democracy – Page 3 – Ashley Dawson

Last night the British movie The King’s Speech won big at the Oscars. I didn’t watch the ceremonies, but I wonder whether the irony was apparent in the festivities: while dictators are toppled, often at the cost of many lives, throughout the Middle East, the Angl0-American establishment is engaged in full-throated celebration of monarchy.

Of course, King George VI, the stuttering protagonist of The King’s Speech, was no Louis XIV. The film demonstrates his human qualities; indeed, his battle to overcome a speech impediment in order to rally Britain in the face of Hitler’s onslaught makes his body into a metaphor of the British body politic in general. This is a trope that goes back to Shakespeare’s time, and that evidently continues to resonate.

And part of the drama of the film derives from the King’s need to overcome his inherited superciliousness enough to trust the Aussie speech therapist who “cures” him of his stuttering.

In depicting George VI’s struggles, The King’s Speech participates in a trend evident since the days of Princess Diana towards humanizing the British monarchy (and aristocracy more broadly). Stephen Frears’s film The Queen managed to perform similar work for Queen Elizabeth, who had previously been famous to cold-shouldering Diana into her grave.

Of course the king’s struggle to overcome fears he seemingly inherited from the tyrannical atmosphere created by his father is powerful. But I think there’s something deeply pernicious about the film, nonetheless. Of course, if you’re going to be ruled by a monarch, it’s best that that they identify with the people and have their powers limited constitutionally. However, there’s nothing particularly benign about the British monarchy. They absorb millions of pounds worth of public funds every year, at a time when budgets for education, libraries, and all sorts of other public institutions are being slashed. As Tom Nairn demonstrates powerfully in Enchanted Glass, Britain’s enduring infatuation with the monarchy prevents it from constructing many of the significant democratic institutions of a true republic.

In addition, we shouldn’t forget the history surrounding World War II, upon which The King’s Speech turns. The British monarchy never explicitly sided with the Nazis, but there was much pro-fascist sentiment among the British aristocracy in the 1930s. Britain refused to side with democracy in Spain when Franco’s fascist forces began their campaign. Moreover, during this period, Britain helped establish some of the more pernicious dictatorships of world history, including the House of Saud (pictured above).

The King’s Speech is a symptom of the enduring appeal of imperial/royal nostalgia today. In a moment in which there is so much visceral public anger against the democratic welfare state, our culture industries nonetheless churn out paeans to national unity in the solitary figure of the “good” monarch. What about a film about what happened to the working class kids who were displaced by the Blitz, and whom middle class Britons often turned out of their homes? Enough with the sordid heritage industry already!

Commodity prices are sky high for the third time in as many years. While the resulting high prices for food may not be particularly apparent to most Americans, in the global South, this inflation of commodity prices is a life and death issue.

There are many reasons for the recent rise in food prices. Speculation by unscrupulous financiers is one of the more unseemly ones. However, the most significant cause of the high prices is the extreme forms of weather over the last year. There’s little mention of this in mainstream news sources, but Paul Krugman recently wrote a very brave editorial that acknowledges the link between high food prices and climate change.

In a throw away line, Krugman links high food prices to the revolutionary movements sweeping North Africa at the moment. Surprising to find such a frank admission of the role of food riots in making broader social transformations. Given the unsustainable nature of our current global food system, we’re likely to see far more political instability and uprising in the future.

Check out this great collection of images of Egyptian women involved in the uprising. It’s a really important alternative to the male-dominated images of the uprising emanating from mainstream media sources. Egyptian women are evidently taking a leading role in challenging the Mubarak regime.

This revolutionary activism on the part of women resonates with Frantz Fanon’s pioneering but problematic analysis of the transformation of gender roles during the Algerian revolution in “Algeria Unveiled” (in his book A Dying Colonialism). Fanon argued that the veil became an important symbol of resistant Algerian identity in the context of French colonial oppression. It also served as a strategic weapon since Algerian women could transport weapons and explosives to support the resistance movement underneath their veils. When necessary, women activists doffed the veil in order to appear “European” and move freely about the colonial precincts of cities such as Algiers. This experience, Fanon argued, catalyzed a radical mutation in gender roles that spelled the end of centuries of Algerian patriarchy.

As feminist analysts have since pointed out, Fanon failed to consider both the depth of patriarchy in Algeria and the limitation of the roles accorded women in revolutionary times. After the departure of the French, the institutional revolutionary party, the FLN, quickly erased women activists from historical memory as part of a reassertion of patriarchal normalcy.

It is obviously very important to watch Egypt to see the impact on gender roles of the current uprising, and to see whether Algerian history will be replayed forty years later. Circumstances may make the denouement of this revolution significantly different. Women in the Maghreb today (and in Egypt in particular) are far more educated and more engaged in the public world than they were during the revolutions of the last century. In addition, poverty has been feminized over the last twenty years or so in ways that are likely to continue to spur women to challenge the status quo, even after this revolutionary wave recedes.

Watch this absolutely brilliant satire of U.S. diplomatic language:

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rBuMuzhvYeA&feature=player_embedded]

Here is a short film made with the collaboration of some friends and colleagues in Torino, who reflect on the challenges facing contemporary Italians:

Back in early July, I wrote a “Letter from London” based on a conversation I had had with a friend during a trip to the UK. He told me of his fears about the implications of the new Tory government’s plans to slash government spending drastically.

Those plans are now being realized. A recent article in the New York Times details the pain that is unfolding as the central government rolls out deep, wholesale, and apparently random cuts. The Film Council, the Health Protection Agency, and dozens of other groups that regulate and distribute money in the arts, health sector, and other areas have simply been abolished at the stroke of a pen. The ability of local authorities to plan and budget on anything beyond an immediate time-scale has been drastically interrupted. The article quotes the chief executive of the country’s supreme court as saying that she doesn’t know whether the country will continue to function if the Tories’ promised cuts of 40% are implemented.

The U.S. needs to watch what’s unfolding in the U.K. very closely. Already the recession and the failure of politicians of both parties to implement a genuine recovery program has led to brutal economic problems around the country. As Paul Krugman discussed in a recent editorial, Colorado Springs recently made headlines by shutting off its streetlights in an attempt to save money. The lights are going off across America, Krugman argues, as the dogmatic anti-statist doctrines of neo-liberalism are implemented remorselessly.

As the great urbanist Jane Jacobs argued in her final, dystopian book, there is a dark age ahead.

The hammer has not yet dropped. London is enjoying an Indian summer before the onset of cold, hard times. During my brief trip to the UK, a government document estimating 1.3 million job losses as a result of the recently released budget was leaked to the press. Right now in sites of culture like the Tate Modern and fleshpots like Shoreditch, this looming downturn is invisible and apparently weighs little on the minds of the average Briton. But the downturn is coming nonetheless. How did the UK get to this point of limbo?

In a recent conversation with Tim Lawrence, a British friend, in a very trendy pizzeria in London, much of this background came clear. Going into the election, the PM, Gordon Brown, seemed exhausted both personally and ideologically. After all, he was the architect of the policies of deregulation that led to the credit crisis and the recession. Labour was in power for over a decade, and seemed to have few new ideas. What’s more, Brown had played fall guy for Tony Blair’s love affair with the City and international finance. True, Labour did spend huge sums on social programs like the National Health Service and Education.

This became the main theme of the election season: wasteful public spending. But this attack, so skillfully wielded by the Tories that Gordon Brown actually seemed to accept the terms leveled against him, was based on totally false premises. The UK is running a deficit of around a trillion pounds sterling. But roughly 700 billion of this figure is the product of the credit crisis created by irresponsible and predatory lending practices and irresponsible speculation by banks. So once again the left hand of the state was blamed for the practices of the financial sector which has come over the last thirty years to dominate the UK’s economy more and more. The answer to Britain’s financial crisis thus becomes massive cuts to the public sector.

Of course it didn’t have to go this way. In the last days of the election, Brown began speaking clearly about fairness and social justice. The televised debates between him, the Tory candidate David Cameron, and Nick Clegg surprised everyone by being extremely contentious and exciting. Many of my friends in the UK felt that the Liberal Democrats had some strong proposals, including changing the British constitution to allow proportional representation. The result was a groundswell of support for the Liberal Democrats going into the election. Liberal papers like The Guardian advised their readers to vote for the Lib Dems in order to secure social change. But Clegg made it clear that he wanted virtually nothing to do with Brown, and so the possibility of some kind of rainbow coalition between the Lib Dems, Labour, and the Green Party was never in the cards.

The election resulted in a hung parliament. The electorate, in other words, gave no clear mandate to any party. Nevertheless, the Conservatives managed to convince the Lib Dems to side with them, and a kind of love fest ensued between Cameron and Clegg, who have similar very posh backgrounds. Many progressives in the UK still felt hopeful since they saw the Lib Dems as exercising a moderating influence on the Tories and pushing forward their positive agenda for the UK by getting into power.

But now the Tory budget has been released. They propose to completely eliminate the country’s debt in five years. They will do this through massive cuts in areas like education and the NHS. It’s clear, according to my friend Tim Lawrence, that these moves are purely ideological. After all, Obama, by contrast, has been arguing a fairly standard Keynesian line – deal with the economic downturn by stimulating the economy through government spending. The Tories have adopted a diametrically opposed line, one that seems to be emerging as the new global status quo. It seems that every country is going to be Greece from now on. Incidentally, Paul Krugman just wrote a very good editorial that totally debunks the idea that fiscal austerity is the solution to the current economic downturn.

Of course the silver lining may be that the electorate never voted for such draconian austerity policies. The context is therefore very different from when Thatcher acceded to power after the turbulent years of the 1970s. Public indignation at the coming drastic budget cuts may very well explode, making the protests and vibrant cultural resistance of the Thatcher years pale in comparison.

I just went to see a fantastic career retrospective exhibition of the South African photographer David Goldblatt at the Jewish Museum here in NYC.

Goldblatt came to maturity during the darkest days of the apartheid era, and his photographs document the oppression meted out to the non-white majority in South Africa in the most visceral way. Here, for example, is a shot of his of a young man recently out of police detention. The severity of the interrogation methods routinely employed by the South African police are glaringly apparent in the two casts which encase the young man’s arms.

We see all of the homicidal violence of the apartheid regime in Goldblatt’s photographs. In this photo, for example, victims of a government death squad lie splayed alongside their car. Such documentary images were crucially important to record during the apartheid era given the government’s attempt to suppress all records of its campaign of secret violence against internal critics and activists. In Deborah Hoffmann and Frances Reid’s brilliant documentary record of the Truth and Reconciliation Commision, a film called Long Night’s Journey into Day, we see the pain inflicted on a group of mothers whose sons have disappeared, leaving no trace to mourn.

Another image of Goldblatt’s from the exhibition documents the appalling policy of forced removals. In this image, a woman lies in a bed wrapped protectively around her newborn child. We are privy to this intimate scene because the house (or shack) within which the mother and daughter had been living has been demolished, leaving them asleep under the brutal empty skies of the land.

As these photographs make clear, Goldblatt acted as a witness to the atrocities of apartheid. What they also underline is his powerful technique of focusing on the quotidian. Instead, in other words, of training his lens on protests and rallies – the stuff of standard photojournalism – Goldblatt delved into the everyday humiliations, oppressions, hypocrisies and contradictions of life under apartheid.

For me, some of Goldblatt’s most powerful work focuses on whiteness. The complexity and painfulness of this position is not always apparent. I recently sat across from a new friend in a small restaurant in Bolivia, for example, discussing what it was like to be white in South Africa. He was surprised by my talk of the ambivalences and contradictions of white consciousness during the apartheid era in South Africa. Of course, average white people in South Africa benefited massively from the apartheid regime’s oppression and exploitation of the non-white majority in the country. This needs to be stated up front and with no hesitation.

But while the material advantages conferred on even the poorest whites by the apartheid system are undeniable, that system nonetheless generated a traumatized sensibility among even the most privileged and cocooned of whites. In the above image, for instance, a white farm kid is caught in an eerily intimate moment with his black nanny. He stands with his arms on her shoulders. Even more powerfully, her left hand is wrapped around his foot. The intimacy in this nonchalant embrace is overwhelming, exacerbated by the fact that both of the subjects are quite beautiful and that the young black woman’s breast is showing through her flimsy jersey. The boy is on the cusp of adolescence. Soon, his childish intimacy with his nanny will shift totally. She will go from being a mother surrogate (perhaps even closer than his real mother) to become part of an alien and threatening race. The sexuality latent in Goldblatt’s photograph will become something threatening or exploitative in the extreme.

Goldblatt’s photographs of everyday life among Afrikaners are filled with this sense of latent, ominous contradiction. How, he asks his viewers and South Africans in general, could people go about everyday life in the midst of such an unspeakably evil system? This is the same question asked by Pumla Godobo-Madikizela’s A Human Being Died That Night, a memoir of this member of South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission encounter with Eugene de Kock, a government assassin known popularly as “Prime Evil.” Godobo-Madikizela travels to a maximum security prison to interview de Kock after the collapse of apartheid. What she finds is a man rather than a monster, someone who is gradually coming to repent his crimes. The upshot is very similar to Hannah Arendt’s account of the trial of Adolf Eichmann after World War II: evil for the most part takes on a totally banal face; average people keep their heads down and focus on the minutiae of everyday life while acting in a manner that is complicit with great evil in many instances in history.

Goldblatt’s images record just such banal evil. If they were set in the United Kingdom instead of South Africa, they might seem nothing more than dull snapshot-like records of provincial life in the 1960s and ’70s. But we as viewers know that these photographs are set in South Africa, that the golden-locked boy walking past the supermarket is likely to graduate soon and be conscripted to fight and possibly die in border wars or in suppressing township uprisings. The teenage beauty pageant contestants are living lives of artificial luxury on the backs of the majority of the South African populace. The man mowing his lawn on a tranquil Saturday morning lives in a town forcibly purged of black residents. No doubt on some level these people knew that they were cogs in a truly evil system, but they found stories to tell themselves – stories founded in race and religion – that legitimated their relatively privileged social positions.

Goldblatt also had a quick eye for forms of class stratification within the dominant white class. Thus, he captures images both of the herrenvolk leaders of the National Party, the architects of apartheid, as well as of the dirt-poor Afrikaner farming families who barely make ends meet, despite the boon of white skin.

Photographs of tragedies such as famine and warfare have largely ceased to shock us. Since the days of Robert Capa, muckraking photojournalism has lost much of its impact as people have grown accustomed to the society of the spectacle. Goldblatt’s photographs are different and perhaps remain effective inasmuch as they focus on intimate moments in everyday life that show the vulnerability as well as the bigotry of the South African white tribe.

Finally, the Jewish Museum show is particularly powerful as a result of the curatorial decision to present Goldblatt’s work organized along lines similar to the initial publication of much of the material. We thus see sections devoted to Goldblatt’s early work in the disappearing gold mines of Johannesburg, a project he undertook in collaboration with Nadine Gordimer. We see his focus on individuals living in small, exclusively white towns. And we see his photographic dissection of the distorted landscapes and city-scapes of apartheid South Africa. These unpeopled urban spaces perhaps speak even more than the portraits, poignant as those are. This is a landscape blighted by the reduction of one portion of the population to the status of non-entities. Here on the right, for instance, is an image of a butcher shop that has literally been butchered, its right half removed along with the family that lived there as part of the infamous “Group Areas Act” that permitted forced removals.

Yet, in the midst of this desolation, Goldblatt also shows us how oppressed people managed to find solace and strength in the quotidian, in rituals such as a wedding, for example. For if evil is banal and, in a place such as South Africa, ubiquitous, resistance and hope are equally evident and omnipresent in everyday life.

The legislature in Arizona recently passed House Bill 2281. This document bans ethnic studies courses which promote race consciousness from public schools. This law of course comes on the heels of the draconian new immigration law SB 1070. It’s worth thinking about the relation between these two laws.

Education bill 2281 specifically prohibits a school district or charter school from including in its program of instruction any courses or classes that: a) promote the overthrow of the United States government; b) promote resentment toward a race or class of people; c) are designed primarily for pupils of a particular ethnic group; d) advocate ethnic solidarity instead of the treatment of pupils as individuals.

The ideology here of course is complete objectivity in the classroom. Supporters of this legislator are marching in lockstep with Daniel Horowitz, whose campaigns with Students for Academic Freedom have long blasted any form of politicization. As my colleague Malini Johar Schueller and I have argued in Dangerous Professors, this spurious notion of objectivity obscures the inherent politicization of dominant established curricula and attempts to roll back the (relatively slight) gains made by post-1960s social movements.

In fact, the explicit target of the legislation is the Mexican American Studies Department of the Tucson Unified School District. According to the department’s website, the education curriculum is designed to a) advocate for and provide curriculum that is centered within the pursuit of social justice; b) advocate for and provide curriculum that is centered within the Mexican American/Chicano cultural and historical experience.

House Bill 2281 is a transparent attempt to clamp down on forces of ideological opposition within Arizona, a necessary counterpart to SB 1070. Their symbiotic nature is made particularly evident when the bills are compared to similar bans enacted elsewhere.

During the apartheid era in South Africa, for example, the ruling regime sought to silence critics of the status quo by banning them. Coupled with lynching, torture, and summary execution, the practice of banning was a key instrument of apartheid-era policy.

The banning of organizations or individuals was originally authorized in South Africa by the Suppression of Communism Act of 1950, and subsequently by the Internal Security Act of 1982. The definition of communism in these laws was extremely broad, including any activity allegedly promoting civil disturbances or disorder, promoting industrial, social, political, or economic change in the country, and encouraging hostility between whites and nonwhites so as to promote change or revolution. The main organizations banned under these laws were the Communist Party of South Africa, the African National Congress, and the Pan-African Congress.

More than 2,000 people were banned in South Africa from 1950 to 1990. Once a person was labeled a threat to security and public order, s/he essentially became a public nonentity. S/he would be confined to her or his home, would not be allowed to meet with more than one person at a time (other than family members), to hold any offices in any organization, to speak publicly or to write for any publication. Banned persons were also barred from entering particular areas, buildings, and institutions, including law courts, schools, and newspaper offices.

The banning of ethnic studies departments in Arizona is an integral part of the reactionary program being advanced by the Right in the state. As the South African parallel suggests, the silencing of dissenting voices is just as essential to authoritarian hegemony as more obviously repressive forms of state power such as ethnic profiling in policing.

This assault on civil liberties and educational democracy needs to be taken just as seriously – and challenged just as ardently – as the state’s oppressive immigration legislation has been.