Back Towards The Locus

This blog has moved. It’ll now live here…

bensix.wordpress.com

Thank you very much for reading, and I hope that you’ll continue to. Please alter links if you feel the urge.

A cricket umpire has died after being struck on the head by a ball.

I was vaguely bemused to learn that the C of E plays the stock market: after their religion’s fractious relations with money lenders, they’ve apparently decided that if ya can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em. Thus, they’ve had to consider a “constructive engagement with the corporate world“. According to their Ethical Investment Policy(pdf), companies are monitored according to…

• responsible employment practices
• best corporate governance practice
• conscientiousness with regard to human rights
• sustainable environmental practice
• sensitivity towards the communities in which business operates

Unfortunately…

A new Amnesty International report says that the company in which the Church of England has its biggest shareholding is responsible for bringing impoverishment, conflict, human rights abuses and despair to the majority of the people in the oil-producing areas of the Niger Delta.

…and, er…

Britain’s largest retailer Tesco will today come under fire over 7p an hour garment workers in Bangladesh as shareholders prepare to hail the company’s record £3 billion profits at its annual meeting.

The Church of England is a major shareholder with an investment of £27.5 million in the company, according to the last annual report of the Church Commissioners.

My moralising instinct wants to run riot, but that might be too hasty: after all, money is low, and being lost; they hardly seem to be making a killing. Asking them to invest ethically assumes that there are opportunities to do this and make returns – well, are there? Ekklesia suggests so…

In an age of green funds, co-operative banks, credit unions, micro-credit, mutuals, housing associations, (fr)ee-cycling and LETS (local exchange trading systems utilising non-monetary exchange) – all of which are suddenly much more attractive and popular given the financial turbulence of the last two years – there are now more possibilities than ever to choose from [21], and little excuse for evasion, complacency or inaction. [22]

If that’s the case, there’s no wriggle room: their investments contradict their ethics. If it’s not the case, perhaps they should lead by example – letting it be know that the corporate world is utterly ridden with hideousness.

In December 2001, Mahmoud Abu Rideh, a Palestinian-born British resident with a British wife and six British children, was arrested, and imprisoned in Belmarsh. His eldest daughter, Ala’a, describes the arrest…

It was the second day of Eid when they came and arrested my Dad. We were all sleeping. It was a bout 5 am, then we heard a big crash, then all we see is lots of police coming inside our bedroom, then all I see is my mother crying and telling us to get up and wear some clothes because we are going to leave the house. We all got ready than after we got ready we went downstairs and we saw policemen in our house sitting and smoking. They took us to a hotel to search the house.

We didn’t even know where our Dad was, all we could do is just wait and wait and wait till one of the police came and took us back home at the night time.

When we got to the house it was very messy and very untidy. We kept waiting for our Dad.

Under the Anti-Terrorism, Crime and Security Act, Abu Rideh could be held indefinitely, and all grounds for suspicion withheld. Thus, he endured three maddening years, with only infrequent, miserable visits from his family. His wife, Dina al-Jnidi, explains…

The visit was a closed visit, which means that neither I nor my children could touch him. The children were unable to hug or hold their father. Even shaking his hand was not allowed. On many occasions after travelling long distances in difficult circumstances we were sent away without being allowed to see him.

Eventually, with his mental condition in bits, he was transferred to Broadmoor. There, he was allegedly “attacked by staff, nurses and other prisoners” and “began to self-harm. He drank detergents, he used pens to dig deep into his arms“.

In 2005, he was released under a control order. His wife describes the conditions…

We were pleased to have him back home, but did not know the full extent of the conditions that would be placed on him. I did not know what a control order was. He had to wear an electronic tag around his ankle. He had to report in several times a day (including the middle of the night) using special equipment that had been placed in our home. We were not allowed to have a digital camera in the home, nor other basic items such as USB sticks, memory cards or MP3 players. Our children were not allowed to use the internet or have a computer. We were not allowed visitors unless they had been cleared by the Home Office after a rigorous vetting procedure. Many would not even call for fear of being harassed by the police or worse.

My husband was a wreck, a shattered man. He could not sleep, he would sweat and shake, he would have nightmares and flashbacks. It was almost impossible to deal with him. He was ill and had complex psychological needs — I am not a trained nurse and he required specialist help. One week later he attempted suicide by taking an overdose of his depression and anti-psychotic medications. I found him on the floor unconscious, in a pool of vomit foam coming from his mouth. He was taken to the hospital and remained unconscious for three days.

Faced with a life of disruptions, deprivation and misery, Abu Rideh’s family travelled to Jordan. Only now, after seven years of torment and imprisonment, is he free to live with them, peacefully.

After all these years of senseless agony and disorientation – that of his wife and children, as well as his own – there’s bewilderment. Why did they arrest him? What gave them the right to keep him?

Andy Worthington puts it superbly…

…everyone who believes that no one should be imprisoned or otherwise deprived of their liberty on the basis of secret evidence – and, essentially, on the whim of government ministers who have turned the clock back to 1214 — must continue to insist that the control order regime is brought to an end, and that the use of secret evidence has no place in a country that claims to uphold civilized values.

Ibrahim Jassam, powerless and ignored, is now on a hunger strike, and his sister reports that “his health is deteriorating. We are very worried about him.“

To recap: Ibrahim Jassam Mohammed is an Iraqi photojournalist, who was detained by American forces last September. A month later, an Iraqi court ruled that there was no evidence against him, and ordered that he be released. The US responded with a great, big middle finger, and the media and international authorities shrugged and meekly shuffled along. So, now Jassam is lumped with a formless wait: his future dependent upon the idle will of his kidnappers.

The extent to which everybody’s turned away is interesting in itself. Ban Ki-Moon is “making personal efforts to…free two U.S. journalists imprisoned in North Korea” and “worked similarly behind the scenes to help win freedom for Roxana Saberi“, but has kept an aloof distance from Jassam’s messy case. The media, meanwhile, have only granted him a passing cough.

The detention embodies many elements of US foreign policy – imperial arrogance, disdain for the rule of law and a cavernous gulf between noble words and nasty deeds – as well as a simple image, luridly displayed throughout the world: a big thumb squeezing a little guy against a wall.

…what terrible things may have befallen us otherwise?

Two more biographies of Michael Jackson have been commissioned by UK publishers, following his sudden death last week. Michael O’Mara’s Michael Jackson: Legend 1958-2009 will be published on 1st September, while Carlton Books is rushing out an illustrated biography of Michael Jackson, with an October publication.

I’m thinking of writing a novel. A rogue biographer will set down the tragic murder of his subject, carry it out and send off the manuscript within minutes. As for the title, well, I’m torn between “A Plotted Biography” and “Biographic Violence”.

Right, team — er, readers. There’s a fine, important post by Andy Worthington over here. I want you to survey that area, and then rendezvous with Glenn Greenwald over here.

Have you got that? Then go!

Go!

Go!

“Today,” Frank Furedi wrote in 2007, “Politicians are…likely to advise the public to fear everything, including fear itself.” It’s ironic, then, that in his critique of the “suspicion and mistrust” of “conspiratorial thinking“, he comes across as a bit, well, overanxious about the whole thing.

Advocacy organisations, political activists and the media are attracted to the idea that behind every headline there lays a hidden agenda. The idea of hidden agendas has influenced discussions on the war in Iraq, the destruction of the World Trade Center, the catastrophe of Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans, and the outbreak of swine flu.

I’ll wait for the clatter of jaws to subside…

…thank you. Is Furedi saying that there weren’t hidden agendas behind Iraq? The whole thing was just one great, big, farcical, innocent mistake? Perhaps. On the other hand, he could – in a rather clumsy way – be suggesting that people were much too quick to probe for Saddam’s “hidden agendas“.

This, too, would be a mistake: he probably did have agendas, but supporters of the war were far too willing to accept their governor’s depictions of them. This doesn’t suggest that people are too suspicious, it suggests that they’ve not been suspicious enough: retaining a selective, unjustified trust.

The media fuel this attitude by frequently arguing that what is important is not what public figures say but what their real agenda is. The media incite the public to look for hidden motives; that normalisation of suspicion and mistrust is the key accomplishment of today’s conspiratorial culture.

It seems dreadfully banal to point this out – and it would be tragic if presented as an original observation – but Furedi demands it, so here goes: disgustingly often, public figures lie.

In The Man Who Mistook His Wife For A Hat, Oliver Sacks recounts an occasion where some of his patients, aphasiacs, and acutely aware of the nuances of speech, were reduced to hysterical laughter by an address from Ronald Reagan: amused by “the grimaces, the histrionisms, the false gestures and, above all, the false tones and cadences of the voice, which rang false for these wordless but immensely sensitive patients“. To recognise the disingenuity of our governors, attentive citizens have needed no such conditions.

There was Tony Blair, of course, who waxed lyrical about “freedom, democracy, human rights [and] the rule of law” but consistently, and with great dishonesty, defied these values. Indeed, it’s been true for just about all prominent statespeople, whose supposedly passionate rhetoric has been founded on lies, and contradicted by actions.

Furedi is also mistaken in castigating the media for “incit[ing] the public to look for hidden motives” – they, too, aren’t suspicious enough. Oh, sure, they can sneer when it’s Russia or Iran, but when our politicians ooze into view they become rather more accommodating. For example, in March, a BBC reporter asserted that Tony Blair “passionately believed” that Iraq had WMDs. When challenged by a reader, she replied: “I said Mr Blair passionately believed Iraq had wmd because he has consistently said so.” I’m not sure what’s more surreal: the idea that Blair would come out and say “I’m sorry, guys, I had my fingers crossed behind my back”, or the idea that anyone could imagine that he would — either way, it befits the nightmares of a junkie, not the the evening news.

On every major issue of the day, the mainstream media has sunk to dumb regurgitation: G8, Iraq, Afghanistan – you name it. We’ve also seen the superlative optimism that’s been displayed towards the new President, despite the fact that a) his actions contradict his rhetoric, and b) as beautifully demonstrated here, his words aren’t really dissimilar to those of his predecessor.

The rise of conspiratorial thinking expresses the loss of causality and meaning in the contemporary world. History demonstrates that nothing is more frightening than when a community lacks a system of meaning through which it can understand the problems it confronts. In such circumstances, people feel powerless and confused and are sometimes drawn towards a simplistic version of events where everything is black and white or good and evil.

People do “lack a system of meaning through which [they] can understand the problems [they] confront“, and they are, indeed, “powerless“. Thus, all to often, they become “confused“. Some, it’s true, may be “drawn towards a simplistic version of events where everything is black and white or good and evil“.

According to Furedi, though, there are no agendas behind this powerlessness, and those who accuse the powerful of holding devious motives are merely expressing “mainstream prejudices“. Well, let’s recount some things that a) I’ve shown, or b) I think we agree on…

• Those in power are greatly deceitful.

• There are obviously great incentives to being deceitful.

• Those in the media often fail to draw attention to this.

• The effect of the deceits, and the bland acceptance of them, has been disastrous.

• The people themselves don’t have the power to hold their governors to account.

Considering this, it’s not only understandable that people embrace “the idea of hidden agendas“, it’s entirely sensible as well. More, please.

Market dogma is exposed as myth. Where is the new vision to unite us?

We need a grand, new, uniting vision like, er — umm — oh, what the fuck, I’ll just insinuate that communism hasn’t been destructive; that’ll keep the buggers talking.