Saramago,
José
School of the Americas Watch, The
Seeing Like A State
Seventh Bullet, The
Slogans To Be Spread Now By Every Means
Social Fascists
Social-ism
Socialist Register
Solidarity Forever!
Starship Troopers
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Saramago,
José
Readers of the Turtle
have occasionally been known to put down their well- thumbed copies
of Capital, and read works of fiction instead. Few contemporary
authors deserve to be higher on summer reading lists than José
Saramago.
After an abortive
couple of novels written in his twenties, Saramago decided his writing
career was over. For 20 years, between 1947 and 1966, Saramago didn't
write a single fictive word, and worked as a clerk in a hospital. He
joined the Portuguese Communist Party in 1969, in April 1974 he became
the editor of the official Communist newspaper, and remained so until
November 1975 when the incumbent centre-right regime purged him from
his job. Faced with the prospect of unemployment, he started to write
again, and with Raised From the Floor (1977) he finally found
the fluid, disarming and richly simple voice which won him the Nobel
prize for literature in 1998.
Saramago is a bit
of a late bloomer -- he was 60 when he first won widespread critical
acclaim for his Baltasar and Blimunda. To date he has written
fewer than ten volumes, including two collections of poetry. But while
his canon may not be large, it is certainly well charged. After hitting
the big time with Baltasar and Blimunda, his second book won
him notoriety: The Gospel According to Jesus Christ tells the
of an all too human Jesus, conceived far from immaculately, and living
the life of a not terribly talented shepherd. The result is a darkly
funny, and poignant, revisiting of the origins of Christianity. Unfortunately,
neither the Vatican nor the Portuguese government quite saw it like
that, and the book was banned for blasphemy. In protest, Saramago left
Portugal and now lives in Lanzarote. The book has since been translated
into twelve languages and has earned Saramago a reputation as a world
class author. Saramago: 1, Church of Rome: Nil.
The Turtle's aesthetic
sensibility is not, however, affected solely by the virtue and credentials
of the writer. Happily, Saramago writes like an angel. His most recent
book, Blindness, is an elegiac and haunting fable of a country
savaged by an epidemic of blindness. One day, and all of a sudden, the
sight of some of the citizens dissolves into 'a milky whiteness'. In
an attempt to control the spread of the disease, the blind are sent
to an asylum, guarded by a frightened army, while the government figures
out what to do with them. Only one character's sight is unaffected throughout
all this: the optician's wife. (There are no proper names in the book
at all - we only come to know characters by the names of their relationships
with each other - the wife, the thief who visited the optician, the
policeman who caught him, etc.) In this key passage, the doctor's wife
passes some of the blind citizens:
"They crossed
a square where groups of blind people entertained themselves by listening
to speeches from other blind people, and at first sight neither group
seemed to be blind, the speakers turned their heads excitedly towards
the listeners and the listeners turned their heads attentively to
the speakers. They were extolling the virtues of the fundamental principles
of the great organised systems, private property, a free currency
market, the market economy, the stock exchange, taxation, interest,
expropriation and appropriation, production, distribution, consumption,
supply and demand, poverty and wealth, communication, repression and
delinquency, lotteries, prisons, of the penal code, the Seville code,
the highway code, dictionaries, the telephone directory, networks
of prostitution, of armaments factories, the Armed Forces, cemeteries,
the police, smuggling, drugs, permitted illegal traffic, pharmaceutical
research, gambling, the price of priests and funerals, justice, borrowing,
political parties, collections, Parliaments, governments, complex,
concave, horizontal, vertical, slotted, concentrated, diffuse, fleeting
thoughts, the fraying of the vocal cords, the death of the word."
In this lyrical
prose, the book follows the optician's wife, from her decision to feign
blindness in order to follow her husband into the asylum, through the
terror of the degenerating conditions there, and into the deserted city
beyond. It is a powerful story, told with the compassion of Primo Levi's
If this Is A Man, with the withering (and occasionally heavy
handed) humour of Nineteen Eighty Four and raising, albeit far
more subtly, some of the issues broached in The Lord of the Flies.
Indeed, Blindness has started to creep on to undergraduate syllabi
for precisely these reasons.
Meanwhile, Saramago
continues to write and has just completed a short story, set off the
northern coast of South America, "El Cuento de la Isla Desconocida"
(The Tale of the Unknown Island), and he'll be giving 100% of the profits
from it to the Colombian earthquake disaster relief fund. It is because
of writing and gestures such as these that Saramago has become one of
the Turtle's favourite Portuguese.
You can find Saramago's
works in your local library.
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School
of the Americas Watch, The
Read about the heroic
activities of the School of the Americas Watch and its founder, Father
Roy Bourgeois, in the Turtle's November
Salute. The SOAW webpage
is itself packed with useful information about the nefarious activities
of the School of the Americas, and is highly recommended.
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Seeing
Like A State
James C. Scott's
Seeing Like A State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition
Have Failed, published by Yale University Press in 1998 as a part
of its Agrarian Studies Series, is the subject of the first Symposium
of the Turtle, the heart of the Autumn
Literary Harvest Festival of 1999.
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Seventh
Bullet, The
(directed by Ali
Khamraev, USSR, 1972, 85 mins, starring Dilorom Kambarova, Suimenkul
Chokmorov, Bolot Bejshenaliyev, Talgat Nigmatulin)
Deeply obscure (as
of June 2002, the Internet Movie Database has yet to receive five votes
on its stature) but nonetheless fascinating, the mere fact that this
is an Uzbek spaghetti western is noteworthy in itself.
The films of Sergio
Leone and his contemporaries were hugely successful in the Soviet Union,
where they were acclaimed (rightly in some cases, fortuitously in others)
as incisive Marxist deconstructions of American history. So it comes
as no surprise that there were also Soviet imitations, usually set during
the civil war of the early 1920s in some far-flung mountainous region.
The best known of these is probably Nikita 'Burnt By The Sun' Mikhalkov's
At Home Among Strangers, A Stranger Among His Own (1974),
but Ali Khamraev's 1972 opus (co-scripted by Mikhalkov's brother Andrei
Konchalovsky) is rather more upfront in terms of its ideology, and remarkably
topical in the light of recent events.
The central storyline
features a Red Army officer stationed near the Afghan border and his
attempts to dissuade his former comrades from turning towards Mecca.
Although the film's own stance is never in doubt, the argument is commendably
balanced, stating the case for both Marx and Mohammed as the one true
prophet -- and while its considerable domestic success (twenty two million
admissions) was undoubtedly thanks to shootouts and horseback chases
every five minutes, it's an excellent example of a popular melodrama
offering genuine food for thought.
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Slogans
To Be Spread Now By Every Means
A celebrated document
of May 1968, reproduced here in full.
(Leaflets, announcements
over microphones, comic strips, songs, graffiti, balloons on paintings
in the Sorbonne, announcements in theaters during films or while disrupting
them, balloons on subway billboards, before making love, after making
love, in elevators, each time you raise your glass in a bar):
OCCUPY THE
FACTORIES
POWER TO THE
WORKERS COUNCILS
ABOLISH CLASS
SOCIETY
DOWN WITH
SPECTACLE-COMMODITY SOCIETY
ABOLISH ALIENATION
TERMINATE
THE UNIVERSITY
HUMANITY WON'T
BE HAPPY TILL THE LAST BUREAUCRAT IS HUNG WITH THE GUTS OF THE
LAST CAPITALIST
DEATH TO THE
COPS
FREE ALSO
THE 4 GUYS CONVICTED FOR LOOTING DURING THE MAY 6TH RIOT
OCCUPATION
COMMITTEE OF THE
PEOPLE'S FREE SORBONNE UNIVERSITY
16 May 1968, 7:00 pm
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Social
Fascists
"Kick the little
social fascists out of the kindergarten!" was a slogan of the German
Communist Party (KPD) during the period of the so-called "left
turn" of the late 1920s and early 1930s, when the Comintern decreed
that the main opponents to the Communist Parties of Western Europe were
the Social Democrats, that these parties were objectively the acceptable
face of fascism, and that they were therefore "Social Fascists".
It was not a sensible line to take, and after the Nazi takeover of Germany
and the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War a worried Stalin reversed
course and ushered in the period of the popular fronts.
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Social-ism
For about a year
after his election as leader of the Labour Party, Tony Blair would refer
to his "social-ism" in public lectures on political ideology
(although how he pronounced this word is not altogether clear). The
term was originally coined by anti-socialist critic David Selbourne,
in his communitarian tract The Principle of Duty (1994), which
no doubt appealed to Blair on account of its trenchant assault on the
notion of a "dutyless right". Blair seems to have first used
the term in a June 1994 speech to a Guardian/Whatever Next? conference,
which was later issued as Fabian Tract 565 (called simply "Socialism",
with no hyphen). The last sighting of it in print may have been a year
later, in his lecture on the 50th anniversary of the Labour landslide
of 1945 (a piece in which he prophetically warns Michael Portillo that
his Enfield seat is not safe). But he seems to have tired of the concept,
for we are not sure that it has been heard of since. "Social-ism"
was followed by a brief flirtation with Will Hutton's slogan of a "stakeholding
society" before he settled down on the more nebulous concept of
the "Third Way".
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Socialist
Register
Ralph Miliband and
John Saville founded the Socialist Register (whose website is
here) in 1964, after disgruntlement at Perry
Anderson's takeover of the New Left Review. An annual publication
published by the Merlin Press, Socialist Register was edited
by Miliband and Saville for many years, and, following Saville's retirement
and Miliband's death, is now edited by Leo Panitch and Colin Leys in
Toronto. Distinguished contributors have included Isaac Deutscher, Ernest
Mandel, Maurice Godelier, Eric Hobsbawm, and articles by a very old
Georg Lukács and Jean-Paul Sartre. The Register is the
home of E. P. Thompson's "Open Letter to Leszek Kolakowski"
(1973), as well as to the latter's response the following year, "My
Correct Views on Everything". Soviet politics, imperialist politics
and questions in Marxist theory were recurrent themes in the journal,
and in the late 1970s it hosted a sustained debate on the possibility
of building a new socialist party in Britain. In a 1994 retrospective,
which must also stand as his farewell to his creation, for he died in
the same year, Miliband highlighted the Register's theoretical
contributions but conceded that "we did not address the question
of socialist construction with anything like the rigorous and detailed
concern which it requires". Annual issues are now organised around
a central theme: the 1998 volume celebrates 150 years of the Communist
Manifesto.
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Solidarity
Forever!
For a long time
one of the Turtle's favourite songs, Solidarity Forever! is the
greatest of all the American labour anthems. Written around 1914 by
Ralph Chaplin and sung to tune of the Battle Hymn of the Republic,
the song is a rare mixture of intelligent words, stirring music and
admirable political aspiration.
We reproduce all
six verses below.
When the union's
inspirations through the workers' blood shall run,
There can be no power greater anywhere beneath the sun,
Yet what force on earth is weaker than the feeble power of one?
But the union makes us strong!
Solidarity forever,
Solidarity forever,
Solidarity forever,
For the union makes us strong!
They have taken untold millions that they never toiled to earn,
But without our strength and muscle not a single wheel would turn,
We can break their haughty power, gain our freedom when we learn
That the union makes us strong!
It is we who ploughed the prairies, built the cities where they trade,
Dug the mines and built the workshops, endless miles of railroad laid,
Now we stand outcast and starving midst the wonders we have made,
But the union makes us strong!
All the world that's owned by idle drones is ours and ours alone,
We have laid the wide foundations, built it skyward stone by stone,
It is ours not to toil in, but to master and to own,
For the union makes us strong!
Is there aught we hold in common with the greedy parasite?
Who would lash us into bondage, who would crush us with his might?
Is there anything left to us but to organise and fight?
For the union makes us strong!
In our hands is placed a power greater than their hoarded gold,
Greater than the might of armies magnified a thousandfold,
We can bring to birth a new world from the ashes of the old,
For the union makes us strong!
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Starship
Troopers
(directed
by Paul Verhoeven, US, 1997, 129 mins, starring Casper Van Dien, Dina
Meyer, Denise Richards, Michael Ironside)
Probably the most subversive Hollywood film of recent years, Starship
Troopers can best be viewed as a head-on collision between American
conservatism and European liberalism, as the values underlying Robert
A Heinlein's sci-fi novel are ruthlessly satirised by Dutch director
Paul Verhoeven (whose PhD makes him one of Hollywood's few genuine
intellectuals). Although made in 1997, it's gained even more resonance
post-September 11 -- if you replace the word "bug" with
"terrorist" and Buenos Aires with New York, the film becomes
an uncannily prescient depiction of the isolationist and xenophobic
mentality behind George W Bush's so-called "war on terrorism",
as young men and women brainwashed by a curriculum devoted to the
pursuit of physical perfection and the advocation of violence as a
one-size-fits-all political solution are pressured into joining the
armed forces (the only way to become a "citizen" as opposed
to a mere "civilian") and sent to fight a war whose motives
they unquestioningly accept. Their passivity is unsurprising, since
their entire lives are spent bombarded by government propaganda --
and the film's masterstroke is to base its style and content on similar
messages from the 1940s and 1950s, fusing the aesthetics of Leni Riefenstahl
with the ideology of Joseph McCarthy and hinting that there wasn't
much difference between Stalin and Eisenhower when it came to social
and cultural conditioning. The fact that the film was dubbed Starshit
Poopers within hours of its US release reveals that it went way
over the head of much of its target audience -- tellingly, the European
reaction was vastly more sympathetic.
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