[Nettime-bold] Brits and 911 part 2

["Lachlan Brown" <lachlan@london.com>]

I should add that I have never considered myself a
net.activist and am wary of people who would suggest
that they are net activists.

Writing email was a way to share immediate thoughts 
and to archive them for rewriting later, as well as to 
try to encourage others to criticise. It was also, I 
thought, a necessity and a responsibility to speak up 
in an extremely dangerous cultural moment and in the 
face of extremely dangerous legislation.

It did seem as though the critical sensibility of 
people in the west had been (and remains) cautersied, subduedor frightened into silence, and this was an 
uncannyexperience. More uncanny was the reaction of 
people(colleagues or ex-colleagues in the main) who reacted to the events in cowering, cringing and 
cowardly ways.

People at Goldsmiths College and former colleagues 
here in Canada were actively unhelpful. 
One or two even intervened during my detention by Immigration Canada to try to make sure that my 
criticism stopped. 

I work the material and insights of the nine months following 911 into two books: 'Some thoughts on
the Unmarked Grave of History from the Unmade Bed of Culture.' and 'Tragedy of the Commons? Tragedy of Capital!'.

I hope to have both complete by September. I am also
putting together the 'coalition' e book, a 
copublication of Thirdnet publishing and the Centre 
for Urban and Community Research, which analyses 
hate sites online provides local resources (Canadian and British) shared globally for combatting racism and provides a way to critique institutional racism in 
our cultural institutions. 

I have found it remarkable that people, white people, 
who like to mediate race have been particularly 
unhelpful or actively unhelpful in facilitating this 
project here in Toronto. The phrase from one:
'we all act under self interest, you know that' (we do
not) a teacher of film at the University of Toronto 
in a College with a name that celebrates a Canadian 
academic by the name of Harold Innis stands out as evidence of the complete victory of the small minded right over the often complex, usually difficult,
but intensely critical cooperative, collegiate, and
collaborative contexts of publishing and education in
Canada.

Lachlan Brown






----- Original Message -----
From: "Lachlan Brown" <lachlan@london.com>
Date: Wed, 17 Jul 2002 01:23:53 +0000
To: p.asvadi@unsw.edu.au
Subject: 


> 
> 
> I was saddened to read the review below which was circulated in Undercurrents. It bemoans the failure of the British to respond 
> to the 'events' of September 11th.
> 
> I think you'll find Lachlan Brown writing actively post 911
> in Nettime and Nettime bold despite a five week spell in
> an Immigration Canada detention centre from October 17 to 
> November 25th 2001, an experience that, in part, prompted his 
> 'Some Notes on the Unmarked Grave of History from the Unmade Bed
> of Culture' and his subsequent Intervention against bad practice 
> in  scholarship and the internet industry carried out in the 
> Association of Interent Researchers (W.O.P.C) List from January 
> 2002. 
> 
> I think you'll find that much time Lachlan was
> spot on in his witness, reflection and analysis. Lachlan is
> a white Brit who does cultural studies. The spirit of Orwell
> etc. is very much alive and well, even if people don't wish 
> to acknowledge it during these cynical days.
> 
> Lachlan also wrote to Undercurrents with material relevant to 
> these themes. 
> 
> Much of the writing that went into these posts is being worked 
> into a book publication.
> 
> The reaction began on 12 September 2001 in a post to several 
> British colleagues who reacted meekly to the event: 'is there 
> anything positive to come out of this?', wrote one.
> 
> 'Well, history has made something of a spectacular comeback' 
> wrote Lachlan.
> 
> Sometimes one is required, especially during general political 
> failures, to do ones own publicity in these matters.
> 
> 
> Best
> 
> Lachlan
> 
>   
> 
> 
> This is a multi-part message in MIME format.
> 
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> Date: Tue, 9 Jul 2002 12:47:50 +1000
> 
> John Pilger takes on Martin Amis
> John Pilger
> Monday 17th June 20
> 
> 
> Martin Amis represents a problem: that some of the most acclaimed and
> privileged writers in the English language fail to engage with the most
> urgent issues of our time. By John Pilger On 1 June, the Guardian published
> a long essay by Martin Amis, entitled "The voice of the lonely crowd".
> It was about 11 September and the role of writers. What did Amis think
> about on the momentous day? He thought he was "like Josephine, the opera-singing
> mouse in the Kafka story: Sing? ´She can´t even squeak.´"
> 
> By that he meant, I guess, that he had nothing to say about "the conflicts
> we now face or fear", as he put it. Why not? Where was the spirit of Orwell
> and Greene? Where was a modest acknowledgement of history: a passing
> reflection on the impact of rapacious great power on vulnerable societies,
> which are the roots of the current "terrorism"?
> 
> Amis referred rightly to the "pitiable babble" of writers following 11
> September. Most of the famous names were heard, their contributions ranging
> from morose me-ism to an aggressive defence of America and its "modernity".
> Not a single English writer commanding the celebrity that provides an
> extraordinary public platform has written anything incisive and worthy
> of our memory about the meaning and exploitation of 11 September - with
> the exception, as ever, of Harold Pinter. Compare their "babble", and
> their silence, with the work of the celebrated Palestinian poet Mahmoud
> Darwish, the subject of a fine Guardian profile on 8 June by Maya Jaggi.
> Darwish is the Arab world´s best selling poet; people´s poet may sound
> trite, but he draws thousands to his readings, thrilling his audiences
> with a lyricism that touches their lives and makes sense of power, injustice
> and tragedy. In his latest poem, "State of Siege", a "martyr" says:
> 
> I love life
> On earth, among the pines and the fig trees
> But I can´t reach it, so I took aim
> With the last thing that belonged to me.
> 
> Darwish´s manuscripts were trampled under foot by Israeli soldiers at the
> cultural centre in Ramallah where he often works. I was in this building
> last month, not long after the Israelis had left. They had defecated on
> the floors, and smeared shit on the photocopiers, and pissed on books and
> up the walls, and systematically destroyed manuscripts of plays and novels
> and hard disks. As they left, they threw paint on a wall of children´s
> drawings. "They wanted to give us a message that nobody´s immune -including
> in
> cultural life," says Darwish. "Palestinian people are in love with life.
> If we give them hope - a political solution - they´ll stop killing themselves."
> 
> Perhaps it is unfair to compare a Darwish with an Amis. One is speaking
> for the crimes against his people, after all. But Amis represents a wider
> problem: that some of the most acclaimed and privileged writers writing
> in the English language fail to engage with the most urgent issues of our
> time. Who among the collectors of Booker and Whitbread Prizes speaks against
> the crimes described by Darwish - the product of the longest military occupation
> in the modern era? Who, since 11 September, has defended our language,
> illuminating its abuse in the service of great power´s goals and hypocrisy?
> Who has shown that our humane responses to 11 September
> have been appropriated by the masters of terror themselves? -by Ariel Sharon
> and his "good friend" George W Bush, who bombed to death at least 5,000
> civilians in Afghanistan.
> 
> Consider Amis´s unexplained reference to the conflicts we must now "face
> or fear". The Palestinians have been facing and fearing an occupation for
> more than 35 years: an atrocious stalemate sponsored by every American
> administration since that of Lyndon Johnson and reaffirmed this month by
> Bush himself. Since 11 September, those who have been allowed to grind
> English into a series of cliches propagating their "war on terrorism" have
> also supplied the Israeli regime with 50 F-16 fighter-bombers, 102 Gatling
> guns, 228 joint direct attack munitions (JDAMs) and 24 Blackhawk
> helicopters. A batch of state-of-the art Apache helicopters is on the way.
> You may have seen the Apache on the news, firing missiles at civilian
> apartment blocks in occupied Palestine.
> 
> The other day, I spoke to a group of children in Gaza. They smiled, but
> it was clear that their dreams, indeed their childhood, had been despatched
> by Israel´s attacks on a people who, for the most part, have defended
> themselves with slingshots. Among these children, almost certainly, are
> those who will sacrifice, as Darwish wrote, "the last thing that belonged
> to me". Who is his equivalent in the west, setting that wisdom against
> our government´s part in the making of this terror? In the 1980s, Martin
> Amis published a valuable collection of essays on the threat of nuclear
> war. Today, India and Pakistan seriously threaten nuclear war, which is
> not surprising, in a world dominated by threats since 11 September: a world
> of either-you-are-with-us-or-against-us, of bomb now and talk later. What
> does Amis or any English writer have to say about the great warrior against
> terrorism in the White House, who says that "first strike" is now the
> superpower´s policy and that America "must be ready to strike at a moment´s
> notice in any dark corner of the world"? This includes the nuclear option,
> Martin Amis, should you still be interested.
> 
> "After 11 September," wrote Amis in the Guardian, "writers faced
> quantitative change, but not qualitative change . .They stood in eternal
> opposition to the voice of the lonely crowd, which, with its yearning for
> both power and effacement, is the most desolate sound you will ever hear."
> Those who publish and promote such empty words, holding the robes of English
> literature´s current emperors, have an urgent responsibility to hand the
> space to others.
> 
> Our language should be reclaimed, its Orwellian vocabulary reversed, its
> noble words such as "democracy" and "freedom" protected, and its power
> redeployed against all fundamentalisms, especially our own. We need to
> find and publish our own Mahmoud Darwish, our own Arundhati Roy, our own
> Ahdaf Soueif, our own Eduardo Galeano, and quickly.
> 
> John Pilger´s latest book, The New Rulers of the World, is published by
> Verso
>  
> 
> 
> Lachlan Brown
> T(416) 826 6937
> VM (416) 822 1123
> 
>                                        
> 
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> 




Lachlan Brown
T(416) 826 6937
VM (416) 822 1123

                                       

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