The could-have-been Scottish revolution in photos (16-18 September 2014)

The penultimate ‘Yes’ rally in Glasgow’s George Square

Tommy Sheridan’s voice was hoarse from his tireless speaking tour rallying grassroots support for his radical vision for an independent Scotland.

The ‘People’s Karaoke’

After-school activities; a ‘YESFS’ (Yes Fuck Sake) biro tattoo.

‘No’ voters on the edge of George Square turn their backs on ‘Yes’ voters in a show of disrespect.

‘Yes’ voters moved to enclose the provocative ‘No’ voters from all sides as police protection came into force. This was a rare act of nationalist aggression.

Palestinian and Catalan flags were on display, and a speaker from (Guinea) spoke on the main stage. This internationalism, however, veiled the inevitable xenophobia and anti-international sentiment of nationalism as a political concept. This Catalan artist’s candle mural of the Catalan and Scottish flags was demonstrative of a reaching out to international reference-points.

  

What both sides agree on is that the referendum campaign encouraged unprecedented political dialogue. This photo was taken outside the ‘No’ rally in a Glasgow suberb where Gordon Brown gave a once-in-a-lifetime speech which undoubtedly came from the heart – something voters had failed to see on the ‘No’ side up to that point.

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How would a Scottish Yes vote affect Northern Ireland’s Unionist politics?

Published in the New Statesman, 11th September 2014

The Scottish referendum campaign has served to weaken Ulster Unionist faith in a historical Ulster-Scots identity, and if Northern Ireland stays in the Union there may be more calls to integrate into the UK party system.

A mural of the Ulster-Scots US president James Buchanan. Photo: Flickr/Stuart Caie

Alex Salmond rarely mentions Northern Ireland. He is keen to stress the self-contained identity of Scotland, looking to Norway as a model for a new society while glorifying Bannockburn. Many in Northern Ireland, however, are shaken by the idea that Scotland would want to leave the UK. They see Scotland as a living part of Northern Irish Unionist identity. “The movements of people from north east Ireland to Scotland and vice versa have taken place well before the creation of our unitary British state ,” Northern Ireland’s First Minister, Peter Robinson, wrote this week. “We are a family.”

An affinity to Scotland is written into the Northern Irish Unionist psyche. The language Ulster-Scots, under the 1998 Good Friday Agreement, was given “parity of esteem” with Irish; it was to be a weapon for Unionists to counteract Irish Gaelic culture. The language was first documented in 1640, thirty-four years after the first Scottish planters landed in Ulster.

The cultural conflict in Northern Ireland is balanced, in theory, by an equal appreciation of both Ulster Protestant and Irish Catholic cultures. Some Sinn Féin MLAs start addresses to the Legislative Assembly at Stormont in Irish. In response, Democratic Unionist Party politicians, who share power with Sinn Fein, occasionally stray into Ulster Scots in their speeches.

Ulster Loyalists feel their ‘Culture’ is under attack. January 2013 saw violent protests over keeping the Union-Jack above Belfast City Hall, and there was rioting due to blocked marching routes in the North Belfast Ardoyne area that summer. Loyalists represent themselves firstly as Ulster people who are historically Scottish, rather than Irish. Without Scotland in the union, this notion of an Ulster Protestant Unionist identity may be fatally undermined.

To visibly parade their historical loyalty up to 2000 Northern Irish Orange Order members are set to travel to Edinburgh on 13 September to march with fellow Scottish Orange Lodge members. “Scottish brethren stood beside us during the Troubles and we need to stand by them when their place in the union is under threat politically ,” the assistant grand master of the Grand Orange Lodge of Ireland said. However, their intervention could alienate potential No voters .

On the other hand, Scottish independence would undoubtedly provide an immense boost for those seeking a united Ireland. A giant ‘Yes’ has been painted on Divis Mountain, overlooking Belfast. Sinn Féin would certainly call for a referendum on the issue in the event of a ‘yes’. Indeed, former Irish government minister Lucinda Creighton TD has said that an independent Scotland with Northern Ireland staying in the union would be “extraordinary” .

But she warned that calls for a referendum in the North could ‘threaten the peace process and alienate the Protestant community.’ One commentator has gone as far as to say that Scotland should “take Northern Ireland with [them] “.

But whatever the outcome, the referendum may stimulate a re-evaluation of Northern Ireland’s political relationship with Westminster. Since the Labour Party do not organise in Northern Ireland and the Conservatives made only a flimsy electoral alliance with the Ulster Unionist Party in 2009, Northern Irish people have effectively very little democratic agency in Westminster.

The DUP and Sinn Féin, a party who refuse take their seats in the Commons, are the fourth and sixth largest parties in the UK. The Northern Irish vote is split between parties that do not get into government or official opposition. The electorate therefore do not vote British governments, cabinet ministers or prime ministers into power. This might put the position of Scotland, who have produced two out of the last three Prime Ministers, into perspective.

According to Nick Clegg the “cat is out of the bag”  on the devolution issue in England and there are calls for more devolution in Wales .

The effects of the referendum will be felt even more keenly in Northern Ireland, however. Northern Irish politics has been inward-looking, facilitated by the reluctance of British parties to organise there. Scotland’s questioning of the union may have provided a galvanising shock, and the opportunity for Northern Ireland to integrate into the British party system. This is surely the only way to finally move on from sectarian politics.

Dervla Murphy: The wintered traveller

“I love cold weather. I really don’t get on with the heat and I don’t care how cold it is.”

In the severe Winter of 1963 Dervla Murphy set off from Dunquerque to Delhi by bicycle and launched into a travel writing career where she has written more than 25 books on Baltistan, Ethiopia, Tibet, Northern Ireland, Rwanda, Birmingham and Gaza among other places.

Eighty-two years old, she lives on the high street in the small town of Lismore, between Waterford and Cork, near the South-East coast of Ireland. She grew up here, grating against the staunchly conservative rural society of the 1930s, and when her mother’s health seriously deteriorated she was forced to take care of her until she was 30, alongside her ailing father.

 

These last years of her mother’s life were filled with frustration. “At 23 I felt increasingly conscious of the passage of time, of my own thwarted potentials” she wrote in her memoirs. She was engaged in a “psychotic personality battle” with her mother, who drove her away, she wrote, “as if a part of her wished to do so.”

Her mother’s death brought Murphy the opportunity to unleash her muted desire for exploration. “As my mother drew her last breath, peace enfolded me. It was profound and healing, untinged by grief, or remorse, or guilt … I thought of it as a gift from my mother’s spirit.”

Murphy was “stretched to breaking point” by the age of 30 and wrote that she “had not yet possessed anything but the minimum of clothes, the maximum of books and a bicycle.”

With the minimum of clothes and a .25 revolver Murphy cycled through the hazardously cold Soviet Eastern Europe and the Middle East to get to India in ‘63. Young men threw stones at her while cycling in Iran before she dressed up as a man to avoid danger and a police officer in Bulgaria tried to molest her. In Slovenia she was attacked by wolves and in Afghanistan she allowed a truck driver who was giving her a lift when her bike was broken to treat her sun burn with engine oil.

Perhaps the most enduring quality that comes through in her writing is her urge to empathise with people. “I stopped to have lunch with a fierce-looking but very amiable shepherd” she wrote in Full Tilt: Ireland to India with a bicycle “and admired his flocks while eating; we solemnly exchanged bread and salt so are friends forever, according to local custom.”

When Dervla Murphy replied to my interview request saying “I’d love to talk”, that is what she meant. She doesn’t like the idea of “interviewing” and said that she developed her technique of recording what people tell her when she was in Northern Ireland in the 1970s, during the troubles. “It was really important not to misquote people”. She used to take out her note book and sit down on the pavement outside pubs where she had spoken with Republicans or loyalists and write down what she had heard, she was “able to develop that short term memory.”

“I never wanted to do anything else.” She says, “People with a very strong urge to do one thing, or in my case two things, to write and to travel, well, you’re just born like that. Just as you might have blue eyes or brown eyes.” Her voice has an effortless twang which is quite apt.

By the time Murphy was 30 she already had “clear ideas about how she wanted to travel”. She wanted to travel on her own to “leave yourself in a position where you are dependent on the local people.” She would “arrive alone” in an isolated village so that “the people know you trust them.”

With her most recent book on Gaza, published in 2013, she sought to “record what the Gazan people had to say for themselves” and wanted to find out “how they felt and how they suffer”.

But it would be “almost impossible” to do “my sort of travelling now”, referring to discovering remote and isolated communities, she concedes. “So many motor-roads have been built in places like Baltistan, linking the remote places to the “modern consumer world.”

In 1977 she wrote Where the Indus is Young: A Winter in Baltistan and noted her own weakness as a traveller, “There I was” she wrote, “rather fancying myself as the hardy traveller moving through remote Baltistan – but the first touch of real pain (from a tooth ache) has revealed me in my true colours as a degenerate product of twentieth century over-civilisation.”

Murphy regrets not travelling in Tibet “in the old days”, “but I wouldn’t want to see it now” she says, “destroyed by the Chinese.” Neither would she travel back to Baltistan or Ethiopia, where she went in 1968, “I’d rather keep my memories of when they were really remote. We never saw a motorcar or a motor road or a big town.”

When talking about young people exploring she says, “I don’t think people want to now” she says, “It’s becoming increasingly difficult to travel simply and slowly.”

The recording of meeting with people has continually been the basis of Murphy’s writing. But in the 1970s her writing became more politicised. “I can pretty well date the change actually, it was on the way back from Peru in ’79 when we just happened to be passing Three Mile Island when the danger point came and then, instead of writing my book about Peru, I wrote a book against nuclear power.”

Her book on Northern Ireland was explicitly sympathetic to the Nationalist cause and she wrote a book on race relations in Bradford and Birmingham in Tales of two cities: Travels of another sort, published in 1987. In 1998 she wrote a book on Rwanda, four years after the genocide, and in 2008 she travelled to Cuba with her daughter and three grandchildren to “point out how well socialism works for the ordinary people” but also highlight the “defects of the Castro regime.”

“I always lived as a feminist in the sense that I did my own thing.” She says “It would have been unheard of to travel alone anywhere” among her contemporaries in Lismore. But she wouldn’t describe herself as a feminist. “I never thought about feminism in the days when it was, as it were, fashionable” she says. “I just did what I wanted to.”

Her autonomy has deep roots. In her memoirs Murphy describes being taught to write the letter h by Sister Andrew, when she was at school. She was “bending over me, whitely angry. I knew quite well how to write a standard “h” but I was determined not to do it according to the specifications. I had my own method, which I naturally preferred.”

As middle class Dubliners, Murphy’s parents were seen as foreigners in Lismore and this would have an important impact on Murphy’s character. They moved from Dublin when her father got a job as a local librarian. The sense that they were outcasts was not helped by his “conspicuously Republican” political identity in a Redmonite town. And der mother’s lifestyle seemed out of place to many locals. As Murphy put it, she “smoked oval Turkish cigarettes specially sent from Dublin, and drank China tea, and preferred her cheese smelly.”

She was aware of the frailty of marriage but described that “a romantic approach to nature was one of the strongest bonds linking a couple who in most ways were utterly unlike.”

When I arrived in Lismore I found out from the butcher where Dervla Murphy lived, but the gate to her house was padlocked. She hadn’t given me her phone number but her neighbour gave her a ring and her daughter picked up.

“Is it Philip from the student magazine?” she asks, sounding apologetic. “I’m so sorry but we’ve been drinking wine and beer all day, and my mother is very drunk.” I can hear Dervla in the background. “Why don’t you stay the night and my mother will talk to you in the morning, she gets up very early, at 7” “5.30” I hear Dervla Murphy yell.

There is no bus to Lismore so I had cycled from Dungarvan through Cappoquin, along the Blackwater river. Murphy wrote that “The beauty of the Blackwater Valley is so much a part of me that it inspires an absurd pride, almost as though I had helped make it”. She is “very rooted here” now, she says, and wouldn’t live anywhere else. The butcher hadn’t seen her for a few days, he said, and it was not unusual for her to leave suddenly without warning.

The Blackwater Valley and Lismore on the left

“I’ve never ever read one of my own books. No, that wouldn’t occur to me” she laughs. Neither does she read other travel writers “on the whole.” Freya Stark, Paddy Lee Fermur and Colin Thubron provide exceptions. But you can see her thirst for knowledge and her father’s influence in the ordered book shelves that line the walls of the huts in her “compound”, as she calls it. These low wooden huts are of typical Irish rural peasant style and the books are arranged by country. There are Turkish rugs, an army helmet from Rwanda and drawers of maps. She has three dogs and is looking after her friend’s sheep, she tells me.

taking care of her neighbour’s sheep in her back yard

 

When I come in to her study she is reading a book on South-East Asia and the Cold War. It’s 5.45 and she begins talking about Syria. I ask her whether she thinks Britain should intervene. She laughs.

When I’m leaving she is still reading in preparation for her next book, which might span multiple volumes and will record her travels in Israel, as a sequel to her Gaza book. She advises me to take the back-road back to Cappoquin, rather than the dual carriageway. “It’s a mile shorter” she laughs “and there’s barely any traffic.”

 

 

 

 

The Backroad from Lismore to Cappoquin

 

Oil Money in Brunei: Buying Freedom

Hassanal Bolkiah was crowned Sultan of Brunei in August 1968. After Bhumidal Adulyadej of Thailand, Queen Elizabeth II, Almu’tasimu Billahi Muhibbuddin Tuanku Alhaj Abdul Halim Mu’adzam Shah Ibni Almarhum Sultan Badlishah of Malaysia (whose name is nearly as long as his 54 year reign), and Oba Aetona of Nigeria, Bolkiah is one of the longest-reigning monarchs in the world.

Known to some as the ‘shellfare state’, Brunei is heavily endowed with oil and gas resources. The 407,000 inhabitants enjoy free schooling and healthcare without being made to pay tax. The fruits of the oil industry are not, however, shared by Brunei’s rapidly industrialising neighbour Malaysia, which has a Gross National Income (GNI) of US$7,700 (£4,875) compared with Brunei’s US$31,800 (£20,132).

The Sultan

 

Backed by Oil

This rosy picture is undermined by an unsustainable political system. In 1991, amid calls for the democratisation of the state, the Sultan introduced a policy named ‘Malay Islam Monarchy’, where the members of the monarchy became the official ‘defenders’ of Islam.

Through religion the Sultan has been able to maintain control of the people. The primary internet service provider is state-owned, and although only 33% of the population have access to internet, it is monitored for ‘subversive’ sites or messages including pornography which, if detected, leave the perpetrator subject to fines or imprisonment.

In 2005, the Sedition Act was passed to regulate the national press, preventing publication of any criticisms of the religious or monarchical system. Freedom House, an international organisation dedicated to the survey of political rights and civil liberties, judges Brunei on a regressive scale from one to seven at just six.
At Odds with Global Investors

However, the religio-monarchical structure causes more tension with foreigners than with locals. Positive discrimination gives religious elites and those related to the Sultan extensive social privileges. International companies can struggle to work effectively in Brunei because of the social barriers preventing criticism of those holding prestigious positions, many of which are not earned on the basis of merit. A British Gurkha regiment stationed at the Shell oil refinery is perhaps a sign of a further burden from working in this volatile environment.

Stuart Rylance, an affiliate of Shell Brunei, said: “[Shell] are now employing more Arabs from Qatar and the United Arab Emirates” instead of Europeans, due to religious barriers. Indians are also being drafted in.

Despite this, there is an expatriate community in Brunei made up mostly of Dutch oil employees and British nationals left over from colonial rule which lasted until 1984. Furthermore, it does not look like Shell will be moving from the huge oil and gas supplies in Brunei any time soon.

Alienated by the theocratic Sultanate and small in number, the expatriate community is fairly transient, with most spending only four years in the country. They are allowed bacon once a year, and, while Europeans are allowed to import heavily taxed alcohol, Chinese residents have to find it illegally.

Fabulously Rich

It is ironic that the Bruneian Sultanate is famously extravagant. As well as owning one of the most extensive collections of super-cars on earth, Prince Jaffri, Bolkiah’s younger brother, is said to own two boats affectionately named “Tit 1” and “Tit 2”. Jaffri, who was allegedly expelled from Brunei for organising an all-female naked tennis match, was sued by Bolkiah in 2000 for misspending US$15 billion (£9.6 billion).

There are inherent contradictions between the philosophy of the state and its actual running. The monarchy act irresponsibly at times, and a huge proportion of the potential wealth is consumed by them. The state is desperately undemocratic and the people do not have the freedom to say what they want. Despite this, it does not appear that a population which does not pay tax and enjoys a high standard of living see this as unfair. With a life expectancy of 81 for a woman and 76 for a man, they have the freedom to live far longer than in most other countries in the region.

The system in Brunei seems temporary, bolstered by unsustainable oil money in a nation that is by many standards undeveloped. The freedom of the people appears to be bribed from them with black gold. Even a thieving and philandering monarchy are not publicly opposed by the Brunein people, as there is not yet enough of an incentive to go against the weight of the system. The question is, however, for how long can this go on?

Ulster Scots or Ulster Slang

Thon yoke cowped in the sheugh” means “That car crashed into the ditch” in the dialect/ language Ulster-Scots/ Scots-Irish. The controversial nature of this form of speaking and, to a lesser extent writing, which was first documented in 1640, is immediately clear.
A synthesis of Lallans Scotch, English and Irish, its exact place in modern Northern Irish society is ambiguous. Although Sinn Féin claim to be “relaxed” about the encouragement of the deeply politicised form of communication, the Ulster-Scots Language Society believe the language is “heavily stigmatised.”
In 1998 Ulster-Scots was recognised as “part of the cultural wealth of the island of Ireland” by the “Good Friday agreement” – in Ulster-Scots: “pairt o’ the wealth o’ heirskeip o’ the islan’ o’ Airlan’.” The British Government ratified Ulster-Scots under the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages giving it Stage 2 status; a stage 3 status would allow it a place in the Northern Ireland educational curriculum. It is currently possible to study for a GCSE in Ulster-Scots, but there is still no official dictionary.
Sinn Féin politicians have always started and ended their addresses to the Stormont Assembly in Irish. Ulster-Scots has come more recently to be associated with Unionism, particularly the Democratic Unionist Party (DUP.) Current politicians such as the DUP politicians Jim Wells and Jimmy Spratt stray into Ulster-Scots when speaking in Stormont. It must be said that the dialect comes out irregularly and often out of anger.
Nelson McCausland, a member of the Democratic Unionist Party (DUP) and former Northern Ireland Minister for Culture arts and leisure (DCAL) described the need for “cultural confidence” and stressed the need for mutual cultural respect from both sides of the community. The DUP stress “addressing the disparity” in funding between Ulster-Scots and Irish. The funding is needed for the Ulster-Scots Agency (Tha Boord o Ulstèr-Scotch) for promotion and preservation of the language but also a department of Ulster-Scots was opened at the University of Ulster in 2001.
If the Sinn Féin Martin McGuiness can shout in Irish, the DUP Nelson McCausland can shout in Ulster-Scots. If road signs on the Falls Road can be posted in Irish, then ones on the Shankill Road can be in Ulster-Scots. Interestingly, the DUP’s affinity with Ulster-Scots may be tested if Scotland votes for independence in the advertised 2014 referendum.
But this political Ping-Pong overshadows the unifying potential of Ulster-Scots. The language is the product of Scottish Protestants living for four hundred years with Irish speakers, and represents a shared cultural heritage.
Ulster-Scots or Ulster Slang?
“Thon yoke cowped in the sheugh” means “That car crashed into the ditch” in the dialect/ language Ulster-Scots/ Scots-Irish. The controversial nature of this form of speaking and, to a lesser extent writing, which was first documented in 1640, is immediately clear.
A synthesis of Lallans Scotch, English and Irish, its exact place in modern Northern Irish society is ambiguous. Although Sinn Féin claim to be “relaxed” about the encouragement of the deeply politicised form of communication, the Ulster-Scots Language Society believe the language is “heavily stigmatised.”
In 1998 Ulster-Scots was recognised as “part of the cultural wealth of the island of Ireland” by the “Good Friday agreement” – in Ulster-Scots: “pairt o’ the wealth o’ heirskeip o’ the islan’ o’ Airlan’.” The British Government ratified Ulster-Scots under the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages giving it Stage 2 status; a stage 3 status would allow it a place in the Northern Ireland educational curriculum. It is currently possible to study for a GCSE in Ulster-Scots, but there is still no official dictionary.
Sinn Féin politicians have always started and ended their addresses to the Stormont Assembly in Irish. Ulster-Scots has come more recently to be associated with Unionism, particularly the Democratic Unionist Party (DUP.) Current politicians such as the DUP politicians Jim Wells and Jimmy Spratt stray into Ulster-Scots when speaking in Stormont. It must be said that the dialect comes out irregularly and often out of anger.
Nelson McCausland, a member of the Democratic Unionist Party (DUP) and former Northern Ireland Minister for Culture arts and leisure (DCAL) described the need for “cultural confidence” and stressed the need for mutual cultural respect from both sides of the community. The DUP stress “addressing the disparity” in funding between Ulster-Scots and Irish. The funding is needed for the Ulster-Scots Agency (Tha Boord o Ulstèr-Scotch) for promotion and preservation of the language but also a department of Ulster-Scots was opened at the University of Ulster in 2001.
If the Sinn Féin Martin McGuiness can shout in Irish, the DUP Nelson McCausland can shout in Ulster-Scots. If road signs on the Falls Road can be posted in Irish, then ones on the Shankill Road can be in Ulster-Scots. Interestingly, the DUP’s affinity with Ulster-Scots may be tested if Scotland votes for independence in the advertised 2014 referendum.
But this political Ping-Pong overshadows the unifying potential of Ulster-Scots. The language is the product of Scottish Protestants living for four hundred years with Irish speakers, and represents a shared cultural heritage.

“

What Next? An interview with Kalle Lasn

Published in the Hilary Term issue of ISIS

“To me this is a kind of oxymoronic madness, I can’t believe that human beings are being so stupid at this moment in human history. We’re still telling each other we have to consume more to get out the fix that we’re in which was caused originally by the fact that we consume too much.” Kalle Lasn speaks with the energy of an agitator. Behind his soft Estonian accent lies the story that transformed him into a radical thinker.

He was born in Estonia in 1942 and spent time in a German refugee camp before his family moved to Australia. It was during the 1960s, when he had set up a market research company in Tokyo, that his worldview started to change. “I was making money like you wouldn’t believe… and yet, all the people around me who worked for all those advertising agencies that were my clients, you know all of a sudden I got bored with those guys. All they did was go around at night and fuck around and whenever I started talking about anything meaningful then they didn’t really want to talk about it.”

This disillusionment grew and, after making films and documentaries for PBC in Canada for twenty years, Lasn founded Adbusters in 1989. Through this left-wing, non-profit magazine, which features clever spoof adverts, poetry and short opinionated articles, Lasn put his ideas on a global stage and provided the stage for others.

Adbusters uses branding masterfully. Its images accuse corporations of perverting consumers, ironically using consumerism’s own weapons against itself. “It’s a process we’re all caught up in and there’s nothing we can really do about it… that process pumps thousands of marketing messages into our brains every day whether we like it or not.” Spoof adverts attack consumerism in the same way as genuine adverts support it. For twenty years the magazine has been running ‘buy nothing day’ and ‘TV turnoff week’.

But on September 17^th 2011 the greatest branding exercise to date came to fruition. Thousands occupied Wall Street, and over the next few months occupied streets all over the world – #occupywallstreet.

When this message was printed in Adbusters they never expected it to reach so many. “That spark, the occupy movement – and now at Adbusters we’re saying ok, what’s next? How can we push this human experiment of ours on planet earth into orbit?”

 

Lasn sees the “huge threat” of ecological degeneration and climate change, the failure of the foundations of neoclassical economic theory which “aren’t working any more”, and the “mental breakdown of humanity” – shown by increasing numbers of people with mental disorders – as evidence that the current system is failing. “This human experiment of ours on planet earth has never been more shaky [than] it is today.”

The Pussy riots in Russia, uprisings in Egypt and the Arab world, protests in Spain, Greece, Chile and Bolivia are all part of this same undercurrent of restlessness that was behind the occupy movement and even the 2011 London riots, he believes. The ecological, economic and psychological problems result from the failure of the current system and “all add up to this… very scary gut feeling among some young people that the future doesn’t compute anymore.”

“Most of the students at Oxford and most people in North America and the one billion rich people in the world, we’re still doing pretty damn ok” Lasn says as he reaches the height of his crescendo. But he predicts “there will be a crash moment, a financial or ecological crash… if we do have a crisis moment then things could move very fast.”

In recent years critics of the left have attacked them for identifying problems and not solutions. Lasn believes that the feeling of frustration among young people is the start of a longer revolution, and the lack of viable solutions is to be expected, citing past revolutions when the ideas have come after initial unrest. “Even though up to now we haven’t come up with any big ideas, those big ideas are percolating in the background.”

But what is the ideological framework for this movement? “Well ideology is kind of an old word, now things are more fragmented… I don’t think it [capitalism] is going to be suddenly replaced by a totally new system… it will become capitalism 2.0 maybe” he laughs.

In his new book, Meme Wars: The Creative Destruction of Neo-Classical Economics, Lasn depicts the flaws of neo-classical economics. It is not radically new, but uses the work that some economists, such as contributors Joseph Stiglitz and George Akerlof, have been working on for a long time. He sees the current economic system as unsustainable because it ignores the fact that resources are renewable and that we live on a vulnerable planet. It makes humans selfish he says, and has caused them to abuse the planet.

He speaks with the precision of someone who has taken English as a second language.  “30% of the world economy is money making money making money ad nauseam… that aspect of capitalism will morph into 2.0”. A Robin Hood tax which would take a 1% tax from all financial transactions and the banning of flash trading would both be part of Lasn’s idea of ‘capitalism 2.0’. “We will figure out the costs of our doing business” with a two-cost market regime which takes into account the ecological cost of products.

Lasn believes this reality will be won through communication technology. “It’s going to be brought about by young people with social media tools.”

And what have Adbusters got lined up to kick-start world revolution? Lasn envisages a #Goldman campaign. A twitter campaign that goes viral “and suddenly all 72 branches of Goldman Sachs are thrashed all over the world.” He says, speaking quickly and eagerly. He realises “our ability to vent our anger at these financial fraudsters who brought on the meltdown four years ago,” and adds that “that anger hasn’t subsided.”

The #kickitover campaign aims to inspire uprisings in economics departments in universities across the world. “My great wish would be that the economics students at Oxford, that they start putting up posters… and asking their professors, you know, how they measure progress and how come they didn’t see the meltdown coming four years ago, and I hope Oxford can once again play a role in shaping the economic paradigm.” Lasn is particularly animated when talking about the nearly 100 Harvard students who, in November 2011, walked out of Greg Mankiw’s class in protest. The #kickitover campaign aims to take this to a new level.

There are also plans for a video game, #killcap, which involves the player trying to defeat capitalism. The tag line reads: “EA Sports – challenge everything”

But when Lasn starts talking about “an apocalypse and a thousand year dark age” I immediately become skeptical. Maybe it’s because, as Lasn says “capitalism does have a style, a tone, a form, a kind of a feeling we all live by, it’s a process we’re all caught up in and there’s nothing we can really do about it.” Maybe I am too caught up in it. But I wonder whether there has ever been a generation in which at least some have not felt that the future “doesn’t compute”.

Is it tenuous to link Pussy riots, the reaction to corruption in Russia, and the anarcho-marxist Zapatistas in Mexico? Perhaps. Has there ever been a generation where at least some haven’t believed the world is about to end? I doubt it. And what makes me even more suspicious is that I know many of the things Lasn says are buzz words that repeatedly feature in his other interviews and in Adbusters. “Capitalism seems to be tankering and faulting in a big way”, “the future doesn’t compute”, “morph”. Adbusters is all about trendy slogans: ones that you’ll remember and spread, ones that can start revolution.

But this isn’t a mad has-been lefty. This is a man and organisation that clearly have the power to motivate thousands through their adept use of imagery, words and the internet. The ideas are not peripheral either. The reality of psychological degeneration in the West is supported by a lot of evidence and Lasn’s new book debunking current economic thought has seemingly been received with acclaim. The existence of climate change can hardly be refuted. Whatever you believe, the potential power of the Adbusters campaign is undeniable. As Lasn says “It could take a generation… but people are waking up to the fact that what we are doing isn’t sustainable.”

“We’re living in a very dangerous but hopeful moment in human history,” Lasn whispers excitedly . “We have the possibility of pulling off a singularity, a one-time mind shift. A revolutionary moment in human history when suddenly we morph into a new orbit and start doing things right.”

The novel historian: an interview with A.D. Harvey

By Philip Bell and Violet Brand – Published in the June 2013 (Trinity term) issue of ISIS

“What’s wrong with being an icon?” A D Harvey asks as we leave his flat in Stoke Newington, North London. He is a sixty-five year old historian, novelist, and poet who publishes twenty academic articles per year, but has only held short posts at universities in Leipzig, Germany, and Salerno, Italy.

Harvey was relatively unknown outside academic circles – although perhaps notorious within them –  until last month, when Eric Naiman wrote an article for the Times Literary Supplement exposing him as the man behind multiple articles and books written under six pseudonyms. So, when he sent a submission to ISIS titled “My Poetry” commenting: “If I’m famous this month, Isis readers might like to read the attached,” we were curious.

More striking than his writing under pseudonyms is that some of the information was deliberately erroneous. In an article by ‘Stephanie Harvey’, AD Harvey implied that Dostoyevsky had met Charles Dickens, and cited an obscure Dostoyevsky letter in a Russian archive. This went unchallenged, then was cited by others – eventually ending up in a prominent Claire Tomalin biography of Dickens and monographs by Malcolm Andrews and Michael Slater. Michiko Kakutani in her New York Times review of Tomalin’s biography described the account of the meeting as “remarkable”.

Tomalin retracted her statements and apologised, saying that she was the victim of a scam. Excited Dickens scholars everywhere were disappointed and some, embarrassed.

This wasn’t the first time Harvey had written under a pseudonym. By 1985 he had published numerous articles, historical monographs and a novel, but felt that he was being rejected from some academic journals on name and reputation, rather than by the quality of his articles: “History [the academic journal of The Historical Association]… was turning down my stuff – not because there was anything wrong with it, but because it was by me!” Why would History want to reject him? Harvey speculates: “I’d never met Speck [the then editor]. It’s only a possibility, but it seems the only explanation, that he and certain other people had been annoyed by letters I’d been writing to the Times Higher [Educational Supplement], complaining about appointment systems and the way universities were clogging up.”

So in 1985 he sent an article to the academic journal History under the name ‘Stephen Harvey’. It survived peer review to be published in the next issue, with the title: ‘The Italian War Effort and the Strategic Bombing of Italy’.

Having in his own head confirmed the idea that the rejection of ‘AD Harvey’ articles was unwarranted, he delivered the coup de grâce: he sent a 14-page chapter from one of his published books, altered to look like an article, under the name ‘Trevor McGovern’. This too survived peer review, by “two other experts teaching the period, none of them recognising, in spite of the fact that I write better English than they do” that it came from a published book. When it was revealed that the Trevor McGovern article was an act of gross plagiarism, Speck, “being hysterical on the subject, actually organised that the Trevor McGovern should be torn out and he provided a replacement [article] to be glued in”.  The episode exposed History as “professionally incompetent” for reprinting a chapter from a book that, in Harvey’s view, all the referees should have known about.

Harvey seems to revel in the opportunity to tell us his story, and in the sudden blast of TLS-induced fame: “At the last count, [the article] features on 44 blogs and internet discussion groups,” he says eagerly. The TLS piece has been something like validation, for a “failed academic” (his words) tucked away in a flat in North London, publishing, writing, reading and researching in local libraries – but without, until this point, public recognition. It doesn’t seem to trouble Harvey that the recognition is for academic fraud.

He  does take issue with the way the article was written: “I think Naiman actually hijacked someone else’s story, made himself the star of someone else’s story – mine, not his,” he says, before interrogating us on whether we feel “warm or cold” towards the AD Harvey presented in the article. Nevertheless, he thinks the piece can be read “both ways” – in favour of Harvey as well as against.

Harvey is intrinsically anti-establishment: anti the established journals, the established academics, and established institutions – which he regards as closed to outsiders, complacent and self-regarding. But this attitude is tinged with fondness for places like Oxford and Cambridge: “I was from a smaller town and a poor background and Oxford was sort of the dream for me.”

He seems to revel in the opportunity to reminisce about Oxford in particular. His opening line, as we sit down in a dusty room piled high with books and antiques, is half-nostalgic: “For me every stone of Oxford is dulled by a failed hope, and, looking back, the only time that I actually really got off on the place was coming up for the interviews.”

In his final year studying History at St John’s College, Oxford, a literary agent expressed interest in a novel Harvey had been writing in his spare time; Harvey decided to be a writer. The obvious way of funding this career was by doing a PhD, in order to have three years’ income – in those days, academic grants were generous. “I didn’t become established as a novelist, but I fell in love with doing historical research.”

He did his PhD at Cambridge, and began to apply for academic jobs: none were forthcoming. Eventually “after 11 years of Oxford and Cambridge, I decided it just wasn’t happening”; he “ran away to become a hippy, and lived in a squat and was an antique dealer for a couple of years.” But he kept on publishing.

In conversation, he keeps returning to a few core themes. One is that “academics don’t read” – evidenced by his repeated successes with pseudonyms, planting false information, plagiarising his own work, and publishing a comparative essay in which one of the texts compared did not in fact exist. The other is that his own productivity (and, not-so-softly implied, brilliance) hindered his chances of getting an academic post. Another, again, is that the academic appointments system is closed, biased, and filled with people interested primarily in promoting their careers.

These grievances, justified or not, are what underlie Harvey’s attempts at academic sabotage. Not all the pseudonyms had serious intent, he claims: Stephen Harvey and Trevor McGovern were invented to prove a point (first, to himself, then, to the academic establishment represented by Speck). But Stephanie Harvey and the Dostoyevsky-Dickens encounter was merely playful –  an act of “jeu d’esprit”, he says. “Isn’t one allowed to have fun in life?”  And the other Stephanie Harvey article, a comparison between work by Doris Lessing and Leo Bellingham (i.e. AD Harvey) – where the Bellingham short story didn’t exist, except in the footnotes of the comparative article – was an attempt to play with literary form. John Schellenberger, a pseudonym used “to puff my work” on historical approaches to literature, he justifies as, partly, “a debate with myself”.

We ask where the (rather odd, or oddly diverse) names come from. “I’m creative, I write novels, I wanted to be a novelist.” Trevor McGovern “For a Southern Englishman … suggests some polytechnic lecturer in a donkey-jacket, which was part of the point” while John Schellenberger recalls “an American girl I had a fling with at Cambridge a long time ago, called Jane Schellenberger… the name was in my head”. Ultimately, “These names, these stylish mannerisms, are actually part of being a writer.”

In the TLS article Naiman slowly peels back the layers of different but linked identities to reveal the shadowy figure of Harvey behind them, who is criticised for damaging the reputation of independent academics. The acts of sabotage, Naiman thinks, will only make journals more closed to independent historians like Harvey.

Harvey is keen to reject this: “That’s just a complete canard. When you make contact, they [the editors] can pursue the question of your existence.” What Harvey doesn’t seem to want to acknowledge is that an author’s existence is taken partly on trust: journal editors don’t have time to ferret out authorial identities.

When pushed on the subject, he concedes, “Yes I have to confess it [the hoaxing] suggests a certain style of maliciousness – and carelessness – for other people’s sense of right and wrong. But then what about their sense of right and wrong? I’ve got 40 years of unemployment to complain about.” He laughs.

He revels in the title of academic terrorist. “Terrorism isn’t just bombs, it’s knowing where to put the bomb, how the system works, and you undermine the system by poking it in certain places. This is partly an exercise in figuring out where to poke and how to poke and how the poking really works.” Later, describing the hoaxing of the Dickensian, he returns to this analogy: “You get a taste for these things… what I really wanted to do [was work out] can you make two tons of explosive out of stuff from the garden centre?” It’s unclear whether, when digressing further into bomb-making, he’s intentionally extending the parallel or simply expressing enthusiasm for the subject. Either way, his conclusion is telling: “The more bombs you make, the more likely you are to blow yourself up, so that actual arithmetical possibility of making a ton of explosive and everything going wrong…”

Does Harvey have a point? He has certainly published a lot, despite (some academics might say, because of) his non-affiliation to a university. Some of his books have been genuinely well-reviewed. Collision of Empires: Britain in Three World Wars, published in 1993, received good write-ups in The Telegraph, The Guardian, The TLS, and several academic journals. And yet, Harvey says, he received no mention in the Annual Bulletin of Historical Literature (a Historical Association publication) between 1992 and 1995, despite two successful books coming out. “Retrospectively, if I’d ever needed a justification for what I’ve done, this would be it. These aren’t straight, honest, fair-dealing  people.” He views it all as a conspiracy to suppress his name. And perhaps there is a closed-ness to the academic history establishment, an unwillingness to recognise the merits of work by someone who’s not ‘one of us’ – an unwillingness to appoint people who’ve come in late, who aren’t of the right generation.

But Harvey is perhaps a little guilty of over-thinking: he thinks the conspiracy of silence extends even to the TLS. “The week after [the article] came out, it was like the interviews at Oxford, I was on air, because I thought the whole letters page for the following week was going to be full of people writing in – mostly negative – but provided there was an opportunity to shit on everyone…” But there wasn’t. The only letter referencing the Harvey article was a short one, picking Naiman up on describing the spires of Oxford colleges (the spires in fact belong to the churches). Harvey suggests: “It’s possible that someone leaned on the TLS not to publish any more to do with it.” If this strains credulity, it also speaks of a man who’s had lots of time – perhaps too much time – to mull over the obstacles, real and perceived, in his own career.

Perhaps Harvey’s problem as an academic is that he has tried to cover too much. The interdisciplinary scope of his work is remarkable: a poet, a wide-ranging historian, a literary critic and a novelist. He describes himself, perhaps slightly tongue in cheek, as a “simultaneous genius”, but simultaneity may have been his downfall. His consensus-breaking attitude and his generalist approach merge so that his fictional and historical writing are not altogether separate. Combine a novelist and an historian and you get AD, Stephen and Stephanie Harvey, and Dostoyevsky meeting Dickens.

But, while Harvey may have dreamed of becoming the historian or novelist on everyone’s lips, what drives him still is a passion for literature and history. When we meet him, he is clutching a thick volume of Dickens; judging from his book collection, he reads what he wants. He has a small red notebook with three columns of article lists: “Accepted”, “Searching” and “Reserved” to denote their stages in the publishing process. Once the articles have been accepted he glues the pages down. “The basic thing is I write what I want to write,” he says. He claims he has no longer has any reason to publish under pseudonyms, although he might still publish “some minor poetry or something” under a fake name. A line from the “My Poetry” piece he sent into ISIS in April perhaps sums up how he thinks: “I suppose my non-fiction work has an adopted voice… A. D. Harvey trying a bit too hard to sound like a scholar or a critic or a theorist… I have published non-fiction under [several] pseudonyms, each presumably with a different voice, though I confess they all sound to me like A. D. Harvey.”

Healers of Doon Well and Donegal

Published in November 2012 – Michaelmas term issue of ISIS
Sweets, superstition and solving the world’s problems

Eczema is difficult to treat. Olga Breslin, one of a number of people who have a gift for curing skin conditions and other ailments in Ireland, will cure the symptoms once you wait out the four-week back-log for an appointment.
Donegal, in North-West Ireland has particularly suffered from Ireland’s property crash. Evidence for this lies in the thousands of empty houses that were built on optimism and now litter the beautiful landscape. People may be reverting from the sudden, and now seemingly failing, material culture to the old spiritualism that was always there in the background.
Olga lives on a winding road of new houses. Her drive-way is filled with Northern and Dublin-registered BMWs; the thirty-five euros she charges to remedy the chronic skin condition is a bargain. “She takes as long as she needs to take”, a cure-hopeful tells me, “I’ve been waiting for three hours, but sure, it works.”
“At some point when I am passing my energy to you the clock will stop”, she tells me. “Don’t mind that.” She clasps my wrists as she whispers prayers continuously. Her hands aren’t as manicured as the rest of her appearance. She makes me hold nine sweets in my hands, to be taken in three doses, nine days apart.
I sit awkwardly. “Can you feel the intense heat coming from my hands?” she asks. The ten minutes that she keeps her eyes closed clasping my hands feel a lot longer. Maybe my wrists do feel a little warmer. I wonder whether the clock is broken.
She says her gift was given to her when she was still a child. “Until I was eight years old I thought it was normal to be able to see into other people’s bodies,” she tells me, before warning that she “can’t guarantee it will work.” The throngs waiting outside seem convinced.
When she releases my wrists Olga can see that my liver is “half full” of the poison which causes eczema. Do I suffer from back pain? Stomach pains? Do I have any problems in my personal life?
There are many other healers like Olga who offer cures, mostly for minor physical and psychological problems. Sprained muscles can be healed with a special ointment administered on three consecutive nights at midnight, by a healer. The ritual repetition three times is seen as particularly powerful.
At midnight on May Day of this year over two thousand people made their way to Doon Well, an ancient pagan pilgrimage site where the ‘peasthe’, a mythical serpent that lives in the well, is said to cleanse those who suffer from problems with their health. Disabled children are regularly brought there in the hope that they will ‘recover’.
Other, darker beliefs persist. The behaviour of people with mental disorders is predicted in parts of rural Donegal. Those with the gift can tell how they will feel that day from the movements of a named piece of paper in a jar.
This is only the tip of an iceberg of submerged beliefs in Ireland. Enthusiasm for the supernatural has not waned, even among a highly educated and modern population. And superstitious belief can suddenly become dangerous as healers have the power to make vulnerable patients do whatever they please.
But there is a stigma attached to believing in ‘superstitions’. “I don’t know if she has a gift,” one woman who had been healed by Olga told me, before adding, “I don’t know how it works. If my husband knew I was here he wouldn’t let me come, he doesn’t believe in this sort of thing.” Others cite placebo as an explanation for healing powers.
Yet folk beliefs are becoming less conspicuous. Ceremonies at Doon Well are not advertised and the whereabouts of healers are spread by word of mouth. As one woman from the town of Ramelton in Donegal told me, “People who believe in the supernatural don’t like to talk about it.”
Still, there is no doubt that the population of Donegal are spiritually charged. Father Sweeney of Ramelton, a semi-retired priest, attracts swathes of the sick and desperate who come to his Friday evening prayer meeting in search of help. He describes himself as a “channel” through which God’s power to heal can work when it is stimulated through prayer. He is “closer to God”, as he explained to me, and is thought of as a mystic by some members of the local community.
Ireland has long been associated with superstitious belief and the supernatural. Yeats broadcast this image to the world in the nineteenth and early twentieth century through the ‘Celtic Twilight’ and other dubious, high-profile rituals practiced by the Golden Dawn, an influential magical order popular throughout Britain at the time.
Belief in supernatural healing is not confined to Ireland. A woman from Kerala in India called ‘Amma’ (mother) tours America followed by a band of devotees, healing through her embrace, which has earned her the nickname ‘the hugging saint’. She has started charities across the world on the back of the huge wealth she has amassed.
Lynne MacTaggart has tried to rationalise folk belief with the Heal America Intention Project. She has applied the principles of scientific hypothesis and experiment to the ‘power of thought’, which she sees as a solution to America’s “greater national debt, poverty and unemployment.”
Her first experiment involved a group of people instructed to use their ‘specific intention’, or their power of thought, to change the position of algae in a remote laboratory. The Heal America Intention Project was launched at 12pm during the Coast to Coast Radio show on 6 June this year. The USA’s sovereign debt crisis has yet to be solved.
Two months and nine toffees on, I still suffer from my minor skin condition. For some, I believe, it is different.
It’s scarcely imaginable that superstitious beliefs will die out. The modern world is in some ways more receptive to them. Amma can run an international multi-million pound business built on her spirituality and Lynne MacTaggart can try to harness the spirituality of the masses to change the world. And then there are those like Olga Breslin, who simply feel they’ve got something to give.
pullout quote:
“Those with the gift can tell how they will feel that day from the movements of a named piece of paper in a jar.”