The biblical foundation for a celibate priesthood is flimsy, and now cracks are beginning to show in the Catholic church's ban on marriage for those in holy orders

The troubled history of priests, sex and the church may be at a turning point

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• • Sophia Deboick
  • guardian.co.uk, Friday 16 September 2011 19.00 BST
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In a new autobiography published this week, Father Edward Daly, former bishop of Derry and the handkerchief-waving priest of the famous Bloody Sunday photograph, has called for an end to the celibacy rule for Catholic priests. Pointing to the severe decline in numbers of serving clergy (while the worldwide Catholic population has almost doubled since 1970, the number of priests has remained virtually static), Daly believes crisis could be averted by allowing priests to marry. Many see clerical celibacy as fundamental to the church, but in fact it is a religious tradition rather than a strict scriptural prohibition, and it has been far from universally observed throughout its history.

The biblical foundation for a celibate priesthood is flimsy. While Saint Paul recommended celibacy, he thought anyone who cannot "contain themselves" should marry, "for it is better to marry than to be burnt" (1 Corinthians 7:9). Further, the Gospels spoke of apostles who were married, with no hindrance to their ministry. But the model of Christ's own celibacy (emulated by the priest acting "in persona Christi") marked it out as a higher calling, and ultimately an unmarried priest would be more committed to his religious duties, his celibacy giving him the "power to attend upon the Lord, without impediment" (1 Corinthians 7:35).

The first official attempt to impose celibacy on those in holy orders was made at the Council of Elvira (c 306), and efforts to enforce it followed throughout the middle ages. But how it played out in practice varied enormously, and stories of married clergy and fornicating popes abounded. Pope John XII was accused by a 10th-century synod of having "fornicated with the widow of Rainier, with Stephana his father's concubine, with the widow Anna, and with his own niece, and he made the sacred palace into a whorehouse".

Unperturbed by such examples, the First and Second Lateran Councils in the 12th century decreed that clerical marriages were invalid, but Thomas Aquinas asserted a century later that this was not the decree of God, but merely church law, reversible by papal or conciliar authority. Indeed, in the middle ages the prohibition of marriage had less to do with spiritual concerns than the conservation of church property. Married priests meant legitimate heirs and the loss of church assets through inheritances – something that couldn't be countenanced.

The 16th-century Council of Trent confirmed the celibacy rule (just as the Church of England was abolishing it), but it was only in the 20th century that priestly celibacy, along with all matters of sexual morality, became an obsession for the church hierarchy. Following the reforms of the Second Vatican Council, Pope Paul VI issued the encyclical Sacerdotalis Caelibatus, reaffirming the fundamental value of celibacy as allowing "a closer and more complete relationship with the mystery of Christ and the Church for the good of all mankind".

Yet the encyclical also permitted the possibility of married clergy from other Christian traditions being ordained as Catholic priests, and cracks began to show in the edifice. Although Pope Benedict rejected the idea of married priests in 2006, he has since taken up Paul VI's baton by allowing defecting married Anglican ministers to enter the church.

The absolute prohibition on married Catholic priests has gone, and with suggestions (of debatable credibility) of a link between the church's child abuse crisis and celibacy, last year's plaintive call for the abolition of the rule from Italian women romantically involved with priests, and the proliferation of groups advocating a married priesthood, a new chapter in the troubled history of priests, sex and the church may be opening.

•  © 2011 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved.

Why the Pope must face justice at The Hague

We survivors of clergy sex abuse have brought our evidence to the ICC so that the Vatican might finally account for its cover-up

• 
• • Barbara Blaine
  • guardian.co.uk, Saturday 17 September 2011 14.00 BST
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Members of Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests (Snap), including Barbara Blaine (third from right), at the International Criminal Court (ICC) in The Hague, 13 September 2011. Photograph: Rob Keeris/AP

When it comes to holding the Catholic Church accountable for sexual abuse of children by members of the clergy, all roads lead to Rome. That is what my organisation, Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests (Snap), concluded after years of seeking justice in other venues and being turned away.

On 13 September, we travelled to the Hague to file an 84-page complaint and over 20,000 pages of supporting materials with the International Criminal Court, documenting our charge that the Pope and Vatican officials have tolerated and enabled the systematic and widespread concealing of rape and child sex crimes throughout the world.

Holding childhood photographs that tell a wrenching story of innocence and faith betrayed, and joined by our attorneys from the New York-based Center for Constitutional Rights, we stood up and demanded the justice that has so long been denied. The New York Times called the filing "the most substantive effort yet to hold the pope and the Vatican accountable in an international court for sexual abuse by priests".

No doubt, many people of faith are shocked that we would accuse a world church leader of crimes against humanity – a man considered by many to be infallible. But the man who is infallible must also be accountable.

By the Vatican's own account, "only" about 1.5-5% of Catholic clergy have been involved in sexual violence against children. With a reported 410,593 priests worldwide as of 2009, that means the number of offending priests would range from 6,158 to 20,529. Considering that many offenders have multiple victims, the number of children at risk is likely in the tens, or even hundreds, of thousands.

We believe the thousands of pages of evidence we filed this week will substantiate our allegations that an operation has been put in place not only to hide the widespread sexual violence by priests in all parts of the world, but also to obstruct investigation, remove suspects out of criminal jurisdictions and do everything possible to silence victims, discredit whistleblowers, intimidate witnesses, stonewall prosecutors and keep a tighter lid than ever on clergy sex crimes and cover-ups. The result of this systematic effort is that, despite a flood of well-publicised cases, many thousands of children remain vulnerable to abuse.

While many pedophile priests have been suspended in recent years, few have been criminally charged and even fewer defrocked. Worse, no one who ignored, concealed or enabled these predators has suffered any consequences. At the head of this hierarchy of denial and secrecy is the Pope, who has served as an enabler of these men. We believe the Vatican must face investigation to determine whether these incidences have been knowingly concealed and clergymen deliberately protected when their crimes have come to light.

I know this story well, because I was sexually abused by a parish priest, from my time in junior high school until graduation. Because of the shame and trauma, several years passed before I was able to tell anyone. By that time, it was too late to file criminal charges. Church officials refused to restrict that priest's access to children or take action against him for several more years, despite other victims coming forward.

Indeed, powerful factors prevent all but the most assertive, healthy and lucky victims from seeking justice. Many others succumb to drugs, anorexia, depression or suicide when the pain of innocence betrayed becomes too much to bear. A recent investigation in Australia revealed a case in which 26 among the numerous victims of a particular priest had committed suicide.

For the safety of children and the prevention of yet more heinous wrongdoing, the International Criminal Court may be the only real hope. What other institution could possibly bring prosecutorial scrutiny to bear on the largest private institution on the planet?

Our journey for justice has been a long one, and it's not over yet. But we know where it must end: with justice at The Hague.

Learning From China: Why The Existing Economic Model Will Fail

By Lester Brown

16 September, 2011
Earth Policy Institute

For almost as long as I can remember we have been saying that the United States, with 5 percent of the world’s people, consumes a third or more of the earth’s resources. That was true. It is no longer true. Today China consumes more basic resources than the United States does.

Among the key commodities such as grain, meat, oil, coal, and steel, China consumes more of each than the United States except for oil, where the United States still has a wide (though narrowing) lead. China uses a quarter more grain than the United States. Its meat consumption is double that of the United States. It uses three times as much coal and four times as much steel.

These numbers reflect national consumption, but what would happen if consumption per person in China were to catch up to that of the United States? If we assume conservatively that China’s economy slows from the 11 percent annual growth of recent years to 8 percent, then in 2035 income per person in China will reach the current U.S. level.

If we also assume that the Chinese will spend their income more or less as Americans do today, then we can translate their income into consumption. If, for example, each person in China consumes paper at the current American rate, then in 2035 China’s 1.38 billion people will use four fifths as much paper as is produced worldwide today. There go the world’s forests.

If Chinese grain consumption per person in 2035 were to equal the current U.S. level, China would need 1.5 billion tons of grain, nearly 70 percent of the 2.2 billion tons the world’s farmers now harvest each year.

If we assume that in 2035 there are three cars for every four people in China, as there now are in the United States, China will have 1.1 billion cars. The entire world currently has just over one billion. To provide the needed roads, highways, and parking lots, China would have to pave an area equivalent to more than two thirds the land it currently has in rice.

By 2035 China would need 85 million barrels of oil a day. The world is currently producing 86 million barrels a day and may never produce much more than that. There go the world’s oil reserves.

What China is teaching us is that the western economic model—the fossil-fuel-based, automobile-centered, throwaway economy—will not work for the world. If it does not work for China, it will not work for India, which by 2035 is projected to have an even larger population than China. Nor will it work for the other 3 billion people in developing countries who are also dreaming the “American dream.” And in an increasingly integrated global economy, where we all depend on the same grain, oil, and steel, the western economic model will no longer work for the industrial countries either.

The overriding challenge for our generation is to build a new economy—one that is powered largely by renewable sources of energy, that has a much more diversified transport system, and that reuses and recycles everything. We have the technology to build this new economy, an economy that will allow us to sustain economic progress. But can we muster the political will to translate this potential into reality?

Lester Brown is an United States environmentalist, founder of the Worldwatch Institute, and founder and president of the Earth Policy Institute, a nonprofit research organization based in Washington, D.C. BBC Radio commentator Peter Day calls him "one of the great pioneer environmentalists."

Copyright © 2011 Earth Policy Institute

The DEVELOPMENT Deception

By Brendan P O'Reilly

Speaking Freely is an Asia Times Online feature that allows guest writers to have their say. Please click here if you are interested in contributing.

"At present, we are stealing the future, selling it in the present, and calling it GDP."
- Paul Hawken

There is a dangerous lie that permeates the media, government and general discourse of nearly every single nation on Earth.

That lie is the Development Deception. This myth is based on three concepts. First is the distinction between the developed nations (North America, Western Europe, Australia, New Zealand, South Korea, and Japan), and the Developing Nations (everywhere else).

The second idea is that "developing" countries can become "developed" through improved education, stable governance, and opening their markets to trade and investment. The third leg of this Deception is that such a transformation is not only possible, but also desirable.

The metric used to distinguish "developed" nations from "developing" nations is gross domestic product (GDP) per capita. Poor nations aspire to reach a certain economic level to become so-called "developed nations". The Myth of Development has four fundamental inter-related flaws. The first one is the problem of the Gray Area.

The gap between "developed" and "developing" countries is presented as a simple black-and-white dichotomy. I often hear from my Chinese students say, "China is a developing country. America is a developed country. We want to become a developed country."

Fair enough. But which country has high-speed trains? Which country has a higher unemployment rate? How can the government of a "developed" country owe trillions of dollars to a "developing" country?

Obviously many nations in Asia and Africa, and Latin America have very serious structural problems, which could be alleviated through stable government and educational reform. Very poor countries should aspire to create social and economic institutions that allow their people to live with dignity. Nevertheless the rise of new economic powers such as Brazil, India, and (especially) China, coupled with the massive financial difficulties faced by Europe, Japan, and the United States, call into question the utility of the developed/developing dichotomy.

The second problem with the Myth of Development is philosophical. The very term "development" implies a steady linear progression from poverty and ignorance to wealth, literacy, and general happiness. This viewpoint is Western in origin, and alien to many of the world’s cultures.

The idea of the inexorable march of progress has roots in the Judeo-Christian worldview of time (God creates the world, the world exists, the world ends), and has been largely co-opted by modern science. We are told to believe that progress is inevitable, that the quality of life for each new generation will be better than the life of their parents. Never mind the fact that humanity has created weapons that empower a handful of political leaders to destroy civilization itself.

Never mind obesity is now challenging starvation as a cause of premature death. Of course, the advances made in the last century in curing diseases, increasing literacy rates, and fighting hunger must be lauded. However, to blindly value "progress" above all else threatens our very survival as a species.

The third problem with the Development Deception stems from definitions. As mentioned previously, GDP per capita is the standard the yardstick for measuring development. This assessment ignores serious social difficulties faced by the so-called developed nations.

For example, a third of the adult population of the United States of America, the archetype "developed" nation, suffer from obesity, with another third classified as overweight. The United States of America also has the dubious distinction of having the highest incarceration rate of any nation on Earth.

Meanwhile Japan, the paragon of "development" in Asia, has one of the lowest fertility rates in the world, leading to a rapidly aging population. This trend, unless dramatically reversed, will exacerbate Japan’s social, economic, and political crisis, as more retirees put enormous strain on the working population. Japan’s population is set to shrink by roughly thirty million over the next four decades (Citation here). Are these worthy goals for the so-called "developing" nations to aspire to?

The fourth and final problem with the Myth of Development is a terminal defect. Citizens in countries such as China and India are encouraged to join the middle class and live "Western" lifestyles. As benign as it sounds, this goal is completely impossible. Simply put, there are not enough natural resources on this planet to sustain such an increase in consumption.

According to World Bank figures, in 2008 Americans, on average, used 87,216 kilowatt hours of electricity. The average Chinese used 18,608 kilowatt hours, and the average Indian 6,280. All three countries depend primarily on coal for electricity. To bridge the gap between these levels of resource utilization of would entail environmental catastrophe and global shortages on an unimaginable scale. Coal is just one example - one could also look at oil, lumber, or meat consumption. Indeed, many of the fundamental challenges facing the world economic system - such as rising food and fuel costs - are directly related to economic development.

The Development Deception is perpetuated by international corporations and national governments. Resource mining, production, and overconsumption are the basis for the current globalized economic system. Human beings are classified as "consumers", because overconsumption entails short-term profit.

Rich nations leverage their "developed" status to influence poorer nations, while the governments of these poor nations use the promise of development to maintain political power. None of this propaganda changes the fact that it is grossly misleading for the nations who over-consume the Earth’s finite resources to be considered developed.

Advocates of The Development Myth may point to science as a savior. We are constantly told that new inventions will allow for more efficient use of resources, or allow for sustainable consumption patterns. This argument provides only false hope. We cannot speculate our way out of environmental pollution and a collapsing natural resource base. Unless and until new "green" technology actually exists and is utilized, science is actually exacerbating ecological disaster.

Recently, the Human Development Index (HDI) has been promoted as a more "human-centered" alternative to GDP as a metric for measuring development. HDI uses data on life expectancy, literacy, number of years in school, and GDP to determine the development status of a country. Although this presents a useful alterative, the continued use of GDP as a basis for measuring development is HDI’s fundamental flaw. Unsustainable consumption of finite resources cannot reasonably be classified as "development".

What is the viable alternative to the Development Myth? Bhutan has advocated Gross National Happiness as an alternative goal to increasing GDP per capita. Citizens are asked about their Subjective Well Being in order to establish Gross National Happiness. Obviously this measurement is difficult to define and numerate, and ignores problems such as illiteracy and extreme poverty. However, it does point in the right direction.

Development needs to be redefined in order to account for human physical and emotional well-being as well as environmental sustainability. Otherwise it is only a lie, and a dangerous one at that. To seek economic advance at the expense of human interests and future generations is a recipe for global disaster.

When extreme wealth is challenging extreme poverty as the bane of human existence, a revolution of values is needed. We as a species must advance values of conservation, and teach people to live within the means of the productive capacity of our planet. No longer can the scramble for nonrenewable resources be viewed as a zero-sum game. Human beings need to develop solidarity on a global scale. Citizens of wealthy nations must learn to live with less.

The most important development is that of the individual. Social and spiritual harmony is the antidote to the Development Deception, for all traditions encourage compassion and warn of the destructive power of greed. To quote LaoZi (as translated by D C Lau):

There is no crime greater than having too many desires;
There is no disaster greater than not being content;
There is no misfortune greater than being covetous.
Hence in being content, one will always have enough.

Brendan P O'Reilly is a China-based writer and educator from Seattle. He is author of The Transcendent Harmony.

'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.

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

Was Isaac Newton A 9/11 Conspiracy Theorist?

By Robin Davis

11 September, 2011
Countercurrents.org

Strange isn't it? To be labelled a 9/11 "conspiracy theorist" you don't even
need to have a theory. It's enough to express any doubt about the official
version of events.

Stranger still, those who consider themselves too wise to entertain such
"nonsense" forget that they, too, are conspiracy theorists. They either
believe the official version, which by definition is a conspiracy theory, or
they have no view. But having no view doesn't let them off the hook. The 911
events had to be caused by a conspiracy of some sort. So, just to
acknowledge that 911 happened is to be a conspiracy theorist.

So, what's really going on here? Could it be that those dismissive of
alternative views are so short on knowledge and the inclination to acquire
it that they have nothing to contribute but ridicule? Could it be that they
simply don't care? Could it be that alternative views are so scary that it's
safer to stifle debate? Could it be simply easier to go with the flow than
to risk the discomfort inflicted upon those who doubt the status quo?

My doubt and discomfort began as it happened, ten years ago while I watched
the towers come down on TV.

I'm not a physicist, but I can do simple maths. Simple maths tells me that a
building can't fall at close to free fall speed unless all but the tiniest
resistance posed by the structure below has first been removed.

I wonder if they called Isaac Newton a conspiracy theorist when that apple
hit him on the noggin and he started babbling about something called
gravity? Probably.

Ask yourself: Could the aircraft impacts and jet fuel fires really render
the structures so feeble that they offered little more resistance than air?
If common sense doesn't provide the answer, do a little research and you'll
find that it couldn't. And if it couldn't, the whole official narrative
falls apart as quickly as the buildings.

If, since 2001, you haven't watched a video of the three towers (yes, three)
coming down, do so again. Just watch. Really watch. Use your stopwatch if
you like. Do some simple maths (the acceleration of gravity is 9.81 metres
per second/per second).

Consider the structures - marvels of architectural engineering. Picture the
thousands of tonnes of steel beams and girders that held those buildings up
for decades. Watch those thousands of tonnes of steel beams and girders
offering next to no resistance as the buildings come down, defying the laws
of physics if the official explanation is to be believed - not once, but
three times in one day.

There's more, much more, and the implications are horrific. Just how
horrific will be all too obvious when future generations marvel at how
easily and eagerly so many were deceived.

Some of us would rather not wait for the bright light of hindsight. Call us
"conspiracy theorists" or "thruthers" or nut cases if you like, but know
that all we want is the truth, because without truth there can be no
justice.

Anything less dishonours the people killed on that day and the millions
killed, maimed, demonised, kidnapped, imprisoned, tortured, widowed,
orphaned, traumatised, and made homeless in the wars raging still in their
name and ours.

Robin Davis lives in Victoria, Australia. He is a freelance writer and
graphic designer. He can be contacted at: robindavis@hotkey.net.au

Graduates in Science, Engineering and Maths are more versatile than others

The versatility of science graduates should be celebrated not criticised. What's the problem if science graduates end up in alternative careers? If anything, we need more of it.

Imran Khan guardian.co.uk, Friday 9 September 2011 13.33 BST larger

'If you study engineering, physics or chemistry as your first degree, you're almost 90% likely to be in either full-time employment or further study three years later.' Photograph: Martin Shields/Alamy

The Guardian reported that "only about half of all science graduates find work that requires their scientific knowledge" – a fact that "casts doubt on the government's drive to encourage teenagers to study [science]". Yet year on year, the Confederation of British Industry (CBI) reports that its members are finding it difficult to get enough staff with science, technology, engineering and maths (Stem) skills. This year more than two in five employers had trouble. The Science Council has just released a report showing that a fifth our workforce is employed in a scientific role. So what's going on?



The concerns come from the paper, Is there a shortage of scientists? A re-analysis of supply for the UK. Its author suggests there is no shortage of scientists and engineers in the UK, despite what the CBI says and contrary to the messages of successive governments. However, both the paper and the Guardian's reporting are based on some pretty odd assumptions. While it's true that about half of Stem graduates end up in careers outside science, that's not an argument to say that too many young people are studying science.



For a start, a Stem degree is a fantastic preparation for a huge range of careers. We should celebrate that fact, not mourn it. Statistics show (table 7) that if you study engineering, physics or chemistry as your first degree, you're almost 90% likely to be in either full-time employment or further study three years later. Those figures compare with 73% for the creative arts, and 78% for languages and historical or philosophical studies. The average across all graduates is just above 80%. That's because a Stem degree gives you a huge range of skills that are in demand in wide variety of jobs, not just in science. Isn't that a good thing? We could "fix" it by training science graduates to be useless in the wider economy, but at the moment we have a higher education sector that is successfully producing young people equipped with highly transferable skills.



Moreover, what's the problem if Stem graduates end up in careers outside science and engineering? If anything, we need more of it. We're crying out for more scientists and engineers to teach in schools, get into politics and the civil service, and become involved in running companies. The scientific method should be more embedded in society, not less. In the UK, we have only two MPs with a PhD. China, the most populous country and fastest growing economy in the world, has been led for the past eight years by two men who are professional engineers. I'm not saying it's better – but wouldn't it be nice to have some diversity among all the lawyers and economists?



We don't worry when law graduates don't become lawyers, history graduates don't become historians, or English graduates don't become … er … So why be concerned about the versatile engineer or chemist? True, we do need more people going into research and development if the UK is to successfully rebalance its economy. To achieve that we must increase investment in research and skills so that employers have a reason to come here, and in turn attract our science and engineering graduates into science and engineering jobs. Yes, each company and lab leader will be looking for the very best staff, so with the best will in the world you're not going to get every single engineering graduate into their first-choice profession. But how is that different from any other type of graduate?



It's a shame that the Guardian's report focused on the misleading figures when there was much else of value in the study. We see that there is far too much social and gender stratification in the people who actually go into science and engineering. This is unacceptable, given the benefits that those subjects give to their students. It's 2011, and yet we still only have around one in 10 female graduate engineers. You're more likely to take science and maths A-levels if you attend an independent school, with pupils at state-maintained schools over-represented in arts and humanities subjects instead.



There is emphatically still a need for more scientists and engineers – and, far from retrenching support for science and engineering, we should be concentrating on making these subjects more accessible to everyone.