To call Labour 'Stalinists' for proposing regulation is beyond absurd

Mark Steel in The Independent

Some people might react to the energy companies raising prices another 8 per cent by saying, “It shouldn’t be allowed.” If you’re one of those people, you should be aware that you’re like Stalin. Because after Ed Miliband’s speech in which he said he would freeze energy prices for a while, he was attacked for being like Stalin by several Conservative politicians and newspapers. So if your neighbour says today, “Ooh those blooming gas people, we shouldn’t let them to put their ruddy prices up again”, tell her, “You murdering bastard. I know your sort, first you starved millions of peasants to death, then you signed a pact with Hitler. Well I’m not afraid to stand up to you, even if you are likely to incarcerate me in a Siberian prison, Mrs Whittaker.”

This is the history that will soon be accepted, that communism collapsed when millions of people demanded that electricity prices were doubled. Heroic citizens stood on the crumbling Berlin Wall and proclaimed, “At last we are free to vote and listen to rock music and charge thousands of pounds for turning the radiators on.”

This is a common response now to any proposal that big business is suspicious of. The suggestion that landowners may be required to use some of their land for housebuilding, to “expand towns such as Stevenage”, was compared by the Institute of Directors to “Joseph Stalin’s notorious seizure of land from prosperous Russians.” For those not familiar with the methods of Stalin, he sent his army to shoot any farmers who didn’t hand over all their land to the state. So if you own a garden in Stevenage you’re in trouble.

Tanks will roll past Luton and on to Welwyn Garden City, rampaging soldiers ignoring the cries of children as they transfer the waste ground behind Stevenage Asda to Hertfordshire County Council, cruelly laughing as they build two-bedroom affordable flats while the people of Bletchley can only wonder if they’ll be next.

Even more worrying, opinion polls show that 75 per cent of people support renationalising the railways, which even Labour aren’t proposing, so three-quarters of the population is WORSE than Stalin. This means that if Stalin was alive in Britain now, his speeches would start, “You lot want too much nationalisation, that’s your trouble.”

So we should write letters to First Great Western Trains such as, “Not only does this country have the most expensive rail network in Europe, but last week my train to Cardiff was delayed by two hours and I had to stand all the way. Congratulations, this proves we’re free. Please please don’t ever give in to those interfering Stalinists who’d take away your right to rob us blind and leave us with deep vein thrombosis.”

Similarly, Scottish Southern Energy’s managing director Will Morris explained his company’s latest 8 per cent price rise by saying, “Our aim is to keep prices low.” But that would clearly be immoral and Stalinist so be thankful he’s prepared to make a stand for freedom and put them up. Along with our payments we should send a tip, and a note saying, “Thank you Mr Morris sir, if I may address you sir, for putting up the prices an’ all, for us simple folk don’t want the burden of what to do wiv spare money and only go and waste it on crack like what happens wiv communism.”

Even when the European Union issued a directive that bankers’ bonuses should be kept to just double their salary, David Cameron went berserk about “interference”. Any attempt to regulate the behaviour of big business in any way is seen as an outrageous intrusion, against the laws of nature and sinful.

The Bible will be rewritten soon, to read that “Jesus took the seven loaves and two fish, and gave them to the starving crowd of thousands who all ate and were satisfied. And the Chief Executive of the Galilee Haddock Corporation did smite Jesus for artificially increasing supply, thereby interfering with the price as determined by the free market. And Jesus learned to refrain from miracles for the Institute of Directors did say they were Stalinist.”

For 30 years the trend has been towards allowing the biggest companies and banks to do whatever they like, even after the system crashed. To be fair this does create a wonderfully free society, as long as you’re on the board of one of those companies or banks. Obviously the section of society that isn’t on the board of a multinational corporation or a bank hasn’t done so well, but there will always be some minority with something to complain about.

After the crash of 1929, Western governments took the view that the banks should be regulated a bit, and these rules remained until they were ripped up in the 1980s. But this time the banks, businesses and individuals that fuelled the crash have carried on exactly as before.

Now Labour has suggested a handful of modifications to this system, and they’re called Stalinists. So we should allow the companies to behave as they like, until sections of the population sit freezing, unable to travel, their 40-year-old sons and daughters huddled with them as Stevenage remains unexpanded, maybe keeping a diary of their existence in the icy conditions that goes, “We’re all very grateful. At least it’s not like it would be under Stalin.”

Communism, welfare state – what's the next big idea?

Any attempt to challenge the elite needs courage, inspiration and a truly ground breaking proposal. Here are two to set us off

• 
• • George Monbiot
  • The Guardian, Monday 1 April 2013 20.30 BST

Maria Bgor and her daughter wait for emergency food supplies at the Mosaic church food bank in Hillfields, Coventry. Photograph: Christopher Thomond for the Guardian

Most of the world's people are decent, honest and kind. Most of those who dominate us are inveterate bastards. This is the conclusion I've reached after many years of journalism. Writing on Black Monday, as the British government's full-spectrum attack on the lives of the poor commences, the thought keeps returning to me.

"With a most inhuman cruelty, they who have put out the people's eyes reproach them of their blindness." This government, whose mismanagement of the economy has forced so many into the arms of the state, blames the sick, the unemployed, the underpaid for a crisis caused by the feral elite – and punishes them accordingly. Most of those affected by the bedroom tax, introduced today, are disabled. Thousands will be driven from their homes, and many more pushed towards destitution. Relief for the poor from council tax will be clipped; legal aid for civil cases cut off. Yet at the end of this week those making more than £150,000 a year will have their income tax cut.

Two days later, benefit payments for the poorest will be cut in real terms. A week after that, thousands of families who live in towns and boroughs where property prices are high will be forced out of their homes by the total benefits cap. What we are witnessing is raw economic warfare by the rich against the poor.

So the age-old question comes knocking: why does the decent majority allow itself to be governed by a brutal, antisocial minority? Part of the reason is that the minority controls the story. As John Harris explained in the Guardian, large numbers (including many who depend on it) have been persuaded that most recipients of social security are feckless, profligate fraudsters. Despite everything that has happened over the last two years, Rupert Murdoch, Lord Rothermere and the other media barons still seem to be running the country. Their relentless propaganda, using exceptional and shocking cases to characterise an entire social class, remains highly effective. Divide and rule is as potent as it has ever been.

But I've come to believe that there's also something deeper at work: that most of the world's people live with the legacy of slavery. Even in a nominal democracy like the United Kingdom, most people were more or less in bondage until little more than a century ago: on near-starvation wages, fired at will, threatened with extreme punishment if they dissented, forbidden to vote. They lived in great and justified fear of authority, and the fear has persisted, passed down across the five or six generations that separate us and reinforced now by renewed insecurity, snowballing inequality, partisan policing.

Any movement that seeks to challenge the power of the elite needs to ask itself what it takes to shake people out of this state. And the answer seems inescapable – hope. Those who govern on behalf of billionaires are threatened only when confronted by the power of a transformative idea.

A century and more ago the idea was communism. Even in the form in which Marx and Engels presented it, its problems are evident: the simplistic binary system into which they tried to force society; their brutal dismissal of anyone who did not fit this dialectic ("social scum", "bribed tool[s] of reactionary intrigue"); their reinvention of Plato's guardian-philosophers, who would "represent and take care of the future" of the proletariat; the unprecedented power over human life they granted to the state; the millenarian myth of a final resolution to the struggle for power. But their promise of another world electrified people who had, until then, believed that there was no alternative.

Seventy years ago, in the UK, the transformative idea was freedom from want and fear through the creation of a social security system and a National Health Service. It swept a Labour government to power which was able, despite far tougher economic circumstances than today's, to create a fair society from a smashed, divided nation. This is the achievement which – through a series of sudden, spectacular and unmandated strikes – Cameron's government is now demolishing.

So where do we look for the idea that can make hope more powerful than fear? Not to the Labour party. If Ed Miliband cannot bring himself even to oppose a bill which retrospectively denies compensation to cheated jobseekers, the most we can expect from him is a low-alcohol conservatism of the kind that doused all aspiration under Tony Blair.

Last week I ran a small online poll, asking people to nominate inspiring, transfiguring ideas. The two mentioned most often were land value taxation and a basic income. As it happens, both are championed by the Green party. On this and other measures, its policies are by a long way more progressive than Labour's.

I discussed land value taxation in a recent column. A basic income (also known as a citizen's income) gives everyone, rich and poor, without means-testing or conditions, a guaranteed sum every week. It replaces some but not all benefits (there would, for instance, be extra payments for pensioners and people with disabilities). It banishes the fear and insecurity now stalking the poorer half of the population. Economic survival becomes a right, not a privilege.

A basic income removes the stigma of benefits while also breaking open what politicians call the welfare trap. Because taking work would not reduce your entitlement to social security, there would be no disincentive to find a job – all the money you earn is extra income. The poor are not forced by desperation into the arms of unscrupulous employers: people will work if conditions are good and pay fair, but will refuse to be treated like mules. It redresses the wild imbalance in bargaining power that the current system exacerbates. It could do more than any other measure to dislodge the emotional legacy of serfdom. It would be financed by progressive taxation – in fact it meshes well with land value tax.

These ideas require courage: the courage to confront the government, the opposition, the plutocrats, the media, the suspicions of a wary electorate. But without proposals on this scale, progressive politics is dead. They strike that precious spark, so seldom kindled in this age of triangulation and timidity – the spark of hope.

The short, sharp life of 'Chinese century'

By Nick Ottens

If there is to be an Asian century, it won't be China's alone. While it still has hundreds of millions of people living in poverty, the country is losing its cheap labor advantage to East Asian competitors while more industrialized nations in the region are far more receptive to international trade.

The Chinese economy is expected to overtake the United States as the world's largest in sheer size by the middle of this decade but the ruling Communist Party has ample reason to be worried about perpetuating China's impressive growth rates for another generation.

As China's middle class expands in the urban east, it is expecting more than just growth but in the western hinterland, a lack of development and, perhaps even more frustrating to the people there, a lack of political accountability fuels unrest and discontent. The party will be increasingly hard pressed to meet the aspirations of both these peoples. Economic and political openness, as desired in the coastal provinces, would weaken the state's grip on industrial development, which could exacerbate the existing imbalance between cities and countryside.

Chinese labor is already becoming too expensive for some manufacturers who are taking their business to countries as Indonesia and Vietnam while Malaysia, Thailand and Taiwan are more attractive for technology companies that require an educated workforce and a business climate that isn't too burdened by regulatory restrictions and corruption.

Labor laws and tax regimes in the rest of South and Southeast Asia are generally more flexible. These countries welcome international trade and investment whereas China seeks to protect its "infant industries" from free and fair competition on the global market. This policy enables the ruling class in Beijing to build high-speed railways across China but the cost, which is less clear, could be hugely detrimental to its economy in the future.

Foreign investors in China have to cope with laws and regulations that are inconsistently enforced - sometimes arbitrary. The Chinese legal system cannot guarantee the sanctity of contracts, which is vital to a market economy. Capital account transactions are tightly regulated.

This is a system that thrives on cronyism where businesses that are connected with local and state officials prosper and companies that aren't could see their investment go up in smoke when a magistrate determines that factory wages should increase by a third, overnight.

China does attract huge amounts of foreign direct investment. In fact, it takes in every month what India assumes in a year. Yet China grows at a rate just two percentage points faster than India. And even there, corruption is endemic.

At its most recent congress in March of this year, the Communist Party affirmed the need to improve "balanced growth", which should translate into increased welfare spending, including subsidies for farmers and the urban underclass. Western stereotypes notwithstanding, the Chinese state is not sitting on an infinite amount of cash however. It cannot simultaneously build a proper welfare state and allow the subsidizing of companies, especially in real estate, to continue unabated. If it wants to expand social programs and thus prevent civil unrest, it has to challenge vested interest with allies in the party.

With major changes in political leadership expected next year, it may not be until 2013 before a comprehensive social agenda is implemented. That could be two years wasted while necessary economic reforms to further open up China to world markets are delayed.

There is another, less immediate concern that could put a stop to this Chinese century before the world has a chance to recognize that it's living in one.

By the middle of the 21st century, 400 million Chinese will have retired. That's more than America's total projected population by that time. India, which is set to overtake China as the world's most populous nation by 2030, is expected to have nearly 400 million people more in 2050 than China.

How is China going to pay for all these old people? China doesn't have an expansive public pension system, which means that many Chinese in their prime, often without siblings because of their government's "one child" policy, will have to provide not only for their parents but, as life expectancy rises, their grandparents as well. Naturally, wages will have to rise to accommodate this unprecedented level of dependency which can only happen if Chinese labor becomes much more productive and skilled - fast.

The party has to manage this while not only dealing with internal pressure to democratize; it is also expected to finance American and European deficit spending when these continents blame China for its "colonialist" scramble for resources, including water, in Africa and Central Asia - resources it desperately needs to continue to grow; to invest in its future industrial base and to alleviate hundreds of millions of people out of poverty.

If despite this all, China somehow ends as tomorrow's superpower, "owning" the 21st century, that will be quite a feat.

Nick Ottens is an historian from the Netherlands and editor of the transatlantic news and commentary website Atlantic Sentinel. He is also a contributing analyst with the geopolitical and strategic consultancy firm Wikistrat.

'The Press Decides Which Revolutions To Report'- Arundhati Roy

The celebrated dissenter on the 10th anniversary of 9/11, mass uprisings in the Arab world, the Anna Hazare movement, her old comrades-in arm like Medha Patkar and Prashant Bhushan, Maoism, writing and much else.

Rajesh Joshi

 

Rajesh Joshi: The 10th anniversary of September the 11th attacks on the US is upon us. What do you think has changed in the world, or hasn’t changed, in these years?
Arundhati Roy: Plenty has changed. The numbers of wars that are being fought has been expanded and the rhetoric that allows those wars —that are essentially a battle for resources —is now disguised in the rhetoric of the war on terror, and has become more acceptable in some ways and yet more transparent in other ways.

Perhaps the most dangerous thing that has happened is that increasingly we are seeing that these wars can’t be won. They can be initiated. But they can’t be won. Like the war in Vietnam was not won. The war in Iraq has not been won. The war in Afghanistan has not been won. The war on Libya will not be won. There is this initial pattern where you claim victory and then these occupation forces get mired in a kind of slow war of attrition. That’s also partially responsible for the global economy slowly coming apart.

The other difficulty is that the more the weapons of conventional warfare become nuclear —and all this kind of air bombing and so on —the more it becomes clear to people who are fighting occupations that you can’t win a conventional war. So, ironically the accumulation of conventional weaponry is leading to different kinds of terrorism and suicide bombings and a sort of desperate resort to extremely violent resistances. Violent, ideologically as well, because you have to really motivate people to want to go and blow themselves up. So, [it's a ] very, very dangerous time.

You have been very critical of the war on terror, especially the US policy. Would you have preferred a Saddam Hussain or a Taliban regime in Afghanistan?

Well, it does look as if the Taliban regime is going to return in Afghanistan in some form or shape. And obviously, people like Saddam Hussain were first created and put in place and supported and funded and armed by the US. This process is something that a country that seeks hegemonic power can put in the despots it wants, topple them when it wants and then get mired in these kinds of battles where eventually it’s having to desperately scramble to get some foothold of a some face-saving measure in, say, Afghanistan. So, eventually, you are not ever going to get rid of despots or dictators or Taliban. The Taliban was also created by them. That kind of ideology was almost handed out as a kind of weaponry by them at the time they were fighting the Soviets which nobody really mentions. They just talk about Pakistan having had those camps but those camps were actually funded by the CIA and by Saudi Arabia, which is now one of the greatest despotic regimes wholly embraced by the US.

How do you look at the mass uprisings across the Arab world? Do you think it’s a positive development?

Obviously there are very positive things about it but the jury is still out on them, in terms of what happened in Egypt for instance. Hosni Mubarak was in power for 40 years. We knew that three months before the uprising in Tahrir Square, the papers were reporting that he was on his death bed. Then this uprising happened. And then you had such enthusiastic reporting by the western press about the uprising — the press decides which revolutions to report and which not to report and therein lies politics. You had similar huge uprisings, let’s say in Kashmir which was more or less blacked out and yet you had this being reported very enthusiastically but at the end of it you had headlines which said: 'Egypt Free, Army Takes Over'.

And today there are ten thousand people being tried in military tribunals. There is probably the emergence of the Muslim Brotherhood happening now; it’s a negotiated emergence. I would say that it would be a successful uprising and a real democracy if they manage to completely stop the Egyptian role in the siege of Gaza. I don’t know if that’s going to happen.

There are lots of manipulations going on. In India, as well as in these places, there is also the use of people’s power. People are angry. People are genuinely furious. People who have lived under these despotic regimes are desperate. But just moving the big blocks a little bit allows an eruption to take place. Is that eruption really going to end up in a genuine democracy or is that anger going to be channelised into something else?... We are still waiting.

Aren’t you happy that dictatorships are falling like a pack of cards?

I would be happy if they were not going to be replaced by military regimes. I would be happy if I was sure that whatever takes its place isn’t going to be another manipulation... I would be happy. But at this moment in Egypt, people are being picked and tried in military tribunals just the way they were under Hosni Mubarak. Of course, I am happy but why should you be celebrating something unless what you are celebrating is the right thing?

You have been supporting people’s movements everywhere but you are very critical of the Anna Hazare movement. Common people participated in the movement, after all.

I don’t support all people’s movements. I certainly didn’t support the Ram Janambhumi movement which was one of the largest people's movement in this country – the movement to topple the Babri masjid and build a temple there. I think all kinds of fascism could describe itself as people’s movements and I don’t support fascism. I am not an indiscriminate supporter of people’s movements. In this particular case, I think it’s very important to read what was going on and what was going on was not simple. We are at a stage where huge corruption scandals mostly involving mining corporations and telecom companies and so on have been exposed for their links to the government, links to the media, for looting billions of dollars and there is no accountability, neither from the government nor from the corporations. And there is a huge amount of popular anger against them.

The reason I am very suspicious about what is happening here is that I feel that this anger from the top to the bottom is channelised into a people’s movement and that anger which was a very amorphous anger was being used to push through this very specific piece of legislation which I don’t think anybody— including a lot of the people who were pushing it— has read. And if you read that bill, it is not only legally ludicrous but the people who call themselves Team Anna themselves said that people were angry and we provided them the medicine. The Team Anna are themselves saying that the people didn’t read the bill but they said ‘give us some medicine for the sickness’, but they didn’t read what it said on the label of the medicine bottle. Very, very few people have read it. And that medicine is far more dangerous than the illness itself. That’s why I am worried. Then it became this moral movement which started to use the old symbols of religious fascism that all of us have seen, that started to exclude the minorities.

Some of your comrades-in arm like Medha Patkar and Prashant Bhushan are part of that movement. How can you say that the movement has streaks of fascism? Do you doubt Medha Patkar and Prashant Bhushan’s integrity or is it their understanding?

It’s not a question of doubting their integrity. I doubt their (Prashant Bhushan and Medha Patkar’s) understanding for sure on the Lokpal bill — I am not doubting their integrity. Neither of them has brought in the politics they spent their life time doing; they left it outside at the doorstep. I just want somebody to have a proper conversation about that bill that they were insisting be passed without discussion through Parliament by the 30th of August. If you look at the bill, it’s so terrifying. Firstly, it’s so un-worked out. It asks for ten people of integrity —and proper class —to be running a bureaucracy that would contain about 30,000 officers. There is no comment on where those officers are coming from, who they are; there is no idea of what you mean by corruption in a society like ours. Sure there is corruption — from poor people having to bribe government officers to get their ration bills to corporates paying and getting rivers and mountains to mine for free.
But corruption is a value system, which has to be pinned to a legal system. And I keep saying that there are huge numbers, millions of Indians, who live untitled and unidentified outside this legal system. Supposing you live in Delhi. You have huge number of slums, illegal hawkers, squatters' settlements. Suddenly some middle class community can say, ‘I live in Jorbagh there is a slum there, it’s illegal. The politicians are keeping them there because they get votes; the municipalities are allowing them because they get bribes. Get them out of here. These are illegal people’. What’s the meaning of corruption has not been debated. Forget the fact that they are asking for a bill where these ten people are at the top and there is an additional bureaucracy of 30,000 who will be given a huge amount of money by the government and they have the right to prosecute, to sentence, to tap phones, to dismiss, to suspend and to enquire into the activities of everybody from the PM to the judiciary downwards. They are just setting up a parallel hierarchy! What’s happening is that the middle class which has benefited from these policies of privatisation and globalisation has become impatient with democracy.

If globalisation and privatisation is not the answer, according to you, then what is?

I think that the only way that we can begin to move to a place where people have some rights is by learning how to become an opposition which demands accountability. What the Jan Lokpal bill does is to set up another Super Cop. I am saying that the beginning of moving towards a society that we would like to live in is to force accountability. And that is only when people begin to stand by those who are fighting for their rights and demand that something happens. Not when they look away and say: that’s not my problem that people are being killed in Dantewada. I am a middle-class person and I believe that I should benefit. If we live in a democracy and you believe that everybody does have certain minimum rights, then you’ve got to be able to open your eyes to it. That’s what I try and do in whatever way I could by standing by those resistance movements that are questioning everything from big dams to mining to all these things—who are refusing to give up their lands, who are standing up to the biggest powers, whether it’s the army or the corporations and all of that.

You are a fierce critic of the Manmohan Singh government’s economic policies but India’s development has been praised by President Barack Obama of the US and British Prime Minister David Cameron. Many would say you are using your celebrity status as a Booker Prize winner author to criticise the path that India has taken after the collapse of the Soviet Union?

Booker Prize and all that is meaningless. There are plenty of famous people who can use their fame to sell shoes or coca cola. Nobody can use their fame meaninglessly. For me, I am a writer; I am somebody who sees the world in a particular way. And I keep saying that these words like ‘India’s development’ have become meaningless because who is India? When you say 'India' are you talking about the few hundred billionaires or are you talking about the 830 million people who live on less than 20 rupees a day? Surely, some people in India have developed very fast beyond their wildest dreams but they have done that by standing on the shoulders and the bodies of large number of other Indians. I keep saying when you have ten people in a room and one person become a billionaire and two people are doing really well and the rest of seven are starving and someone says, 'Hey, there are seven people are starving in this room', and you say, 'Why are you being negative? People have developed!' It doesn’t matter who I am, what I won, what I didn’t win. If I am saying something that is relevant it will have a place in this world. If I am being stupid, if I am being negative, if I am being meaningless, I won’t have a place in this world. So, there is no point in personalising things because it doesn’t really help.

Is Maoism the answer?
Of course it’s not the answer. However, as I keep saying what I believe is the answer is the diversity of resistance and the Maoists are at one end — the very militant end of the diversity. And they fight deep in the forests which are being filled with paramilitary and police and surely in that tribal village where no television camera ever reaches, where no Gandhian hunger strike is ever going to make the news, there is only the possibility of an armed resistance. Outside, that armed resistance will be crushed in a minute. The Maoists have not had any success outside. You need to look at other kind of resistance outside. The resistance movements often confuse the necessity for tactical differences with ideological differences. But the fact is that one of the things I think is wonderful in India is that there is a huge bandwidth of resistance movements who are being very effective and who are insisting on their rights and who are winning some battles. When you come back to this business of corruption, I would like to say that you have hundreds of secret memorandums of understanding (MoUs) between the governments and private corporations, which will result in a kind of social engineering across central India — forests, mountains, rivers — all of it given away to corporations. Millions of people are fighting for their rights. Nobody stood there and said can you declare those MoUs.

What does the state do? It has to defend itself.

Implicit in that statement is that the state is the enemy of the people and it has to defend itself. And if you see what’s happening in the world, increasingly that’s true that states and their armies are turning upon what traditionally were their own peoples. Wars are not always being fought between countries; they are also being fought by the state against their own people — a kind of vertical colonisation as opposed to a horizontal one.

Do you love to mess with power?

I do believe that the only way to keep power accountable is to always question it, to always mess with it in some way or the other.

Some people would say it’s very convenient of you to criticise things from a safe corner. What do you think your role is going to be in the future? Are you going to be a writer or have you every thought of joining politics?

It’s not a serious question, I am afraid. What I do is politics. What I write is politics. Traditionally this is what writers have done. So to separate commentary from writing, from politics, minimises politics, minimises writing, and minimises commentary. This has historically been the role of writers. I could surely go and wear a khadi sari and sit in the forest and become a martyr but that’s not what I plan to do. I have no problem being who I am, writing what I have because I am not playing for sainthood here. I am not playing for popularity. I am not asking to be hailed as a leader of the masses. I am a writer who has a particular set of views and I use whatever skills I have, I deploy whatever skills I have, whatever means I have to write about them, not always on my own behalf but from the heart of the resistance.

In an interview to Financial Times you once said, and I quote: “I feel like I’ve done a very interesting journey over the last 11 years, but now I’m ready to do something different. Two years ago, I told myself, ‘no more, enough of this’, and I was working on some fiction. Then this huge uprising happened in Kashmir.” Some would say your activism is just another career move — I’ve done this and now let’s move on and do something more exciting?

It’s not about more exciting things, it’s about writing again. If I am a writer and I have written in a certain way, then suddenly you feel like, for example The God of Small Things is a very political book but then there became another phase of very urgent and immediate politics and it became non-fiction. But I think fiction is a deeper, more subversive kind of politics. Like if you read The God of Small Things, dealing with issues of caste for example. It’s not about the government or the state versus the people; it’s about the absolute malaise within your own society. Fiction is a much better way of dealing with it. You can’t allow yourself to just be bogged down doing the same thing, thinking the same ways or using the same techniques of writing. It’s always a challenge. And it can never be that I will stop being a political person. Of course, I think that everybody, even a fashion model, is political. It’s the kind of politics you choose is what you choose to do. There is no escaping that. This idea that politics is only going out and standing for elections or addressing rallies is a very superficial thing.

---

Rajesh Joshi works with BBC Hindi Service where this interview was first broadcast in Hindi

The Seduction Of Indifference, Again And Again And Again

By Gaither Stewart

20 December, 2007
Countercurrents.org

(Rome) Yesterday I ran into a poem I had read as a student in Germany written by the Luthern Pastor, Martin Niemöller, who broke with the Nazis in 1933 and became a symbol of the German resistance. His words prompted me to look more closely at the complex subject of indifference he speaks of. Niemöller wrote the following at war’s end in 1945:

First they came for the Communists,
and I didn’t speak up,
because I wasn’t a Communist.
Then they came for the Jews,
and I didn’t speak up,
because I wasn’t a Jew.
Then they came for the Catholics,
and I didn’t speak up,
because I was a Protestant.
Then they came for me,
and by that time there was no one
left to speak up for me.

In my mind the subject of indifference is not a closed end affair. You don’t even need a password to enter this site. Most certainly I cannot relegate the matter to “oh, that, well, we’re all indifferent to many things in life.” If so it would imply “indifference to indifference,” which in my mind is located still another ring deeper in the Dantesque Inferno. In that respect; I hope that here, as Baudrillard writes, words will prove to be carriers of ideas and not the reverse.

Life Is Oh So Beautiful

Recently one-third of Italian TV viewers watched a 100-minute tour de force of a literary-political interpretation of Dante’s Divine Comedy delivered by comic philosopher Roberto Benigni (Remember the film, Life Is Beautiful!). At the point Benigni referred to the “indifference” of Dante’s characters in his Inferno, I ran for pen and paper.

Making notes on indifference, I have continued thinking about that grassroots activist in Asheville, North Carolina who warns that voting is just not enough to change things. As a growing number of others like her, she feels frustrated because of the widespread indifference to Power’s deviations. I have in mind the polls showing that over half of Americans oppose the war in Iraq, oppose how it is conducted and its costs to America, and some are even horrified by the slaughter of Iraqi people.

The other side of the coin is that, amazingly, nearly half the public either favors the war against Iraq or they just don’t care one way or the other. Those many millions of people display an inexplicable indifference to the reality of the suffering, indifference to war’s uselessness and to its criminal-terroristic nature.

Some writers have long dealt with that one aspect of indifference, the indifference that the strong feel toward the weak. In the end most concord that such indifference is frivolity and knavery and cowardice.

Categories of Indifference

It’s true that there are many kinds of indifference and many things to which we can be indifferent. Animals can be loving and attentive one moment and totally indifferent the next. Just watch a cat, after a few caresses it marches away triumphantly. Nature in general is indifferent. Medieval Europe was incredibly indifferent to the great Alpine chain—the magnificent geographical mountain divide of the continent. Especially the Papal State was indifferent to nature in general and to its former territories around Rome in particular.

Researching the word indifference I re-encountered Albert Camus’ notation of the universe’s “benign indifference” toward creation. Also my former professor Nobel poet Czeslaw Milosz was fascinated by “the contradiction between man’s longing for good and the cold universe absolutely indifferent to any values. “If we put aside our humanity,” Milosz writes, “we realize that the world is neither good nor bad—it just is.”

The spark of human life in us differentiates us from nature, which, though neither good nor evil, doesn’t always seem neutral. But in human beings the battle between good and evil is eternal. From that point of view humanity is also in battle with nature, against its apparent meaninglessness. We humans instead search for meaning.

Therefore man is an alien creature in the universe because he cannot be genuinely indifferent to what is good and what is bad.

In that sense, the indifference of reasonable people to war seems inconceivable. In the same western generation that was obsessed enough with the Vietnam War to help bring it to an end, the indifference to the Middle East wars today seems impossible.

Back To Earth

This year Italy is marking the 100th anniversary of the birth of Alberto Moravia, a major novelist of the 20th century. Born to a family of the Rome bourgeoisie in 1907, Moravia published his most famous novel, The Age of Indifference, at age 22. That story shows the apathy of Rome bourgeois society during the same time that Fascism was taking root in the nation.

“All these people,” Moravia’s protagonist, Michele, thinks, “have something to live for, whereas I have nothing. If I don’t walk, I sit; it makes no difference.” Michele knows he should act but never succeeds in shaking off his inertia. All actions and situations are alike for him. He is indifferent to emerging Fascism as were the masses of Germans during the rise of Nazism.

Here one might shrug and say indifference today is so general that it is not worth reflection. What difference does it make? Nonetheless here are some examples.

Indifference means “no difference.” On a basic human level, the indifference of one person to the other in a dwindling love affair is emblematic of the terrible impact of indifference in any field at all. As French chansonnier Serge Gainsbourg sang of his love for Brigit Bardot: What does the weather matter, What matters the wind! Better your absence than your indifference. Or Gilbert Becaud’s words: Indifference kills with small blows.

For Indifference, as Martin Niemöller and most people of the murderous 20th century know, is the destroyer of whole societies. I have excerpted some lines from a speech on Indifference by Holocaust survivor and Nobel Laureate, Elie Wiesel, delivered in the White House on April 12, 1999:

A strange and unnatural state in which the lines blur between … good and evil. Is there a philosophy of indifference conceivable? Can one possibly view indifference as a virtue?

Of course, indifference can be tempting—more than that, seductive. It is so much easier to look away from victims….In a way, to be indifferent to suffering is what makes the human being inhuman.

Indifference, after all, is more dangerous than anger and hatred. Anger can at times be creative. One writes a great poem, a great symphony, one does something special for the sake of humanity because one is angry at the injustice that one witnesses. But indifference is never creative.…Indifference is not a response. Indifference is not a beginning; it is an end. And, therefore, indifference is always the friend of the enemy, for it benefits the aggressor.

What Is the Alternative?

For me the opposite of indifference is involvement. It’s the search that leads to fulfillment, the extraordinary event we wait and hope for that interrupts the everyday flow of time. It is a kind of transcendence that points toward answers to questions like, ‘What am I as an individual?’ ‘What is my life all about?’ ‘Do I count?’

The answers to such questions however are forever misty and cloudy. We are aware—just barely aware—of that something hovering in the beyond, which at some rare times, for brief moments, seems within reach. It is something like longing for an impossible Utopia that we aspire to, most certainly the conviction that we are not neutral in the world.

However, that devil and prison of Indifference—and the indifference to indifference—excludes a priori the possibility of those high moments of existence that make life worth living.

Three Steps Back

So what, all these quotes and reflections about indifference! What does it mean today? What does it mean to me personally? Am I involved and committed just because I am aware of indifference? Does it even matter?

At this point I want to retrace my steps toward the heart of the subject at hand: indifference toward evil.

Late in life, the great Argentinean writer, Jorge Borges, denied he wrote for either an elite or the masses; he wrote for a circle of friends. This claim is familiar but suspect. His thesis that “there is a kind of lazy pleasure in useless and out-of-the-way erudition” is dangerous banter. Nobel Prize winner this year, Doris Lessing, said in an interview last October that she wrote for herself, for what interested her at the time. But her case is different from that of Borges, for she always dealt in ideas—anti-war for example.

Indifference toward evil! In 2002, I “covered” the G-8 conference in Genoa, a phony show, which ended with the murder of a real little man dressed in black. An Italian, from the suburbs of this port city, he called himself an Anarchist. The Big 8 labeled him an enemy of globalization, of the free market, an enemy of progress. While representatives of the rich world were barricaded inside the safe zone and served sumptuous meals by hordes of servants, they exchanged expensive gifts that were/are slaps in the face of the poverty they had gathered to combat.

Leaders of the world’s eight richest nations nonchalantly discussed poverty in Africa, issued casual sentences about the economies they do not control, imparted lessons they themselves do not observe, and finally budgeted the indifferent sum of 1.3 billion dollars to combat epidemics in Africa, a few pennies for each African dying of AIDS, a sum reportedly equal to one-eighth of the annual cost of only the tests for the US space shield project.

As inhuman as it is, indifference to suffering is bearable as long as it is invisible. We all experience that each day watching newscasts. Indifference to war is something else; were it not for the enthusiastic way humans participate in war we could call it inhuman.

Most people know of someone whose loved one died in US foreign wars for absurd reasons. But then time passes. Wounds heal. Indifference takes over.

Ignorant and deaf indifference is bad enough. But today, in Europe and the United States where information abounds, we have to call conscious indifference to war and injustice, and also its brother “indifference to indifference,” criminal and evil.

Here is an example of active indifference: the Chávez referendum in Venezuela. A former journalist acquaintance in Rome when he was the correspondent for the Wall Street Journal, today an editor and columnist of the New York Times, in his articles about Chávez on the eve of the referendum, was remarkably indifferent to what is really happening in Venezuela. A talented but overly ambitious journalist, he, like the newspaper he works for, is aware of but indifferent to the reasons that Venezuela and most of Latin America are striving for independence from the USA, whether its struggle is called “Socialism of the 21st Century” as in Venezuela, or “Agrarian Revolution” as in Bolivia.

Indifference! It doesn’t matter! Indifference appears in all places and at all times about every subject that has no direct, personal bearing on one’s own little life.

Indifference about global warming.
Indifference about national health care.
Indifference about poverty and the abyss between rich and poor.
Indifference to the value of labor and the working man.
Indifference about a society based on euphemisms and slogans.
Indifference about public corruption and crime.
Indifference about violence against women.
Indifference about arms controls.
Indifference about the government defrauding its citizens.
Indifference about the indifference granting the government license to defraud citizens.
Indifference about capital punishment.
Indifference about bombing civilians from the stratosphere.
Indifference about facts.
Indifference about a free press.
Indifference about indifference.

I made this list, sat back and examined it again and again, added one more indifference, deleted another, and turned a few words until I came to realize I had omitted the principle indifference: the indifference to evil itself that creates the things about which we are indifferent.

This rings complex but in fact it is not.

And I realized too that indifference is in fact often active indifference. It encourages indifference in others.

In a speech in 1908 Eugene Debs, the great Socialist trade unionist-activist, said more or less what Pastor Niemöller said in his poem a half century later: the indifferent ones do not see others. Theirs is a life of emptiness, devoid of any future. Debs recalled that thousands of years ago the question was asked: ''Am I my brother's keeper?''

Our society refuses to answer that question.