddle the government line is not only ridiculed but shat on from a very great height… since when were people in this country so immediately and viscerally judgemental? I personally see that all official explanations should be looked at and commented on contructively… a long cold look at the different viewpoints… and yet why are we so polarised as to arrest the person responsible for an alternate viewpoint in a shower of low blows against the way he happens to appear  in a photo?

I’m also amazed at the BBC’s coverage on Hill and, while I reserve the right to not totally agree with everything he says, the bigger question must be ‘Why, on earth, must we assume that anything but the government line gets labelled with the term ‘conspiracy theory?’ It’s insulting to the intelligence of the general public and it’s insulting to the intelligence of those who lost relatives in the bombings of 2005.

Why, suddenly, such emotional TV coverage intended to polarise nations and discredit those offering variations on official reports? These are individuals rights after all, and, in the blink of an eye, they could be discredited in any one of us, simply for offering opinions. The only conspiracy I see is the conspiracy of silence that mainstream media encourages and, in effect, the conspiracy of silence we place upon ourselves by jumping wholeheartedly into one camp or another.

Before 2005 I do not believe that this attitude was in any way prevalent and it is to our own shame that we have descended into kneejerk reactions and generalistic political gestures (not wholly representative of the public since it is the BBC and others who choose to ‘represent’ public opinion in this way.

We, in the very least, not only owe ourselves better, but we owe our children better… so as not to imure them in a world of overly simplistic polarised viewpoints.

The BBC should also be ashamed of its ‘Conspiracy File’. Such ‘journalistic’ efforts as these, from reading their website page, should be given a lot more time than these hastily put together rebuttals in favour of the usual government mantra.

I hope to God, and for the sake of the British public as a whole, that their TV coverage makes more of an effort to spend time with opinions that may not be those of their shareholders, those of politicians and other vested interests that may get in the way of such a dwindling, alien concept as true ‘impartial’ reporting (impartiality, the more it is trumpeted by a media outlet, I’m sure, the more it is doubted by the general public, who are not at all stupid on any of these themes, as BBC policy may think or assume).

On the subject of John Hill, I would also like to know how the law has been changed to include the sending of DVDs when one is adamant that the course of justice has been perverted. Regardless of what we think of Hill’s views, or Dr Naseem’s views, we have lived in a nation that, I believe, has, up until now, listened with interest without alienating and punishing those who express them. Woe betide us if we allow our country to become a monoculture with all supposed ‘intelligence’ encompassing increasingly slim areas of assumption, investigation and debate.

Is the U.K a fascist state? When people are extradited and arrested for sending DVDs the average citizen has got to wonder, regardless of the DVD content, what on earth all the fuss is about. I personally concur with much of Hill’s ideas but, as has been said elsewhere, a thorough investigation, as ever, is needed. But will we ever get such a thing in a country where government is increasingly responding to public debate in a thoroughly fascistic way. Will we find out where Hill is, and what his views are (further to his film), via the BBC, or government? My odds are in the negative.

Notes:

1/Phone call to Kells district police on the topic of Anthony John Hill, the man behind 7/7 Ripple Effect (a film concluding that the London bombings were an inside job, or at least must be totally re-thought given the media coverage and other evidence Hill uncovers). 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9bGSGQ21rlA

Hill has been extradited to the U.K for posting DVDs to a court case regarding the bombings held in Britain.

2/BBC News Story on Hill

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/magazine/8124687.stm

3/Hill’s 7/7 Ripple Effect

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=7003925131815306453&hl=en

4/Hill, interviewed about 7/7 Ripple Effect

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w1oKWx8Uo18

Random Notes on a Radio 4 Programme on Logical Positivism

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00lbsj3

I find all of this discussion absolutely hilarious… the folly of acute pseudo-Germanic idiocy (that’s not to deny developments in Austria now, however).  Why? Because, all the time, and acutely, the notion of the rational, of the harmless wankerdom of previous science and previous Greek discipline being total bollocks. If there was ever an undeclared leader/precursor of this lovingly moulded set of fools then it must be Blake, Neitzsche and Schopenhauer… or, to mirror all traditional approaches logical positivism claimed to reject, the better ancestors might be Socrates or Diogenes…

The logic of Logic is simply the madness of authoritarian communal modes. Modes of acceptance, human-made, and human-produced, communally, always fail. The real truth, and the only system of truth that can be wholesome (i.e an attempt at a summary of the whole of human thought without pandering to social acceptance whatsoever). The greatest truth is the truth of the dead man, or the person NOT seeking any kind of social acceptance.

All truth is the truth for a community, and the discipline of philosophy, of course, is implicated in that. No truth is globally useful… tribally speaking, the land is constantly changing, and at odds with social change, and with temporary human factions. The problem of gaining truth is the problem of migrational attitudes, and survivalist prejudices that will allow ‘Truth’ to continue, in any sort of communally acknowledged project. Logical positivism belongs with a much surer intellectual climate (as most have been…)

We’re sitting at the end of Truth in this era, presently. The question: What can you do with certain information? Where can it be taken, and how can communal law adapt to vastly changing psychological attitudes?

The great problem, as ever, it seems, is how a perceived truth about the world shapes human attitudes as to how that perceived truth is communally perceived. The two great forces of allowing evil into one’s acts constitute 1/ Most people do this now, or 2/If most people don’t seem to do this now they DID used to do this, and in great numbers. Silence, as regards governmental tyranny plays into both of these senses. And, within the gap the weak, the unfortunate, the half-breed and the conservative extremist all play their part in bolstering the tyrannous status quo.

The only thing the logical positivists have going for them, in the current stream of philosophical thought (OR is that the lack of it?) is that they can only be celebrated for their wanting-to-overthrow… which they have in common with every new stream of philosophical thought. Under constantly encroaching global totalitarianism vast lakes of silence (in the form of words) will open up around us… particularly when Intelligence will be even more corporatised and limited by Percieved majority viewpoints (as expressed in the mainstream media). The great allowance that this process of inhibiting process creates, of course, is that subsequent anti-authoritarian feeling will only grow with new generations… in relation to the emptiness of mediac words.

Notes:

The term ‘mediac’ is something I’ve been developing over the last few months… it’s a compound of the words ‘media’ and ‘maniac’  and is meant to infer the way in which communal social pronouncements officialise themselves within bigger mainstream media concerns. In the end the media is fundamentally human and has been twisted by corporate greed into the attempt to allow human voices no access to real situations that can be investigated as of old; what needs to be taken back within any authority mainstream media chooses to manifest itself in, and any representation it may advance for itself in terms of communal representation. Only when corporate coffers have been emptied will our modern media concern itself with the local realities of the people.

The ‘Justice for Ali Khan Bike Ride,’ Gwangju – Daejeon Prison 7-9 July ’09

[submitted to the Gwangju News 19/7/09 and edited 22/7/09]

The idea for a bike ride to raise awareness and possible funding came to me a few months ago and was pitched to the volunteers already involved with the case of Ali Khan at the G.I.C (for more information on the case of Ali Khan please check out the November ’08 Gwangju News article ‘Introducing… The Justice for Ali Khan Campaign’).

Over the previous months the Korean language blog has generated a sufficient number of hits to gather over 700 signatures protesting for a total legal review of the sentencing of prisoner #3390 Ali Khan at Daejeon prison. I’m very proud that over 700 Koreans and foreigners living in Korea have had faith in the information we have brought to them over the last while. The next step, it seemed to me, would be an event to mark our own collective commitment to Ali Khan’s cause and to bring further awareness to the case of Ali Khan in the hope of a human rights lawyer giving proper legal attention to this case.

The bike ride was to begin in Gwangju and to arrive two days later at the gates of Daejeon prison, approximately 205 km north of Gwangju. With this first event we thought it best to involve ourselves closely with members from the Gwangju YMCA who had already planned an incredibly ambitious bike ride for the beginning of July. They were to cycle from Haenam to Gosong Reunification Observatory in Gangwondo and we had thought to join them for the Gwangju to Daejeon leg of the journey. The riders who had joined us were: [show photo] Gwak Hyo Sung, Daniel Baek, Julian Warmington, Kim So Ri and Jong Il.

It did not start well, however. A punctured tire somewhere on the outskirts of Cheomdan in the pitch black marred our arrival at the exit point for our trip. For a dreaded hour it looked like without a supplier to get me a new tire having my bike make the 120 km ride to Jeonju the following evening would be a miracle. With hasty visits to two bike shops we patched up the puncture as best we could and I and Jong Il arrived two hours late at the YMCA where the rest of the YMCA riders had arrived from Haenam earlier that evening. The only thing to give me confidence was Jong Il, relating to me the Korean expression ‘A small accident before a big event brings one luck’. If only we Brits could be so optimistic!

I awoke, after barely three hours sleep, to a large breakfast in the basement of the Cheomdan YMCA. We were to leave an hour before an interview and photos had been planned. I crossed fingers that we’d relay what needed to be relayed later on into the trip.

And so it was, on the morning of Tuesday 7th July 6 riders from the G.I.C and 35 assorted riders from the YMCA walked out into the pouring rain in a strange attempt to cycle to Jeonju. And rain it did. Gutters streamed to bursting in the 7am half-dawn, streams burst their banks and glasses were repeatedly wiped from under tenuously protective plastic hoods. After an hour of cycling we found ourselves among the morning traffic of highway 1 heading north out of Gwangju. Either because of the rain or in order to keep the entire group together we stopped every hour or so to regroup, snack, and/or relate the newest horror story. About twenty km north of Gwangju we stopped at a small Mart and found cover, watching the rains pummel the trees and cars unfortunate enough to be out on this particular morning in time.

Three hours in the heavy rains lightened and the act of rain, after all this time, seemed to be less of a problem. Although we’d all been fearful that the YMCA’s pace would leave us tired out after an hour the speed of our two-tiered convoy was actually bearable. The YMCA proved amazing at organizing how our convoy was to push ahead towards Jonju. Batons were produced at each major junction and elected individuals made sure no one strayed from the route. Shouts of encouragement (along with the rain) sprayed the air at every major incline, and even the worst prepared person, by lunch time, would have felt a little more secure travelling with the YMCA’s more experienced cyclists.

A hastily prepared speech in Jeongup, after lunch, communicated to the YMCA’s riders what we were in this for. Ali Khan, a citizen of Pakistan had been held in Daejeon prison for over six years as a result of a badly executed trial and confessions gained under police torture.

Legs ached but no one tired too visibly after lunch. North of Jeongup we hit that steep obstacle known as Galchae San and, as the rain came down lightly we all (slowly!) made it to the top… to be met by the brilliant view of the largely flat lands of Jeollabukdo. While the rain continued the wonderful view gave one pause for thought and a certain delight in attempting a journey that wasn’t from behind the comfort of a train of bus window. Cycling, for me, gives you the sense of accomplishment that, yes, you’ve actually completed distances due to your own efforts. It also affords you the time to really consider the reasons for doing such a thing… in this way, a confirmation of the problems and setbacks of the case of Ali Khan, as well as giving you confidence in your own goal of wanting a fair trial for a hugely mistaken prisoner.

These were the thoughts that circled through my head as we made our way across the first 50 kms towards Jeonju. Four hours of further cycling and we found ourselves joining the busy rush hour traffic of Jeonju, having completed the first 120 km of our trek. So Tuesday had been the hardest day. Tomorrow would be easier.

In the morning I woke to the news that my bike had finally, and once again, given in to another puncture and I was obliged to borrow a spare bike from the YMCA riders while we tried to work out what had gone wrong with it (it turned out the tires had worn through so fast that I would have to buy new ones in Daejeon). In reality I wondered how my back tire even managed the 120 km to Jeonju without any problems. After a still-wet start we completed our daily morning exercises (a kind of elaborate pre-football ‘dance’ to these British eyes) and cycled out onto highway one again.

North of Nonsan we had lunch and re-grouped… texts and calls were made to bloggers and reporters and then… yes. Unbelievable. Sunshine! The fifty kilometres north of Nonsan, and on into Daejeon, proved to present us with exactly the opposite problems. Heat. Sunburn. I walked for ten minutes into our next break stop 30 km south of Daejeon. The heat was doing it to everyone. Water bottles were suddenly everywhere. The mild (but long!) inclines south of Daejeon proved incredibly debilitating and so we were glad, two hours later (at around 3:30pm) to finally arrive on the road into Yuseong, just south of Daejeon, where Ali Khan is imprisoned. We took photos with the YMCA and said our farewells (they would need it, they had another 70km to Chongju that day!).

With only five people confirmed as able to meet Ali Khan on Thursday morning Julian and I, with the help of Jong Il, scrabbled a late appointment with a still-confused and depressed Ali Khan at 4pm on Wednesday afternoon. My impression of Ali Khan on this visit was similar to what was reported in Brian Deutsch’s blog the week previous. There was talk of Khan ‘going mad’ or being ‘severely depressed’ but the reality, as ever, is a little harder to unpick. Ali Khan has become isolated, firstly, from potential visitors to the prison (in his own words he has not received any other visitors than those connected with his campaign in over 18 months) and also from those inside the prison. The person that originally confessed to the murder Khan is in prison for; Samiullah Salamat; has, for the most part, turned away from the regret he displayed four years ago (when he wrote his confession) and is now deeply resentful of Ali’s presence in the prison and has convinced more than one foreign prisoner that Ali is indeed the killer that he has been painted as by the authorities. This about-turn has caused such fear in Khan that he has, on occasion, wholeheartedly believed that Salamat, or someone close to Salamat, was going to ‘stab him’ at the next available opportunity. I and Julian both left feeling that talking with Ali was now a very complex procedure and requires patience and sympathy…

After a longwinded search for accomodation, the long-needed bike shop repair, and a late dinner we each concluded our day.

Early morning, and without any discernible ring around the prison we decide to use the approach road as our symbolic ring, travelling up and down six times, each circle for each year of Khan’s incarceration. Any laps made within the prison grounds could not be photographed/documented so this route seemed to be the best plan (even our photos taken at/near the gate, with a zoom lense, were intensely argued about by the guards on duty).The rain started up again on the third lap and by lap six the group is pretty much soaked to the skin. With a lot of effort, though, all six of us make it into the prison, with five of us meeting Ali Khan (three of whom meeting him for the first time).

Hope is sometimes a painful thing to allow in one so abused. So it is with Ali Khan. Khan’s continuing isolation from many inside the prison, and, as I mentioned above, Salamat’s almost total about-turn from accuser, to regretful confessor, back to cold psychological games player who now holds the threat that Ali is now a wanted man in Pakistan over Ali (without any attainable evidence) must have a lot to do with Khan’s continuing confusion, along with the bombings of Pakistan by U.S military that assure him (?) he perhaps will not be able to see his home country in the near future.

What is apparent after my last four visits (in quick succession) is that Khan is not at all ‘insane’ in any way. He is simply a person who is incredibly nervous and worried for his own safety both in prison in the present, and possibly outside (if he is released). Now that the situation in Pakistan has worsened he sees no ‘home’ to go back to.

He’s also been convinced by Salamat that, if he returns, he will be convicted for ‘unspecified crimes’ in Pakistan. No option holds much promise, and this is why Khan seems preoccupied and sometimes finds it hard to be swayed by efforts made on his behalf. All these things attest to his pain, both in his local outlook and his international outlook. The campaign will continue to look for ways his case can be transmitted to others, particularly lawyers able to take on a case of this kind, while taking into account Ali’s future well being.

More actions are planned in the next few months, with another sponsored event hopefully organised for the beginning of September (all info via the GIC website, Ali Khan blog or from me directly at andrewodonnell77@yahoo.co.uk). For foreigners, there was also some talk of ‘political events’ like these affecting those on E-2 visas, either with trouble from Hagwon or University bosses/authorities. To my knowledge actions like these are entirely legal provided one has given notice of any time away from work. Without a doubt they are entirely legal under Korean law and, if any of those participating in future events do have future problems rest assured I will be happy to visit them with Korean representatives/translators to explain how I see these actions, and foreigners’ participation in them.

We are also currently looking for volunteers who are able to put in a few hours every week towards different campaign goals, particularly website designers, translators and potential visitors to Ali Khan… particularly someone in Daejeon who could spend some time with him every week in the absence of any English speaking counsellor being provided by the prison service in Daejeon. A newsletter is also in the offing from Aug/Sept.

http://www.petitiononline.com/FreeAli
(Online petition in English, just sign your name and add your email)

http://profile.blog.naver.com/gwangjugic
(Information on Ali’s case in Korean)

http://free-ali.blogspot.com
(Information on Ali’s case in English)

We are also now collecting money for a human rights lawyer for Ali Khan. For this, you can donate directly to the Ali Khan Fund Account at: 019 107 329298 (Gwangju Bank/Gwangju International Centre)

Thanks go to: Kim Sing Sing at GIC for all the logistics and information gathering, all at the YMCA for their comradeship and support along the way, Michael and Ju Hyun at GFN for their reports and interest, Gwangju Dream, Brian Deutsch at ‘Brian in Jeollanamdo’, Jo McPherson at ‘ZenKimchi’, and Kimberly Hogg at ‘Socius’ for blogging on the event at the last minute, Kim So Ri and Hwan for Ali’s brilliant Korean blog design and the petition here in Korea, Audrey Pecott for her continued support and tireless work on the English blog, Jung Il for T-shirt and pamphlet designs, many of the artists at Daein Market for support and encouragement, Mr. Kim Dong Jo for donating a pair of cycling gloves to me in Jongeup on the way back (sore palms after over 100km into the return journey) and, mostly, to everyone who took part in the event itself.

Anti-Zionism, Ezra Pound, Social Unrest, Economic Theory, Poetry etc

(from a reply to Erik Vatne re: Palestine on Facebook)

This took me an age to get back to… to be honest the reason for the delay was a kind of dismay at how this is a totally new ‘term’ for me, and disappointing since it smacks of the usual corporate media rhetoric (actually I shouldn’t moan so much about corporate media since it is a product of the choices that populations in cultures have made, whether that be consciously or not). Anti-zionism is the same as ‘protectionism’… which is another new term which basically means any country that doesn’t particularly want to sell off its assets (whether that be food, land, technology or services) to the corporations existing in richer nations… it’s localism at its finest (globalisation was simply a very sophisticated way for corporations to exploit poor nations, either attitudinally, linguistically or economically… these are often interconnected very closely and are usually tiered in this way to a kind of cultural enslavement, most noticeably to the west).

Just out of interest what papers are you reading? New York Times? Where did you find that term? I’d be interested in reading on anything related to this stuff…

Anyhow, digressions aside… anti-zionism simply means ‘people (Palestinian people) being rather pissed off by the fact that there families are persecuted, killed, bureacratically ground into inhuman mush, land taken and all the rest of it…’. It is simply a sixty year holocaust that has never been largely picked up in any human fashion by western medias because of their own involvement in the area, historically and presently. It’s a business decision… and is treated as simply a matter of economics, the result of the apathy and anti-curiosity (now there’s a term to combat it!) of these populations. Sell arms to Israel, make money (and, ok, go on then… we ‘may’ mention the fact that 100 died in Gaza that day… if we feel like it)… a good day’s work for arms manufacturers and the largely side-stepping populous. But to create a ‘side-stepping populous’ you need to make sure they have phrases like ‘anti-zionism’ to play with… and lots of stories of Israeli deaths.

Its nothing new. Its been going on for decades… except that I feel the violence is on the increase mostly due to U.S and British tax payers wanting more profits from arms sales to Israel as a way of offsetting the effects of the economic downturn (a downturn for the most part that is a result of climate change). So in order to exploit and kill in this way they must remind themselves that there are ‘very important reasons’ for doing so. Terrorism wash etc, Hamas as terrorists etc

But focussing on the continued oppression and the ethnic cleansing of Palestine there is so much to say. For one, the problem is emblematic of the larger struggle for the human soul… i.e, by this I mean the human soul that aspires to anything but brute oppression or extreme violence a la Darfur. What it symbolises is the extreme lack of communicative ability humans have when it comes to the influence corporate interests have on governments (particularly American and British governments in this case, it’s also a symbol of the difficulty to enquire and to learn when in a totally alien scenario (meaning a scenario one is not familiar with within one’s own experience).

Fear means the inability to ask questions. I was actually having a similar discussion with someone about this the other day. When people say ‘These Islamic militants… why are they so crazy? Blowing up themselves and taking others with them?’ Well they do it because each generation of their family has been wiped out by Israeli armed forces, one after another. The struggle in Gaza is about global society’s inability to put themselves at the heart of a situation I would call an ‘in-that-situation’ scenario… meaning our reticence to act against our own worsening behaviour is due to being unable to ask cogent questions (the ‘in-that-situation’ phrase immediately implies psychological distance; i.e, my situation (as a global citizen) is not ‘in-that-situation’ but, I’d argue that the two are irrevocably bound together.

Our media usually is unable, even conceptually, to go near the material that is there for them (the death, the bodies, the shattered lives) and report back. The modus operandi might be that ‘people make situations’ and ‘situations make people’. This is a slightly blinkered way of discussing it (both are a little reductive) BUT the western citizen always has the arrogance of thinking they would act differently if they were ‘in that situation’…but the most potent issue is how on earth do we as individuals from western nations propose to comprehend generational genocide as an emotional fact of the being of a person?? We should take a step back and be less proud in the face of these realities if we’re to solve them.

I saw a documentary on the BBC when I was back in England and what was fascinating was that, for its entire World Service in Arabic, the BBC employs two correspondents to pull up stories for the listener. Yes, just two people (ex-pats living in the Arab world, usually mixed race speakers of Arabic with connections to Britain). So, even if we forget about the quality of information given… even if it’s startling in its rigour and investigative skills… the quantity of information even large corporations are able to give over to the Arab world is staggeringly small, particularly given that the western world claims, when atrocities are uncovered, to want to solve the situation.

So let us say that, no.1, we don’t know very much about the situation on the ground at all and, two, that what we do know is subject to massive corporate interests… so we need to develop an incredibly fine tuned bullshit detector when it comes to Palestine. We have to remember our own humility in all this, to respect what we don’t know, and to want to listen. There are so many speakers, so many experts, and very few ears when it comes to the western attitude to Palestine. (However the documentary on the whole was awful, in retrospect, a kind of piece of propaganda for the impartiality of the BBC, clever though it may have been)

I learned this recently too… during the course of an average Palestinian’s life they have spent approximately eight years at checkpoints. Eight years waiting at checkpoints… just to go to work or run an errand.

My friend, Paul Swannell, went to Palestine a few years ago… he came back absolutely horrified and refused to ever refer to it as Israel ever again.

Last year they buried the poet Mahmoud Darwish in Ramallah. His home village was bulldozed during the Nakba and, to all intents and purposes, does not exist anymore… plus the Israeli authorities wouldn’t allow his body to be buried in the area of his old hometown. So we must bring the question back to our own experience. In correlation can I imagine not being buried in my home town? Can I imagine my home town not being there anymore, as regards a historical record? Can I imagine the local authorities not allowing this burial to take place? All of these things get immediately thrown up by exposure to Darwish’s work… an instant humilitizer, as it were. Darwish also played a major part in the PLO’s two-state solution efforts that got as far as Oslo at the end of the nineties, I believe.

I guess one is always a kind of victim and proud purveyor of one’s experience. The reason I see anarchism and localism as such a freeing force in the world is that I’ve experienced first-hand whole communities who, to all intents and purposes, do not need recourse to money… and are quite comfortable without the finer points of modern technology. In the mountains of Nepal I found that out. And it tapped me into a whole other world. I realised that it is in the west who are the odd ones out, that we’re the ones who are unable to intergrate ourselves with nature, and our industrialism and capitalism has weakened those individuals around the world who did have the knowledge to achieve such integration.

There are more people in the world right now who are living at a subsistence level, and for the most part, without money than those under the cosey umbrella of capitalism… so surely it is for us to learn from them and not the opposite? The question being: can we make do without, and do we have the vision to adapt ourselves to our neighbour again and get the most out of what is immediately to hand? Can we find a stop-gap ideal that would allow us good healthcare without the religion of buying? Can we discover any useful ideals without corporate intervention?

In Korea knowledge for survival is immediately to hand in the form of parents and grandparents but in the west it’s a harder job… even our grandparents were pretty much assimilated into capitalism to a great degree. But the problem of climate change can be solved in an instant if the idea of nation state is dissolved and community projects are on the rise. One thing Brodsky understood was that large populations, like China, can NEVER be effectively governed from a central government in Beijing… there is simply too much stuff going on. Same goes for Russia and the U.S.

Homogeny and globalisation shocked us ‘global individuals’ that lived under capitalism out of any kind of responsibility for our fellow man. I think we’re beginning to pick up that thread again now, although I’m not sure far we can run with it. That is a question of vision, and if we’re able to elect leaders, on a local level, with any vision whatsoever. So far it looks doubtful.

But to get onto your point about Pound and Anti-semitism… No, they are entirely separate, and this is also part of the same pill western media has been largely feeding us with for the past sixty years (or we’ve been feeding ourselves with, more to the point, in order to displace cultural guilt)… Zionism is an idealogy created in the late 1800s which was something that asked of its adherants to work towards world domination of some kind (which, ironically, smacks more of Western Imperialism than anything racial)… semitism is the fact of being Jewish. In order for us to displace guilt feelings we must confuse the two… the only way for a killer to gain sympathy for him/herself is to see him/herself as victim… that is closely bound up with why we must say anti-zionism is like anti-semitism. Albeit totally wrong (and I’ve heard many Jews speak who will back me up on that, many of them persecuted for their opinions).

In order to answer your question on Pound I actually read Torrey E.Fuller’s ‘The Roots of Treason: Ezra Pound and the Secrets of St Elizabeth’s’ which details the run-up to Pound’s incarceration and arrest, and the treatment he had at St. Elizabeth’s. Interesting stuff.

Pound, without a shadow of a doubt, was a raging anti-semite… I don’t think anyone has any doubts about that BUT his theories on economics were very sound (no pun intended) in the main… he shouldn’t have confused his own in-bred anti-semitism with Douglas’s social credit theories BUT he was correct in saying that Jewry, for good or ill, owns an incredible amount of the capital of the world via corporate investments… that has not changed as far as I can see. I loved the example Sam Davies (I think) gave me the other day… the one where Brando, as a young actor, went out and sais that the whole of Hollywood was run by Jews… he couldn’t get any work until he apologised… thus proving his point (!)

But Pound really should have concentrated on constructing a cogent theory on economics rather than Jew-bashing (perhaps he wrote theory outside of his poetry? Are there any of his essays on economic theory in wide circulation these days? Not to my knowledge, and not from my tenuous side of the Atlantic. This says something in itself… most interesting things are buried these days and I don’t think its any different of Pound’s time or beyond… if you haven’t I’d suggest reading Hannah Arendt on Jefferson… very interesting slant on him, I think it’s in one of her last books).

Neither Hitler nor Mussolini would have been of use to him in furthering his economic ideas… I guess Pound was a victim, to some degree, of his own optimism.

As I get older I realise that the world is so damn homogenous in terms of new ideas that I can forgive something of Pound before WWII… in essence, because he wanted something different, something new in the wind to hitch himself onto (he wasn’t the only one… there were a fair few westerners interested in both those leaders before the war as you probably know.

But this homogoneity of opinion is even more rife now but I don’t think many can make the same mistakes as Pound since the average western individual is a tad more cynical about how power is manipulated… I mean I wouldn’t hold up Lee Myung Bak or Hugo Chavez in the same way… I know both are probably fairly corrupt individuals. My hopes lie in communication between individuals in a grass roots way (a tinge of ye olde Lancashire socialism mebbe?) but Pound always revered leaders, he was essentially an elitist, and had faith in ‘the leader’ as a world-changing concept/thing or whatever it is.

I don’t get much from that angle. Spread of ideas from one person to another is much more my thing. Beyond Brian Haw I can’t think of one ‘political individual in the public eye’ who obviously walks the walk. Most individuals, anywhere, don’t! That sounds cynical but not HALF as cynical as the behaviour of those being brought up by parents who have done much to encourage that attitude in the past. I mean, at least I can express frustration… in ten years it might be easier for your average uneducated middle class white kid to shoot someone rather than ‘express frustration’. But not all of this is Now… check out Thoreau (from Walden):

‘I have lived some thirty years on this planet, and I have yet to hear the first syllable of valuable or even earnest advice from my seniors. They have told me nothing, and probably cannot tell me anything, to the purpose. Here is life, an experiment to a great extent untried by me; but it does not avail me that they have tried it. If I have any experience which I think valuable, I am sure to reflect that this my Mentors said nothing about.’

But anyway Pound always struck me as a genius but someone who was still a little bit immature somehow. Like Olson, he knew and was brave enough to unmask western imperialism as a branch of totalitarianism, and show how it worked, and how it had worked historically… and, for that, we must be grateful. But yeah there was some immaturity there… perhaps all very Active individuals need a little bit of niavety just to encourage themselves that they can pull off a new angle or new idea. I don’t know but that’s the impression I got reading that book.

Pound’s overriding ethos, which set the tone for all of English language poetry written in English, was a result of the great schism of the 20th Century, to look BACK in the face of a hideous present… this is the great secret that lies at the heart of the western psyche… to go back OR become unintelligible (L.A.N.G.U.A.G.E poetics etc). It has absolutely nothing to do with poetry… it has to do with western communal psyche… the recycling of all older notions of time, how we conceive past, present, future… all still largely uninvestigated, lying dormant under the McPoets, McExperts and the self-advertisers. The tag ‘jealousy’, in all this, is the most easiest to hand but, again, it’s used so as not to really access the problems I’m highlighting… another distancing technique, consequence rather than cause.

To some extent population increase means that there are many people on the ground reading stellar work (or work of some kind!), and the officialising of that work via publishing doesn’t necessarily have to be the aim but I’m still slightly nostalgic for people like James Laughlin, publisher of both Miller and Pound… are there people like this anymore in publishing? I doubt it. I’m not having a go at all poets whatsoever when I say McPoet (in fact I see intelligent performance poetry as a way out of the professionalising of poetry, which will bring us back to the roots of why poems are spoken) but, let’s be honest, certain things do worry me deeply re: the future (this, from The Guardian):

http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/2008/oct/13/fashion

http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/books/poetry/article6044758.ece?token=null&offset=12&page=2

Some of these people (above) have interesting work but…

‘Amy Blakemore, 17

Chosen as a Foyle Young Poet of the Year first at 15, Blakemore was recognised a second time last year. She is about to sit A levels in English, History and Philosophy and hopes to take up a place at St Edmund Hall, Oxford, next year, to read English literature.

“The poet Clare Pollard came to my school and encouraged us to enter the competition. When I won I was incredibly surprised. When I won again, I was even more surprised. I write a lot, I do readings and I’ve been published in magazines – I want what I do to become a career eventually. I write short stories but poetry is where my heart lies – it’s so much easier to throw away all the rules and experiment.”

I want what I do to become a career eventually. Hmmm. Poetry as interesting career move. Spokesman for a generation? Liberator, visionary, seer?… no. Instead howzabout ‘an interesting career move’.

O.K, I kid… but it just ain’t my cup of tea. A forest of journalistic angles but hardly a truth to be heard. The thing about all these ‘angles’ on poetry is how mindnumbingly unstimulating the whole thing is. Particularly for the women. Christ… it must be hard for these women poets if they’re being set up early in life as entertaining dollybirds sans brain cells.

I can’t imagine any reader of any intelligence cares about these things at all, if these are the ideas (or anti-ideas?) poetry is now asked to propogate. It’s essentially condescending. One generation tipping its hat to another without really asking it any meaty questions about what is on its mind in any fundamental way (except ‘facebook’ is a new way for poets to network… the whole things’s a paragraph!)

But anyway…

that Split; the individual unable to live in the present colours all of literature for the 20th Century. Eshleman, perhaps subconsciously, understood this when he says (in The Book of Eternal Death, which I mentioned in another note) The present. Is. Dead.

To get back to Pound tho… for me, he’s also interesting in relation to two other figures in poetry: Rimbaud and Pasolini. Pasolini famously said that all poetry ended with Rimbaud. So it’s interesting to go back to that revelatory moment (outlined in Miller’s The Time of the Assassins) when Rimbaud leaves Paris and walks all the way back to Charleville after not bothering to pick up the 200 hundred copies of Une Saison en Enfer. He has pre-empted that shift in communal psyche approximately forty years before Pound unconscously applied that new ethos of remembering (note also that Pound’s identity was absolutely atrophied by regret towards the end of his life, particularly on not ever being able to provide a ‘Paradise’ to The Cantos… the problem being is that he simply could not envision a paradise…).

But, Rimbaud’s retreat from all things Literature… a seminal moment in the cultural life of the West in modern times, and, I think, indicative of something much greater than not being able to get words on paper or out of one’s mouth… I think he realised that there really weren’t (as Whitman has it) any great readers around. At heart, Rimbaud was essentially a practical person, I think.

Andrew

P.S- I’ve got more on Olson but that will have to wait a while yet. Work has piled up at this end of things.

P.P.S- This, from my blog as of January, I think you can gauge what happens in Gaza directly to be keyed in with what happens in Washington… this was a last blast/party for the Bush administration before Obama took over (I think there was incredible nervousness among many in terms of how Obama would deal with Palestine… but, as expected, he has kept to the same centuries-old line of saying lots and doing nothing. I mean, how does Obama’s administration deal with its corporate friends who sell arms to Israel if there’s no need for arms? Why would there be any interest in solving the problem if it makes more money for U.S corporations, and thus bolsters the Obama administration’s standing in the eyes of the people?

And it IS awful to couch it in these terms, but these are sick people we’re talking about… and unfortunately very difficult times we live through.

——–

Don’t Tha Just Love Yr Continual News Obscurement (Israel’s Bombing of Gaza)

I shouldn’t get so addicted to Yahoo News (its actually derived from ITN, officially)… there are lots of other news sources out there (check out the links here, Indymedia is reporting on this) BUT I just found myself looking at this piece first. The usual emphasis on the Israeli/U.S perspective and the obscure (and always highly dangerous) Palestinian threat:

http://uk.news.yahoo.com/4/20090103/twl-hamas-defiant-as-israeli-troops-mass-41f21e0.html

Indymedia, from the 28th Dec:

http://www.indymedia.org.uk/en/2008/12/416189.html

…from the 29th (take a close look at what Israel does to innocent civilians). A massacre:

http://www.indymedia.org.uk/en/2008/12/416355.html

…and protests in the south of England (2nd Jan):

http://www.indymedia.org.uk/en/2009/01/416797.html

———

Related reading:

Mahmoud Darwish – Unfortunately It Was Paradise, The Butterfly’s Burden

Clifford Hugh Douglas – Social Credit (mostly out of print in the U.S, or expensive in the U.K)

Noel Stock – The Life of Ezra Pound

Torrey E. Fuller – The Roots of Treason: Ezra Pound and the Secrets of St Elizabeth’s

Henry Miller – The Time of the Assassins

Pier Paolo Pasolini – Poems, Collected Letters Vol.1 (a second volume, in English, never appeared I think)

Ilan Pappe – The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine

Mourid Barghouti – I Saw Ramallah, Midnight and Other Poems

Sweet 2009 Solar, Wind and Earth Energy Trade Fair 2009, Gwangju, South Korea

From March 18th-20th the Kim Daejung Convention centre played host to S.W.E.E.T, its annual renewable energy fair and, while not having been to any previous exhibitions (the program was started in 2006) I thought I would bike down there and have a look at what was going on.

On arriving in the exhibition space I was greeted by a plethora of sales stands offering a wide range of renewable energy solutions, be it wind, water, geothermal or solar and beyond. What seemed apparent to begin with was that Gwangju City seems to specialise in photovoltaic technology (the cells used in solar panels, to my knowledge) with it heralding itself as an industry leader within Gwangju. And from the exhibitions stands the investment so far in solar energy seems to outstrip any other renewable energy in this part of the country. Good news for those who can afford the solutions on offer, but, to be honest, slightly intimidating for those less well off.

Next on the agenda was a seminar held on the Wednesday afternoon hosted by members of Gwangju City Government and the Jeollanamdo Provincial Government in partnership with other renewable industry leaders. A short presentation was provided to give the audience a sense of what was happening in Gwangju and Jeollanamdo on renewable energy development, with the emphasis on a city that is, in the main, looking to the wider world for its renewable energy solutions (Korean businessmen solemnly shaking hands with besuited white visitors etc). After this we were given a run-down on the facts, developments in production, and plans that are on the horizon in Jeollanamdo, as to renewable energy. Among other things, these included:

1. Jeollanam-do produces 28% of Korea’s renewable energy (O.K, a certain amount of understandable provincial pride… the bigger question being how much renewable energy IS in development in the Jeollanamdo region, surely?)

2. Solar investment for schemes in Mokpo, an increased use of the country’s land for bio-ethanol technology (the aim being 10% of Korean land to be used for bio-ethanol… one wonders what poor land-owning families in Korea will make of this?)

3. Utilization of sea currents to the south of Jeollanmdo, and investments in different hydro-powered utilities to exploit this

4. Jeollanamdo’s “Leisure City Project” (planned to be an ongoing development project as of ’06, and to continue until 2025). Again, there are a lot of questions as to what the taxpayer will receive as a benefit to them.

5. Jeollanamdo’s aim to reduce carbon emissions by 10% by 2011 (when questioned, however, this was planned to be an ‘ongoing target until 2025’). This is obviously the most horrific news… with my knowledge of most targets in foreign countries being much higher (with governments pledging towards targets of 50-90% for approximately the next 25 years.

6. Wind Power plants at Shinan Bigeum and Jindo Uldolmok (this one alone can generate 50 megawatts of energy (both of these are ongoing projects in tidal power generation (but it seems a lot more must be invested in these two plants if they are to generate power consistently over long periods of time, Gwangju city government is looking for foreign investment in schemes like this)

7. Already established photovoltaic panel ‘fields’ in a number of locations around Gwangju, including next to the Kim Daejung Convention Centre car park. Yay!

8. Further investment in photovoltaic technology. ‘Jeollanamdo has the highest level of investment in photovoltaic investments in Korea’.

9. The provincial government has organised the ‘Gwangju Techno-park Scheme’ with ’47 Institutes involved in renewable energy schemes between separate Universities and Colleges’. This strikes me as more positive i.e- hopefully ‘clever people talking to each other’ about solutions.

10. Gwangju City’s ‘Carbon Banking System’, which will save Co2 across Gwangju City. I’ve heard a lot of talk about this scheme (similar to the U.S’s cap and trade scheme) and have spoken to a lot of well-informed good Korean English speakers about it… I am still hazy on what it actually is, when the scheme proposes to start, and how it will be managed specifically. Answers on a postcard, please. Please.

11. Investment from POSCO in Jeollanamdo’s Yulchon Local Industrial Complex (interesting? The countrys most reputable steelworks and car manufacturer investing in green energy developments? So, let me get this right… if people keep buying more cars POSCO will keep investing in green energy?). Also, sixty wind turbines to be made in a new POSCO factory in Gwangju.

After the (very hasty) presentation (much of the above points were scribbled down quickly while watching a lightning speed Powerpoint presentation) I also asked a number of other questions, particularly of Soh Yong-ho, the team leader of Jeollanmdo’s investment scheme (why not give him a call on 061 286 5130 or email: yhtimes@jeonnam.go.kr?). Much of my interest centred around the topic of foreign investment, which seemed to be a repeated mantra throughout. Afterwards it was mentioned that the provincial government was in negotiation with two foreign investors (one in the U.S, one in Israel) but could not name them thus far in their discussions.

All in all, a polite bit of information gathering, and some positive, interesting developments, but one can’t help bemoaning the woeful turn-out for this seminar (about 20 people, many of whom were foreigners from many different countries France, Germany etc). The fact that the fair didn’t make use of a day on the weekend so that more interested citizens could attend is also a bit of a mystery.

So I’m left with the thought that the overriding attitude to renewable energies in this part of the world is still at the level of initial discussion, and obviously still worried about whether investment will quicken any time soon. While government seems ‘helpful’ enough, and investment in photovoltaics is high, it seems that the people should force these officials into corners (or vie for their jobs?) and make sure many of the ‘difficult promises’ are acted on (and with a global depression now in full swing one wonders whether the solution of ‘sacrifices now’ seem better than ‘technology when?’).

Andrew O’Donnell

from the ‘Gwangju News’ (April ’09)

http://www.openseasonpress.com
http://www.myspace.com/ajodonnell

Favourite Rilke Translations

The Spanish Dancer

As on all its sides a kitchen-match darts white
flickering tongues before it bursts into flame:
with the audience around her, quickened, hot,
her dance begins to flicker in the dark room.

And all at once it is completely fire.

One upward glance and she ignites her hair
and, whirling faster and faster, fans her dress
into passionate flames, till it becomes a furnace
from which, like startled rattlesnakes, the long
naked arms uncoil, aroused and clicking.

And then: as if the fire were too tight
around her body, she takes and flings it out
haughtily, with an imperious gesture,
and watches: it lies raging on the floor,
still blazing up, and the flames refuse to die –
Till, moving with total confidence and a sweet
exultant smile, she looks up finally
and stamps it out with powerful small feet.

Archaic Torso of Apollo

We cannot know his legendary head
with eyes like ripening fruit. And yet his torso
is still suffused with brilliance from inside,
like a lamp, in which his gaze, now turned to low,

gleams in all its power. Otherwise
the curved breast could not dazzle you so, nor could
a smile run through the placid hips and thighs
to that dark center where procreation flared.

Otherwise this stone would seem defaced
beneath the translucent cascade of the shoulders
and would not glisten like a wild beast’s fur:

would not, from all the borders of itself,
burst like a star: for here there is no place
that does not see you. You must change your life.

Translations by Stephen Mitchell

I’ve owned the Mitchell ‘Selected Poems’ (Picador) for a long time (a first copy picked up in Chennai years ago, then lost in Gwangju, and bought again a couple of years ago) and these are the two short poems that really hit me the hardest when I read them in India a decade ago. The economy Mitchell has, the skill with rhyme and how the poems seem have to have their own self in English are all the most commendable things, and also what makes this book a ‘save from the fire’ purchase.

Mahmoud Abdul Ghaffar Reads the Poetry of Palestinian Poet Mourid Barghouti

Gwangju International Center, March 28^th
[article from the Gwangju News May ’09]

Palestinian poet Mourid Barghouti was born on the 8^th of July 1944 in Deir Ghassana near Ramallah, Palestine; He has published 12 books of poetry, the last of which is Muntasaf al-Lail (Midnight), Beirut, 2005. His Collected Works came out in Beirut in 1997. He was awarded the Palestine Award for Poetry (2000). His poems are published in Arabic and international literary magazines. English translations of his poetry were published in Al Ahram Weekly, Banipal, Times Literary Supplement, Pen, and Modern Poetry in Translation. His autobiographical narrative Ra’ytu Ramallah (I Saw Ramallah), 1997, published in several editions in Arabic, won the Naguib Mahfouz Award for Literature (1997) and was translated into several languages; the English translation was published by the American University in Cairo Press as well as by Random House, New York and Bloomsbury, London, Barghouti participated in numerous conferences and poetry readings and festivals in almost all Arab countries and in several European cities. 

In the pages of Sulfur magazine, back in the 1970s, the American L.A.N.G.U.A.G.E poet Charles Bernstein wrote about what he called Official Verse Culture, which essentially pointed towards a homogenizing of poetic concerns among poets leading to the stifling of genuinely imaginative and fresh voices in poetry, particularly voices whose concerns lay outside a conservative view of the world, politically.

Now, with the development of Creative Writing courses in the U.K, and MFA courses in the U.S the western world sees a final commodifying of poetic sentiment and thought. Personally, these courses represent the last gasp of capitalism’s attempts to turn all things, both physical and psychic, into commodity, and this is largely a problem of these societies developing their own ‘experts’, ‘poets’, ‘writers’, (some of whom may be genuinely talented but too eager to gain a salary over telling the truth) to head these programs. To a certain extent, this is a generalization, there are genuinely progressive programs and workshops available in these countries but they are few and far between. In fact the entire concept of a genuine poet needing paid instruction (and not friendly advice), institutionalised book recommendations and not stumbled upon books from stumbled upon bookshops seems wildly suspect to me.

In short though, we live in an irrevocably changed world and have done, I believe, since the attacks on the World Trade Centre of ’01 (which were very probably engineered by the Bush Administration) and the attacks on the London underground in ’05 (also possibly engineered by government). Each incident, particularly the latter in the U.K, constituted a ‘going-to-sleep’ process in the way those countries medias represented reality (and perhaps in other countries too), with less truth and a higher quotient of Notspeak (my own term for the fluffy, gossipy unengaged way in which the entertainment world has crossed over into the realms of a once-purer journalism). With journalism layed bare as questionable, the next question would be how does poetry respond to this gap in believable reporting? Well, my response would be that, on the whole, it doesn’t. A couple of years ago I took a large number of subscriptions out to different literary magazines in the U.K and was, for the most part, disappointed with what I read. The level of engagement with the world was disappointingly low, and was often lost to combinations of ‘visit’ poems (poet visits somewhere and his/her interest is piqued by something), private nightmare/fantasy poems (all with closed hermetic atmospheres and unengaging images and voices) preserving of attitudes/thoughts between people that the writer would prefer the general reader to be excluded from.

There were exceptions of course. Publications like The Wolf, The Liberal, Citizen 32, Banipal, http://www.nthposition.com , incwriters and certain issues of the London Review of Books still featured writing that to differing degrees, seemed to be confronting a world which I could recognize as the one I inhabited from day to day, a world that was outward looking and open-minded in its preservations of poetry, While Britain has never been liberal enough to question itself in the terms Bernstein used to characterize U.S. poetry in the 70s you could definitely say Official Verse Culture is very much present in the way that the majority of poets approach their ‘art’ at the beginning of the 21^st Century in Britain… and it’s this lapse in being vigilant to the present (and by the present, I mean, as ever, the political present) is part of a wider intellectual lethargy when it comes to the problem of corporate world powers’ take-over of the citizen’s freedom of speech and any provisions for basic human rights, both outside and in the Western world, and also via the evil that is committed to other countries in the name of the citizens of the west. An audience for world poetry, and the sense of poet as global citizen, and reflection on poetry in translation is vital to a useful creative and inspirational wellspring for writer and reader alike. These things must be preserved over the new cultural tribalism, globally, that an economic downturn seems to have ushered in. 

It’s in this context that, a few years ago, I came across an English language translation of a selection of poems by the Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish called “Unfortunately It Was Paradise” and it was this book that opened up a totally different world of poetry to me (Darwish’s poem ‘Mural’ I think is one of the best lyric poems I’ve ever read anywhere). Darwish’s death on August 9^th last year (my birthday, no less) left a gaping chasm in my own personal feelings about world poetry, and a hope that, in this poet’s absence, other cross cultural dialogues emerge given a good supply of translators. 

So it was, in this context, a great relief to hear about Mahmoud Abdul Ghaffar’s reading of (and translations of) the Palestinian Poet Mourid Barghouti given as part of the Gwangju International Center’s ongoing series of talks. 

First of all Mahmoud introduced himself, stating that he wanted to concentrate solely on the poems, and not to dwell too much on information, gotten in media, etc. After this he showed us a computer presentation focusing on the background of the Palestinian struggle and the history behind the Nakba (the sixty year holocaust that the people of Palestine have been subject to). Much of this was very useful to me, particularly the centuries old history of the people of Palestine since if helped to put the struggle of the recent poet into a much wider context (I’m now full of curiosity about history and poetry from this region in older times). The film also showed the level of encroachment of the settlers in Palestine after World War II and what surprises is the speed of the settlers domination of much of the area of Palestine over such a short time.

The film also showed how the life of Palestinians has been radically altered over this time, due to the domination of Israeli forces (with British and U.S. backing) in Palestine. He also pointed that the average Palestinian, doing this lifetime, will wait at checkpoints an average of about eight years. This was an absolutely astounding fact that really gets to the heart of the everyday experience of Palestinians.

Although, as Ghaffar mentioned earlier, the political context is important but the emphasis on the poems was a useful one.

So the poems were presented in English with some short explanations by Ghaffar, providing comments on why exactly he saw them as affecting poems. 

Interpretations

A poet sits in a coffee shop, writing:
the old lady
thinks he is writing a letter to his mother,

The young woman
thinks he is writing a letter to his girlfriend,

The child
thinks he is drawing,

The businessman
thinks he is considering a deal,
the tourist
thinks he is writing a postcard,

the employee
thinks he is calculating his debts,

the secret policeman
walks slowly, towards him 

This strikes me as a very distanced and intelligent way of showing how the policeman or the representation of authority resolutely doesn’t think… but this is done in an implied way, and is the implication of these poems, their understatedness that many in the audience found particularly satisfying. What was striking about the poems is the way Barghouti plays with perspectives in order to create an entirely new view of a particular series of situations, most interestingly through the use of giving voice to inanimate objects, as in: 

Third World

The magnet said to the iron filings:
You are totally
free
to go in whatever direction you want! 

In the next poem he talks about the nature of yearning, of wanting… in the face of time, which does not retain the fixity of moment and place.

 Eagerness

The threshold said:
I wish I could enter the hall.
The hall said:
I wish I could go out to the balcony.
The balcony said:

I wish I could fly.

Lots of questions were asked after the reading, and I think all found the work memorable and educational. Personally, I love the sounds of the poems and it would have been wonderful to hear the poems in the original Arabic as well as in translation but given this was very much a multi-cultural audience solely English versions were chosen.

Most importantly, though, Mahmoud’s talk proved that there are human hearts, poems under the layers of political agenda and media spin. For me, it was particularly inspiring, particularly given  Western corporate media’s continual Israel bias on reporting on the atrocities in the West Bank and Gaza.

– Mahmoud Abdul Ghaffar was professor at Cairo University and currently works in the Arabic Department of Chosun University. Poet Mourid Barghouti has two books available in English translation, Midnight and Other Poems from Arc Publications and I Saw Ramallah from Bloomsbury in the U.K and Anchor in the U.S.

– For a link to yahoonews and indymedia’s reporting on the January bombings in Gaza please visit my myspace blog at http://www.myspace.com/ajodonnell