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Elias Canetti quote from The Toungue Set Free

I believe that part of knowledge is its desire to show itself and its refusal to put up with merely a hidden existence…Knowledge radiates and wishes to expand everything along with itself. One ascribes the qualities of light to it… There is a small Herodotus in every young person who hears about hundreds of things, and it is important that no one should attempt to raise that person beyond that, by expecting restriction towards a profession…They wish to radiate knowledge as soon as it takes hold of them, so that it won’t become mere property for them. Tony Hall

'They must be lying'

Britain's asylum system assumes children are guilty until proven innocent Phil Hall  guardian.co.uk, Monday November 24 2008 08.00 GMT  I tutor a 15-year-old Chadian refugee. His father was killed and the youngster was imprisoned and tortured. His mother had him sprung him from prison. From prison he was sent in the back of a lorry to the coast where he was stowed in the hold of a cargo ship heading for Dover. He arrived at 4am one January morning in 2007, wet and dressed only in a T-shirt. He had no idea where he was but instead of sympathy and succour he was interrogated and intimidated by angry, white-skinned "green-eyed" people (as he saw them). He had been taught to fear the Italians when he was little, he said, and these people were scaring him, so he assumed they were Italians. Given all that he had been through he couldn't cope and broke down. He suffers from post-traumatic stress disorder. Later on he was given an interpreter, but the interpreter

Woodrow Wilson on invisible empire:

…reference to Woodrow Wilson brought to mind a comment by Wilson in one of his speeches, published as The New Freedom in 1913: "The government, which was designed for the people, has got into the hands of their bosses and their employers, the special interests. An invisible empire has been set up above the forms of democracy." Tony Hall - Donkeyshott

The Giddy clowns of capitalist exploitation and religious extremism

IN PERSPECTIVE… In the second week of September, large numbers of innocent occupants were killed in the bombing of big city buildings at the instigation of Islamist terror groups run and financed by Arab Muslims. New York in 2001. Of course. And Moscow two years before. Responding to a wave of anger and revulsion, staring at the prospect of a centre that could not hold, of a state no longer able to protect its citizens, the President ordered the armed forces to move in and to bomb and blast the perceived source of the terror. That’s how Bush saw it and did it in Afghanistan; that’s how Putin responded two years before, in Chechnya. We all know the differences. But what are the similarities? It was three decades earlier, in the third week of September 1970, that the Jordan Army went into the Palestinian refugee camps, bombing and blasting. They killed 5,000 people. That was Black September. The historical times of the first black September were very different to those of the second and

Antonio de Montesinos came before Thomas Paine

Karen Armstrong says that all religions have compassion at their core and that they should all be looking for issues where they can converge, and converge on the enlightened values and laws of secular democracies too; secular values enshrined by such documents as the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR). We have to support the UDHR to the hilt, but I would argue that rather than using the opportunity of the anniversary of the UDHR to beat the rationalist drum, we should be reanalysing UDHR and broadening it into a commonplace of humanity. We should be looking at the underlying syncretisms between different ethical codes and in the light of these syncretisms, finally bring as many people on board the UDHR bandwagon as possible. What chance is there then that an evangelical atheist can agree on the need for convergence between secular and religious principles? A concept of human rights that ignores religious belief is exclusive, not inclusive. Convergence has far more real pot

A good hearted, communist, James Bond

There he is looking out of an advertisement in the pages of the Guardian: James Bond, a public schoolboy with a machine gun in his hands advertising Barclaycard and Aston Martins. Was he once a member of the Bullingdon Club too? Probably. But where can we find an alternative James Bond, the heroic and stylish story of a hard-wearing sophisticated hero of the left? How about Dale, Dr Dale T McKinley? As a youth he moved to the US from his native Zimbabwe, where he trained at Ranger school, the US equivalent of the SAS. He went on to get a PhD in Politics and while he was studying for it he travelled to El Salvador where he was with the Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front (FMLN) and used his military skills to defend village communities. Back in North Carolina Dale became incensed when he heard the CIA were recruiting at his university. He had seen the CIA's Felix Leiters at work in Central America and hated them. With colleagues he hunted them down and physically threw the rec

Lost is an example of US provincialism.

On the day after the Nobel committee gives a Frenchman the prize, lets say what's true about the Emperor's new clothes. US TV series like Lost are hyped up entertainment products with little or no lasting cultural relevance - especially outside the USA. There is a place called planet USA where J.J. Abrams and his colleagues exist. I think it must be a little like secondlife . There, human reality is the product of a lot of fictionalisation. Artificial values are manufactured and sustained in the face of Imperial wars. Stories of the American dream belie the reality of lives lived under the thumb of the US corporates, banking mafias and olygarchies. In the 1930s and 40s there were a group of people who made intelligent and thoughtful films. This progressive group was later extirpated from US cultural life by McCarthyism. And since then there has been very little of real value produced in the mainstream. What is subversive or interesting about Lost then? We can conclude, howeve

Bill Gates should come out against free trade.

Knowingly or unknowingly the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation's good works have helped to offset an aggressive and destructive US foreign policy. The Foundation has done its best to save lives and rescue communities in Africa, while in the Middle East, US foreign policy has destroyed lives and communities. What is the Gates Foundation's answer to the conundrum of African development? It is to triage Bill Gates wealth towards helping the poorest people in Africa. The scale is different, but there is nothing new in Gates'philanthropic instincts. Helping poor Africans is a fairly traditional practice for US magnates. Generations of Rockefellers have had lots of fun raising money for African charities at $250,000 a head dinners. The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation aims to rescue African communities by financing the poor, helping small farmers (in particular women) and combating disease. But when it comes to confronting neo-liberal agendas, the Foundation has had very li

Anglo Indians like J R Barrow couldn't parlay Bengali culture

A sweet, piping voiced colleague reminded me of Bobby from the railway children. In fact she told me a story which shows she actually was Bobby. She had been travelling from Calcutta to Delhi. He mother sent her when she was 14 with her little 8 year old brother. But with warnings that as they went past one part of the journey, they shouldn't look out of the window, because there were bandits. But "Bobby" did look out and saw the bandits stealing money from people who had got off the train. So, in character, she rolled down the window and shouted at them to stop it immediately. Of course they just laughed. So she threatened to call a policeman and they laughed again, because the policemen got their cut from the robberies. Of course they boarded the train, probably to assault her, she was firey and beautiful child with long black hair. Quickly she locked the sturdy door of the compartment of her train and they banged and banged at it. The train pulled off, but still they d

Is Britain on the slippery slope to dictatorship?

Phil Hall Sunday June 22, 2008 An 82-year-old former bomber pilot I met in the street the other day said: "Supermen. Ha! If Hitler had come over here we would have given him a proper kick up the jacksy." As Michael White suggests , British people are fond of the myth that they won't tolerate dictatorships, despite the fact that there were many fascist sympathisers in Britain in the 1930s. Yes, we do live in a relatively free and secular country - just ask any young Afghani woman studying at a college here for her opinion. But there is also evidence around us that the British government is engaging in repression. And not just in Iraq or Afghanistan, but here in Britain. Perhaps those of us who have lived for a time under dictatorships can spot some of the warning signs: • Inconvenient elections are avoided in the name of getting on with the job. • Leaders of the opposition are character-assassinated by the state media. • Institutions like the legislature begin to lose th

Mom and Dad's burial ground