Der Spiegel covers #europeanrevolution
Primary tabs
[I'm stickying this because there are a lot of ideas I'd like feedback on. And also there's a totally inspirational part below the fold. Readers? --lambert]
Here; read the whole thing, it's got great detail; really excellent elite journalism. Naturally, Der Spiegel, in its framing, is setting the movements* up to fail: They frame the square occupations as a youth movement, when (I would argue) "all walks of life" must participate for the movement to sustain itself; they push internet triumphallsm, when all the evidence is that the weak ties provided by (the heavily surveilled) Facebook are insufficient for the movement to sustain itself; and it's all about the "rage" and not the joy**; note the deck, added by the editors: "The Rage of the 'Indignants'," which is not supported by the reporting at all. And so much for the media critique.
That said, read it all, but I'd like to focus on this most excellent part of the unfolding story:
Ironically, a 93-year-old Frenchman provided the template for the youth protests. "Indignez-vous!" or "Be Outraged!" is the polemic pamphlet that the former French resistance fighter Stéphane Hessel published last year. The Spanish "indignados" and the French "indignées" have borrowed their names from Hessel's title.
Although Hessel did not establish the pan-European movement himself, he is demanding something that has once again become en vogue after years of apathy: citizen involvement. His appeal is both vague [editorilizing at the critical point] and sufficiently serious [ha] to garner approval in many European camps [Factions? Or squares?]. He advocates nonviolent action in a world in which there is an ever-widening gap between rich and poor [that's "vague" why?].
So, a few morals of the story:
1. You don't have to be young, so Der Spiegel's frame is wrong. Unless you're "93 years young."
2. Writing really does matter.
3. Contributions that seem small can have great effects. (Read this post carefully for two key ideas from a systems perspective: The best way to steer a path through a complex system is to stick to your principles; and in a highly stressed complex system, small events can produce massive shifts).
Now, none of us can know the effects of our own writing, or witnessing, or actions, or organizing in advance; cf. Matthew 25:13. But "every act that imparts hope is a victory in itself." And many small drops make a tide.
I'd also argue that the more you free yourself from rents, the more likely it is that not only will you be able to make contributions that you can make, but and so your life will be more joyful as well.
NOTE * I'm being deliberately vague here, with "movements," plural, but then I think reality is very fluid and dynamic now, and long may it remain so. The elite, as here, is attempting to fix its target in order to bring its forces to bear on it, and so to convert a war of movement, which they will lose, into a war of position, which they might win.
NOTE ** By validating rage, Der Spiegel encourages violence and narratives of violence, which is a four-fer: They create business opportunities for themselves in narrative construction and propagation, they drag the movement onto the ground of compliance and off the ground of democracy, they bring self-indulgent and sociopathic leaders like themselves to the top (for example), and they devalue non-violence as a strategic asset. This last idea is, I think, the most important: If we think of the movement as having a balance sheet, non-violence (as in Egypt) generated tremendous "good will" on the asset side. And our kleptocratic elite is about nothing so much as looting or destroying assets that do not maximize their power and status, as in the balance sheets of households, domestic manufacturing, the destruction of the Philadelphia Orchestra, and so on and so forth.
UPDATE For an opposing view, see Ian Welsh here.
- lambert's blog
- Log in or register to post comments
Comments
Nice to see any major media coverage of this
Also nice to see some attempt to draw parallels with what's been going on in the Middle East.
But note, it's "Der Spiegel," not "Speigel."
Thanks!
Fixing.
Violence/Non-violence Balance Sheet
I am fascinated by this formulation; it is much more than a throw-away concept. A credit to one is a debit to the other. If you looked at non-violence as the asset, then violence is a debit, and vice-versa. But the more you have of one, the more you have potential for the other. I never knew much about balance sheets, now becoming more intimately involved. The concept of "not-something' being equalled out by "something" was unfamiliar to me. To create the balance between the two, what would be the "equity" in this case? Goodwill? Effectiveness? The ability to influence people?
Could the magnitude of the non-violence be the credit side, where the debit side is the magnitude of potential violence used? Would Ghandi, or MLK have had as much power in non-violence, if the potential of violence of a similar magnitude wasn't present? In other words, wouldn't violence be the asset that is spent down, and non-violence is the credit against potential future violence? I guess balance sheets still confuse me....
I don't think it is deniable that violence is an effective tool to influence people. If it wasn't, it wouldn't be the method of choice of the powerful interests that rule our world. However, the nature of what is achieved is unclear, aside from the power to influence. The pen is mightier than the sword, because the sword gives the pen it's might?
This comment is exactly why I stickied this...
It never occurred to me to look for the debit; I imagine it's the suffering one endures from the violent????
Israeli forces shooting Palestinian protesters: Debit for those
who died AND for those doing the killing?
Read Chris Floyd's description. Imagine yourself in that situation. Think about the Indians mowed down in Ghandi's march to the sea for making salt. Think about the young people in the burning bus during the Freedom Rides in our own South.
To get a positive return on those deaths and beatings, a press willing and able to cover the incidents, and do it well, is absolutely necessary.
Those doing the killing...
... are part of a different enterprise and have a different balance sheet.
I agree on the necessity of coverage. Why we're here...
Complications
I am not sure that a credit to non-violence results in a debit to violence. And with that I'm moving away from accounting speak since it gives me a rash.
But the thing is, non-violence as a movement should be evaluated in terms of both affect and effect.
Satyagraha as a principle of ethics, or moral right action, is affective in the population that seeks to gain that higher moral ground. It says all humanity has equal and infinite value, and we recognize that and will not surrender this principle up to and including death. So the affect is that it communicates courage -- courage is as contagious as fear... but fear is the immediate response, the egoic auto pilot, the desire to survive at all costs. Courage requires you to look into the abyss and leap it. Once you do that fear has no hold over you. The risks you are willing to take are much greater and there is certainly an exponential form of power in groups that perceive this aspect of themselves, together.
The issue of effect, or effectiveness, has to do with the appeal of this higher moral ground to other groups. This is about resistance -- one group contending with another. If you have, as in Israel today, a growing fundamentalist "right" which devalues the humanity of the "other" -- the effect of the group practicing non-violence is nil. Because the opposing group does not share that view of the equality of humanity. They are practicing in-group/out-group dynamics. There is no appeal here, on moral grounds. But when the opposition is divided, and this is also true in Israel, where part of the population does perceive the principle in play, then you have affect (resulting in guilt in the recognition of the "other" as "self") and effect (resulting in a lack of cohesion in the opposition).
The key, imo, to non-violence is making the moral plea to those that can be affected by it, and share it, in the opposing group. And the courage that it communicates across to the other group to contend within itself is the thing that brutally violent crackdowns are, at least subconsciously, trying to stop.
So this like two sets of books. Instead of a direct balance sheet, or a one for one correspondence.
The Ian Welsh is worth reading and is not necessarily
an opposing view.
In effect, he is saying that non-violence only generates assets under specific conditions. (And I recommend the article for his take on how the number of people who have those conditions is shrinking.)
He writes to criticize the Guardian's interviewer Stephen Moss and to praise Arundhati Roy.
As Roy put it: "Non-violence is a piece of theatre. You need an audience. What can you do when you have no audience?"
The Guardian ran a five-part piece from March 2010 (http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2010/mar...). Extremely worth reading
Even though Roy clearly takes the sides of the Indian tribal people's and their right to use violence against those who have used so much violence against them, she also clearly sees the cost to the tribal people of that violence, specifically the danger of the need to use violence shifting leadership among the tribal people to their most callous and heartless members and the danger of a shift in focus from building better lives to exacting revenge.
What I think unifies what Lambert is saying, what Ian Welsh is saying, and what Arundhati Roy is saying is that they are all grounding the evaluation of the use of different forms of resistance in the needs of the non-elite ordinary people, not in some abstract rule saying that non-violence is always and everywhere superior to violence.
As Welsh points out (quite eloquently), such a stance can easily function as an apology for a violent elite system.
What I would add to this is that in those cases where non-violence was usable, such as Egypt, it both required higher levels of organization and culture and in turn helped build them. That capacity to create something new and nourishing rather than to get stuck in the elite's cruder patterns may be what is most important. To the extent it is possible.
Probably
I find this offputting:
Shades of Spiro Agnew. That said, Roy's interviewer is pretty disgusting, and Ian Welsh is always worth reading.
I choked on it too, but as you say, the article is worth it
I also disagree with "sharp limits". One of the things worth doing is exactly to expand those limits. The struggle of the Avidasi in India is fairly invisible in the West, so even just spreading the article by Arudhati Roy helps them a tiny bit. If they were more visible, that would give them a bit of maneuvering room.
Any use of non-non-violence needs to serve the envisioning and building of the elements of the next, better society. A major cost of non-non-violence is that using it tends strongly to make it the center of things, rather than a tool to use only when better ones are just not available.
To clarify
"Any use of non-non-violence needs to serve the envisioning and building of the elements of the next, better society."
I meant "in the better off parts of the West". It is technically accurate even for the Avidasi, but to frame it this way would be insensitive to the reality of how much non-non-violence is used against them.
"Writing really does matter."
If these occupations the world over have revealed one thing, it is the power of an idea. The internet has fueled them only insofar as the internet has served the same role that pamphlets and hobo codes and ham radio have all served before- as a means of transmission. The internet has been used to spread the ideas of occupation and resistence from Tunisia to Egypt to Wisconsin to Syria to Yemen to Spain to Greece.
But ideas need more than means of transmission. They also need clear articulation. They need to be communicated in a way that makes them understandable to all people. That is where writing takes on seminal importance. A good writer communicates clearly- they put complex concepts into simple terms without dumbing them down, such that anyone can grasp them.
This is a lesson near and dear to my own heart, because I've always been a writer, since my days in elementary school. Those of us who have written for a long time, who have honed their skills and excelled, now have a special duty: it is up to us to help articulate these grand ideas. We must lend a hand wherever we can, however we can, to help craft the messages that these daring men and women are trying to send. If we are committed to the common good, we can do nothing less. And speaking for myself, I think it is the highest ideal to which a writer can aspire. It is moments like this that truly prove the pen mightier than the sword.
(To that end, I'm actually writing a sort-of-weekly column on a website now, devoted to the "millenial" perspective, that being my generation. I'm in the Current Events section, which has given me ample opportunity to write on the very things we discuss here on Corrente. I have tried to inject the perspectives I pick up here and throughout the C-List Blogosphere into my writing, in the hopes that more people will be made aware of the truth, such as I am in a position to reveal it.)
By all means cross-post!
I would love to see them!
Ha, right now I'm writing an article with the following topic:
Obama is not popular with Gen Y anymore: Although polls show his popularity levels are nearing what they were in 2008, young people and college students are not so fond of him anymore... What do you think as a millennial? Has Obama failed the young generation? Is he worthy of running in 2012? Would need interviews/gen y perspectives on this idea.
I'm having some fun with it.