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Racist Propaganda
A German and a French paper yesterday reprinted caricatures the Danish paper "Jyllands-Posten" had published last years. Those caricatures pictured the prophet Muhammad. Some in ways, that connected him with terrorism.
A few Muslim countries protested and called for a widely followed boycott of Danish products. Only after months, the paper issued a half hearted apology. (Tip for Danish folks: If you don`t like these boycotts, retaliate: stop buying their gas for your car.)
The editor of "France Soir" immediately got fired and the publisher asked for pardon.
But the German daily "Die Welt" is playing hardball. "Die Welt" is the chronically money loosing flagship of the rightwing publisher house Axel Springer AG, the German Murdoch equivalent (note: this is NOT the Springer science publisher).
Steve Gillard is exactly right on this:
While the cartoonists have the right to say what they want, and no one should bow to terrorism, the problem with the cartoons was that they were genuinely offensive, bigoted, actually. Many suggested that Muhammad was a terrorist or approved of terrorism. It’s easy for people in the West to assume Muslims are not rational people, who get upset at the slightest mention. But this isn’t that case.
These cartoonists went out of their way to find the most offensive way to depict Muhammad and then sat back, stunned that people didn’t like their uninformed takes on Islam.
The papers claim they are fighting for a freedom of speech which nobody had questioned. Of course anybody has the freedom of speech to call me an asshole, but do not be astonished if I react offended – slap, slap.
In reality these papers have two agendas with these reprints.
- First it is a disgraceful scheme to increase circulation and profits.
- Second it is a calculated provocation of a clash of civilizations.
The corporate governance of Axel Springer AG include:
[S]upport the vital rights of the State of Israel [and] support the Transatlantic Alliance
What better way to do that, than to provoke an escalation on this issue?
This is right out of the playbook of Der Stürmer. Pure bigot racist propaganda.
well, I finally saw the cartoons and read most of this thread…
I do not agree with JR’s take at all…just look, as De noted, at what’s going in the US now with the talibornagains…
which brings me to the anon post about the way “atheist lefties” or whatever denigrate Christians…but I believe the issue is fundies, not Christians overall…or at least, from my pov, the issue is the intrusion of one interpretation of one religion into my govt.–which definitely defined church as one thing and state as another, no matter how many semantic gymnastics the fundies engage in (see I.D. for another example) to deny an entire history of the founders era, writings, and actions.
the idea behind the US govt, again according to those guys writing a constitution, from what I know, was advancing the human condition via reason.
but back to the cartoons– satire and cartoons are supposed to be “transgressive” as far as I know. there are plenty of cartoons that make fun of the fundies here and include god in them.
I thought some of the cartoons were funny–the virgins one, for instance…and funny b/c a subgroup of ppl, not the prophet, have, imo, hijacked a religion, in the same way the fundies have done so here.
the same with the women in burkas and the pr meeting. the rest weren’t funny to me, because the target was not the foolishness of humans, but rather an idea of an entire religion.
so, the idea behind those cartoons was the problem. the issue should be humans who interpret ideas.
just as in the Bible, it seems like ppl can pick and choose which parts and attitudes to emphasize for their own purposes.
…but such attacks on perceived powers via cartoons are nothing new, either. Just go back and look at the cartoons during the French Revolution. Women who raise their skirts in protest against the king, for instance. that was certainly transgressive. And the king and the state and god were all tightly bound together…
the current cartoons, however, do not occur w/o a context, and part of that context for westerners is the whole Rushdie thing, as well as suicide bombing in general. laughter releases tension over fears.
I suppose that’s why I can say that three of the cartoons made sense to me as satire, while the others did not…in fact, they seem weird…not cartoons and satire, but a sort caricature of the worst sort…
annie- I do not think that Supply-side Jesus is milder than the three I mentioned — for xtian fundies. (and at least one conservative–Goldberg?–thinks Al Franken is one of the worst things about the US right now)
however, there is also the issue of the idea of abstraction in Islam, like Judaism, in portraying the almighty…but Muhammid is the prophet, not the almighty, if I understand things…and the factions are due to who had the right to claim the mantle of the prophet after he died.
JR’s remarks about Islam fail to note that Europeans and their colonies would still be flagellating themselves if Islam, eastern Christianity, and Jews had not preserved via libraries and translated among themselves polyglot version of texts and translated Greek philosophers and Babylonian mathematicians into Latin.
However, I do think that religion as a basis for governing is a problem, is a problem, because all religions that do so seem to use the religion as a way to oppress females and minorities and as a way to obstruct peace.
Maybe there’s a religion and a govt that doesn’t do that… even Tibetan buddhism fights with other forms of buddhism, as far as I understand.
and all that leads back to Todd’s book and the idea that the middle east is undergoing its own crisis of modernization. Muslims can question the literalism of other Muslims, but maybe, because the west is seen as a negative, the west isn’t “allowed” to make jokes.
and JR’s insistence that the knowledge of the workings of religious power in the ME that were related to the Danes seems to misinterpret the statement as a threat, when it seems the issue was stating the reality of the power of certain Imans among certain populations.
and as for Denmark– long ago I was there staying on a ship/hotel and the guy at the desk was helping a friend and me find a place. He was flirting around some and one of us asked him how old he was and he said he was thirty. I said, “Wow, you look really young to be thirty.” (b/c that was REALLY old to me at the time.) The guy said, yeah, well, I keep a little body fat to hide all the wrinkles, and I have a beard. I took him seriously.
so who knows. everything I say here may be negated by ignorance.
Posted by: fauxreal | Feb 3 2006 13:31 utc | 51
Again, who profits from all of this? Centralized Governments, Religions, Corporate Media, and a few bad artists. All of this is almost comic relief–more “buffo caricato”, than “buffo nobile,”–from the major issues of war, poverty, imperialism, resource depletion, and ecologic catastrophe confronting mankind.
When I was young, I was very much taken with “avante-garde” artists breaking through people’s pretentions and prejudices with their confrontational art. Later, I learned that there was nothing original about their works or their methods–it had all been done before and has all been done since (from Duchamp and Man Ray to Serrano’s “Piss Jesus” and Madonna and whomever has taken over since). Each time the media has been breathless in fanning the flames of rightgeousness and indignation. It’s a circus that has never brought people closer to understanding and respecting each other. Rather, it is more an idealization of a certain puerile adolescent state when one simply must break away from all authority figures, and indeed, the whole world, as the whole damn thing is rotten. Except the artist, who of course, has completely escaped consumer culture; and the marketing of religion these days is the very definition of consumer culture, whether it is recognized as such or not. There is nothing particularly subversive about any of this; it is the obverse of situationism, what situationism seeks to struggle against; it is, indeed, the spectacle itself, with its endless array of mirrored halls each emptily reflecting back upon each other…
It should be obvious to all that corporate media has no real interest in exercizing any particular freedom to tell greater truths, and that intelligent, thinking and feeling Muslims these days have far more on their plate than taking the bait and thrashing around like a hooked fish on an issue that was not of their framing, and not essential to the greater struggles they face.
It is a sign of the terminal nihilism of our age that a work such as Duchamp’s “Fountain” should be considered the most influential work of modern art ever. The verdict is not incorrect either, as R. Mutt’s urinal has spawned an endless conga dance of imitators, such as my old friend from my NYC days, Bill Anastasi, whose myriad conceptual “breakthroughs” include works like “Trespass”, a negative installation where he systematically scraped away squares of paint from the walls of the gallery; “Untitled”, where he displayed actual reproductions of the gallery wall itself; and “Subway Drawings” where he recorded the random motions of pencil upon paper during a subway ride–this idea actually stolen from the work of John Cage, of which I used to own two. Perhaps far more relevant to this discuusion is his work “Without title”, where he stands before a wall with the word “Jew” painted over him. Anyway, you can read the mind numbingly trivial conclusions that the privleged elite are free to draw from this image at the link above. (Hint: He is not Jewish.)
Don’t get me wrong, I’m not knocking conceptual art here. Though it’s rarely well done–when it is, it can be challenging and mind opening.
What I am attempting to do, is comment upon a culture that holds subversion of convention, provocation, and intellectual tittilation above human values such as the universality of suffering, and the longing for social justice. That’s the greater frame into which this discussion should be placed. (It seems almost unnecesary to point out how difficult to craft, and rare, good art–representational or modern–that upholds these human values, truly is. Picasso, usually an extraordinarily quick worker, spent months of studies tweaking and retweaking the emotions and symbols of suffering in various ways before painting “Guernica.”)
So, I’m a little disappointed with my barmates being so taken in with this discussion, fighting for values that neither of the actual participants really holds. Whenever there is a spectacle such as this, it always signals to me far more sinister doings beneath the surface. (Perhaps the latest Bliar-Bush memo.) That is where we should be paying our attention.
I quite agree with Tariq Ramadan’s position, which is to consciously minimize the noise in the echo chamber, so that the chamber does not control us. Unless we want to be another “outrage of the day” blog–whether left or right, similarly controlled by the machinations of politicians and corporate media. This brouhaha is deliberately designed to pit factions against each other and increase general insecurity. This is obvious. This is what the elite do when they sense any solidarity developing. We should pick this up instantly, put our noses to the ground, and take it from there. We can do better than this, I hope and think.
Posted by: Malooga | Feb 3 2006 21:02 utc | 65
Waterbirth
I realised when I wrote that, some might consider it’s inclusion somewhat extreme, yet the social engineering that has resulted from the ‘pregnancy is a condition not an illness’ combined with ‘pregnancy/childbirth is wimmen’s bizness’ has caused a rise in infant mortality incidents in NZ.
Now before some of the more staunchly pro-feminist women MoA contributors come after me with the garden shears (see I told you he was a typical male, it seems DiD comes complete with castration complex), I do need to point out that I am talking about extreme or fundamentalist views.
I think I’ve mentioned in here once or twice that a lot of kiwis take extreme points of view. We moved from ‘east germany without the tanks’ to ‘a model example of the efficiency of the unhindered market’ in the blink of an eye.
A parallel birthing structure for women who regard childbirth as ‘wimmens bizness’ was established.
This was largely in reaction to the ‘old model’, where about 90% of deliveries happened in a hospital.
One centralised hospital ironically named ‘National Womens’ became a centre of ob-gyn research. Lots of good work done there but the organisation had fallen into the hands of men (eg professors of gynaecology and the like) who happened to be catholic men.
Some of these types saw ensuring the continued fertility of women as their number one priority.
This got extreme.
Conditions of vaginal warts and such were left in situ! When they did become cancerous they were still left because the bossfella felt sure that most of the cancers would remain benevolent. He was doing research to that effect and wanted as many cases where this occurred as possible to ‘prove’ this.
Naturally he didn’t tell the women they were research subjects and he certainly didn’t tell the women of their cancerous, or precancerous condition.
Are we all following this quick note which has once agin become a complex saga?
By the early 80’s a few things had occurred. Women were become coming much less content to accept the bland assurances of the kindly old physician, medical research ethics had begun to frown upon ‘experiments’ such as this, and worst of all it was becoming blindingly obvious that the good professor was wrong, wrong, wrong.
As far as anyone the least bit objective could tell every precancerous condition, if left untreated for long enough, would become malignant.
Medico structure moved to close the research down quietly but was caught between new young medicos determined to fix the problem rather than just leave it.
They wanted to call in all patients, check them and operate where necessary.
This was usually a full hysterectomy which was why the catholics didn’t want to do it until it became too late, so that they would be able to fulfill there god given right to be barefoot and pregnant for as long as possible.
Worst of all the young medicos wanted to tell the women what had happened.
That went down like a lead ballon in the hallowed halls of the Royal Australian and New Zealand College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists.
Even worse the professor, who was ‘getting on’ by now, wouldn’t concede that he was wrong, and wouldn’t stop his ‘non-treatment’!
It should be noted that this idiot had done a great deal of groundbreaking work in other aspects of his industry so he carried a degree of weight in the RANZCOG.
Even once the ordure reached the ventilator, a lot of people, esp and including women, wouldn’t tolerate any criticism of him.
So finally the shit did hit the fan.
It all came out in a big scandal which caused a number of changes in the obstetrics lurk including putting a woman in charge of National Women’s Hospital! (No surely not. Not a woman.)
The scandal boosted the careers of a number of the feminist, left wing politicians who had helped publicise it. Some rose to senior positions in the Labour Party which by now was in opposition.
They aligned with the nurses union women, who had been pushing for years, not unreasonably either, for nurses to have more say in medical issues, rather than just cleaning up the vomit and the blood.
Other ‘whistle blowers’ had become professional ‘wimmens bizness’ journalists. If stories were slow that day, they could always beat up the National Women’s affair push for childbirthing to be put entirely in the hands of women and somehow managed to let some limelight spill onto themselves.
A lot of these issues had many valid arguments. Just like other developed nations the rate of C-section delivery was more a function of the families’ insurance status than the percieved hazards of the birth.
Anyway once labour came to power a parallel model of confinement and childbirth was instituted where the medical practitioner in charge was a nurse (hereinafter referred to as a midwife).
These were specialist nurses who had many years experience in childbirth.
Indeed the times when I’ve been around for my children’s arrival on planet earth (all of which were hospital births) I don’t think I ever clapped eyes on the obs/gyn. This was fine because these were simple, straightforward procedures.
The most dramatic occurences were the torrents of invective hurled at moi by the child’s mother during the last critical, and extremely painful, I’m told, phase.
OK back to story. The midwives specialised in home-births and since Dr’s had given this game away years before (my cousin who must have delivered hundreds if not thousands of children during his career was one of the last G.P.s to give it away. Something to do with the $15 fee from go (diagnosis of pregnancy) to whoa (delivery).
The midwives became much in demand especially for water births and other faddy deliveries. (Sorry but as far as I can discern, the best delivery is the one that just happens with as little fuss, and bother, and home videos as possible. Just call me Harvey Straightarrow).
This whole parallel structure thing became somewhat contraversial, to say the least.
The doctors would claim that they were concerned about what would happen if something went wrong, while the mid-wives would claim that the only thing wrong was that obstetricians’ income had dropped.
Blah blah blah finger point finger point.
Now to any reasonably neutral observer there was one glaringly obvious flaw in the parallel structure.
That was if anything did go wrong, it would happen away from a venue with all the equipment and people with skills to help make it right.
Obviously in situations where it was apparent there may be complications, conscientious mid-wives referred the mother to a obs-gyn specialist.
However there are situations (somewhere about 1% of births, this is probably why births were shifted to hospitals in the late 19th century), where something goes wrong without warning. Mostly an ambulance would be calledand all would be well.
There would be mild ructions; eg midwives complaining about Dr’s attitude toward them as the primary health care provider, and Dr’s complaining that these births were occuring with no hospital or medical professional, (ie the Drs), having any prior notice a birth was likely to occur.
Staff may not have been rostered on, etc etc.
So it wasn’t long before fingerpoint, fingerpoint became fingerpoint, child dies, loud fingerpoint.
One of the first was a water birth with all the trimmings; ie friends and family standing around expounding with champagne glasses in hand, Mum in extreme pain, Dad (from behind the video camera) ‘calming’ her, then disaster. breech birth! (upside down)….Chaos waiting for ambulances….midwife flustered by all distractions….lack of support….then the inevitable…. death of child.
Yep we got to see it all, courtesy of local edition of 60 minutes. Because the parent’s attitude toward home birth and water births in particular had taken a dramatic turnaround. Like most of us they took up fingerpointing as a way to get out from under the mountain of grief compounded by guilt which they felt.
Publicity guaranteed an inquiry of the ‘whitewash’ kind which concluded ‘nobody was to blame’.
That having child at home entailed an increased risk of death from ‘complications’.
By this time people on both sides (midwives and drs) were suggesting that a better effort be made to integrate the parallel structures.
However the fundies held sway and nothing happened except a lot more deaths.
But today we learn this :
Newborn dies after delay in caesarean
” A newborn baby died after an emergency caesarean operation was delayed, prompting the Health and Disability Commissioner to call for tougher maternity safety controls.
The baby died at North Shore Hospital in 2004, two days after being delivered by emergency caesarean. A private midwife and a doctor at the time employed by the hospital, a senior registrar, were involved with the birth.
Commissioner Ron Paterson, who is calling for tougher safety controls on private maternity practitioners, plans to release his report on the case early tomorrow. The Weekend Herald has been told in advance of key contents.”…..
…..””They didn’t intervene fast enough for a caesarean,” Dwayne Crombie, chief executive of the Waitemata District Health Board, which runs the hospital, said yesterday. “They didn’t recognise the baby was distressed quickly enough, and they didn’t show enough urgency in getting the emergency caesarean done [in the handover] between the midwife and the registrar.”
Dr Crombie said Mr Paterson had found that no systems controlled by Waitemata were at fault, but he had found a national problem in the so-called access agreement.
This is a three-page Government document governing the access of private maternity practitioners – midwives, obstetricians and GPs – to maternity hospitals, most of which are state-owned.
“When they come to public facilities under the access agreement, there is no requirement for them to observe the policies of the facility,” Dr Crombie said.”….
….””They don’t have to take any notice of any concerns of my staff or protocols and policies of my units.
“The access agreement the Ministry [of Health] set up makes it clear I cannot impose those things. The only thing imposed on them is cultural safety.”
A number of district health boards had suggested introducing safety controls into the access agreement, but the ministry had not done so.
Dr Crombie said national clinical guidelines, of some form, were needed.”…..
…..”The head of the New Zealand branch of the Royal Australian and New Zealand College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists, Dr Bill Ridley, said last night the access agreement was a serious concern to the college.
He tied it to concerns about midwives’ accountability and training.
Midwives, like doctors, must be registered and have a practising certificate to work in their field. But Dr Ridley claimed midwife training was inadequate.”…..
….”Midwifery groups have rejected this view in the past, but yesterday College of Midwives chief executive Karen Guilliland declined to reply to Dr Ridley.
Earlier, Midwifery Council chairwoman Dr Sally Pairman declined to comment on the Paterson report before its release, as did the ministry and Health Minister Pete Hodgson.
The ministry is already reviewing aspects of the Government’s maternity regulations, including clinical quality, and is likely to accept the need to develop systems suggested by Mr Paterson. “…..
…..”Mr Paterson’s report follows criticisms last year by Wellington coroner Garry Evans of midwifery training and his call for a review of maternity services, greater involvement of GPs and an audit of baby death rates.”…..
Things to note:
(i) If I were a real anti-PC’er I would expound at great length about ‘cultural safety’ but as this issue is even more fraught than the wimmin’s bizness’debate, I’m sure the ‘good dr’ threw it in to really get the blue up and running.
For me to give justice to that issue would make MoA habitues on dial up grow cobwebs waiting for the download.
(ii)We can hope that the silence from the midwives lobby is a pause for reflection, prior to joining with the medicos to work out a system that will satisfy both groups needs, whilst keeping the safe birth of the child and the health of the mother the number one priority.
It could be but a pause to gird the loins for round 57 of the blue, hopefully (iii) should preclude that.
(iii) The new minister is replacing a former nurse who held the position of Health Minister for 2 years and who was possibly instrumental in the original instransigence.
Minister is unfortunately both a bloke, and member of the right-wing faction of the labour party. If he gets tempted to take no prisoners and make this exercise a purge, his gender will feature heavily in the reaction to his destructive onslaught.
(iv)In NZ we can only hope that both sides are reasonable and won’t let this unworkable situation continue.
Posted by: Debs is dead | Feb 3 2006 23:54 utc | 70
Sorry for my “hit and run” demeanor the last week or two, but outside life has called, I’ve been under a lot of stress, and I have been battling an ear infection, so that when I get home I just want to go to sleep and it seems too hard to post anything. I actually took a great deal of interest in the Palestinian/Israeli thread and was planning a post but haven’t yet gotten it written.
First off, a small matter:
@slothrop: Thanks for the correct translation, I don’t know what I was thinking. It’s hard to believe I once knew that language a bit.
Most importantly:
@b: I am sorry for striking a dissonant chord with you, and I thank you for speaking up promptly and airing your feelings. I, like everyone here, appreciate your dedication and work in keeping this bar open. You have more than once offered me the right to post new threads here and I thank you for that. I don’t feel very original, and seem to draw my posts more from other’s responses, but I should consider your offer, as should we all, if only to distribute the load. It is a shame that Billmon seems to have found some other activity (raising a family, earning a living, a bloggers anonymous twelve step program?) that he finds more rewarding than blogging.
In any event, I was not commenting on your posts when I made my criticism. I think maybe some of the troll comments on the Palestinian thread helped to set me off, and then was exacerbated when I saw the same trend arising on this thread. But I in no way want to be a moral arbiter of others. And in that sense, perhaps I was wrong for using language like “we can do better.” I did not want to name names of posts that annoyed me unless I was prepared to rebut their positions, which honestly did not seem worth the effort.
So, I want to apologize if I offended you and say that I definitely appreciate your work on this blog. You are too modest when you say you are not a writer; maybe not professionally, but may of your posts shine with intelligence and sensitivity.
DiD asks “what is the ‘correct’ response to something so deliberately obnoxious as those cartoons?” I only have two things to add to what has been said already. First, as an activist for equal rights and social justice, I try to see these types of conflicts through that lens. A.S. Neil, in his book on his groundbreaking educational methods, “Summerhill”, used the phrase “freedom, without license.” That is to say that one should have the freedom to do as he wants, without having the license to adversely impact others. Now, how that plays out in this particular case, the tactics, is a matter of debate. My ideas are not any better or different those suggested by others here. Second, questions of tactics in activism are unfortunately quite difficult, without obvious right answers. In a case such as this, one might decide to support the rights of fundamentalist muslims, who’s totalitarian rightgeousness one would ordinarily detest, based on the reasoning that they are less powerful and monolithic, and hence more democratic, than the forces of hegemonic empire. After the battles for self determination from empire are won, one would then side against them for greater personal freedom.
I am heartened to see Uncle $cam’s link to the Kos post that the cartoons are a “manufactured controversy.” This is where I was trying to point with my post. No one suggested the option that this whole brouhaha could very likely be a false flag disinformation project. It seems to me that most conflicts given this amount of airplay in corporate media are meant in one way or another to serve the interests of the empire. Why should this be any different? I don’t know who owns Jyllands-Posten, whether they have neo-con leanings, or not. All of this seems a great pretext to me to incite a few small “terrorist” attacks which can then be used to further erode the freedoms of Europeans, so that they maintain “parity” with empire’s hub. Two countries have recently announced that they are leaving the coalition of the willing. Another possibility is that this is meant to dissuade Denmark from also leaving. It is easy to predict the predilictions and general directions of empire, but much harder to make sense of each particular gyration. I remember when experienced Kremlinologists studied the positions of ministers in group pictures to predict policy.
@annamissed-
Thanks for your lovely recollections. Soho was so new and shiny then…. And thanks for not taking my criticisms personally or as indicative of all conceptual art; it was more to create a distinction for my argument.
Unfortunately, I feel compelled to waste today watching our national tribute to sublimated martiality, namely the Stupid Bowl. Pray for my soul.
Posted by: Malooga | Feb 5 2006 17:28 utc | 100
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