Caribbean mistakes

The Cuban president, Raul Castro, announced this week measures to reinforce the socialist nature of the Cuban revolution. The “experiment”, in the words of the Cuban rulers, will consist in letting some Cubans to offer haircuts or taxi services privately… Of course, we cannot call these measures “reforms”, said the Cuban finance minister, Marino Murillo, since there is nothing to “reform”. They amount to just an “improvement of the Cuban economic model”. We should not worry, because Mr. Murillo guarantees us that “this improvement is being considered carefully”, because, and it strikes me as odd nobody paid much attention to this part of the sentence, “we don’t have the right to make a mistake”. Good. No right to make a mistake.

It seems to me the mistake in Cuba is called “Communist regime”, and the experiment “socialist revolution”, which have crushed the lives and freedom of the Cubans for more than fifty years now.

You may think, “well, just another pronouncement from a despot. No big deal”. However, in this precise moment, while you are reading these lines, there are men and women dying in prison just because they demanded a change, peacefully, or called for freedom, or because they read something forbidden, or talked to the wrong person, or expressed his or her solidarity with the oppressed. And there are many other men and women lining up for hours to get the rationed, insufficient supply of calories from the government stores, the only ones available to the average Cuban. And many more who go to bed with fear and despair every night in this Caribbean prison called Cuba.

Ah, only a little mistake.

Photo: Havana, Cuba, 2009 © Michaelsdonovan

Implicit consent

“Dubai: Alleged victim of gang rape sentenced to one year in prison”, reads the newspaper headline. We’ve read it so many times. In most Arab and muslim countries, women who are sexually assaulted are nearly always victims of two consecutive crimes, and not just one: first, the men who rape them; then, the courts which condemn them to jail and/or to lashes for “enticing men to have sex with them”, “being in the pressence of men who are not family members”, engaging in “consensual sex”, or having an “extramarital relation”. Of course, none of the crimes commited on them ever deserve any justice or reparation worth of that name.

I won’t engage myself now in an easy condemnation of Islam as a whole, or even of certain extreme understandings of Islam. I am just thinking now, why these barbaric and widespread practices are not denounced by the muslim masses in the countries where they take place? I could hear the usual answer: we’re talking about very traditional and conservative societies, they never knew anything different, they don’t know any better. What about the more illustrated groups or the emerging middle class there ? Again, free speech, individual liberty and rule of law don’t exist in any of these countries, and criticizing well entrenched practices may be quite dangerous. Then, what do you say about muslim communities in the Western world? Why are they not denouncing these and other practices we all rightly associate with Islam? Information is not censored here, and is easily accesible; critique is valued and encouraged; freedom and different lifestyles can be compared to a life of oppression and tyrannical social hierarchies. Why we never, ever hear of significant campaigns in the Western democracies, lead by muslim organizations themselves? Why are there no ambitious, comprehensive and combative muslim strategies here to change this state of affairs? I’ve got an answer that, sadly, I don’t think I’ll reconsider in the short term: tacit and widespread approval.

It doesn’t matter most muslim people in a free society would somehow be lukewarm or non-supportive if asked about the well established violence in islamic sacred books, ruling elites and social structures alike against women and children, against dissenters male or female. The truth is they, as a collectivity living in a free society, as theoretically free citizens themselves, are not willing to stand up for freedom, thus voluntarily locking themselves up in the jail of tyranny, violence, indignity and hopelessness.

Photo: State Sanctioned Abuse, 2007 © Dude Crush

Taboo, dignity and purpose

A judge from Augsburg, in Germany, has forbidden Gunther von Hagens from showing a couple of corpses having sex in the exhibition opening this month in the city. Von Hagens, medical doctor and Professor, invented the plastination technique, which allows to preserve corpses and display them in different postures, something he has been doing for pedagogic purposes in a number of exhibitions around the world, which bear the title of Koerperwelten. The judge claims the composition with the bodies shows contempt for human dignity.

As it happens, the exhibition has been open during the whole Summer in Berlin, where it raised no controversy, and one has to wonder why this part “shows contempt for human dignity” and other bodies displayed in the same exhibition playing the saxophone or catching a rugby ball do not. Perhaps the judge was influenced by two widespread taboos which play a role here, those of sex and death. However, in this region of the world freedom of expression is a paramount social value, and prohibiting an exhibition is a serious legal decision, which here would only be justified if it actually showed “contempt for human dignity”. It seems this is not the case.

The judge appears not to have taken into account the pedagogical purpose of the Koerperwelten exhibitions, which apparently has not offended the thousands of visitors that attend them each year in different countries and continents, which surely will have different perspectives regarding the representation of death. I attended one of these exhibitions years ago in Berlin and found it fascinating and very interesting. To judge by their attitude, the hundreds of other visitors that day had similar feelings.

In matters of freedom of expression, the rule should be “everything is allowed except…”, and the list of exceptions should be a minimum one, aimed at preserving human dignity, yes, but considering the matter on a case by case basis, and always assessing from an ethical point of view the purposes of the author and the coherence of means and ends. For instance, should we allow the display of explicit images of forced sex betwen adults and children, or of a human execution, devoid of any context? I would say we should not. Should one be free to show those images in, say, a movie, a book, an exhibition, etc., maybe not explicitly, in a meaningful context and with a purpose most would deem ethically acceptable? I would say one should.

I am well aware of the many caveats raised my choice of terms -”ethically acceptable”, “assesing purposes”, “coherence”-, and that this clearly is a moral minefield. However, a liberal system of values -the one we should cherish in our liberal societies- should hold freedom as its highest moral tenet, devising criteria -as morally sound as possible- aimed at making the list of exceptions to this rule a minimum one. Otherwise, it is all paternalism and censorship.

On a final note, I must admit that even the extreme examples I gave a couple of paragraphs before are not very useful to establish the moral boundaries of what we can legitimately display in the public realm. A few years ago, I attended an art exhibition in the P.S.1 museum in New York, which showed an excerpt of an old black and white movie in one of the rooms. In the film we could see a group of white hunters aboard an helicopter, flying above a tropical forest and shooting people with their rifles - apparently, members of an indigenous tribe, who run scared in all directions. Each time they hit one of them, the hunters would celebrate it blatantly. Brutal fictional images, I thought. However, these images became breathtakingly disgusting when minutes after I read the movie was not fictional: it was part of a recovered footage of real human hunting in the Amazon forest in the 70s, hunting for pleasure, as in a normal sport. Perhaps the judge of Augsburg would have censored this exhibition if it had taken place in his city, and for the very same reasons that lead him to censor part of von Hagens´ exhibition, but in doing so, he would have served very poorly the cause of human dignity, for the message the artist wanted to convey when showing this real movie -the radical, unthinkable and utmost inhumanity we could express towards our fellow individuals- reached this visitor deeply, and more so when this message was devoid of any obvious context (just the screen and some brief lines stating it was a real movie). The film itself rendered any description redundant from a moral point of view. Was this bare displaying obscene? Yes, it was. But it made us reflect on something -respect for human life- we carelessly take for granted, and this reflection started in our guts. Nothing short of sheer revulsion could have had such a moral effect.

Photo: Two corpses at the Koerperwelten exhibit in Berlin, 2009 © Koerperwelten.de

Freedom and civic courage

I still have many progressive acquaintances that purport to cherish freedom, but would never criticize autocratic regimes… if they happen to be “leftist”, that is. These people would do themselves a favor if they watched attentively the film The lives of others (Das Leben der Anderen, Germany, 2006, directed by Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck). What would they say then about states that destroyed so meticulously the lives of so many people on behalf of socialism? Would they agree with the claim that building an egalitarian society required spying most citizens, looking at every aspect of private, individual lives, and locking up or eliminating all those over who fell the slightest shadow of a paranoic doubt of disloyalty to the regime, proof of what could often be the mere possesion of a Western newspaper? Perhaps they would try to convince themselves that this events happened long time ago, sidestepping the fact that the terrorist practices of the Eastern European socialist governments against their own citizens were in place until 1989, or that it was a corruption of the true ideas of socialism. But how to avoid linking the millions of lives destroyed by regimes like the former DDR with those being equally destroyed nowadays in Cuba, China or Venezuela, for instance? Those who experienced first hand the fear of the secret police, censorship, and terror at some point in their lives are much more willing to stand up for individual freedom than some of those who were born in a free society, take their liberties for granted, and for whom being progressive is just an empty aesthetic exercise which requires no critical, honest thinking. After all, Nazism and Communism arrived in Germany after decades of constitutional and semi- or fully democratic governments. Those ones that tend to think democracy can defend itself -or worst: that governments will safeguard our liberties, and that it is a task requiring no individual effort on our side- should take the best lessons from this excellent film. On the other hand, and timely related to the film, two days ago the Hungarian President Laszlo Solyom and the German Chancellor Angela Merkel commemorated the 20th Anniversay of the so called “Pan-European picnic”, an spontaneous meeting of East Germans and Hungarians in the border between Austria and Hungary that helped precipitate the fall of the Berlin wall (“Hungary Remembers Picnic That Cracked Iron Curtain”, thanks for the link, J.), and which is the perfect example of the civic courage needed to fight totalitarianism. How many of us here in the Western world would show nowadays the same resolution if our liberties were in danger?

Photo: Das Leben der Anderen, 2006 © moviezkult

A shameful dictator

Our little dictator does not give a damn about life -among many other reasons due to his close contacts with the mafia-, though he says he will do anything he can to keep alive an Italian citizen who has been in a coma for the last 17 years and who had previously expressed his will to be let die if she ever encountered herself in that situation. Our little dictator does not give a damn about freedom, for the same reason, nor has the least degree of respect for others, since he insulted repeatedly her father, accusing him of a vile attempted murder because keeping her daughter alive apparently would be costing him a lot of money. Our little dictator does not give a damn about the separation of powers in a democratic State, since he is willing to reverse the rulings of the Italian Supreme Court overnight -something the parliament cannot do-, to govern by decree, threatening the members of government who do not agree with him, and to change the Italian Constitution also overnight, that is, he is willing to confront any constitutional powers who oppose his decision to keep this individual alive at all costs. Our little dictator does not give a damn about legality, in this case or in any other case, since his self-proclaimed goal is to change Italian political structures in order the government -that is, him- faces no constitutional hurddles to impose its ruling. This comes as no surprise, since he entered politics to change every single law that could get him in jail due to his endless number of illegalities while running his businesses. Our little dictator is a successful man, since he has managed to change all these democratic rules and stay out of jail despite the hundreds of legal processes he has been involved in. Our little dictator does not give a damn about christian morality, since he has publicly acknowledged to have broken every possible catholic principle a number of times, those regarding with sexual fidelity in particular, yet he did not hesitate to always align his policies with the official positions of the Vatican -which does not care at all if he is a sinner, a thief or a murderer if he can help the institution to upheld its power-, Italy having the most regressive social legislation in Western Europe as a result. Our little dictator does not give a damn about women since, among many other reasons, he has repeatedly justified rape, saying happily in recent times, for example, that nothing can be done about it since the Italian women are the ‘più belle delle mondo’.

Shame on our little dictator. Shame on everyone who voted for him throughout these years. Shame on the political parties conforming the so called opposition, which are not able to defend dignity, legality and truth in front of this liberticide who mocks any conceivable kind of freedom and human decency.

Photo © tulipanonero

European paternalism

These may be unimportant news… or perhaps not. Adducing a certain research on the dangers of listening to loud music in mp3 devices, the European Commission wants to limit the decibels such electronic gadgets may reach, effectively banning the manufacturing and distribution of the more powerful ones in the European markets.

Nice the most top political institution in Europe pays attention to our health in such trivial matters. However, should it not devote its energy to the issues it has a explicit mandate over? Why governmental bodies find it so difficult to differentiate between making information relevant to our private daily lives available and ruling on private matters? Why they often cross the boundaries of their legitimate and beneficial informative functions -no objections to the Commission diffusing the aforementioned study- to become paternalistic organizations that feel entitled to control private decisions that affect only the individuals making them, not to speak of broadly distort markets?

Since all answers given to these questions throughout history have to do with the accumulation and use of power, this fact highlights the importance of states observing neutrality over different conceptions of what may be regarded as a personal good life, and of limiting governmental authority, in particular when it comes to the undisputable core of our private realm.

Photo: ‘Bossanova ‘84: Orwell’s world’, 2008 © Manuel Todde

Lontano da dove?

Lately, my family and some friends have been asking me on a regular basis: Why do you have to go so far away? There wasn´t any closer place to move to? I am often tempted to answer the same way that character did in the Jewish story giving its title to Lontano da dove, the amazing account by Claudio Magris of the Jewish cultural legacy after the fall of the Austro-Hungarian Empire.[1] Facing all sorts of difficulties in the country he is living in, a Jewish man plans to move away, and visits a rabbi to get his blessings before the trip. When the rabbi learns where the man wants to travel to, he asks: ‘Why so far?’. ‘Far from where?’‘, replies the man, touching on the errant condition of the Jewish people.

Sometimes, we take for granted we know where our home is, and even where it is natural to feel ourselves at home, and perhaps this is true for most people. However, some of us are not so sure our place ought to be close to where your ancestors lived and died, where your mother tongue is spoken, where most of your family lives, where you were born. Some of us are voluntary expatriates, still looking for the landscape, faces, sounds and atmospheres that may help us to recognize a spot as our own. In particular, we do not care about the nationalities or ethnic origin of the people surrounding us, working with us, or where the food, the films, the music we consume comes from. We are promiscuous, culturally promiscuous. We see as a positive thing to be constantly borrowing items from different cultures -as much as possible- to contruct our own. We are post-national in our minds. We abhor cultural endogamy. Actually, we value the availability and interaction of all this diversity in the same place. Therefore, paramount to us is to be surrounded by heterogeneity, and to be able to thrive there where a given ethnicity, culture, religion, skin colour or family name do not imply any advantages or disadvantages from the outset, where opportunities are there if you are determined enough, where every possible path in life is not already set, where choosing your own way does not raise eyebrows in disapproval.

Lontano? I will be closer to myself.

[1] Claudio Magris, Lontano da dove. Joseph Roth e la tradizione ebraico-oriental, Torino, 1971.

Photo: Shadows and reflections, 2007 © Eric Flexyourhead

Unaffected crackdown

Are Chinese authorities worried because the eyes of the world are on them now Olympics are approaching? Do they recently initiated conversations with the Tibetan leaders in exile really acknowledging the status quo in the region must change? Apparently, the answer to both questions is ‘No’. Though they claim to have realeased hundreds of prisoners in the last weeks, actually they keep more than one thousand Tibetan protesters in prison. According to Amnesty International, many of those detainees are kept in dire conditions, without enough food and frequently beaten, and some of them have been judged and ’sentenced after questionable trials”. Meanwhile, Chinese journalists continue working amidst the extreme censorship stablished around their job when the riots began, and foreign ones are simply blocked from entering Tibet.

Isn´t it high time we ceased to reward the Chinese dictatorship with international events -such as the Olympics- for free? Shouldn´t the international community be exerting a stronger pressure on the Chinese government on behalf of human rights and the rule of law?

Read Amnesty´s report here.

Photo: Police, Lhasa, Tibet, 2007 © culturalvisions

Happy birthday, my friend

Today my friend Tom turns eighty-eight. For a variety of reasons, I have seldom contacted him lately, but I did not want to miss out the chance to express publicly my respect, my admiration and my personal gratitude to him. Tom is probably not only the world´s most important expert in psychiatry, psychoanalysis and personal and social behaviour, but also the person who has had the most significant impact on worldwide generations of social researchers, politicians, physicians, and scholars worried about the increasing medicalization of society and the progressive loss of our basic liberties on the medical-political Establishment´s hands. However, forgive me if I do not devote this space to praising his public figure right now. Check out any of the two-million Google search references with his name, or, better still, visit his website, The Thomas S. Szasz Cybercenter for Liberty and Responsibility, if you want to know about his intellectual stature, his dozens of books, and hundreds of articles and speeches. Read his texts. You will realize that, the number of his works being almost immeasurable, what makes a difference is what he says, rather than how many times he says it. I am not going to talk about his magnum opus either. There are many studies, articles and reviews on The Myth of Mental Illness (New York: Paul B. Hoeber, 1961) and the importance of this paramount work in the medical, social, political, and philosophical fields. What I really want to do is to talk very briefly about the Tom I had the pleasure to meet some years ago. Actually, I ‘met’ him before actually meeting him, when I read for the first time Our Right to Drugs: The Case for a Free Market (New York: Praeger, 1992), and became fascinated by the logical strength of his arguments. Then The Myth of Mental Illness, The Meaning of Mind (Westport, CT: Praeger, 1996), and many other of his books contributed to change the way I had thought about personal freedom issues for good. Since I started reading him and, later on, communicating with him, I have never come accross a single book, article, letter or piece of text that has not left me thinking, reflecting, and later wondering how on earth someone could possibly write such a number of masterworks. In 2001, I had the honor of translating into Spanish his book Fatal Freedom: The Ethics and Politics of Suicide (Westport, CT: Praeger, 1999), and a year later I visited him in his hometown in upstate New York. I will never forget how nicely and kindly he greeted and showed us around the amazing national park surrounding Syracuse, his brilliant reasoning in our conversations, and the peaceful atmosphere of his beautiful house in the middle of a forest in the town of Manlius. I have never meet anyone with such intelligence and mental strength, and, at the same time, equally high principles, decency, kindness, and sense of humour.

Dear Tom, I hope you have had the best of birthdays, full with the love of your family, and surrounded by the Spring colors of the amazingly beautiful trees of your place. We do not forget you in this side of the Atlantic.

All the best,

Photo: Thomas S. Szasz, Syracuse, New York, 2002 © www.szasz.com

A double-edged Olympic sword

As a part of a diplomatic offensive this week, the Chinese government has criticized American human rights record, poverty and racial divides, after the American Department of State only mildly critiziced Chinese human rights abuses, and even erased the country from the list of the serious human rights abuses, to the outrage of international human rights NGO´s. China´s protest constitutes a shameful and hypocritical move, since China´s performance in these fields is among the worst in the planet. The offensive tries to counteract Western condemnation of Chinese human rights abuses just before the Olympic Games in Beijing. China has staked enormously in the gigantic public relations operation the Games amount to, whose aim is to show the world how far has China reached in its quest for development. However, the idea Chinese officials have in mind when thinking about development may have nothing to do with the image it conjures up for the Westerner, since the latter includes not only living conditions but also freedom and respect for individuals, whereas the former just points to a kind of competition to attain material and technological goals. In other words, it is all about national pride, a very Asian concept, by the way.

The Olympic Games should have never been granted to China, probably the most serious human rights violator in the world. Once the appropriate international bodies took the decision, the only action left for democratic governments and peoples is to actively boycott them. And for the boycott to be really effective, it should be a widespread Western decision, regardless the Chinese reaction to it. During the Cold War, the Moscow 1980 Olympic Games Western boycott did not lead us to the Third World War; if anything, it contributed to the Soviet regime´s collapse. Moreover, China needs Western markets desperatedly, so here we have a powerful tool to exert influence on the country. And to those claiming we should not mix sports with politics, let us note an event such as the Olympic Games is one of the best examples of global politics nowadays. Besides, the political nature of the Games is officially recorgnized by the Chinese government, which rightly weighted the huge opportunities to improve its international image the gathering offered. However, when betting on the Games, Chinese officials seemed oblivious to the fact that in our globalized world, they are a double-edged sword. Therefore, a big-scale fiasco would project a multiplied image of incompetence, corruption and, ultimately, backwardness. That would imply losing face, again, a very important concept in Asian cultures.

It is this multiplier effect we need to take advantage of to expose China´s abusive public policies towards its own citizens, raise awareness about its immoral international behaviour -i.e.: its role in the Darfur crisis-, and show our solidarity with Chinese dissidents and human rights activists. No one is denying China its right to economic and social development, but the Free World -a Cold War expression which is nevertheless relevant today, unfortunately- should send a clear message: if the Chinese government wants its country to be accepted as a major actor in the international community, it should respect life, freedom, and human rights.

Read on:

Human Rights Watch last report on China´s abuses on Beijing´s migrant construction workers.

On China´s disastrous environmental record.

On China´s international public relations setbacks as a consecuence of the Olympic Games exposure.

On Chinese officials defending China´s stand in Darfur and criticizing the Olympics tie-in.

Photo: Woman holding a dog, Beijing, 2007 © Nataliebehring

Next Page »