Quakers and UK child soldiers

It boggles the mind how the UK is getting away with using child soldiers. And the Quakers' response isn't quite good enough.

Ok, forget facebook, use blogger

I have not written here for almost a year. No idea whether anyone ever reads this, but what the heck.

From now on, I'll use the brief posts I tend to put on facebook on this blog instead. I can't promise I'll always add a little theological commentary, but there it is.

I'll start by using some old posts from facebook.

MoD newspeak

Whatever the truth of the allegations against UK armed forces interrogation centre in Iraq, the response of their officials is a classic example of imperial deception, hubris, and political newspeak.

1. "Nick Harvey, the Liberal Democrat armed forces minister, said the MoD should be allowed to investigate the matter itself, adding: 'A costly public inquiry would be unable to investigate individual criminal behaviour or impose punishments. Any such inquiry would arguably therefore not be in the best interests of the individual complainants who have raised these allegations.'"

Brilliant argument: a government department should not be investigated in public because such an inquiry would make individual prosecutions difficult. Excellent stuff. At first I thought that he must be a lawyer, but it turns out that he used to work in marketing and public relations.

2. "Brigadier John Donnelly of the MoD's Judicial Engagement Policy department said: 'We have set up the dedicated Iraq Historic Allegations Team (IHAT) to investigate them as quickly and thoroughly as possible.'"

Excellent use of newspeak: to treat events that are alleged to have happened seven years ago as "historic allegations" nicely likens it all to, say, allegations about abuse during the Napoleonic wars. Nothing really to do with us now, to be sure. Perhaps they have some former advertising executives working for them.

The prophets used pretty vitriolic language to lambast their own rulers and the elite. According to the gospels, Jesus did not mince his words either. Not that there is any chance at all of this happening in the UK; certainly not in the leadership. Sadly, there are few churches left (anywhere, I might add) where such language, or any, can be used to hold the powerful to account. I suppose it makes us feel a little better to prevaricate; avoid social analysis; or, in some cases, turn around and oppress others ourselves: 'let's hunt down gays', for example.

Sometimes I wonder whether anyone can seriously remain a Christian without considering every day why we haven't left 'the church' yet. Personally, if I had not started quite some time ago to divorce my understanding of 'church' from the 'really existing churches' (to paraphrase East Germany's real existierender Sozialismus), I would long have left and shaken the dust off my sandals.

Personal

I like to read several books at the same time (not to mention things directly related to teaching and research). At the moment I am trying to read, amongst other things, Achmat Dangor's "Bitter Fruit", and Stephen Clingman's "Bram Fischer". I am struggling with the latter, and had to give up on the former. Achmat Dangor's book in particular brings up too many bad memories: old stuff from South Africa is coming up in bad dreams.

This rarely happened before. Perhaps the crap from Pietermaritzburg (1987-1994) affected me more than I wanted to admit to myself: after all, nothing 'bad' ever happened to me. I never got detained and tortured; I never got shot or beaten up. I was so irrelevant to the regime that they did not even trouble themselves to deport me. Even with the few close calls included, when I managed to duck in time, run faster than the gunmen from Inkatha [1], or when Felicity smoothly found the reverse gear in her ancient Ford Escort, just in the nick of time to get us away from an Inkatha mob picking up stones to kill us - I was never injured. No physical scars, anyhow.

I know I am not a courageuous person by nature; there were years when I had a knot in my stomach every time I drove into Imbali township - I often had to fight the urge to stay behind. I guess that is why I refused to admit that the apartheid era could have damaged me. Thousands got killed, many more detained and tortured - what right do I have to feel troubled?

Where I am going with this? Heaven knows.


[1] Gerhard Mare & Georgina Hamilton, An appetite for power: Buthelezi's Inkatha and South Africa;
Monika Wittenberg, Einfach nichts tun, das geht auch nicht! Aus einem südafrikanischen Tagebuch: Aufzeichnungen und Briefe, 1985-1989;
The South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission: Videotape Collection.

R.I.P. Jimmy Reid

The sort of person who only makes it into the public spotlight today when he dies. Never met the man, and I don't know what he was like as a person, but ... what a life. Pity his 'rat race' speech is not available online. Ironically, given who he was and what he stood for, it's kept behind a paywall by the NY Times.

R.I.P, comrade.

http://blogs.aljazeera.net/europe/2010/08/11/death-unlikely-hero

http://www.eveningtimes.co.uk/news/editor-s-picks/jimmy-reid-tributes-a-working-class-hero-1.1047807

http://news.scotsman.com/politics/Jimmy-Reid-the-leader-of.6470446.jp

http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2010/aug/11/jimmy-reid-obituary

http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/greenslade/2010/aug/11/tradeunions-scotland

Brutalisation

Conflict brutalises all sides. Nothing new in that, of course. But language is often the first thing that you notice unless you are right in the middle of it (and then it's even harder to notice your own brutalisation). It works at all levels - it is not just the people who beat or shoot their victims; it affected Adolf Eichmann just as much as his concentration camp guards, and in its own way also the victims inside, as Elie Wiesel and others have shown in their recollections. I am not talking about guilt and sin here: what I mean is the sometimes slow process of becoming less sensitive, more hateful (or whatever), and so on.

It should therefore not be a surprise us that the Metropolitan Police Force in Britain decided on a bizarre plan to limit prostitution by posting photos, names and dates of birth of sex workers in a certain area, even if they had never been convicted of a crime. Some newspapers (if you can call the Sun, for example, a newspaper), then printed this information. Note that their clients are not 'named and shamed' that way. I hope that some lawyers will take the Met to court over this, but is not my point here. Nor do want to mention it to highlight the process by which the police forces' obligation to keep the law (supposedly), regardless of what it is, also leads to a disregard for what we used to call common sense, but which turned out to be a special skill called social analysis. No, what I am really want to say here is this: it seems to me that police officers have to deal with the awful, depressing, and sordid side of humanity so much, ever day of their working lives, that they become brutalised through that process (assuming that they all went in as "nice people" in the first place, which is not realistic either). Down that track lies abuse of power. That is why good supervision is so important, not to mention political oversight. But the latter, precisely because party politics is understood and practicd as self-entrenching power politics, is usually missing.

The same goes for the curious remarks of the current immigration minister in Britain, Mr Damian Green concerning the Oakington detention centre (oops, I mean, immigration reception facility). There is that odd idea of speaking about 'detention estate', meaning the range of prison-like facilities available to lock up certain people accused of being in the country illegally. And there is that curious slippage from accusation to conviction and execution, all in the form of one institition (the executive), when he states:

"For the past 10 years, Oakington has housed hundreds of immigration offenders and allowed us to remove those with no right to be in the country."

Actually, it's been many thousands of people who have gone through that prison-like place. And it's a nice populist thing for a government to say, of course; new labour, tory - whatever. Xenophobia always works.

The point is, however, that the police and immigration officials accused them of being in the country illegally. The legal avenues open to them (to challenge the immigration officers' determination of their situation) had not been exhausted yet. Put differently, for people like Mr Green, people are 'offenders' if he says they are. Sod the law.

This is particularly important to note because the previous government introduced a deliberate strategy to use Oakington and other places to subvert the whole legal process by routinely turning down asylum claims in the first instance with the most pathetically flimsy decisions, many of which were overturned in the process later on. After all, if you simply turn down almost everyone in the first instance, you have effectively removed it as a real legal instance. In fact, Oakington was created for a 'fast-track' process of getting people through the legal instaces and out of the country as quickly as possible. Only callous, brutal disregard for people's lives can cause this kind of awful strategy. Not surprisingly, the immigration officials who were given the task of putting this strategy in effect were the first to be brutalised by the system (not to mention their victims). Once again, the effects of brutalisation at all levels: a government is faced with the task of dealing with a large number of often desparate immigrants (for whatever reason), and has to respond to this by inventing a system. That is where bureaucracy comes in; that is where brutalisation (at the level of bureaucracy) comes in.

[I mention these examples here only because I still keep an eye on British politics, having lived there for eight years and a bit. The same thing happens everywhere, of course; Britain is just like every other place. But the fact that "others are doing it, too" is never an ethical argument.]

Brutalisation also affect those who are victims of the system, and/or those who fight it. It is part of a self-defense mechanism, I suppose, to avoid ending up crying in a corner every day. For example, I think it is almost impossible to work with people who have been beaten up, shot, or callously mistreated in other ways, without becoming desensitised in some ways. You can't go to funeral after funeral of victims of violence without shutting down something in yourself. How much worse for the victims, if they are still alive, and their relatives. And it is hard, really hard, to love your enemies. That is where brutalisation kreeps in. I certainly know that it happens in me, and I have seen it in many others.

In the third part of his meditative poem addressed 'To those who will be born after us', Bertold Brecht expressed it thus:

Auch der Hass gegen die Niedrigkeit
Verzerrt die Züge.
Auch der Zorn über das Unrecht
Macht die Stimme heiser. Ach, wir
Die wir den Boden bereiten wollten für Freundlichkeit
Konnten selber nicht freundlich sein.

Hard to translate (I don't think the translation offered in the link above is all that accurate, but that is understandable - neither is mine):

Hatred of awfulness, too,
will distort your face into a grimace.
Anger about injustice, too,
makes your voice hoarse. Oh we
who wanted to prepare the ground for friendliness
were not able to be friendly ourselves.

Brecht's mistake is to accept that those who struggle against injustice are doomed to accept their own brutalisation. It happens, of course. But this brutalisation has to be fought, not just in our enemies, but also in ourselves.

Intercessory prayer

"Intercession is:

not an alibi for some kind of passivity;
it is the continuation of the struggle with other means;
it is the indispensable prolongation of political action and of participation in the class struggle on the side of the victims of exploitation and domination.

It is an act of modesty,
not of demobilization,
the expression of lucid realism,
not of discouragement,
even less of any sort of resignation.

What matters is that I am always conscious of both the indispensable character and the relitivity of the work in which I am engaged with others; waiting for that great final liberation, there are small steps, limited advances, towards more justice and respect for man in this world in which we live. As long as I breathe, I will not rest nor be indifferent toward these brothers, comrades, companions, and those I do not know, who are reduced to the last moral and physical extremity..."

Georges Casalis, "Torture and Prayer", International Review of Mission 66 (1977) p. 240.

The language of George Casalis (1917-1987) is that of his time, but I find his point still worth remembering. Casalis was a remarkable man; his story is hardly known in the English-speaking world (and it isn't that much better in German or French either). His most well-known book, Correct Ideas don't fall from the Sky (orig.: Les idées justes ne tombent pas du ciel, 1977) gives us one, relatively late, insight. I wish I had the time to read more by and about him, and perhaps write, too.