At 22:32 local time tonight, NRK announced that a man had been arrested and charged with both the bombing in central Oslo and the shootings at Utøya. He is a 32 year old Norwegian man and does not seem to be a Muslim.

As tends to happen in situations like this, people jumped to the (in this case mistaken) conclusion that Islamists were behind the atrocity. The news media quickly find some “analyst” or other, usually strong on opinion and links with government and weak on intellectual substance. Those who are knowledgeable, understanding and argue responsibly are rarely heard. Earlier in the evening, an expert on Norwegian TV cautioned against drawing hasty conclusions but  added that such coordinated attacks bore the hallmark of Al Qaeda. People are said to have carried anti-Al Qaeda placards in central Oslo hours after the events. According to NRK, there are “many reports that Muslims are being harrassed on the streets of Oslo.” A man is alleged to have been dragged off a bus and beaten up. (http://www.nrk.no/nyheter/norge/1.7723535)

The religion or lack of religion of the person who detonated the bomb and pulled the trigger makes no difference to the parents of the young people shot. But sadly, the Islamophobic current in Europe and North America is so strong that it seems very difficult to swim against it. As soon as some atrocity is committed, journalists and supposed experts point their fingers at Muslims. Now that it turns out the suspect is a Norwegian, we are unlikely to hear pundits pontificate about the essential Viking savagery and bloodthirst of the Scandinavians. Nobody will commit the same category error they commit when somebody claiming to act in the name of Islam carries out an act of violence.

The reaction by my wife’s friend was extremely irresponsible and borders on hate-speech. He may have been writing in a private capacity on Facebook, but because he is a well-known broadcaster he reaches many people and should exercise more caution. Even more irresponsible was the New York Times’ decision to print the suggestion by Will McCants, an American security ”intellectual” with apparently strong links to the Norwegian military, that a specific Islamist group was behind the attacks. This was repeated by the Guardian, The Telegraph and The Independent in the UK. The Independent have substantially rewritten their report (http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/terror-returns-to-hit-norway-2319030.html) since the evening of the 22nd July. After I posted a comment on it, they have also disabled comments. The previous version of the article made a telling but disturbing link between race, ideology and religion. It said that the physical appearance of the man arrested indicated that he was a right-wing extremist rather than a Muslim. There are anti-Muslim, anti-immigrant chauvinist groups on the right whose members have brown skin like Shiv Sena in Maharashtra. There are also tall, blond Norwegian Muslims, although Anders Behring Breivik does not seem to be one. People with different physical traits can and do belong to all kinds of religions and ideologies. Religion and ideology do not change a person’s body, nor do skin and hair colour determine a person’s beliefs. If a bomb had gone off in a Protestant neighbourhood of Belfast, would journalists say that a Catholic-looking man was seen in the vicinity? Probably not, because the idea of typically Catholic physical features is absurd. Yet such absurdities are conventional wisdom when there is a suspicion, however unfounded, that Islam is involved. Like its closest relative, Christianity, Islam is a universalistic creed with believers of all races and political persuasions.

The initial media coverage of these tragic events tells us a lot about the world we live in. It is the same world that gave rise to National Socialism, the Khmer Rouge and the Interahamwe. Not much has changed since the 1930s. The tendency to stereotype and scapegoat ethnic and religious minorities is the same as it was before Auschwitz. Just like anti-semitism was once respectable mainstream opinion, today Islamophobia is. As has been from Hitler and Goebbels to Radio Milles Collines, the modern mass media play a key role in reflecting and shaping popular opinion. During the Rwandan genocide, hate radio mobilised the perpetrators to action. If instead of immediately assuming that “it was the Muslims who dunnit” and speculating about cartoons, Afghanistan and Libya, the Norwegian and international media had reported differently, maybe two young women at Grønland and a man on an Oslo bus would not have been harmed. And if, instead of a supposedly non-Muslim Norwegian, a Norwegian or foreign Muslim suspect had been arrested, we would perhaps have seen pogroms on a larger scale. We do things when we use words, and we all have a responsibility to not harm our fellow human beings through language. This is true for all but particularly for journalists and the supposed intellectual authorities the media give voice to

The following is a very quick translation of an article published on the website of NRK, the Norwegian public service broadcaster, at 22:43 CET (http://www.nrk.no/nyheter/norge/1.7723431)

The arrested person is Norwegian

The man who has been arrested after the shooting at Utøya is Norwegian, says Storberget. Witnesses NRK have spoken with say the man is tall, blond and spoke Østland dialect.

- The offender is Norwegian. He has been charged with what has happened at Utøya, says Justice Minister Knut Storberget.

A total of at least 17 people have been killed after attacks on the government quarter in Oslo and the Labour Party youth camp on Utøya Island outside Oslo. According to the police, the death toll will rise.

Police confirmed that the same offender is behind both attacks.

- The arrested man is 32 years old, and he is an ethnic Norwegian, says police chief Sveinung Sponheim in Oslo.

Unknown if more are involved

According to witnesses NRK have spoken with, the man is tall, blond and spoke Østland dialect.

- It is imperative to create security, but not least, to find the perpetrators and the person or persons responsible, says Storberget.

The Justice Minister will neither confirm nor deny whether the man is known to the police.

- I am not aware that any threats have been made prior to this attack, he continued.

The Justice Minister stresses that the police do not know whether the man acted on his own or whether more people were involved in the attack.

- You will not destroy us

- Today Norway has been hit by two cowardly and bloody attacks. We do not know who is behind them, said Stoltenberg.

- This is a very taxing evening. The days ahead will be even harder.We share the suffering of the wounded, and we sympathise with their relatives. I have a message to those who attacked us: You will not destroy us

At least 17 killed

A fake policeman is said to have been seen at both crime scenes.

Police say the perpetrator arrested at Utøya can be linked to both the attack on government buildings and the shooting drama at Utøya.

Earlier this evening, police arrested one man, but it is unknown whether more perpetrators are involved.

- The person was dressed as a policeman when he arrived to the island, regional police information chief in Nordre Buskerud, Bjørn Erik Sem-Jacobsen, told NRK.

Ha estado lloviendo a chaparrones en los últimos días. Tras un periodo luminoso y soleado, volvemos a un otoño templado o una primavera fría. A pesar de estar en el mes de Julio, como Irlanda está más cerca del Ártico y Groenlandia, las estaciones son las de otro mundo verde, no el de la Europa Mediterránea. Nuestros días son grises, fríos, ventosos y húmedos. Estamos con una especia de verano recortado, de otoño adelantado, como si el FMI (Fondo Monetário Internacional) tuviese también poder sobre la meteorología. O quizás, es el humor del país, humillado en su jóven desarrollismo de tigre celta sesgado, que está afectando sus cielos. El caso es que nuestros horizontes son nubosos y grises a pesar de ser verano en el calendario, quizás el deseo de que apareciese el sol de nuevo, para poder disfrutar de nuevo de la vida al aire libre y del divertimento de experimentar con un reloj de sol de papel, ha hecho que mi hijo quisiera ajustar las cuentas al tiempo y tener finales y principios claros con el espacio y el tiempo, poner orden en el universo.

Las gotas de lluvia han sido la banda sonora de estos días, como el agua en este tema de Brian Eno:

(que podéis escuchar mientras seguís leyendo si abrís el vínculo en otra ventana.)

La letra de “Golden Hours” del LP “Another Greeen World” de Brian Eno puede leerse aquí http://music.hyperreal.org/artists/brian_eno/AGWlyrics.html

La letra de “Golden Hours” del LP “Another Greeen World” de Brian Eno puede leerse aquí http://music.hyperreal.org/artists/brian_eno/AGWlyrics.html

- “¿Hace sol hoy?” Es la primera pregunta del día.

- “A no ser que el tiempo vaya en círculo, y vuelva al principio, tendrá que acabarse alguna vez, tiene que tener un final y terminarse”, dijo ayer mi hijo.

La letra de la canción de Brian Eno habla de sentir incertidumbre. Precisamente la que tengo yo sobre la creación y final del universo. También dice la canción que algunos momentos pasan muy despacio, como ocurre cuando hay lluvia, no se puede salir y se es joven, el cerebro percibe con más lentitud el tiempo que los adultos.

Consciente de que mis palabras se tomarían como referencia de verdad en su presente, y probablemente, cuando ya estén conscientemente olvidadas, estarían aún almacenadas inconscientemente en su mente, sopese mi respuesta. Tuve que contestar con sinceridad que no lo sabía, que hay gente que piensa que sí se acabará, y otros que dicen que no, pero que de momento, no tenemos esa información con certeza. Y, que en todo caso, no se preocupase pues el universo es muy grande, y parece que todavía le queda mucho espacio y tiempo, donde y hacia donde expandirse. O sea, seguí diciendo, que no se iba a terminar pronto, si se terminase, tendrían que pasar muchos cientos de miles de años para que ocurriera. El que el fin del mundo no ocurriese ese mismo día a la hora de la merienda, pareció calmar momentáneamente su curiosidad de mini-físico teórico y futurólogo. Continua sorprendiéndome la considerable frialdad y distanciamiento racional con que los niños plantean este tipo de preguntas, aunque también hay una cierta inquietud entrevelada.

Pero a mí, sus preguntas directas y claras, cuyas cuestiones ya las llevo siempre dentro, me llevan derechita a vértigos siderales. Además, estos se añaden a las preguntas culturales y ya tenemos la tarde completa, nada, que no hay manera de tener un día aburrido, sin nada que hacer, ni pensar, mente en blanco y cuerpo indolente. Una nueva madeja metafísicaculturalespiralidosa, me hizo preguntarme cómo de universales eran estas preguntas en la infancia. No el hecho de preguntar sobre el mundo, sino la forma de plantearlas, aunque claro, el mundo sobre el que los niños preguntan es el mundo que perciben.

Y la percepción está influenciada por el lenguaje, aprendido de los adultos, que denomina conceptos y cada cultura que marca o hace más sobresalientes ciertos aspectos del mundo que otros. Los europeos o mejor dicho, en los países de población con cultura de origen greco-judeo-cristiano, se tiende a ver la historia y el tiempo de forma teleológica. Esto es orientado a un objetivo o fin, aunque este no quiera decir un final completo, puede ser una transformación. Esto es la base de las ideas evolucionistas y del progreso.

Como bien es bien conocido, China es un estado muy extenso geográficamente con una gran variedad cultural, étnica, lingüística y religiosa. Sin embargo en comparación con la visión linear y con un objetivo último de la historia, en otras culturas, como en la confucionista y taoísta de China, la historia se entiende como ciclos naturales que se repiten. Para ellas, el punto de vista europeo les parece un considerable sin sentido. El mundo es un lugar donde todo tiene un nombre y un rol y que consigue la armonía y el equilibrio simplemente con que cada elemento conozca y actue de acuerdo con el papel que le ha tocado en el engranaje total de la sociedad y la vida. Como la forma de ver el mundo está presente de manera inconsciente en la vida cotidiana de todos lo que dicen, hacen y piensan los adultos, los niños internalizan esos principios y costumbres desde el momento en que nacen y son criados en un grupo humano.Cualquier forma de imaginar e intentar esos objetivos de una libertad sin pasado, es absurda y lo que es peor, llevan a las masacres de poblaciones por aquellos que se creen en posesión de una verdad que liberará a los otros. En realidad es una utopía de liberación que lo que hace es forzar a otros a ser “libres” de acuerdo con las reglas de quien tenga el poder. Las únicas maneras para que se liberase de su propio origen, y es imposible, serían, una, nuevo año cero tipo Pol Pot or que fuesen aislados de contacto humano, especialmente el lenguaje, lo cual les privaría de aprender su humanidad. Por lo que hasta la crítica a la sociedad misma, es transmitida socialmente por nuestras relacciones con nuestro grupo humano inmediato y a los que luego conocemos y nos incorporamos con el paso de los años: el colegio, los amigos, el trabajo, las asociaciones.

Me pregunto cuales serán las preguntas que los padres chinos tienen dificultades en contestar a sus hijos. Si los europeos afirman de una forma racional un inexorable fin del universo que nos hace rememorar la angustia existencial que sienten los adolescentes como estudiaron los filósofos nórdicos como Kierkegaard (¿Son los filósofos de la angustia existencial simplemente adolescentes permanentes que no han pasado a la siguiente fase de crecimiento?) ¿Cuales serán las angustias existenciales que los niños en China confucionista y taoísta hacen pasar a sus padres con sus preguntas?En todo caso, desde que nació, cada año del tiempo de mi hijo, ha sido y es circular, como lo son sus tartas de cumpleaños que es donde va viendo pasar el tiempo, con el aumento de una vela cada vez. Las tartas, hacen que el paso del tiempo sea algo dulce y suave, con su forma y sabor, aceptamos y hacemos que las jóvenes generaciones degusten agradablemente la experiencia y el envejecimiento.

Música
Tanto el álbum como su autor, Brian Eno, son puntos cardinales en la música y en mi panteón musical. “Golden Hours” en Another Green World de Brian Eno, Island Records, Londres, 1975.

Información sobre el álbum en Wikipedia en español
http://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Another_Green_World

En Wikipedia inglés
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Another_Green_World

At the recent Media for All Conference in London I came across a stall marketing a new division of the subtitling company Broadcast Text International. The rather unfortunate name they have chosen is Eskimo Avenue. It could not have been named Paki Street or Nigger Lane, but it seems that Eskimo Avenue does not raise many eyebrows in our day and age. In the company’s own words:

Eskimo Avenue is a Nordic dubbing company within the home entertainment industry.

We localise cartoons, films, games and TV shows into Swedish, Danish, Norwegian and Finnish.

If you demand excellence throughout the whole chain, from translation to the 5.1. master – welcome to Eskimo Avenue.

(htttp://www.eskimoavenue.com)

Ironically, some translational excellence seems to be missing somewhere in the chain. The name is highly inappropriate, even offensive to the indigenous peoples of the Arctic. Using the word “Eskimo” is a serious branding error and a manifestation of, probably unthinking, racism. It is all the more surprising because both the parent company and Eskimo Avenue pride themselves on the quality of their translation work. Cross-cultural branding is, in the broad sense, about translation. A brand transmits meanings between different cultures. As an exercise in translation, this is a failure. As I have argued elsewhere (Steffensen 2011, forthcoming), what Charles Taylor terms misrecognition is a serious problem in the media’s representation of subaltern ethnicities, and in this case in branding:

A person or a group of people can suffer real damage, real distortion, if the people or society around them mirror back a demeaning or contemptible picture of themselves. Nonrecognition or misrecognition can inflict harm, can be a form of oppression, imprisoning someone in a false, distorted, and reduced mode of being (Taylor 1997: 98).

The term “Eskimo” refers collectively to the Yupik and Inuit peoples of the circumpolar Arctic. Specialists disagree on its exact etymology and whether it was originally a pejorative term or not. What they do agree on is that it originates in more southerly North American languages. That is to say that it was an externally ascribed ethnonym. The people labelled as “Eskimo” never adopted it and, more importantly, take objection to it as mirroring back “a demeaning or contemptible picture of themselves.” Unlike some other externally ascribed names for marginalised and oppressed social groups, like “queer” or to some extent “nigger”, “Eskimo” has never been appropriated and resignified by the stateless nations it lumps together and demeans. That is what matters in this case. Whether it originally meant “those who lace snowshoes” or “eaters of raw meat” and whether it came from Cree or Algonquin is irrelevant to its contemporary meaning in political discourse. Over the last 40 years or longer, the “Eskimo” in Canada and Danish-occupied Greenland have asked the wider world to stop using the word. They do not identify as “Eskimo” and prefer other designations (Kalaalit, Inuit, Inupiak, Yupik, Naukan and others) that do not have the negative connotations associated with centuries of colonisation and racism.

Eskimo Avenue Logo

It is well known that the Inuit and Yupik resent being called by this name. One does not have to be a specialist in Arctic affairs to know this. It is common knowledge to most generally informed Westerners. It is therefore nothing less than scandalous for a company whose business is to transmit meanings between cultures and languages to engage in such racist name-calling. The fact that it is discursively possible to launch a company called Eskimo Avenue apparently without further thought provides some insight into the status of the Arctic and its population in the contemporary world. As I argued in an earlier post on this blog, the Arctic tends to be constituted in policy and academic discourse as nature rather than culture (Steffensen 2009). Its human inhabitants and their cultures are systematically erased, as can be seen and heard at policy and academic conferences about the region. It is conceived of as a tabula rasa for states and corporations ruled and managed by Asians, Europeans or their diasporic descendants to act on and in to further their own national, corporate or putatively universal (in the case of climate change) political and economic interests. The Arctic is seen as a zone of climate change, military rivalry, transit and economic exploitation, but rarely as somewhere where “real” people of equal worth and dignity live and die. Or, as Kuupik Kleist put it at the Arctic Council summit in May this year:

Although the focus on the natural sciences absolutely makes sense for our political way of thinking and strategic planning, it is also important to consider what we who depend on the conditions in the Arctic consider the most important aspect. The Arctic is not only about polar bears and ice. What is most often absent from discussions is the human situation in the Arctic and our living conditions. (Quoted in Sermitsiaq, 13^th May 2011, my translation)

What the inhabitants of the Arctic consider “the most important aspect” is the human factor, which the outside world tends to prioritise lower than fishing, shipping, mineral and fossil fuel extraction, global climate change and military security. What Broadcast Text/Eskimo Avenue are doing lies in continuation of a long tradition of dehumanising non-Western peoples and using racism to justify political and economic domination. In this Western optic, the Arctic is a vast space to be exploited, and its inhabitants “wholly crude and barbarous peoples such as the Eskimos.” (1988: 229) Continuing on a Hegelian note, it is “is no historical part of the World; it has no movement or development to exhibit.” (Hegel 1956: 99) Whatever history takes place in that part of the world, such as the new global warming-fuelled geopolitical and economic “great game” unfolding between the Arctic powers is thought not to include the region’s human inhabitants. They and their aspirations for self-determination, equality and liberty are either overlooked or considered so insignificant as to be fair game for stereotyping and misrepresentation in advertising and marketing. The Arctic remains incompletely decolonised and there are no politically powerful diasporas of Arctic peoples. These are the conditions of possibility for naming a business Eskimo Avenue. The people insulted are far away and matter very little. Usually, the subaltern does not speak back (Spivak 1994). One can better understand that companies and products may have contained a pejorative name some 50 years or more ago, but it is utterly indefensible in 2011. One therefore hopes that the Qallunaat at Broadcast Text International take note and reconsider their branding in their own interest and as a gesture of respect to the Arctic nations.

References

Eskimo Avenue website http://www.eskimoavenue.com

Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich 1956 The Philosophy of History. New York: Dover, 1956

Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich 1988 Lectures on the philosophy of religion: The lectures of 1827. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988

Sermitsiaq 13^th May 2011 http://sermitsiaq.ag/node/100965

Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty “Can the Subaltern Speak?” pp. 66-111 in Williams, Patrick & Laura Chrisman (eds.) Colonial Discourse and Post-Colonial Theory: A Reader. New York: Harvester/Wheatsheaf, 1994

Steffensen, Kenn Nakata 2009 “Arctic science, Arctic policy and Acrtic politics: A tale of different lifeworlds” http://culturalmeanings.wordpress.com/2009/06/30/new-frontiers-inscience-diplomacy/

Steffensen, Kenn Nakata 2011 “BBC English with an accent: “African” and “Asian” accents and the translation of culture in British Broadcasting. Thematic issue on “Ideology and manipulation in audiovisual translation”. Meta: Journal of Translation 2011, edited by Jorge Diaz Cintas and Aline Remael

Taylor, Charles “The politics of recognition”, pp. 98-130 in Heble, Ajay, Donna Palmateer Pennee & JR (Tim) Struthers (eds.) New contexts of Canadian criticism. Peterborough: Broadway Press, 1997

Este texto es aún un borrador y un trabajo en curso. Son unas notas rápidas con pensamientos sobre las críticas que se están aireando en España contra los políticos profesionales, el sistema y proceso electoral y lo que interpreto como una aguda y profunda crisis de legitimidad. Esta crisis ha hecho que por lo que creo es la primera vez en la historia del estado español, haya una masiva movilización política de un pueblo generalmente cauto, comedido, escéptico e incluso apático en cuanto a manifestaciones políticas masivas en espacios públicos. Este es uno de los puntos más significativos: la crisis es de dimensiones tan gigantescas que ha provocado que gentes de todas ideologías, clases y edades dejen la comodidad de sus espacios privados y el escepticismo, ironía e incredulidad que caracteriza a la actitud de los españoles sobre la política, y se lancen a las calles y plazas de todo el estado a expresar su desesperanza y descontento demostrando ruidosamente que no reconocen el poder del ejecutivo, las instituciones y el sistema electoral. Un antiguo profesor mío de Teoría de las Relacciones Internacionales en LSE, Philip Windsor, decía que solo tienen poder aquellos a los quienes se les reconoce, cuando el pueblo para de reconocer el poder a quienes lo ostentan, simple, sencilla y fácilmente desaparece, ya no hay obediencia ni autoridad.

Tras las recientes elecciones locales y autonómicas en España, el discurso del movimiento del 15M está re-alineándose. Esta adaptación estratégica a la situación política tras la victoria del conservador PP, se está viendo en todo tipo de comunicaciones tanto en las individuos directamente activos en el movimiento, asambleas,  de grupos como Democracia Real Ya y sus sitios Web y en participaciones en redes sociales, como en programas y artículos en medios de comunicación que tienen una actitud abierta y en casos de apoyo al 15M.

Me ha llamado mucho la atención leer y escuchar en medios y foros públicos,  la idea ampliamente difundida, de que los candidatos elegidos lo han sido porque los votantes  que les confiaron su voto lo hicieron porque estaban apoyando a los principios y acciones incluidas en sus manifiestos electorales. Esto tiene más fuerza en el caso español, dónde las listas de candidatos son realizadas por los partidos y no por votación preliminar de los miembros de cada partido en los distritos electorales, como ocurre en es sistema de británico. En estas protestas del público, ee enfatiza que las recortes económicos y sociales que se están intentando legislar, no habían sido parte de esos manifiestos. La conclusión que se escucha es que si los candidatos ganadores incumplen los manifiestos y/o las promesas hechas durante las campañas electorales, no tienen legitimidad para mantener sus cargos.

RTVE- Asuntos Propios: 15 M Violencia y manifiestos electorales incumplidos

Se están oyendo argumentos sobre cómo se podría pedir la retirada de votos a candidatos por incumplir sus promesas. De hecho se ve a los manifiestos electorales y a las declaraciones hechas durante la campaña electoral como un contrato, en el primer caso escrito y en el segundo un contrato oral. Estas declaraciones y críticas toman la idea de que existe un contrato social entre dos partes: los candidatos y el electorado que es pueblo soberano. Por este contrato, los partidos y candidatos reciben el cargo de representar al pueblo.

El procedimiento electoral en democracias liberales occidentales, es el proceso y medio para adjudicar la tarea de gestionar, ya sea el estado, los ayuntamientos o las autonomías y la vida pública y por un tiempo limitado, a aquellos cuyas propuestas electorales expresadas por escrito en sus manifiestos y oralmente en las declaraciones de sus campañas y mítines electorales, ganarón más votos. Las ideas y planes que más gente “compraron” al votar. Y lo que se está diciendo es que los políticos españoles al recortar beneficios, incumplir propuestas y sus manifiestos, al aliarse a partidos opuestos de los que no solo dijeron pestes, muy typical Spanish, sino que, en casos hubo promesas de que nunca se aliarían con otros partidos, están incumpliendo sus promesas, i.e las bases de sus contratos para ser representates del pueblo, por lo que están actuando de manera ilegítima.

Los  que se está implicando es que los políticos profesionales son empleados del pueblo, del electorado que les ha contratado porque prometieron hacer cierto tipo de trabajos y de cierta manera,  por lo que como con otros empleados o contratas, si no se cumplen las bases del contrato, se les despide y a buscar otros que cumplan. Y además, la primera obligación la tienen con su contratante, el electorado o mejor dicho, el pueblo soberano que es el estado. También hay descontento pues estos concejales y parlamentarios, empleados nuevos del estado, aunque los antiguos también, se han tomado manga por  hombro, se están pasando los límites de su contrato  pero no parece que haya una parada a la reflexión.

Las protestas en España muestran que la gente corriente tiene una idea muy baja del nivel ético y profesional de los políticos españoles profesionales. Les ven como lo opuesto de la idea que Hegel tenía de que los que  los que trabajan por el estado tienen que ser un grupo dedicado al bien común, sirviendo al pueblo con honradez, devoción y dedicación, anteponiendo en todo momento el bien público al personal.

Se oyen quejas de que los políticos profesionales en el poder ejecutivo, están incumpliendo las condiciones de contratación en por ejemplo, coger sin permiso del pueblo, sus jefes  el  tesoro público para arreglar los tejemanejes de quienes han arruinado negocios a nivel internacional pero dejando al estado, a los ciudadanos, sin trabajo, salud ni vivienda.

Me pregunto si en la legislación nacional o internacional podrían encontrar aquellos especialistas en derecho, algunas clausulas que sustanciasen querellas contra políticos elegidos por baja productividad, ruptura de condiciones de contratación, daño a la honestidad y reputación del estado, pedir la devolución del mandato por no entregar lo prometido y otros caso. Quizás veamos abogados de organizaciones no gubernamentales y plataformas ciudadanas presentar querellas contra los políticos que estén rompiendo sus bases de contratación y buscar sus despidos, o quizás sanciones laborales, quien sabe lo que va a ocurrir cuando hay descontento y miedo.

Claramente, algunos políticos profesionales tendrían que, al menos, haber practicado jugando al juego de Alpha-Centauri,  para ver simulaciones muy simples de las revuelas que pueden originarse por cortes y recortes de lo básico para el sustento, el cobijo y la salud.  Y si no, ya se esta oyendo por las plazas geográficas y virtuales gritos de gente que quiere que les devuelvan sus votos, que dicen que no hay contrato, que se ha roto. Y si es así, ¿qué va a arreglarlo o sustituirlo? La idea del contrato social como legitimación de la transferencia de poder del pueblo al soberano, en Hobbes, y en Rousseau a los representantes políticos, parece estarse tomando como un contrato literal, lo cual no es. Con el tiempo, veremos que el ruido de las plazas tiene muchas nueces que llevaban acalladas durante años. Ahora hay ruido de quejas ciudadanas en numerosos países. Nunca había oído o leído de tantas protestas en tantos lugares simultáneamente. Esto significa algo, el aire huele a cambios el tiempo nos enseñará cuales y donde.

¿Hacia donde puede ir el movimiento 15M? En este movimiento popular, como en otros, existe el riesgo de que grupos más organizados y experimentados políticamente traten de controlarlo. Estoy pensando el grupos con la táctica del cuco, partidos pequeños y marginales pero bien organizados que se infiltren entre el liderazgo de las diferentes asambleas e impongan sus ideologías. Ya se está viendo en algunos comunicados que llaman a acciones mucho más allá de los principios básicos que han unido a gentes tan variadas alrededor del 15M y DRY: los cuatro puntos y su naturaleza como un movimiento reformista no derroquista.  Por ejemplo, llamadas a revoluciones a nivel internacional, a la ocupación de parlamentos, a la derrocamiento de gobiernos y jefes de estado establecidos.  Estas consignas solo conseguirán reducir el número de gente que apoye al movimiento pues alienará a todos aquellos que no estén convertidos a la idea de la revolución permanente y credos un tanto obsoletos de la guerra fría. Lo que también se ve en sus comunicados es, generalmente desconocimiento de la terminología política. Se usan términos como “comodidades” de forma incorrecta o democracia  de forma imprecisa e idealizada.

Otro aspecto es la cultura española, entendida de una manera muy general, los individuos se relacionan de una forma autoritaria. Está presente un maniqueísmo inconsciente, una visión binaria bueno-malo, el tener razón o estar equivocado sin un lugar para la diversidad de opinión y de acción. Con esto se junta la práctica habitual tanto el discurso de la calle y el parlamento, de la humillación como forma de relación, juegos de poder en palabra y obra usando de la falta de respeto en la discusión, en la rapidez usando motes  mofosos y etiquetas desestimando al otro diferente. Por eso, en declaraciones de políticos y en los medios, rápidamente se usan calificativos con la intención de humillar y desestimar el movimiento de protestas en vez de responsable y conscientemente reflexionar sobre qué está ocurriendo. La actitud general es que los unos creen que son los otros quienes son malos, o por corruptos o por vagabundos, pero nadie asume que es un problema de todos. No, las uvas no están verdes.

Si DRY y el movimiento 15M consiguiera que tanto la élite política y económica como la población en general asumieran todos las responsabilidades por la crisis. No son solo esos imprecisos y distantes “los otros” sino las prácticas en una sociedad que fomentan, mantienen, reproducen y autorizan la picaresca y la corrupción a diferentes escalas. Pero aquí está el antiguo problema de la relación del ciudadano con el estado y en España, es una de profunda desconfianza.

En los próximos días, incluiré otro documente con un resumen general de las teorías del Contrato Social, yendo desde Hobbes y Rousseau hasta el presente con Rawls. Si es posible, también otro con teorías de representación, especialmente política.

The Danish government’s recent decision to impose border controls in possible violation of its Schengen Treaty obligations has caused concern among the country’s EU partners, its immediate neighbours Sweden and Germany in particular. The apparent intention to permanently reintroduce border controls (unlike France’s temporary closure earlier this year) has cast the EU’s flagship accomplishment of free mobility into crisis. Both the common currency and free mobility are now under threat, perhaps teaching us that it is Hobbes and Machiavelli rather than Kant we should turn to in order to understand the regional dynamics in Western Europe in the past and present.

The way the policy change was announced in Danish and English further substantiate some points I have previously made about the political use of language and manipulative translation practices in Danish foreign policy and international relations in general. In an article published in 2009, I argued and documented that the Danish state systematically misrepresents the legal and political character of its sovereignty over its North Atlantic territories when projecting its international identity in the English language (Steffensen 2009). The way this takes place is principally by means of translation practices, which resignify Danish legal/political concepts by appropriating a mostly British conceptual vocabulary for strategic purposes. The political objective and effect is to render the colonial nature of the relationship between the metropole and its overseas territories more palatable to international opinion. The efforts are by and large successful, and the Danish state is able to maintain a separation between the “private”, domestic, truth expressed in Danish and an external “public” image as a model liberal internationalist state, and certainly not a significant colonial power.

This is similar to the Japanese dyad of honne本音and tatemae建前. Honne refers to a person’s sincere feelings and tatemae to socially necessary public manifestations. The two can be in conflict, and this does not necessarily pose the same problem in Japanese ethics as in the monotheistic “truth is one, error is many” traditions of Judaism, Christianity and Islam (See Williams 1996; Gray, Doi 1973). One could argue that Denmark’s recent contradictory messages in Danish and English reflect a conflict between domestic honne and international tatemae caused by its giri (social obligations). The related concepts of omote 面　and ura 面　can also be applied to understand the two tongues Denmark seems to be speaking with.　There is an international facade and another side that is hidden from view.

What is remarkable about the announcements of the closing of Denmark’s borders is that two different statements were issued in Danish and English. Where the cases I examined in 2009 were examples of tendentious translation from Danish, and where a foreign-language announcement is usually a translation of a native source text, the English press release (http://skat.dk/SKAT.aspx?oId=1947798&vId=0) is a completely different text from the official Danish-language document (http://www.b.dk/sites/default/files/node-files/64/4/4064437-fakta-her-er-aftalen-om-grnsekontrol.pdf). Issuing two statements with very different messages for domestic and international consumption is a step further than manipulatively translating texts and selectively failing to translate others.

The first difference that strikes any reader who knows both Danish and English is the titles. The English text is neutrally entitled “The Danish agreement on customs control.” The much stronger worded Danish title is “Permanent customs control in Denmark (enhanced border control)”. In Danish, the government wishes to signal that the measures are of a permanent nature and that border controls will be strengthened.

According to the Danish text, the main objective of the new border policy is to prevent foreign criminals and irregular economic migrants from getting to Denmark:

 There has in recent years been a marked increase in cross-border crime in Denmark. This is not least the case for crimes of enrichment committed by foreign gangs, the smuggling in and out of drugs, weapons, people and large sums of money as well as avoidance of Danish tax through the use of foreign labour.

 The Government, the Danish People’s Party and Christian Democrats agree that this trend must be curbed and that it must be done through a heavy build-up and permanent and visible controls at the Danish border crossings.

The English text, on the other hand, states that the policy “aims first and foremost at enhancing customs control and implies increased controls in relation to the smuggling into Denmark of mainly goods and items.” The Danish text emphasises the need to prevent certain people from entering the country, not “mainly goods and items.” Where the visibility and permanence of the projected border facilities are stressed in Danish, this is played down in English to mean that “construction of proper facilities will help create better conditions for both travellers, road-users and the customs officers.” The new installations are only permanent “in the sense that the new customs control buildings will be permanent and the allocation of new resources will also be of a permanent nature.”

The English document omits the Danish document’s emphasis on stopping “people-smuggling” and “foreign gangs.” It says that:

It also is important to bear in mind that the agreement in no way implies that the police will carry out checks on individuals at the Danish border, just as there is no question of introducing passport control in relation to the other Schengen States.

The general tone is also very different. The Danish text presents a picture of necessary defensive measures to protect a vulnerable country from external threats. It uses the military metaphor of an arms build-up (oprustning). Denmark is discursively constructed as being under threat and the rhetoric maximises the threats from outside. The main thrust of the English text is to minimise the threat Denmark’s actions poses to the outside world. There seems to be an implicit recognition that the new measures are perceived as aggressive, so the purpose is to avoid misunderstanding by presenting the policy as moderate and harmless by the frequent use of reassuring words and phrases like “however, this does not mean”, “important to bear in mind”, “in no way implies” etc.:

The agreement also implies a strengthening of policing in order to enable the Danish police to act upon specific requests from customs officers. However, this does not mean that the Danish police will be permanently present at the border.

It is clear that the two press releases present two different and logically incompatible pictures of the reasons behind and the purpose of the policy. The Danish public are told that their government is protecting them from the dangerous “outside”. It is fulfilling its obligation of providing security, law and order, and this means controlling the flow of people and illicit substances/objects across the borders of the realm. It is presented as a defensive measure. There is no reference to EU and international obligations. The world outside Denmark is reassured that the government is not threatening the free mobility of people because the objective is to prevent smuggling. The Danish government says to its domestic constituency that it is defending the realm while trying to defend Denmark’s international reputation in English.

The two press releases can be read here:

• English
• Danish

The following is my translation of the Danish text. It is unofficial, but judging from what I have seen from Danish ministerial translators in the past, it is almost certainly far more accurate (See Steffensen 2009).

Permanent customs controls in Denmark (enhanced border controls)

There has in recent years been a marked increase in cross-border crime in Denmark. This is not least the case for crimes of enrichment committed by foreign gangs, the smuggling in and out of drugs, weapons, people and large sums of money as well as avoidance of Danish tax through the use of foreign labour.

The Government, the Danish People’s Party and Christian Democrats agree that this trend must be curbed and that it must be done through a heavy build-up and permanent and visible controls at the Danish border crossings.

This is to be ensured by substantial investment in new control facilities, significantly more customs officers, extensive video surveillance of cars that cross the Danish borders, and rapid assistance from police if customs officers discover crime.

The enhanced controls are to take place at all Danish border crossings. This means a permanent presence at the Danish-German land border, the Øresund link, Danish ferry ports and airports as well as the Danish waters, see below.

The Government, the Danish People’s Party and the Christian Democrats agree to allocate a budget of up to 150 million kroner for investment in new, visible, control facilities and new IT equipment etc, as well as a frame of up to 35 million kroner in 2011, rising to up to 119 million kroner in 2015 for more customs officers and an enhanced police deployment etc.

Derived income is also expected from the enhanced deployment.

The Government, the Danish People’s Party and the Christian Democrats will follow up on implementation of the enhanced control efforts, with a particular focus on the progress and impact of each initiative. The enhanced deployment will contribute significantly to exposing and curbing illegal activities at the Danish borders, see box 1 below.

References

Doi, Takeo Omote to ura. Tokyo: Kobundo, 1973

Gray, John Heresies: Against progress and other illusions. London: Granta, 2004

Steffensen, Kenn Nakata “Denmark’s invisible empire: The politics of translating the Danish constitutional order”. in Epstein, Brett J. (ed.) Northern lights: Translation in the Nordic countries. Oxford: Peter Lang, 2009

Williams, David Japan and the enemies of open political science. London: Routledge, 1995

I have followed in the news media what is happening in Spain and the support it has engendered around the world, including here in Cork. It is interesting and potentially politically transformative. It is inspiring to see people peacefully protesting against injustices. Hopefully, something better than what has existed until now will come out of it. However, the text on “global revolution” you have uploaded strikes me as not quite in the spirit of the True Democracy Now Manifesto, and I suspect that it may work against rather than for the movement. Having read the two texts, it looks to me like True Democracy Now Cork may be going in a different and less productive direction than the Spanish True Democracy Now movement.

These comments and questions are from the perspective of a sympathetic observer watching your movement unfold from the sidelines and wishing you success. One reason why I can only remain an observer and not a participant is the doubts raised by the text you uploaded to http://globalrevolutioncork.blogspot.com/2011/05/we-are-everywhere.html. I do not have as direct a stake in the political development of Spain as most of you, but I hope the search for alternative democratic forms of organisation will have some success there and inspire change in other countries.

You write that

 Today May 21th, all the anonimous children and grandchildren of those who lived in such a dark period of history, have not forgotten the dark shadow that were their lives. They have raised and educated a generation that can see the light, a generation based on solidarity and equality.

Which dark period of history are you referring to? The global economic crisis of recent years? The Spanish Civil War? The Franco dictatorship? It is not clear. It seems that certain historical memories have been transmitted to the “anonymous children and grandchildren” of previous generations, but I cannot work out which “dark period” is being remembered.

I also do not understand what it means for a generation to be “based on solidarity and equality.” If so, when did this apparently momentous social change take place? And how? Was there no solidarity at some point in the recent past? Was equality not a key political value since quite some time before the French Revolution? I think you mean that young people today value solidarity and equality higher than their parents and grandparents. I am not convinced. These values can be found throughout history and across generations.

You also seem to be claiming that May 2011 is somehow like May 1968 in Paris, i.e. primarily a student/youth rebellion. When you speak of “a generation that can see the light” you also seem to imply that one generation has particular insights that older generations lack. I believe this is both factually wrong and a tactical mistake. While it may be true that the movement in Spain is mostly made up of young people, who have suffered relatively more hardship as a result of the economic crisis than other age groups, I do not believe that this is a generational struggle. If it is, it has little prospects of success, especially in a country with the demographic structure that Spain has. Like most of Western Europe, Spain has a rapidly ageing population, and if any movement wants to succeed it should not claim only or primarily to represent young people or appeal exclusively to them. They are already on your side, as are many older people whom you should (1) Take care not to alienate and (2) Mobilise more of. The conflict is really one between political and economic elites and masses who feel that the political system fails to represent their interests adequately and that they are picking up the bill for the excesses of the business, particularly financial, elite. You should therefore not turn it into a conflict between generations, especially because you need middle-aged and elderly people on your side for the simple reasons that there are numerically more of them and they have more power than younger people. Defining the struggle as one between generations does not help the cause.

The sentence “Each one of us have a new world within ourselves and in our hearts, and there is enough anger and happiness to make a real change” may sound good as a piece of rhetoric, but does it work as politics? While emotions like anger and happiness may ultimately be what spurs people to political action, there is little hard political substance to such statements. The point is to channel those emotions and go beyond feeling indignation to effecting real change. That cannot be achieved just by “keeping going”. Activism for its own sake is like a headless chicken, and it leads nowhere. There must be specific and realistic objectives, and dismantling “the capitalist system” is too vague and romantic. It is an abstraction and distraction from more attainable goals. Keep it more modest, please. Global capitalism is a reality your movement has to deal with, and it won’t go away that easily. Apart from being analytically naïve, using rhetoric like that of dismantling capitalism is sure to alienate the majority of people who are on your side and it will win you few supporters, and certainly not the type you need to have maximum impact. It is therefore a major tactical blunder. Besides, the contradictions of capitalism are not between generations but between classes, if you are attempting some form of Marxian analysis. Young people belong to all socio-economic classes and a generation can therefore, in a Marxian sense, not be a revolutionary subject. I think you should avoid sounding Marxist, but if you do, make sure it makes analytical sense.

As I have understood it, the objectives of the Spanish movement and your local offshoot are still somewhat vague and fuelled by a sense of distance between the ordinary citizen and the main channels of representation in the Spanish political system: Elected assemblies, political parties, trade unions and the like. The grievances being voiced by the movement are, as far as I am aware, to do with corruption, a two-party dominant electoral system, mass unemployment among young people in particular but also across generations, and socially unjust austerity measures. These are the issues you should be addressing. If you speak in flowery terms about representing an especially enlightened generation that demands and wants “it all and wants it now” and claim that this dwindling demographic is on the verge of overturning capitalism on a global scale, you will be seriously disappointed. If, on the other hand, you can keep the momentum going and more tangible and realistic objectives come out of the process, you have a chance making a real difference in Spain and beyond. As I understand the Manifesto, it is a call for a substantive democracy rather than a merely procedural one.

The first objective should be to try broaden the coalition of social forces behind the movement. Real democracy now should not mean “angry young people against capitalism” but something more like “the people against corruption and for social justice.” You should choose your words much more wisely than you have done in this text. The more specific demands should aggregate and channel the sense of dissatisfaction mentioned above, i.e. the introduction of more effective measures against corruption, electoral reform to more accurately represent the views of the voting population, policy measures to generate employment opportunities for younger Spanish workers in particular, and social welfare measures like adequate pensions and unemployment benefits, a moratorium on mortgage and utility bill arrears etc.

Revolutions are turbulent and unpredictable, and only history will tell if this is a truly revolutionary upheaval like the great 18^th, 19^th and 20^th century revolutions. I think there are also cautionary lessons to be learnt from the history of revolutions. They have often degenerated into terror, been manipulated by small but disciplined groups, and frustrated the hopes of the initial revolutionaries.

There is an opportunity to make history and improve things for the better, but only if you are more inclusive, more modest and realistic.

Today is the first time I have come across the works of Sheikh Michael Mumisa of Cambridge and Dr. Satoshi Kanazawa of the London School of Economics. One is a South African Quranic scholar and Ph.D. candidate in literature, the other a Japanese evolutionary psychologist and reader in management. Both are of non-European origin but think remarkably like each other, it seems. Mumisa’s discussion of the problems he sees in Kanazawa’s work come across as not substantially different from what he criticises. The irony is that these two non-Westerners both subscribe to an Enlightenment view of history as progress and of a moral hierarchy between racial (Kanazawa) or ethnic groups (Mumisa). Both are, as far as I can see, profoundly European, even Anglo-American, thinkers. It is a silly family quarrel between an African and an Asian son of the enlightenment, and Mumisa’s attack on Kanazawa leads nowhere because their reasoning is very similar.

Michael Mumisa asks his readers “Why does LSE academic Satoshi Kanazawa seem to hate women and black people?” The answer he gives is just as disturbing as Dr. Kanazawa’s apparent racism and misogyny. Mumisa’s answer in short seems to be “because he is Japanese.” The argument can be summarised as:

1.A tacit taken for granted assumption that racism and sexism are evil. This is so obvious that Mumisa does not need to spell it out.
2.The evil Japanese are more racist and sexist than other people.
3.Satoshi Kanazawa is Japanese and therefore a racist and sexist.

Being Japanese supposedly makes him more susceptible to the errors of evolutionary psychology than bearers of other cultural traditions. Ironically, Mumisa thus seems to be guilty of exactly what he accuses Kanazawa of – racism wrapped up in a dubious underlying philosophy of history as evolution or moral progress.

Like I presume Mr. Mumisa does, I take for granted that most people who read this value rational argument and fairness and therefore oppose racism and sexism as irrational and unethical doctrines. To claim that one is a racist and sexist is beyond the pale of contemporary public discourse. I also agree with Mumisa that the pseudo-scientific views attributed to Satoshi Kanazawa are reprehensible and that evolutionary psychology is “a pernicious political ideology which masquerades as science.” There is, however, a curious imbalance and self-undermining logical flaw in Mr. Mumisa’s short article.

It takes the author a long time to get to what should be the point – the intellectually and ethically problematic status of Dr. Kanazawa’s statement that “Black women are objectively less attractive than non-Black women” and especially how this relates to his theoretical views on humanity and society. Just over half of the article (383 out of 758 words) discusses the problem of pervasive racism in modern Japanese culture and its historical roots. This is highly relevant in the analysis of Japanese culture and politics, but the question is how relevant it is to the case at hand – Satoshi Kanazawa’s views on race and gender.

Mumisa is right that racial stereotyping and discrimination are widespread in Japan and partly right that some of the sources, or perhaps amplifiers, have historically been Social Darwinism and the white supremacism of European-American imperial ideology. But his account neglects the indigenous sources of racism in Japanese and wider East Asian traditions of thought, where Shinto notions of purity and pollution, the divine origins of the Japanese nation and Confucian notions of hierarchy play an important part. Besides the originally British doctrines of Social Darwinism and utilitarianism, another equally if not more important element in the 19th century Japanese re-encounter with Western thought was German romanticism. But the assimilation of “blood and soil” national romanticism was possible because of cultural conditions favourable to its reception. Japan is not some tabula rasa onto which Western ideas are transcribed and exist in an unchanged form. It is made up of thinking people with a dynamic culture of their own.

What is missing from Mumisa’s treatment of racism in modern Japanese culture is any sense of its indigenous roots and of Japanese historical agency. The reader is left with the impression that the Japanese “aped” Western Social Darwinism, which is precisely the general Western stereotype of East Asians and the Japanese in particular. When we are told that “the ideas advanced by Social Darwinism and eugenics remain influential today in Japanese intellectual life and popular culture”, the silent referent is contemporary Britain or the generalised West, against which Japan is compared unfavourably. Japan may have been late in revoking its last piece of eugenic legislation, but only some 20 years later than Sweden, which is generally held up as the paradigm case of enlightened, progressive European modernity. Mumisa seems to be suggesting that Japan is stuck in backward 19th century modes of thinking, which more enlightened parts of the world have evolved beyond! By saying that the ideas he disapproves of “remain influential” he is portraying Japan as relatively backward and morally inferior. It would seem that the ghosts of Darwin, Hegel and Marx haunt the author too.

The first half of Mumisa’s text sets the stage for the denunciation of Kanazawa and evolutionary psychology that follows. He builds up a picture of Japan as somehow more racist than a silent and idealised referent, the West/Britain. The extent of the socio-political phenomenon we call racism is empirically difficult to compare, as there are both quantitative and qualitative aspects to it.1 Racism in Japan manifests itself differently and is often not recognised as such by its perpetrators. There is a general tendency to think of it exclusively as racism against the Japanese and a failure to think of Japanese racism against others. My impression as a Japanese-European who grew up in Africa is that racism is more pervasive in Japan than in the UK or US but no more so than in countries like Denmark, Israel, the Netherlands or France.

It is also curious that Mumisa mentions Emobile’s Obama monkey ad, as the decision to withdraw it can be seen as an illustration that racism is considered unacceptable and that Japan is thus a much more “normal” and enlightened country than he makes it out to be. So Japanese companies are clearly receptive to foreign concerns about racism and deal with in a responsible manner. If we accept that the ad was racist, the response by the company does not support Mumisa’s argument.2 But it is questionable whether the ad in question was racist at all:

E-mobile has used this cute Japanese macaque as their mascot in commercials before this one (in the last one the monkey listened to headphones while using a PC), so it would be hard to claim that they just pulled this monkey out of nowhere so they could make a racist joke (this is not the same as Mandom’s ad). The monkey’s previous commercials had him acting like a human, so it was already established that E-mobile’s mascot is a cute monkey that mimics people. With this latest ad, they were probably trying to make a cute commercial that brings attention to the benefits of changing to E-mobile’s service, and a parody of Obama’s “Change” slogan was most likely included without a thought of race issues. I doubt that most Japanese people would even understand how a pink-faced grey monkey native to Japan could be equated to African people.3

A newspaper article does not leave enough room to discuss in depth the complexity of the Japan and racism problematic. But what Mumisa overlooks is that, even if they were accorded “honorary white” status in Apartheid-era South Africa, the Japanese are not white. Japan’s historical experience of racism is both as victims of European and American racism and as colonisers and perpetrators of racism against other Asians, especially Chinese and Koreans. The US had its “Oriental Exclusion Act”, interned its citizens of Japanese ancestry, and waged racist “war without mercy” against Japan, Korea and Vietnam. My own mother was denied a visa to Australia in the 1970s. The Japanese have been both victims and perpetrators of racism. Another aspect of this complexity, which Mumisa fails to mention is that in the late 19th and early 20th century, Japan was seen as a champion of the non-white world by some Indian and Burmese nationalists, anti-colonial liberation movements in the Malay world and Middle East and by elements of the movement for racial equality in the US. The first attempt to enshrine racial equality in international law was by the Japanese delegation to the Versailles Summit. Japan wanted the preamble to the League of Nations founding treaty to state that all races were equal, but this was blocked by the “white” powers. These are well-known historical facts, so one wonders why Mumisa paints a one-sided picture of a Japan that imports and imitates Western racism. Is it ignorance or a determination to misrepresent?

Japan is by no means unique in having its share of racists, but more importantly, Dr. Kanazawa is an individual with certain objectionable views. He happens to be Japanese, but he does not necessarily hold his views by virtue of his ethnicity. Yet this is what Mr. Mumisa claims when his text moves from an essentialist attack on Japanese culture as such to state that the individual Kanazawa represents Japanese racism:

Nowhere is this more evident than in Satoshi Kanawaza’s work at the London School of Economics where he has been reproducing and disseminating medieval and early modern Japanese views about blacks and women through the new medium of evolutionary psychology.

This is where Mumisa commits the category error of equating being Japanese with being a racist and misogynist. Kanazawa may be all three things, but is he a racist and misogynist because he is Japanese? And is this not itself a racist argument?

Another question is the “essential” Japaneseness of Dr. Kanazawa and the dubious theories he peddles. He is a reader in management at the London School of Economics. He received his Ph.D. in sociology from the University of Arizona in 1994 and has, as far as I have been able to establish, never held an academic position in Japan. Judging from his publication record, the “gateway drug” to his life of abusing harder, Darwinian, theory was rational choice theory and structural functionalist sociology. Along with the pioneer of sociobiology, Westermarck, Kanazawa proudly parades Talcott Parsons, Bronislaw Malinowski and Robert Merton as his intellectual grandfathers, his “father” being his Ph.D. supervisor Michael Hechter.4

Anybody familiar with Japanese intellectual history, and especially the social sciences in the 20th and 21st centuries, will know that it has mainly been Marxist and Weberian in orientation, sensitive to historical and cultural particularity and inherited a certain anti-positivist tendency from the mainly German intellectual currents it engaged most strongly with – Weber’s interpretive sociology, neo-Kantianism, Lukacsian historicist Marxism and the “fateful encounter” (Heidegger) with phenomenology and existentialism. Kanazawa is far from a typical Japanese social scientist, and this is underlined by the fact that he works abroad and publishes in English. Where the German and Japanese traditions have been idiographic in orientation, Kanazawa is much closer to contemporary Anglo-American and historically French (Destutt de Tracy, Comte among others) ambitions for a cumulative, unitary science of society and nature. As he is atypical of the Japanese social science profession, was educated and works outside Japan, the source of his views is more likely to be that he is one of “Helena’s cronies” (a colleague of the neo-Darwinist star Helena Cronin) rather than his Japanese ethnicity. The real problem is not Japan but positivism and neo-Darwinism in the social sciences, of which the LSE is the main propaganda centre.

To argue that he is “reproducing and disseminating medieval and early modern Japanese views” and to imply that he is a racist and misogynist because he conforms to Mumisa’s stereotype of what the Japanese are essentially like is mistaken. Dr. Kanazawa’s ideas are very British and represent one of the most influential streams in recent Anglophone thought, i.e. the re-application of Darwinian evolutionary theory to society and culture. Rather than waste half his article on showing how his Japanese culture makes Kanazawa a racist, Mumisa should have spent more energy on exactly why “the claims of evolutionary psychology rest on shaky empirical evidence, flawed premises, and unexamined political presuppositions.” By failing to pursue what is the real argument, and by arguing in the irresponsible way way he does, he undermines his own purpose. A person’s ideas are undoubtedly a product of historical circumstances. This goes for Kanazawa, Mumisa and myself. To understand and criticise a thinker must involve some consideration of the social and historical context, including culture and ethnicity. But one has to distinguish between relevant and irrelevant context. By emphasising Dr. Kanazawa’s Japanese ethnicity, explicitly misrepresenting Japanese culture and implicitly idealising the British culture that Kanazawa operates in, Mumia misses the point. I am not familiar with the rest of Mumia’s authorship, but just as there is very little of Japan in Kanazawa’s views, this article reflects an unthinking Eurocentrism and internalisation of the social evolutionism he opposes. There is little in it that seems to reflect South Africa or Islam, both of which are part of Mumisa’s biography. This is far from unusual. Like Dr. Kanazawa, he lives in Britain and works in one of that country’s elite universities. Intellectually, both are “brown sahibs”, and it is difficult not to be one in a post-colonial but still imperialist world. It may arguably be the Hegelian master-slave dialectic in operation.

My admired journalist Robert Fisk’s article  “Tea with Bin Laden” is a fast paced summary of his many years reporting on the Middle East and eating in huge variety of circumstances and with very different people. From a mourning Afhgan village father feeding chicken to the journalist, to the cigarrettes on the table by the King of Jordan. Food and drink as cultural, geographical and political markers. Fisk is offering us a narration of the meals as codes showing the social relations, hierarchies and values of the hosts and people sharing a meal, some of them in particularly difficult contexts. The meals he describes speak about the social events,  the values and knowledge of the  people sharing food. He shows how generous and caring with food people have been with him everywhere in the Middle East. Robert Fist  is telling the reader about the human aspect of all kinds of subjects he interviewed, from Bin Laden to Iranian security officers. Robert Fisk knows the fine tuning of how to share a meal and a conversation at a palace and in a cave .  He includes two recipes, one of tabbouleh and another one of falafel from the great food writer Claudia Roden.

Robert Fisk \”Tea with Bin Laden and other stories\“

Of course, Mary Douglas’  “Deciphering of a Meal”, came to my mind and I included a link to her great article below.

Mary Douglas “Deciphering a Meal”Mary douglas_deciphering meal

Then music and food are related, both satisfying emotions. Abjeez is a band of Iranian sisters from Sweden. Another day I will write on food and migration. Bye for now.

manbatohastam.html

Frankly, he does not seem to know much about the subtitling industry or the craft of subtitling. I will have a few words to say about it later, but I am too busy subtitling today.

For some reason or other, WordPress does not let me upload the audio file. In the meantime, you can listen to the interview here:

www.lopez-steffensen.co.uk/VN00007-20100520-1450.amr

Recent media reports of Danish police brutality brought back memories of my student days in “wonderful Cop-enhagen”. Some days ago, the police there arrested almost a thousand mostly peaceful and law-abiding marchers and were only able to charge a dozen with any offences. All had their hands tied and were held for four hours on a bitterly cold street and forced to wet themselves. Judging from reports in the British media, the brutality of the Danish police seems to have surprised some foreign journalists and climate activists. A lady from the Philippines was shocked that they were as bad as or worse than the police back home. I cannot say if they are better or worse than their Philippine counterparts, but it is my experience that they are far more prone to arbitrary and racially motivated harassment than London’s Metropolitan Police. Observing the streets of Copenhagen and those of London, they also generally seemed more brutal and intimidating. The expectation that the Danish police should be gentler than other police forces is testimony to the strong power of a false general image the country enjoys abroad. In spite of the mainstreaming of aggressive nationalism with racist overtones since the 2001 elections, the 2005 cartoon crisis, confrontation in the Arctic and an increasingly militaristic and pro-US foreign policy, the idea of Denmark as a small, liberal internationalist and internally egalitarian and democratic country remains strong. Parts of the successfully projected ideological myth are true, but this was never the whole story. There is democracy and egalitarianism, but the other side of this is a tyranny of the majority and intolerance of cultural diversity. Nationalism was always stronger and more arrogant and xenophobic than in many other parts of western Europe. As for imperialism, I argued in an article published earlier this year that Danish international relations discourse operates as a “cloaking device”, which mysteriously makes 97% of the state’s territory invisible in international relations. This huge land and sea mass is the still colonised remnant of a once even vaster Danish empire.*

When I lived in Copenhagen between 1989 and 1994 I was regularly stopped and questioned by the police for no apparent reason. The same happened to male Iranian exile acquaintances. My belief then and now is that it was a matter of race. Many police officers seemed to have the prejudice that young men with darker hair and pigmentation than the majority were all up to no good. They would therefore stop them, demand identification and check if the bicycle they were riding had not been reported stolen. It is of course ironic that the descendants of Vikings and Vandals should hold such views. Many policemen are from Vendsyssel in Jutland, which takes its name from the ancient Vandal tribe.

I was stopped by the police every few months, sometimes to verify the legal ownership of my bicycle, other times just to check ID. This did not happen to my “normal-looking” friends. One summer night outside my home in Oehlenschlægersgade I was threatened with a beating next time they came across me. I was guilty of nothing and completely sober coming back from the shop across the road. I may have been irritated and sounded condescending, but I was polite in my exchange with them. Another time I was stopped cycling down Tagensvej. Not only my identity but those of my immediate family were checked as was the ownership of my bicycle. I was also stopped on Frederiksberg Alle and Gammel Kongevej.

On another occasion I walked past what must have been a fight between two groups of teenagers – one “immigrant”, the other “Danish”. This was on the corner of Vesterbrogade and one of the streets leading towards Istedgade. A shop window was smashed, nobody seemed injured, and four or five youths in black bomber jackets fled the scene as the police arrived. Black jackets were the uniform of the racist gangs of the time. The police made no attempt to chase the young fascist-looking men but started questioning the others and took them away in their cars.

Outside Copenhagen I was sometimes stopped by police up to 25 kilometres from the Danish-German border. They drove in unmarked cars and seemed generally to approach foreign-looking pedestrians in border towns and villages by shouting at them in English. At night they shone powerful lights at you, and as they tended to drive in unmarked vehicles it was quite intimidating. You did not know before they shouted “Stop! Danish police!” that it was not some psychopathic killer in a Volvo. They often seemed disappointed that they had not caught an illegal migrant. Their response to being spoken to in “better” Danish than their own (more educated and middle class) was often hostility. A person who was not expected to speak Danish responding politely in a social dialect considered superior to their own may have been unsettling. Often the response to the unfamiliar and unclassifiable is aggression. Sadly, a racially “alien” person who neither speaks no Danish nor speaks with a foreign or working class accent seems to fall outside the sociological imagination of many Danish police officers. Ironically, there was probably fear on both sides because of their inability to deal with a person who fell outside their established categories. I was afraid of what they might do to me, and they were disturbed by and afraid of an unclassifiable stranger. In Britain, on the other hand, not many would be unsettled by a Gujarati or Jamaican who sounds no different from any other English lawyer or academic. It is a sad reflection of the state of Denmark and the intersections of race, ethnicity and class. Perhaps there is “something rotten in the state of Denmark” as Shakespeare’s Hamlet famously said.

My most frightening border encounter was not with the Danish but the German police. It made me feel “fear and trembling”. It happened in the spring of 1989. I was walking on a street in the centre of Flensburg, some six or seven kilometres from the border. I had arrived by train from Munich via Hamburg and was going to catch a bus to Sønderborg in Denmark. An unmarked burgundy Volkswagen van drove onto the pavement, a man jumped through the side door, grabbed me and dragged me inside. The back of the van was full of electronic equipment, and the man who lifted me off the street and the driver were wearing police uniforms. They asked for my passport, which they inspected. They asked where I was going, complimented me on my German and let me go. They were polite once they were satisfied that I was Danish and going to my parents’ house across the border. Interestingly, they apologised when they had established my nationality and said something about having to do what they did because of the proximity of the border. The implicit message seemed to be that it is acceptable to bundle holders of certain other passports into vans and do who knows what to them. In other, and perhaps somewhat extreme, words Germans, Danes and some other nationalities are fully human and endowed with rights to be treated decently, but some other people do not have those rights.

Having had these experiences as a law-abiding Danish citizen who happens not to look like a Viking, I am not surprised by reports of excessive force by the Copenhagen cops. I imagine them to approach foreign demonstrators with the same prejudice as they approach their fellow citizens and permanent foreign residents who look Muslim, Greenlandic or anarchist – as fair game deserving a “røvfuld” (thrashing/beating) I was told in a North Jutland (Vandal) accent one summer night in Vesterbro.

I am aware that black men are far more likely to be targeted by London’s Metropolitan Police than any other sociological category. I am also aware that the police force has been officially described as “institutionally racist”, but this is in itself testimony to the relatively more liberal nature of British political discourse. In spite of the dominance of an increasingly unpleasant nationalism with racist elements, an unresolved colonial history and creeping illiberalism, most Danes seem to think that racism and imperialism are other people’s problems, namely countries like Britain, France and the US. My experience since 1994 in London is that I have never been stopped and questioned by police on the street. When I have had to speak to members of the police force, they have always been professional and polite, and I have not felt any hostility or suspicion due to my looks or origin outside the British Isles.

Police forces are by definition violent and repressive. They are the agency charged with exercising legitimate(d) violence within the territory of the state. The British police are no exception to this, and there are clearly also problems of abuse of power, disproportionate violence, racism and religious prejudice. Even so, at least in my experience, they are a lot more civilised than their Danish colleagues, and the British media and political system openly discuss problems with policing. These are some of the reasons I prefer life in London to Cop-enhagen.

* Steffensen, Kenn Nakata “Denmark’s invisible empire: The politics of translating the Danish constitutional order”. in Brett Epstein (ed.) Northern lights: Translation in the Nordic countries. Oxford: Peter Lang, 2009