Been away from the keyboard for awhile. Had a slight relapse of the multiple sclerosis. It seems you can't write anything that compromises the defenders of capitalism without them trying their worst to stress and hence destroy you bit by bit. Should have expected it really, especially when posting an essay that makes clear to those who know me, though not naming those whom I consider by their actions be spooks. More later.

One thing that has come out of being away from writing is the time to reflect on some writers whose work I've been following. Reassess their style and the content within their words and find the courage to put some political criticism forward.

Recently Gilad Atzmon was interviewed by Mary Rizzo at PeacePalestine , reprinted at Dissident Voice . I was invited by Mary to participate in an off-site discussion about this interview but felt that that was not the place to put any criticisms of Gilad's views which I have, though I was sympathetic to the request as some of the language being used against both Gilad and Mary by those claiming to be of the left was quite disgraceful.

Now I've previously written about Gilad and some of his writing , found it interesting and in it's own way important. I don't think I would do a disservice to describe his general position as that first and foremost we should define ourselves as human beings, everything else is secondary; ethnicity, religion, race, nationality etc. It is something we can all quite happily subscribe to. Unfortunately for this idea is that the way we define ourselves is socially acquired, the differences emphasised and hence are exploitable by a power elite in class society. Israeli and Palestinian societies are both predicated on class, which to me is the one definition of ourselves that has the ability to unite the poor across the differences.

My criticism of the content of the interview is to do with the Palestinian academic and cultural boycott campaign against Israel which Gilad seems to equate as being equivalent to burning books. To quote;

".....I see a tremendous difference between banning an avocado and a book. I would welcome any form of financial restrictions on Israel and its supportive bodies yet, I truly believe in freedom of speech and oppose any form of of Maccarthyism or intellectual censorship of any sort. Thus, interfering with academic freedom isn't exactly something I can blindly advocate. Unlike some of my best enlightened friends, I am against any form of gatekeeping or book burning. But it goes further, I actually want to hear what Israelis and Zionists have to say. I want to read their books. I want to confront their academics. If justice is on our side we should be able to confront them."

At least 50% of Israeli academic research is funded by the military and any new equipment or software developed from this research is tested on the Palestinians before being offered for sale overseas. Israel has overtaken Britain as the worlds fourth largest exporter of military and security equipment. Naomi Klein, writing in the Guardian says the Palestinians are being treated as the laboratory subjects of the Israeli military's experiments. This expression of state sponsored racism in itself warrants an academic boycott but there are others. Such as the Israeli policy of cantonisation and road blocks denying the Palestinians the opportunity of attending college and gaining an higher education, or the killing of school students at their desks from sniper fire. Then there is the concentration of people imprisoned and being slowly starved in Gaza.

Gilad actually contradicts himself in an earlier passage from the same interview where he says;

"Recognising the historical injustice against the Palestinian people and watching the  escalating Israeli barbarism my moral duty is clear to me. I just support the Palestinian people and their different choices even if those are contradicting."

It is the decision of Palestinian academics to call for an academic and cultural boycott of Israel and supported by academics in Britain which is being questioned by Gilad that I find difficult to understand, or maybe I have misread his interview.

International actions like the academic and cultural boycott really frightens Zionism and which forces its activists such as Dershowitz to campaign against those institutions and individuals who are prepared to take a stand against colonial barbarity. I'm sure Gilad does not wish to be associated with such reactionaries and hope this criticism of his position is accepted in the light of how it is given - without the abuse he gets from others claiming to be of the left.

Another writer I've been reassesing is Joe Bageant whose writing is unsurpassed with its compassion for the ordinary, everyday American, or so it would seem. His articles relating an upbringing in a fundamentalist religious family are exceptional for the understanding and sympathy for those trapped in such thinking. I liked his writing so much that I nominated him for a thinking blogger award, so what I'm about to write now is a bit difficult because I have to criticise an essay of his for its portrayal of our situation as being useless. That we are inevitably on the road to destroying ourselves by our actions on the environment.

In his latest essay - The Ants of Gaia - he is quite disingenuous in this regard. In the essay he tries to say that we are naught but ants with a more complex nervous system. A bit like that artistic frontman for Franco, Salvador Dali who depicted us, the poor as ants in his paintings.  

"As a small boy, I once transferred most of an anthill population from its natural digs in our front yard to a gallon jar of fresh dirt, sprinkled it with a little sugar (in the cartoons, ants are always freaks for sugar, right?) and then left the ants on their own. Of course the day came when all I had was a jar full of dry earth, ant shit and the desolation of their parched little carcasses. I'd guess that it was the lack of water that finally got 'em.

But the most interesting thing in retrospect -- if a jar of dead bugs can be called interesting -- is this: Up until the very end they seemed to be happily and obliviously busy. They constructed an ant society with all of its ant facilities, made more baby ants and did all those things ants do that the proverbial grasshopper is famous for not doing. Obviously Christian predestinationists to the last ant, they met the grasshopper's grim fate by another route, and did not look at all surprised in death."

For those that don't know, like me until I checked it, the ant and grasshopper reference comes from Aesop's Fable;  

"It was wintertime, the ants’ store of grain had got wet and they were laying it out to dry.  A hungry grasshopper asked them to give it something to eat.  ‘Why did you not store food in the summer like us?’ the ants asked.  ‘I hadn’t time’, it replied.  ‘I was too busy making sweet music.’  The ants laughed at the grasshopper.  ‘Very well’, they said.  ‘Since you piped in the summer, now dance in the winter’. –"

Erik Hurst from the University of Chicago Business School uses this fable to blame the poor for being poor. (See PDF ). Its a refusal to recognise that millions of people are living pay cheque to pay cheque without any hope of saving even a penny for a rainy day, and that doesn't include those who are out of work and dependent on benefits. The fable is in fact used as an arguement to deny benefits to the poor by implying they are spendthrift.

Throughout Joe's piece is the believe that we are dumb and have no hope of understanding the political realities in which we live and that if we do we are to weak to want to change it; that we are all equally responsible for the state we are in in this world irrespective of ones place in the heirarchy of power; that the power elite have accrued all the chips. For somebody who has made a living from editing a military history magazine over the last 20 odd years, a minor cog in the military-industrial complex, this attitude can be seen as understandable.

We are more than ants Joe. Our own volition cannot be equated with that of the ant who has none but only reacts to the chemical scent trail, the pheromones left by others of its kind. We on the other hand can recognise the damage we are doing to the environment and, if acting in conscious unison, change the trajectory of our negative impact on planet Earth to one of sustainability for the benefit of all.

Joe's writing gives the impression that he cares for the people he writes about but to leave people without hope of changing the way it is - "It's only the end of the world, so quit bitching" - is an expression of defeatism par excellence. Knowingly or unknowingly this is a part of the panoply employed in the demobilisation of the oppostition to the way it is.

I've previously mentioned on this site about suicide being put to me quite a few times, over the last 6 weeks suicide has again been put to me at least 3 times, one of which came from a bloke in Totnes who mentioned using prescription drugs. Funny enough Joe also posted on his site recently a short piece about a friend of his who had committed suicide with the use of prescription drugs a couple of years ago. I hope it is just a coincidence. But anyway, I want to make it clear that suicide for me is not an option.

And now to a writer whose lyricism is quite stunning. Phil Rockstroh doesn't write all that often but when he does it is worth the wait. I've been reading his work from since the days when he was being published online by Swans and have always been impressed by the writings of this supreme wordsmith. Going so far as to rip off and use in an essay a few years ago the Olympian god of death - Thanatos - as the one worshipped by the Bush family. I hope that didn't annoy him, but the folowing may.

In his latest essay , Phil again brings his gifts of poetry to the page to criticise the American way of life, or to be more precise, way of death. Writing that never fails to engage the emotions of anger, repulsion, enmity and especially a visceral distain for what is, the way things are.

Yet there is a serious weakness with it, as in all his writing, in that he sees the way forward to changing this state of affairs as a spontaneous awakening of individuals. This affects a lot of American writers whose understanding of societies seems to have been conditioned with an extreme form of individualism at the expense of the wider commonality of interests and actions. It's as if they have never played team sports - or even loath them and the learning from working with others in the active pursuit of a goal

To be fair to Phil, he does see his contribution to the struggle for the new as being in his writing, beautiful writing that many would like to emulate.

The one thing that Phil and Joe have in common is that they have failed to appreciate the hope engendered in such events as the recent US Social Forum. 9,000 activists from across the United States converged on Atlanta at the end of June 2007 exchanging experiences and knowledge, making new contacts and alliances. Hopefully in the process finding common cause and joint actions to further an agenda of political resistance and progressive change. The social forum does have space for political difference as has been amply described by Thomas Ponniah at Znet , but the least of their problems is the determination to find a way forward for humanity.

Finally a quote from Ernest Hemingway;