American televangelist Pat Robertson has blamed the devastating earthquake in Haiti on a pact between the impoverished nation’s founders and the devil.
…C.L.R. James‘ The Black Jacobins, first published in 1938, was a forbidden book in South Africa until the recent dismantling of apartheid. It’s not hard to see why. James researched his account of Toussaint L’Ouverture and the Haitian slave uprising with meticulous care. It remains a masterpiece of historical scholarship, but the book was designed to be a weapon for revolutionary combat. James wrote it while active in the International African Service Bureau — the organization founded by his childhood friend George Padmore, the godfather of Pan-Africanism. By narrating “the first successful slave revolt in history,” he meant to provide a tool kit of ideas and information for future liberation movements. Apartheid’s censors knew what they were doing when they banned the book.
Yet The Black Jacobins did find readers in South Africa. Copies were scarce and the potential audience was large, so people had to improvise. One circle of activists typed up key passages and distributed them in carbon copies. Another group tore James’ thick book into clusters of a few pages, to be circulated a little at a time.
Members would study each fragment closely and then pass it on to the next eager reader. They doubtless memorized large parts of the book this way, while waiting for the next installment to reach them. Few writers ever find their work treated with such passionate intensity. Naturally, James was pleased to learn about his South African readers. The very ingenuity and seriousness with which they handled the book were proofs of a lesson James sought to teach, over and over again, throughout his work: In their efforts to free themselves, to reshape their world into a more livable place, people display a creative drive that now and then directs history into new courses.
After his death in London in 1989, tributes to James came from all corners of the African diaspora, and beyond. It is evidence of the scope of his life and work that, over the past half-dozen years, new books by and about James have been pouring off the presses…
…The food crisis erupted first and most dramatically in Haiti in early 2008. Like Bangladesh, Haiti today is a symbol of misery and despair. And, like Bangladesh, when European explorers arrived, the island was remarkably rich in resources, with a large and flourishing population. It later became the source of much of France’s wealth. I will not run through the sordid history, but the current food crisis can be traced directly to 1915, Woodrow Wilson’s invasion: murderous, brutal, and destructive. Among Wilson’s many crimes was dissolving the Haitian Parliament at gunpoint because it refused to pass “progressive legislation” that would have allowed U.S. businesses to take over Haitian lands. Wilson’s Marines then ran a free election, in which the legislation was passed by 99.9 percent of the 5 percent of the public permitted to vote. All of this comes down through history as “Wilsonian idealism.”
Later, the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) instituted programs to turn Haiti into the “Taiwan of the Caribbean,” by adhering to the sacred principle of comparative advantage: Haiti must import food and other commodities from the United States, while working people, mostly women, toil under miserable conditions in U.S.-owned assembly plants. Haiti’s first free election, in 1990, threatened these economically rational programs. The poor majority entered the political arena for the first time and elected their own candidate, a populist priest, Jean-Bertrand Aristide. Washington adopted the standard operating procedures for such a case, moving at once to undermine the regime. A few months later came the anticipated military coup, and the resulting junta instituted a reign of terror, which was backed by Bush senior and even more fully by Clinton, despite pretenses. By 1994 Clinton decided that the population was sufficiently intimidated and sent U.S. forces to restore the elected president, but on the strict condition that he accept a harsh neoliberal regime. In particular, there must be no protection for the economy. Haitian rice farmers are efficient, but cannot compete with U.S. agribusiness that relies on huge government subsidies, thanks largely to Reagan, anointed High Priest of free trade with little regard to his record of extreme protectionism and state intervention in the economy.
There is nothing surprising about what followed: a 1995 USAID report observed that the “export-driven trade and investment policy” — that Washington mandated — will “relentlessly squeeze the domestic rice farmer.” Neoliberal policies dismantled what was left of economic sovereignty and drove the country into chaos, accelerated by Bush junior’s blocking of international aid on cynical grounds. In February 2004 the two traditional torturers of Haiti, France and the United States, backed a military coup and spirited President Aristide off to Africa. Haiti had, by then, lost the capacity to feed itself, leaving it highly vulnerable to food price fluctuation, the immediate cause of the 2008 food crisis.
The story is fairly similar in much of the world. In a narrow sense, it may be true enough that the food crisis results from Western lack of concern: a pittance could overcome its worst immediate effects. But more fundamentally it results from dedication to the basic principles of business-run state policy, the Adam Smith generalization. These are all matters that we too easily evade — along with the fact that bailing out banks is not uppermost in the minds of the billion people now facing starvation, not forgetting the tens of millions enduring hunger in the richest country in the world.
Also sidelined is a possible way to make a significant dent in the financial and food crises. It is suggested by the recent publication of the authoritative annual report on military spending by SIPRI, the Swedish peace research institute. The scale of military spending is phenomenal, regularly increasing. The United States is responsible for almost as much as the rest of the world combined, seven times as much as its nearest rival, China. There is no need to waste time commenting…
“1991 documentary tracing the development of Photomontage, based on the pioneering work of John Heartfield (Helmut Herzfeld), through to the contemporary use of these techniques in advertising and video. The film looks at the work of John Heartfield, particularly that aimed against Hitler and the Nazis, and takes a radical look at Photomontage, with the animation of archive material, contemporary interviews and footage shot in Berlin during the opening of the Berlin Wall. Music is by Click Click.”
Watch them all fall down
Revolution, the only solution
The armed response of an entire nation
Revolution, the only solution
We’ve taken all your shit, now it’s time for restitution…
Sue Taylor, ‘Heartfield’s photo-Grenades…’, Art in America, June-July 2006:
On the night of Apr. 16, 1933, John Heartfield climbed out a window of his apartment on Potsdamer Street and jumped from the first-floor balcony, narrowly escaping the SS men who pursued him. Fleeing Berlin, he crossed the Sudeten Mountains on foot, bound for the temporary safety of Prague. A Communist and a Jew, Heartfield (1891-1968) was anathema to the Nazis; his many political offenses included the notorious photomontage he had published in the AIZ (Arbeiter Illustrierte Zeitung, or Workers Illustrated News), with the caption “Adolf, the Superman: Swallows Gold and Spouts Junk.” The image X-rays the pernicious orator’s chest to expose a column of coins in place of an esophagus and a swastika instead of a heart. The ingested gold also resembles a spine, suggesting that capitalist wealth formed the literal backbone of Hitler’s National Socialism. With this conceit, Heartfield boldly put the lie to Nazi claims to represent Germany’s working class. When the picture appeared as a poster during the national elections in 1932, fistfights broke out in the streets between outraged Hitler supporters and their Communist opponents.
Long admired for his innovations in photomontage and graphic design, Heartfield appeared to late 20th-century postmodernists as a progenitor who appropriated mechanically reproduced images in a critique of consumerism and the media. As much as the strategies of Barbara Kruger, say, or Richard Prince in the 1980s recall Heartfield’s subversive montage, the comparison neglects a crucial aspect of the latter’s project: the dissemination of his work in mass-circulation communist newspapers, as posters, dust jackets, and in magazines and books. (1) A recent exhibition at the Getty Center, curated by Andres Mario Zervigon, effectively restored Heartfield’s oeuvre to its embattled political context and reminded viewers of the historical conditions in which it was so passionately produced. “Agitated Images: John Heartfield and German Photomontage, 1920-1938” includes examples of Heartfield’s early contributions to Dada periodicals; montages in AIZ and its incarnation in Czechoslovakia, Die Volks Illustrierte (Peoples Illustrated); and designs for his brother Wieland Herzfelde’s publishing company, Malik Verlag.
Side by side with Heartfield’s work were competing images and other materials from mainstream publications such as BIZ (Berliner Illustrierte Zeitung, or Berlin Illustrated News), Illustrierter Beobachter (Illustrated Observer) and Das Magazin. In venues like these and in posters plastered throughout the cities, an ideological “struggle of signs” was waged in interwar Germany. (2)
To convey a sense of this struggle, the exhibition opens with a group of photographs documenting campaign posters in situ in 1932, when Hitler and the Communist candidate Ernst Thalmann challenged the incumbent Reichspräsident Paul von Hindenburg. A hammer and sickle at the top of a column displaying Thalmann’s thrice-repeated image advertised his goals for constituents: “Work, Bread, Freedom.” Nazi posters on kiosks rehearsed the same rhetoric, in one case depicting a worker with a sledgehammer over his shoulder proclaiming, “We want work and bread! Vote Hitler!” Also photographed in several urban locations, a huge poster in red and white, designed by the expressionist Mjolnir, hangs high in the gallery. In this apparently ubiquitous image, a barechested man with raised fists and broken manacles wears a swastika on his belt buckle. “Enough already!” he cries, “Vote Hitler!” Identifying no issue other than mere dissatisfaction, the poster vied at the time with a similarly uninformative advertisement for Hindenburg declaring, “Vote for a man, not for a party!” A focus on personality over substance proved effective then as now: Hindenburg won the election, and appointed Hitler chancellor the following year.
Scenes of Hindenburg’s previous presidency appear in copies of BIZ, where we see him marching in parades, glad-handing voters, meeting disabled veterans. Displayed nearby, a photograph of the president outside his home, facing reporters with their cameras, suggests how strategically managed such apparently candid images were, even in the 1920s. Heartfield’s contempt for the subservience of the mainstream press to manipulations by the ruling class is expressed in a fullpage photograph he published in AIZ in 1930, which also taunts an uncritical readership. He shows the bust of a man in a workshirt–and harness–whose head is entirely wrapped in newspaper. Beneath this suffocating image, a caption admonishes, “Those who read bourgeois newspapers become blind and deaf. Away with these debilitating bandages!” Heartfield staged this particular photograph, to brilliant effect; mostly, however, he relied on familiar, preprinted materials and rendered them disturbingly strange. A grotesque photomontage of a snarling hyena in a battlefield strewn with dead soldiers occupied a two-page spread in AIZ in 1932. Weirdly, the animal wears a top hat and a cross-shaped medal of honor on a ribbon around its neck. The medal parodies the distinguished Prussian decoration “Pour le Merite” by a subtle intervention: Heartfield modified its inscription to read “Pour le Profit.” Below the montage, a caption declares “War and corpses–the last hope of the rich,” comparing the hyena who feasts on carrion to wealthy profiteers who grow fat off war.
Associating objects of hostility or ridicule with animals is a common device in caricature. Heartfield resorted to it in the provocative picture book he produced with leftist journalist and social critic Kurt Tucholsky, Deutschland, Deutschland, uber alles: Ein Bilderbuch (1929). Here a montage of eight elderly, bemedaled, right-wing Prussian patriarchs is cannily and maliciously captioned, “Animals are looking at you,” after a popular tome by nature writer Paul Eipper, Tiere sehen dich an (1928). (Challenged to defend Heartfield’s image, Tucholsky professed to dislike it, explaining, “insulting animals is not my taste.” (3)) For the cover of their book, Heartfield used the colors of the German flag–black, red and gold. On the back, two hands are shown, clutching a sword and a billy club respectively; with its caption, “sticking together fraternally,” the image presents imperialist aggression abroad and police brutality at home as twin expressions of capitalist domination. For the front cover, Heartfield cobbled together from various photographs a bust-length figure, part burgher, part military man, top-hatted, helmeted and mustachioed, sporting the familiar Pour le Merite. From this stout citizen’s mouth emanate the unnerving words of the book’s title in gothic script, “Germany, Germany, Over All.” It’s the same mindless patrioteering parodied by Heartfield’s friend George Grosz in his famous watercolor of flag-waving Republican Automatons (1920), produced just after the First World War.
Meeting Grosz in 1915, Heartfield had been moved to destroy all his own previous, romantic paintings and drawings. The two artists anglicized their names (from Helmut Herzfelde and Georg Gross) in defiance of the anti-English sentiment in wartime Germany. Three years later, they joined the German Communist Party (Kommunistische Partei Deutschlands, or KPD) and Club Dada in Berlin. Typical of Heartfield’s montages from this period is The Tire Travels Around the World, published on the cover of Der Dada 3 in 1920, a dense, energetic, Futurist-inspired jumble of textual snippets (one in Chinese) as well as photographic images of a tire, toothbrush, bicycles and Dadaist Raoul Hausmann’s shouting face. Tellingly, in one corner Heartfield inserts the phrase “Nein! Nein! Nein!” But one sees him in this exhibition abandon the pure negativity of Dada as, in his words, “the chaotic eruption of resistance, the protest against everything, gave way to a systematic and conscious pursuit of art propaganda in the service of the Workers’ Movement.” (4)
The photomontages now become organized and legible, with fewer elements arranged in an often believable pictorial space. By 1924, in a haunting poster displayed in the window of Malik Verlag on the 10th anniversary of the outbreak of the Great War, Heartfield relied on only three photographic components: a parade of little rifle-bearing boys in uniform, a row of huge skeletons looming over them, and a striding figure of the celebrated General Karl Litzmann, bristling with medals, sword, spiked helmet and an aura of military resolve. Titled Ten Years Later: Fathers and Sons, the image warns that another generation, inculcated in the nationalistic values represented by Litzmann, is doomed to suffer the fate of their slaughtered fathers. It was the year that Otto Dix recalled his horrific experiences as a soldier in the print portfolio Der Krieg (The War), and Kathe Kollwitz placed her hope in the figure of a determined pacifist youth in the lithograph Never Again War! Heartfield used photomontage instead to point accusingly at those culpable for the insanity of the prior conflict and for promoting conditions that would lead to the next.
He channeled his outrage, working creatively for class consciousness and political change, exhibiting his designs internationally in art contexts while participating in the collective agitprop efforts of the KPD. His best-known poster–reproduced a dozen times for “Agitated Images” and wrapped around a column in the gallery as it would have been plastered on kiosks in 1928–depicts a single worker’s hand, fingers spread, grasping for power: “5 fingers has the hand,” states the caption, “with 5 you seize the enemy/vote list 5 Communist Party.” Heartfield conceived the indelibly memorable image for that year’s Reichstag election, in which the KPD appeared fifth on the ballot. First test-marketed as a handbill, the poster entailed a collaborative effort, with the artist soliciting the cooperation of factory workers whose hands he had photographed and then lobbying vigorously within the party for approval of his strikingly simple design and its distribution during the last days of the campaign. (5)
Comparisons with contemporary Soviet design are offered in the exhibition via some photomontages by Heartfield’s comrade Gustav Klutsis celebrating worker solidarity and revolutionary achievements. Heartfield traveled in the USSR in 1931 and 1932, exhibited and lectured there and contributed to Soviet publications. One problem for worker propagandists was how visually to advertise the idea of proletarian power in collective action and as a common goal. Both Klutsis and Heartfield found a solution in an image subsuming, by means of montage, many small hands into a single monumental one. In Heartfield’s cover design for a special AIZ issue on anti-fascist demonstrations in 1934, a crowd of demonstrators delivering a simultaneous power salute assumes the contours of a single clenched fist through photographic superimposition. More obviously formulaic is the strategy, common in many later examples of Socialist Realism, of juxtaposing a proletarian mass with an outsize portrait of a visionary leader who symbolizes a unifying spirit. Heartfield resorted to the technique in Lenin’s Vision Became Reality (1934) for AIZ, where Lenin’s giant, disembodied head floats above a mass of people admiring a modern, Soviet-produced tractor. The great revolutionary had been dead for 10 years, but economic and technological progress was evidence, in Heartfield’s montage, of his legacy.
Heartfield was at his best, and to his enemies most dangerous, when raging against injustice and hypocrisy with ferocious satire. From Prague, he continued his visual attacks on Hitler and National Socialism, countering, for instance, the promotion of Aryan physical perfection and prowess in the 1936 Olympics with his riotous yet deeply disturbing montage Programm der Olympiade Berlin.
In Heartfield’s version, events include ax-swinging, with robed judges brandishing axes and pistols; rope-pulling, where Nazis drag along the ground a bound man with the sign “Jude” on his chest; check-riding, in which businessmen mount colossal bank notes instead of horses; and the finale, where the Luftwaffe provides “grandiose fireworks” by bombing a village. Incensed by his insults, the Nazis in 1938 demanded Heartfield’s extradition from Czechoslovakia, causing him to flee to England. He was the thorn in Hitler’s side that Honore Daumier had been to Louis-Philippe in the 1830s. “Agitated Images” makes this analogy with examples from La Caricature, the anti-monarchist weekly that published Daumier’s most barbed political satires. Along with the illustrated daily Charivari, the newspaper provided Daumier his broad-based audience. His medium was lithography, just a few decades old at the time. As his early 20th-century successor in political protest, Heartfield exploited another modern technology and its mass distribution, wielding humor like a grenade. We might look today for avatars of their unflagging resistance not in the art world but among media-savvy and hilarious comic-critics–like Jon Stewart, Stephen Colbert and Michael Moore.
“Agitated Images: John Heartfield and German Photomontage, 1920-1938” is on view at the Research Institute Gallery at the Getty Center, Los Angeles [Feb. 27-June 25, 2006].
(1.) Maud Lavin challenged a too-facile comparison of Heartfield with contemporary artists, arguing for a consideration of his modes of distribution, in “Heartfield in Context,” Art in America, February 1985, p. 85.
(2.) Sherwin Simmons coined this phrase in his discussion of political emblems used respectively by Nazi, Communist and Social Democratic parties during the 1920s, in “‘Hand to the Friend, Fist to the Foe’: The Struggle of Signs in the Weimar Republic,” Journal of Design History, vol. 13, no. 4, 2000, pp. 319-39.
(3.) Kurt Tucholsky, quoted in Douglas Kahn, John Heartfield: Art and Mass Media, New York, Tanam Press, 1985, p. 56.
(4.) John Heartfield, quoted in Nancy Roth, “Heartfield and Modern Art,” in John Heartfield, Peter Pachnicke and Klaus Honnef, eds., New York, Harry N. Abrams, 1992, pp. 20-21.
(5.) See Simmons, “Hand to the Friend,” pp. 329-30.
Everybody’s welcome to the hooley!
Everybody’s welcome to the hooley!
As long as you ain’t ructious or unruly,
‘Cos Everybody’s welcome to the hooley!
Ye eejits from white power, you can take a golden shower,
If you’re gonna come here spoutin’ all yer crap…
– ‘though we fly our colours, it’s no stick to beat no others,
Let’s make it clear we’re just here for the craic (fact: so no-one gets attacked!)
Everybody’s welcome to the hooley!
Everybody’s welcome to the hooley!
As long as you ain’t ructious or unruly,
‘Cos Everybody’s welcome to the hooley!
I think you are mistaken when you see our flags we’re wavin’,
You think we’re sayin’ somethin’ that we’re not:
After years of being oppressed, we’re just proud we can express
What we are, and not confused with what we’re not (& you bet yer life we’re not!)
Everybody’s welcome to the hooley!, etc.
All those people back at home now, who didn’t really roam now,
And are giving xenophobia a go…
– We’re the very last nation that can begrudge immigration,
So shut up to feck – ya make a holy show! (of all of us- with all your stupid fuss!)
So! Every body’s welcome to the hooley!, etc.
(Just repeat until everyone, kinda like, gets the general idea, y’know…)
The racist thugs of the “Scottish” Defence League are planning to march in Edinburgh on the 20th of February.
Their attempt to march in Glasgow in November failed miserably when about 50 of them had to be bused out of town by police for their own safety, after they were confronted by hundreds of antifascists.
Edinburgh Anti-Fascist Alliance has been formed to unite and coordinate the activity of all those who want to make sure that the fascists will get the same welcome in our city too.
Anti-military groups are supporting Enver Aydemir, who is under arrest for refusing to perform military service, which he says would be in conflict with his Islamic beliefs. Though he does not want to be called a conscientious objector, Aydemir’s refusal to serve is bringing together supporters of different ideologies who share an anti-war stance.
Enver Aydemir, the 87th conscientious objector to military service in Turkey and the first known to refuse to take up arms due to his Islamic beliefs, has been arrested again.
Aydemir, 33, is refusing to wear a Turkish military uniform, saying he does not want to serve a secular army…
A rally was held in Ankara in solidarity with Aydemir on January 6. Police arrested many of those who attended, including Volkan Sevinç. Sevinç remains incarcerated. For more infos, please see: To all The Earth And The Comrades Of Conscience (January 10, 2010).
“In a lecture reaching far beyond the designated topic of Middle East peace prospects, Noam Chomsky is sharply critical of Israel, India, Pakistan, President Obama, and the United States—which he calls a “rogue nation” and “the Godfather.” He accuses the U.S. of controlling Israel and undermining the two-state solution that would establish a Palestinian state.”
Last Hours is an online and occasional print zine for the anti-authoritarian, DIY and punk communities. It offers news, analysis, interviews and articles about radical culture, be it music, protests, events, books, zines or comix.
The first issue of Shift Magazine was published in summer 2007 and there has since been a new issue every 4 months. It is currently edited in Manchester.
The idea is to create a space for the exchange of radical ideas and strategies, though always with reference or direct relevance to organisation and ‘activism’. But we also want to make a political intervention into activist theory and practice. We take for granted that Shift readers are looking for debate on a non-state, non-capitalist ‘way out’. Yet, we will challenge all answers, as ‘radical’ as they may be, that will increase social control or that demand a movement for austerity.
Turbulence is a journal/newspaper that we hope will become an ongoing space in which to think through, debate and articulate the political, social, economic and cultural theories of our movements, as well as the networks of diverse practices and alternatives that surround them.
…The name gestures to an obscure non-sectarian 1940s journal of that title, which at first we thought seriously about reviving. It was edited and published out of a cabin in Bearsville, a hamlet near Woodstock, New York. Retort‘s printing press had belonged to the eloquent Wobbly agitator Carlo Tresca before he was assassinated on the streets of Manhattan, perhaps by agents of Mussolini. The journal Retort was anti-statist, anti-militarist and published essays on art, politics and culture…
Recent weeks have seen racial tensions in the news once more, with the antics of the ‘English Defence League’ and those responding to them featuring high in the headlines. Like the BNP, the EDL claim to be defending the rights of the majority culture in the same manner as minorities, with support from their liberal sympathisers, defend theirs. As times get harder and the economic cake shrinks over the coming years, the battle for the crumbs will, as things stand, be fought along racial lines. This is the legacy of identity politics and multiculturalism.
In writing ‘Black Flame: The revolutionary politics of anarchism and syndicalism’, Michael Schmidt and Lucien van der Walt set themselves an ambitious task of writing a history of anarchism. I use the word ambitious mainly because, as Guerin (1970) once pointed out, it is difficult to trace the outlines of anarchism.
Its master thinkers rarely condensed their ideas into systematic works. If, on occasion, they tried to do so, it was only in thin pamphlets designed for propaganda and popularization in which only fragments of their ideas can be observed.
Schmidt and van der Walt, however, logically map the history of anarchism by showing that the ‘idea’ has, since the 1860s, inspired movements globally. As the authors of the book argue, one of its distinctive contributions is its global scope. Further, the book’s intellectual exploration goes deep, and, most importantly, the whole project is carried out with remarkable independence of thought. Schmidt and van der Walt write that what motivated them to undertake this project is the belief that the role of anarchism and syndicalism is indispensable to the understanding of modern history…
– the aims & methods of the state
– hyper-edited version
– preparations
– the aims of the protestors
– sticking together
– precautions: surveillance, truncheon blows, chemical sprays, baton charges, dogs, horses, vans, tasers
– defending
– basic police choreography
– the dance steps
– line dancing or stopping lines forming
– counter-advancing: snow plows, using your body, reforming, snatch squads, de-arresting
– other links & contact details for comments on this guide…
Guerrilla News was created as a place of refuge for members of the (now closed) GNN.tv community, but all are welcome. We are working towards creating an open news wire for the free discussion of current events and ideas.
a repository for online access to various texts I have [some body has] found while trolling through the archives of the radical political history of the 20th century (give or take a bit).
WHY: An event to raise funds for a community-run radio station for the indigenous Mapuche peoples of central and southern Chile and southern Argentina.
The Mapuche peoples continue to struggle against neo-colonialism, harsh state repression and enforced poverty, and for territorial reclamation.
Strong community ties and effective communication tools help create strong and dynamic grassroots organisations and movements, thus community radio can help strengthen the Mapuche peoples’ struggles.
Come and show your solidarity with the Mapuche peoples.
In response to a call for international support from the Association of Shoreline Farmers (Paguyuban Petani Lahan Pantai – PPLP), the Melbourne Anarchist Club (MAC) organised a protest outside the Indonesian Consulate in Melbourne this morning. Called at short notice and falling on a day when temperatures were forecast to exceed 45 degrees, the gathering was not surprisingly small (about ten in all), but made its point. A statement was read in English outside the front gate, and then in Indonesian at the back entrance – requests to be admitted to the building or to deliver a message directly to a member of the consulate were refused, but a member of the staff was busy with a camera, and an officer did agree to take a copy of the statement…
We meet regularly to discuss anarchist and other radical texts.
The group is named in memory of Francesco Fantin, an Italian anarchist murdered by fascists in Loveday Internment Camp in Barmera, South Australia, on November 16, 1942.
Update : It’s perhaps not that strange that Caldwell had neglected to read Ponchaud, given that he had already dismissed the Frenchman’s credibility in print. He based his damning opinion on a brief extract of Year Zero which the Guardian had published and a critique of the book by the American academic, Noam Chomsky. An icon of radical dissent who continues to command a fanatical following, Chomsky had questioned the legitimacy of refugee testimony that provided much of Ponchaud’s research. Chomsky believed that their stories were exaggerations or fabrications, designed for a western media involved in a “vast and unprecedented propaganda campaign” against the Khmer Rouge government, “including systematic distortion of the truth”.
He compared Ponchaud’s work unfavourably with another book, Cambodia: Starvation and Revolution, written by George Hildebrand and Gareth Porter, which cravenly rehashed the Khmer Rouge’s most outlandish lies to produce a picture of a kind of radical bucolic idyll. At the same time Chomsky excoriated a book entitled Murder of A Gentle Land, by two Reader’s Digest writers, John Barron and Anthony Paul, which was a flawed but nonetheless accurate documentation of the genocide taking place.
We can never know if Caldwell would have taken Ponchaud more seriously had Chomsky not been so sceptical, but it’s reasonable to surmise that the Scotsman, who greatly admired Chomsky, was reassured by the American’s contempt. In any case, the 47-year-old Caldwell arrived in Cambodia untroubled by the story that Ponchaud and others had to tell. In fact, he had just completed a book himself that would be posthumously published as Kampuchea: A Rationale for a Rural Policy, in which he wrote that the Khmer Rouge revolution “opens vistas of hope not only for the people of Cambodia but also for the peoples of all other poor third world countries”.
~ Lost in Cambodia, Andrew Anthony, The Observer, January 10, 2010. (Wave of hammer and sickle: Bob.)
Prompted by a bloke called Bob — he’s from Barcelona Brockley — I’ve been doing a little reading on Chomsky on Cambodia.
In summary, a number of Chomsky’s critics accuse him (and occasionally his partner-in-crime Edward Herman) of being apologists for the Khmer Rouge (‘Red Khmer’). Often, Chomsky’s critics assert that this gross failing (and occasionally that of his partner-in-crime Edward Herman) is a product of his (and occasionally his partner-in-crime Edward Herman’s) general moral and political degeneracy and/or a myopic ‘anti-Americanism’. According to Leonard Zeskind, for example: “For two decades, Chomsky has repeatedly sung one analytical note. Sometimes he hits the right target. Other times he has been remarkably tone deaf. One note. One idea.”
The Khmer Rouge, under the leadership of Pol Pot (aka Saloth Sar: 1928(?)–1998) ruled Cambodia (aka the ‘Democratic Republic of Kampuchea’) between the years 1975–1979. During this period, the regime engaged in what French writer Jean Lacoutre termed ‘autogenocide’: a deliberate policy of mass extermination, the number of victims of which has been estimated as being in the vicinity of 1.7 million people. Thus, according to Yale University’s Cambodian Genocide Program:
The Cambodian genocide of 1975-1979, in which approximately 1.7 million people lost their lives (21% of the country’s population), was one of the worst human tragedies of the last century. As in the Ottoman Empire during the Armenian genocide, in Nazi Germany, and more recently in East Timor, Guatemala, Yugoslavia, and Rwanda, the Khmer Rouge regime headed by Pol Pot combined extremist ideology with ethnic animosity and a diabolical disregard for human life to produce repression, misery, and murder on a massive scale. On July 18, 2007, Cambodian and international co-prosecutors at the newly established mixed UN/Cambodian tribunal in Phnom Penh found evidence of “crimes against humanity, genocide, grave breaches of the Geneva Convention, homicide, torture and religious persecution.”
In brief, Bob identifies a number of key texts which chart Chomsky (and Herman’s) views on Pol Pot’s rule.
First, ‘Distortions at Fourth Hand’, Noam Chomsky & Edward S. Herman, The Nation, June 6, 1977, “a key text because it was here that they launched their assault on Ponchaud’s Cambodge année zéro [Cambodia: Year Zero], the book that more than any other really alerted the West to the Khmer Rouge crimes”.
Note: Year Zero: The Silent Death of Cambodia is the title of a 1979 documentary film by John Pilger. Pilger also produced Cambodia: The Betrayal (1990), “An examination of the continued secret support given by Western governments to the Khmer Rouge”. See also : Thirty years on, the holocaust in Cambodia and its aftermath is remembered, October 29, 2009. “Today, Pol Pot is dead and several of his elderly henchmen are on trial in a UN/Cambodian court for crimes against humanity. HenryKissinger, whose bombing opened the door to the nightmare of Year Zero, is still at large. Cambodians remain desperately poor, dependent on an often seedy tourism and sweated labour.”
Secondly, The Political Economy of Human Rights, Volume II: After the Cataclysm: Postwar Indochina and the Reconstruction of Imperial Ideology (South End Press, 1979), also written by Noam Chomsky & Edward S. Herman (and a companion volume to The Political Economy of Human Rights, Volume I: The Washington Connection and Third World Fascism (South End Press, 1979)).
Thirdly, Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media (Noam Chomsky & Edward S. Herman, Pantheon, 1988).
The video antifa in Germany produced — Uno Di Noi: Ein Antifaschistisches Graffiti In Bochum — has now been added to YouTube (home to tens if not hundreds of thousands neo-Nazi videos). It documents the construction of a mural in Bochum, made in order to commemorate the murder by neo-Nazis of seven anti-fascist yoof:
Jan Kučera (18, Prague, Czech Republic, January 18, 2008) Fedor Filatov (27, Moscow, Russia, October 10, 2008) Carlos Javier Palomino (16, Madrid, Spain, November 11, 2007)
Davide Cesare “Dax” (26, Milan, Italy, March 16, 2003)
Renato Biagetti (26, Rome, Italy, August 28, 2006) Timur Kacharava (20, St. Petersburg, Russia, November 13, 2005)
Thomas Schulz (31, Dortmund, Germany, March 28, 2005)
It kicks arse.
It may also be usefully contrasted with the attitudes of some locals.
Workers at an Anheuser-Busch InBev brewery in eastern Belgium have taken their bosses hostage after an announcement of lay-offs at the world’s biggest brewer, local media reports.
“We are demanding that the (company’s) senior managers come here and call off the lay-offs,” Marc Devenne, a union representative was quoted as saying by the Belga news agency.
RTBF radio reported that about 10 managers at the plant were being held in a meeting room in an office building located next to the plant.
Anheuser-Busch InBev announced on Thursday a tenth of the company’s 3000 [sic: 8000] employees in Belgium will be laid off due to declining beer consumption in the country.
Two Greek anarchists are making molotov cocktails. One says to the other: "So who will we throw these at then?" The other replies: "What are you, some kind of fucking intellectual?"
