Picture Post #73 The Children's Hospital in Ukraine

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'Because things don’t appear to be the known thing; they aren’t what they seemed to be

neither will they become what they might appear to become.'

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Posted by Martin Cohen

This is actually a still from a video, which is partly a matter of practicality – I was looking for a particular image to sum up the futility and horror of the Russian ‘Special Operation’ in Ukraine – but also a small aesthetic statement too. For today war-reporting, and news is seen more through moving images than still ones.

The trouble with that is that our attention is constantly distracted. We see terrible scenes but barely absorb them before (perhaps mercifully) the camera has moved on.

Anyway, this scene that creates this still image, is rather hidden in the video, which generally pans around the courtyard of the Maternity and Children’s Hospital in Mariupol, Ukraine. Indeed, most of the photographer’s attention is on several burning wrecks of cars and this sad figure just appears to the side, walking slowly with a body in wheelbarrow. I don’t know if the body is alive or dead – I assume the former from the care being taken with the sheets, but within such a tragic scene it hardly seems to matter.

COVID-19: We Would Do It All Again

by Thomas Scarborough

'Compound Risks and Complex Emergencies.' PNAS.

Staying in a South African township in the autumn of 2021, once a week an old woman in worn out clothes slipped into the house unannounced, and sat down. She sat quietly for four hours, until lunch was served. She quietly ate her lunch, and left. I was curious to know the reason for her visits.

Her son, she said, had lost his work through the pandemic. He had been supporting her, and she could not now afford to feed herself. She couldn’t keep the lights burning after dark. She couldn’t even pay for candles—let alone the rest. Every day, she would slip quietly into a house like this, she said, and wait for a meal.

This was a direct result of a COVID-19 lockdown. Not that lockdowns are all the same, or have the same effects. The University of Oxford has developed a Stringency Index, which monitors a wide range of measures adopted by governments across the world, in response to the pandemic.

Without weighing up the rationale behind them, it is clear that these various measures have had grievous effects.

It is estimated that more than 200 million jobs were lost worldwide, in 2020 alone. The United Nations’ International Labour Organisation estimates that 8.8 percent of global working hours were lost, which is equivalent to 255 million full-time jobs. This is without considering the knock-on effects—apart from which, such losses are seldom made up in the years which follow.

According to the World Economic Forum, 38 percent of global cancer surgery was postponed or cancelled in the early months of the pandemic. The backlog, they said, would take nearly a year to clear. Of course, one can’t afford to postpone or cancel cancer surgery. Many surgeries were stopped besides—in fact, millions of surgeries per week.

Frustrations and the pressures of life under lockdown brought about huge increases in certain types of crime. Gender-based violence soared. The United Nations General Secretary reported a ‘horrifying global surge’. Scattered statistics confirm it. Many cities reported increases in gender violence of more than 30%. Some reported more than 200%. The effects of such violence never go away.

The lockdowns, in all their complexity and diversity, had negative effects on personal freedoms, supply chains, mental health, inequalities, and any number of things—and since everything is related to everything, almost anything one may think of was skewed.

Of course, not all of the effects of lockdowns were negative. Drug arrests plummeted in various places. Break-ins, not surprisingly, decreased as more people stayed home. In South Africa, a ban on liquor sales quickly emptied out hospital emergency rooms. Most importantly, it is thought that very many lives were saved from COVID-19.

How many lives were saved? This is hard to tell. Imperial College London judged that ‘the death toll would have been huge’—which is, there would have been millions more deaths. Surely this is true. At the same time, they noted that there are ‘the health consequences of lockdowns that may take years to fully uncover’—and paradoxically, the many attempts to stall the pandemic may have prolonged it.

How do we calculate the advantages and disadvantages of a pandemic response? It is, in fact, frightfully difficult. One needs to identify the real issues—or some would say, select them. One needs to weigh all relevant factors—however that might be done. There is a place, too, for the human trauma, whatever its logical status may be, and this is hard to quantify. 

At the end of the day, however, it all comes down to priorities.

An absolute priority during the pandemic was life. No matter how many or how few, lives should be saved. This emphasis is easy to see. Almost any graph which has traced the pandemic shows two lines: the number of cases, and the number of deaths. Other effects of the pandemic are by and large excluded from everyday graphs and charts—which is not to say that they are completely overlooked.

What does one mean, then, by loss of life? One means rapid loss of life, of the kind which overcomes one in the space of a few days from hospital admission to death. Such death, in most published instances, has been an almost complete abstraction—a number attached to COVID-19—signifying the priority of death pure and simple.

At the end of the day, the avoidance of rapid loss of life was the absolute priority in this pandemic. All other priorities were demoted, or put on hold, even repudiated as side-issues. Ought life to have been given absolute priority? Who can say? It has to do with human, cultural, and social values, as we find them, in the early 21st century.

The fact is that life—or the possibility of losing it quickly—was the immutable priority. Therefore, we would do it all again.

COVID-19: Let It Be

Miguel Opazo, Pest, 2017

Posted by Thomas Scarborough and Martin Cohen

Jeffrey Kluger, the editor at large for TIME magazine, observed last week, ‘There’s nothing quite like the behavior of panicky humans.’  He was writing in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Is the panic -- or should we say, alarm -- justified?

The initial response to the disease, although stumbling and slow in some respects, was by and large the correct one: get a fix on the disease.  What are we dealing with?  What is its character?  The next steps, then, were textbook containment and mitigation.  Since then, of course, the pandemic has developed other dimensions, though not as a direct result of the disease. Rich Lesser, the CEO of a global management consultancy, wrote in Fortune magazine last week, ‘It started as a health crisis, within days became a real economic crisis, and is now on a swift path to becoming a massive fiscal challenge.’

There would seem to be two assumptions in the early -- and continuing -- response to the pandemic: under no circumstances sickness, yet if there is, complete control.  All over the world, we find language which reveals an ‘uncompromising’, ‘relentless’, and ‘aggressive’ approach -- an ideal plan which is not to make any concessions to the disease.  And always, in the statistics, one finds a column marked ‘deaths’, to which all control would seem to defer.  The aim is zero deaths, zero deaths, zero deaths.  In fact the biggest opprobrium for any government in the midst of the pandemic is the death rate.

The COVID-19 pandemic has two important features: the seriousness of the pandemic, and the character of the disease.

About the seriousness of the pandemic, mortality stood last week at about 3% -- if one calculates the ratio of total confirmed cases to deaths.  Yet for a number of reasons, this is quite uncertain.  For example, various academic papers have estimated that more than 80% of cases are undetected.  This reduces 3% to 0.6%.  Some place mortality far lower -- the Centre for Evidence-Based Medicine placed it at 0.14% last week.  The World Health Organization calculated that in China, the 'real' mortality rate for ‪COVID-19‬ was 0.7% of reported cases, where only 5% of cases were reported. That's a 0.035% death rate.

While various kinds of ‘experts’, media, and ‘modellers’ have been plugging in figures as high as 10% for ‪Corona virus‬ fatalities, one professor of public health, John Ionnidis of Stanford University, suggests ‘reasonable estimates for the case fatality ratio in the general U.S. population vary from 0.05% to 1%’.  Compare the lower figure.  He explains his reasoning, too, saying that the one situation where an entire, closed population was tested was the Diamond Princess cruise ship and its unfortunate, quarantined passengers.

‘The case fatality rate there was 1.0%, but this was a largely elderly population, in which the death rate from Covid-19 is much higher…’  

Writing for Stat magazine, he adds,

‘Projecting the Diamond Princess mortality rate onto the age structure of the U.S. population, the death rate among people infected with Covid-19 would be 0.125%.’

If we assume that the ‘case fatality rate’ among individuals infected by the virus is 0.3%, and 1% of the U.S. population gets infected, this would translate to about 10,000 deaths. This sounds a huge number, but is within normal flu toll.

Even the one thing everyone agrees -- that we have to flatten the curve to spread out the load of cases (and avoid overburdening health services) -- Ionnidis casts doubt on.  Spreading the infections out over a longer period of time is better?  Not necessarily.  It ‘may make things worse: Instead of being overwhelmed during a short, acute phase, the health system will remain overwhelmed for a more protracted period.’  For Ionnidis, the policy response, not the virus, is the perturbing part, as ‘with lockdowns of months, if not years, life largely stops, short-term and long-term consequences are entirely unknown, and billions not just millions, of lives may be eventually at stake.’

The point is that fatalities, although they are tragic and traumatic in every case, are comparatively small, although, the numbers sound alarming given the large population which may be affected.

As for the character of the disease, it has some well-defined features.  It is now certain that it is far more dangerous to those who are more advanced in years, from about age 60, certainly from age 70.  It is far more dangerous for those with pre-morbidities, or compromised health, or concurrent infections, among other things.  This makes the picture far more varied than the simplest scenario of containment and mitigation.  Also, methods of containment and mitigation themselves are very varied, and may be greatly helped with fairly simple -- and far from extreme -- measures.

Given this brief survey, and assuming that it is broadly true -- what would the philosophers have said?

The Delphic maxim proclaimed, ‘Nothing to excess,’ while Aristotelian philosophers emphasised the Golden Mean -- the middle way between extremes of excess and deficiency.  Socrates said, ‘Choose the mean, and avoid the extremes on either side, as far as possible.’  In short, they sought a general holism.  With this in mind, they might well have cautioned us against a reductionist response to the crisis, and to take all factors into account and to balance them.  Protect the elderly, defend the vulnerable, comfort the distressed, yet for the rest, accept the tragic inevitability of illness and death among us, maintain the life and pulse of society -- and let it go.  Let it be.

A more holistic view suggests, too, that we should think, not only of the present pandemic, but of the past and the future.  As with all pandemics, there is a bigger picture.  Where have we come from, that this has happened to us now?  Where are we going to, as we shape the society of the future?  And what if it had been worse?  Pandemics are always embedded in background conditions.  One needs to consider economic and financial systems, urban planning, health care, lifestyle choices, communications -- in fact, the entire order of the day.

Above all, it is a reductionist response which drives us to the totalising ambition of no illness, and certainly, zero deaths -- and in the midst of this, the suppressed premise of our age: preserve life at all costs.  Less than a hundred years ago, religious congregations all over the world would pray for healing through God’s angel of death, if he should so will.  That prayer has now been expunged.  Death is not a constant companion today, as it sometimes was in the past, but an enemy to be defeated at all costs.  If only one knew what one were hoping to save.  It would seem that not many do -- and that in itself may be a large part of the panic, the alarm.  There has to be a way of living that triumphs over stalking death.

It remains to be seen whether ‘the behaviour of panicky humans’ can be sustained today.   At the moment, we are all locked into a more or less unified response to the pandemic, by the decisions of governments the world over -- and they in turn are judged by their peers.  

Doublethink: Raising the Dead

 

Pi is pleased to present a bonus episode of

 Youngjin Kang's Doublethink

Doublethink 25 – Death Synchronizers

 

Death and History

Posted by Király István

Death lays the foundations of human history. However, this is only one aspect of death.

Death does not only illuminate the historically articulated human life, so to speak 'externally' — or more precisely, from its end, from an indefinite and aleatory, 'retrospective' point of view, as a foreign and external element — but it continuously interweaves, and what is more, grounds it in its most essential aspects.

To such an extent that history probably exists precisely because there is mortal human life — which is to say, a mortal human being who relates by his life to death, to his being-like-death and mortality — also in a being-like way, and mode of being-like. In other words because there is such a life to which death — its own death — in all respects lends weight, challenge, pressure — grip! — over itself and for itself, and by this a continuous and unavoidable possibility to undertake.

So, the non-human, non-Dasein*-like life which is 'finite', and as such is always born, disappears, passes away, comes into being, extinguishes, changes and evolves ... well, this life actually does not, and cannot have a history — just as the 'inorganic' regions of being have no history in fact, only in a metaphoric sense. Which of course does not mean that this life is not in motion, in change — that it is unrelated with time, or does not 'possess' time with all the processes and 'events', necessary or incidental — in the sense of their happening and references. These of course are also in touch with human history as challenges, meanings and possibilities — which is, when and if there is a questionable meaning or a question referring to meaning. So they have a story, but do not have a history — to the extent that this story of beings devoid of history only becomes — or only can become! — a history of being by history.

In accordance with this reasoning, history exists in fact because there is human death, because there are beings who relate to death — explicitly or implicitly — in and with their being, in and with their mode of being, in a being-like way — for whom death, their own death is not a mere givenness, but — by the way they relate to it — is, in fact, a possibility.

Moreover, it is a possibility which, by its own 'substantive' happening, is dying — precisely by its dying but always beyond it. It is a possibility which derives — and constitutes and structures, articulates, permeates, colours — all of their other modes and possibilities of being. In other words, it opens them up really and truly, structures them open in — and precisely because of — its finitude. And by this, it also lends to these possibilities a well-defined importance, open towards, and from, this finitude, which also leads in fact to the articulation of these modes of being.

If the various modes and regions of human existence — as well as their birth and changes in time — can prove that their very existence, meaning and change is utterly unthinkable and 'absurd' without death, or that death plays a direct or indirect role in their coming into being or changes, then it is also proved that death grounds, originates, and constitutes history in the … essential, ontological sense.


*Dasein is a German word which literally means 'being there' or 'presence'.

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Király V. István is an Associate Professor in the Hungarian Department of Philosophy of the Babes-Bolyai University, Cluj, Romania. This post is an extract selected by the Editors, and slightly adjusted for the purposes of the blog,  from his new book, Death and History.

Terrorists, Secret Services and Private Incomes

Sceptical reflections and conspiracy theories relating to the politics surrounding the killings at Charlie Hebdo and the recent massacre in Saint Denis

 

The shooting at the start of this year of the cartoonists at the Parisian satirical magazine, Charlie Hebdo has all the hallmarks of a CIA inspired brutal incident. November's massacre at Saint Denis looks much more like an attempt to replay, in the center of European social life, similar deadly outrages to those committed in towns and cities across the Middle East. Colin Kirk* teases out the links.

That most of the perpetrators of these atrocities were known to French secret services is now admitted. There are even several indications of what may have been secret service and police assistance to the Charlie Hebdo incident. Help apparently given to the get-away vehicle and discovery of the driving license dropped by the driver recalls some aspects of the slaughter of over 3000 people on the ninth of November 2001 in New York.

Charlie Hebdo was a satirical magazine before it got its current name after an atrocity in Northern France that resulted in over a couple of dozen deaths was reported in Paris as 28 dead in Northern France. It caused little stir compared with mourning for De Gaulle, who died a few days later. Un homme mort à Paris was the bold, black cover of what was thereafter called Charlie Hebdo.

President Charles De Gaulle founded the Fifth Republic in his own image with draconian rights of state surveillance of its citizens that are not dissimilar to those afforded by the American Patriot Act. The State of Emergency currently in force allows police entry without warrant and arrest without charge. There really isn’t any further to go in state legal rights of citizen control, is there?

The CIA is known to have funded media to promote certain political messages in America, Britain and France in particular. On his own account, Stephen Spender, the editor of the British literary magazine Encounter, originally founded by the poet Stephen Spender, resigned  when he discovered the source of much of its 'well-wisher' donations.

Satirical media and those critical of the state were important to western democracies to demonstrate state toleration of dissent in comparison with actions of totalitarian states. Egalité and Fraternité were far less important to politicians than the sacred notion of Liberté.



Heads of State who linked arms with President Hollande to lead the Liberty March in Paris the Sunday following the Charlie Hebdo massacres included central African dictators not to mention Prime Minister Netanyahu. The simultaneous attack on a Jewish supermarket was the reason for his presence and for President Hollande’s ostentatious attendance with him at the central Paris synagogue that evening.

Anti-Semitism is the most serious taboo in France, Semites in this context being Jewish rather than Arabian Semites. Charlie Hebdo itself dismissed a journalist for writing a somewhat anti-Israeli article not long before the murders of some of its staff for drawing cartoons of Mohammad.

The murder of cartoonists horrified people who had adored Charlie Hebdo in its glory days, although it was, until the early January murders, a spent force. Je suis Charlie was displayed in posh shops. The t-shirts didn’t catch on. Here in the Normandy town where I live the Charlie Hebdo March was of elderly and middle aged lefties. And two weeks later it was all forgotten.

'Plantu', the cartoonist of Le Monde, the guy who always has a little mouse observer of the scene, made a film of international cartoonists (Caricaturistes, fantassins de la démocratie) that was released two weeks after the Charlie Hebdo killings. It was a brilliant film with world-wide coverage of cartoonists’ art, except from the sacred monarchies of Britain and Japan for some reason. Brilliant as it was it was not a box office success. Surely after the dreadful incident everyone would want to see it. But that was weeks ago, according to the local film projectionist when asked why such a small attendance in mid-February. Not here the spirited defence of the right to lampoon.

France is not unique in being media led. It certainly is media led. Flavour of the month has become flavour of the week as span of attention has contracted. The same tune is played in all the papers, on all the television channels, in almost all social gatherings; much as elsewhere world-wide.

Only the issues of immigration and Islamic terrorism are here to stay in France, as in the rest of Western Democracies or Civilisations or the International Community or any other feel-good appellation appropriate to smug arms manufacturing countries, which have caused mayhem in the Middle East and are beginning to do so in Africa. The CIA will see these issues retain top billing.

The CIA’s sundry billion dollar budget is not accounted for other than in the most general terms. The last 'almost serious' presentation to the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence was by Professor George Tenet, who himself had long been a member of it. President Clinton made him Director of Central Intelligence when they turned down his earlier choices. President George W. Bush kept him on as 'A charming diplomat liked by all '. Director Tenet admitted that hidden in the accounts somewhere are colossal expenditures on Hollywood films, computer war games, and subsidisation of all branches of the media on a grand scale. His wording was rather less transparent than here.

The question of the appropriate national reaction to atrocity has to take account of the reaction imposed by the media. Under and overlaying that reaction are ancient religious prejudices in a country where political prejudices have the psychic force of religious ones, not least because they tend to be interlinked. Bourgeois Catholic and Protestant Christian beliefs inform and are informed by the mainstream media feed, which is conformist and conservative. Since President Mitterrand’s second term most all politics in France have become conformist and conservative.

President Hollande, in his inaugural Presidential address, appeared to be about to break the mold: his only enemy was capitalism, which he said he was determined to release France from. He was quickly overcome by the same machinery that engulfed President Obama and will no doubt have the same success with Prime Minister Trudeau.  Shortly after, Trudeau informed Washington that Canadian planes were no longer available to the coalition, President Hollande authorized massive revenge air attacks on Islamic State (ISIS) for its agents’ revenge attacks on Saint Denis. When will we ever learn?

France, in the days of Freedom Fries, condemned the war on Iraq and subsequently fêted President Gadhafi, the key proponent, along with President Mandela, of Pan African government. These were when there were right wing governments in power. French oil interests are given as reason for government action whoever claims to lead the country. Right wing leaders have always tended to an independent line to Washington’s. In the Middle East French and Russian interests are at variance to those of the Anglo-Americans.

By and large the popular mood in France remains that of La Marseillaise - perhaps the most jingoistic and racist national anthem in the world. The French Third Republic, which led the world in consumerism, self-indulgence and free thought began with murder in 1870 of 20,000 communards and ended in 1945 with murder of a similar number of collaborators, all in Paris, and all without any legal process.

This is the country of the Dreyfus Affair, fire at the Charity Bazaar, loss of a million soldiers in the First World War, capitulation at the beginning of the second and loss of empire that was never as glorious as was made out. France has been a wounded beast ever since the Battle of Waterloo. Indeed, since Régis Debray published his Loués soient nos seigneurs; un education politique in 1996 there has been very little serious dissenting intellectual voice in France. He gives as explanation:

We are forced to witness the death throes in France of Marxist Socialists; a proud species that emerged in the nineteenth century from the crossing of the Revolution as myth with the Book as instrument but is now a technical anachronism, doomed to disappear in the global ecology of the videosphere.

These days, it seems to me that the Christianist and Christian Zionist control freaks are truly in control by means of the New York Council on Foreign Relations This private body links the State Department, Wall Street and every other power house in America. It was founded with $1000 donations of the 1000 richest Americans to control President Wilson, as honest broker at Versailles that produced the Peace Treaty signed 28 July 1919. He appeared to have achieved nothing for the United States except honest influence but appearances can be deceptive.

Alan Dulles the first Secretary of the Council went on to found the CIA, with brother John Foster Dulles, Secretary of State, the family tinned fruit fortune escalated in value from millions to billions of dollars. In a democracy one looks after one’s own interests…and how!

As someone who loves France for its landscape and folkscape, probably in that order, and as someone able from personal experience to compare it with Britain and the United States, I think there’s little to choose between the three in terms of genuine dissenting analysis of the perilous state humanity is in.

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Colin Kirk writes on health and philosophical issues, poetry and classical history, whilst growing lots of fruit and vegetables in a mediaeval walled garden, to prepare and cook for guests - what has been described as a kind of ' Pythagorean GuestHouse'. A characteristic recent publication is Death of Augustus his Conversion to Christ

How to help the French living under Terror and their own Terreur

Posted by Perig Gouanvic

"Inside a Revolutionary Committee under Terreur (1793-1794)"
Finger pointing and cleansing the public discourse is not new In France

In France, there are very old beliefs, reminiscent of the Terreur era, about religion and minorities that should never be questioned. Multiculturalism is considered a danger. Let's consider, for instance, the fact that the Paris attacks terrorists, who were born an raised in France or Belgium have more in common with the skinheads of the 1980s than with the fundamentalists we see on TV. They drink alcohol, smoke pot, play murder rampage video games, and really have the "no future" belief system of other teenagers 20 years ago. Several observers witted that religion would actually be a pacifying, structuring, influence for these young people. In other words, supporting the strength of religious communities, not just stopping humiliating them, might actually prevent terrorism. At the present moment, the orthodoxy says that we should not limit "free speech" - especially the Charlie* kind - and even that we should celebrate humiliation of religion as the most exquisite mark of French Freedom and Rationality.




A French anti-terrorism judge also lamented that, as the laïcité laws became more rigid, the whole Muslim community felt so alienated they stopped collaborating with the police to denounce potential terrorism suspects. But, again, don't try to convince the authorities and intellectuals that supporting communities, especially the Muslim community, as such (not as a community with socioeconomical problems, but as a community whose customs and religion are positive contributions to France) is a positive step towards the elimination of terrorism. Supporting ethnic, religious or cultural minorities, in France, is called "communautarism". Another word for multiculturalism? Yes, except that it must be said with a grin of disgust. The French feminist sociologist Christine Delphy, who has been widely vilified for her opposition to the French scarf-banning laws, offers the rest of us a definition :

The French definition of communautarism is the fact that people who are discriminated, who are assigned with prejudices, to whom equal chances are denied, etc. these people – who have often been parked in the same neighborhoods – these people hang out and talk to each other. This is communautarism, it's bad, it means that they want to part from the rest of society and, instead of looking for well seen people, people who have privileges, for example, for Blacks and Arabs instead of reaching out for Whites and beg them to come and talk with them, they talk to each other. That would be communautarism.

Yet the fact remains that cultivating friendly and respectful relationships with communities, acknowledging their contribution to civil society, is one of the time-tested ways to prevent ostracism and extremism.​ Yet in france, too often individual members of minorities talking to each other are considered potential enemies of the state. Just imagine how dangerous it would be for the French State if it decided to approach these communities and recognize them as such!

I don't think most people are aware of the mental straightjacket in which the French have placed themselves for the last 30 years. It encompasses more than the issue of ethno-religious groups. Some probably know that the French have some very strange philosophers such as Finkelkraut and BHL**, and some very despicable intellectuals such as Michel Houellebecq, who recently wrote a book describing France becoming an Islamic republic, and became a National obsession in the wake of the Charlie attacks. These public figures pretend to be victims of political correctness, although they occupy most of the media. One thing that might not be as well known is that there also exists, in parallel, a whole swamp of dissident intellectuals that are actively maintained in the margins of the French discourse. In France, they are called the "confusionnists", "cryptofascists", and so on, so forth.

The slippery slope argument and guilt by association have become commonplace in France. In this mixed bag, you will find true far right people, but also anarchists, radical critics of NATO, Israel, etc. As an example, France has been able to outlaw the boycott campaign against Israel, which makes it more repressive of boycott calls than Israel itself. Don't try to protest: if you are not called an anti-Semite you will be called an objective supporter of anti-Semites. There is no way out. These kinds of large-scale paranoid delusions are reminiscent of the arbitrary denunciations of French Revolution's Terreur, described in the above 1797 illustration.


Finally, journalism too is constrained in this straightjacket. There are only a few journalists left who analyze the terror events in depth. They have pointed out in the past the same thing that was pointed out about the Bush administration (foreknowledge, and the presence of elements in the intelligence services who rather preferred terrorist attacks to happen, for instance to impose mass surveillance (of course these theses are not mainstream but they are still more audible in the anglophone world than in France)). But they are marginalized, and quickly become part of this "cryptofascist", "conspiracy theorizing" swamp I was talking about. The result is that compelling elements of inquiry are missed not only in France but abroad. For example, Hicham Hamza, a French journalist, has investigated the local ramifications of a Times of Israel article covering a warning by "officials" to France's "Jewish community", on the morning of the attacks. His resources are thin,  his site is regularly under cyberattacks and of course most would not approach him with a tad pole, because of the usual name-calling.

The same could be said of the Charlie Hebdo attacks - and further in the past --  of Rwanda, about which the BBC aired a documentary that would be swiftly thrown in the holocaust denying, cryptofasisct swamp in France. These elements do circulate in the French blogosphere. But guess what: France now has the right to shut down any website it judges problematic. What might be judged problematic is quite broad:

[It’s] a heterogeneous movement, heavily entangled with the Holocaust denial movement, and which combines admirers of Hugo Chavez and fans of Vladimir Putin. An underworld that consist of former left-wing activists or extreme leftists, former "malcontents", sovereignists, revolutionary nationalists, ultra-nationalists, nostalgists of the Third Reich, anti-vaccination activists, supporters of drawing straws, September 11th revisionists, anti-Zionists, Afrocentricists, survivalists, followers of "alternative medicine", agents of influence of the Iranian regime, Bacharists, Catholic or Islamic fundamentalists. « Conspirationnisme : un état des lieux », par Rudy Reichstadt, Observatoire des radicalités politiques, Fondation Jean-Jaurès, Parti socialiste, 24 février 2015.

(Welcome to the conspiracy theorist movement.)

Even so, of course, it cannot prevent us from thinking and inquiring. The French population really needs a breath of fresh air right now. They need fresh insights, serious journalism, and the freedom to discuss outside of their mentally and legally censored world. I don't have specific suggestions to solve those issues. I just think that the rest of the world should be aware that the French prison of ideas is not always self imposed and that there are many people who just wish they could escape. Many do: I can see that in Quebec.


*The Charlie Hebdo satiricial magazine whose cartoonists were murdered in January.
** Bernard Henri Levy, a self-styled philosophe.

How to help the French living under Terror and their own Terreur

Posted by Perig Gouanvic

"Inside a Revolutionary Committee under Terreur (1793-1794)"
Finger pointing and cleansing the public discourse is not new In France

In France, there are very old beliefs, reminiscent of the Terreur era, about religion and minorities that should never be questioned. Multiculturalism is considered a danger. Let's consider, for instance, the fact that the Paris attacks terrorists, who were born an raised in France or Belgium have more in common with the skinheads of the 1980s than with the fundamentalists we see on TV. They drink alcohol, smoke pot, play murder rampage video games, and really have the "no future" belief system of other teenagers 20 years ago. Several observers witted that religion would actually be a pacifying, structuring, influence for these young people. In other words, supporting the strength of religious communities, not just stopping humiliating them, might actually prevent terrorism. At the present moment, the orthodoxy says that we should not limit "free speech" - especially the Charlie* kind - and even that we should celebrate humiliation of religion as the most exquisite mark of French Freedom and Rationality.


A French anti-terrorism judge also lamented that, as the laïcité laws became more rigid, the whole Muslim community felt so alienated they stopped collaborating with the police to denounce potential terrorism suspects. But, again, don't try to convince the authorities and intellectuals that supporting communities, especially the Muslim community, as such (not as a community with socioeconomical problems, but as a community whose customs and religion are positive contributions to France) is a positive step towards the elimination of terrorism. Supporting ethnic, religious or cultural minorities, in France, is called "communautarism". Another word for multiculturalism? Yes, except that it must be said with a grin of disgust. The French feminist sociologist Christine Delphy, who has been widely vilified for her opposition to the French scarf-banning laws, offers the rest of us a definition :

The French definition of communautarism is the fact that people who are discriminated, who are assigned with prejudices, to whom equal chances are denied, etc. these people – who have often been parked in the same neighborhoods – these people hang out and talk to each other. This is communautarism, it's bad, it means that they want to part from the rest of society and, instead of looking for well seen people, people who have privileges, for example, for Blacks and Arabs instead of reaching out for Whites and beg them to come and talk with them, they talk to each other. That would be communautarism.

Yet the fact remains that cultivating friendly and respectful relationships with communities, acknowledging their contribution to civil society, is one of the time-tested ways to prevent ostracism and extremism.​ Yet in france, too often individual members of minorities talking to each other are considered potential enemies of the state. Just imagine how dangerous it would be for the French State if it decided to approach these communities and recognize them as such!

I don't think most people are aware of the mental straightjacket in which the French have placed themselves for the last 30 years. It encompasses more than the issue of ethno-religious groups. Some probably know that the French have some very strange philosophers such as Finkelkraut and BHL**, and some very despicable intellectuals such as Michel Houellebecq, who recently wrote a book describing France becoming an Islamic republic, and became a National obsession in the wake of the Charlie attacks. These public figures pretend to be victims of political correctness, although they occupy most of the media. One thing that might not be as well known is that there also exists, in parallel, a whole swamp of dissident intellectuals that are actively maintained in the margins of the French discourse. In France, they are called the "confusionnists", "cryptofascists", and so on, so forth.

The slippery slope argument and guilt by association have become commonplace in France. In this mixed bag, you will find true far right people, but also anarchists, radical critics of NATO, Israel, etc. As an example, France has been able to outlaw the boycott campaign against Israel, which makes it more repressive of boycott calls than Israel itself. Don't try to protest: if you are not called an anti-Semite you will be called an objective supporter of anti-Semites. There is no way out. These kinds of large-scale paranoid delusions are reminiscent of the arbitrary denunciations of French Revolution's Terreur, described in the above 1797 illustration.


Finally, journalism too is constrained in this straightjacket. There are only a few journalists left who analyze the terror events in depth. They have pointed out in the past the same thing that was pointed out about the Bush administration (foreknowledge, and the presence of elements in the intelligence services who rather preferred terrorist attacks to happen, for instance to impose mass surveillance (of course these theses are not mainstream but they are still more audible in the anglophone world than in France)). But they are marginalized, and quickly become part of this "cryptofascist", "conspiracy theorizing" swamp I was talking about. The result is that compelling elements of inquiry are missed not only in France but abroad. For example, Hicham Hamza, a French journalist, has investigated the local ramifications of a Times of Israel article covering a warning by "officials" to France's "Jewish community", on the morning of the attacks. His resources are thin,  his site is regularly under cyberattacks and of course most would not approach him with a tad pole, because of the usual name-calling.

The same could be said of the Charlie Hebdo attacks - and further in the past --  of Rwanda, about which the BBC aired a documentary that would be swiftly thrown in the holocaust denying, cryptofasisct swamp in France. These elements do circulate in the French blogosphere. But guess what: France now has the right to shut down any website it judges problematic. What might be judged problematic is quite broad:

[It’s] a heterogeneous movement, heavily entangled with the Holocaust denial movement, and which combines admirers of Hugo Chavez and fans of Vladimir Putin. An underworld that consist of former left-wing activists or extreme leftists, former "malcontents", sovereignists, revolutionary nationalists, ultra-nationalists, nostalgists of the Third Reich, anti-vaccination activists, supporters of drawing straws, September 11th revisionists, anti-Zionists, Afrocentricists, survivalists, followers of "alternative medicine", agents of influence of the Iranian regime, Bacharists, Catholic or Islamic fundamentalists. « Conspirationnisme : un état des lieux », par Rudy Reichstadt, Observatoire des radicalités politiques, Fondation Jean-Jaurès, Parti socialiste, 24 février 2015.

(Welcome to the conspiracy theorist movement.)

Even so, of course, it cannot prevent us from thinking and inquiring. The French population really needs a breath of fresh air right now. They need fresh insights, serious journalism, and the freedom to discuss outside of their mentally and legally censored world. I don't have specific suggestions to solve those issues. I just think that the rest of the world should be aware that the French prison of ideas is not always self imposed and that there are many people who just wish they could escape. Many do: I can see that in Quebec.


*The Charlie Hebdo satiricial magazine whose cartoonists were murdered in January.
** Bernard Henri Levy, a self-styled philosophe.

Six smarter ways to stop the terrorists

It is important to fight the real enemy, not an imaginary one

François Hollande declared the attacks on Paris “an act of war that was waged by a terrorist army, a jihadist army, by Daesh [the Islamic State], against France.” The French president (who was at the soccer game outside which bombs were detonated), has promised that France will wage "pitiless war" against those who conceived and executed the attacks.

Now there's two ways to respond to the Paris attacks - an unthinking violent way, and a smart way. Guess which one is in favour? The influential magazine, Foreign Policy, puts it very clearly, it sees  in the streets of Paris an occasion for the ruthless application of hard power.

France has already had one outrage - in the senseless killing of a group of the Charlie Hebdo cartoonists seated around their conference table. The response to that - essentially an attack on free speech - was a new law prohibiting language that the State interpreted as supportive of terrorism. In the days that followed, several hapless French motorists were given life terms in prison for breaching the new rules.

A 34-year-old man who hit a car while drunk, injuring the other driver and goaded the police when they detained him by praising the acts of the Hebdo killers was sentenced to four years in prison. In the following days, according to Cédric Cabut, a French prosecutor, a good hundred people were investigated or charged with making or posting comments that 'supported terrorism'. Of course, the charges were ridiculous. But the principle of 'free speech' the cartoonists had died for was buried further.

And rather than arrest and carefully dissect the mindset of the terrorists, the government organised a spectacular 'shoot out' with them, which left the media satisfied but the nation deprived of an opportunity for a meaningful investigation into the underlying issues.

And now less that a year on, another and indeed worse tragedy, underlines the failure to learn anything from the first one.

The immediate response was to 'close the borders' - a grand slamming shut of the characteristic French shutters  -  to stop terrorists getting in or out. This involved several hundred thousand police and army. But it was entirely irrelevant to a terrorist cell made up largely of European (three were from Brussels!), indeed, French, nationals.

So let me tentatively and in a spirit of solidarity, offer the French authorities some more 'analytical' six ideas on behalf of the ordinary people of France  - not the government or the security forces - who were the chosen targets as well as the victims in both attacks.

1. There is no way to stop small groups of people killing ordinary citizens. You can protect your elites, but cannot protect the vast majority. Thus the real battle is for minds and hearts.

"A 242-ship Navy will not stop one motivated murderous fanatic from emptying the clip of an AK-47 into the windows of a crowded restaurant."

2. It follows from this that the security services must work under and for the people, not on top of and against them, as has always been the case in France. The most egregious example of what happens when the security services operate in isolation from the people came in the Second World War when the gendarmerie rounded up Jews for transportation to the Nazi death camps.

3. Instead of these 'muscular' reasons - immediately proffered again by the French politicians - there should be an intelligent response, both in terms of social policy and in terms of security. Suspicious individuals, of whom for example returned jihadis are an obvious and entirely manageable group, should be individually watched and their activities curtailed. Policies directed against the 60 million French people - such as closing the borders, searching all vehicles etc etc - are not only an abuse of power but a waste of resources.

4. The French State needs to respect citizens of all religious persuasions. It simply won't do, for example, to  impose pork on Muslims (or Jews, or indeed vegetarians) in school canteens, nor is there any rational argument for opposing the wearing of headscarves. Face-obscuring garments I think are in a different category. There is a tendency to seek the erasure of religion today rather than the freedom of religion. At the same time, radical Islam itself seems to advance by encroaching on the laws of a nation. It expands its ‘territory’, where other religions focus on heart.

5. Part of the State's obligations to all its constituent groups is to ensure equality of opportunity - and to actively combat inequality. It is in the swamps of the sprawling suburbs of the cities, that the Hebdo killers festered. Jihadis are by no means explained as simply frustrated workers, but on the other hand, their twisted senses of grievance are fuelled by the extremes they see in life around them.

6. The militarisation of the police and the frequent use of the army by the French State creates inevitably a response, and the people who suffer most, as we have seen now, are the weakest and most defenceless. It is thus shameful to hear the drum beating and the clamouring for more 'resources' from the security services that have so clearly let down their citizens.

Europe needs to think outside the box, not only about war but about peace.  I sense that it needs fundamentally new ideas, even mindsets, and an openness to new ideas without its obsession to preserve what it has, or idolises. 

But there's one other practical step that can be taken. Stop propping up the anti-democratic regimes in the Gulf States. The ones behind 9/11, and many other atrocities worldwide - and now the new horror in Paris.

Picture Post No. 6: The Croquet Game

'Because things don’t appear to be the known thing; they aren’t that what they seemed to be neither will they become what they might appear to become.'

---

Posted by Martin Cohen and Tessa den Uyl

New Mexico, 1874

This peaceful scene (the whole right part looks almost like a romantic painting) of a game of croquet set in the American South, generated considerable media interest, once it was established that one of the men pictured was none other that the notorious outlaw, Billy the Kid. Billy, it should be explained, was considered to be both ruthless and dashing, and had a dramatic end at an early age involving a shoot out with the sherifs.

Juxtaposed, then, as art critics might say, with this quintessentially genteel act, the game of croquet, redolent of English afternoon teas and cucumber sandwiches, we have a powerful perhaps slightly piquant reminder that even a murderer, a desperado, can have another, gentler  side. (Even if, as anyone who has actually played croquet knows, the game is actually quite cruel and remorseless, as players wreck the hopes of their opponents by blasting their wooden balls into the shrubbery.)

Billy himself, looking just a little bit dangerous?

Death, Philosophically

By Thomas Scarborough

'While I thought that I
was learning how to live,
I have been learning
how to die.'
– Leonardo da Vinci

It would seem to be an all-important philosophical subject. Humans, wrote anthropologist Ernest Becker, contribute all of their waking actions to avoiding it or distracting themselves from the complete thought of it. No surprise, therefore, that philosophers tend to do the same.



The philosophical debate about death, whatever one might believe about it oneself, is most basically defined in terms of whether our present life is related to an afterlife, or not. The operative word is “related”. If indeed it is related to an afterlife, then we may ask on what basis this might be. And if not, then we may ask what the absence of such a relation might imply. With this in mind, we shall explore the subject of death from the point of view of Homo sapiens as a relation-tracing being.

Relation-tracing is what makes us human. We have the special ability to arrange our world, conceptually and materially. In fact, it is our relation-tracing ability which enables us to transcend space and time, to pursue ambitions and aspirations which lie completely beyond the scope of the animal kingdom. Such relation-tracing, further, has everything to do with motivation. Most basically, wherever we find that things are not arranged as we think they ought to be, we are motivated to act.

In thinking about death, it is important to understand that, if our relation-tracing has no reasonable prospect of fulfilment, this may ruin our motivation. Plans and ambitions generally need to have some prospect of completion, or we do not undertake them. And death, it need hardly be noted, may rob us of such fulfilment. While it may not take away every motivation in life, it would seem to take away any ultimate motivation we have. Philosopher Thomas Nagel writes, with this in mind, that we should best not let thoughts about such things enter our heads. 'The trick,' he writes, 'is to keep your eyes on what's in front of you.'

An important fact about death is that its moment is nearly always uncertain, more or less. As much as we might hope that we can control it today, we do not know at what point death will intervene in our lives. Therefore any arrangements which we make for the future (which is relation-tracing) will almost inevitably be cut short by death at some point. We are not going to finish all that we began. In fact, the bigger the ambitions we have, the more likely they are to be cut short by death. To this, philosopher Simon Blackburn comments: 'That might reasonably bother me a great deal.

Unless, that is, it should be possible in some way to continue our present activities after death. Rarely is it assumed that we will, but one does encounter the idea. More often than not, it is assumed that the story will continue in some other kind of way. Assume, for instance, that the real story of our life is not one of hopes and plans, but it is really one of sin and righteousness. What would matter then, for any continuation of the story, is whether I was a person of virtue in this life. Or, by way of contrast, the real story of our life may be one of faith and apostasy – and so on. Thus one may view continuation in a variety of terms.

This view would seem to present us with a respectable answer to the puzzle of death. With such prospects of continuation, we would retain our enthusiasm over the things of this life. Nothing would ever be lost – which is, nothing that really matters. It would not matter to us, therefore, if our hopes or our plans should be cut off in this life. However, there is an obvious difficulty with this view – for philosophers at any rate. There is no evidence – not that we can agree on anyway – as to whether there is continued consciousness after death.

But there may be other ways, in which we might find a continuation. Our plans and ambitions might leave a valuable legacy in this world. We might live on through our children, and their children again. And if we should want to be romantic about it, Edvard Munch (the Norwegian painter) wrote that we live on through the flowers which grow on our grave. This, too, might provide the motivation to carry on with the purposes of life, even though we might not personally survive to see them fulfilled. Of course one assumes – although it might seem presumptuous to some – that our purposes are worthwhile.

But perhaps we should not think too deeply on this option. No legacy lasts forever. No family line is eternal – and some have been short, with brutal ends. In fact, whatever might lie ahead of us, the stars, they say, will one day all go out. Realistically, we should think of our continuation merely for the time being, however long that might be. Yet this would seem to serve as a disincentive for anything that we might do. Let us perform a simple thought experiment. Would we continue to do what we do now if we knew with certainty that an all-powerful police state would frustrate and destroy it? Probably not.

We have a further possibility, however. Perhaps we may lose our own person, even while we are living. We may have no thoughts which are our own. We may lose ourselves in our society, or in our culture – to the extent that we do not exist. Our hopes, our desires, our intentions might not belong to us. The notion of death is, after all, a very personal thing, and would seem to be infinitely accentuated by our own self-awareness and self-importance. Might it not be possible to blend with a stream of consciousness from generations past to generations future? Or perhaps – it might not be culture with which we may blend, but the very universe. 'Forget yourself,' writes Yayoi Kusama. 'Become one with eternity.'

Is this a viable option? Is it potentially possible, not to take death into the heart of our reality? As Homo sapiens, we have said, we transcend space and time with our relation-tracing. We think all the time in terms which transcend our lives. We see beyond our beginnings and our ends. Not only this, but any escape from our individuality would seem to necessitate an exit from our society as we know it. Not only is our society dependent throughout on individualism: my rights and freedoms, my intentions and actions,seen apart from the group. It is so variegated and fragmented that any attempt to reunite it in a fusion of histories and beliefs and purposes seems beyond possible. The individual, say the philosophes, is prior to the group.

And then there is, of course, the option simply of living in tension – in terror, for some, of the end of all our dreams and designs. This is, after all, what many people do with death. 'Men fear it,' said Socrates, as if they knew that it is the greatest of evils.' The fear of death may well be born of a rejection of death – in the sense that we decide to carry on with life with disregard, even defiance, in the face of death. The only way to carry on, we might say, is to forge ahead with all of our plans and ambitions, yet with terror, if we grasp the full reality of it. Unreconciled is how we should die, wrote philosopher Albert Camus.

Or perhaps there is a way – which the ancients could not fully have imagined. We may enter a phase of life, at the end of life, which we call retirement – in which there is nothing more to be done, nothing left to lose. This is the time of life where we deliberately set it all behind us, burn our bridges, and enjoy the afterglow. We have already died the coward's death – so that if we should die tonight, we might only miss a cup of filter coffee in the morning, or a game of golf in the afternoon sun.