Donkeyshott & Xuitlacoche

Capitalism doesn't like disruptive technologies. Look at the foul combustion engine. We still use the combustion engine because it suits the profits of car manufacturers and oil producers. You can't conflate innovation with the development of new technologies, capitalism is no the source of innovation. It is not true that companies have come up with most of the major new technologies. Reach out to the innovation nearest to hand; the Internet - the World Wide Web and what you have is an "innovation" funded by DARPA, a branch of the US state. This innovation was developed by university campuses over the length and breadth of the United States, not by companies. And then, for the birth of the WWW you have a researcher funded by the European Union CERN facility. Tim Berners Lee. The Jet, the computer, radar, genetics, nuclear power, you name it. These are all the products of STATE FUNDING. They are not the "innovations" of capitalism. Counter examples? The cornf...

Totally occupied for weeks with final illness and farewells for my wife Eve, ever an ANC loyalist, I have completely missed the wide coverage of Mark Gevisser’s book on Thabo Mbeki. Just until I have completed and sent off this article, I will stay outside the buzz of interest which the book – by a fine writer, after years of research – is stirring, for its full and sensitive treatment of the subject: I know that to understand can be to forgive – but it should not be to excuse, to validate, and to allow the subject to carry on messing up our national politics. Of course Thabo Mbeki should not be standing for a third term as ANC President – it simply muddies the fountains of choice as to who will lead the country into the next crucial phase of transition. But sadly, it is only the latest and greatest act of irresponsibility and manipulation in a catalogue of choices which I believe have characterised and shaped the course of the presidency, and of national policy. Like most long-standin...

My mum was ill with cancer in South Africa and I posted a note on Cif in one of the discussion threads about her life and my father's. The next thing, Linda Grant - a regular Cif contributor - got in touch, inquiring about my mum and dad. I am not surprised that she knew them - their lives touched the lives of many. Mum was in the last stages of cancer. Linda's warmth surprised and pleased her. She even had the idea of writing her life story and Linda offered to help. This cheered her up immensely and she wrote a little beginning called La Petite Madeleine. But then we had to rush to my mother's side. Those last days as a carer were extremely hard for dad. We arrived at mum's bed less than an hour before she died. Hating her agony, I remember saying: "You can go now, mum." She died about a minute later. Then each of us acted in character. We all cried. Dad said how beautiful she was, Chris checked his watch in the middle of all his pain and said: "1.18...

I saw a copy of Che's African diaries about three years ago and was asked to translate them, but that offer soon faded away. At the time I said I would be honoured to translate the diaries. I am not so sure now. Che's language was dense and circular and confusing in its references, alluding to conversations and events that he didn't specify or detail. If Che was writing for posterity, there was absolutely no sign of it in the Spanish he used. Pure stodge. And he did go through a period of being quite obese. And then, a few days ago I was chatting to one of the former leaders of the African revolutionary and anti-colonial movements and he enlightened me somewhat. He said that he had respected Che's ideas to some extent, but didn't like Che as a person. According to him, Che had been a latecomer to the Cuban revolution, and without much of a background in Cuban politics. He just got onto the boat with Fidel in order to help swell the numbers. From then on Che was unde...

So you have "lived deep" and extracted all the sweetness out of life, and you have had your last meal . But, what food and drink would you like people to remember you by? What wafting smell would have the power to conjure you up from the grave, to draw you back down through the portals of heaven, to tempt you back onto this lovely balls-up of a planet? Were you the Queen of buttered, slightly crisp and salty asparagus? Were you the King of French Cognac? Were you the Polish Prince of English wild forest mushrooms? Were you enslaved to Arabica? Were you an advocate for English cheese? Did you murder for a drink? Were you an innocent victim of chocolate? And, did you see the world in a grain of rice and eternity in a glowing coal of truffle? On All Hallows, on November 2, in an act meant to both evoke and invoke the dead, Mexicans put up altars and lay out the favourite food and drink of those that they loved, respected or just plain put up with. Traditionally, Mexicans are bot...

Eve Hall 1937 – 2007 Eve Hall, beloved wife of Tony, died peacefully at home on 23rd October. Loved and mourned by her sons Phil, Andy and Chris, her grandchildren Natalie, Lucy, John, Myles, Betty, Carmen, Jess, Alice, Eve and Bobby, and her daughters-in-law Tere, Kate and Anne. She will also be deeply missed by all her family and friends. The spotted hawk swoops by and accuses me, he complains of my gab and my loitering. I too am not a bit tamed I am untranslatable, I sound my barbaric yawp over the roofs of the world. The last scud of day holds back for me, it flings my likeness after the rest and true as any on the shadowed wilds, It coaxes me to the vapor and the dusk. I depart as air, I shake my white locks at the runaway sun, I effuse my flesh in eddies, and drift it in lacy jags. I bequeath myself to the dirt to grow from the grass I love, If you want me again look for me under your boot-soles. You will hardly know who I am or what I mean, But I shall be good health to you neve...

Compassion means you are on-side, that you go out to bat for someone. Pity, on the other hand, is what you may feel for an Iraqi, for a Palestinian in a refugee camp, for a brown skinned Tsunami victim. You can feel pity for a sweatshop worker in China and still buy the clothes. You can feel pity for the Iraqi's as a US grunt and still mow someone down at a check point. Pity is what we offer a Palestinian child shot by an Israeli sniper. Compassion is what we offer an Israeli child blown up by a Palestinian. It is all about point of view, isn't it. It's about being able to manipulate events to set agendas. Bush used the destruction of the Twin Towers like Hitler used the Burning of the Reichstag. Hitler introduced the enabling act and Bush the Patriot act. It's a ploy as old as history. Moore tells us, 15 out of the 19 bombers were Saudis, Saudi money financed the attack on the Towers and a Saudi planned it, but Bush used 9/11 as justification for the invasion of......

Although I have only seen it in flashes between the trees, I have a connection with Sarajevo, It looked beautiful. Past the rocky slopes and cracking pine cones, it shone at me from a valley. You can see my great grandfather Izy on the steps of the town hall in pictures, part of the committee that gave the Archduke Franz Ferdinand his send off. In India, during Indira Gandhi's emergency, long ago now, I met my first girlfriend, a budding Yugoslavian. She had obsidian eyes, fine bronze hair, a smile like the Medusa and stubby fingers. In1976 Yugoslavia seemed like a peaceful place and I romanticised it because I remembered Natasha and I felt I was a socialist and I was only 16. A year later, in summer, we lived together for a month. In 1980. She left her new boyfriend in town and took me to a small Island off the coast. We slept in the forest and swam in a bay surrounded by yellow rocks like. Her friends seemed to have so much time to waste, to get themselves into existential knots....

It's rare that you watch an action movie that makes you laugh out loud at the crux of the action. Watching Jason Bourne hide at the back of the Thresher's off license in Waterloo station was such a moment. And to top it all, in the hot heart of the frenetic action, as Bourne and a Guardian Journalist negotiate W. H. Smiths, placed slap bang in the middle of the Waterloo concourse, the loudspeakers announce that "The train to Chessington South will be leaving from platform 8." "But, hey, that's my train!" The Bourne movies have had quite a good stab at capturing a tiny bit of the spirit of places where they are set. This was important to their success. The Moroccan and Madrid stair wells, a modern German home, all these little touches. But they could have gone a little further, they could have provided little holographic shards or narrative rather than just a bit of reflected shatter. "The train to Chessington South will be leaving from platform 8....

Drew A. Hyland has a point when he argues in 1973 against philosophy as a Hegelian view of history. And he is also right to mark out the importance of the Epic of Gilgamesh. From my perspective of the 21st century I always thought the story was silly. A comic-like story of a sexually ambivilant superhero. What was that thing he had going with Enkidu? All that wrestling in the dust. Enkidu Shams and Gilgamesh Rumi. But Gilgamesh wasn't Superman, he wasn't, as Tarantino suggested in Kill Bill II, a snide critique on the weakness of men or Chabon's Kavalier and Clay fantasizing about saving all our grandparents from the ovens of Treblinka and Aushwitz. Gilgamesh headed straight for the ovens of Ishtar. The figure of Gilgamesh is worthy of being the first human figure in myth. greater. Gilgamesh would fight for humanity's dignity and place in what Pythagoras was to call the kosmos. Gilgamesh, as quoted by Hyland says: "Shamash, listen to me, listen to me Shamash, l...

The language of Tarkovsky is poetic and he expresses himself cinematographically through images of melting ice and trees moving in breezes that swell up unexpectedly. Tarkovsky work is incohate, while barns and candles burn and vast oceans move with sentience. Tarkovsky's landscapes are always sentient. The rhythms of car and train journeys play against the unspoken thoughts of Tarkovsky's characters, which, in turn, still unrevealed, play against the watching cinema audience like Rimbaud's sunlight reflecting off water. Long slow camera shots allow us to dwell in Tarkovsky's iconography and share his sentiment. We feel we may even sense the characters heartbeats and, doing so, our own heartbeat breaks through in synchrony. We watch the candle flicker as the writer shields it from the eddies of air blowing up dry leaves in the empty swimming pool, and we can't help but hear the softly snickering whispers. Who's that? Who's there? Can you hear them too? And t...

The best charity bookshops in London are Oxfam bookshops. The books are well shelved, sorted according to subject area and alphabetically and priced slightly more highly. And the best book section in an Oxfam bookshop, I don't mind sharing this with you, is run by "the book lady" in Twickenham . Her name is Felicity. Felicity must be in her late 80s. She is thin and smiles and wears pince nez . Her diction is slow, and her vowels and consonants are grooved into the the clarity and timbre of the 1940s. She says she is so pleased when she can "match a person with a book." She thinks that "well, most literature is either Dionysian or Apollonian, isn't it." - she says this with another cheering smile. Recently, I bought from her, for 2 pounds, a 150 year old red leather bound volume of Sir. Walter Scott's poetry (Why on Earth did I do that?), A book including two of Thomas Paine's pieces, and three other books: Fraser, The Golden Bough, the ...

Post-war praise from US establishment quarters for 1. the Soviets 2. the French Communists Extract from a (1945) article on the difference between Fascism and Communism , as quoted by K Zilliacus, British MP: The USSR, like the US, is opposed to the fundamental Fascist ideas on which Germany has operated: (1) The master race; (2) the State is all important; (3) Lebensraum: and (4) desire to dominate the world. Master Race : If the US is a ‘melting pot’, then the Soviet Union is an electric mixer. Scientists have counted 189 ‘races’ in USSR. Under the Tsars, many of the racial minorities were persecuted; today in the Soviet Union, there is no such thing as racial discrimination in practice or in theory. The people of each ‘race’ have been encouraged to retain their own language, customs and individuality and to educate themselves and develop the economic area in which they live. All-Important State : Some people profess to see strong likeness between the Soviet and Nazi forms of govern...

We must believe in and work toward the further development of Regions. Regions as loose networks of nations, as freemarket areas, as confederations, even as federations and ultimately unions. Witness the historical and epic achievements and lovely narrative of the Coal and Steel Community evolving into the European Common Market and the European Union, spawning, on the way, the political and economic renaissance of its second line members, Spain and Portugal out of fascism and into prosperity, Greece out of royalist and rightwing oppression, Ireland out of historical marginalisation and deep cultural oppression, not to mention the way Irish Republican prosperity has helped the North into a peaceful settlement. Look into your history of the last few decades and note how left of centre French leaders ( Mitterand )have worked together on the European project with right of centre German leaders (Kohl), right of centre French leaders ( Chirac ), with left of centre Germans ( Schroeder ). ...

I believe Yasser Arafat would have approved a one-state solution. I wrote this at the time of Arafat's death. I republished it as Hamas was given a voters' mandate to carry the torch of Palestine into the next stage, in conditions of extreme difficulty...and now again, as Israel has gone from bad to mad. In mourning the death of Yasser Arafat, let me quote extracts from an article by Jonathan Steele in the Guardian Weekly in which he gets the historical context exactly right, in explaining Arafat's greatness:"In the days when Britain was being forced to give up one colony after another, the phrase 'father of the nation' was much in vogue. Julius Nyerere in Tanzania, Archbishop Makarios in Cyprus, and Kenneth Kaunda in Zambia were among the many who won this informal title, not just from journalists in search of a label but, more importantly, from their own people. As teachers, clerics or trade unionists who became political leaders, they were seen as the chief ...

Immediately after liberation the French people were in a condition of exhaustion and demoralisation. The urgency and magnitude of the problems to be solved were so appalling that there was a general mood of apathy and despair. The Communists did a great deal at this crucial time to put heart into the French workers. They gave a militant lead through the trade unions in carrying out emergency and salvage work, repairing railway lines, rolling tock, locomotives, bridges, roads and factories, restarting production in the mines and so forth. From there they went straight on to becoming the driving force behind reconstruction. In the New York Herald Tribune in July 1946 Mr Joseph Alsop [he and his brother Stuart were two very prominent and in/famously right-wing journalists] gave his impressions of the situation in France, based on his own investigations on the spot. French reconstruction, he explained, hinged on the Monnet plan, worked out by Jean Monnet (who was the first Deputy General ...

Letter to the Editors, New York Review of Books, November 2005 Alan Ryan's review of Tony Judt's history of post-war Europe, and perhaps the book itself, are partial in both main meanings of that word. The review lingers on eastern Europe, and gives short shrift to the evolution of European unity, from its origins in the "pointless" Coal and Steel Community to a United States of Europe "not remotely in prospect". There is no mention of what EC/EU membership has done for Ireland, Portugal, Spain, Greece... It is consistent with this partiality that Slobodan Milosevic should get all the blame for "the breakup of Yugoslavia and the nastiness that followed" and the Germans in Bonn be totally exonerated, although their recognition of Croatia and Slovenia so clearly pointed the way to that nastiness, by leaving Serbia/Yugoslavia out of the equation. Alan Ryan writes: ..."it is hard to believe that [Hans-Dietrich] Genscher in 1991 could have persuad...

Letter to the New York Review of Books About Adam Hochschild's interesting and valuable account of the big Congo exhibition in Belgium… (In the Heart of Darkness, NYRB, 6 October 2005)...He describes how: "Again and again, both the Royal Museum's exhibit and its catalogue pass glancingly over the darker side of an aspect of the Congo's history, and then stress its benign side. " [what benign side is that, by the way?]… This is so recognisable, as the way revisionists everywhere are emboldened these days to recast African colonial history – let alone ignore the existence of post-independence neo-colonialism and its relentless savaging of some African leaders of real quality and courage, like Lumumba and numerous others, in the 1950s, 60s and 70s. Africa is once again some dark generalised landmass. The only difference is that these days, you feel sorry for it. Along with the cry "Make Poverty History" goes the Impoverishment of History. The evidence that...

At the end of a series of exchanges on the SA Debate network, in late August 2003, I put the question: What can be done, in any constructive sense, about the serious malaise in ANC policy, and ANC leadership? I said I would do another, a final note, outlining the dream that I have been having. It went something like this...The ANC executive, SG Kgalema Motlanthe, Treasurer Mendi Msimang and others, with other tripartite alliance leaders, call a huge indaba, a big, big bosberaad of all the leadership, including senior stalwarts...Invite the likes of Cyril Ramaphosa, Tokyo Sexwale, Matthews Phosa ...Ask them to leave any (justifiably) resentful and (understandably) bruised political egos at the door, along with their inflated business personas, so their charisma, great ability and energy can be redirected to help a revival of the national political project rather than a corporate/enrichment project.Bring in the mobilising and analytical powers of those such as Jay Naidoo, and Pallo Jorda...

Tony Hall writes: on the eve of Jacob Zuma's next court appearance, here is a selection of writings and raves back to 2003, mostly my own, on how victimising and villainising the man has damaged our body politic, which can now be healed only through the Tripartite Alliance _______________________________ This email to friends and debaters, in late August 2003, was one of the earlier warnings after leading ANC figures Jacob Zuma and Mac Maharaj came under a media spotlight beamed on “corruption”. We sent it to the ANC website itself, in a critical but loyal approach… We sing out a warning We are circulating this because we really do note there is a dangerous campaign going on. Whatever the real or apparent levels of corruption, we must keep alive to the political agenda of those knowingly doing this – and how much we are being diverted from focussing on where the real corruption liesIn the face of the present all-out media attack on leading figures, the latest attempt to sub...