Newest updates on the Grito: Fox has decided that he will not hold the Grito here and he has already skipped town to hold it a few hundred miles outside of Mexico city. The news has been well-received on the camp, and AMLO has announced that instead of him, Alejandro Encinas, PRD-member (and following AMLO to hold that post) will hold the Grito at the Zocalo. At the same time it was promised that we would remove our tents from the Zocalo, but it’s not quite as easy as that…
Political acitvist with too much time on your hands during the summer holidays? If you live in Oslo, you should of course join us in the struggle to keep Norway from throwing out the Afghan refugees. However, if you do not live anywhere around here, this is one thing that is easily done: write letters do the editors! Yes, that was “letters” as in plural of “letter” and “editors” as plural of “editor”. The newspapers do not have much of anything to print during the summer months, and most of the ordinary writers in the letters to the editor section of any newspaper have gone on summer holiday this time around. Nevertheless, people still read that section. If you keep the letter short and to the point about some current issue, it is very likely to get in.
Here are some examples…
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Hey there, back from Amsterdam. Besides attending the European political bureau meeting of the Fourth International over one weekend, I walked around and sat around much of Amsterdam reading and watching people around me get excited by the world soccer cup. I myself can not really get anything positive out of these constant, but controlled “wars” that make chauvinist and nationalist feelings come out everywhere. So I usually just wish that “my countries” are kicked out as early as possible. With neither Denmark nor Norway being in it to start with this time, “my countries” are Germany and Sweden (the latter of which apparently has been kicked out now). Whenever they’re out, the enthusiasts pick some other country to support, quite independently of where they come from themselves, but the feeling of being in the middle of a war usually vanishes quite fast.
This year the feelings are running especially high in Germany where social problems are about to climax. With the population drugged on soccer, the government is taking the opportunity to parse laws on increasing the sales tax (a tax that generally hurts those with little money), while at the same time cutting even more in the spending for the unemployed. The newest idea of theirs is to cut the amount they’re willing to pay for rent and the amount the unemployed is allowed to own. But who cares if Germany might end up as the world soccer champion? As an East German said at the camp ground that I stayed at in Amsterdam: “You saw that old English guy over there? Yesterday [when it was Germany vs. Poland], he fevered for us! I told him: ‘respect, man, respect!’” I don’t know if that meant that he had settled all hard feelings between the British and the Germans following WWII, but according to this soccer fan it was absolutely a deed of diplomatic proportions.
Antroplogi.info just published an interview in Norwegian, after earlier critisizing me for being “too engaged” in the way I conducted my study of Douglas, AZ. It seems that there were a few things I had to clarify: contrary to popular believe, I do in fact not believe that i hold the one and only key to the truth about what Douglasites should be doing, nor what goals they shoudl strive for. That does not mean that I do not have an opinion or that I believe that all options have equally much going for them. All it means is that I do not set myself apart from the “field” the way some intellectuals tend to do. But I believe the interview makes that pretty clear.
Right now I’m interested in the reactions the proclamation of “Marxist anthropology” as being a sort of study with the goal of undertstanding some local phenomenon better in order to be able to change things on a bigger scale will stir up. I know there are quite a few radicals studying anthropology here in Norway, but as far as I can get, most of those still follow the liberal model of anthropology (the one in which you are not allowed to say that A is better than B nor that you prefer A over B, but you have to tell about A, B and the totally outlandish alternatives C through Z). Let us see if we get a response from one of them.
Tomorrow morning at 9am the trial against us six activists who walked out onto a major inner Oslo road wearing Guantanamo costumes in connection with the visit of US Secretary of defense Donald Rumsfeld’s visit June 7th 2005. That day was the the 100th anniversary of Norway, and we happened to walk out onto Karl Johann’s Street just before the king drove by.
The reason why we were dressed up as Guantanamo prisoners was of course not to protest the king, but to protest the fact that the Norwegian government at the time welcomed invited a person such as Rumsfeld to celebrate the day here in Norway. Also, they had filled the Oslo harbor with war ships from all over the world (including a major hangarship the US) and had lined up soldiers on both sides of Karl Johann’s street the day when Norway celebrated 100 years of independence from Sweden — while the seccession bck then had been exceptionally peaceful.
<%image(20060503-militparade.jpg|379|284|A disturbance for the system? (picture: NRK))%>
What many people do not know is that several of us spent some of the other days on a similar street theatre as we had planned to do on the 7th as well.Up until then, everything had worked out fine. Now we’re facing a potential fine of 10,000NOK (ca 1600USD) + costs of the courtcase.
None of think we’re guilty, as we never really were a danger to the king. But this case is about so much more.The rather hefty fine is probably meant to deter others who might get similar ideas, and therefore I believe it is politically motivated.
See also:
http://www.aftenposten.no/nyheter/iriks/article1055066.ece¦ http://pub.tv2.no/nettavisen/innenriks/article403556.ece ¦ http://www.spisderike.net/artikkel/3088/
We were finally fined 9000kreach for the incident. See the Norwegian article in Klassekampen below
My good friend and inventor Michael Fallwell is at it again. Previously he came up with a home-built revolutionary new telescope design, which is much cheaper than the existing designs because it leaves out all the unnecessary parts and the lenses can be grinded using parts of any old washing machine you can find on the road. Then he came up with a glider powered windmill that might soon make oil obsolete as there is much less electronical cruft involved compared with the static windmills as we know them today.
This time, Mike takes care of another of our current global problems: climate change. Mike’s rainenhancer works in the following way: you have a fleet of ships moving around the coast, pumping all the seawater they can up about 10m into the atmosphere (in 100m wides stripes around 200m apart). Then some of that water will get stuck there and form clouds which will then move up 100–1000km inland before they rain out — “like a little storm system,” as Mike says.
Just like most socialists, Mike believes that change in the structure of society is closely connected to changes in technology. But while most socialists in some way or another are politicians and believe the necessary technology to permit for a restructuralization are present already and all that needs to be done is to organize for a social revolution that will leave society with a different (socialist) structure which will be able to take full advantage of the inventions that have been made already.
Not so with Mike — as an inventor he sees the main driving force of human history to be the inventory spirit of mankind. If one wants changes, one needs to invent new ways of doing things — social changes will follow as reactions.
Unrealistic? Well, maybe. But how can we know if we don’t even try? I wish Mike all the luck he needs for getting it to work, but as a socialist I can’t quite see how society will change without any human intervention at all. But maybe technological inventionism is what people focus on if social change seem impossible to start with…
You might remember my previous item on the matter, and our protest from the Left Alliance against Millinkevich, the pro-Western, pro-privatization candidate in Belarus. Last weekend, Millinkevich came to Oslo as a guest of the Norwegian Helsingfors Commitee. As noone else had, we ended up being the ones protesting him. And by the way, yesterday, I gave up all my positions in the Left Alliance. I decided upon that mainly for three reasons:
1. the youth has to take over (although several of them are older than me or have been in student politics for a longer time)
2. the student parliament is mainly limited towards having the powers of a student council at a high school. Now although it was pretty soon clear to me that those were it’s formal powers, it took quite a long time for me to udneerstand that most other MPs also wanted it to remain that way and that they enjoyed having phony debates about things they couldn’t do anything about — without even getting the press involved to build up public pressure
3. I might, believe it or not, actually finish my career as a student this summer!
…well and then there are more interesting things/activities out there. So don’t expect me to stop being active quite yet!
Update (04/30/06): The last session of the student parliament this year was actually on Thursday after I had written the entry, so technically speaking, I had one last meeting to attend to. And at that meeting, the student parliament called for a boycott of all the main occupation states: Israel, USA, China, Marocco, Turkey, Russia, Iraq, Iran, Great Britain, Pakistan, India and Indonesia. I really don’t think it can get very much more radical… If you know Norwegian, you can read the entire text below.
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I discovered these two books reviews yesterday: one in Norwegian (Norwegian) by the student magazine at our institute, and this one (English) at a pretty good anthropology website. Although they write in rather different ways, they both focus on the fact that I was very much engaged in the world of my informants in Douglas and the latter specifically critisizes the fact that I concluded with what I thought needed to be done.
Now I do agree that their criticism is valid, as far as we are speaking of liberal academic practice. This is what we today know as being the practice in “academia” and it is what gets you high grades: self-censor yourself to say absolutely nothing while showing how many books you have read so far.
This contrasts highly with the ideals I am trying to follow: For a Marxist (and I am excluding the academizised version of it for now) the point of conducting and research or study is precisely to be better skilled to change the circumstances under whih people exist and suffer.
The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways; the point is to change it. (Marx 1845 Theses on Feurbach: II, VII, XI)
and for a radical such changes will with necessity be huge and, uhm well, radical… 🙂
Hi there, you guys haven’t heard from me for a while. Now you might have thought that the system finally got me, but the truth is that this is only the state of affairs temporarily. In other words: the teaching practice takesquite a lot of time that I could have used on other projects. That does of course not mean that it’s not fun any more in any way.
And also, the silence here is somewhat of an exaggeration if you look at what I actually am able to get done. One of the things I did get done was to discuss the Muhammed picture case in Flensborg Avis (they do not let you find stories under one month old at their site). Now there are two reasons why I did it there: First of all it’s exactly NOT because I have any plans of ever going back to the wicked border area Germany/Denmark (where the paper is based), quite on the contrary: I know I can write stuff in that paper with a readership far far away from here without having to feel repercussions from my surroundings. Secondly, to a large extent I praised the Norwegian government’s handling of the case and asked for the resignation of the Danish prime minister for their extremely poor and confrontational imperialist-minded handling of it all. And what point is there in addressing a Norwegian audience telling them that they and their government are doing everything exactly right?
So the newest scare is upon us.This time it’s the birds who’ll be coming to get us. After sheep, bees and cows, it’s about time for the birds to be trying their luck with ending human civilization. And the media helps us in explaining just where the battle man against bird stands at the time, while governments are doing just exactly what makes common sense when they send out experts in allbody dresses whenever a dead bird is reported anywhere within a few hundred kilometers of any known cases of the Avian Flue. It’s just as professional as it wasfor them to ask us to stop the car and walk through some chemicals whenever we were passing some border line during the heydays of the Mouth-and-Hoof disease (whenever someone goes to a farm, it’s very likely that he’ll wear the same shoes as he will wear when he takes an airplane some days later, right?).
As far as I’ve heard, altogether three cats have so far managed to contract the virus — and that was on the Island where it was first found (Rügen). Now I’ve seen quite a number of pictures of cats eating various small birds in newspapers all across Europe after that, and the number of headline stories about how to avoid getting it yourself have risen immensely as well. Alone on that island, the German military collected 3000 dead birds. Frightening? Well, not if you consider, that under 20% of those found had the virus, and only a small percentage of those actually died of it. (On the 21st of February, when they had found 1000 dead birds, the number of infected cases was 79 — while the north-eastern part of the island houses 69,000 wild birds and altogether 400,000 chicken live on the entire island). And while world wide there have been no cases of cat to human transmissions yet, the German army was granted the right to use a Tornado fighter jet in order to find more bird carcases — of course without result — as one couldn’t tell the difference between dead and alive birds on the pictures they shot! In Russia, Deputy Speaker of the national parliament Vladimir Zhirinovsky is reported to have suggested to arm all males between Sochi and Crimea (both at the Black Sea) in order to stop the yearly bird migration to and from Turkey.
Ts, ts, what can I say? Maybe this is a good time to go out and waste a lot of money on yourself at the mall — you know you might not live to see tomorrow.