As anyone who has read this blog down the years will not be surprised, I am pleased that Jeremy Corbyn has been elected leader of the Labour Party. After the May 2015 election I did not have any expectation that the Labour Party will be re-elected. The demographics are against them and as has been quoted before, the British public is Conservative and only occasionally votes Labour. Indeed the New Labour it voted for was simply a pale blue version of the Conservative Party with a better publicity machine. Corbyn is refreshing because he puts forward an attitude that many, if only a large minority, have felt have been missing from British politics (though clearly not the politics of Greece or other European countries) for so long.
It is not surprising that the right-wing media have attacked Corbyn on every basis from what songs he might sing to who he slept with forty years ago to his fashion sense to made-up policies they think sound poor. In some ways I welcome that fact as it does suggest that they see him as a genuine threat to their distortions and scares peddled to the population. If Andy Burnham had won, I doubt he would have attracted a fraction of the attention that Corbyn has done.
'The Guardian' feels that Corbyn and his camp could have rebuffed false accusations if they had had their 'media machine' set up quicker. In some ways, however, I am heartened by the fact that it was not. To feel an obligation to rebuff every last accusation as soon as possible is simply to play the game of the right-wing; it shows that you feel that you can be harmed by them, rather than ignoring the rubbish thrown at you because it is in fact nothing more than rubbish, often fabricated and always plastered with indignation.
Corbyn is facing a man who left a child unattended in a pub and has no grasp of how 95% of the UK population live. Even when he is pictured on public transport, it is clearly faked. Corbyn looks like he belongs on the underground train, travelling home from work, looking tired, like literally millions of other Londoners. Part of the problem are the Blair years. The Blairite government made themselves masters of media manipulation. However, they also made themselves vulnerable by seeming to care whether one MP stepped off a very narrow line about a policy. They created a context in which it is felt that unless an entire political party is full of drones mouthing exactly the same words on everything it has somehow failed. This makes it very difficult for genuine debate to occur not just over the big issues but also the nuances within them. That does not aid British democracy. Why is it acceptable for the Conservatives to have a spectrum of opinion from people wanting immediate exit from the EU to those who want to stay in forever and yet even moderate differences on the issue are seen as a 'failure' by Corbyn. I suppose because we lack a left-wing media.
The anti-Corbyn campaign has been so relentless that it is unsurprising that it is picked up unquestioned and every crumb used as gospel truth by a lot of the population. I work where people generally have to have a decent level of education to be employed. However, I have been harangued by the fact that Corbyn wants to wreck the UK economy by scrapping the Queen and he will abolish the Army the moment he comes into office. Even then, to me such policies seem pretty rational alongside ones such as compelling schools to become academies and allowing the private sector to take over handling prisoners and hospitals. Given how shoddy and expensive the British railway system is, why is it not shouted down whenever anyone suggests it is not re-nationalised?
I do not expect people to agree with me. This is a democracy, there are different parties and there is a range of views within every political party no matter how the Conservatives and the media portray it. Yet, Corbyn politics in a matter of a week have been made to appear illegitimate even to discuss and at best something very naive. No other political leader has reinvigorated a movement in this way for decades. Perhaps Sir Keith Joseph and following in his footsteps, Margaret Thatcher did for the Conservatives and that was forty years ago now. Yet if I ever say anything positive about a Corbyn policy people titter as if I am foolish. I would be happier to accept them being angry about my approach. However, the right seems to be winning as it did in the 1980s by simply making Labour policies not seem a threat but simply not worthy of even considering and viewing anyone who proposes them as 'loony'. It worked before, so I should not be surprised that it is working now. It is exasperating for a number of reasons.
I could stand in a French or a Greek workplace and outline political views at odds with the people around me and they might disagree perhaps vocally, but they would not look on me as a child; they would not strip me of my right to hold that opinion. To do so in Britain is a form of censorship which is in fact akin to the approach of dictatorships, not that of other mature democracies. A further point is that I could state that the world was created in 7 days in 4004 BC; that dinosaur bones were laid in the strata by God to show man the passing of all things and that one day the righteous will be lifted into the skies during the Rapture and no-one would be allowed to laugh or ridicule my views without risking a disciplinary action for discrimination. I subscribe to a political stance which is rational and in my view would be better for the bulk of people living in my country than the current policies. Yet, because those very few who control our society and economy feel threatened by such views, they have schooled their minions in the population to ridicule and simply dismiss even the expression of that view. Is it any surprise that people say Britain has only a partial democracy?
Showing posts with label censorship. Show all posts
Showing posts with label censorship. Show all posts
Sunday, 20 September 2015
Wednesday, 30 July 2014
Freedom to Speak = Freedom to Swear
The UK has a principle of free speech. This has been restricted in recent years with the introduction of hate crimes which mean you can be arrested for making racist and religious insults to people. I assume that this also applies to sexist comments, but there do not seem to have been any arrests on that basis just yet. What is important to note is that these are generally made at people as a form of verbal assault. However, even if using such terms in general and heard by someone of a particular group, you run the risk of being arrested. Given that such verbal abuse is often the starting point of more serious attacks, I support the legislation against such behaviour.
What I am going to talk about in this posting is general swearing. This is not directed at people, but typically the universe in general or at inanimate objects, very often cars and computers. As someone who has been constantly shafted in his life, usually simply on the whim of someone in power, sometimes swearing is the only thing I have left. It is an outlet for the pent-up frustration when you know that nothing you do is ever going to be able to get back at the person who has treated you so badly. It also is essential when dealing with machinery which behaves in an irrational manner or at least functions in a way that you can tell no reason for it doing so. These days with computers both at home and in the workplace I feel as if I only get to do what I want to do in the few moments between the computer running itself. Most of the time I simply have to bow what it sees as more important than my choices - constantly downloading new versions of software I do not use or that lead to no noticeable change and even altering my documents to the format it favours. The computer is no longer my servant, it is an arrogant sod who allows me some crumbs once in a while. At work I was issued a new computer last month and now it takes 30-40 minutes to boot up every morning, often requiring to be started 4-7 times to even achieve this. Three IT staff have looked at it, but, as yet none have been able to resolve the problem.
I swear because often it is all I have left. The alternative is to fall to the floor sobbing and the risk with that is you will be arrested 'for your own safety' and risk being sanctioned. However, increasingly people including some women, but primarily men as being censored in what they say. A certain set of people, typically white, middle-aged women, seem to feel they have the right to go around censoring what complete strangers say. I am getting sick of them pursuing me in towns simply to lecture me that I should not have said 'fuck' when my groceries fell to the floor or I was cut up once again at a roundabout. The swearing was not aimed at them and in fact was none of their business. I constantly hear people spouting opinions that to me are ignorant or offensive, but would never think of stepping in and saying, 'you must not say that people on benefits are scroungers' even though it is in large part a lie peddled by 'Daily Mail', because in fact, these days, two-thirds of those who need benefits to be able to pay their rents and eat are in work. Yet, I withhold, recognising I live in a democracy with some civil liberties remaining.
In contrast, these women feel they have the right, indeed the duty to pursue me and lambast me for swearing. On the recent holiday one pursued me for more than five hundred metres to lecture me and the people I was with. They stretch what was an instant of fury into a prolonged encounter. They seek to treat me like a child. I imagine that they get some thrill out of it; some sense of satisfaction and that shows how misplaced their efforts are. They would be far better off challenging racist and sexist language and simply erroneous facts about so much that you hear daily in public places. However, they lack the imagination for that. Instead they get their hit of indignation through challenging words not aimed at them at all. We are not living in a Jane Austen novel and even if we were in the early 19th century, these women would be surprised to hear all kinds of offensive language. They judge based on a distorted view of the past and a sense that their self-importance is not sufficiently stoked up without getting angry about anything they can find, even though it is in fact of no importance.
Swearing is therapeutic and very necessary. Swearing is an element of freedom of expression. Until the UK has fully turned into an authoritarian state, interfering people need to back off and let people express themselves. It is none of their business. They only do it for some kind of buzz. There are numerous more important things they could be putting their efforts into. Stand up for your rights to speak and within that your democratic right to swear. No censorship!
What I am going to talk about in this posting is general swearing. This is not directed at people, but typically the universe in general or at inanimate objects, very often cars and computers. As someone who has been constantly shafted in his life, usually simply on the whim of someone in power, sometimes swearing is the only thing I have left. It is an outlet for the pent-up frustration when you know that nothing you do is ever going to be able to get back at the person who has treated you so badly. It also is essential when dealing with machinery which behaves in an irrational manner or at least functions in a way that you can tell no reason for it doing so. These days with computers both at home and in the workplace I feel as if I only get to do what I want to do in the few moments between the computer running itself. Most of the time I simply have to bow what it sees as more important than my choices - constantly downloading new versions of software I do not use or that lead to no noticeable change and even altering my documents to the format it favours. The computer is no longer my servant, it is an arrogant sod who allows me some crumbs once in a while. At work I was issued a new computer last month and now it takes 30-40 minutes to boot up every morning, often requiring to be started 4-7 times to even achieve this. Three IT staff have looked at it, but, as yet none have been able to resolve the problem.
I swear because often it is all I have left. The alternative is to fall to the floor sobbing and the risk with that is you will be arrested 'for your own safety' and risk being sanctioned. However, increasingly people including some women, but primarily men as being censored in what they say. A certain set of people, typically white, middle-aged women, seem to feel they have the right to go around censoring what complete strangers say. I am getting sick of them pursuing me in towns simply to lecture me that I should not have said 'fuck' when my groceries fell to the floor or I was cut up once again at a roundabout. The swearing was not aimed at them and in fact was none of their business. I constantly hear people spouting opinions that to me are ignorant or offensive, but would never think of stepping in and saying, 'you must not say that people on benefits are scroungers' even though it is in large part a lie peddled by 'Daily Mail', because in fact, these days, two-thirds of those who need benefits to be able to pay their rents and eat are in work. Yet, I withhold, recognising I live in a democracy with some civil liberties remaining.
In contrast, these women feel they have the right, indeed the duty to pursue me and lambast me for swearing. On the recent holiday one pursued me for more than five hundred metres to lecture me and the people I was with. They stretch what was an instant of fury into a prolonged encounter. They seek to treat me like a child. I imagine that they get some thrill out of it; some sense of satisfaction and that shows how misplaced their efforts are. They would be far better off challenging racist and sexist language and simply erroneous facts about so much that you hear daily in public places. However, they lack the imagination for that. Instead they get their hit of indignation through challenging words not aimed at them at all. We are not living in a Jane Austen novel and even if we were in the early 19th century, these women would be surprised to hear all kinds of offensive language. They judge based on a distorted view of the past and a sense that their self-importance is not sufficiently stoked up without getting angry about anything they can find, even though it is in fact of no importance.
Swearing is therapeutic and very necessary. Swearing is an element of freedom of expression. Until the UK has fully turned into an authoritarian state, interfering people need to back off and let people express themselves. It is none of their business. They only do it for some kind of buzz. There are numerous more important things they could be putting their efforts into. Stand up for your rights to speak and within that your democratic right to swear. No censorship!
Friday, 26 October 2012
‘You Can’t Handle The Truth’: Forced To Create A ‘Legend’ In The Workplace
As regular readers will know in the past few years I have suffered in jobs as a result of individual words and sentences that I have uttered. These were not rude words or offensive sentences, they just did not fit with very exacting standards that employers have around every word you might utter. I have got into trouble for saying ‘I am not a cleaner’ when in fact I was not a cleaner. I have got into trouble for trying to notify my manager of a hospital appointment connected with my diabetes. I have got into trouble discussing the curriculum that the boy who lived in my house was studying. I have got into trouble for saying that I was not responsible for organising an even date that, in fact, I truly was not responsible for organising. I guess one problem is that as yet I have not learnt how to suck up all the blame being levelled at my managers as if it was my own fault; I do not step forward fast enough or enthusiastically enough to take the blame off their shoulders and as a result it is open season to criticise me as ‘inappropriate’ or rude or incompetent. The censorship and self-censorship that develops can harm companies, see: http://rooksmoor.blogspot.co.uk/2011/02/i-dont-want-to-hear-that-censoring-in.html
Now, I know from people who have written to me, that I am not alone in suffering such problems and that schools should teach young people that in any job, no matter how competent they might, they must always expect to be the ‘fall guy’ for any errors made around them even if they are not connected to them. My mistake has been not been ready to do that. Ironically as a consequence I am portrayed as the one creating a ‘blame culture’ simply because I am not able to absorb the blame into myself quickly enough. In this I am hampered further as it seems I have Asperger’s Syndrome. Whilst I doubt it has worsened in recent years, the clear changes in UK society and in working culture mean that there are more pitfalls that I may be missing with heavy consequences for my job and thus for the rest of my life which has been largely wrecked this year.
I began a new job in September and was relieved that a lot of the behaviour I have noted above was absent. This was both relaxing and also reminded me how abnormal the previous places actually were. Workers should behave as adults not primary school children and certainly it seemed as if that was more the case where I am now working, despite the fact that the company, like most in the UK is facing hard economic times and so instability. However, the seemingly warm reception I received in this job clearly led me into a false sense of security. I had originally gone there, scared from my previous jobs to mention anything about my life outside work or my past. However, with people confiding in me about their cancer treatment, medical conditions, marital problems, etc., I too opened up especially about some of the things that have hit me this year. Partly this was also because I have had to speak with people so much about losing my job, my house and household that they have now become mundane; they are the ache that has become dull so to me these things are no longer a big issue. To start viewing this way and even letting down my guard a little has proven to be a big mistake.
On Friday I was summoned to see my line manager who outlined the complaints against me. Now, these differ in nature to the problems I have had before. These days I avoid making statements unprompted even to people I think will not distort them. However, when people ask me questions I respond truthfully. Given that the workplace has an atmosphere of being open, people have asked direct personal questions that they might not have done elsewhere. The first was that I had been asked why I was eating biscuits during a training session. I explained briefly that this was because as a diabetic I tend to have a low blood sugar in the late afternoon especially when I have been on a day’s training as had been the case that day and so ran the risk of hypoglaecemia. I know I should not have used the word ‘hypoglaecemia’ but when you have had a condition 24 years as I have done, you tend to slip into these things. I have explained my diabetes to hundreds of people, so think nothing of it.
The second one was I was asked why I had left the lovely town on the south coast that I have recently moved from, by someone who still lives close by but is also employed now by the same company as me. I responded, ‘because I lost my house’. Now that is the truthful answer, it is the only reason why I left, but again that was an unacceptable answer. A similar situation came when waiting for a meeting to start there were comments at how the set-up of the room resembled that for an interview. I was asked as a newly appointed member of staff, how many interviews I had had. Again I told the truth: ‘67 in the past 4 years’.
I have noted before how people feel somehow contaminated by reference to redundancy and unemployment: http://rooksmoor.blogspot.co.uk/2011/12/how-redundancy-became-dirty-word-once.html However, when asked a direct question, and this may be as a result of Asperger’s, I have the tendency to give the truth. Yet, me describing what has happened to me or my medical condition, not in an unprompted way, but in response to a question, is these days seen as ‘inappropriate’ and even verging on the offensive. Clearly I cannot read the mind of the person asking me the question. I have been alerted to the fact by one company that has interviewed me three times, that I give an answer without first having ascertaining the type of answer the questioner is looking for. I missed out on the training on this approach to answering at school, university and in work. In fact, I received the opposite: answer a question as directly and truthfully as you can. I know I am enthusiastic when talking with people and these days they will not tolerate an answer which is shorter than the question asked. I thought I had cracked that with the answers given above. However, now I have to also quickly judge whether the truthful answer is what they are seeking.
I am in no position to say ‘well that is my business’ as I could clearly have done with these three personal questions or even ‘why are you asking that?’ as that would clearly been seen as rude. You cannot be defensive as that rouses suspicion. The truth, if it encompasses failure or illness or simply bad luck is also unacceptable whether given briefly or explained in full. Thus, my line manager has now advised me to come up with what I call a ‘legend’. This is the term used by spies and undercover police to describe the false identity they establish. It is a fiction, weaving in elements of the truth, but in general appealing to the assumptions of the people that the agent will be working with whilst distancing this fictional personality from the agent’s genuine one. I need to learn this legend well and be able to respond with aspects of it whenever I am asked a personal question again. I have to be careful, as, unfortunately, I have already revealed the truth about my life to quite a few people. I also have to avoid slip-ups that contradict or differ from what I have said before.
Now, from the troublesome questions I have faced recently, I have to come up with an explanation for why I might eat carbohydrates in the afternoon, which does not reference any medical condition nor makes me appear a glutton. I suppose in future I must sneak off to the toilet to eat them. This presents an ideological challenge for me. Back in 2005 when the UK law put diabetics into the disabled category, I took the decision to ‘come out’ as a diabetic. Now it appears I have to go back into the medical closet and conceal my condition as best I can. In terms of why I left the town, I am rather stumped what to say. All the suggestions about house prices seem to be equally as negative and something along the lines that the area was going down clearly are not true to people who know the town. If I say it is simply because I tired of the place, that might make me look feckless. Even saying that I moved to be closer to family would sound like there was bad luck if not for me then for them, so that is out. With the interviews, clearly I have to severely reduce the number. I cannot really guess what the tolerable number of interviews would be over a 4-year period, do readers think 10 still sounds excessive?
The one thing that I must bury even deeper in my legend, is a sense of indignation. People accuse me of self-pity, however, it is impossible to keep lying to yourself that things will get better or to take all the blame on to yourself for how you have been mistreated; as it is, I cannot shake the sense of guilt at what I may have done wrong, not helped by people telling me that I am a 'natural victim', something which I reject entirely as that is the path to racism and disability discrimination, things I will have no truck with. As the government tells us that we need to suffer for the sake of the country, people in many workplaces see it as wrong to even indicate that you are suffering as a consequence. I cannot reveal how badly I have been treated in previous jobs, the social class discrimination, the disability discrimination and the simple maliciousness I have encountered. I cannot express my dismay at the fact that in 2009 I earned £42,000 per year and had 35 days leave and now earn £26,000 (what I was earning in 2002) and get 19 days and 2 hours leave (what is the point of 2 hours’ leave?). I have to pretend that my life has not gone down the drain in so many ways and that my chances of ever owning even a flat, let alone a house, are now zero. I have to conceal how the pressure from the bad treatment I have received has worsened my blood pressure and consequently my eye sight. My legend has to show me as a successful man, going places despite the worst economic depression in 80 years. It has to pander to the assumptions of the people who ask me questions. It has to provide the answers that they find acceptable, because it has been made very clear to me that in fact, they cannot handle the truth.
Now, I know from people who have written to me, that I am not alone in suffering such problems and that schools should teach young people that in any job, no matter how competent they might, they must always expect to be the ‘fall guy’ for any errors made around them even if they are not connected to them. My mistake has been not been ready to do that. Ironically as a consequence I am portrayed as the one creating a ‘blame culture’ simply because I am not able to absorb the blame into myself quickly enough. In this I am hampered further as it seems I have Asperger’s Syndrome. Whilst I doubt it has worsened in recent years, the clear changes in UK society and in working culture mean that there are more pitfalls that I may be missing with heavy consequences for my job and thus for the rest of my life which has been largely wrecked this year.
I began a new job in September and was relieved that a lot of the behaviour I have noted above was absent. This was both relaxing and also reminded me how abnormal the previous places actually were. Workers should behave as adults not primary school children and certainly it seemed as if that was more the case where I am now working, despite the fact that the company, like most in the UK is facing hard economic times and so instability. However, the seemingly warm reception I received in this job clearly led me into a false sense of security. I had originally gone there, scared from my previous jobs to mention anything about my life outside work or my past. However, with people confiding in me about their cancer treatment, medical conditions, marital problems, etc., I too opened up especially about some of the things that have hit me this year. Partly this was also because I have had to speak with people so much about losing my job, my house and household that they have now become mundane; they are the ache that has become dull so to me these things are no longer a big issue. To start viewing this way and even letting down my guard a little has proven to be a big mistake.
On Friday I was summoned to see my line manager who outlined the complaints against me. Now, these differ in nature to the problems I have had before. These days I avoid making statements unprompted even to people I think will not distort them. However, when people ask me questions I respond truthfully. Given that the workplace has an atmosphere of being open, people have asked direct personal questions that they might not have done elsewhere. The first was that I had been asked why I was eating biscuits during a training session. I explained briefly that this was because as a diabetic I tend to have a low blood sugar in the late afternoon especially when I have been on a day’s training as had been the case that day and so ran the risk of hypoglaecemia. I know I should not have used the word ‘hypoglaecemia’ but when you have had a condition 24 years as I have done, you tend to slip into these things. I have explained my diabetes to hundreds of people, so think nothing of it.
The second one was I was asked why I had left the lovely town on the south coast that I have recently moved from, by someone who still lives close by but is also employed now by the same company as me. I responded, ‘because I lost my house’. Now that is the truthful answer, it is the only reason why I left, but again that was an unacceptable answer. A similar situation came when waiting for a meeting to start there were comments at how the set-up of the room resembled that for an interview. I was asked as a newly appointed member of staff, how many interviews I had had. Again I told the truth: ‘67 in the past 4 years’.
I have noted before how people feel somehow contaminated by reference to redundancy and unemployment: http://rooksmoor.blogspot.co.uk/2011/12/how-redundancy-became-dirty-word-once.html However, when asked a direct question, and this may be as a result of Asperger’s, I have the tendency to give the truth. Yet, me describing what has happened to me or my medical condition, not in an unprompted way, but in response to a question, is these days seen as ‘inappropriate’ and even verging on the offensive. Clearly I cannot read the mind of the person asking me the question. I have been alerted to the fact by one company that has interviewed me three times, that I give an answer without first having ascertaining the type of answer the questioner is looking for. I missed out on the training on this approach to answering at school, university and in work. In fact, I received the opposite: answer a question as directly and truthfully as you can. I know I am enthusiastic when talking with people and these days they will not tolerate an answer which is shorter than the question asked. I thought I had cracked that with the answers given above. However, now I have to also quickly judge whether the truthful answer is what they are seeking.
I am in no position to say ‘well that is my business’ as I could clearly have done with these three personal questions or even ‘why are you asking that?’ as that would clearly been seen as rude. You cannot be defensive as that rouses suspicion. The truth, if it encompasses failure or illness or simply bad luck is also unacceptable whether given briefly or explained in full. Thus, my line manager has now advised me to come up with what I call a ‘legend’. This is the term used by spies and undercover police to describe the false identity they establish. It is a fiction, weaving in elements of the truth, but in general appealing to the assumptions of the people that the agent will be working with whilst distancing this fictional personality from the agent’s genuine one. I need to learn this legend well and be able to respond with aspects of it whenever I am asked a personal question again. I have to be careful, as, unfortunately, I have already revealed the truth about my life to quite a few people. I also have to avoid slip-ups that contradict or differ from what I have said before.
Now, from the troublesome questions I have faced recently, I have to come up with an explanation for why I might eat carbohydrates in the afternoon, which does not reference any medical condition nor makes me appear a glutton. I suppose in future I must sneak off to the toilet to eat them. This presents an ideological challenge for me. Back in 2005 when the UK law put diabetics into the disabled category, I took the decision to ‘come out’ as a diabetic. Now it appears I have to go back into the medical closet and conceal my condition as best I can. In terms of why I left the town, I am rather stumped what to say. All the suggestions about house prices seem to be equally as negative and something along the lines that the area was going down clearly are not true to people who know the town. If I say it is simply because I tired of the place, that might make me look feckless. Even saying that I moved to be closer to family would sound like there was bad luck if not for me then for them, so that is out. With the interviews, clearly I have to severely reduce the number. I cannot really guess what the tolerable number of interviews would be over a 4-year period, do readers think 10 still sounds excessive?
The one thing that I must bury even deeper in my legend, is a sense of indignation. People accuse me of self-pity, however, it is impossible to keep lying to yourself that things will get better or to take all the blame on to yourself for how you have been mistreated; as it is, I cannot shake the sense of guilt at what I may have done wrong, not helped by people telling me that I am a 'natural victim', something which I reject entirely as that is the path to racism and disability discrimination, things I will have no truck with. As the government tells us that we need to suffer for the sake of the country, people in many workplaces see it as wrong to even indicate that you are suffering as a consequence. I cannot reveal how badly I have been treated in previous jobs, the social class discrimination, the disability discrimination and the simple maliciousness I have encountered. I cannot express my dismay at the fact that in 2009 I earned £42,000 per year and had 35 days leave and now earn £26,000 (what I was earning in 2002) and get 19 days and 2 hours leave (what is the point of 2 hours’ leave?). I have to pretend that my life has not gone down the drain in so many ways and that my chances of ever owning even a flat, let alone a house, are now zero. I have to conceal how the pressure from the bad treatment I have received has worsened my blood pressure and consequently my eye sight. My legend has to show me as a successful man, going places despite the worst economic depression in 80 years. It has to pander to the assumptions of the people who ask me questions. It has to provide the answers that they find acceptable, because it has been made very clear to me that in fact, they cannot handle the truth.
Tuesday, 3 May 2011
Resisting Counter-Factual Speculation: China And Time-Travel Movies
In past postings, I have looked at how uneasy Americans can be about counter-factual discussions around the history of the USA: http://rooksmoor.blogspot.com/2007/11/denying-counter-factual-issues-around.html and http://rooksmoor.blogspot.com/2008/06/when-counter-factual-becomes.html This seems to stem from an enduring if unstated faith in the so-called 'manifest destiny', i.e. that the USA was always destined to turn out the way that it has and so any discussions of alternatives is a waste of time. Naturally I strongly oppose that viewpoint, not least because it allows a state to argue that whatever policy it adopts must be correct because it was 'destined' to happen. The ridiculousness of that is immediately apparent if you compare the policies of President Barack Obama and his immediate predecessor George W. Bush. Which was truly manifesting the USA's destiny? Clearly that is not happening, unless it is the USA's destiny is to constantly chop and change.
All states exist as a result of a series of accidents combined with deliberate actions, some of which succeeded, some of which failed. As I have noted before, not every alternative, in the long run, would have led to a great change in history as we have known it. Conversely, small differences can lead to vast changes in what happened. Each counter-factual needs to be weighed on its own merits. In addition, we have to recognise that this is no more than an intellectual exercise, we cannot 'prove' the propositions, but saying that, in many branches of science, that is the same. Some dismiss counter-factual analysis as a 'game'. It can be entertaining and is the basis of an extensive sub-genre of fiction dating back many decades. However, counter-factual analysis is also a vital tool in properly weighing up the different elements which went into our history. Thus, as I have argued before, it is something that should not be dismissed: http://rooksmoor.blogspot.com/2007/05/usefulness-of-what-if-history.html
Now, it is probably on the basis of the usefulness of counter-factual analysis, that on 31st March 2011, China announced 'guidelines' effectively banning time-travel movies and television programmes. In a statement from Li Jingsheng head of television drama at China's State Administration for Radio, Film and Television (SARFT) has said that such dramas (and comedies): 'lack positive thoughts and meaning'; 'its content and the exaggerated performance style are questionable'; 'Many stories are totally made-up and are made to strain for an effect of novelty'; 'They casually make up myths, have monstrous and weird plots, use absurd tactics, and even promote feudalism, superstition, fatalism and reincarnation.' Of course, many of these things could be charges laid against many genres of fiction, for example, romance, Westerns, crime stories and even historical drams. It is the last elements about promoting feudalism and fatalism which really cut to the heart of the issue.
ommentators about Chinese society believe this move has been prompted by recent programmes featuring happy times in China's past (though it is pretty difficult to find any era in Chinese history when a substantial group of Chinese were not suffering). The key example is 'The Palace', as pointed out by Professor Nie Wei, from the School of Movie and Television Drama Studies of Shanghai University. The series features a 21st-century girl travelling back in time to the Qing dynasty (which ruled China 1644-1911). The episodes for the next series are being rewritten.
The movies and series has effectively banned in China on this basis include 'The Terminator' (1984) and presumably its sequels and television series; 'Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure' (1989) and its sequel; any version of 'A Christmas Carol'; 'Planet of the Apes' (1968) and its sequels, series and remake; 'Austin Powers: International Man of Mystery' (1997) and its sequels; 'Back To The Future' (1985) and its two sequels, 'Black Knight' (2001), 'The X-Files' (1993-2002) though I am not certain that many episodes of this actually featured time travel, 'Doctor Who' (1963-) and 'Star Trek' (1966-9) and presumably all the movies and sequel series.
I can only think of one time travel episode, in the original 'Star Trek' series, 'The City on the Edge of Forever' in the original series which the crew prevent a woman (played by Joan Collins!) being run over in 1930s USA so leading to a subsequent Nazi victory in World War Two including the USA coming under Nazi control. Apparently, however, three other episodes feature time travel, one taking crew members to 1968, one to 1969, one taking them back 3 days and one to two historic time periods on an alien planet. There is also time travel in the movie, 'Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home' (1986).
The fatalism would be seen in movies like 'The Butterfly Effect' (2004) in which a man tries to change his own life by travelling back in time on a number of occasions only to constantly make things worse; in 'Running Against Time' (1990) the repeated attempts by three time travellers to avoid US intervention in the Vietnam War only exacerbate the conflict. However, this then shows up the contradictions in the Chinese guidelines. They oppose both time travel that can make things turn out better and they dislike time travel that worsens the situation. They oppose time travel stories that only impact on the fate of a few individuals and also ones which affect the whole world such as 'The Terminator' and 'Star Trek IV' or 'A Sound of Thunder' (2005) which radically sees humans replaced by a reptillian species as a result of a time traveller to the Cretaceous period treading on a creature. Of course, the Chinese government could insist that all time travel stories adhere to the Novikov self-consistency principle, that, in fact you cannot alter history as it has happened, any attempt to do so will fail, as shown in 'Twelve Monkeys' (1995) and 'The Time Machine' (2002).
One movie not mentioned by the Chinese is 'Fatherland' (1994) perhaps because though the book it was based on was a best seller, the movie had little success, especially in the USA. The movie does not feature time travel, rather it is one of the only actual counter-factual movies in that it envisages a world in which Nazi Germany won the Second World War. Though not stated, it must be assumed that in such a scenario Japan would have been victorious in the Pacific as victory in Europe would have allowed its forces to be supplement by Germany and its allies. Despite the fact that Germany and Japan were always awkward allies (as history of wartime Shanghai show), Germany presumably would have put experienced U-boat packs into the Pacific; experienced German pilots and aircraft into the Pacific and China and provided SS units to exterminate Chinese Communists behind the frontlines. It seems unlikely Japan would have conquered all of China but it would have held the major cities and wealthiest regions, so today, North-East China would still be Manchukuo and Communism would have been eliminated from the Japanese colonies in eastern and central China.
I believe the movies listed owe more to their international renown than the portrayal of events in specific movies that is what has drawn Chinese state attention to them. However, there is also the factor of discussion around time travel and the possibilities it may offer to change a country which is what alarms the Chinese government the most. Despite this, It seems that, in the opposition to time travel, the Chinese are also dismissing a lot of general science fiction. This may be the authorities' intention.
Many of these series and movies have other concepts, discussion of which would be seen as a threat, especially 'Star Trek' which often handled moral judgements in story lines and elements such as discrimination. A fuller part of the SARFT statement suggests this is the case: 'fantasy, time-travel, random compilations of mythical stories, bizarre plots, absurd techniques, even propagating feudal superstitions, fatalism and reincarnation, ambiguous moral lessons, and even a lack of positive thinking.'
The timing seems to be in preparation for the 90th anniversary of the Communist Party of China being established (and, of course, the centenary of the 1911 Revolution which established the Chinese Republic which the Communists did not control entirely until 1950) and so '[a]ll levels should actively prepare to launch vivid reproductions of the Chinese revolution, the nation’s construction and its reform and opening up.' Of course, if we travelled back to 1971 for the 50th anniversary, the party members then would be in horror of the capitalist economy now in place in China and would see predictions for 2011 which featured China as one of the leading capitalist states of the world as completely counter-revolutionary and in need of suppression. Thus, even in its own history, the Communist Party of China has gone down 'alternative' paths that would have been considered highly inappropriate to discuss, even within living memory.
You can see the easy step from thinking about time travel to challenging the current regime, whether to argue that the more Maoist era or the Imperial era or the brief periods of democracy were better than the current state. Of course, the kind of question that the Chinese regime fears most is 'what if the democracy movement of Tiananmen Square had not been suppressed in 1989?' and other similar ones about Mao being ousted or the Chinese Civil War having a different outcome, all things that may allow people to think that an alternative path would have been better for the country's people.
China has not been alone in having such concerns. When the National Curriculum for the UK was launched in 1992, the history section of it instructed teachers specifically not to even suggest that any time period or country was better to live in than the UK at the time. The Conservative government was seemingly as insecure as the current Chinese government.
It is interesting that the two greatest Powers in the world at the moment, the USA and China are the ones who are most nervous about any speculation that their histories could have turned out very differently to how they did. In the USA pressure tends to come by brow-beating or dismissal as irrelevant. In China, a totalitarian dictatorship which practices extensive censorship, the approach is much more direct. However, in my view this only adds value to the role of counter-factual analysis. After all, if the Chinese government sees counter-factual speculation as potentially such a threatening tool, one leveraging greater democracy and liberty in the country, to the extent that movies even speculating about it must be censored, then it has some real potency beyond mere entertainment.
All states exist as a result of a series of accidents combined with deliberate actions, some of which succeeded, some of which failed. As I have noted before, not every alternative, in the long run, would have led to a great change in history as we have known it. Conversely, small differences can lead to vast changes in what happened. Each counter-factual needs to be weighed on its own merits. In addition, we have to recognise that this is no more than an intellectual exercise, we cannot 'prove' the propositions, but saying that, in many branches of science, that is the same. Some dismiss counter-factual analysis as a 'game'. It can be entertaining and is the basis of an extensive sub-genre of fiction dating back many decades. However, counter-factual analysis is also a vital tool in properly weighing up the different elements which went into our history. Thus, as I have argued before, it is something that should not be dismissed: http://rooksmoor.blogspot.com/2007/05/usefulness-of-what-if-history.html
Now, it is probably on the basis of the usefulness of counter-factual analysis, that on 31st March 2011, China announced 'guidelines' effectively banning time-travel movies and television programmes. In a statement from Li Jingsheng head of television drama at China's State Administration for Radio, Film and Television (SARFT) has said that such dramas (and comedies): 'lack positive thoughts and meaning'; 'its content and the exaggerated performance style are questionable'; 'Many stories are totally made-up and are made to strain for an effect of novelty'; 'They casually make up myths, have monstrous and weird plots, use absurd tactics, and even promote feudalism, superstition, fatalism and reincarnation.' Of course, many of these things could be charges laid against many genres of fiction, for example, romance, Westerns, crime stories and even historical drams. It is the last elements about promoting feudalism and fatalism which really cut to the heart of the issue.
ommentators about Chinese society believe this move has been prompted by recent programmes featuring happy times in China's past (though it is pretty difficult to find any era in Chinese history when a substantial group of Chinese were not suffering). The key example is 'The Palace', as pointed out by Professor Nie Wei, from the School of Movie and Television Drama Studies of Shanghai University. The series features a 21st-century girl travelling back in time to the Qing dynasty (which ruled China 1644-1911). The episodes for the next series are being rewritten.
The movies and series has effectively banned in China on this basis include 'The Terminator' (1984) and presumably its sequels and television series; 'Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure' (1989) and its sequel; any version of 'A Christmas Carol'; 'Planet of the Apes' (1968) and its sequels, series and remake; 'Austin Powers: International Man of Mystery' (1997) and its sequels; 'Back To The Future' (1985) and its two sequels, 'Black Knight' (2001), 'The X-Files' (1993-2002) though I am not certain that many episodes of this actually featured time travel, 'Doctor Who' (1963-) and 'Star Trek' (1966-9) and presumably all the movies and sequel series.
I can only think of one time travel episode, in the original 'Star Trek' series, 'The City on the Edge of Forever' in the original series which the crew prevent a woman (played by Joan Collins!) being run over in 1930s USA so leading to a subsequent Nazi victory in World War Two including the USA coming under Nazi control. Apparently, however, three other episodes feature time travel, one taking crew members to 1968, one to 1969, one taking them back 3 days and one to two historic time periods on an alien planet. There is also time travel in the movie, 'Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home' (1986).
The fatalism would be seen in movies like 'The Butterfly Effect' (2004) in which a man tries to change his own life by travelling back in time on a number of occasions only to constantly make things worse; in 'Running Against Time' (1990) the repeated attempts by three time travellers to avoid US intervention in the Vietnam War only exacerbate the conflict. However, this then shows up the contradictions in the Chinese guidelines. They oppose both time travel that can make things turn out better and they dislike time travel that worsens the situation. They oppose time travel stories that only impact on the fate of a few individuals and also ones which affect the whole world such as 'The Terminator' and 'Star Trek IV' or 'A Sound of Thunder' (2005) which radically sees humans replaced by a reptillian species as a result of a time traveller to the Cretaceous period treading on a creature. Of course, the Chinese government could insist that all time travel stories adhere to the Novikov self-consistency principle, that, in fact you cannot alter history as it has happened, any attempt to do so will fail, as shown in 'Twelve Monkeys' (1995) and 'The Time Machine' (2002).
One movie not mentioned by the Chinese is 'Fatherland' (1994) perhaps because though the book it was based on was a best seller, the movie had little success, especially in the USA. The movie does not feature time travel, rather it is one of the only actual counter-factual movies in that it envisages a world in which Nazi Germany won the Second World War. Though not stated, it must be assumed that in such a scenario Japan would have been victorious in the Pacific as victory in Europe would have allowed its forces to be supplement by Germany and its allies. Despite the fact that Germany and Japan were always awkward allies (as history of wartime Shanghai show), Germany presumably would have put experienced U-boat packs into the Pacific; experienced German pilots and aircraft into the Pacific and China and provided SS units to exterminate Chinese Communists behind the frontlines. It seems unlikely Japan would have conquered all of China but it would have held the major cities and wealthiest regions, so today, North-East China would still be Manchukuo and Communism would have been eliminated from the Japanese colonies in eastern and central China.
I believe the movies listed owe more to their international renown than the portrayal of events in specific movies that is what has drawn Chinese state attention to them. However, there is also the factor of discussion around time travel and the possibilities it may offer to change a country which is what alarms the Chinese government the most. Despite this, It seems that, in the opposition to time travel, the Chinese are also dismissing a lot of general science fiction. This may be the authorities' intention.
Many of these series and movies have other concepts, discussion of which would be seen as a threat, especially 'Star Trek' which often handled moral judgements in story lines and elements such as discrimination. A fuller part of the SARFT statement suggests this is the case: 'fantasy, time-travel, random compilations of mythical stories, bizarre plots, absurd techniques, even propagating feudal superstitions, fatalism and reincarnation, ambiguous moral lessons, and even a lack of positive thinking.'
The timing seems to be in preparation for the 90th anniversary of the Communist Party of China being established (and, of course, the centenary of the 1911 Revolution which established the Chinese Republic which the Communists did not control entirely until 1950) and so '[a]ll levels should actively prepare to launch vivid reproductions of the Chinese revolution, the nation’s construction and its reform and opening up.' Of course, if we travelled back to 1971 for the 50th anniversary, the party members then would be in horror of the capitalist economy now in place in China and would see predictions for 2011 which featured China as one of the leading capitalist states of the world as completely counter-revolutionary and in need of suppression. Thus, even in its own history, the Communist Party of China has gone down 'alternative' paths that would have been considered highly inappropriate to discuss, even within living memory.
You can see the easy step from thinking about time travel to challenging the current regime, whether to argue that the more Maoist era or the Imperial era or the brief periods of democracy were better than the current state. Of course, the kind of question that the Chinese regime fears most is 'what if the democracy movement of Tiananmen Square had not been suppressed in 1989?' and other similar ones about Mao being ousted or the Chinese Civil War having a different outcome, all things that may allow people to think that an alternative path would have been better for the country's people.
China has not been alone in having such concerns. When the National Curriculum for the UK was launched in 1992, the history section of it instructed teachers specifically not to even suggest that any time period or country was better to live in than the UK at the time. The Conservative government was seemingly as insecure as the current Chinese government.
It is interesting that the two greatest Powers in the world at the moment, the USA and China are the ones who are most nervous about any speculation that their histories could have turned out very differently to how they did. In the USA pressure tends to come by brow-beating or dismissal as irrelevant. In China, a totalitarian dictatorship which practices extensive censorship, the approach is much more direct. However, in my view this only adds value to the role of counter-factual analysis. After all, if the Chinese government sees counter-factual speculation as potentially such a threatening tool, one leveraging greater democracy and liberty in the country, to the extent that movies even speculating about it must be censored, then it has some real potency beyond mere entertainment.
Monday, 7 February 2011
'I Don't Want To Hear That': Censoring In The Workplace
Before Christmas I attended a Christmas Fayre held at a local primary school. It had the usual games, stalls and refreshments that you find at such events held by churches, schools and other organisations. Being a small school some of the stalls were in classrooms. As I made my way into one classroom and joined the queue to buy some Christmas items, I looked at the work on the walls. It is always interesting to see what is being produced by children, especially as the curriculum is far wider than in my day and a lot of the work has been printed off the computer rather than hand-drawn and coloured. I was in the classroom used by Year 5 children, i.e., aged 9-10. On the wall was a series of notices admonishing the children to behave in certain ways, seeming rather old fashioned in style, but that may reflect the tone of that school or of the particular teacher of that class. Anyway, the one that concerned me most encouraged children not to speak. It told them not to say anything unless it complied with the following criteria: it had to be True, Helpful, Inspiring, Needed, Kind', as you can see this gave the acronym THINK. I suppose telling people to think before they speak is not really a bad principle. However, it seemed to reinforce more unsettling trends I have been encountering in society and in the workplace, in particular, so I was unnerved to see them coming into primary school teaching.
Let us look at the criteria. I suppose none of us would be against encouraging children to tell the truth. However, in western society, especially in education, the truth is always being contested. If it was not then knowledge would not advance, and to some degree this even applies in primary schools where the children are testing out ideas. If one child said 'Father Christmas exists' and another child said 'Father Christmas does not exist' who, among 9-year olds, would be telling the truth? Does the school rule out any of the mysteries that children often receive from their parents. What if a child said 'God created the World in 7 days' and another 'the universe started with the Big Bang' and so on? It certainly rules out any child telling a fictional story; perhaps that school only deals with non-fiction. As to the other criteria, they are all incredibly subjective. How does a 9-year old understand 'inspiring' and presumably if they did not think what they were saying 'needed' to be said then they would not bother; similarly with 'helpful'. Perhaps 'kind' is easier to judge, but if the child is not being particularly insulting to another child or shouting at them, then how do you apply this to other statements. Generally it seemed like an new way of saying 'children should be seen and not heard', a very Victorian precept.
This attitude that seems to be penetrating, even if in just some isolated cases, into schools is already widespread in the workplace. If I had a pound for every time in the past decade that I had heard the phrase, 'I don't want to hear that' in a work situation then I would be wealthy enough not to need to be applying for a job at the moment. I imagine it stems from the revived fashion for 1980s style management, encouraged by methods seen on programmes such as 'The Apprentice' in which managers are stern and distant and bellow at their employees as if they are all idiots. Lord Sugar has been very successful in bringing the methods used my sergeant-majors, including the insults and humiliation, into the office. The key difficulty is an assumption that the manager determines the parameters of what is a permitted topic and even what language can be used to describe it. This assumption is one I have often encountered and seems to be increasingly common with each passing year.
I accept that such an approach is a stamp of authority. However, it puts a far greater distance between the manager and the workforce, often artificially. In any given office there are always at least one or two people who could easily step into the manager's shoes and, in fact, in many situations do the job better. However, in the UK workplace we seem to now have very stratfied approaches and no sense any longer that employees, through hard work and training can progress up the company hierarchy. These days managers have to be managers brought from somewhere else (though often from elsewhere within the same company), rather than promoted internally. I accept it is difficult to set one employee above their previous colleagues, but that should not mean that there is an automatic sense that people on a certain grade will never become managers whether in their own office or elsewhere.
Defining the language which people are permitted to use when speaking is discriminatory. We are not talking about abusive or even crude language, but terminology and ways of expression which I have witnessed being shot down by 'I don't want to hear that'. I have generally worked in Southern England and the Midlands, but with staff from regions right across the UK, from many parts of the EU, from Canada, the USA, Australia and China and numerous other countries, especially in South Asia. In addition, I have worked with men and women, people aged 16 to 78 in my work and from all social classes, even interacting with nobility from time to time.
With this variety there is often wide diversity in the use of words and phrases in the work context. I have encountered challenges with which floor a meeting is on with Americans (for whom the first floor is the British ground floor) and with a Liverpudlian who pronounced the word 'staff' the way I pronounce 'stuff'. I even had to work out what a delivery driver meant when he said 'I need to fucking fuck that fuck', which to many would have been abusive, but was expressed in a neutral tone and meant he was going to back up his lorry; I had to interpret it from the context (I was reminded of this reading a China Mieville story in which the language of an alien race alters so there is only a single sound used for all words and sentences are understood purely by the context, partly as a defence against manipulation of the society by people alien to the planet). Ruling out words and phrases on some criteria which is, again, not articulated, only assumed to be 'common sense', is prejudicial as it descriminates against the speech of particular workers be that on a social, gender, regional, ethnic or age basis. Of course, it is simply another tool for the manager to constrain other employees left to try to guess at unwritten words and having their comments demoted in relation to the already privileged statements of the manager.
Setting the parameters of what is a permitted topic and what is permitted language helps to separate out managers from the level below them (which in many companies can often be another layer of managers who in turn are separating themselves from the level below). Usually the parameters are not defined; they are simply things the manager is ignorant of or for some reason does not feel relevant, but rather than saying that, simply the manager holds up their hand and says 'I don't want to hear this' and that is literally the end of the conversation. There is no explanation; no attempt to help the colleague develop so they say different things in the future. People saying 'I don't want to hear this' tend to assume that their opposition to some approach is common sense. Typically, however, ruling out certain approaches so peremptorily is not done on any criteria than either the manager does not want to hear 'bad' news or the person addressing them has started referring to things that the manager does not feel confident about and is unwilling to reveal the gap in their knowledge. No-one in any company or organisation knows everything, but when we have to comply with 20-50 essential specifications to get a job then none of us dare admit that there is something we are weak on. The only solutions that are allowed to be presented in so many companies now are the ones which the manager understands already and naturally this is detrimental to any innovation and even different ways of addressing a particular problem in order to work out solutions.
Too many managers not only do not want to hear about things they are unfamiliar with, but they do not want to hear anything they deem to be 'bad'. This marks an interesting change. Back in the early 2000s I remember a counter-trend which was that I would be asked for 'war stories', taken to mean examples of situations or projects similar to the ones we were dealing with but which had gone badly wrong. Back then people did not want to hear success stories, rather ones outlining all the potential problems they could avoid. It was easy to tell this from not only comments and requests I received but also from looking at the number of hits on the reports that myself and numerous colleagues had loaded up to the internal information database. The hits on the 'war stories' exceeded those on the success story reports fivefold. Of course, this did not mean that people wanted to hear about the unsuccessful parts of their own projects, but I believe they were far more willing to speak about them, otherwise myself and the people I worked alongside would have had no material from which to write our 'war stories', a situation far more common now, a decade on.
'Bad' is a loose word anyway. In my experience it encompasses anything that brings doubt about the success of even a single small aspect of the proposal made by the manager themselves. If they are fixated on even the most hare-brained scheme, you risk your job to highlight even one of the erroneous assumptions or ill-informed decisions in the project. This is insulting. What is the point of recruiting capable people, questioning them at length about their knowledge and capabilities; sending them on training courses and to conferences, only then to dismiss any observations that run counter to the leader's vision for the company/department/office. What is the point of me having these skills and knowledge if you are not going to even let me draw on them? I remember challenging one boss on two schemes of his. I pointed out that in one cases there were already 146 examples of what he proposed to develop, already on the market. In the second I highlighted to him that sending British staff for 3 years without a chance to return to the UK in that period might cause a rapid turnover of staff and questioned how he was going to pay them in China given that the reminbi (also known as the yuan) was not convertible; even seven years on from then and with China having taken steps in this direction, full convertibility has not been achieved. You would think my points were valid, but they were dismissed 'I only hear bad news from you' I was told and 'you seek to stop anything I plan'. The sense that anything that tempers or modifies the plan as envisaged by the originator is seeking to stop it entirely, rather than improve it, makes it difficult to develop pragmatic responses and adjustments which would actually make the plan work better or, in some cases, actually feasible. As with what can be raised, the 'all or nothing' approach hampers what should be the productive evolution of business activities, drawing on the skills of the full range of staff the company has taken so much effort to recruit.
The exclusion of anything defined as 'bad' (and this is defined by the beholder rather than any objective perspective) excludes a lot of the input that is needed when planning and executing plans in business. One basis for this attitude is the sense that we must all be hyper-positive about everything that happens in the company (the more I write the more the managerial style I am characterising seems to be similar to that of the Five Year Plans of the USSR and China, ignoring the flaws and continuing with unflinching optimism). In fact, excessive positivity can be dangerous. A study in 2009 by Canadian academics Joanne Wood and John Lee, University of Waterloo and Elaine Perunovic, University of New Brunswick. They felt that making self-esteem affirmations actually reinforced established behaviour rather than bringing about change. This is easy to comprehend, because if you feel good about yourself then they begin to feel that the way you are doing things must be the correct way, even if this means disregarding signals to the contrary. In an extract last January in 'The Guardian', supporting the release of her book, 'Smile Or Die: How Positive Thinking Fooled America And The World' (2010), Barbara Ehrenreich outlined how the insistance on positivity when dealing with cancer actually can be a hindrance to effective treatment. Her article went on to discuss something which I am on the verge of experiencing, the sessions telling the unemployed to be positive and to see their period of unemployment not as something negative and limiting, rather as something opening up new opportunities. I can say from my own experience that unemployment shuts down so many opportunities, to go anywhere, to socialise, to get things repaired and, in fact, to get another job, because employers prefer applicants currently in work over the jobless.
Now, I am not saying we should all be gloomy about the future and recognise that that can be debilitating. However, we seem to have got to a situation in which we feel that good news should be the only news we hear, everything else should be dismissed. This leads to an imbalanced and in turn inaccurate appreciation of the real situation. This position is exacerbated by another trend in the workplace which I have highlighted before, the insistence on brevity. See: http://rooksmoor.blogspot.com/2010/02/blogging-blog-10-demand-for-brevity.html I suppose in our sound bite age this is to be expected. No-one of today can stomach the kind of political speeches people would stand listening to for hours in the Victorian era and even 30-minute long programmes seem tiresome to some viewers; we have 60-second news broadcasts even on BBC3. However, this intolerance for anything longer than a single email page or some texted or tweeted lines, has turned into an assumption that anything which is longer than the personally defined tolerance level is wrong. It does not matter what the content actually says, the length makes whatever is contained in the message wrong in the view of far too many managers. Complex situations, analysis of different elements of a process, of different markets or customers, often need to be thoroughly analysed. Of course, you can fragment the reports, looking at a single customer or market at a time, but then all comparison goes out of the window.
Managers should make judgements. Often for jobs I have applied for 'evidence of decision making ability' is listed as an essential specification for a manager. However, excluding and bad or neutral news and insisting on only the briefest of reports or contributions, actually takes the decision making away from the manager. Instead they are given a number of brief, positive options and they simply plump for one or other. Without a rounded picture and full information about the options, and vitally, the context in which they will operate, the manager cannot make an actual judgement, they can simply 'pick' an option or go with the one which is best sold to them rather than one which might be most beneficial for the business. The insistence on 'positive & brief' also rules out a combination of elements from different options. You cannot see the downsides of any option or where its weaknesses might be countered by bringing across something from another option. I would argue that this kind of culture not only led the 'Columbia' space shuttle disaster of 2003, but also to a whole host of problems in the UK, for example, the defective software used for air traffic control and most recently by HM Revenue & Customs. Business and public service is complex. It deals with complex situation which require answers which generally are not simple, but typically multi-faceted and with positive, neutral and negative points about each option available. However, simply because of a fashion to make managers feel more in control, business and public service culture's insistence on 'positive & brief' will continue to lead us into difficulties because better answers will never even be allowed to appear.
P.P. 09/02/2011: I was reminded of an incident I experienced a couple of years ago, which combined with my knowledge of Chinese business suggests that this trend is even more prevalent in Chinese companies than it is with British ones. We were having an end of year meal in a restaurant for a number of staff and freelancers who had worked with a new unit, focusing on China, inside the company I was then working for. Most of the staff of the unit were British but it was headed by a Chinese man who had lived in the UK for some time and his personal assistant was a more recently arrived Chinese woman. Both of them read and speak English fluently. The head of the unit offered anyone who wished a lift in his car to the restaurant. I was the only one who accepted, the others made their own way there. The head drove with his assistant beside him, I was in the back. Whilst I was junior to the head I was certainly far more senior in the company than his assistant.
As we approach the restaurant the head pulls into a car park which is clearly labelled as being reserved parking only for members of the company who owned the building the parking sat beside. I saw this and tried to alert the driver to the fact. His assistant turned and very vigorously told me not to question the head's driving and when I repeated trying to alert him to the fact that he could not park there his assistant shushed me as if I was a child and then told me I should not say anything. I found this laughable but was also offended. The head proceeded to park and get out of the car. His assistant followed in his footsteps saying nothing. The head then walked away and continued until he saw the sign. Of course, he had to turn round and come back and move his car farther down the street or risk being clamped and fined. However, time had been wasted that could have been avoided if I had been permitted to speak.
I know this is a single incident but it seemed painfully characteristic of the problems that the centralised economies of China and the USSR faced in the past which led them in the 1980s and 1990s to move towards capitalism. However, the attitudes of not questioning authority figures or their immediate agents seem to have persisted from the Communist context into the capitalist environment. Given the success of China in the global marketplace, perhaps it is no surprise that British companies are apeing this behaviour. Yet, as I have outlined above, turning a blind eye and a deaf ear to warnings of things that may go wrong might work for a short time but ultimately will lead to you running into problems that could have been avoided with just a little care and some attention.
P.P. 21/05/2011
I was interested to catch an episode of Evan Davis's BBC2 programme, 'Business Nightmares' broadcast on 19th May 2011. He featured serious blunders by companies such as HBOS and Marks & Spencer particularly in taking over foreign companies. He concluded the programme saying that these examples and others stemmed from when the man in charge of the company had a grand idea but did not permit anyone to present an alternative or to caution him about what he planned to do, not simply about the plan in general but also specifics within it. Consequently, these cases turned into 'business nightmares' that damaged the company. As I have noted in this posting, this tendency to see anything which does not fit entirely with the boss's vision as a unwanted criticism that the boss is unwilling even to hear, is increasingly prevalent throughout UK companies, causing not only problems for the company at the top level, but hampering its efficiency and successful progress at all levels, so still damaging the company in the long term. Davis is a far more respected commentator on business than myself, but his argument that, for a company to prosper, a vision needs to be tempered with practical considerations and that bosses should not 'turn a deaf ear' to these reinforces what I have witnessed working for a number of companies.
Let us look at the criteria. I suppose none of us would be against encouraging children to tell the truth. However, in western society, especially in education, the truth is always being contested. If it was not then knowledge would not advance, and to some degree this even applies in primary schools where the children are testing out ideas. If one child said 'Father Christmas exists' and another child said 'Father Christmas does not exist' who, among 9-year olds, would be telling the truth? Does the school rule out any of the mysteries that children often receive from their parents. What if a child said 'God created the World in 7 days' and another 'the universe started with the Big Bang' and so on? It certainly rules out any child telling a fictional story; perhaps that school only deals with non-fiction. As to the other criteria, they are all incredibly subjective. How does a 9-year old understand 'inspiring' and presumably if they did not think what they were saying 'needed' to be said then they would not bother; similarly with 'helpful'. Perhaps 'kind' is easier to judge, but if the child is not being particularly insulting to another child or shouting at them, then how do you apply this to other statements. Generally it seemed like an new way of saying 'children should be seen and not heard', a very Victorian precept.
This attitude that seems to be penetrating, even if in just some isolated cases, into schools is already widespread in the workplace. If I had a pound for every time in the past decade that I had heard the phrase, 'I don't want to hear that' in a work situation then I would be wealthy enough not to need to be applying for a job at the moment. I imagine it stems from the revived fashion for 1980s style management, encouraged by methods seen on programmes such as 'The Apprentice' in which managers are stern and distant and bellow at their employees as if they are all idiots. Lord Sugar has been very successful in bringing the methods used my sergeant-majors, including the insults and humiliation, into the office. The key difficulty is an assumption that the manager determines the parameters of what is a permitted topic and even what language can be used to describe it. This assumption is one I have often encountered and seems to be increasingly common with each passing year.
I accept that such an approach is a stamp of authority. However, it puts a far greater distance between the manager and the workforce, often artificially. In any given office there are always at least one or two people who could easily step into the manager's shoes and, in fact, in many situations do the job better. However, in the UK workplace we seem to now have very stratfied approaches and no sense any longer that employees, through hard work and training can progress up the company hierarchy. These days managers have to be managers brought from somewhere else (though often from elsewhere within the same company), rather than promoted internally. I accept it is difficult to set one employee above their previous colleagues, but that should not mean that there is an automatic sense that people on a certain grade will never become managers whether in their own office or elsewhere.
Defining the language which people are permitted to use when speaking is discriminatory. We are not talking about abusive or even crude language, but terminology and ways of expression which I have witnessed being shot down by 'I don't want to hear that'. I have generally worked in Southern England and the Midlands, but with staff from regions right across the UK, from many parts of the EU, from Canada, the USA, Australia and China and numerous other countries, especially in South Asia. In addition, I have worked with men and women, people aged 16 to 78 in my work and from all social classes, even interacting with nobility from time to time.
With this variety there is often wide diversity in the use of words and phrases in the work context. I have encountered challenges with which floor a meeting is on with Americans (for whom the first floor is the British ground floor) and with a Liverpudlian who pronounced the word 'staff' the way I pronounce 'stuff'. I even had to work out what a delivery driver meant when he said 'I need to fucking fuck that fuck', which to many would have been abusive, but was expressed in a neutral tone and meant he was going to back up his lorry; I had to interpret it from the context (I was reminded of this reading a China Mieville story in which the language of an alien race alters so there is only a single sound used for all words and sentences are understood purely by the context, partly as a defence against manipulation of the society by people alien to the planet). Ruling out words and phrases on some criteria which is, again, not articulated, only assumed to be 'common sense', is prejudicial as it descriminates against the speech of particular workers be that on a social, gender, regional, ethnic or age basis. Of course, it is simply another tool for the manager to constrain other employees left to try to guess at unwritten words and having their comments demoted in relation to the already privileged statements of the manager.
Setting the parameters of what is a permitted topic and what is permitted language helps to separate out managers from the level below them (which in many companies can often be another layer of managers who in turn are separating themselves from the level below). Usually the parameters are not defined; they are simply things the manager is ignorant of or for some reason does not feel relevant, but rather than saying that, simply the manager holds up their hand and says 'I don't want to hear this' and that is literally the end of the conversation. There is no explanation; no attempt to help the colleague develop so they say different things in the future. People saying 'I don't want to hear this' tend to assume that their opposition to some approach is common sense. Typically, however, ruling out certain approaches so peremptorily is not done on any criteria than either the manager does not want to hear 'bad' news or the person addressing them has started referring to things that the manager does not feel confident about and is unwilling to reveal the gap in their knowledge. No-one in any company or organisation knows everything, but when we have to comply with 20-50 essential specifications to get a job then none of us dare admit that there is something we are weak on. The only solutions that are allowed to be presented in so many companies now are the ones which the manager understands already and naturally this is detrimental to any innovation and even different ways of addressing a particular problem in order to work out solutions.
Too many managers not only do not want to hear about things they are unfamiliar with, but they do not want to hear anything they deem to be 'bad'. This marks an interesting change. Back in the early 2000s I remember a counter-trend which was that I would be asked for 'war stories', taken to mean examples of situations or projects similar to the ones we were dealing with but which had gone badly wrong. Back then people did not want to hear success stories, rather ones outlining all the potential problems they could avoid. It was easy to tell this from not only comments and requests I received but also from looking at the number of hits on the reports that myself and numerous colleagues had loaded up to the internal information database. The hits on the 'war stories' exceeded those on the success story reports fivefold. Of course, this did not mean that people wanted to hear about the unsuccessful parts of their own projects, but I believe they were far more willing to speak about them, otherwise myself and the people I worked alongside would have had no material from which to write our 'war stories', a situation far more common now, a decade on.
'Bad' is a loose word anyway. In my experience it encompasses anything that brings doubt about the success of even a single small aspect of the proposal made by the manager themselves. If they are fixated on even the most hare-brained scheme, you risk your job to highlight even one of the erroneous assumptions or ill-informed decisions in the project. This is insulting. What is the point of recruiting capable people, questioning them at length about their knowledge and capabilities; sending them on training courses and to conferences, only then to dismiss any observations that run counter to the leader's vision for the company/department/office. What is the point of me having these skills and knowledge if you are not going to even let me draw on them? I remember challenging one boss on two schemes of his. I pointed out that in one cases there were already 146 examples of what he proposed to develop, already on the market. In the second I highlighted to him that sending British staff for 3 years without a chance to return to the UK in that period might cause a rapid turnover of staff and questioned how he was going to pay them in China given that the reminbi (also known as the yuan) was not convertible; even seven years on from then and with China having taken steps in this direction, full convertibility has not been achieved. You would think my points were valid, but they were dismissed 'I only hear bad news from you' I was told and 'you seek to stop anything I plan'. The sense that anything that tempers or modifies the plan as envisaged by the originator is seeking to stop it entirely, rather than improve it, makes it difficult to develop pragmatic responses and adjustments which would actually make the plan work better or, in some cases, actually feasible. As with what can be raised, the 'all or nothing' approach hampers what should be the productive evolution of business activities, drawing on the skills of the full range of staff the company has taken so much effort to recruit.
The exclusion of anything defined as 'bad' (and this is defined by the beholder rather than any objective perspective) excludes a lot of the input that is needed when planning and executing plans in business. One basis for this attitude is the sense that we must all be hyper-positive about everything that happens in the company (the more I write the more the managerial style I am characterising seems to be similar to that of the Five Year Plans of the USSR and China, ignoring the flaws and continuing with unflinching optimism). In fact, excessive positivity can be dangerous. A study in 2009 by Canadian academics Joanne Wood and John Lee, University of Waterloo and Elaine Perunovic, University of New Brunswick. They felt that making self-esteem affirmations actually reinforced established behaviour rather than bringing about change. This is easy to comprehend, because if you feel good about yourself then they begin to feel that the way you are doing things must be the correct way, even if this means disregarding signals to the contrary. In an extract last January in 'The Guardian', supporting the release of her book, 'Smile Or Die: How Positive Thinking Fooled America And The World' (2010), Barbara Ehrenreich outlined how the insistance on positivity when dealing with cancer actually can be a hindrance to effective treatment. Her article went on to discuss something which I am on the verge of experiencing, the sessions telling the unemployed to be positive and to see their period of unemployment not as something negative and limiting, rather as something opening up new opportunities. I can say from my own experience that unemployment shuts down so many opportunities, to go anywhere, to socialise, to get things repaired and, in fact, to get another job, because employers prefer applicants currently in work over the jobless.
Now, I am not saying we should all be gloomy about the future and recognise that that can be debilitating. However, we seem to have got to a situation in which we feel that good news should be the only news we hear, everything else should be dismissed. This leads to an imbalanced and in turn inaccurate appreciation of the real situation. This position is exacerbated by another trend in the workplace which I have highlighted before, the insistence on brevity. See: http://rooksmoor.blogspot.com/2010/02/blogging-blog-10-demand-for-brevity.html I suppose in our sound bite age this is to be expected. No-one of today can stomach the kind of political speeches people would stand listening to for hours in the Victorian era and even 30-minute long programmes seem tiresome to some viewers; we have 60-second news broadcasts even on BBC3. However, this intolerance for anything longer than a single email page or some texted or tweeted lines, has turned into an assumption that anything which is longer than the personally defined tolerance level is wrong. It does not matter what the content actually says, the length makes whatever is contained in the message wrong in the view of far too many managers. Complex situations, analysis of different elements of a process, of different markets or customers, often need to be thoroughly analysed. Of course, you can fragment the reports, looking at a single customer or market at a time, but then all comparison goes out of the window.
Managers should make judgements. Often for jobs I have applied for 'evidence of decision making ability' is listed as an essential specification for a manager. However, excluding and bad or neutral news and insisting on only the briefest of reports or contributions, actually takes the decision making away from the manager. Instead they are given a number of brief, positive options and they simply plump for one or other. Without a rounded picture and full information about the options, and vitally, the context in which they will operate, the manager cannot make an actual judgement, they can simply 'pick' an option or go with the one which is best sold to them rather than one which might be most beneficial for the business. The insistence on 'positive & brief' also rules out a combination of elements from different options. You cannot see the downsides of any option or where its weaknesses might be countered by bringing across something from another option. I would argue that this kind of culture not only led the 'Columbia' space shuttle disaster of 2003, but also to a whole host of problems in the UK, for example, the defective software used for air traffic control and most recently by HM Revenue & Customs. Business and public service is complex. It deals with complex situation which require answers which generally are not simple, but typically multi-faceted and with positive, neutral and negative points about each option available. However, simply because of a fashion to make managers feel more in control, business and public service culture's insistence on 'positive & brief' will continue to lead us into difficulties because better answers will never even be allowed to appear.
P.P. 09/02/2011: I was reminded of an incident I experienced a couple of years ago, which combined with my knowledge of Chinese business suggests that this trend is even more prevalent in Chinese companies than it is with British ones. We were having an end of year meal in a restaurant for a number of staff and freelancers who had worked with a new unit, focusing on China, inside the company I was then working for. Most of the staff of the unit were British but it was headed by a Chinese man who had lived in the UK for some time and his personal assistant was a more recently arrived Chinese woman. Both of them read and speak English fluently. The head of the unit offered anyone who wished a lift in his car to the restaurant. I was the only one who accepted, the others made their own way there. The head drove with his assistant beside him, I was in the back. Whilst I was junior to the head I was certainly far more senior in the company than his assistant.
As we approach the restaurant the head pulls into a car park which is clearly labelled as being reserved parking only for members of the company who owned the building the parking sat beside. I saw this and tried to alert the driver to the fact. His assistant turned and very vigorously told me not to question the head's driving and when I repeated trying to alert him to the fact that he could not park there his assistant shushed me as if I was a child and then told me I should not say anything. I found this laughable but was also offended. The head proceeded to park and get out of the car. His assistant followed in his footsteps saying nothing. The head then walked away and continued until he saw the sign. Of course, he had to turn round and come back and move his car farther down the street or risk being clamped and fined. However, time had been wasted that could have been avoided if I had been permitted to speak.
I know this is a single incident but it seemed painfully characteristic of the problems that the centralised economies of China and the USSR faced in the past which led them in the 1980s and 1990s to move towards capitalism. However, the attitudes of not questioning authority figures or their immediate agents seem to have persisted from the Communist context into the capitalist environment. Given the success of China in the global marketplace, perhaps it is no surprise that British companies are apeing this behaviour. Yet, as I have outlined above, turning a blind eye and a deaf ear to warnings of things that may go wrong might work for a short time but ultimately will lead to you running into problems that could have been avoided with just a little care and some attention.
P.P. 21/05/2011
I was interested to catch an episode of Evan Davis's BBC2 programme, 'Business Nightmares' broadcast on 19th May 2011. He featured serious blunders by companies such as HBOS and Marks & Spencer particularly in taking over foreign companies. He concluded the programme saying that these examples and others stemmed from when the man in charge of the company had a grand idea but did not permit anyone to present an alternative or to caution him about what he planned to do, not simply about the plan in general but also specifics within it. Consequently, these cases turned into 'business nightmares' that damaged the company. As I have noted in this posting, this tendency to see anything which does not fit entirely with the boss's vision as a unwanted criticism that the boss is unwilling even to hear, is increasingly prevalent throughout UK companies, causing not only problems for the company at the top level, but hampering its efficiency and successful progress at all levels, so still damaging the company in the long term. Davis is a far more respected commentator on business than myself, but his argument that, for a company to prosper, a vision needs to be tempered with practical considerations and that bosses should not 'turn a deaf ear' to these reinforces what I have witnessed working for a number of companies.
Friday, 22 January 2010
The Contradictions of China
It is no surprise that China has become such a potent force in the 21st century world. Even Napoleon characterised the country as being a sleeping giant even more in his times of the late 18th and early 19th century. It can easily be argued that China would have assumed its role of a Power in the world far sooner if it had not had a string of poor rulers and policies which have disrupted its economy and led to starvation and millions of deaths. China was a victim of imperialism both in the 19th century from European powers notably the British, French and Germans and in the 20th century from the Japanese conquest of much of the country 1931-45. However, it has long had the largest army in the world and exploded its first atomic bomb in 1964 and its first hydrogen bomb in 1967. It was a superpower alongside the USA and USSR but aside from small conflicts with the USSR which fortunately did not escalate into anything larger, its focus was generally internally, especially when the ideology and internecine fighting of the Cultural Revolution 1966-76 disrupted so much of the economy and society of China.
With the death of Mao Zedong and leaders from the era of the final phase of the revolution of 1945-50, China began to look out into the wider world and effectively became a Communist state with a capitalist economy. Its huge resources notably of workers meant that it was destined to always be a strong player in the world an if it had not been for Mao's insanities it may have reached this position in the 1960s rather than the 1980s and 1990s. What has not changed is the political structure which has overseen this vast economic growth. There has been the liberalisation of things such as where people are allowed to live, necessary to allow the rural-urban migration which has brought cheap workers to the cities though periodically older regulations are enforced to clear out slums. Anyone who has done business in China knows that influence with leading local members of the Chinese Communist Party is vital for achieving anything. This political power over economic activity unsurprisingly, as in so many other states, has led to corruption. Again periodically the corrupt are purged (often facing the death penalty) in some propaganda seeking attempt to reassert the supposed values of Communism but this does nothing to reverse how corruption is an integral part of the economic boom of China. Of course, there is a lot of ingenuity and hard work done in China, most of which was choked off in the past, so it is unsurprising that the economy prospers.
Despite all the economic shifts in China it remains a totalitarian state that Mao would still recognise. The suppression of the Tianamen Square protests in 1989, continued occupation of Tibet, suppression of the Falun Gong religion and of Uighur nationalists are all characteristic of a country unwilling to tolerate any political shift especially from ethnic and religious minorities. People forget that China has 56 ethnic minorities which are highly over-represented in terms of absolute poverty, i.e. earning less than equivalent to US$1 per day. Thus, while people become multi-millionaires in Shanghai, in Xinjiang province they are as poor as in Third World countries. Despite the strength of its military and its vast economy, which is now the second strongest in the world, China continues to pretend somehow that it is a poor, defenceless countries bullied by the old Western imperial states.
This dichotomy between China's real strength and how it expects to be treated in the world has come out on a number of occasions recently. In the 1960s, despite being a Communist superpower, China tried to present itself as being in the 'non-aligned' group of nations. However, it was as happy to spread its ideology, a rural-focused brand of Communism to developing countries, feeling it was more appropriate than the heavy industry focused Soviet Communism. Similarly these days China still portrays itself as a victim of imperialism, though the last imperial forces left in 1945 and even if you count the British and Portuguese leaving Hong Kong and Macao as late as 1997 they have all gone now. Chinese people become indignant if you suggest that actually China is behaving like a (neo-)imperial power. They characterise their investment especially in African states like Zimbabwe and Sudan as being utterly different from the neo-imperialism through investment that the USA, Britain, France and the USSR adopted in the 1970s, when in fact it is no different. Chinese staff supervise Zimbabwean workers on Chinese projects in the country. The Chinese steps to secure raw materials across the world even in developed countries does not differ from the efforts of the UK, France and the USA to secure natural resource supplies. However, always, China says that it is different and is still a victim of imperialism when in fact it is now an imperialist power itself. Do not even mention the Spratly Islands where the imperialism is even more old fashioned.
China is a totalitarian state. People seem to keep forgetting that so it is worthwhile emphasising. It has possibly over 1.6 million prisoners, second only to the USA, with 2.3 million, which has about a quarter as many people. The difference for China is that the 'crimes' of many of these people are political and they are being 're-educated'. Bizarrely unlike the US system that seems to think people cannot be changed, the Chinese prison system believes that they can, though to the bulk of us the methodology would appear like brainwashing and certainly involves torture which the USA has only comparatively recently adopted as a method and then only for its political prisoners. The US population should be utterly ashamed that, as a supposedly liberal democracy, they can be bracketed with a totalitarian regime in this respect. Anyway, China has censorship, it always had. With the expansion of the internet promoted in a large part by the rapid economic growth the country has experienced in the past three decades, this censorship has had to expand to the internet. Singapore has struggled to maintain its censorship system when dealing with the internet. China with its vast resources has been more successful using a combination of electronic means such as the police officers that appear on screen when you access certain websites, to arresting blogging dissidents, to compelling Google to ban the searching of certain phrases. Now, in its hacking into Google accounts of dissidents and the launching of a sophisticated cyber attack the Chinese authorities have even angered Google which is now holding back on introducing a new generation of mobile phones to the country. The Chinese have found that there are sometimes limits even to the powerful renminbi (the Chinese currency often still called the yuan). The Chinese have not said 'well, we are a totalitarian dictatorship, so we censor' again they have whined that they are victims of imperialism. They complain that there is an imbalanced 'global information order' again in favour of the West which is trying to impose its culture on China. In fact China is giving heart to those who want to censor internet activity (of course, leading this is the USA with its desire for a war on terror in all facets) and the UK which has long monitored all email traffic. China whines that it is being bullied, when in fact we are suffering as a result of the dictatorial, suppressive measures it is pressing on the world.
At the recent Copenhagen climate change conference, powerful China was again portraying itself as the weak country in need of support from the supposedly rich West (even though China's economy is now more powerful than all Western states bar the USA). It was seeking financial support for steps to ameliorate the impact of climate change, despite China having US$2.272 trillion in foreign currency reserves in September 2009. This tactic help divert attention from China's appalling record on industrial damage to the environment which has caused poverty and disrupted the lives of millions of its citizens and no doubt contributes heavily to global climate change. The fact that the government ceased traffic flow during the Beijing Olympics because the air pollution was so severe, indicates the impact of China's booming industrial and transport sectors that have barely been affected by the global recession. China should be one of the industrialised states looking to reduce its pollution but instead it whines that it is only a developing country which needs support to do this. The amount of money the USA owes China is sufficient for China to effectively buy the whole US economy and close down every factory and stop every vehicle there, that is not a country which needs help reducing its pollution impact on the world, it is one that needs to be leading the way.
China is immensely strong in so many ways, but it seems constantly to pretend that it is the victim and rebuff any claims that it should comply with international standards on the basis this is bullying by other states. I have not even mentioned its unwillingness to comply with copyright law. There is unsurprisingly, given the nature of the regime, an immense arrogance from China that it can behave with impunity in the global context and that its stated values, i.e. censorship, freedom to exploit people and the environment, imprisonment on issues of conscience, continued occupation of a foreign country, should not even be challenged by the world community. Of course, many powerful states engage in these kinds of policies, but perhaps the irritation with China is that it somehow pretends that it is the best society and that any criticism is based on myths and motivated by a desire to imperially suppress China. It attacks other states for in fact things it is doing itself. I guess this is one reason why we find taking official China's statements so hard. They are both hypocritical and seek to conceal atrocities that we all know are going on beneath an incredibly pathetic line that China is weak and a victim of bullies. All of us who support freedom of thought, contact, communication, conscience, must keep challenging China (as well as the USA, UK and other states that are doing wrong) and one first step is for the Chinese state to actually admit it is a bully, not a victim.
With the death of Mao Zedong and leaders from the era of the final phase of the revolution of 1945-50, China began to look out into the wider world and effectively became a Communist state with a capitalist economy. Its huge resources notably of workers meant that it was destined to always be a strong player in the world an if it had not been for Mao's insanities it may have reached this position in the 1960s rather than the 1980s and 1990s. What has not changed is the political structure which has overseen this vast economic growth. There has been the liberalisation of things such as where people are allowed to live, necessary to allow the rural-urban migration which has brought cheap workers to the cities though periodically older regulations are enforced to clear out slums. Anyone who has done business in China knows that influence with leading local members of the Chinese Communist Party is vital for achieving anything. This political power over economic activity unsurprisingly, as in so many other states, has led to corruption. Again periodically the corrupt are purged (often facing the death penalty) in some propaganda seeking attempt to reassert the supposed values of Communism but this does nothing to reverse how corruption is an integral part of the economic boom of China. Of course, there is a lot of ingenuity and hard work done in China, most of which was choked off in the past, so it is unsurprising that the economy prospers.
Despite all the economic shifts in China it remains a totalitarian state that Mao would still recognise. The suppression of the Tianamen Square protests in 1989, continued occupation of Tibet, suppression of the Falun Gong religion and of Uighur nationalists are all characteristic of a country unwilling to tolerate any political shift especially from ethnic and religious minorities. People forget that China has 56 ethnic minorities which are highly over-represented in terms of absolute poverty, i.e. earning less than equivalent to US$1 per day. Thus, while people become multi-millionaires in Shanghai, in Xinjiang province they are as poor as in Third World countries. Despite the strength of its military and its vast economy, which is now the second strongest in the world, China continues to pretend somehow that it is a poor, defenceless countries bullied by the old Western imperial states.
This dichotomy between China's real strength and how it expects to be treated in the world has come out on a number of occasions recently. In the 1960s, despite being a Communist superpower, China tried to present itself as being in the 'non-aligned' group of nations. However, it was as happy to spread its ideology, a rural-focused brand of Communism to developing countries, feeling it was more appropriate than the heavy industry focused Soviet Communism. Similarly these days China still portrays itself as a victim of imperialism, though the last imperial forces left in 1945 and even if you count the British and Portuguese leaving Hong Kong and Macao as late as 1997 they have all gone now. Chinese people become indignant if you suggest that actually China is behaving like a (neo-)imperial power. They characterise their investment especially in African states like Zimbabwe and Sudan as being utterly different from the neo-imperialism through investment that the USA, Britain, France and the USSR adopted in the 1970s, when in fact it is no different. Chinese staff supervise Zimbabwean workers on Chinese projects in the country. The Chinese steps to secure raw materials across the world even in developed countries does not differ from the efforts of the UK, France and the USA to secure natural resource supplies. However, always, China says that it is different and is still a victim of imperialism when in fact it is now an imperialist power itself. Do not even mention the Spratly Islands where the imperialism is even more old fashioned.
China is a totalitarian state. People seem to keep forgetting that so it is worthwhile emphasising. It has possibly over 1.6 million prisoners, second only to the USA, with 2.3 million, which has about a quarter as many people. The difference for China is that the 'crimes' of many of these people are political and they are being 're-educated'. Bizarrely unlike the US system that seems to think people cannot be changed, the Chinese prison system believes that they can, though to the bulk of us the methodology would appear like brainwashing and certainly involves torture which the USA has only comparatively recently adopted as a method and then only for its political prisoners. The US population should be utterly ashamed that, as a supposedly liberal democracy, they can be bracketed with a totalitarian regime in this respect. Anyway, China has censorship, it always had. With the expansion of the internet promoted in a large part by the rapid economic growth the country has experienced in the past three decades, this censorship has had to expand to the internet. Singapore has struggled to maintain its censorship system when dealing with the internet. China with its vast resources has been more successful using a combination of electronic means such as the police officers that appear on screen when you access certain websites, to arresting blogging dissidents, to compelling Google to ban the searching of certain phrases. Now, in its hacking into Google accounts of dissidents and the launching of a sophisticated cyber attack the Chinese authorities have even angered Google which is now holding back on introducing a new generation of mobile phones to the country. The Chinese have found that there are sometimes limits even to the powerful renminbi (the Chinese currency often still called the yuan). The Chinese have not said 'well, we are a totalitarian dictatorship, so we censor' again they have whined that they are victims of imperialism. They complain that there is an imbalanced 'global information order' again in favour of the West which is trying to impose its culture on China. In fact China is giving heart to those who want to censor internet activity (of course, leading this is the USA with its desire for a war on terror in all facets) and the UK which has long monitored all email traffic. China whines that it is being bullied, when in fact we are suffering as a result of the dictatorial, suppressive measures it is pressing on the world.
At the recent Copenhagen climate change conference, powerful China was again portraying itself as the weak country in need of support from the supposedly rich West (even though China's economy is now more powerful than all Western states bar the USA). It was seeking financial support for steps to ameliorate the impact of climate change, despite China having US$2.272 trillion in foreign currency reserves in September 2009. This tactic help divert attention from China's appalling record on industrial damage to the environment which has caused poverty and disrupted the lives of millions of its citizens and no doubt contributes heavily to global climate change. The fact that the government ceased traffic flow during the Beijing Olympics because the air pollution was so severe, indicates the impact of China's booming industrial and transport sectors that have barely been affected by the global recession. China should be one of the industrialised states looking to reduce its pollution but instead it whines that it is only a developing country which needs support to do this. The amount of money the USA owes China is sufficient for China to effectively buy the whole US economy and close down every factory and stop every vehicle there, that is not a country which needs help reducing its pollution impact on the world, it is one that needs to be leading the way.
China is immensely strong in so many ways, but it seems constantly to pretend that it is the victim and rebuff any claims that it should comply with international standards on the basis this is bullying by other states. I have not even mentioned its unwillingness to comply with copyright law. There is unsurprisingly, given the nature of the regime, an immense arrogance from China that it can behave with impunity in the global context and that its stated values, i.e. censorship, freedom to exploit people and the environment, imprisonment on issues of conscience, continued occupation of a foreign country, should not even be challenged by the world community. Of course, many powerful states engage in these kinds of policies, but perhaps the irritation with China is that it somehow pretends that it is the best society and that any criticism is based on myths and motivated by a desire to imperially suppress China. It attacks other states for in fact things it is doing itself. I guess this is one reason why we find taking official China's statements so hard. They are both hypocritical and seek to conceal atrocities that we all know are going on beneath an incredibly pathetic line that China is weak and a victim of bullies. All of us who support freedom of thought, contact, communication, conscience, must keep challenging China (as well as the USA, UK and other states that are doing wrong) and one first step is for the Chinese state to actually admit it is a bully, not a victim.
Saturday, 8 March 2008
Next Steps in Constructing the British Police State
With the announcement this week that identity cards which had fallen from public attention in the past few months were not only going to be introduced but on a more rapid schedule at a cost over over £5 billion (€6.65 billion; US$9.95 billion) and the continued attempts to increase the time a prisoner can be held without charge from 28 days to 42 days indicates that the Blairite agenda of sweeping away civil liberties is continuing full force under Brown. The question is what can we expect next? Obviously opposition to identity cards and extended detention (which they want to extend to 90 days, 42 days is the 'compromise') has slowed down the programme, but given the government's desire to push it on it is likely to continue. Now, there are lots of examples of authoritarian and totalitarian regimes that we can look at for examples. Some of these are getting out of date now. The last fascist regime in Europe ended in Spain in 1975 and the last Communist states in Europe fell in 1991. However, even if we have to look back to the 1940s, it is really only the technology that has changed and not the way in which governments want to control people, so we can draw parallels. The Nazis did not have CCTV or retinal scans or computer databases (though IBM helped them number crunch the Holocaust), they still kept track of people as governments wish to today it just needed more time and effort.
In the past I have argued that the kind of state that Blair was seeking to construct resembled Vichy France 1940-3/4 or Corporatist Austria 1934-8 (i.e. before it was absorbed by Germany) in having a prejudiced state without democratic rights and with strong police powers but based on a Christian nationalist basis so lots of emphasis on the (Catholic) Church, national identity, hard work, sacrifice and the family. Blair used rhetoric from Vichy France and so I imagine this is still the model the government is aiming for. However, with the departure of Blair (soon formally to become a Catholic) and his replacement with Brown has shifted the emphasis towards a more Presbyterian, quietist rhetoric, but still aiming for the state attributes that were Blair's goals. This is unsurprising as Blair and Brown worked closely for over a decade and whilst they did not agree on everything, they cannot have had diametrically opposed views on what they wanted for British society.
Right, now by 2009 I anticipate we will have 42-day detention without charge and identity cards, already in place for foreigners and coming in for British people too. Already in 2008 you now have to wait 6 weeks to get a passport and will have an interview before being given one. This kind of thing will increase so that you will be checked up on more regularly by government bodies. The excuse is that it prevents identity fraud but there is no evidence it has reduced it at all. You will probably start being checked before you can get a national insurance number or a driving licence, not just whether you qualify but whether you are the 'right' kind of person. This legal shift from people being guilty because of what they do, i.e. commit a crime to being assumed guilty because of who they are, e.g. a foreigner or a 'subversive' is always characteristic of authoritarian regimes. The government has already revived the police power of 'stop and search', popularly known as 'sus'. They have also talked about curfews of 9pm for under sixteens. Before long it will be a crime to be out without your identity card leading to immediate arrest and then I envisage, taking slightly longer we will have curfews for adults too. The use of ASBOs (Anti-Social Behaviour Orders) is supposed to stop disruptive youths but they are often applied to mature and elderly people and now they are in place they will be used to stop people assembling in certain areas or meeting with each other. ASBOs seem ineffectual, but that is actually beneficial for the government as few people have noticed they actually curtail the right of individuals to the freedom of assembly or to go where they like in public areas.
The other noticeable thing is that universities are being asked to keep check on 'suspicious' students, especially from abroad. In fact this was already in place during the Cold War, it is now just becoming more overt. Lecturers have resisted this, but once they start seeing that the universities and the staff that get government funding are those that best comply with what the government is asking for on surveillance they will get in line or be forced to do so by their managers, desperate for funding. Such checks I envisage will extend through other sectors of society, next, I imagine will be the National Health Service, particularly due to how dependent Britain is on doctors and nurses from abroad, and the Civil Service. These three areas were the professions which the Nazis purged the Jews first.
Within, say, five years, appraisals in all jobs, and certainly those in the public sector, will include checking how loyal you are to the state and whether you are involved in 'subversive' activity. I also imagine that we will get something as they have in China where everyone has a file that goes with them as they move from job to job and in particular records any protests they have been involved in. Effectively it creates an automatic blacklist because if you go for a job interview and the employers see in your file that you are politically active they simply do not employ you. Nazi Germany had a similar work card system. Most people will keep quiet to keep their jobs, especially as the media is telling us we have to compete so hard for them especially with foreign workers and especially if you are a man. This builds up compliance and also increased resentment against people who are 'other', two things the government is keen to do.
One clear element of an authoritarian regime is its secret police force. Well, first there is the issue of surveillance. Already we are moving to bugged or wire tap evidence being used in court. The standard police already make use of such devices but clearly they are incredibly beneficial to secret police bodies. Whilst torture is banned in the UK there seems an increasing willingness to use evidence gained under torture in other countries notably the USA. Britain may find that like the Americans with Guantanamo Bay on Cuba, that there is a little bit of empire left which is strictly not Britain and where they can use torture without violating UK laws or maybe they will just leave it to the Americans to do it for them. The use of torture to gain evidence in the UK, I doubt will be here until late in the 2010s, especially as surveillance technologies are so sophisticated that they allow 'suspicious' people to damn themselves with their own words. Since the early 2000s all emails sent from the UK have passed through security service devices (surprisingly in the Clinton era this fact actually upset American businesses, but since 2001 they seem to have stopped complaining) and GCHQ in Cheltenham has long been tapping telephone conversations. It is always fun to wind them up by using buzz words that their computers are looking for in innocent conversations on the phone. Mobile phones and laptops are even easier to get a grip on, even a member of the public with a few hundred pounds can get enough equipment to start listening into you and parents now can subscribe to a service that allows them to locate their children by their mobile phone usage. In addition, bascially anything you see on a spy movie has been in use 5-10 years by the time you see it.
Back to the secret police. Well, we have MI5 (also known as the Security Service) as our counter-intelligence agency, which gets great PR from the televisions series 'Spooks'. If you look at the very complex police structure of Nazi Germany you find MI5 resembles most the SD (Sicherheitdienst, literally Security Service), but MI5 lacks the power of arrest they are just about intelligence gathering. Though I am sure they do not hold back from abducting the odd person here or there. Britain had Special Branch which was a part of the Metropolitan (i.e. London) police force founded in 1883 and throughout its history often focused on Irish terrorism, though in the 1960s and 1970s it also focused on trade unionists and political extremists. In 1992 MI5 out of work following the end of the Cold War took over much of its anti-terrorist work. Special Branch (600 officers) was merged in 2005 with the Counter-Terrorism Branch SO13 (500 officers) to create a new body, the Counter-Terrorism Command with extra officers to lift its number to 2000. Special Branch is assigned the intelligence gathering and the former SO13 part the investigative (and arrest part). This is similar to what happened in Nazi Germany in 1939 when the Gestapo and SD were merged in the so-called RSHA but kept their previous roles. The new CTC explicitly mentions that its roles now branded 'counter-extremism' includes monitoring political, animal rights, anti-globalization, and environmental 'extremism'. This has nothing to do with al-Qaeda it is just about keeping down protest. So while the UK does not have a Department of Homeland Security, it certainly already has its secret police force and in larger numbers than at the peak of the Cold War and Irish terrorist activity. I have forgotten the new UK Border Agency launched this week bringing together customs and excise and immigration units. It is going to be responsible for identity cards for foreigners in the UK and is aiming to increase its detention capacity as part of its year long programme. This is one irony of the UK's rush to become a police state, its prisons are currently full, so maybe they will have to concentrate people in camps in rural areas just like the Australians do when they intern asylum seekers in camps in the outback. The UK has just adopted the Australian system for regulating foreigners coming into the UK so it cannot be long before it adopts the Australian concentration camp system too (of course invented by the British anyway at the start of the 20th century for interning Boer families in South Africa).
Censorship, well, that seems already to be effectively in place given that we had to wait 10 weeks to find out about where Prince Harry was. The UK has always had its D-Notice Committee which sends out notices to British media blocking them from reporting various things and at times journalists have had their resources seized. The fact that so much of the media is in the hands of so few people and the BBC network is semi-state owned. I never understand when politicians call it left-wing, it is so pro-Establishment that it is painful, I think that is just a blind played by politicians who want overt censorship powers and it is interesting that authoritarian regimes do not like interesting programmes. Only Josef Goebbels, propaganda minister of Nazi Germany recognised that you just had to provide tacky entertainment to keep the masses happy and we seem to have arrived at that stage now with all the reality shows. George Galloway's failure to subvert the 'Big Brother' series by appearing on it demonstrated the inability to dent that power. However, control of the media is far tougher now even when you have the media producers on your side. China spends immense amounts of money policing the internet and Singapore has had to give up as it is too expensive. When you can log on and get news coverage from across the planet it is difficult to stop people seeing a different viewpoint. The Chinese do it by arresting bloggers and others who take a political line and by encouraging society to see it as bad to look at other sources of information (animated police characters come on screen when you connect to such websites). So establishing societal norms against accessing 'improper' information and arresting the most outspoken is probably the path the UK will adopt. It is helped by the fact that the UK has long been a country disinterested in politics anyway, few people vote or read political news stories, and that is actually in sharp contrast to the population of China which has a long history of political activism. Censorship and self-censorship and shoving meaningless news and programmes at us is already under way and is liable to keep increasing at its current steady rate.
The other element the government needs to put in place more actively if it is truly going to get the authoritarian state it desires is a mass movement. As noted above the British are apathetic so are reluctant to get involved. Various newspapers run bigoted, pro-military campaigns that attract short-term support, but unlike the Americans, the British do not adhere to mass movements even when scared and they forget the frights very quickly. Partly the problem with a mass movement is that British society is so fragmented with region, class, age, etc. and lacks common grounds that groups in places like the USA can coalesce around. We cannot even agree on St. George's Day let alone the flag and so on. Getting people together in the UK shows up the class differences which riles the British more than anything else. So, what I envisage is again that the British government will follow the Nazi model and have a whole series of patriotic groups, ones associated with teachers and nurses and truck drivers and mothers and young people and old people and so on. They can draw in groups that already exist, the scout movement in the UK already has a very patriotic agenda and I imagine we will see it increasing in size and support from the state. Something like a spin-off from the Countryside Alliance may become the rural arm and across the UK we will see more of these bodies becoming corporations of the state, seeming to represent the voice of their members but in fact constraining them to the line set by the government. Fascist Italy was very keen on this approach and even ended up with a part of its parliament at which all these different groups were formally represented.
The spin-off from the mass movement is to get a watcher on every street. Authoritarian regimes are fuelled by the so-called 'little Hitlers' you see in every country. These are the self-righteous busybodies who love to have some power over their neighbours and to police their behaviour. They are everywhere especially on residents' groups and pushing for ASBOs against people they take a dislike to. There are many on local councils too and most magistrates (the part-time judges at the British equivalent of police courts) fit this category. They think they are better than the rest of us and love getting official power from the state. They flourished during the Second World War when every Home Guard soldier and every ARP (Air Raid Precautions) officer fell into this category (excellently portrayed in the long-running TV series, 'Dad's Army' in all their officiousness) to the extent that Home Guard checkpoints slowed up the movement of the regular army as their officers could often not prove they were not German agents in disguise and would be arrested. Millions of Britons would relish the chance to become Anti-Terrorist Warden for their street and bully anyone they feel is 'different' or 'improper' with official sanction. Again, this was an approach the Nazis adopted with their block wardens (as Germans generally live in blocks of flats) and China does with its danwei work group system. People say that the British do not like behaving this way and policing their neighbours, that is utter rubbish. If like me you ever work in the post room of the local tax office or benefits office, every day you have to deal with letters from people 'shopping' (i.e. asking people to be investigated and arrested) their neighbours who they suspect of defrauding the government. Only a tiny fraction of these letters are ever accurate and most simply reflect jealousy of what the neighbour has or indignation at how they live their lives. So, Britain has got a ready made body of ATWs just waiting for the government to mobilise them. There was one minor attempt back in the early 2000s when the government sent round information about defending yourself from terrorism, but they did not really follow it up or get a movement behind it.
So, these are the next steps the UK is likely to take in building its police state. Many things like ASBOs are well established it just needs other elements to come together with them and suddenly they become much more powerful. Things that have been growing in recent years such as censorship and control over our movements will continue to do so quietly. We have already lost so many freedoms since 1997 that you do not realise until you sit down and look back that you can see the changes. Of course there is an injection of fear once in a while and the British need more of them because we forget our fears much faster than the Americans do. I predict some terrorist attack at a large event this Summer just to cap off the new developments with identity cards and show us why we would should yield to our fears and instead accept the warm protecting arm of our authoritarian government. Get out now and ramble through the countryside possibly bringing you near some base (driving through southern England last year, I pulled over to check my map and found I had inadvertently pulled into the entrance to the Porton Down chemical and biological weapons research centre, I did wonder why there was such a big fence and all the cameras), and meet up with your friends on a street corner one night, go into town without it being filled with people in military uniforms (do that one quick as the rules are being changed as we sit here), do all these things before you lose the right.
While researching for this posting I came across a useful site called Statewatch which monitors civil liberties right across the European Union. It has great resources on all of the issues I have covered here, go visit it at: http://www.statewatch.org/
In the past I have argued that the kind of state that Blair was seeking to construct resembled Vichy France 1940-3/4 or Corporatist Austria 1934-8 (i.e. before it was absorbed by Germany) in having a prejudiced state without democratic rights and with strong police powers but based on a Christian nationalist basis so lots of emphasis on the (Catholic) Church, national identity, hard work, sacrifice and the family. Blair used rhetoric from Vichy France and so I imagine this is still the model the government is aiming for. However, with the departure of Blair (soon formally to become a Catholic) and his replacement with Brown has shifted the emphasis towards a more Presbyterian, quietist rhetoric, but still aiming for the state attributes that were Blair's goals. This is unsurprising as Blair and Brown worked closely for over a decade and whilst they did not agree on everything, they cannot have had diametrically opposed views on what they wanted for British society.
Right, now by 2009 I anticipate we will have 42-day detention without charge and identity cards, already in place for foreigners and coming in for British people too. Already in 2008 you now have to wait 6 weeks to get a passport and will have an interview before being given one. This kind of thing will increase so that you will be checked up on more regularly by government bodies. The excuse is that it prevents identity fraud but there is no evidence it has reduced it at all. You will probably start being checked before you can get a national insurance number or a driving licence, not just whether you qualify but whether you are the 'right' kind of person. This legal shift from people being guilty because of what they do, i.e. commit a crime to being assumed guilty because of who they are, e.g. a foreigner or a 'subversive' is always characteristic of authoritarian regimes. The government has already revived the police power of 'stop and search', popularly known as 'sus'. They have also talked about curfews of 9pm for under sixteens. Before long it will be a crime to be out without your identity card leading to immediate arrest and then I envisage, taking slightly longer we will have curfews for adults too. The use of ASBOs (Anti-Social Behaviour Orders) is supposed to stop disruptive youths but they are often applied to mature and elderly people and now they are in place they will be used to stop people assembling in certain areas or meeting with each other. ASBOs seem ineffectual, but that is actually beneficial for the government as few people have noticed they actually curtail the right of individuals to the freedom of assembly or to go where they like in public areas.
The other noticeable thing is that universities are being asked to keep check on 'suspicious' students, especially from abroad. In fact this was already in place during the Cold War, it is now just becoming more overt. Lecturers have resisted this, but once they start seeing that the universities and the staff that get government funding are those that best comply with what the government is asking for on surveillance they will get in line or be forced to do so by their managers, desperate for funding. Such checks I envisage will extend through other sectors of society, next, I imagine will be the National Health Service, particularly due to how dependent Britain is on doctors and nurses from abroad, and the Civil Service. These three areas were the professions which the Nazis purged the Jews first.
Within, say, five years, appraisals in all jobs, and certainly those in the public sector, will include checking how loyal you are to the state and whether you are involved in 'subversive' activity. I also imagine that we will get something as they have in China where everyone has a file that goes with them as they move from job to job and in particular records any protests they have been involved in. Effectively it creates an automatic blacklist because if you go for a job interview and the employers see in your file that you are politically active they simply do not employ you. Nazi Germany had a similar work card system. Most people will keep quiet to keep their jobs, especially as the media is telling us we have to compete so hard for them especially with foreign workers and especially if you are a man. This builds up compliance and also increased resentment against people who are 'other', two things the government is keen to do.
One clear element of an authoritarian regime is its secret police force. Well, first there is the issue of surveillance. Already we are moving to bugged or wire tap evidence being used in court. The standard police already make use of such devices but clearly they are incredibly beneficial to secret police bodies. Whilst torture is banned in the UK there seems an increasing willingness to use evidence gained under torture in other countries notably the USA. Britain may find that like the Americans with Guantanamo Bay on Cuba, that there is a little bit of empire left which is strictly not Britain and where they can use torture without violating UK laws or maybe they will just leave it to the Americans to do it for them. The use of torture to gain evidence in the UK, I doubt will be here until late in the 2010s, especially as surveillance technologies are so sophisticated that they allow 'suspicious' people to damn themselves with their own words. Since the early 2000s all emails sent from the UK have passed through security service devices (surprisingly in the Clinton era this fact actually upset American businesses, but since 2001 they seem to have stopped complaining) and GCHQ in Cheltenham has long been tapping telephone conversations. It is always fun to wind them up by using buzz words that their computers are looking for in innocent conversations on the phone. Mobile phones and laptops are even easier to get a grip on, even a member of the public with a few hundred pounds can get enough equipment to start listening into you and parents now can subscribe to a service that allows them to locate their children by their mobile phone usage. In addition, bascially anything you see on a spy movie has been in use 5-10 years by the time you see it.
Back to the secret police. Well, we have MI5 (also known as the Security Service) as our counter-intelligence agency, which gets great PR from the televisions series 'Spooks'. If you look at the very complex police structure of Nazi Germany you find MI5 resembles most the SD (Sicherheitdienst, literally Security Service), but MI5 lacks the power of arrest they are just about intelligence gathering. Though I am sure they do not hold back from abducting the odd person here or there. Britain had Special Branch which was a part of the Metropolitan (i.e. London) police force founded in 1883 and throughout its history often focused on Irish terrorism, though in the 1960s and 1970s it also focused on trade unionists and political extremists. In 1992 MI5 out of work following the end of the Cold War took over much of its anti-terrorist work. Special Branch (600 officers) was merged in 2005 with the Counter-Terrorism Branch SO13 (500 officers) to create a new body, the Counter-Terrorism Command with extra officers to lift its number to 2000. Special Branch is assigned the intelligence gathering and the former SO13 part the investigative (and arrest part). This is similar to what happened in Nazi Germany in 1939 when the Gestapo and SD were merged in the so-called RSHA but kept their previous roles. The new CTC explicitly mentions that its roles now branded 'counter-extremism' includes monitoring political, animal rights, anti-globalization, and environmental 'extremism'. This has nothing to do with al-Qaeda it is just about keeping down protest. So while the UK does not have a Department of Homeland Security, it certainly already has its secret police force and in larger numbers than at the peak of the Cold War and Irish terrorist activity. I have forgotten the new UK Border Agency launched this week bringing together customs and excise and immigration units. It is going to be responsible for identity cards for foreigners in the UK and is aiming to increase its detention capacity as part of its year long programme. This is one irony of the UK's rush to become a police state, its prisons are currently full, so maybe they will have to concentrate people in camps in rural areas just like the Australians do when they intern asylum seekers in camps in the outback. The UK has just adopted the Australian system for regulating foreigners coming into the UK so it cannot be long before it adopts the Australian concentration camp system too (of course invented by the British anyway at the start of the 20th century for interning Boer families in South Africa).
Censorship, well, that seems already to be effectively in place given that we had to wait 10 weeks to find out about where Prince Harry was. The UK has always had its D-Notice Committee which sends out notices to British media blocking them from reporting various things and at times journalists have had their resources seized. The fact that so much of the media is in the hands of so few people and the BBC network is semi-state owned. I never understand when politicians call it left-wing, it is so pro-Establishment that it is painful, I think that is just a blind played by politicians who want overt censorship powers and it is interesting that authoritarian regimes do not like interesting programmes. Only Josef Goebbels, propaganda minister of Nazi Germany recognised that you just had to provide tacky entertainment to keep the masses happy and we seem to have arrived at that stage now with all the reality shows. George Galloway's failure to subvert the 'Big Brother' series by appearing on it demonstrated the inability to dent that power. However, control of the media is far tougher now even when you have the media producers on your side. China spends immense amounts of money policing the internet and Singapore has had to give up as it is too expensive. When you can log on and get news coverage from across the planet it is difficult to stop people seeing a different viewpoint. The Chinese do it by arresting bloggers and others who take a political line and by encouraging society to see it as bad to look at other sources of information (animated police characters come on screen when you connect to such websites). So establishing societal norms against accessing 'improper' information and arresting the most outspoken is probably the path the UK will adopt. It is helped by the fact that the UK has long been a country disinterested in politics anyway, few people vote or read political news stories, and that is actually in sharp contrast to the population of China which has a long history of political activism. Censorship and self-censorship and shoving meaningless news and programmes at us is already under way and is liable to keep increasing at its current steady rate.
The other element the government needs to put in place more actively if it is truly going to get the authoritarian state it desires is a mass movement. As noted above the British are apathetic so are reluctant to get involved. Various newspapers run bigoted, pro-military campaigns that attract short-term support, but unlike the Americans, the British do not adhere to mass movements even when scared and they forget the frights very quickly. Partly the problem with a mass movement is that British society is so fragmented with region, class, age, etc. and lacks common grounds that groups in places like the USA can coalesce around. We cannot even agree on St. George's Day let alone the flag and so on. Getting people together in the UK shows up the class differences which riles the British more than anything else. So, what I envisage is again that the British government will follow the Nazi model and have a whole series of patriotic groups, ones associated with teachers and nurses and truck drivers and mothers and young people and old people and so on. They can draw in groups that already exist, the scout movement in the UK already has a very patriotic agenda and I imagine we will see it increasing in size and support from the state. Something like a spin-off from the Countryside Alliance may become the rural arm and across the UK we will see more of these bodies becoming corporations of the state, seeming to represent the voice of their members but in fact constraining them to the line set by the government. Fascist Italy was very keen on this approach and even ended up with a part of its parliament at which all these different groups were formally represented.
The spin-off from the mass movement is to get a watcher on every street. Authoritarian regimes are fuelled by the so-called 'little Hitlers' you see in every country. These are the self-righteous busybodies who love to have some power over their neighbours and to police their behaviour. They are everywhere especially on residents' groups and pushing for ASBOs against people they take a dislike to. There are many on local councils too and most magistrates (the part-time judges at the British equivalent of police courts) fit this category. They think they are better than the rest of us and love getting official power from the state. They flourished during the Second World War when every Home Guard soldier and every ARP (Air Raid Precautions) officer fell into this category (excellently portrayed in the long-running TV series, 'Dad's Army' in all their officiousness) to the extent that Home Guard checkpoints slowed up the movement of the regular army as their officers could often not prove they were not German agents in disguise and would be arrested. Millions of Britons would relish the chance to become Anti-Terrorist Warden for their street and bully anyone they feel is 'different' or 'improper' with official sanction. Again, this was an approach the Nazis adopted with their block wardens (as Germans generally live in blocks of flats) and China does with its danwei work group system. People say that the British do not like behaving this way and policing their neighbours, that is utter rubbish. If like me you ever work in the post room of the local tax office or benefits office, every day you have to deal with letters from people 'shopping' (i.e. asking people to be investigated and arrested) their neighbours who they suspect of defrauding the government. Only a tiny fraction of these letters are ever accurate and most simply reflect jealousy of what the neighbour has or indignation at how they live their lives. So, Britain has got a ready made body of ATWs just waiting for the government to mobilise them. There was one minor attempt back in the early 2000s when the government sent round information about defending yourself from terrorism, but they did not really follow it up or get a movement behind it.
So, these are the next steps the UK is likely to take in building its police state. Many things like ASBOs are well established it just needs other elements to come together with them and suddenly they become much more powerful. Things that have been growing in recent years such as censorship and control over our movements will continue to do so quietly. We have already lost so many freedoms since 1997 that you do not realise until you sit down and look back that you can see the changes. Of course there is an injection of fear once in a while and the British need more of them because we forget our fears much faster than the Americans do. I predict some terrorist attack at a large event this Summer just to cap off the new developments with identity cards and show us why we would should yield to our fears and instead accept the warm protecting arm of our authoritarian government. Get out now and ramble through the countryside possibly bringing you near some base (driving through southern England last year, I pulled over to check my map and found I had inadvertently pulled into the entrance to the Porton Down chemical and biological weapons research centre, I did wonder why there was such a big fence and all the cameras), and meet up with your friends on a street corner one night, go into town without it being filled with people in military uniforms (do that one quick as the rules are being changed as we sit here), do all these things before you lose the right.
While researching for this posting I came across a useful site called Statewatch which monitors civil liberties right across the European Union. It has great resources on all of the issues I have covered here, go visit it at: http://www.statewatch.org/
Friday, 26 October 2007
Blogging the Blog 3: Chinese blogs and Freedom of Media
Sometimes you wish you had the ability to read certain languages and if I could I would be able to reinforce this post. However, I lack the ability to read Chinese script so will have to rely on the evidence of a woman called Prof. Susan Shirk who is Director of the University of California systemwide Institute of Global Conflict and Cooperation, quite a mouthful, but she seems to know her stuff. She comments quite a great deal on current developments in China and it seems that she knows Chinese very well. Anyway, recently I came across some stuff she was outlining on changes in the media in China and how blogging is playing a role in that.
As you know, China is currently under a kind of dictatorship which is Communist in name but is thoroughly engaging with capitalist economics. Since the 1980s there has been a huge economic boom with millions of people moving to the cities and being able to travel far more freely, buy consumer goods and so on. It has been noticeable in the UK where many universities now seem to each recruit hundreds of students from mainland China whereas in the past they would have come from Hong Kong or Taiwan. Despite the move to economic freedoms (itself causing major environmental and also social problems as China's welfare state seems to have disappeared) political freedom has been far more restricted. Most obvious was the suppression of the pro-democracy demonstrations in Tianamen Square in 1989 which were broken up by troops and tanks. This ended speculation (at least for a while) that China would follow the path of the USSR at the time, i.e. economic hardship leading to economic liberalisation and openness and then in turn to freer press and TV and to democracy (of course since then Russia has started going back to a more authoritarian system under Vladimir Putin.
As an aside, I was talking to a Chinese man who said that China currently has democracy at least to the level of democracy that there is in the USA and the UK. His view of Anglo-Saxon democracy is that it is dominated by multi-national companies and established families, along the lines of the Bushs, Kennedys, etc. in the USA and noble families in the UK. The people superficially have the ability to choose their government, but in fact it is these powerful families and their companies which run everything. Thus, he sees China with all its nepotism and Communist party leaders running large companies, as already having attained the level of democracy that the USA and UK have. Given that half of the British parliament (the House of Lords) is unelected, I would accept he has some points here, though I would not agree with his overall conclusion; neither Tony Blair or George Bush will be in power when they are 92. More importantly, though, it says something about the level of expectations of people in China, given that this man was in his 20s, spoke fluent English and had had the money to come to the UK for education.
A free media is vital for democracy. In China steps in that direction have almost come about by accident. Up until the early 1980s all publications, television, etc. belonged to the government and simply reported what the government wanted to say. The upper elite had access to information about the wider world, but they kept this to themselves. Journalists were civil servants and not only reported news to the public, but also reported on the feelings of the public to the elite. The cost of running such a system became impossible to sustain and so since then there has been a mushrooming of independent newspapers and magazines, particularly appealing to the urban middle class which has done well out of the economic changes. In fact most of them have a government newspaper at their core as these were the only people able to finance and get passed the bureaucracy to set them up. However, the news they report is much more extensive than in the old days. In addition, freer media from Hong Kong such as Phoenix television brings in a different view on things. Of course a free media may help democracy grow but it does not necessarily mean it is pro-democracy and a lot of the media in China is very nationalistic especially towards the USA and Taiwan.
So, where do the blogs come in. Well, the Chinese government still has a lot of power over the media and can push out editors they do not like. They still control the 11 television stations and 40 provinicial television stations and they still produce numerous official newspapers. Even on the internet they patronise news digest websites and ensure that the news they include on them is not out of step with what the government wants to cover. However, the internet cannot be a closed loop in the way that even television media can be. The Chinese government has heavy filtering of internet material accessible from China and some western companies have been criticised for collaborating on such filtering. In addition now, if you visit sites that are felt to include material that is inappropriate to what a person in China should be looking at, automated images of Chinese police appear on screen to tell you off. However, blocking and monitoring the internet is costly. Singapore which has an authoritarian government had to stop trying to control the internet coming into its country in the way it does with newspapers and television because it began to cost too much. The Chinese government continues to foot the bill for such control within its borders.
The Chinese government's filtering, despite the numerous monitoring staff its Department of Propaganda employs, is not perfect and things sometimes slip through, sometimes only for a few hours before they are eliminated. Now, apparently, however, there are bloggers waiting to snatch up such nuggets of news from the outside world. They email them around very quickly and put them up on their blogs so that Chinese people can read what is otherwise being denied to them. Obviously the Chinese government can go around eliminating blog by blog, but speed of communication and the number of bloggers will always mean some escape to post news of that kind in the weeks and months to come. Sometimes I worry that much blogging is little more than navel-gazing, so I guess my faith in its value was partly restored by realising that some bloggers out there are actually helping to spread knowledge and indirectly (hopefully) move the world's most populated country closer to (true) democracy.
As you know, China is currently under a kind of dictatorship which is Communist in name but is thoroughly engaging with capitalist economics. Since the 1980s there has been a huge economic boom with millions of people moving to the cities and being able to travel far more freely, buy consumer goods and so on. It has been noticeable in the UK where many universities now seem to each recruit hundreds of students from mainland China whereas in the past they would have come from Hong Kong or Taiwan. Despite the move to economic freedoms (itself causing major environmental and also social problems as China's welfare state seems to have disappeared) political freedom has been far more restricted. Most obvious was the suppression of the pro-democracy demonstrations in Tianamen Square in 1989 which were broken up by troops and tanks. This ended speculation (at least for a while) that China would follow the path of the USSR at the time, i.e. economic hardship leading to economic liberalisation and openness and then in turn to freer press and TV and to democracy (of course since then Russia has started going back to a more authoritarian system under Vladimir Putin.
As an aside, I was talking to a Chinese man who said that China currently has democracy at least to the level of democracy that there is in the USA and the UK. His view of Anglo-Saxon democracy is that it is dominated by multi-national companies and established families, along the lines of the Bushs, Kennedys, etc. in the USA and noble families in the UK. The people superficially have the ability to choose their government, but in fact it is these powerful families and their companies which run everything. Thus, he sees China with all its nepotism and Communist party leaders running large companies, as already having attained the level of democracy that the USA and UK have. Given that half of the British parliament (the House of Lords) is unelected, I would accept he has some points here, though I would not agree with his overall conclusion; neither Tony Blair or George Bush will be in power when they are 92. More importantly, though, it says something about the level of expectations of people in China, given that this man was in his 20s, spoke fluent English and had had the money to come to the UK for education.
A free media is vital for democracy. In China steps in that direction have almost come about by accident. Up until the early 1980s all publications, television, etc. belonged to the government and simply reported what the government wanted to say. The upper elite had access to information about the wider world, but they kept this to themselves. Journalists were civil servants and not only reported news to the public, but also reported on the feelings of the public to the elite. The cost of running such a system became impossible to sustain and so since then there has been a mushrooming of independent newspapers and magazines, particularly appealing to the urban middle class which has done well out of the economic changes. In fact most of them have a government newspaper at their core as these were the only people able to finance and get passed the bureaucracy to set them up. However, the news they report is much more extensive than in the old days. In addition, freer media from Hong Kong such as Phoenix television brings in a different view on things. Of course a free media may help democracy grow but it does not necessarily mean it is pro-democracy and a lot of the media in China is very nationalistic especially towards the USA and Taiwan.
So, where do the blogs come in. Well, the Chinese government still has a lot of power over the media and can push out editors they do not like. They still control the 11 television stations and 40 provinicial television stations and they still produce numerous official newspapers. Even on the internet they patronise news digest websites and ensure that the news they include on them is not out of step with what the government wants to cover. However, the internet cannot be a closed loop in the way that even television media can be. The Chinese government has heavy filtering of internet material accessible from China and some western companies have been criticised for collaborating on such filtering. In addition now, if you visit sites that are felt to include material that is inappropriate to what a person in China should be looking at, automated images of Chinese police appear on screen to tell you off. However, blocking and monitoring the internet is costly. Singapore which has an authoritarian government had to stop trying to control the internet coming into its country in the way it does with newspapers and television because it began to cost too much. The Chinese government continues to foot the bill for such control within its borders.
The Chinese government's filtering, despite the numerous monitoring staff its Department of Propaganda employs, is not perfect and things sometimes slip through, sometimes only for a few hours before they are eliminated. Now, apparently, however, there are bloggers waiting to snatch up such nuggets of news from the outside world. They email them around very quickly and put them up on their blogs so that Chinese people can read what is otherwise being denied to them. Obviously the Chinese government can go around eliminating blog by blog, but speed of communication and the number of bloggers will always mean some escape to post news of that kind in the weeks and months to come. Sometimes I worry that much blogging is little more than navel-gazing, so I guess my faith in its value was partly restored by realising that some bloggers out there are actually helping to spread knowledge and indirectly (hopefully) move the world's most populated country closer to (true) democracy.
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