Sam Han | Eportfolio

TOKYO — Responding to recent provocations by North Korea, Japan’s defense minister will soon visit Seoul with several proposals aimed at strengthening military ties despite South Korea’s lingering bitterness over Japan’s colonial past, Japanese news media reported on Tuesday.

During the trip next week, Defense Minister Toshimi Kitazawa will propose that the two Asian neighbors sign separate agreements to cooperate in supplying each others’ armed forces during peacekeeping and other international operations, and to facilitate sharing of sensitive military information, the reports said. They also said he will propose that Japan and South Korea increase military contacts by scheduling regular high-level meetings between defense officials.

One Japanese newspaper, the right-leaning Yomiuri Shimbun, also said the two nations are working on a more sweeping, joint declaration on military cooperation, though a South Korean Defense Ministry official denied that. The official, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said the other agreements had been discussed with the Japanese, but stressed these were about low-level cooperation.

In Tokyo, a spokeswoman for the Defense Ministry refused to comment on the reports or the agenda of the trip. However, the fact that the anonymously sourced reports all carried the same information suggested they had come from an official background briefing.

The anonymous reports and official backpedaling underscore how sensitive the issue of military cooperation is in both countries, though for different reasons. In South Korea, resentment remains raw over Japan’s brutal early 20th-century colonization, while many Japanese have a deep phobia of military action abroad from their nation’s devastating defeat in World War II.

Japan also faces obstacles in its pacifist Constitution, which severely restricts the use of Japan’s military.

Still, Tokyo and Seoul have been cautiously moving toward closer military ties after recent attacks by North Korea on the South, particularly the artillery bombardment of a South Korean island in late November. The two nations have also been prodded by the United States, which has called on Japan and South Korea, its two closest Asian allies, to join in three-nation military drills.

Last month, South Korean observers attended joint United States-Japan military exercises for the first time. In an interview last month, Foreign Minister Seiji Maehara of Japan said he expected the two nations to slowly increase military ties in response to the North.

The discussion about closer military cooperation between Japan and South Korea comes as the United States special envoy for North Korea began a visit to the region to discuss restarting talks to reduce nuclear tension on the Korean Peninsula. The envoy, Stephen Bosworth, arrived in South Korea on Tuesday before heading to China and Japan later this week.

According to Tuesday’s press reports, one of the Mr. Kitazawa’s proposals would be for an agreement allowing forces to cooperate during international operations like peacekeeping and disaster relief efforts. The proposed agreement would limit cooperation to providing each others’ militaries with essential items like food, water and fuel, and to sharing support services like transportation and medical care.

Japan already has similar agreements with the United States and Australia. According to the reports, the proposed agreement on the protection of shared military information would also be similar to one that Japan has signed with the United States.

The news reports said it was unclear if the proposed cooperation with South Korea would also extend to military emergencies, like a larger confrontation on the Korean Peninsula. While some Japanese leaders have spoken of raising their nation’s profile, Japan has so far said it would limit its military role during such a contingency to supporting the United States, its long-time protector.

Yasuko Kamiizumi contributed reporting from Tokyo, and Su-hyun Lee from Seoul, South Korea.

Oh isn’t this a bit…odd.

Patton Oswalt, the voice of the main character of Ratatouille(which I hear, by the way, is an excellent film), is one America’s most literary comics. Yes, there is this other guy but after one bizarre-o appearance at the 92Y this year, well, it seems that people have realized that his time as the intellectual doyen of comedy is slowly coming to an end. But to call Oswalt the new Martin would be unfair to both. Martin basically cut his teeth as a voice in the literary upper echelon of the US through the New Yorker, perhaps still the major gatekeeper of what is in among the cultural elite. Oswalt, on the other hand, has really relied on the web and Wired. Both are fantastic writers, but have really addressed different “publics,” Martin’s being the NPR-crowd (broadly) and Oswalt’s being the TRON-crowd (broadly). 

In the most recent issue of Wired, Oswalt penned a much-lauded essay on the past, present and future of “geek culture.” I have to say it was a great read—well-written, made a point and often funny. But at the end of it all, I was left with a bit of puzzled feeling. Let me explain. 

The general thrust of Oswalt’s argument is that geek culture, once the exclusive property of actual geeks, has massified, become pop, and irrevocably Web-ified, making it no longer actually geek but just simply one among many cultural pools from which people can take a sip. Here’s Oswalt’s the state of the geek: 

The topsoil has been scraped away, forever, in 2010. In fact, it’s been dug up, thrown into the air, and allowed to rain down and coat everyone in a thin gray-brown mist called the Internet. Everyone considers themselves otaku about something—whether it’s the mythology of Lost or the minor intrigues of Top Chef. American Idol inspires—if not in depth, at least in length and passion—the same number of conversations as does The Wire. There are no more hidden thought-palaces—they’re easily accessed websites, or Facebook pages with thousands of fans. And I’m not going to bore you with the step-by-step specifics of how it happened. In the timeline of the upheaval, part of the graph should be interrupted by the words the Internet. And now here we are.

The problem with the Internet, however, is that it lets anyone become otaku about anything instantly. In the ’80s, you couldn’t get up to speed on an entire genre in a weekend. You had to wait, month to month, for the issues of Watchmen to come out. We couldn’t BitTorrent the latest John Woo film or digitally download an entire decade’s worth of grunge or hip hop. Hell, there were a few weeks during the spring of 1991 when we couldn’t tell whether Nirvana or Tad would be the next band to break big. Imagine the terror!

Long gone is the ”chilly thrill in moving with the herd while quietly being tuned in to something dark, complicated, and unknown just beneath the topsoil of popularity.” 

I get it. Oswalt’s lament is something that die-hard fans of various subcultures feel when what they once viewed was theirs is shared by the masses, usually boiled down to LCD (Lowest Common Denominator) backwash that no longer resembles what they first fell in love with and obsessed over for so long. It’s not hard to imagine why Oswalt, and conceivably others, would feel such a way. I used to feel that way about hip hop. Once considered to be a cultural danger on par with drugs (remember Tipper Gore and C. Dolores Tucker?), hip hop has emerged as part and parcel of the cultural logic of capitalism, or at least one can argue. But more specifically, the fear for Oswalt is that the increase in availability of geek culture will lead to not only its dilution but a kind of laziness. See, part of Oswalt’s definition of geek is a penchant for working hard. There’s a strong thread of austerity that undergirds much of his descriptions of his early years as a geek. Thus, the actual fear for him is ease not massification. He calls this condition ETEWAF: Everything That Ever Was—Available Forever.

Here’s the danger: That creates weak otakus. Etewaf doesn’t produce a new generation of artists—just an army of sated consumers. Why create anything new when there’s a mountain of freshly excavated pop culture to recut, repurpose, and manipulate on your iMovie? The Shining can be remade into a comedy trailer. Both movie versions of the Joker can be sent to battle each another. The Dude is in The Matrix.

So what does Oswalt suggest we do about the status quo, with geek culture being spread so thin that it no longer holds meaning? 

Rather surprisingly, he takes a page from a rather orthodox Marxism. Like those adhere to the linear theory of history that Marx provided, Oswalt suggests that in order to get to a degree zero of geek culture, where everything is as it was, we must accelerate the very thing that he admonishes and trying to take down. In the case of Marxism, it was to help along the process of capitalist “primitive accumulation.” For some Marxists, in order to get to the state of communism, where one could be a poet at night and a fisherman during the day, there needed to at least be the social conditions under which the transitional period of socialism could emerge. But this can only occur if capitalism, viewed by Marx, as a stage of the development of history towards communism, and its universe of economic and social relations takes hold. 

No, I’m not suggesting that Oswalt is in anyway Stalin-like but I do wish to draw some parallels in the kind of rigid framework under which he is writing. I understand, he’s trying to be funny and not every word in his essay is meant to be taken literally. But, there is undoubtedly some sense that the Web, for better or for worse, has ruined geek culture. For various Marxists, this has been a point of confusion and has resulted in a rather bizarre way of dealing with non-proletariat populations. How does on develop a revolutionary class consciousness when the group one is trying to galvanize is not even in the stage before the stage before that stage that would lead to communist paradise? Well, you either killed them all or removed them to the Gulag. Either get on the Juggernaut, or we’ll throw you off. While there is no geek ETEWAF Gulag in Siberia, Oswalt does suggest that we must aid the process of ETEWAF to the point where there is, as he describes it an “ETEWAF singularity.”   

So the topsoil we’re coated in needs to wash away for a while. I want my daughter to have a 1987 the way I did and experience the otaku thrill. While everyone else is grooving on the latest Jay-Z, 5 Gallons of Diesel, I’d like her to share a secret look with a friend, both of them hip to the fact that, from Germany, there’s a bootleg MP3 of a group called Dr. Cali-gory, pioneers of superviolent line-dancing music. And I want her to enjoy that secret look for a little while before Dr. Cali-gory’s songs get used in commercials for cruise lines.

Oswalt is effectively contributing to a cultural elitism that has long been the favored strategy of post-WWII social and cultural critics, particularly the group of intellectuals called “the Frankfurt School” and those influenced by them, of which the most important figure today would be Fredric Jameson. (See this article in particular where he comes off as especially culturally elitist.)

In the case of Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, the most representative figures of the Frankfurt school, it was revolutionary, anti-capitalist consciousness that they argued was being repressed by homogeneity of mass culture, which they, tellingly, refer to as “the culture industry.” For them, the massification of culture through technological means meant that the artistic sphere, for instance, which used to be the breeding ground of anti-status quo ideas and sentiment, has become the very opposite, the bearer of hegemonic ideology. In their classic The Dialectic of Enlightenment, they write: 

Works of art are ascetic and unashamed; the culture industry is pornographic and prudish. Love is downgraded to romance. And, after the descent, much is permitted; even license as a marketable speciality has its quota bearing the trade description “daring.” The mass production of the sexual automatically achieves its repression. Because of his ubiquity, the film star with whom one is meant to fall in love is from the outset a copy of himself. Every tenor voice comes to sound like a Caruso record, and the “natural” faces of Texas girls are like the successful models by whom Hollywood has typecast them. The mechanical reproduction of beauty, which reactionary cultural fanaticism wholeheartedly serves in its methodical idolisation of individuality, leaves no room for that unconscious idolatry which was once essential to beauty.

…

The assembly-line character of the culture industry, the synthetic, planned method of turning out its products (factory-like not only in the studio but, more or less, in the compilation of cheap biographies, pseudo-documentary novels, and hit songs) is very suited to advertising: the important individual points, by becoming detachable, interchangeable, and even technically alienated from any connected meaning, lend themselves to ends external to the work. The effect, the trick, the isolated repeatable device, have always been used to exhibit goods for advertising purposes, and today every monster close-up of a star is an advertisement for her name, and every hit song a plug for its tune. Advertising and the culture industry merge technically as well as economically. In both cases the same thing can be seen in innumerable places, and the mechanical repetition of the same culture product has come to be the same as that of the propaganda slogan. In both cases the insistent demand for effectiveness makes technology into psycho-technology, into a procedure for manipulating men. In both cases the standards are the striking yet familiar, the easy yet catchy, the skilful yet simple; the object is to overpower the customer, who is conceived as absent-minded or resistant.

Why is austerity and difficulty so important for this perspective? What about the process of spending long hours to discover something special only to keep it to yourself is so appealing? While I understand where both A+H and Oswalt are coming from, I have a few questions in response to this figure of the “austere geek”: How many of today’s geeks grew up as Oswalt did, with a family with means so much so that as children they could spend hours upon hours digging through geek-cultural esoterica? Is not Oswalt’s lament basically one that assumes a middle-classness of yesteryear that no longer exists for the majority of America’s potential geeks? To call for a return to the hard-work era of geek culture, is not Oswalt simply providing a cover, a rather well-argued one at that, that is founded upon a sacrosanct status quo ante that, well, is simply a justification of elitism under the guise of “revolutionary” politics? What is more “capitalist” than an ethic of hard work? 

If it is this “geek culture” for which Oswalt is nostalgic, I say good riddance. It’s been a long time coming. 

This is funny.

Judson Phillips, founder of Tea Party Nation, one of the country’s most prominent tea party organizations, really seems to despise the Methodist Church, or as he would call it, “the first Church of Karl Marx.”

In a recent blog post (subscription required) the founder of Tea Party Nation recounts his recent experience visiting the United Methodist Building in Washington D.C., where saw a promotional banner for the DREAM Act, a failed piece of legislation that would have provided a path to citizenship for some undocumented immigrants who entered the country as children.

Such a stance could only mean one thing, Phillips concluded.

“The Methodist church is pro-illegal immigration,” he said. “They have been in the bag for socialist health care, going as far as sending out emails to their membership ‘debunking’ the myths of Obamacare. Say, where are the liberal complaints on the separation of church and state?”

Phillips was once a member of the so-called “religious arm of socialism,” but abandoned its ranks when he found his views diverged from the party line. Among the positions that he now detests:

They want amnesty, they want “economic justice”, they opposed “global climate change” (earth to the Methodists, man isn’t doing it), fighting global poverty (here is another hint, most poverty is caused by a lack of freedom and lack of a free enterprise system). Not shockingly, the Methodists side with the Islamists against Israel, and of course oppose America in Iraq.

A blogger at “Unsettled Christianity” has unsurprisingly taken issue with Phillips’s attack:

I’ve noticed one thing about all of this – he is lacking in his Scriptural foundation. Where is his scriptural support for those things which he says that the UMC is wrong for? Instead, he uses words which he doesn’t understand, like Socialism, Marxism and Communism.

It’s not the first time Phillips has offended people with his ham-handed religious criticism. In October, Phillips drew fire first for claiming that Minnesota Rep. Keith Ellison should be removed from office in part because he was a Muslim, and then for admitting that he had a “real problem with Islam.” Phillips also recently galled the sensibilities of even the most amateur fans of social justice or common sense when he suggested that it would make “a lot of sense” to return to a system where only property owners have the right to vote.

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Ha! This is so funny. The Methodists are worse than the Presby’s on the gay clergy issue. I wonder what the Tea Party Nation thinks of them.

Oy…

There have been many attempts at writing just the right thing for the holidays. Perhaps the best effort has come from David Sedaris, whose Santaland Diaries is so masterful, I’d sacrifice 1st, 2nd, 3rd, 4th and 5th borns to the writing gods to obtain such literary skill. (Listen to an excerpt from NPR here.) Alas, I can’t, not only because there are no writing gods but also because I don’t really have or want children. (Another story for another post). Yet, I do feel compelled to write something about the holidays, since I live in New York City, where the holidays, no matter how hard one tries, is inescapable. Christmas lights are dangling everywhere. (Electrical fires waiting to happen.) Stores are blasting pop-versions of Christmas tunes. (“Silent Night” sung by Beyonce…really?) I see people on the train wearing Santa hats. (I guess going to and from Christmas parties? But when did Christmas parties become dress-up? It’s not Halloween. Also, if you are over 25 and dressing up for Halloween, I mean…) 

All of this, however, I can deal with. I live in New York. I grew up here. I’m sort of expecting all of this. 

What I have a harder time with is the family-centrism of the whole block of time, starting from a week before Christmas to the 3rd of January, or whenever that Monday is when people come back to work. No, one is forcing anyone to go “home” to see your parents but nevertheless all small-talk in the run-up to this period of two weeks turns into something related to going home.

“What are you doing for the holidays?”

“Are you traveling?” 

These are all what James Scott, the political anthropologist, calls “euphemizations.”[Sub. req.] Statements like these have a double-meaning. While seemingly innocent, questions like these are probes into one’s “family situation.” To be fair, this doesn’t happen during the holidays exclusively, but it is most pointed around this time. A pretty generic question when getting to know someone is about brothers, sisters, moms, dads, etc. I never understood this, though I undoubtedly have played into this myself. Family, for me, is not necessarily something I wish to talk about because well…I don’t see it as having much to do with who I am. It was bizarre when I first entered my “limousine liberal” middle and high school (which I loved and still do by the way), and saw my (white) friends have relationships with their parents that exceeded mere Hi’s, Bye’s and silent meals? To be asked about my family is well, I don’t know, like asking about my left pinky toe. I have one, it’s necessary and pretty important to me but I don’t think about it as capturing who I am. 

But it’s not really my family that I’m really hating on here (though truth be told, my parents could use some work. I know, they’ve sacrificed a tremendous amount for me but, as my fellow Koreans will attest to, that Confucian ethic of obligation is really wack. My brother Paul is the man though!). I’m more so grating against the fact that “family” has become the object of worship during today’s secularized holidays. Thanksgiving is really about family. Christmas is really about family. You go “home” for Thanksgiving; you go “home” for Christmas or Hanukkah. All holidays seemingly function in this manner. (Perhaps the consideration of a holiday from holidays is in order.) 

The family, in the United states, has been an ideological tool used most historically for some sublimated form of nationalism. This has basically mirrored the increasingly secularized understanding of religious holidays. Indeed, this is the very basis for the theory of “civil religion,” articulated first by Rousseau but more recently by sociologist of religion Robert Bellah, who looked at events such as the Presidential Inauguration as rituals for worshiping a new transcendent figure, the Nation. Perhaps the sacraments of the holidays have reoriented its object to another transcendent deity—family. 

“Family values,” the phrase, betrays this history of the alignment of national identity and family. So does the Family Reunification Act, first instantiated in the 1965 Immigration Act, which much sociological literature on immigration views as its point d’appui. The family, as an institution, has done much of the cultural work required to preserve the social order in the United States. It has, in my view, an innate conservative function. I don’t mean conservative in terms of political spectrum but in its true sense; it conserves and upholds. It maintains. We still live in the wake of Leave it Beaver, Ozzie and Harriet, Happy Days, Brady Bunch, Full House andThe Cosby Show. To be fair, not all of these portrayed “traditional” families—you know, 2.5 kids, dog, white picket fence, house with a garage, etc. Nevertheless, what they did portray was the family as center, as emotional stability, as unconditional love, as…HOME. 

As a consequence, the “home,” as the temple of family, is a figure closely associated with American-ness. The financial crisis sparked by the over-leveraging of mortgage-backed securities is more telling culturally and semiotically than what many so-called experts have let on in their analyses. So much of the analyses overlooked the simple fact that the selling of bad mortgages is predicated upon an extant collective ideal, a “cultural goal” as the sociologist Robert Merton once called it, for owning a home. The metaphysics of home-ownership runs so deep in this country that basic mathematical skills are overrun by one’s dreams of a granite countertop. “Yeah, an ARM (adjustable rate mortgage) and no down payment are definitely fishy, but who cares, I’m going to own my first HOME!!!!” You can see this cultural goal in action in no better place than on HGTV, where on shows like “House Hunters” and “My First Place,” couples say things like, “I can really see us starting a family here.” This is also the case on another home-centric TV show Extreme Makeover: Home Edition, which selects families under some sort of duress, usually financial, and basically create a McMansion for them. The “reveal” (when the families return to see their brand new homes for the first time) is always super-emotional, with mom in crying hysterics and children jumping up and down in excitement hysterics. The appeal of the show is affective. It draws upon a certain empathy that most of us feel towards a family, without a home, to have one. This is the same set of feelings that panhandlers draw upon in the NYC subway when they mention they are scrounging up something with which to feed their kids. I’m in no place to judge whether the deployment of family, as strategy, is good or bad. I quite frankly don’t care. If dropping a line about one’s kids gets more change or a few dollar bills in the paper cup, I’m all for it. But I’m more interested in why it works. How is it that in the US, family, has taken on a sacred status, when nearly everyone who comes back from holidays usually complain about their crazy families? Perhaps it is less so a fetishism of family and home and more so a fear of homelessness, not in the literal sense but in the metaphorical sense of not having a center, a core, an essence.

Home is, in addition to being where the heart is, a metaphor for ontological security. It gives one the feeling that you are.  

The nature of “home” has been analyzed wonderfully by Gaston Bachelard and Mircea Eliade, in spatial and religious terms. But none, in my view, have approached the issues that I feel are most pertinent to me, someone who has lived in sixteen different dwellings in my lifetime, than the Chicana, feminist theorist Gloria Anzaldua, who in the much-celebrated Borderlands tells this story: 

In a New England college where I taught, the presence of a few lesbians threw the more conservative heterosexual students and faculty into a panic. The two lesbian students and we two lesbian instructors met with them to discuss their fears. One of the students said, “I thought homophobia meant fear of going home after a residency.” 

And I thought, how apt. Fear of going home. And of not being taken in. We’re afraid of being abandoned by the mother, the culture, la Raza, for being unacceptable, faulty, damaged. Most of us unconsciously believe that if we reveal this unacceptable aspect of the self our mother/culture/race will totally reject us. To avoid rejection, some of us conform to the values of the culture, push the unacceptable parts into the shadows. Which leves only one fear—that we will be found out and that the Shadow-Beast will break out of its cage. Some of us take another route. We try to make ourselves conscious of the Shadow-Beast, stare at the sexual lust and lust for power and destruction we see on its face, discern among its features the undershadow that the reining order of heterosexual males project on our Beast…But a few of us have been lucky—on the face of the Shadow-Beast we have seen not lust but tenderness; on its face we have uncovered the lie. 

Ultimately Anzaldua concludes that we must be comfortable with this homophobia, and that it is a condition of living in “the intersticios.” She must live as outsider in a New England college as well as the Tejas of her youth. 

Like Anzaldua, I don’t see this as tragic. It’s quite simply, how we live now. Existing on the borderlands, that is, living away from home but not truly making a home where you live, is something more people in the 20th century have done than in previous centuries thanks to the advent of road travel, sea travel and air travel. (The deruralfication of China in recent years, actually, is one the largest migrations of peoples in human history.) “Home,” once again, is something, as we are reminded more and more each day, is something for the landed elite. The rest are out here surviving, doing the best they can.  

Happy holidays to you and yours. 

@scatteredspecs will be back in the New Year. 

The article in the most recent New Yorker by John Cassidy on “state capitalism” and the falsehood of the concept of “free trade” is so damn good but it’s behind their selective pay-wall. There is, however, this, which I think must be useful.

The prison protest has entered the wireless age.

Inmates in at least seven Georgia prisons have used contraband cellphones to coordinate a nonviolent strike this weekend, saying they want better living conditions and to be paid for work they do in the prisons.

Inmates said they would not perform chores, work for the Corrections Department’s industrial arm or shop at prison commissaries until a list of demands are addressed, including compensation for their work, more educational opportunities, better food and sentencing rules changes.

The protest began Thursday, but inmates said that organizers had spent months building a web of disparate factions and gangs — groups not known to cooperate — into a unified coalition using text messaging and word of mouth.

Officials at the Georgia Department of Corrections did not respond on Sunday to phone and e-mail messages seeking comment.

Smuggled cellphones have been commonplace in prisons for years; Charles Manson was caught with one in a California penitentiary this month. Officials worry that inmates will use them to issue orders to accomplices on the outside or to plan escape attempts.

But the Georgia protest appears to be the first use of the technology to orchestrate a grass-roots movement behind bars.

Reached on their cellphones inside several prisons, six participants in the strike described a feat of social networking more reminiscent of Capitol Hill vote-whipping than jailhouse rebellion.

Conditions at the state prisons have been in decline, the inmates said. But “they took the cigarettes away in August or September, and a bunch of us just got to talking, and that was a big factor,” said Mike, an inmate at the Smith State Prison in Downing who declined to give his full name.

The organizers set a date for the start and, using contact numbers from time spent at other prisons or connections from the outside, began sending text messages to inmates known to hold sway.

“Anybody that has some sort of dictatorship or leadership amongst the crowds,” said Mike, one of several prisoners who contacted The New York Times to publicize their strike. “We have to come together and set aside all differences, whites, blacks, those of us that are affiliated in gangs.”

Now, Mike said, every dormitory at participating prisons has at least one point man with a phone who can keep the other inmates in the loop.

Miguel, another prisoner at Smith who also declined to give his full name, estimated that about 10 percent of all inmates had phones.

“We text very frequently,” he said. “We try and keep up with what’s going on in the news and what’s going on at other facilities. Those are our voices.”

They are also a source of profit to the people providing the contraband. Miguel said he paid $400 for a phone that would have cost $20 on the street. Mike said he bought his through a guard. “That’s how a lot of us get our phones,” Mike said.

Inmates said guards had started confiscating the phones, and they complained that hot water and heat had been turned off. The Corrections Department placed several of the facilities where inmates planned to strike under indefinite lockdown on Thursday, according to local news reports.

“We’re hearing in the news they’re putting it down as we’re starting a riot, so they locked all the prison down,” said an inmate at Hays State Prison in Trion who refused to give his name. But, he said, “We locked ourselves down.”

The inmates contend that if they have a source of income in the prison and better educational opportunities to prepare them for release, violence and recidivism will go down. But the Department of Corrections has not publicly acknowledged the protest.

Mike said that the leaders were focused on telling inmates to remain patient, and not to consider resorting to violence.

The inmates’ closest adviser outside prison walls is Elaine Brown, a longtime advocate for prisoners whose son is incarcerated at Macon State Prison, one of the other major protest sites.

A former Black Panther leader who is based in Oakland, Calif., Ms. Brown helped distill the inmate complaints into a list of demands. She held a conference call on Sunday evening to develop a strategy with various groups, including the Georgia chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People and the Nation of Islam.

Amazing.

A new strategy is needed for a brutal new era

13 December 2010

Peter Hallward describes why he joined the demonstration on 9 December, and gives his personal account of how events unfolded that day

Last Thursday, the government passed one of the most reactionary and ill-conceived pieces of legislation in this country’s history. At a stroke, the increase in tuition fees promises to destroy publicly funded further and higher education in England, and to consolidate one of the most far-reaching shifts of power and opportunity that has ever been engineered in a so-called democracy. Camouflaged by vacuous reference to “student choice” and a few token concessions to the less affluent, the new law will rig the entire system in favour of the privileged few. It will accelerate the conversion of genuine education into market-driven job training, and it will do irreversible damage to arts, humanities and social science subjects in particular.

Students and staff have mobilised in unprecedented numbers and unprecedented ways to oppose these disastrous education cuts. Unable to sustain let alone win the argument in public debate, unwilling to devote even minimal time for general consultation and discussion, the government has instead opted to quash our demonstrations with naked force, intimidation and collective punishment. Up and down the country, secondary school students have been threatened with expulsion for joining local protest marches. Scores of protesters have been injured by riot police, hundreds have been arrested and many thousands have repeatedly been corralled and detained (and then photographed) against their will.

Attempts to portray the protests as “riots” provoked by a frenzied few are a clichéd evasion of the real issues at stake here. Anyone who has participated in these demonstrations knows that each one has been a massive and powerful expression of revulsion for the government’s plans, an uncompromising rejection of the cuts and the neoliberal priorities they represent. It takes some nerve for a government that is destroying our education system (while waging war in Afghanistan, investing in new nuclear weapons and using “anti-terror” laws to persecute large swathes of its own population) to treat the tens of thousands of students and lecturers defending it as if they were guilty of collusion in violence.

In reality, the great majority of the violence has been suffered rather than inflicted by the protesters. In reality, given the calamity that confronts us, protesters have acted with remarkable discipline and restraint. In reality, although police justify the use of “containment” as a means of preventing violence, most of what violence there was during Thursday’s rally began well after the vast kettling operation was set up.

I imagine that the experience of my own students (studying philosophy at Kingston University, or at Middlesex University where I taught until this past summer) is typical of many others. Most of them have already committed huge amounts of time and energy to the anti-cuts campaign, and many have attended all of the major London rallies over the past month.

Shortly after Thursday’s vote, a policeman hit one of my current MA students on the head with his truncheon. He said it felt like he was struck by a solid metal bar. After being bandaged by other students and released from the kettle on account of his obvious injuries, police medics took a quick look at him, and checked that his eyes were still responding to light. According to my student, they recommended that he make his own way to his local hospital in North London, where he received stitches.

At least a dozen of the students I work with didn’t escape the kettle so quickly, and were among the thousand or so people who were eventually forced back on to Westminster Bridge shortly after 9pm, without water or toilets, without information or explanation, in the freezing cold and wind, long after the media had gone home. They were then crowded together for a couple of hours between solid lines of baton-wielding riot police. Many students say they were beaten with truncheons as they held their open hands high in the air, in the hope of calming their attackers.

“I was standing at the front of the group with nowhere to go,” Johann Hoiby, a Middlesex philosophy student, told me. “My hands were open and visible, when a riot police officer, without provocation, hit me in the face with his shield, screaming ‘get back’ when I clearly couldn’t move. The most terrifying thing was the fact that everyone was screaming that people were getting crushed, yet the police kept pushing us backwards when we had nowhere to go.”

Around the same time, one of Johann’s classmates, Zain Ahsan, was “hit in the abdominal area with a baton; I shouted back at the officer that my hands were in the air and I was being pushed by the people behind me.”

My Kingston students say they saw people having panic attacks, people seized up with asthma, people who fell under the feet of the crowd.

“The fact that there were no deaths on that bridge”, one says, “is a true miracle.”

Some students claim that they were then kicked by police as they were slowly released, single file, through a narrow police corridor. Everyone was forcibly photographed, and many of the people detained on the bridge were then taken away for questioning.

The story of one Middlesex undergraduate who used to sit in on my MA classes, Alfie Meadows, is already notorious. He received a full-on blow to the side of his skull. My partner and I found him wandering in Parliament Square a little after 6pm, pale and distraught, looking for a way to go home. He had a large lump on the right side of his head. He said he’d been hit by the police and didn’t feel well. We took one look at him and walked him towards the nearest barricaded exit as quickly as possible. It took a few minutes to reach and then convince the taciturn wall of police blocking Great George Street to let him through their shields, but they refused to let me, my partner or anyone else accompany him in search of medical help. We assumed that he would receive immediate and appropriate treatment on the other side of the police wall as a matter of course, but in fact he was left to wander off on his own, towards Victoria.

As it turns out, Alfie’s subsequent survival depended on three chance events. If his mother (a lecturer at Roehampton, who was also “contained” in Parliament Square) hadn’t received his phone call and caught up with him shortly afterwards, the odds are that he’d have passed out on the street. If they hadn’t then stumbled upon an ambulance waiting nearby, his diagnosis could have been fatally delayed. And if the driver of this ambulance hadn’t overruled an initial refusal of the A&E department of the Chelsea and Westminster hospital to look at Alfie, his transfer to the Charing Cross neurological unit for emergency brain surgery might well have come too late.

Over the last couple of days the stories of other victims (including the writer Shiv Malik, whose head needed five stitches after another encounter with a police baton) have begun to circulate, but it will take a few more days before the full extent of the injuries suffered on 9 December becomes clear.

With each new protest, we learn a little more about what we are up against.

For decades, the corporate interests that promoted and then implemented their neoliberal “reforms” sought to present them as a form of modernising improvement, one carried by the inexorable progress of history towards the untrammelled pursuit of profit “for the benefit of all”. For decades, this grotesque distortion of reality has helped to mask a relentless assault on the remnants of our not-yet-for-profit services and resources, and to persuade many of those sheltering in the more privileged parts of the world to tolerate such “development” as a necessary price to be paid for their comfort and security. Not any more. The days of “there is no alternative” are rapidly becoming a distant memory, and all over Europe the bankers’ masks have begun hiding behind police visors.

On Thursday, the government converted its assault on further and higher education into law, but only additional reliance on police truncheons will allow them to enforce it. To judge from the government’s response so far, it is now only a matter of time before truncheons are reinforced by water cannon and rubber bullets, and before near-fatal injuries become fatalities. As Michel Foucault understood, however, the successful exercise of power is “proportional to its ability to hide its own mechanisms”. If the neoliberal programme has never yet pushed so deep into the British public sphere, rarely have the means to impose it looked so exposed. No amount of police brutality can enforce an unpopular measure in the face of massive non-compliance. If threats to expel students may intimidate an isolated few, they soon become risible if ignored en masse.

The government has no mandate to treble fees and eliminate the Education Maintenance Allowance, and Parliament offers no credible alternative. The only way to block implementation of the Tory cuts is to mobilise schools and campuses over the coming months in ways that will oblige the government to back down. The Tories have called the question; as Howard Zinn reminds us, you can’t be neutral on a moving train.

Postscript :

Peter Hallward is professor of modern European philosophy, Kingston University.

Readers’ comments

• dave 13 December, 2010

  Hello Peter, how’s the indefatigable struggle at Middlesex going these days? Oh, that’s right, I forgot, you’re one of the prestigious ones who jumped ship to the bastion of People’s Democracy that is Kingston U. Everyone else was left swinging in the wind. Still, nice to see you keep in touch with your old students, must be very satisfying to see one go down as a martyr for the revolution. You’ve certainly been milking it. Lev Davidovitch would be proud of you. If only he’d been an actual prole, all that talk about ‘education for the masses’ might have been more meaningful.

  Why, you may ask, do I fail to address the substance of your piece? Well, part of it is just waving the bloody shirt, perfectly understandable but run-of-the-mill. The rest, esp. the last 3 paras, is just recycled agitprop gibberish. They used to say the same things about Thatch; they even used to say that the Poll Tax Riots brought her down. Yay the rioters! What did we get? Seven more years of John Major, and 13 of New Labour that ended up making him look like a pinko. Cheers, nice work. Still, being a Trot’s a living, isn’t it, at the end of the day? Certainly is for you.

• Dr Howard Fredrics 13 December, 2010

  Kudos to Prof Hallward and THE for publishing this important piece. Whether or not such discussions will lead to positive results remains to be seen, but it is good to see an example of an appropriate public stance being taken by an academic. One can hope that others will follow suit and serve as role models for their students in this regard.

  Only through direct action and refusal to comply, not only at the level of students and teaching staff, but also at the level of university management, will the policies stand a chance of being reversed.

• Edwin 13 December, 2010

  This is a valuable first hand account of last thursday’s protests, and criticism of – what’s becoming evermore clear – a police strategy that is as brutally excessive as it is confused.

• Yaiza Hernández Velázquez 13 December, 2010

  Dave, whoever you are, I take it you are not too fond of Peter Hallward. I am with you there, I hate precocious overachievers. But, seriously, are you in your right mind? What does the outcome of the MDX campaign has to do with any of this? A young man nearly died and you are using the occasion to dish some insubstantial dirt on an old enemy. And given as you seem to be so certain as to what the long-term consequences of these demos (yes, demos, not riots) are going to be, can you explain what different course of action you recommend? Maybe staying at home surfing the net and ranting at suspected Trots while basic rights disappear from under your nose? Your head is a very confused place young man, and there is a lot more Daily Mail in there than you seem to realise. Thank you Peter and thank you THE for echoing this.

• Cat 13 December, 2010

  Hear hear Yaiza.

• A very middle-class revolution 13 December, 2010

  Waching middle-class students who read a little bit of Marx and love techno getting all excited over pissing on Churchill’s plinth is not exactly that awe inspiring.

  The demonstrations, both physical (under the auspices of NUS) and intellectual (from articles in magazines and newspapers, to the support of the Turner Prize winner) are right and proper.

  However, the attempts of middle-class Trots like Prof. Hallward to encourage everyone to ‘rise-up’ are a joke. What happened last Thursday was truly awful, from the violence on both sides, to the passing of this bill. But it’s rather simple-minded to say ‘it’s all the fault of the police’.

  50,000 people went to the first demonstration, but why is it that this number didn’t turn up last Thursday? It’s because the direct-action mentality of the trots has done nothing but put people off. Really, what idiot would go to Thursday’s demo anyway? Everyone clearly expected they would be kettled (from the softer side of tea tents, to the harder side of make-shift protest shields). If you were still determined to go, only a real idiot would get near the police. Did you really think that after they were surprised at Millbank, and had a fire extinguisher dropped at them, that the police were going to sit around and sing kumbaya with the protestors?

  What happened to those injured, on both sides, was horrific. It’s time to denounce the direct-action idiots, and get back to peaceful demonstrations, sit-in’s, candle-lit vigils, recalling MP’s.

  If Prof. Hallwell’s mate continue with their line of attack, all they will get is more hurt, more time in prison, and more ridicule. This is not about ‘workers and student unite and fight’. That’s a revolution you’ll never start, but a fight you’ll definitely lose.

• John Protevi 13 December, 2010

  Thank you, Peter, for the clarity and passion of your testimony here.

  No one needs me to add this, but you are a small and petty person, “dave.”

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Comment on this story

Hallward is a major researcher of continental philosophy and an expert on Haiti.

The decision has reopened a long-simmering tension between researchers in science-based anthropological disciplines — including archaeologists, physical anthropologists and some cultural anthropologists — and members of the profession who study race, ethnicity and gender and see themselves as advocates for native peoples or human rights.

During the last 10 years the two factions have been through a phase of bitter tribal warfare after the more politically active group attacked work on the Yanomamo people of Venezuela and Brazil by Napoleon Chagnon, a science-oriented anthropologist, and James Neel, a medical geneticist who died in 2000. With the wounds of this conflict still fresh, many science-based anthropologists were dismayed to learn last month that the long-range plan of the association would no longer be to advance anthropology as a science but rather to focus on “public understanding.”

Until now, the association’s long-range plan was “to advance anthropology as the science that studies humankind in all its aspects.” The executive board revised this last month to say, “The purposes of the association shall be to advance public understanding of humankind in all its aspects.” This is followed by a list of anthropological subdisciplines that includes political research.

The word “science” has been excised from two other places in the revised statement.

The association’s president, Virginia Dominguez of the University of Illinois, said in an e-mail that the word had been dropped because the board sought to include anthropologists who do not locate their work within the sciences, as well as those who do. She said the new statement could be modified if the board received any good suggestions for doing so.

The new long-range plan differs from the association’s “statement of purpose,” which remains unchanged, Dr. Dominguez said. That statement still describes anthropology as a science.

Peter Peregrine, president of the Society for Anthropological Sciences, an affiliate of the American Anthropological Association, wrote in an e-mail to members that the proposed changes would undermine American anthropology, and he urged members to make their views known.

Dr. Peregrine, who is at Lawrence University in Wisconsin, said in an interview that the dropping of the references to science “just blows the top off” the tensions between the two factions. “Even if the board goes back to the old wording, the cat’s out of the bag and is running around clawing up the furniture,” he said.

He attributed what he viewed as an attack on science to two influences within anthropology. One is that of so-called critical anthropologists, who see anthropology as an arm of colonialism and therefore something that should be done away with. The other is the postmodernist critique of the authority of science. “Much of this is like creationism in that it is based on the rejection of rational argument and thought,” he said.

Dr. Dominguez denied that critical anthropologists or postmodernist thinking had influenced the new statement. She said in an e-mail that she was aware that science-oriented anthropologists had from time to time expressed worry about and disapproval of their nonscientific colleagues. “Marginalization is never a welcome experience,” she said.

Really? The rehashing of the science wars? What year is this?

I actually wish sociology would also have this kind of a disagreement within the discipline. It’d be very healthy, I think.