The Sad, Mad World we Live in

Do you know the feeling, that feeling of anger and disgust at the amount of fucked-up stupidity, evil and hopelessness in the world?

Today a couple of (almost certainly) Islamicist fanatic terrorists attacked the offices of the French satirical paper Charlie Hebdo, killing twelve people. There is video coverage online of two gunmen shooting a policeman down in the street and then finishing the execution with a headshot, even as the man on the ground raises a hand, possibly in a last plea for mercy. It’s horrific in its brutality so I’m not going to post a link to the video itself here. The photo shows enough.

Charlie Hebdo is not a particularly pleasant newspaper; but that’s not what its makers want it to be. It is relentlessly satirical, regards nothing as sacred, and is prepared to lampoon anyone and anything in the news, be they pope, prophet or president, moron, mullah, or messiah. That’s their job as they see it. And it’s their right in a free, pluralistic, secular society. If you don’t like what they publish you don’t have to buy it or read it. If you feel personally damaged by something they publish you can sue them. That’s the way a civilized society works, particularly a civil society which sees freedom of expression and the press as a basic value.

One result of this barbaric event will certainly be calls from the populist (partly proto-fascist) right in France (led, no doubt, by Marine Le Pen and the Front National) and worldwide for clampdowns on Islam, and Islamic foreigners, and foreigners generally; migrants, refugees and asylum seekers. The usual cacophony of ignorance, fear- and hate-mongering. Indeed, this may have been one of the perverted, calculated aims of the mad, evil bastards who planned and carried out the attack.

Here in Germany in the past number of weeks we’ve been treated to the dubious spectacle of thousands of ignoramuses marching every Monday night in the streets of Dresden under the banner of a strange organisation calling itself PEGIDA [Patriotic Europeans Against the Islamization of the West]. According to the Saxon Interior Ministry in 2010 0.1% (around 4,000) of the population of Saxony (of which Dresden is the capital) describe themselves as Muslims [Source: Spiegel Online]. Biiiiig threat. Last Monday night, as a sign of some hope for sanity in my adopted home-country, thousands of people marched in Cologne, just a few miles down the road from me, in favour of tolerance and an open society. Cologne has 120,000 Muslims out of a population of around a million. For those who can’t do the math, that’s 12%. Around a hundred times higher than in Saxony.  

Personally, I’m not a great fan of Islam. But then, I’m not a great fan of evangelical Protestantism, traditionalist Catholicism, neo-liberal free-market capitalism, or Justin Biber either. This nevertheless doesn’t mean that I would ever contemplate or tolerate any calls for or moves to forbid people their right to believe whatever they want to and to freely profess and express those beliefs, however idiotic I may consider them to be. This freedom is one of the constituting principles of a humane civil society. It goes further; even people who profess beliefs abhorrent to these constituting principles – like, I am forced to conclude, quite a number of those marching in Dresden – have a guaranteed right to do so, as long as they don’t resort to violence, or incitement to violence, against others. That’s what a humane civil society has to be able to tolerate and, I have no doubt, any healthy civil society is well able to withstand the irritation caused by such misguided fools.

Of course, that does imply that those of us (the vast majority, I like to think) who value these basic principles of humane civility sometimes have to speak out for them and defend them.

A journalist friend just told me the story of an initial interview she did this afternoon. It was with a young man who’s been in Germany for four years now. He was born in one of those war-torn countries we frequently hear of in the news but his family fled terror and conflict when he was a child, finishing up in Iran. He spent seventeen years there and managed to obtain a degree in computer-programming before realising that, as a stateless person with no official identity-papers, he had no future in the mullah-dominated Islamic Republic. His mother sold the last of her jewels to provide the necessary money and he (alone of his family) made a long, dangerous, illegal journey, culminating in a frightening boat-trip across the Aegean from Turkey to Greece before finally ending up here in Germany four years ago.

In Germany he has the status of a tolerated (but not recognised) asylum seeker. He still has no legal papers, so that his “official” status, such as it is, can be described as stateless. Inquiries at the embassy of his native country have resulted in no practical prospects of ever getting a passport. He is given enough to live on – barely – in Germany. He is not allowed to work, although he has good training in a field where his skills are demanded everywhere. His freedom of movement here in the country is extremely uncertain, since he has no official papers. Without them he cannot open a bank account or make a contract for telephone and internet access with a telecommunications provider. He spends his life in fear of police controls, of suddenly being thrown out of the country. He has little hope for the future and has been suffering – increasingly – from depression.

No wonder.

This is one of those people the fools in Dresden seem to be protesting about. This is one of those people who will be regarded with increased suspicion and even hatred as a result of the brutality of the terrorists in Paris today.

This is someone who only wants to live an ordinary life, someone with the skills and potential to offer a positive contribution to any society which would welcome him.

The way our world is so screwed up, it doesn’t look like he’ll be welcomed anywhere.

That humane civil society I was defending earlier in this essay still has a long way to go.

Picture source: http://www.cbsnews.com/news/charlie-hebdo-french-satirical-magazine-paris-office-attack-leaves-casualties/  

The Open Society and its Friends: WikiLeaks

“We must plan for freedom, and not only for security, if for no other reason than only freedom can make security more secure.”

(Karl Popper, The Open Society and its Enemies, Vol 2, Ch 21)

This citation from Karl Popper’s seminal work defining the foundations of western societies (as we like to see them at any rate) sets the real context for the whole debate over WikiLeaks – a context which seems to have been forgotten by the many members of the political establishment worldwide who have loudly been expressing indignation at the actions of the website and those running it.

There is, of course, a difference between the high ideals and aspirations which are expressed in constitutions all over the world and the nasty cutthroat world of Realpolitik. It’s a jungle out there and principles alone won’t serve to protect you all that well. This is why states need armies and diplomats and all that other cool stuff.

But accepting this reality does not mean that principles, ideals and aspirations are not important, otherwise one ends with the Stalinist cynicism implied in his famous question about the number of brigades commanded by the pope. The basis of all modern societies, inspired by their first Enlightenment incarnations in the USA and France is that might is not right and that government is by the people of the people for the people.

One of the guarantors of these constitutional democratic principles is what is often called “the Fourth Estate,” a free press dedicated to the free dissemination of information which pertains to the public interest and comment thereon. Indeed, the very term “Fourth Estate” has itself its origins in the French Revolution. And this is what makes the issue of WikiLeaks so important.

What has WikiLeaks done which is so wrong? It has published documents which pertain to issues of the public interest, documents originating from (mostly US) government sources, sources in other words which draw all their legitimacy from the fact that they are elected by the people to act in their interests and to pay and oversee others to carry out particular tasks in the public interest and on its behalf. So basically, Wikileaks has been telling the public what the institutions of government have been doing in its name; a basic function of the free press and one which is necessary in any open society to act as a check against the abuse of power.

The arguments against WikiLeaks run along parallel tracks; firstly, the information they have published is confidential and therefore should not be reproduced in the public domain and, secondly, the publication of this information does actual harm – particularly to the USA and their interests as a state. I’ll address the second of these arguments first, as a reflection on it will lead logically to the first one.

In terms of some of the documents published about the war in Afghanistan there may be some cause to worry that the revelation of actual military tactical and strategic information may have endangered some on-going operations, and even the lives of specific individuals. Realising this weakness, and realising that their strength was in the obtaining and publishing of information and not in the evaluation and redacting of it, the WikiLeaks people changed their modus operandi significantly during the publication of the Afghanistan documents and before publishing the second major group of documents, those originating in the US State Department, and obtained the cooperation of The New York Times, The Guardian and Der Spiegel to advise them and vet the material prior to publication. If there was actually a problem here, it has been dealt with by adding an instance of professional journalistic oversight.

The further question arises as to the actual concrete harm done by the leaking of diplomatic documents, originating from government sources, with the purpose of publicising them to the people who elected that government, to whom that government is responsible and from whom it derives its legitimation. It is certainly uncomfortable for the State Department to have the honest, plain-talking, confidential reports of its employees around the world publicised for all to read. But the real fault here lies not with WikiLeaks, but with those who put such documents in such a domain that their privacy and confidentiality had already been destroyed. The State Department files which WikiLeaks published were potentially available to up to two million US government workers. As David Rothkopf cogently expressed it, “if a 22-year-old moon-faced army private with a blank Lady Gaga CD in his hand can download a mountain of classified documents and make them public, I wonder how many other slightly more sophisticated actors have been siphoning out more important secrets more discreetly over the past several years.” There can be very little doubt that all the relevant intelligence agencies of the countries (and their political bosses) where, apparently, so much damage was done by the leaking of the documents, whether Iran or Russia or China or any of the others, if they are not completely incompetent, have long been aware of the contents of the documents anyway.

Yes, there was some embarrassment and there will be more, as more documents are published, but the real “harm” done was the exposure of the irresponsible way security procedures were organised within the US government apparatus and the possible future lack of trust on the part of diplomatic employees of the US throughout the world following the realisation that every undiplomatic opinion they state, every honest report they write may be available for the whole world to read. Candour, I suspect, can only be expected – if at all – in handwritten notes on edible paper, sent in the diplomatic pouch.

The primary question anyway is that of the extent to which confidentiality is necessary or even desirable in the dealings and actions of government. I would argue that the right to such confidentiality is a reflection of the trust which the sovereign people can place in their elected governments, exercising power in their name. Apart from a plethora of other issues, the documents published by WikiLeaks are yet another proof that practically all of our governments have proved themselves unworthy of such trust. As John Naughton put it recently in The Guardian:

“What WikiLeaks is really exposing is the extent to which the western democratic system has been hollowed out. In the last decade its political elites have been shown to be incompetent (Ireland, the US and UK in not regulating banks); corrupt (all governments in relation to the arms trade); or recklessly militaristic (the US and UK in Iraq). And yet nowhere have they been called to account in any effective way. Instead they have obfuscated, lied or blustered their way through. And when, finally, the veil of secrecy is lifted, their reflex reaction is to kill the messenger.”

And they’re not even making the pretence of putting on kid gloves to do it. Pressure put on Amazon and other IT businesses to remove WikiLeaks from their servers, on PayPal/Ebay and Mastercard to block attempts from ordinary citizens to donate money, the whole sorry spectacle of the attempt to get Julian Assange to the USA via a sexual abuse charge in Sweden (the precise nature of which seems to be a matter of debate among various Swedish legal officers), there to be tried for treason – if Senator Joe Lieberman has his way – and possibly sentenced to death.

I’m not for a minute claiming here that Assange is a saint. If he has committed crimes of sexual abuse in Sweden then the allegations must be investigated and he should be charged and tried for them. But this is purely a matter for the Swedish police and prosecutors, independent of any political influence. And if the Swedes take the independence of their judicial system seriously, this must now preclude them extraditing him to the USA, where the utterances of Senator Lieberman may have ensured that there is little possibility of him getting a fair trial, should he be arraigned for anything. If treason (for a non-American!) is the charge, then he could even expect the death penalty – reason enough for Sweden to refuse to extradite him!

Listening to Senator Lieberman, I feel very worried. There are two possibilities and both are frightening; either the senator really believes what he is saying, in which case he exhibits a stupidity and dangerous naivety frightening in a public representative of so many years experience, or he is indulging in a cynical, vicious, small-minded, vindictive witch-hunt. And to think that this man came within a few hanging chads of Dick Cheney’s job – truly, in retrospect, America in 2000 had the choice between typhus and cholera!

We are now in the tenth year since the attack on the Twin Towers. Watching the WikiLeaks spectacle unfold, I tend to think that the terrorists have achieved more than they dared to dream. Through the reactions of fear, siege-mentality and the dangerous indulged temptation to flail out blindly at almost any (rightly or wrongly) perceived threat, they have managed to strike a deep blow at the basic values underpinning western society; values like openness, accountability, the rule of law and due process, faith and trust in the power of integrity to face down fanaticism and terror. The political leadership in the USA has reacted precisely the way Osama bin Laden hoped and they are too stupid to realise it or too cynical to care.

In a better, more honest society, WikiLeaks would not be necessary. As it is, these people are vital and, thanks to the nature of the internet, they and many like them will be almost impossible to subdue. Unless, of course, the politicians are prepared to wage open war on the internet itself. There are signs that moves are afoot in this direction, but here, I hope and believe, the citizens will finally tell them they’ve gone too far. Moreover, given that large sections of the press, the conventional Fourth Estate, is under the private control of a few immensely rich individuals, with their own political agendas, we can indeed be thankful that the largely non-regulated, non-centralised internet provides both a platform and means for the publication and dissemination of the activities of our governments acting in our names. Or, as is promised in future leaks, the corrupt dealings of some of those financial institutions who have been given billions in public funding following the recent financial crisis, for which they themselves are largely responsible.

I’ll finish this as I started, with a reference to Karl Popper. In The Open Society he quotes with approval a comment from Kant: “Kant remarked once in a very different spirit that the sentence 'Truthfulness is the best policy' might indeed be questionable, whilst the sentence 'Truthfulness is better than policy' is beyond dispute.” It is because the political classes have lost any respect for the value of truthfulness that the work of groups like WikiLeaks is so important. Our leaders and representatives really only need one thing to make the whistle-blowers superfluous. It’s called integrity.

Female Genital Mutilation

If you visit this blog regularly you will have noticed a new widget on the right-hand side, down towards the end. It’s a link to a petition being organised by Irish Amnesty International and other NGOs, the aim of which is to raise consciousness in Europe about the issue of female genital mutilation.

This petition, and the way I discovered it (on Facebook), is one of the positive things about the spread of the internet worldwide and its possibilities. This, of course, can be overemphasised and cynics may question the value of such actions. After all, how much difference does it really make for us to simply click a link on a website and spend less than a minute entering a few details and hitting a “Submit” button? Not much. But not much is not nothing and such actions have cumulative effects. Firstly, even the minimal engagement shown by digitally “signing” such a petition can be quite effective when multiplied by hundreds of thousands, and there have been many such internet actions in the past years which have had an effect in bringing the weight of worldwide public opinion to bear on particular issues, one of the most recent being the global publicising of the case of Sakineh Ashtiani, the Iranian woman sentenced to stoning to death for adultery. Secondly, such actions have the effect of raising public consciousness about issues and keeping these issues in the focus of public attention.

Thirdly, such actions are, in many ways, harbingers of new forms of individual participation in civil societies, hints of new ways of future empowerment, the first tentative steps maybe towards as yet undefined structures of what political philosophers and theorists call deliberative democracy. One of the basic premises of many old philosophical models of anarchism predicated complete freedom of information as a necessary stage in developing societies beyond centralised state structures. This was perhaps too simple, for one of the ways free information can be most effectively countered is to simply bury it in a flood of trivia – often the prevailing reality in our so-called information age. Yet the availability of information remains vital in the development of free, responsible societies and it is not a coincidence that many states with totalitarian, illiberal tendencies are quick to try to block access to particular web sites and to emasculate search engines.

But to come back to the theme of the link on this site, female genital mutilation is still commonplace in many countries in the year 2010. It is an unspeakably cruel, ghastly practice and it is a shocking indictment of our self-assured maturity as human beings that we continue to tolerate it in our world. The following is from the “End FGM European Campaign” site:

“Three million girls and women are subjected to female genital mutilation worldwide each year. That's 8000 girls per day.

Female genital mutilation (FGM) is a form of violence against women and children that can amount to torture.

The practice violates:

• Right to physical and mental integrity
• Right to highest attainable standard of health
• Right to be free from all forms of discrimination against women (including violence against women)
• Right to freedom from torture or cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment
• Rights of the child, and
• in extreme cases, right to life

Female genital mutilation has been documented in certain parts of Africa, Asia and Middle East, and it is now being encountered in Europe as well. Most often, girls and women are taken to their countries of origin during school holidays to be mutilated.

The European Parliament estimates 500,000 girls and women living in Europe are suffering with the lifelong consequences of female genital mutilation.

FGM constitutes a persecution qualifying for being granted refugee status according to the international human rights standards as well as European law. However, because of lack of uniform implementation among all member states of the European Union (EU), women and girls are put at risk of being returned to countries where they could be subjected to FGM…"[i]

“…There are several reasons provided to justify the practice of female genital mutilation:

• Control over women’s sexuality: Virginity is a pre-requisite for marriage and is equated to female honour in a lot of communities. FGM, in particular infibulation, is defended in this context as it is assumed to reduce a woman’s sexual desire and lessen temptations to have extramarital sex thereby preserving a girl’s virginity.
• Hygiene: There is a belief that female genitalia are unsightly and dirty. In some FGM-practicing societies, unmutilated women are regarded as unclean and are not allowed to handle food and water.
• Gender based factors: FGM is often deemed necessary in order for a girl to be considered a complete woman, and the practice marks the divergence of the sexes in terms of their future roles in life and marriage. The removal of the clitoris and labia — viewed by some as the “male parts” of a woman’s body — is thought to enhance the girl’s femininity, often synonymous with docility and obedience. It is possible that the trauma of mutilation may have this effect on a girl’s personality. If mutilation is part of an initiation rite, then it is accompanied by explicit teaching about the woman’s role in her society.
• Cultural identity: In certain communities, where mutilation is carried out as part of the initiation into adulthood, FGM defines who belongs to the community. In such communities, a girl cannot be considered an adult in a FGM-practicing society unless she has undergone FGM.
• Religion: FGM predates Islam and is not practiced by the majority of Muslims, but it has acquired a religious dimension. Where it is practiced by Muslims, religion is frequently cited as a reason. Many of those who oppose mutilation deny that there is any link between the practice and religion, but Islamic leaders are not unanimous on the subject. Although predominant among Muslims, FGM also occurs among Christians, animists and Jews.”[ii]

The chairman of an Indonesian Islamic foundation which sponsors female “circumcision” defended the practice to the New York Times journalist, Sara Corbett, in 2006, citing three “benefits” for the victims:

‘“One, it will stabilize her libido,” he said through an interpreter. “Two, it will make a woman look more beautiful in the eyes of her husband. And three, it will balance her psychology.”’[iii]

As a father with two daughters, the very idea of this practice makes me profoundly sick. There are different forms of it, the most extreme being infibulation, the so-called pharaonic circumcision – if you really want to read the details they are available on the end fgm website or in the Wikipedia article on the subject. The writings of victims like Waris Dirie and Ayaan Hirsi Ali are also moving – and harrowing – descriptions of what goes on. Mutilation is generally forbidden by law even in the countries in which it is most commonly practised, like Egypt, but the law is often not enforced. The reason usually given for this is that FGM is deeply culturally rooted.

I confess to having little sympathy for this explanation. Culture cannot be put forward as a blanket justification for all kinds of barbarity; it could just as well be used to condone cannibalism, or slavery. But, with clenched teeth, I can accept the argument that the most effective means of combating this unspeakable abuse of basic human rights is patient educational work on the ground by social workers and local women activists. Who need support, including material support.

Which is one of the basic reasons for the petition to your right. Please sign it. It is part of a series of actions in Europe which will be running until December 10. If you’re on Facebook or another social network, post a link to it. If you have a blog or a website, copy the html code and put the widget on your own site. It is very little for us to do but if the few minutes we spend helps save even a few girls from this horror then they were surely well spent.

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[i] http://www.endfgm.eu/en/?utm_source=website&utm_campaign=badge

[ii] http://www.endfgm.eu/en/female-genital-mutilation/what-is-fgm/why-is-it-practised/

[iii] http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/20/magazine/20circumcision-t.html?_r=2&oref=slogin&ref=magazine&pagewanted=print