Last fall our comrades at Groundswell called for submissions for their new print-based publication and we were lucky enough to get the first issue hand-delivered by Dave Morgan, editor, when he passed through Provisions last week.

The handy tome introduces Crisis Folklore, a view of the world today from an imaginary future.  It includes contributions from Gavin Grindon (the Laboratory of Insurrectionary Imagination), Susan Sakash (RadKidCare), John Hulsey and collaborators (City Life/Vida Urbana), Karl Fitzgerald (Real Estate 4 Ransom), the Team Colors Collective, and Chris Kennedy (basekamp/The Institute for Applied Aesthetics).

You can get a copy from these great bookstores:

• Red Emma’s (Baltimore, MD)
• Bluestockings (NYC, NY)
• Lucy Parsons Center (Boston, MA)
• or contact Groundswell directly

It’s great to hear new work from this poet/survivor, and generator of the radical meme: “The revolution will not be televised.”

The video is of Scott-Heron’s cover of Robert Johnson’s Me and the Devil and is included on his new album which can be heard on his website.

Here’s an animation by Ineke Goes of Johnson’s original song.

Scott-Heron’s Message to the Messengers.

BBC interview.

Jess Baines has an excellent new article in Afterall on the history of radical graphics beginning in England in the 1960’s.  It’s a great introduction/reminder of how a previous revolution in technology, namely broad access to low-cost printing equipment, fueled global resistance to war and helped spread alternative social justice movements.

A wiki has been started to collect information on the topic.

Image: Poster from the Poster-Film Collective’s History Series.

Sue Coe has an exhibition at the Philadelphia Print Center, as part of the Philagrafika 2010 festival.  A short interview with her appears in the Philadelphia City Paper:

“It comes back to that theme of power and control, who has it, and who does not and why? I am wary of telling people what to think; I do not like being told what to think. All my work is my own inquiry and despair for the state of the world, and joy in the making of art, and sharing that work with people, and getting their comments.”

On the occasion of the U.S. national holiday in his honor, below is a recording of Dr. Martin Luther King most well-known speech.

From the Wikipedia entry for Martin Luther King: “I Have A Dream” is the popular name given to the public speech in which Dr. King spoke of his desire for a future where blacks and whites among others would coexist harmoniously as equals. Dr. King’s delivery of the speech on August 28, 1963, from the steps of the Lincoln Memorial during the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, was a defining moment of the American Civil Rights Movement.”

[Cross-posted to The Data Stream.]

And from another great address:

“And the leaders of the world today talk eloquently about peace. Every time we drop our bombs in North Vietnam, President Johnson talks eloquently about peace. What is the problem? They are talking about peace as a distant goal, as an end we seek, but one day we must come to see that peace is not merely a distant goal we seek, but that it is a means by which we arrive at that goal. We must pursue peaceful ends through peaceful means. All of this is saying that, in the final analysis, means and ends must cohere because the end is preexistent in the means, and ultimately destructive means cannot bring about constructive ends.”

Martin Luther King, Jr., “A CHRISTMAS SERMON” 24 December 1967

Robben Island Museum
Off the coast of Cape Town, South Africa

“From the 17th to the 20th centuries, Robben Island served as a place of banishment, isolation and imprisonment. Today it is a World Heritage Site and museum, a poignant reminder to the newly democratic South Africa of the price paid for freedom.”

Jillian Edelstein
Truth & Lies Exhibition

Based on her documentation of hearings that revealed gross human rights violations during proceedings of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) from 1996 to 2000.

The photographs are a reminder of an apartheid ‘hell-hole’ that was prevalent in South Africa prior to 1994; a South Africa that the young of today might only have heard about. The Edelstein photographs also represent seemingly innocent scenes of murder, torture, secrets, lies and the uncovering of truths.

A visit to the exhibition goes hand in hand with a deeper understanding of Nelson Mandela’s words of wisdom at the dawn of our democracy: “Never, never and never again shall it be that this beautiful land will again experience the oppression of one by another.”

On view through March.

[Text from Museum website. Graphic from Good & Evil: Stories and photographs from South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission. Accompanying text below by Jill Edelstein. ]

DIRK COETZEE
Pretoria, 26 February 1997

“I follow Dirk Coetzee’s detailed instructions down Jacaranda-lined Isipingo Street. For a few short weeks every year, this dull brown town is turned purple by a mass of exquisite blossom. My first impression is of how heavily Coetzee has incarcerated himself. His rottweilers are snarling, and the barbed wire around the metal gates glistens in the sunshine. Tea is served in china cups on a floral tray. So civilized, I think, holding my cup and saucer. I notice that wherever Coetzee goes, the leather purse which hangs off his wrist like a little handbag goes with him. ‘It contains my gun,’ he informs me. ‘I take it everywhere, even when I go to the toilet.’”

– From Jillian Edelstein’s diary.

Dirk Coetzee was the first commander of the special ‘counter-insurgency’ unit at Vlakplaas. He had ordered the deaths of many ANC activists, including Griffiths Mxenge, a human rights lawyer, who was stabbed 40 times at Umlazi Stadium in Durban, and Sizwe Kondile, a young law graduate from the Eastern Cape, who was interrogated and beaten then handed over to Coetzee who had him shot and his body burned. Coetzee’s career at Vlakplaas was short-lived. He was demoted first to the narcotics division and then to the flying squad and in 1986 was discharged from the police force. In 1989, prompted by the last-minute confession about the unit at Vlakplaas by one of Coetzee’s colleagues, Almond Nofomela,who was attempting to avoid execution on death row for a non-political murder, Coetzee exposed the undercover operations of the SAP in an interview with the journalist Jacques Pauw. For the next three years, Coetzee lived in exile. He returned to South Africa in 1993, and in May 1997 was tried and found guilty for his role in the murder of Griffiths Mxenge. But he had applied to the Truth Commission for amnesty and in August 1997 he was granted amnesty for Mxenge’s murder. At the TRC hearing in Durban, Coetzee was asked what he felt about what he had done to the Mxenge family. He said he felt:

“… humiliation, embarrassment and the hopelessness of a pathetic, ‘I am sorry for what I have done’ … What else can I offer them? A pathetic nothing, so in all honesty I don’t expect the Mxenge family to forgive me, because I don’t know how I
ever in my life would be able to forgive a man like like Dirk Coetzee if he’d done to me what I’ve done to them.”

[Cross-posted to The Data Stream.]

By the end of 2010, Google’s operations in China (www.google.cn) may be over and done. A presence in China’s carefully state controlled fiefdom in cyberspace since 2006, Google has reacted to a mid-December breach of its security, which, according to Google,  the Chinese government orchestrated.  Google and 20 other companies (including Yahoo) suffered the indignation of similar hacking incursions.

The attack targeted the Gmail accounts of Chinese human rights activists, though Google assures the hacking attempt was unsuccessful. As a result of this ungracious behavior on the part of their host, Google will stop its self-imposed policy of censoring searches as per Chinese law. In a letter from Google’s legal office, the internet firm stated that it is “no longer willing to continue censoring our results on Google.cn, and so over the next few weeks we will be discussing with the Chinese government the basis on which we could operate an unfiltered search engine within the law, if at all. We recognize that this may well mean having to shut down Google.cn, and potentially our offices in China.” As of press time, Google has granted its employees in China an extended holiday furlough.

The internet has always been cumbersome set of golden chains for China, essential for its economic expansion but also a powerful forum for political dissent and expression. While has been disappointing to see Google entertain Beijing’s requirements for censorship since 2006, it will be pleasing to see Google follow through on its indignant exit. By demonstrating that China can’t bully forms of foreign direct investment that require a degree of privacy and intellectual freedom to operate, Google’s departure from Chinese cyberspace may make other American and European firms less reluctant to show the same boldness in negotiations with the government. Unfortunately, China will probably respond by creating its own tamed search engines like www.baidu.com, which beats Google’s share of the Chinese market by a wide margin. So there’s a long road ahead for any truly unrestricted internet in China, and the cat and mouse game between government and dissident will continue. To distort Deng Xiaoping’s quote concerning free market reforms and economic development (”it doesn’t matter if the cat is black or white as long as it catches mice”), no matter how determined the cat, it can’t catch all the world’s mice.

Matt Yglesias on the blog thinkprogress.org wrote a post recently concerning a troubling trend in America’s meritocracy: it doesn’t work, at least not as well as in other countries. Except for the United Kingdom, the United States has the lowest level of intergenerational income increase, meaning that, more often than not, people stay put in their parents social class. His data come from a Center for American Progress study. Here’s an illustrative graph:

The data contrast family incomes between late 60s/early 70s and the late 1990s/early 2000s.  While it seems hard to dispute such a comprehensive statistical study, the good news is that there may be other factors at work, at least in a few of the countries above. In the late 1960s, Norway had yet to exploit its substantial oil resources. At the same time, Germany, riven by the Berlin Wall, was emerging from the process of recovering from World War II, as was France. In the later half of the 20th century, however, things got better for Scandinavian and Continental countries. The United Kingdom it seems, however, has less of an excuse. There, stubborn distinctions of class seem to be at work, a barrier to a rising post-war tide that lifted everybody’s boat a bit.

What is to be done, though, in America remains unclear. The U.K. has a far more comprehensive social safety net, as do Norway, Denmark, and Sweden. But since Congress seems incapable of drafting legislation that will help keep the U.S. labor force alive, at least, there’s probably little hope in any effort that seeks to increase social mobility through redistributing wealth, at least as far as political reality is concerned. And, besides, it doesn’t seem to do much for breaking down class in the U.K. Perhaps the answer is more funding for education and school loans. But then that might mean having a less luxurious welfare state for America’s hard working corporate persons. Still, somebody’s got to lose in order for everybody to win.

Pop music star and Sri Lankan native M.I.A. reacted angrily to the Times heavily laundered assessment of touristic possibilities on the revolution-torn island.  “HERE IS THE LUSH COASTLINE THEY ARE TALKING ABOUT,” she stated in a Twiitter post with a link to atrocities commited against rebels.

Here’s an article about government-inflicted atrocities.

Thanks to Pitchfork.

The COP15 Conference, the  meeting in Copenhagen for countries party to the United Nations Framework Convention (UNFCC) on Climate Change, has begun in earnest. With it, a flood of foreigners has washed ashore in Denmark, among them NGOs, IGOs (Intergovernmental Organizations), the Press, and delegates from UNFCC signatories. Among them, unfortunately, is not your correspondent, Wilson Dizard, the one writing this blog post from Copenhagen. Others are in a similar position, and not just due to the fact that the they basically accredited twice the number of people the conference center can hold.

Nevertheless, there are plenty of interesting things going down around town that concern the arts of social change. Here are the first photos of the acts at the conference.

Alright, this is a picture of a ice flow in Iceland, where I had a rather long lay over. Iceland’s endangered glaciers are a topic of discussion at the Conference, as you might imagine.

The Bella Center. The world will have to wait to see what kind of substance, if any, might manage to emerge from this building a fortnight from now. Look at the cranes in the background, evidence of economic development chugging along. And then there’s a wind turbine, too. To be sure, Denmark is a land of contrasts.

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