Category: Politics

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Some impressions of the anti-Dilma protests

These are some impressions of the anti-Dilma protests in Sao Jose do Rio Preto, a city of about four hundred thousand people in Sao Paolo state. My Portuguese is not good enough for the detail of the speeches, so these are mostly visual impressions, based on what I saw and could read on placards. My guess is that the turn-out was about ten thousand.

Firstly, the protestors were overwhelmingly white. Bar literally three people, everyone I saw in the crowd was white, and the only black or indigenous people I saw were riot police. Whatever the movements might say about not being a `white elite’, it would be obvious to an observer on this demonstration. Rio Preto is not very mixed by Brazilian standards—the immigrant population here was mostly Italian and Middle-Eastern—but it is a lot more diverse than the crowd on this demonstration. The speakers on the platform were all white.

The protest movement claims to be in favour of legality and against corruption, but there were placards which were unambiguously anti-left (“Brazil is green and yellow, not red”, “Dilma go to Cuba”, etc) and slogans seemed to be what you would get from a Brazilian UKIP: resentful of change, especially change that undermines established privilege.

There is a definite nationalist and/or militaristic element, even in the mainstream of the movement. As well as singing the national anthem (twice), the speakers asked the crowd to wave and cheer to the (military) police helicopter and talked of the armed forces and military police as a force for stability. One marcher carried a placard with the slogan `military intervention’ which is the demand of one group which forms part of the broader anti-Dilma movement.

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Shifting Sands

For resentful white folks in search of a struggle with which to express solidarity, there is a rich seam of oppression to be mined in Ireland. Violence in Ireland has long been assimilated to the violence of national liberation struggles in the developing, or post-colonial, world. At a distance, some of the ambiguities can be fudged: in 1998, I attended a gig which turned out to be in aid of the Committee for the Self-Determination of the People of Ireland, at a centro sociale in Rome. The headline act was the Modena City Ramblers, who sound something like the Pogues would have done if they had been a bunch of communists from Emilia-Romagna (but I repeat myself). Their songs have included misty-eyed laments about Irish rain, Bobby Sands’ friends, and Che Guevara’s motorcycle trip. Their last release but one was a concept album about a joint Allied-partisan operation in 1945; on the cover was an SAS dagger and `Who Dares Wins’.

The affection of the Italian left for Ireland, or at least for an image of Ireland, is no surprise: the discourse of `struggle’, armed or otherwise, is a good fit for `solidarity’ with `oppressed peoples’. The mythologization of Ireland on the right is another thing entirely.

Should you ever find yourself near a demonstration in Italy, or watching a football match involving an Italian club, you will inevitably see flags featuring a stylized Celtic cross. The cross is an icon, in the literal sense of venerated symbol, because of its use by French Waffen SS troops, wiped out in the defence of Berlin against the Bolshevik hordes in 1945, but also for its connection to Ireland and Irish mythology. Like Hitler, the neo-fascist movement in Italy has long drawn inspiration from Norse mythology: one legendary street-fighter had a taste for charging left-wing demonstrations swinging a hammer over his head, Odin-like, rather than using the standard issue 36mm spanner. Clearly, a warrior myth is useful for people who use `hierarchical’ and `anti-democratic’ as compliments, and see Tolkien’s books as models of a well-ordered society, so much so that the 1970s neophyte Nazi spent his summers at `Camp Hobbit’.

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Policing by consent (of the police)

In a BBC Radio 4 programme about the relationship between the Conservative Party and the UK police, the presenter, journalist Robin Aitken, discusses the breakdown in the previously amicable relationship between the Tories and the police, harking back to the golden age of upstanding beat coppers who were trusted by the public. Roger Scruton pops up to talk of how the law in Britain is felt as the property of the people, and how the police are servants of the public and not an arm of the state. One interviewee wants to go back to the standards which prevailed thirty or forty years ago.

These would be standards of torture (Birmingham Six, Guildford Four, Maguire Seven), murder (Blair Peach, inter alia), political repression (Orgreave), and, more recently, in addition to established practice, the impregnation of political activists and the desertion of them and their children. All of the above has been covered up for by perjury.

Aitken mentions that for many years the only critics of the police were the `radical left’, where it would appear `radical left’ means `people who think the police should obey the law and not beat confessions out of people’. He is shocked, however, by the idea that a police officer would lie about a government minister saying `pleb’.

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Roman a Clerc

[Declaration of interest: Kirsty McCluskey is a friend of mine, and I read the book in various drafts.]

Ruritania is not Greeneland, but the Catholic geology of both should be mined properly, if it is to be mined at all. Kirsty McCluskey’s new novelette, The Royal Confessor, is built around the relationships between the ailing monarch of Santa Teresa, his niece, and his Jesuit confessor. Fernand, veteran of Borodino, is prey to some unnamed terror which increasingly extreme religious devotions cannot ease; Sophie, his widowed niece, lives on the charity of the royal household, where the heir apparent Lucien is powerless to protect the island’s autonomy secured by Fernand’s skillful diplomacy decades earlier; Father Neri, the confessor, can offer no consolation to the old soldier, but duty obliges him to come when called.

Catholicism has taken on some of the otherness once reserved for distant tribes of which we knew only that we ruled them, and can be an easy gimmick for a lazy writer. This is especially true of confession (strictly the Sacrament of Penance), whether the use of the `seal’ to set up a thriller, or as a form of therapeutic talking cure (“Fr Eud will see you now.”).

The (A) point of Penance, which distinguishes it from secular therapies, is the relationship to the world outside the penitent. Simply unburdening oneself of one’s concerns is not enough: to be fully reconciled, after forgiveness, the penitent accepts some penance which is commensurate with the sin. Fernand has seen and done terrible things at Borodino; he wants his confessor to reconcile him with his God; his confessor can find no way to bring him to confess the sins which weigh upon him; no penance is possible.

Among the pleasures of the book, then, is an intelligent fictional treatment of a genuine dilemma, and probably one which has been set as an essay question in theology exams: how to absolve a penitent who will not confess his sin. Fernand believes himself damned, but cannot take the only refuge open to him; Neri does not believe him damned, but cannot offer him the only consolation of worth.

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The meaning of our NO

From National Association of Partisans of Italy

The Germans told me “sign and you will be free”, the Nazis reiterated “sign and you can go home”, certain Italians who declared themselves brothers without being such, added “sign and you will live our apotheosis.”

I said NO, I will not sign. I repeated NO, I will not sign. I did not surrender to flattery, I did not fear threats, I peacefully made my gesture and I said NO, I will not sign. I said NO when no meant being enmeshed and yes meant transitory freedom, I said NO when no was the looming tragic unknown, while yes was the tempting pause in my torment; I said NO when no meant death and holocaust while yes was the sporadic return to living a life; I said NO because no was a soldier and yes meant a mercenary. I said NO because no was rebellion against Nazi-Fascism because no was duty, no was fatherland, no was Italy.

And I said: NO, I will not sign.

(Prisoner IMI 151 AZ, unknown)

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The great streets thrown upon the little: Strumpet City

Strumpet City is a novel of Dublin in the early twentieth century: between the royal visit of 1907 and the hero’s departure for Flanders in 1914, a servant girl marries her sweetheart; the slum of her employer collapses; three priests contend for hegemony over the allegiance of Dublin’s poor; an ageing rake finds a cause; a labourer falls in love with a prostitute; a raggedy-arsed chorus of beggars are Godoted into comment by the shambles they see about them.
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A pox on student satisfaction

If you aren’t in over your head, how do you know how tall you are? (T. S. Elliott)

One of the methods used to rate universities, and departments, in the UK is the National Student Survey, based on a questionnaire seeking new graduates’ opinions of their degree courses. It claims to `build a broader picture of the quality of Higher Education‘ by measuring student satisfaction. In the interests of transparency, I should declare that my employer is very proud of having the highest NSS score in the land.

The logic here seems to be that if students are satisfied, the university has done its job properly. Students are invited to think like customers, because they are paying, and because customer satisfaction is the objective of the supplier. Apart from the unexamined assumption that `satisfaction’ is the same thing as good service, for this to work, students need to forget that charging for a service puts a limit on what is to be expected: you can’t get more than you pay for, if you pay in cash, and if you do not invest part of yourself, `satisfaction’ is all you will get from the transaction.
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Christopher Logue on books

And, of course, we loved books. Books were the thing. Portable, durable, inexpensive—a marvel of technology, needing no intermediary save spectacles; that can be exceptionally beautiful, and may become valuable. Above all—free spirited, subversive, difficult to police.

Christopher Logue, Prince Charming.

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How to write a high impact paper

Academics, in the UK at least, are being encouraged to write papers with `impact’. There is some discussion about what exactly `impact’ means, but these seem to be two papers which can reasonably claim to have had some:

  1. a paper in one of the world’s leading journals, cited 1730 times in fifteen years (according to Google Scholar), which described a previously unknown phenomenon, and led to a massive change in public behaviour.
  2. a paper cited 543 times in three years, which led to changes in government policy world-wide, with far-reaching societal effects.

Paper 1 is Andrew Wakefield’s fraudulent Lancet work which found that the MMR vaccine can cause autism. As a result, vaccination rates fell as low as 80% in the UK, with predictable results.

Paper 2 is Reinhart and Rogoff’s paper claiming that government debt above 90% of GDP slows economic growth. The authors made an error in Excel (using it was their first mistake) which led to them leaving out data which contradicted their conclusion. Governments have used this paper to justify their cutting of public services, on which many people depend, with predictable results.