[Nettime-bold] Brits and 911 part 1

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

> 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.
> 
> 
> 
> 
>   
> 
> 
> This is a multi-part message in MIME format.
> 
> ------=_NextPartTM-000-63049535-f378-4408-8740-a0907239bab5
> Content-type: text/plain; charset="US-ASCII"
> Content-transfer-encoding: 7bit
> 
> 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
> 
>                                        
> 
> -- 
> __________________________________________________________
> Sign-up for your own FREE Personalized E-mail at Mail.com
> http://www.mail.com/?sr=signup
> 
> Save up to $160 by signing up for NetZero Platinum Internet service.
> http://www.netzero.net/?refcd=N2P0602NEP8
> 
> 




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

                                       

-- 
__________________________________________________________
Sign-up for your own FREE Personalized E-mail at Mail.com
http://www.mail.com/?sr=signup

Save up to $160 by signing up for NetZero Platinum Internet service.
http://www.netzero.net/?refcd=N2P0602NEP8

_______________________________________________
Nettime-bold mailing list
Nettime-bold@nettime.org
http://amsterdam.nettime.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/nettime-bold