Core Warrior Values

Like military intelligence, it is an oxymoron, though not devoid of (unintended?) resonances.

Core Warrior Values.

Isn't it a wonderfully macho phrase? Staunch. Robust. Muscular. Just look at those rippling core warrior values. Cor.

Why 'Warrior'? Why not 'Soldier'? Or 'Military'?

The word choice will have been deliberate.
Somebody thought about it, probably more than one somebody.
A public relations officer somewhere mulled it over, showed it round the office. Asked their manager, "Hey. What do you think? Warrior? Or Soldier? I wondered about 'Military' but - meh - it just doesn't have the right ring to it. Too stodgy. Too organisational."
Maybe they even did a focus group.

Warrior. Not Soldier.

Perhaps 'soldier' also had too much of that organisational reek. 'Soldiers' follow orders, do what they're told. They permit their autonomy to be erased. They consent to be reduced to cogs within a very particular kind of machinery. That's not nearly as cool as being a 'warrior.' The term 'warrior' lends itself to associations with nobility, with heroism.

And also, 'soldier' might lead to further inconvenient questions. Like "But were they not being cog-like then, when they murdered that toddler?" and "But weren't they just 'completing their mission' when they shot that man in the wheelchair?"

It might lead us to the conclusion recently drawn by the peerless Gary Younge that "These atrocities are not contrary to the ethics of this particular occupation but the natural and inevitable consequence of it." As he said in the same article "This is what occupation is; this is what occupation does."

Let's look at the phrase holistically for a second: "Core Warrior Values."

What are they? Well the PR machine would have it that they're about things like not killing civilians (or at least not killing the conspicuously unarmed ones, unless you have to hand an adequate supply of shovels and AK47s with which to appropriately outfit your victims. It remains advisable, however, to remember that no matter how many shovels you lay down beside that little pre-schooler's corpse, the total effect is always going to lack a certain verisimilitude). In other words -- well, for all the obvious reasons, 'core warrior values' training is not going to be about persuading warriors to act decently. At best it's an effort to persuade them to refrain from the most egregious forms of indecency in those situations where discovery and publicity is likely.

But like so many of these resonant phrases, 'core warrior values' turns truth on its head. Up is down. In is out. Speech is silence. War is peace.

If you want to know about core warrior values, go ask the Sabine women (and wasn't it just too cute for words how that worked out?) Go ask the inhabitants of any of a wide array of towns and cities after the Mongols came. Or those from Constantinople just after the Fourth Crusade. Or the estimated 12, 000 Jews who died in the Rhine Valley, killed during the First Crusade by Crusaders en route to Jerusalem. Ask those who fled to al-Aqsa mosque what those crusaders did on arrival. I suspect they would prove quite informative about what -- traditionally -- have been 'core warrior values.'

Evidently, it's a tradition embraced with some enthusiasm by the U.S. military and their (I'm not quite sure what the right word should be. Colallies? Allonies? Coalitionies? Colonition? I think that last might be my favourite) Colonition.

And as for 'Core?'

It could mean 'hard' -- I suspect that was what that PR officer was going for. Like 'the solid unshakeable core.' Or 'hard-core.'

But I find myself thinking of a different core that's kind of squishy and surrounded by something even squishier (maybe even a bit mouldy in places -- not green or black mould like you get on bread, but that white, powdery-looking stuff that collects on the particularly brown, almost liquidy-soft spots like mini-snow-drifts). The whole thing smelling somewhat fermented. Maybe a bit vinegary. A bit like cider, come to think of it.

The Use of Walls

Living in that particular island, one became accustomed to being bounded. There, to your left, was the Pacific Ocean stretching all the way to Chile. Over the Alps, to your right, the Tasman Sea beat upon those black iron sands. It is true that from the tip of the North Island, island hopping was barely possible (certainly people had made that trip in reverse, but Kupe’s epic voyage from Hawaiiki is beyond the means of most to emulate, even with different destinations in mind). Erewhon is a long way from anywhere.

The water is a wall. A flat, final frontier stretching far beyond the curvature of the earth.

It is a safe, politically stable place. Occasionally, nevertheless, standing on that windswept beach in a cold Southerly and staring at that horizon, the thought might drift across your mind: "If things go wrong, there is no escape." And it's true. Close the airports and suddenly those islands look a whole lot different. Claustrophobic. Isolated. Like a trap.

Given this context, land borders were quite the novelty. To go from one country to another, without getting on a plane and flying over salt water for several hours. Extraordinary. The best efforts of border control notwithstanding, there remained something liberating about those crossings into Canada.

But despite its land borders, the U.S. is (at least in my experience) an insular place. What happens beyond its borders -- and what it does beyond its borders -- is seen as remote and unreal. Peripheral to the main sweep of history, even when the events comprising that history take place in that mysterious and exotic elsewhere. How else can the Vietnam War (Invasion? Occupation?) be understood primarily as an American tragedy?

Possibly it's a size thing: the U.S. has a profusion of States, each with their names, geographical locations and State Capitals to keep tabs on and locate accurately on maps. Small wonder, perhaps, that the colonies, the client states, the occupied terrain, the savage barbarian lands to be subdued don't too get much of a look in. Or perhaps it is simply a hallmark of imperial powers. Was the U.K. similar during those long years when the sun never set on its bloodied-red dominions? Certainly other similarities are evident in the self-portraiture: both imagine themselves as benevolent, democratic, humane, agents of liberation and modernity. Exercisers of a civilising influence. Behold those wondrous railways! Witness those free elections!

But I have digressed.

Whatever the proximate cause, the U.S. is insular and desires to be more so. It aspires to insularity, to the condition of being an island. To that end it builds walls: huge monstrosities of walls complete with watchtowers, floodlights, sensors, ditches, barbed wire and armed vigilantes, linking a myriad legion of smaller walls, equally monstrous in intent, though not in scale. Barbed wire and concrete from sea to shining sea.

Firstly in the South, since fear of the Other is the engine driving this machine. Those folks up North -- despite their many languages and hues -- are for the most part still imagined as white English speakers a la that lovely lady who sang that song about her heart and that ship that sank -- and doesn't she do shows in Vegas now? (Yes, I know. So do you. But it is perception that matters here, for beyond the borders we enter the land of the unreal). Nevertheless, the North is unlikely to prove immune forever. Are there not already rumblings and grumblings about 'back doors' and 'soft laws?' Are not the gates already closing?

Then they shall be an island in truth. Isolated. Impassable. Free from undesirable influx, ingress, influence, incursion, invasion, immigration, innundation, infestation and insinuation. Quarantined. Safe. Secure. Invulnerable. Preserved from the foreign, saved from the alien, they shall be free to focus their attentions on the enemies within.

There's this thing about walls. Like knives, they cut both ways.

Those sensors cunningly placed to detect ingress can as easily detect egress.
It is a very simple matter to direct the floodlights inwards.
From the watchtowers one has 360 degree vision.
That concrete edifice, that extravagantly snarled barbed wire will tear the hands of those seeking exit just as painfully as it does those seeking entrance.
The ditch does not care which way people attempt to traverse it.

Just as it made no difference to that flat and final frontier (stretching all the way to Chile) whether it excluded or incarcerated.

Open the borders.
The world was never meant to be a prison.

Music for the People

Once upon a time I found a collection of G.B. Shaw’s music criticism in a second-hand bookstore. It only cost a dollar, so I bought it. I didn’t know much about Shaw – only that he’d written a play I very much liked (Arms and the Man) and that he had a reputation for a fierce wit. Well-earned. Leafing through the book I found gems such as:

“There are some experiences in life which should not be demanded twice from any man, and one of them is listening to the Brahms Requiem."

Happy are those composers, performers, musical impressarios and organisers of choral festivals who did not happen to be living and working during his tenure as a music critic, for he was that most dangerous of creatures: an honest man. I took it home to read in more detail. After all, it was only a dollar. And at some point in the following days I found this:

“What we want is not music for the people, but bread for the people, rest for the people, immunity from robbery and scorn for the people, hope for them, enjoyment, equal respect and consideration, life and aspiration, instead of drudgery and despair. When we get that I imagine the people will make tolerable music for themselves, even if all Beethoven’s scores perish in the interim.”

I was training to be a musicologist at the time – in other words preparing for a life focused around ensuring that scores – Beethoven’s and others – don’t perish, literally or figuratively.

I typed out Shaw’s words, printed them off and propped them up on top of my monitor. The rest of that term, I used to glance up at them occasionally, while I wrote about fourteenth-century motets, or – yes— Beethoven’s approach to form. But whether or not I looked at that piece of paper, it looked at me. After that term I don’t remember what happened to it: perhaps it was lost or discarded when I moved. It no longer mattered by then: Shaw’s accusation, his question, was in my head every time I set finger to keyboard or pen to paper.

I fought him. Every day for more than six years, I fought. I accused, I denied, I contradicted, justified and rationalised, weaved, dodged, ducked and dived with the best of them. For though I was an economic emigrant, money was not my only motive. And I had something to lose: I had left a lot of people and all the places I knew, to pursue this particular future.

The opening salvos in that long war of attrition were sadly predictable.

“How dare you, George?” (he just hated being called George, so I called him George on every possible occasion – Georgie Porgie if I were feeling particularly vindictive), I said between clenched teeth, “How. Dare. You. Judge. By what possible right? You –a writer of clever social comedies for the leisured classes – yourself a music critic! You are a complete hypocrite. Shame on you.”

“What we want,” he replied with infuriating calm, “is not music for the people, but bread for the people, rest for the people, immunity from robbery and scorn for the people, hope for them, enjoyment, equal respect and consideration, life and aspiration, instead of drudgery and despair. When we get that I imagine the people will make tolerable music for themselves, even if all Beethoven’s scores perish in the interim.”

But this time, I heard what had been there in those words the first time too. Accusation? Yes. Perhaps. But self-accusation in equal measure. And whereas he was dead, I was still alive.

“But George.” I said after some pause. “This isn’t my fault. Really. It isn’t. I did not invent Empires. I did not make the munitions. I didn’t go soldiering. I did not build the barbed wire borders. The thumb screws, the hoods, the exposed wires, those prison cells with grated drains? – these were not of my construction. The maquiladoras? Not of my manufacture. I have not grabbed land in the Taranaki, or anywhere else for that matter. In the bigger scheme of things I am innocent: there are no flies on me. I am not to blame for sexism, for racism, for xenophobia, for homophobia, for imperialism, for any of that. Why then should I not live my life in peace and quiet, doing something which – after all – does not cause anyone any particular harm? There are many far worse things I could choose to do.

“What we want,” he replied, rootling through my well-stocked fridge, rummaging through my full cupboards and wardrobe, casting a sceptical eye over my over-burdened bookcase and peering out my dorm window out over the peaceful snowbound town, “is not music for the people, but bread for the people, rest for the people, immunity from robbery and scorn for the people, hope for them, enjoyment, equal respect and consideration, life and aspiration, instead of drudgery and despair. When we get that I imagine the people will make tolerable music for themselves, even if all Beethoven’s scores perish in the interim.”

I had little reply. The point was clear enough.

Truth be told, those opening salvos were brief. A week? Two weeks max. And from there, Georgie and I settled down in our respective trenches for a long slow war of attrition. The weapons of choice? Justification. Rationalisation. Prevarication.

“Hey George,” I shouted across No-Man’s Land, “I teach people – students, yeah? That’s useful isn’t it? And music can be political and we need to know how that works don’t we?”

But George was having none of it. He just sat there, hunkered down in his trench, darning his socks, looking smug. “What we want –” he began to call back –

“Yeah, yeah. Whatever. Shut up already.”

I told George to ‘Shut up’ most days for a good few years, but he just didn’t seem to do so. And in that time I came up with any number of variants on the general theme, but the answer stayed the same.

“Hey Georgie” I yelled much later, thinking that maybe this time I’d discovered a devastating new tactic that would keep him quiet once and for all, “Look at this – I’m doing all this union work. Lots of it – oodles of it. That makes it ok, right? I can keep on with the music thing if I’m doing stuff like this the rest of the time, can’t I?”

He didn’t even bother opening his mouth. He just raised an eyebrow from across No-Man’s-Land and even at that distance I could see he was going to give me one of those Looks.

It was a long slow war: in the end it was a relief to lose.

The more I tried to justify what I was doing, the more my deeds required justification.

The more I tried to give reasons, the more they seemed like rationalisations.

And the thing about both justifications and reasons is that sooner or later, they run out. About six years in, I found myself one day with nothing left. There was nothing more I could say to Shaw's words.

“Yes,” I was finally forced to concede, “That is what we want. And yes, if we have that, people will make tolerable music for themselves, even if . . .”

It was the first moment of peace I’d known for a long time, that moment when I realised I couldn’t be a musicologist after all.

(Though to an external observer it might have seemed that nothing changed, or rather, not immediately. I still finished (most of it was already written by then, after all – and figuring out what one cannot do is not the same as discovering what one can) but what usually serves as one’s introduction to a field became, to all intents and purposes, my farewell.)

It’s not that I sleep better now exactly, but what keeps me sleepless is not that particular angst, not that particular maze of justification. It’s not that I’m out of the woods, either – but it is true the trees do seem sometimes a little less entangling. So there’s something I want to say which is well overdue:

Hey Bernard. Thanks. A thousand thanks. And I’m sorry that I called you names.

Touring the Archipelago

It’s true. I was – what’s that word? Tail-gating? Band-wagoning? Jumping on the band wagon. That’s it. I’d seen the “This blog is anti-torture” logo a few places around the Eegian Neighbourhood and so I signed up. (Now I just have to figure out how to do the Tapir thing)

It’s quite easy to sign up – all you have to do is click the link and follow the instructions. The harder thing is writing something about torture. They’re after more bloggers, so if you’re even slower to jump on a bandwagon than me, click that ‘Join Us’ link just under the logo.

I suspect I’m not the first to observe that one of the side-benefits this idea is that it exposes you to a lot of other good bloggers out there who write on – well, all manner of things political actually, and in all manner of styles.

So let me take a leaf out of Nanette’s book and take you on a very abbreviated tour of an extensive archipelago.

First stop, Kel’s The Osterley Times. It’s primarily a news blog, focusing on U.K. and U.S. stories from a U.K. left perspective. If you want to get a sense of what’s going over this way, this is a great starting point -- here is an example of what I like about it.

“Most reasonable people can conclude that any Israeli footage taken from a drone that shows people sunbathing on a beach is unlikely to have been taken whilst that beach was, according to Israel's own timeline, being shelled.”

Kel – you have mastered the art of dry understatement.

South Africa has been on my mind this week for both personal and political reasons – well, I can write about the political ones anyway. It’s 30 years now since schoolchildren in Soweto took to the streets to protest against the use of Afrikaans as the medium of instruction in their (chronically and deliberately underfunded) schools. (There’s a great Guardian article by David Johnson on this). Over at Crossing the Line: Life in Occupied Palestine , Christopher Brown has a powerful account of the ways in which the apartheid regime used sleep deprivation as a form of torture.

Meanwhile at My Occupied Territory; thoughts in a space, moi has provided an informative and excellent account on the extraordinary rendition of Maher Arar, a Syrian-Canadian citizen, rendered to Syria where he was imprisoned and tortured for thirteen months.

He says of his ‘occupied territory’ that:

although i have occupied this blog, i do not plan on enforcing this occupation through concrete barriers that will prevent visitors from traveling though this site. Nor will I use security check points to make sure that individuals have the right nationality/race/ethnicity in order to comment.

Grin. Bravo.

Finally (well I said it was abbreviated) Al-Baal has a tale to tell (June 12th so you have scroll down a little) about a Swedish controversy over the naming of wines. Enjoy.

On Solidarity

Be warned. I'm not sure that I'd call this an optimistic diary. `Somewhat bleak' might be a better weather forecast.
When I was in high school, a good friend introduced me to Crisis. It was the first comic I ever read. I used to wait for him to get his copy every month so that I could shamelessly borrow it before he'd even finished reading. Before I found Crisis, I had no idea that comics could be something other than super-trashy stories about super-macho heroes and super-scantily-clad screaming (though never ever shrill) women. Shows what little I knew - those were the glorious years of the Hernandez Brothers Love and Rockets series, and Neil Gaiman's Sandman, not to mention his ethereal and utterly remarkable Black Orchid .

I first encountered Pastor Niemoller's famous words on the back of one of those Crisis issues. You all know the ones:


First they came for the Jews
and I did not speak out
because I was not a Jew.
Then they came for the Communists
and I did not speak out
because I was not a Communist.
Then they came for the trade unionists
and I did not speak out
because I was not a trade unionist.
Then they came for me
and there was no one left
to speak out for me.


For a long time I found those words very powerful. If you had asked me why I thought politics mattered, I might well have paraphrased Niemoller. If you asked me what I thought solidarity was, the odds are pretty damn good that I would have pointed you to the back of that comic. "Hang together," I would have said, "Or you will hang separately."

But then I found that all too often, you will hang separately anyway.

I still greatly admire Niemoller. But I've come to harbour some serious doubts about these famous words as a prescription for solidarity. Not recently - my doubts been stewing away quite merrily for some years now. But it would be fair to say that lately they've come bubbling up to the surface again.

At their crudest, Niemoller's words invoke a kind of self-interest. "Defend others," they proclaim, "if you want to be defended in your turn." I am not suggesting that such self-interest is malicious: it's a rare motive that is not mixed. But I think this crude paraphrase offers some clues about why we end up hanging separately.

In our barbed wire world, equality is the rarest of commodities. All of our relations are power relations, predicated on inequality and our efforts to bolster or undermine it. And let me add some bluntness to my earlier crudeness. Those with power often perceive that they can afford to betray those without power, because they don't believe that they'll ever actually be so vulnerable as to require the defence of the powerless. The citizen does not in her heart of hearts believe that she will ever need to hide in the basement of an illegal immigrant. The captain of industry does not imagine that a pauper shall keep him from starvation. In the U.S. and the U.K., the Christian woman does not envision a time when a Muslim woman will shield her from religious persecution. The imperialist does not dream that he shall be saved from subjugation by a colonial subject. And frankly, those perceptions are usually accurate. After all, the ability to betray with personal impunity is an integral part of what having power and privilege is all about.

Interpreted as a prescription for solidarity based on enlightened self-interest, I think Niemoller's words assume an equality that is seldom present. Read more literally, they explain why we too often hang separately.

But I'm not done with Niemoller's words just yet.

I was at a union stewards' meeting soon after the U.S. attacked Iraq. By that time, stewards' meetings had become something I forced myself to attend. Climbing up those stairs to the office/meeting room, I'd feel my mask fall into place. You know the one? The mask you put on because you're going to a place where you know that you are despised because of who you are and what you believe, and you don't want to give the bastards the pleasure of your pain. After four years of sitting in that room of mostly white, mostly U.S. faces, I had learned to keep my mask very firmly in place.

One of the items at the meeting involved a resolution condemning the U.S. invasion. Nothing that would make much practical difference, but a kind of belated `going on record' to express support for anti-war groups in the area. There was a round robin `discussion.' "Unions are not political organisations," one person said. "we should not be endorsing or opposing this sort of thing." Another volunteered that "This won't make any practical difference, so we shouldn't bother talking about it." But the argument that received the most attention went something like "We shouldn't condemn the U.S. invasion of Iraq, because that would show a lack of solidarity with union members who support the invasion."

So where does solidarity end and complicity begin?

And if self-interest, enlightened or not, will not serve as a basis for solidarity, then what can replace it?

Apologia

Another old diary -- this one's from BT, June 10, 2005.

On Voice and Anonymity

Anonymity is one of the few non-violent tools available to the relatively weak for use in improving their circumstances.
It is the veil that liberates. It allows at least some few who would otherwise be voiceless to come to voice, to tell their stories, to describe the world as it appears from their vantage point. Sometimes it allows a cat to look at a king – or if that is too optimistic – to at least think out loud about looking at a king, to speculate upon the nature of that glorious visage.

That is why journalists interviewing children seeking asylum who have had to go into hiding do not reveal their names.

It’s also why the Samaritans doesn’t require your identity before they’ll listen to you.
And it’s why, at least in some places, you can report hate incidents anonymously.

One of the beauties of blogism is that it can allow people who are relatively powerless (not absolutely powerless mind you, but relatively powerless) to come to voice without the mediating influence of journalists – be it benevolent, malicious or merely indifferent. And we must recognise that for some, this coming to voice is possible only because of anonymity.

The sixteen-year-old kid living in FredPhelpstown Central who is questioning her sexuality is more likely to bring her voice, her thoughts, into the public sphere if she can do so without the prospect of additional harrassment, violence and the small but not insignificant risk of death that would be attendant on the revelation of her identity.

For the relatively powerful, one’s name is one’s protection. It confers authority, it establishes their credentials. Sometimes it even grants a kind of impunity. For the relatively powerless, however, one’s name is often one’s greatest vulnerabilty. The vulnerabilities associated with one’s name are – to give one salient example – why refugees often lack identity documents.

It may be tempting to say that those who write anonymously just lack the courage to put their names to their words. To say that they simply need to learn to stand up for themselves or else, shut up or change what they say. I’m suspect most of us have seen such claims made in a wide variety of online and offline situations.

My rather brutal response would be: ‘Go tell that to Sophie Scholl.” As it happens, one cannot. She and others in her circle of friends were beheaded soon after their identification. One might, I suppose, make the claim that her interrogation and show trial provided her with a valuable opportunity to learn to stand up for herself: it’s not a case I’d care to make myself. Personally, I would rather she had lived on, along with her brother and friends to continue their work in cowardly anonymity.

Of course, her case is an extreme example. The claim that that it is isolated or exceptional, however, is difficult to sustain in our barbed wire world: Sophie Scholl merely inhabits a position near to one end of a particular continuum of political vulnerability.

In light of current events, I think it would also be useful to remember that even those who are relatively powerful in one context, may nonetheless be relatively powerless in another.

Let me digress a little (or a lot).
There’s an opera by Verdi called I Vespri Siciliani

Verdi was on a bit of a nationalist kick when he wrote it (but was Verdi ever not on a nationalist kick, she says, rolling her eyes?). It’s a political opera about a French invasion of Sicily. In the opening scene we see subjugated Sicilians being menaced by French soldiers, with what – at least in performance – usually involves thinly veiled threats of sexual violence against Sicilian women. Rape has been an established weapon in war for a long time now.

And indeed sexual violence – or more particularly, the ways in which rape is used simultaneously as weapon of war and as justification for war – is one of the main themes that runs through this deeply cynical opera. (At least I read it as deeply cynical)

After a bit of a setup, in which we are told about Our Noble Heroine Elena and the tragic death of her brother, she is introduced to the stage and vows to be avenged for her brother’s death. At the same time, she first encounters the French military, one of whom – an obnoxious individual by the name of Roberto tells her to sing for him. (Again, the staging usually makes plain the pleasure demanded from her voice is sexual)

She refuses. He threatens her with his ‘sword.’ Elena is a pragmatic woman and so she sings.

The other Sicilian women on stage watch intently.

Now this is an important moment: Elena is the most powerful Sicilian woman there is. If she can be raped with impunity (even figuratively) even while wearing mourning for her brother – what is there that cannot be done to those Sicilian women with less power? Whether those women liked Elena is beside the point. The reason they watch so intently what becomes of her is that whatever is done to her can so much more easily be done to them. After all, Elena is a powerful woman.

The purpose of analogy is not to assert identity, but rather to delineate points of similarity and difference. Nevertheless, while I think it important not to confuse that rare beast, solidarity, with the more pragmatic act of supporting someone for reasons of expediency, there may still be occasions when that pragmatic support is both right and necessary.

To Stay or Go through a Foreign Pair of eyes

It’s a perennial argument, one of those old conundrums. An evil regime comes to power. What does one do? Go into exile? Stay and wait it out? Stay and resist? Some infinitely complex combination of all three? Are those who leave cowards who are giving up? Are those who stay complicit, responsible for propping up the regime? And what about those who cannot leave?

“Come on and let me know, Should I stay or should I go?”

After November 2004, it was an argument that folks from the U.S. had quite a bit. As someone who lived there for a long time, and as someone who’s not terribly good at staying put, it’s one I have a stake in.

Many of my close friends in the U.S. are non-nationals. When I think of them, it's with a low-grade anxiety, a nagging fear and a sense of threat, as though a door were slowly, almost imperceptibly, closing on them. Increasingly I feel that same worry and concern for my friends who are U.S. nationals.

I think that the presumption that those who leave are giving up, abdicating their responsibilities, abandoning their brethren, or turning their backs on political activism, is deeply mistaken. I think that presumption weakens our ability to resist the Bush regime by blinding us to the fact that all politics - even the most local of politics - is ultimately global in its implications.

We live in a world where `all the planet's little wars are joining hands.' (apologies to The The )

But so are all the world's little struggles for human rights.

I don't think it matters where you push back, so long as you push hard. It doesn't matter to me whether you want to fight primarily on the terrain of anti-war activism, or ending torture, or anti-racism, or electoral reform, or combating homophobia and heterosexism, or opposing sexism or any of a number of other human rights issues – so long as you do so in a way that recognises that all these struggles are linked.

Similarly, the geographic region of the planet that you happen to live while you're pushing back doesn't matter to me either. It does, however, matter to me that you get to choose where to live: one of the ways that I push back is by supporting freedom of movement.

It is true that only U.S. citizens vote in U.S. elections, but they don't have to be in the U.S. to do so.

And they sure as hell don’t have to be in the U.S. to take part in struggles for human rights. These are global struggles: they are not national.

Say it three times fast - the struggle to get rid of Bushco and his supporters is international not national. Even within U.S. borders. Maybe you can't tell just by looking around you, but I'll guarantee that the next time you're out on a big protest march some of the people you're marching side by side with will be foreigners. That was true in 2004: it is even more so now.

Let me tell you a story.

Shortly before I left the United States, I was talking with an old friend from a sophisticated, vibrant, thriving, lively metropolis - one of the greatest cities of the world. I'm from a small, provincial, little city on a small sparsely populated island. Both have their beauties, both have their uglinesses. But if we'd stayed put and not ventured into the wider world, we'd never have become friends.

We're both long-time foreigners and activists – well all our adult lives, anyway. We were talking about why he had decided to stay and why I was leaving (or rather why I was glad to be leaving, since leaving for me had rather little to do with choice).

He quoted John Lennon, "If I'd lived in Roman times, I'd have lived in Rome. Where else? Today America is the Roman Empire . . ."

And I thought about that for a bit. Neither of us were huge fans of empire. Indeed, several years earlier that John Lennon quotation had been a small part of why I had moved to `Rome.'

I answered, "Give me a lever long enough and a firm place to stand" or words to that effect.

And our conversation drifted on to other topics.

Perhaps because we'd both been foreigners for a long time and because we'd been through some rough fights together, there wasn't any talk of betrayal, or abdicating political responsibility, abandonment, or complicity. He didn't accuse me of giving up the fight. I didn't accuse him of propping up a military empire through his taxes.

I know I can count on him to be pushing hard in his corner of the world, whereever that may be at any time. I'm pretty damn sure he knows he can be counting on me to be doing the same in mine, wherever that may be at any moment.

Being a habitual foreigner is costly - I don't think it's the easy option some think. You end up missing a lot of people and being homesick for a lot of different places. I still see ghosts all the time - my good right eye tricks me into thinking I see old friends in places where I only have new friends. It's easy to be lonely. Everywhere is home and nowhere is home. Everything is transient and temporary. Contingent. And you never quite fit in, you never simply `belong.' Not even when you go back to the places you first came from. Always, you must answer questions about `where are you from?' - questions to which there are no longer any simple answers.

But the costs are also the prize. And the prize is that the old national allegiances don't fit any more. Because you have friends and allies strung out across the world like pearls, and your loyalties are to them and to the ideals that you share with them and these are the property and product of no single nation. And through them your loyalties are to the world - and not to the little patch of dust and earth where you happened by pure chance to be born.


Apologia:
This is a dusted off and tidied version of something I posted back at dKos on 1/4/05, when someone was being hauled through the coals for having the temerity to announce that he was emigrating.

This is what Complicity looks like

A web of collusion tethered to four continents, ensnaring the world: a secretive geography of fear.



It is a perverse reflection of the forced immobility of refugees. Those who flee torture are held paralysed in the static limbo of the detention centre, the temporary hostel, the holding pen. Those whom certain client states (doubtless for reasons of political expediency and the preservation of ‘special relationships’) consent to persecute are forced into flight. Not flight from torture but towards it. And – in some cases at least – they are not flown far. In the cautiously discrete words of Dick Marty, “a number of coherent and converging elements indicate that secret detention centres did indeed exist in Europe.” Dick Marty Council of Europe Parliamentary Assembly, Committee on Legal Affairs and Human Rights Alleged Secret Detentions and unlawful inter-state transfers involving Council of Europe Member States ( Draft Report Part II , June 2006, 1.8.23). It is thought that Rumania and Poland currently harbour secret CIA detention centres.

The chief-spider-in-charge officially began the weaving of this web in the mid-1990s. The programme was devised under Clinton by Michael Scheuer (who remained in the employ of the C.I.A. until November 2004) as a way of taking “terrorist suspects in foreign countries ‘off the streets’ by transporting them back to other countries, where they were wanted for trial, or for detention without any form of due process.” (Marty, 2.26)

Rendition. It’s a lovely word in its way, doubtless chosen with exquisite care. On its surface it’s merely another mealy-mouthed euphemism: kissing cousin to ‘collateral damage,’ ‘surgical strike’ and ‘shoot to incapacitate.’ But as Naomi Klein and others before her have observed, torture is predicated upon a ‘knowing / not knowing.’ It is a secret that is really no secret at all: a “semi-clandestine institution” (Sartre, “A Victory” Colonialism and Neo-Colonialism ). And herein lies the particular appropriateness of ‘rendition’ for it is a semi-clandestine word. Though bland enough on its surface, it bears the resonance of other meanings (albeit philologically distinct): to rend – to tear with violent force; to render – to extract (fat) by melting (meat).

And in selecting as his leitmotif the spider's web, Marty chose well. For even the process by which prisoners are ‘prepared’ with a ‘security check’ for ‘rendition’ bears a grotesque resemblance to the spider’s systematic entombment of its prey.

85. The general characteristics of this “security check” can be established from a host of testimonies as follows:

i. it generally takes place in a small room (a locker room, a police reception area) at the airport, or at a transit facility nearby.

ii. the man is sometimes already blindfolded when the operation begins, or will be blindfolded quickly and remain so throughout most of the operation.

iii. four to six CIA agents perform the operation in a highly-disciplined, consistent fashion – they are dressed in black (either civilian clothes or special 'uniforms'), wearing black gloves, with their full faces covered. Testimonies speak, variously, of “big people in black balaclavas”, people “dressed in black like ninjas”, or people wearing “ordinary clothes, but hooded”.

iv. the CIA agents “don’t utter a word when they communicate with one another”, using only hand signals or simply knowing their roles implicitly.

v. some men speak of being punched or shoved by the agents at the beginning of the operation in a rough or brutal fashion; others talked about being gripped firmly from several sides

vi. the man’s hands and feet are shackled.

vii. the man has all his clothes (including his underwear) cut from his body using knives or scissors in a careful, methodical fashion; an eye-witness described how “someone was taking these clothes and feeling every part, you know, as if there was something inside the clothes, and then putting them in a bag”.

viii. the man is subjected to a full-body cavity search, which also entails a close examination of his hair, ears, mouth and lips.

ix. the man is photographed with a flash camera, including when he is nearly or totally naked; in some instances, the man's blindfold may be removed for the purpose of a photograph in which his face is also identifiable.

x. some accounts speak of a foreign object being forcibly inserted into the man's anus; some accounts speak more specifically of a tranquiliser or suppository being administered per rectum - in each description this practice has been perceived as a grossly violating act that affronts the man’s dignity.

xi. the man is then dressed in a nappy or incontinence pad and a loose-fitting "jump-suit" or set of overalls; “they put diapers on him and then there is some handling with these handcuffs and foot chains, because first they put them on and then they are supposed to put him in overalls, so then they have to alternately unlock and relock them”.

xii. the man has his ears muffled, sometimes being made to wear a pair of "headphones"

xiii. finally a cloth bag is placed over the man's head, with no holes through which to breathe or detect light; they “put a blindfold on him and after that a hood that apparently reaches far down on his body” .

xiv. the man is typically forced aboard a waiting aeroplane, where he may be “placed on a stretcher, shackled”, or strapped to a mattress or seat, or “laid down on the floor of the plane and they bind him up in a very uncomfortable position that makes him hurt from moving”.

xv. in some cases the man is drugged and experiences little or nothing of the actual rendition flight; in other cases, factors such as the pain of the shackles or the refusal to drink water or use the toilet make the flight unbearable: “this was the hardest moment in my life”.

xvi. in most cases, the man has no notion of where he is going, nor the fate that awaits him upon arrival.

Marty, 2.7.1.85

Usually, what awaits them on arrival at that unknown destination is a secretive indefinite detention, profound isolation and torture.

Go.

Read the whole report It does not take long.

See for yourself the complicity of the colonies, the collusion of the client-states, set forth in calm judicious (though alas, not judicial) tones.

This is what solidarity looks like

If ever they did, they need no longer doubt whom they are or where they stand. The members of Education sans Frontières -- and many others -- have made their choice.

Spring has come and gone. A long and anxious summer is beginning.

On May 19th 2006 (though I suspect most had made their promises earlier) they vowed to hide and shelter school-children and college students whom French Interior Minister Nicolas Sarkozy had ordered to be rounded up and summarily deported in late June 2006. The basis of the planned deportations is the irregular status of the children's parents.

So now and through the coming weeks, all over France, families under threat of deportation will be meeting -- often for the first time -- with those who are going to shelter their children from the police and from the State. Plans are being laid. Spare rooms are being recurtained, attics and basements are being prepared. Indeed some are already in hiding.

Without doubt -- just as those who prepare to send their children into hiding with strangers must wonder 'Can I trust you?' -- those preparing shelter will find themselves considering their circumstances anew. "Whom among my friends and neighbours do I trust to not flap their mouth?" they must ask themselves. "Whom among my own child's friends knows how to keep silent?"

As they plan for contingencies (plans some will doubtless need as the imperative to recruit and organise volunteers necessitated public offers of shelter in some cases), they will be wondering about these questions in ways, perhaps, that they have not before. For it is one thing to trust one's neighbour with the house keys, to be confident that they will water the potplants and feed the cat while one is on vacation -- it is one thing even to trust them with one's own life. But it is something else to entrust another's. Some deep friendships will be forged this summer: inevitably, others will be broken.

So where do they stand then, these attic tidiers, these curtain purchasers, these basement redecorators?

With those who place water in dry places.
With Miep Gies.
With those who claim that these behaviours -- far from being heroic -- are merely the normal, civilised thing to do in the face of incivility.

As one put it, 'It is quite simple. They live in my road. Their kids go to the same school as my son. It's normal. It's the only thing to do.'"

The Tip of the Iceberg

I stated recently that there are now about 200 million of us who live outside the borders of the nation-state where we – by mere random chance – happened to be born.

(Well, actually in an over-optimistic (not usually one of my faults) and over-populous feat of misreading and mathmatical ineptitude, I actually said 200 000 million, but I’ve corrected that now. Mea culpa.)

I’m one of that 200 million.

Primarily, I’d categorise myself as an economic migrant with regular status – at least that’s what I am in my head. Technically though, mine has been a case of hopping from one non-immigrant visa to the next, with some country hopping thrown in for good measure. I started out as a (non)migrant in the U.S.: once it became impossible to remain there legally I became a (non)migrant in the U.K. At least my current visa offers a tenuous path to residency.

Obviously, migration is like everything else: mixed motives go with the territory and my motives were no exception. A big part of it was wanting to keep on studying the thing I loved most – which it took me a good seven years of struggle and moral angst to finally abandon in favour of something that – well, I would say it lets me sleep at night, but that’s a whole 'nother kettle of fish. Part of it was curiousity – wanting to see the heart of the Evil Empire up close and personal (and yes, in the time and place from whence I come, the United States was without doubt the Evil Empire. N.Z. is a client state but that doesn’t mean the populace likes it too much.) Part of it was peer pressure: most of my close friends had left already. Part of it was that leaving was – in many ways at least – the path of least resistance. Which is a bit odd if you think about it, given that emigration is almost always an experience of profound dislocation – and it certainly did turn out to be so in my case. But nevertheless, filthy lucre was up there somewhere very near the top of the list – not in the sense of a desire to earn millions but certainly in the sense of not wanting to worry about electricity bills and not being able to afford a doctor any more – and for that reason I shall always class myself as an economic migrant first and foremost.

Anyway, personal digressions and self-indulgence aside, I thought it might be interesting – especially in light of the excellent work Man Eegee and Migra Matters are doing around migration in the U.S. context to find out a bit more about the other 199 999 999. Where do we live? Why did we migrate? And who are ‘we’ anyway?

Well fortunately, the Global Commission on International Migration (GCIM) have been doing some work on answering some of these questions. There’s a lot there to disagree with as well as to agree with (at least if you're like me and have somewhat un-nuanced views on borders and the desirability of opening them forthwith), but it’s well worth the read.

Mostly likely though, they underestimate the count of undocumented migrants, so really, it’s 199 999 999+ of us.

‘We’ – and it’s one of the very few ‘we’s’ to which I shall lay unequivocal claim – are non-nationals. But if we were a nation, we would be the fifth most populous on Earth depending on that undetermined (but valued!) number of us who are ‘irregular.’

Still, we are only about 3% of the world's population in total or perhaps a little more.

Migration has often been thought of as a young man’s game, but almost half of us are women.

We come from everywhere and we go everywhere: the “distinction that has been made between country of origin, transit and destination” has become increasingly difficult to sustain” (GCIM, 5). In other words, you cannot escape us.

49 million of us live in Asia. 16 million of us live in Africa. 6 million of us live in Latin America and the Caribbean. The rest of us, if only by process of elimination, live in North America, Europe (that’s me!), Russia and the states of the former Soviet Union, the Middle East, Australasia and Oceania (and doubtless other places too that are not so easily categorised).

A few of us (like me) are educationally, economically and racially privileged: most of us are not.

About 20 million of us are refugees and most of that subset of us lead desperate lives indeed.

An awful lot of us are economic migrants and an awful lot of us send money ‘home.’ In terms of developmental impact that’s hugely important. Although the extent to which we have a home is questionable. Notions of ‘home’ are – in my, and in the experience of those very few of us for whom I feel entitled to speak – among the very first things to become problematic. It might be more appropriate to say that a lot of us send money to people whom we love or care for.

It’s sad but true that some of us are trafficked. Some of us are forced migrants. But slamming the door in our faces is no solution to this.

Whoever we are and whereever we are, we did not surrender our humanity the day we crossed the border. All too often – though this would be true even if it had been only one of us – we crossed the border because it was the only way we had to preserve our humanity.

And here’s the important bit – we migrants are only the iceberg’s tip. Like most icebergs, 90% lies below the waterline. For after all, be you the most stay-at-home person from the most stay-at-home family – still, most likely you have migrant ancestors and relatives, distant or near, migrant friends and colleagues, close or casual. (Were we a nation, we would after all be the fifth most populous on Earth.) So even if you have not yet yourself ventured out into that wider world, it has nonetheless most likely ventured towards you, smiling, with welcoming hand extended. Mostly likely, you, too, are part of diaspora. The question that remains is whether you will choose to claim it.

Open the borders.
The world was never meant to be a prison.

"The wide world is all about you: you can fence yourselves in, but you cannot for ever fence it out “ J.R.R. Tolkien, (b. Bloemfontein, S.A., 1892, d. U.K., 1973).