Thursday, March 23, 2006

 

Understanding Power The Indispensable Chomsky Edited by Peter R. Mitchell and John Schoeffel Explanatory Footnotes Available At www.understandingpower.co.uk

Understanding Power, which is a collection of transcripts of teach ins, discussions and lecture sessions conducted by Noam Chomsky, an institute professor in the Department of Linguistics and Philosophy of M.I.T., regarded as a vocal critic of America and intellectual on contemporary world issue, reveals how global power works.

Not strictly reading for academia, it caters to individuals interested in US and world affairs, activists and NGOs who will gain a slightly different perspective on how American corporatism, capitalism and politics work.

Leaving no punches, Chomsky provides an alternative US history; such as how the media shapes public opinion through a “Propaganda Model” which Ed Herman and him wrote in “Manufacturing Consent” which was also made into a film. Chomsky also describes the wars which America went into or support through other underground methods in order to impose control on the Third World. He cites examples such as the Vietnam war, the Korean War, the various wars in Indochina, the Nicaragua war, the Iraqi War, the Panama invasion, and how the government supports dictatorships such as Suharto which invades Timor. He also discusses at length the capitalistic structure in US and how it has crushed the worker's union.

While professing no insights on how the civil societies should work specifically towards their aims, his perspective on how concentrated power works prove to be useful for activists and lobby groups working within the limits of contemporary societies.

For the Singaporean reader, certain sections seems to strike a chord.

On page 10, Chapter 1, under the subheading of government secrecy, Chomsky maintains that government classified records are normally not associated with security issues which has often been claimed, but rather to keep the population afraid. He dates the use of secrecy to Herodotus, an ancient Greek historian which describes how the royalty gained power by creating a “cloak of power”.

On page 111, Chapter 4, under the subheading of Perpetuating Brainwashing under Freedom, he elaborates how the educational system is a complex filtering system which “weeds out” people who are too independent and incapable of “submissiveness” as it is “dysfunctional” to the institutions. He uses the example of George Orwell and his book, Animal Farm to describe how education has been used to internalize people in their actions or thought.

Sometimes, he gives some guidelines on what activism is about.

On Page 121, Chapter 4, under the subheading of Escaping Indoctrination, “... the whole tradition of popular control has been exactly that: to keep people isolated, because if you can keep them isolated enough, you can get them to believe anything. But when people get together, all sorts of things are possible”

There is something for everyone in this book, whether you are interested in furthering your thoughts on activism , gaining an alternative perspective on contemporary global affairs or US dominance in world politics.

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Links:
http://www.chomsky.info/
http://www.zmag.org/chomsky/intro.cfm

http://www.zmag.org/Chomsky/


 


Quotes from Bob Dylan Chronicles, Volume 1:


Columbia was one of the first and foremost labels in the country and for me to even get my foot in the door was serious. For starters, folk music was junky, second rate and only released on small labels.

But John was an extraordinary man. He didn't make schoolboy records or record schoolboy artists. He had vision and foresight, had seen and heard me, felt my thoughts and had faith in the things to come. He explained that he sae me as someone in the long line of tradition, the tradition of blues, jazz and folk and not as some newfangled wunderkind on the cutting edge.

I was there to find singers, the ones I'd heard on record – Dave Van Ronk, Peggy Seeger, Ed McCurdy, Brownie McGhee and Sonny Terry, Josh White, The New Lost City Ramblers, Reverend Gary Davis and a bunch of others – most of all to find Woody Guthrie. New York City, the city that would come to shape my destiny. Modern Gomorrah. I was at the initiation point of square one but in no sense a neophyte.

I'd heard Van Ronk back in the Midwest on records and thought he was pretty great, copied some of his recording phrase for phrase. He was passionate and stinging, sang like a soldier of fortune and sounded like he paid for the price. Van Ronk could howl and whispher, turn blues into ballads and ballads into blues. I loved his style.

Folk songs were the way I explored the universe, they were pictures and the pictures were worth more than anything I could say.

If you told the truth, that was all well and good and if you told the un-truth, well, that's still well and good. Folk songs had taught me that.

In the past, I'd never been that keen on books and writers but I liked stories. Stories by Edgar Rice Burroughs, who wrote about mythical Africa – Luke Short, the mythical Western tales – Jules Verne – H.G. Wells. Those were my favourites but that was before I discovered the folksingers. The folksingers could sing songs like an entire book, but only in a few verses. It's hard to describe what makes a character or an event folk song worthy. It probably has something to do with a character being fair and honest and open. Bravery in an abstract way.

I liked the French writer Balzac a lot, read Luck and Leather, and Le Cousin Pons. Balzac was pretty funny. His philosophy is pretty simple, says basically that pure materialism is a recipe for madness. The only true knowledge for Balzac seems to be in superstition. Everything is subject to analysis. Horde your energy. That's the secret of life... Balzac is hilarious.

You want to write songs that are bigger than life. You want to say something about strange things that have happened to you, strange things you have seen. You have to know and understand something and then go past the vernacular... you can see similar patterns in the ways that you were thinking about things. I never looked at songs as either “good” or “bad”, only different kinds of good ones.

Picaso had fractured the art world and cracked it wide open. He was revolutionary. I wanted to be like that.

Of all the versions of my recorded songs, the Johnny Rivers one was my favourite... When I listened to Johnny's version of “Positively 4th Street”, I liked his version better than mine. I listened to it over and over again. Most of the cover versions of my songs seemed to take them out of left field somewhere, but River's version had the mandate down – the attitude and melodic sense to complete anad surpass even the feeling that I had put it down.

Little things foreshadow what's coming, but you may not recognize them. But then something immediate happens and you're in another world , you jump into the unknown, have an instinctive understanding of it – you're set free. You don't need to ask questions and you already know the score. It seems like when that happens, it happenes fast, like magic, but it's not really like that.

A folk song has over a thousand faces and you must meet them all if you want to play this stuff. A folk song might vary in meaning and it might not appear the same from one moment to the next. It depends on who's playing and who's listening.

Reality was not so simple and everybody had their own take on it. Jean Genet's play The Balcony was being performed in The Village and it portrayed the world as a mammoth cathouse where chaos rule the universe, where man is alone and abandoned in a meaningless cosmos. The play had a strong sense of focus, and from what I'd seen about the Civil War period, it could have been written one hundred years ago. The songs I'd write would be like that, too. They wouldn't conform to modern ideas.

Woody always asked me to bring him cigarettes, Raleigh cigarettes. Usually I'd play him his songs during the afternoon. Sometimes, he'd ask for specific ones - “Rangers Command,” “Do Re Me,” “Dust Bowl Blues,” “Pretty Boy Flyod,” “Tom Joad,” the song he'd written after seeing the movie The Grapes of Wrath. I knew all those songs and many more. Woody was not celebrated at this place, and it was a strange environment to meet anybody, least of all the true voice of the American spirit.

As far as I knew, I didn't belong to anybody then or now. I had a wife and children whom I loved more than anything else in the world. I was trying to provide for them, keep out of trouble, but the big bugs in the press kept promoting me as the mouthpiece, spokesperson, or even the conscience of a generation. That was funny. All I'd ever done was sing songs that were dead straight and expressed powerful new realities. I had very little in common with and knew even less about a generation that I was supposed to be the voice of .

 


Homophobia
Byrne Fone
Picador USA

“Indeed, in modern Western society, where racism is disapproved, anti-Semitism is condemned, and misogyny has lost its legitimacy, homophobia remain, perhaps the last acceptable prejudice.”

What makes “Homophobia” an interesting if not informative read for academics and the average man is the way Byrne charts the history of the “fear and loathing of homosexuals” through the ages from the ancient Greeks to the Romans, Renaissance Europe, and Northern America.

In his book, Byrne reveals and uncovers myths such as the central belief that Greece was often seen “as a utopia in which homosexual love flourished without blame or censure”. In his book, he purports that since much of ancient Greek text was lost, much of the arguments on same sex love could only be seen to reflect the ideas of an educated few elites, namely Plato, Xenophon, Aristophanes and Aristotle. He argued that Greeks would not be able to understand the idea of homosexuality as they were more preoccupied with proper sexual and social conduct between lovers, of which is detailed in Plato's dialogue in the “Symposium”. For the Greeks, the ideal male is heroic, romantic, popular, and dutiful to wife, family and parents. “He practises self-control and avoids extreme behaviour in his public and personal life.” “The Greeks attach more importance to the sexual instinct than to the sexual object. What most concerned the Greek male was not whether the object desire was male or female, but what place that object occupied in social and sexual hierachy””Adult males were expected to take the active – that is – penetrative – role in sex, because as adult males they had superior status in society.”

In another instance, he revealed that though the Romans did not prohibit same sex activity, like the Greeks, it was still accepted only within certain social conventions. Nevertheless there were certain differences. Male romans of wealth were allowed to have sex with their male slaves, commonly known as concubinus whereas the Greeks can have same sex relations with their freeborn youths.

He also brings forth discussion within the Bible. In the Old Testament, the story of Sodom, which has been commonly accepted as an indication of anti-homosexual behaviour, he explains how the original translated word “yadha” which is now accepted as “to have sex with” could have meant “to know” and that it was meant as a cautionary tale of inhospitablity rather than sodomy.

Without simplifying the issue, he details the devastating effects and persecution of “sodomites” which intensified with the rise of organized church that was quick to blame it for the “downfall of empires” and occurance of “natural calamities”.

In chapter Ten, “A Continental Epidemic”, the author reveals how Florence was reputed to be so infected with sodomy that the Germans called a sodomite a “Florenzer” and to sodomize someone was called “florenzen”. The black plague in Florence which reduced the population from more than 125 thousand in 1348 to fewer than 40,000 squarely blamed it on the sodomites. In Spain, as early as 1265, King Alfonso prescribed the death penalty for the offence. In Barcelona, Valencia and Saragossa, over 16 hundred persons were prosecuted for sodomy and bestiality between 1540 and 1700. About 20 percent were actually executed. In France, French King Henri III who was assasinated by a Dominican monk, and celebrated by a Catholic God of a King who refused to exterminate the French Protestants, was surrounded by young men known as mignons, suggesting sexual relationships.

In the next chapter, “England's Abominable Vice”, the author devotes an entire chapter to how “buggery” laws were enacted first by Henry VIII, ironically used to expel the Roman Church, that was “prone to such accusations”. The purpose was for the king to gain wealth and power in the country and proclaim himself as the head of the new church of England. The sodomy act would however be challenged and removed with other successions until it was brought back again by Elizabeth I and remained for two hundred and sixty five years in English laws. The death penalty for sodomy would however be only repealed in 1828.

Such persecutions existed till the 18th and early 19th century. The arrests for sodomy in the Dutch republic peaked between 1730 and 1811 when the country was felt to be in “grave danger” - “its commerce declining, its populace enervated by foreign luxuries, its religion unheeded”. “Sentences for attempted sodomy ranged from two years of solitary confinement, to imprisonment for life, to execution. In Amsterdam, sodomites were killed by garroting, after which their faces were scorched. Some were drowned, held under water in a barrel placed upon a platform, as the populace watched their struggles...” These were just some of the harsh measures meted out to those accused. The book also listed an excerpt of the records of 60 men those tried and sentenced between the 1730 and 1731. The wave of persecution in Europe would however also end during the century. Sodomy would be decriminalized in 1791 in France followed by successive European nations influenced by the Enlightenment. In 1810, the Napoleonic Code eliminated all penalties for homosexual practice throughout Napolean's European empire. By the end of the 19th century, homosexual acts would be decriminalised in Belgium, Italy, Luxembourg, Monaco, Portugal, Romania, Spain and The Netherlands.

The author also focused on homophobia in America describing how the colonialists persecuted certain Indian tribes who engaged in sodomy. He also detailed how writers and activists fight the battles in their own ways in the late 20th century. Some reports such as Sex Variants: A Study of Homosexual Patterns (1941) by Dr George Henry and Dr Alfred C. Kinsey's Sexual Behaviour in the Human Male (1948) tried to combat the prejudices against homosexuality while between 1945 and 1950, nearly two dozen works of fiction with frank and sympathetic homosexual themes were published among them, Gore Vidal's The City and The Pillar (1948) and Christopher Ishherwood's Berlin Stories (1946). It would however be the famous Stonewall Riots on June 27, 1969 which would propel the story further into mainstream consciousness.

Various events have occurred since 1999 when the book was published, Nevertheless, in the last chapter, the writer described with accuracy the kind of homophobia still prevalent in institutions and public awareness: such as the Defense of Marriage Acts, the “don't ask don't tell” policy in the military, and the murder of Matthew Shephard; despite progress made by the activist movements of LGBT organizations. As he rightly points out, homophobia remains the last acceptable prejudice.

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