Gaza Forever

What can I possibly say about Palestine right now?  The words to keep speaking are there, of course, tangible almost by the sheer volume of texts, print and electronic, that havedeluged the world of bombs and ruined homes, rockets and helicopters blasting hsopitals.  It won’t do, it won’t: Thoughts of Xanadu points to a protest in Trafalgar Square, shoes scattered as if the wearers had been spirited away by rapture, a beautiful, poignant and perhaps, like so many of our protests, sadly, unable to help Palestinians now, or convince our governments to actually be more than vaguely critical of Israel’s actions; instead, Obama’s silence, Bush’s backing  of the official Israeli line that it was all in self defense, the gentle puppet nodding of Sarkozy, Brown, Harper

…impressive, a revolt in the back benches in Parliament, bi-partisan, demanding a stronger line against Israel, who it appears have finally, in the deaths of hundreds for a paltry few missiles, dangerous and violent as they are to Israelis; is Gaza to be a prison and tomb for decades still to come?

Znet, MRZine, Counterpunch, Lenin’s Tomb or Socialist Unity have all much more to say than I, in much more detail, in much more savage and uncompromising energy; I can know anger, the kind that is slow and exhausting, and like struggling through snow while walking in the cold, drains without revealing.  I read about revolutions, and nothing happens.  Of note, the great white media as always is its usual self: when not blaming the Palestinians or at least Hamas, it is at least trying to be neutral, the kind I was angered about during Musharaf’s state of emergency  in Pakistan: the CBC was so neutral it basically made the opposition into the people responsible.  The same happens in Gaza: violence and death is bemoaned and the destruction of Gaza is state

d as a matter of fact, but the battle is equal, always: Israeli aggression is equal to Palestinian violence, following the old narrative about the population being ‘caught in the middle’ in Vietnam.

Of interest:

Toronto: Wednesday January 8, 2009 Time: 10:25 am
A diverse group of Jewish Canadian women are currently occupying the Israeli consulate at 180 Bloor Street West in Toronto. This action is in protest against the on-going Israeli assault on the people of Gaza.

The group is carrying out this occupation in solidarity with the 1.5 million people of Gaza and to ensure that Jewish voices against the massacre in Gaza are being heard. They are demanding that Israel end its military assault and lift the 18-month siege on t

he Gaza Strip to allow humanitarian aid into the territory.

Blaming the victim:

Israel said on Tuesday that an initial army investigation showed mortar fire may have come from a UN-run school in Gaza, where dozens of people were killed in an Israeli strike.

“The initial findings… are that t

here was hostile fire at one of our units from the UN facility,” government spokesman Mark Regev told AFP.

“Our unit responded. Then, there were explosions out of proportion to the ordnance we used,” he said. “And then you can only speculate as to why. We are still investigating.”

And the truth?:

The Israel Defense Forces Spokesman’s Office asserted that militants fired mortars from inside the school at troops involved in Israel’s controversial incursion into the Gaza Strip in pursuit of Hamas fighters — a military operation that is drawing fierce international condemnation as civilian casualties mount. “The IDF returned fire,” according to the spokesman’s office.

But after a preliminary investigation of the Jan. 6 attack at the Fakhura girl’s elementary school, “we’re 99.9% sure that no militants were at the school,” says Chris Gunness, a spokesman for the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA). The agency questioned survivors, including UNRWA staff that run the school under U.N. auspices.

Before the school was hit by Israeli bombs, some 400 Palestinians fleeing shelling of the Jabalya refugee camp had taken shelter inside Fakhura, hoping that the U.N. flag would shield them from harm, according to survivors. Earlier, the U.N., which oversees relief efforts for more than 800,000 Palestinians in Gaza, had passed along the coordinates of all its schools and buildings to the Israeli military so that its humanitarian missions would be spared attack.

The Tomb has some especially scintiallting and enraged notes about the myth of Hamas rejectionism, the doctrines of official cleansing and destruction, the apopletics of the defenders of Israel, etc. etc.

The Blasted Pine, 8: Kirkland Lake, by James Wreford

1943

Under the dark industrial sky

we wonder why we have to die

who living, were valued at a wage

that starved our youth and murdered age.

or why engage for tyrants here

to end the tyranny of fear,

whose quarrel is with all of those

the heavens of our desire that close?

For justice undertake a cause

that has no justice in its laws,

but claims for unity the right

forbids the citizen unite.

For thirty dollars shall we sell

our happiness to mend their hell,

to save their cuckoos, clear our nest,

redeem by our unrest their rest

and fight for freedom who are not free?

Let freemen die, but why should we

who toil to set the rich on high

three shifts beneath the smoking sky?

Let those who call on us to keep

their freedom safe and safe their sleep

account and pledge us higher for

the wealth and peace our grief ensure:

A week-end fit for play like theirs

and futures guaranteed from cares,

evenings when not too tired a man

his leisures takes and pleasures can

a chance for more than daily bread –

their daughters for our sons to wed,

so working and in wanting we

may equal them and be as free.

But till that day let them not cry

upon our loyal sons to die,

who with our usual logic see

They die for freedom that are free.

- James Wreford

from The Blasted Pine: An Anthology of Satire, Invective and Disrespectful Verse, Chiefly By Canadian Writers. Revised and Enlarged.  Selected and Arranged by F. R. Scott and A. J. M. Smith. (Toronto: Macmillan Company, 1957)

New Species along the Mekong

Such an exhuberance.

A shocking pink, spiny new species of “dragon millipede”, Desmoxytes purpurosea, was described in 2007 from Lansak district, Uthaithani Province, Thailand. Several millipedes were found sitting and moving on limestone rocks and on the leaves of Arenga pinnata palms. Scientists suggest the stark bright colour is to alert would-be predators of the toxic animal, and they would do well to heed this warning – the millipede has glands that produce cyanide as a defensive mechanism. The species joins twenty-three other dragon millipedes of the genus Desmoxytes known from a large area in Southeast Asia, from southeastern China, south through Myanmar, Thailand and Vietnam31. A further four of these deadly dragon millipedes were described from Vietnam in 2005.

Found at: http://news.mongabay.com/2008/1215-mekong_species.html

The Blasted Pine, 2: The Convict Holocaust, by E. J. Pratt

The Convict Holocaust

(Columbus, Ohio, 1930)

Waiting their turn to be identified,

After their fiery contract with the walls,

Three hundred pariahs ranged side by side

Upon the floors along the cattle stalls!

The fires consumed their numbers with their breath.

Charred out their names; though many of the dead

Gave proof of valour, just before their death,

That Ceasar’s legions might have coveted.

But these, still subject to the law’s commands,

Received the last insignia of the cell:

The gyards went through them, straightened out their hands,

And with the ink-brush got the thumb-prints well.

E. J. Pratt

from The Blasted Pine: An Anthology of Satire, Invective and Disrespectful Verse, Chiefly By Canadian Writers. Revised and Enlarged.  Selected and Arranged by F. R. Scott and A. J. M. Smith. (Toronto: Macmillan Company, 1957)

Woe the Sportsman

An unusually candid piece emerging from, of all place, MSN News and their Sports Division:

What set off a round of similar grousing in the pro sports world this week was the election of Barack Obama, and with it the likelihood of a hike in both the top tax rate – from 35 per cent to 39.6 per cent – and Social Security taxes.

“It’s a sad day for me,” said Minnesota defensive lineman Jared Allen, who supported John McCain. “There is nothing I can do about it now. Our paycheques will be cut in half.”

Woe is him. Allen joined the Vikings from the Kansas City Chiefs for three draft picks just before the season started, signing a record six-year contract for a defensive player. He got $31 million in guaranteed money and can make as much as $74 million. That’s on top of the extra $69 he insisted on to match his jersey number.

Who else is sweating every nickel and dime?

Boo (Hoo) Weekley, for one.

The PGA golfer was preparing for the Children’s Miracle Network Classic at Disney tournament Wednesday morning when he felt a stabbing pain in his back only to discover it was his wallet. Weekley would rather be hunting and fishing than playing golf, so he’s talked often of retiring. Once he banked $8 million, Weekley vowed, he would call it quits.

“That number went up, as of last night,” he said.

Don’t know if Boo’s heard this, but retirement just got pushed back for anyone with a 401(k) plan, and the rest of us won’t have courtesy cars, lavish buffets and the easy money of lucrative sponsor outings to soften the blow.

Terrorist Communist Monsters, Obama Style

Frank Rich in the New York Times on “The Terrorist Barack Hussein Obama“:

Until now. At McCain-Palin rallies, the raucous and insistent cries of “Treason!” and “Terrorist!” and “Kill him!” and “Off with his head!” as well as the uninhibited slinging of racial epithets, are actually something new in a campaign that has seen almost every conceivable twist. They are alarms. Doing nothing is not an option.

All’s fair in politics. John McCain and Sarah Palin have every right to bring up William Ayers, even if his connection to Obama is minor, even if Ayers’s Weather Underground history dates back to Obama’s childhood, even if establishment Republicans and Democrats alike have collaborated with the present-day Ayers in educational reform. But it’s not just the old Joe McCarthyesque guilt-by-association game, however spurious, that’s going on here. Don’t for an instant believe the many mindlessly “even-handed” journalists who keep saying that the McCain campaign’s use of Ayers is the moral or political equivalent of the Obama campaign’s hammering on Charles Keating.

What makes them different, and what has pumped up the Weimar-like rage at McCain-Palin rallies, is the violent escalation in rhetoric, especially (though not exclusively) by Palin. Obama “launched his political career in the living room of a domestic terrorist.” He is “palling around with terrorists” (note the plural noun). Obama is “not a man who sees America the way you and I see America.” Wielding a wildly out-of-context Obama quote, Palin slurs him as an enemy of American troops.

By the time McCain asks the crowd “Who is the real Barack Obama?” it’s no surprise that someone cries out “Terrorist!” The rhetorical conflation of Obama with terrorism is complete. It is stoked further by the repeated invocation of Obama’s middle name by surrogates introducing McCain and Palin at these rallies. This sleight of hand at once synchronizes with the poisonous Obama-is-a-Muslim e-mail blasts and shifts the brand of terrorism from Ayers’s Vietnam-era variety to the radical Islamic threats of today.

That’s a far cry from simply accusing Obama of being a guilty-by-association radical leftist. Obama is being branded as a potential killer and an accessory to past attempts at murder. “Barack Obama’s friend tried to kill my family” was how a McCain press release last week packaged the remembrance of a Weather Underground incident from 1970 — when Obama was 8.

The road to nowhere in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania; the discourse of opposition to Obama:

The shocking political allegiances of Barack Obama, according to ISMisBAD and is wonderful website about Socialism, Marxism, Communism & Obama and the attempt to create a United Socialist States of America (especially enjoy the PLA troops marching behind Obama.  Obama, we learn, is a communist because of his association with Indie band The Decemberists (!):

15. Obama’s Opening Band - The band that opened for Obama’s Oregon rally (The Decemberists) is named after an 1825 revolt over the Imperial Russian succession (Decembrist revolt) that Meloy views as an attempted communist revolution. They also open many of their shows by playing the Soviet National Anthem… Source: Jeff Johnson, OneNewsNow Source: Jerome R. Corsi, WorldNetDaily Source: Oleg Atbashian, Pajamasmedia

Say it ain’t so!!!

The Canadian Election

If There is Hope on the aftermath of the Canadian election; the anatomy of Liberal Party failure:

The fallacy of ABC
With the media reinforcing the Tory attacks on Dion’s character and the Green Shift, the Liberals were in dire straights. This led many to believe that Harper was on the way to a majority. Midway through the election Liberals, Greens and many on the left began calling for an Anything-But-Conservative vote. The end result was probably many thousands of left votes being tossed away by backing the Liberals. The left-wing ABCers tied themselves to a sinking boat and did nothing to build a left alternative. And this latter point is the main point. The left cannot be built by proposing strategic votes for a corporate party. It can’t be built during election campaigns either. And it can’t, as some have suggested to be including someone from FairVote Canada, be built through reform of the electoral system. These are all narrow, short-sighted proposals. Building the left means laying the groundwork between elections through campaigning on particular issues that are at the forefront of people’s minds – climate change, the economy, the environment.

NDPers and the rest of the left should be knee deep in local climate change campaigns that organize educational events, flyering and leafletting, and rallies. It needs to be engaged in unionization campaigns on picket lines, listening and talking to workers and building trust and solidarity. It needs to be engaged in the anti-war movement in the unions, on the campus, in the streets and in the neighbourhoods. Carrying coherent arguments into these campaigns can begin to galvanize the existing left, while attracting people to it, people who may be open to campaigning on climate change but may still think the war is the right thing to do, or that tax cuts are the way out of economic crisis. By working alongside people to the right of the self-identified left towards a common, limited goal, a friendly political discussion can be carried out that wins people to the left. It’s hard work, it takes time, but it lays a real basis for building a real left with real convictions. Changing the electoral system to PR to prevent strategic voting and distorted results is all fine and dandy but without a grassroots political campaign running all the time, such changes are largely meaningless.

Financial Chaos

A sample of articles I have read over the last week about the unravelling US financial market:

“…there’s also been a fairly impressive amount of back-patting going on in Canada, with a range of commentators and officials remarking how different the system is here and how much more prudent Canadian regulators and standards are than those in the U.S.

As Canadians, we are no strangers to smugness. It’s not a particularly endearing national characteristic at the best of times, but even less so when it’s utterly unfounded.

Sure we may have dodged a direct bullet this time around, but that’s not to say that our regulation of our own financial services business is not without some profound and frightening flaws.

…

Remarkably, for example, there’s no single agency in Canada that has a full mandate to review and report on the health of brokerage industry balance sheets.

The Office of the Superintendent of Financial Institutions (OSFI) – which is a federal government body – has a singular mandate to keep an eye on the books of Canadian banks. Because the brokerage arms of the banks are consolidated on those books, they get a pretty clear look at what’s going on there. But OSFI officials don’t have the power to enforce any recommendations or warnings they may deliver on the brokerage side.”

from Why Canadians Shouldn’t Be So Smug (September 18)

“It is obvious that the current financial crisis is becoming more severe in spite of the Treasury rescue plan (or maybe because of it as this plan it totally flawed). The severe strains in financial markets (money markets, credit markets, stock markets, CDS and derivative markets) are becoming more severe rather than less severe in spite of the nuclear option (after the Fannie and Freddie $200 billion bazooka bailout failed to restore confidence) of a $700 billion package: interbank spreads are widening (TED spread, swap spreads, Libo-OIS spread) and are at level never seen before; credit spreads (such as junk bond yield spreads relative to Treasuries are widening to new peaks; short-term Treasury yields are going back to near zero levels as there is flight to safety; CDS spread for financial institutions are rising to extreme levels (Morgan Stanley ones at 1200 last week) as the ban on shorting of financial stock has moved the pressures on financial firms to the CDS market; and stock markets around the world have reacted very negatively to this rescue package (US market are down about 3% this morning at their opening).”

- from Nouriel Roubini’s Global Economonitor (September 28)

Many are still in denial it seems, arguing more and more fiercely for deregulation: the message of much of the business community is still that government is the problem,  government is too intrusive, the government should be out of the way of the private market so it can do what the government can’t; all this at the same time that the private market, especially the bank where most of our recent growth has been concentrated, is failing, disastrously, and begging for money from the government.

“I am definitely not a fan of a windfall profit tax on the oil companies, and I understand the need to plow those profits back in new equipment and searching for new drilling sites. However, if the oil companies do not at least pretend they are not completely profit driven and provide some relief for the consumer, some clown in Congress or the Senate or wherever looking to make a name for himself/herself will force through some legislation that will drastically hamstring the oil companies from doing what they do best, and ultimately affect all our standard of living.”

- from Agora Capital’s Five Minute Forecast (September 17)

“

This is further evidence, if any were needed, of the fact that the market is not and never can be the answer. (The need to pursue illegal wars is pretty strong evidence too, of course.) You look around the world and you see massive need on the one hand, and massive wealth on the other, and the two never connect. The market is massively inefficient, capitalism is massively unstable and turbulent, and it’s insane that we are all bound to this terrible wheel of instability.

The real left is making a lot of noise about this. There’ll be a convention of the left during the Labour party conference, all the shades of genuine leftwing opinion, and we’ll be hammering all these questions out from a socialist perspective. But if the papers and the broadcasters fail to record it, it’s very difficult for these ideas to penetrate the public consciousness. The media just turns a deaf ear; it chooses not to hear it. It’s a lot more interested in the careerism of whoever’s after Gordon Brown’s job.”

- Ken Loach, from the Guardian (September 19)

“Although we have long been opposed (and remain so) to views that place monetary policy at the heart of explanations of the course of modern capitalism—a perspective that Grant is identified with—we nevertheless agree with his assessment here that the state and finance are in bed with each other (or have at least closed ranks in the crisis, representing a common ruling-class viewpoint). This also extends to the two major political parties and their candidates. And it includes the media, which ought to be raising a stir. The silence in the context of a general election speaks volumes. We also find ourselves in accord with Grant’s conclusion that in the end there seems to be no completely satisfactory explanation for lack of popular protest over a series of ad hoc grants showering hundreds of billions of dollars of public money on the masters of finance, collectively the richest group of capitalists on the planet. And that raises the question: Is this outrage present nonetheless, growing underground, unheard and unseen? Will it suddenly burst forth, like some old mole, unforeseen and in ways unimagined? That too, we think, is a possibility.”

- the editors of the Modern Review, from last year (2007)

The New Taliban

New Breed of Taliban replaces old guard

Money and a hatred of foreigners are motivating a new generation of Afghan fighters.

Beware: these men may lay down their lives for you if you are their guest. But they may hack your head off if you’re an intruder.

They soon demonstrated gruesome beheading videos on their state-of-the-art mobiles to establish their credentials.

Hamidullah Khan, a veteran fighter in his mid-forties, underlined why the wild body-counts of the Afghan government are meaningless. These Talibs fight, he claimed, like shark’s teeth. “This is the late Mullah Dadullah’s home. He gave his life for God’s will. When he was killed 20,000 more came forward in the name of Dadullah. They’re now behind him. This is the Taliban way. When one is killed another comes in. Then another. We don’t leave the ground empty.”

And there was no evidence here of hordes crossing the frontier from Pakistan. To a man they were Afghan. The sole foreigner, Aftab Panjabi, a former Pakistan Army officer, took a dozen Talibs through the art of firing an AK47 accurately.

They were candid about their motives. There was no chat of Mullah Omar – the old Taliban leader – nor Osama bin Laden and Al-Qaeda. Their fight is both modern – and yet traditional.

In modern terms they feel nothing has changed. They see a country mired in corruption. They know there is a government of sorts in distant Kabul but it has no writ here. Haji Hyatullah, in his twenties, may have his face covered in black turban – but talks openly about getting far more money fighting with the Taliban than any other job around. Assuming for a second that there were any jobs. “People are getting fed up with the lies the government has told them.

- from The Telegraph in the UK

“We shall require a substantially new manner of thinking if mankind is to survive.”

“Is it advisable for one who is not an expert on economic and social issues to express views on the subject of socialism? I believe for a number of reasons that it is.

Let us first consider the question from the point of view of scientific knowledge. It might appear that there are no essential methodological differences between astronomy and economics: scientists in both fields attempt to discover laws of general acceptability for a circumscribed group of phenomena in order to make the interconnection of these phenomena as clearly understandable as possible. But in reality such methodological differences do exist. The discovery of general laws in the field of economics is made difficult by the circumstance that observed economic phenomena are often affected by many factors which are very hard to evaluate separately. In addition, the experience which has accumulated since the beginning of the so-called civilized period of human history has — as is well known — been largely influenced and limited by causes which are by no means exclusively economic in nature. For example, most of the major states of history owed their existence to conquest. The conquering peoples established themselves, legally and economically, as the privileged class of the conquered country. They seized for themselves a monopoly of the land ownership and appointed a priesthood from among their own ranks. The priests, in control of education, made the class division of society into a permanent institution and created a system of values by which the people were thenceforth, to a large extent unconsciously, guided in their social behavior.

But historic tradition is, so to speak, of yesterday; nowhere have we really overcome what Thorstein Veblen called “the predatory phase” of human development. The observable economic facts belong to that phase and even such laws as we can derive from them are not applicable to other phases. Since the real purpose of socialism is precisely to overcome and advance beyond the predatory phase of human development, economic science in its present state can throw little light on the socialist society of the future.

Second, socialism is directed toward a social-ethical end. Science, however, cannot create ends and, even less, instill them in human beings; science, at most, can supply the means by which to attain certain ends. But the ends themselves are conceived by personalities with lofty ethical ideals and — if these ends are not stillborn, but vital and vigorous — are adopted and carried forward by those many human beings who, half-unconsciously, determine the slow evolution of society.

For these reasons, we should be on our guard not to overestimate science and scientific methods when it is a question of human problems; and we should not assume that experts are the only ones who have a right to express themselves on questions affecting the organization of society”

- from “Why Socialism?”

A passionate argument from one of the best human beings of the last century, Mr. Albert Einstein.

Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe, The Sorrows of Young Werther

"Es hat sich vor meiner Seele wie ein Vorhang weggezogen, und der
Schauplatz des unendlichen Lebens verwandelt sich vor mir in den
Abgrund des ewig offenen Grabes.  Kannst du sagen: Das ist!  Da alles
voruebergeht?  Da alles mit der Wetterschnelle vorueberrollt, so selten
die ganze Kraft seines Daseins ausdauert, ach, in den Strom
fortgerissen, untergetaucht und an Felsen zerschmettert wird?  Da ist
kein Augenblick, der nicht dich verzehrte und die Deinigen um dich her,
kein Augenblick, da du nicht ein Zerstoerer bist, sein musst; der
harmloseste Spaziergang kostet tausend armen Wuermchen das Leben, es
zerruettet ein Fusstritt die muehseligen Gebaeude der Ameisen und stampft
eine kleine Welt in ein schmaehliches Grab.  Ha!  Nicht die grosse,
seltne Not der Welt, diese Fluten, die eure Doerfer wegspuelen, diese
Erdbeben, die eure Staedte verschlingen, ruehren mich; mir untergraebt
das Herz die verzehrende Kraft, die in dem All der Natur verborgen
liegt; die nichts gebildet hat, das nicht seinen Nachbar, nicht sich
selbst zerstoerte.  Und so taumle ich beaengstigt.  Himmel und Erde und
ihre webenden Kraefte um mich her: ich sehe nichts als ein ewig
verschlingendes, ewig wiederkaeuendes Ungeheuer."



"It is as if a curtain had been drawn from before my eyes, and,
instead of prospects of eternal life, the abyss of an ever open
grave yawned before me.  Can we say of anything that it exists
when all passes away, when time, with the speed of a storm, carries
all things onward, -- and our transitory existence, hurried along
by the torrent, is either swallowed up by the waves or dashed
against the rocks?  There is not a moment but preys upon you, --
and upon all around you, not a moment in which you do not yourself
become a destroyer.  The most innocent walk deprives of life
thousands of poor insects: one step destroys the fabric of the
industrious ant, and converts a little world into chaos.  No: it
is not the great and rare calamities of the world, the floods which
sweep away whole villages, the earthquakes which swallow up our
towns, that affect me.  My heart is wasted by the thought of that
destructive power which lies concealed in every part of universal
nature.  Nature has formed nothing that does not consume itself,
and every object near it: so that, surrounded by earth and air,
and all the active powers, I wander on my way with aching heart;
and the universe is to me a fearful monster, for ever devouring
its own offspring."

Herman Hesse, Demian

“The bird struggles out of the egg. The egg is the world. Whoever wants to be born, must first destroy a world. The bird flies to God. That God’s name is Abraxas.”

These lines are what led me to Herman Hesse’s first major novel, Demian, subtitled The Story of Emil Sinclair’s Youth, published in 1919, and as the back matter of my edition informs me, a major influence on youth culture in the American 1960’s. The strange thing, for me, about Demian is that, despite its fame, I knew of the lines long before I knew of the book itself. Word for word, this strange and esoteric prayer to the god Abraxas, a major symbol in Demian, appears in the famous and equally esoteric Japanese anime Revolutionary Girl Utena, uttered in many episodes by its ostensible villains. I watched Utena as an older teenager, and its strangeness and depth of character and theme has stuck with me over many years and after a complete disenchantment with anime and its fandom. When I discovered the origin of this quote, and that Utena had been inspired partly by Hesse’s work, including a heavy use of Jungian archetypes, I was set to find this piece of fiction.

The sole change in Utena is to replace Abraxas with an equally mythical call to revolution, otherwise, the general meaning remains the same: a call for transcendence through transgression, or to skip the academic jargon, and quote right from the book: “…the life of the hedonist is the best preparation for becoming a mystic. People like St. Augustine are always the ones that become visionaries. He, too, was first a sensualist and a man of the world…”

This is the voice of Demian, the eponymous character whose appearances are exceedingly rare in the text, but whose shadow looms very large indeed over the novel. His first appearance is as an odd, confident and aggressive, “too superior and detached” young man who saves the then school boy protagonist, Emil Sinclair, from a agonised moral dilemma caused by Kromer, a young tough who uses a fictional crime concocted by Sinclair to hold him ransom. In Sinclair’s words, Demian allows him “see the world again bright and joyful before me, and no longer succumbed to fits of suffocating fear”; Demian gives Sinclair the courage to confess to his parents the moral trauma he had suffered. Thus in both a literal and a metaphorical sense Demian, appearing periodically throughout Sinclair’s early life to utter cryptic lessons and approbations, from the beginning of the novel offers the opportunity of liberation, of the courage to break free of the circumstances imposed from without.

Demian offers to Sinclair, liberation.

But what kind of liberation? Utena replaced Abraxas with Revolution, which suggests one interpretation, and one that is easily applied to Demian. Demian mocks religion, the state, ministers and priests as oppressive and tired remnants of cowards; Sinclair himself sees his choice in chapter four, p. 57, as between becoming “a good son and a useful citizen” or going in an “altogether different direction.” To mistake Revolution and Liberation with only activism, or criminality in Hesse’s case would misunderstand, however. Liberation in Demian is external, materialist or Marxist but internal, and spiritual, like the crisis of Stapledon’s Star Maker.  And therefore sometimes descends into vacuousness.

Stanislaw Lem…or Steven Soderbergh, Solaris

Why do you think it has to want something?

if you think that there is a solution, you’ll die here

…our enthusiasm’s a sham. We don’t want other worlds; we want mirrors

I remembered her wrong

Recently I have been reading Stanislaw Lem, I just finished his short novel The Invincible, and then the critical writings by Frederic Jamieson about Lem in his collection Archaeologies of the Future. I won’t comment on Jamieson, as I found writing about critics dangerous territory.  Lem, on the other hand, I’m much more comfortable writing about. He is a man whose value and intelligence as an author and commentator are often overstated, but deservedly so. Though he wrote science fiction, I don’t believe Lem should be condemned just for that, any more then any science fiction writers: a cliche, yes, but his thought and importance and influence range beyond the science fiction he came to disown and vilify. He resented the narrow provincialism and parochialism of the science fiction practised in America (as if that in Poland was any better; remember, the major difference between capitalist and communist junk writing is that the capitalist junk writer exports his work and expects to be rewarded for it). Lem wrote about subjects like alien contact that were purely speculative, with an intelligence and commitment to ideas, science and philosophy, and an often unwilling ability to capture the fragility of the human and the frustrating mysteries of our existence (or so he claims).

And that brings me to the lines above, quotes from Steven Soderbergh’s adaptation of Stanislaw Lem’s most famous work, Solaris. That I would use quotes from the second time that book was made into a movie has undoubtably set Lem’s carcass writhing about in his grave…may he rest in peace..: like any self-respecting reclusive intellectual author, Lem hated other people’s interpretations of his work: Tarkovsky’s and Soderbergh’s Solaris are not his. Deservingly so.

SPOILERS AHEAD…SO BE PREPARED…

Iain M. Banks, The Algebraist

“Swim” said Fassin. “You know; when your head kind of seems to swim because you suddenly think: “Hey, I’m a human being, but I’m twenty thousand light years from home and we’re all living in the midst of mad aliens and super weapons and the whole bizarre insane swirl of galactic history and politics! That; isn’t that weird?”

These lines are a defining summary of Iain M. Banks as science fiction writer, uttered in his next to newest science fiction novel, The Algebraist. This novel is one in a long series of of his science fiction novels stretching back to the early eighties, though it is not set in the fictional culture and civilisation of the Culture, the rather unimaginatively named but superbly omnipotent (and thus deserving of such a lame descriptor) galactic civilization. It is a stand-alone piece, a novel set in the space opera traditions of old, where the science falls rapidly away to the fiction, and where things that are sometimes implausible but at least imaginative occur with entertaining frequency. The Algebraist shares with classic space opera like Star Wars or a dozen other, A. E. Van Vogt, Bester, Flash Gordon, E. E. Doc Smith, with enormous space empires, bizarre and unsettling alien species, startling scientific discoveries, whole universes to be conquered. There the resemblance ends.

Iain M. Banks is part of what has been called the ‘new space opera,’ a group of mostly British science fiction writers such as Banks, Alistair Reynolds, Paul McAuley (who includes M. John Harrison in this list, though I’m less certain), Charles Stross (to an extent) Liz Williams and Ian McCleod, even Dan Simmons, who use the ‘loose and unrigorous’ science of old space opera as a backdrop for stories whose central importance has little to do with death rays or flying saucers; instead, well-developed characters, well-realised plot and strands of social criticism, moral philosophy or startling imagination replace the surface deep ‘gee-whiz’ attitude of older space opera. They are also rarely possessed of the often conformist, parochial, Science Club attitude of 1940’s and 1950’s space opera (Van Vogt being a major exception) and being distinct from the Webers and Moons of ‘new’ American space opera.

Notably, Banks is reported to have torn up his British passport in protest over the invasion of Iraq, and Ken MacCleod, as can be seen on his fine blog The Early Days of a Better Nation, is involved in various socialist and revolutionary currents in the UK. Their stories do reflect this; one of MacCleod novels features a digital and heroic Trotsky, and the novella The State of the Art leaves the Culture’s contempt for our capitalist and socialist ‘democracies’ in little doubt.  The Culture is frequently depicted and described in other reviews as being an ‘anarchist utopia’, an ideal society wherein a total availability of resources and intelligence has rendered war, poverty, social inequality, even jobs, redundant, and its conflicts with civilizations that have yet to see the ‘benefit’ of such a system. The Culture novels have been recognized as much more important by no less than the Cambridge Companion to Science Fiction, praising Consider Phlebas and Use of Weapons for being brave enough to use science fiction  to genuinely imagine something different but plausible, truly, totally different, and not just replaying World War 2, the Cold War or the Napoleonic Wars in space. Or assuming that the US government and corporations will be around thousands of year from now in space.

(As an aside, it is worth noting that the Culture novels bear some striking affinities with Star Trek’s future world;  the idea of Earth as paradise where replicators have freed humanity from a need for resources and forced labour, allowing us the potential for true cultural and personal freedom is enticing…but Star Trek shows and movies rarely delve into that aspect of the Federation, and leaves us bored with Star Fleet, military uniforms and troubles that seem all to mundane from their reality…despite the nebula and bumpy headed life forms.  The Culture at least follows through on the radical potentials of its whizbang magic technology, and is much sleeker, sexier and cooler to boot).

In these new space operas, just To be sure, Things are complicated as well, there is not just evil, and non-human, and good, and pure and American; as an example, Fassin, the protagonist of The Algebraist, is a skilled scholar in an obscure field whose knowledge places him square in the middle of a vicious war; he serves, and is not particularly morally worried about this service, to a military order of a repressive, reactionary interstellar empire run by an alien species.  He is morally uncertain, a philanderer and naive, and he is no hero, not at all, but just a patsy and a scared man trying to survive in a universe that, while not outright hostile, is not friendly either, a true heir to the protagonists of New Wave space opera like The Centauri Device by M. John Harrison (who dislikes that book the most of his ouevre, apparently) and The Void Captain’s Tale by Norman Spinrad.

The Swedish author Sam J. Lundwall in his 1977 study of science fiction, The Illustrated History of Science Fiction argues that space opera is fundamentally a stale genre, one in which the hero can “single-handedly destroy an entire galaxy of fifty thousand million suns, each of them with an undisclosed number of inhabited planets, without raising an eyebrow.” The greatest genocidaires ever as heroics, and the hero concerned about his WASP girlfriend and the fame and glory of Earth; an essentially parochial genre, Lundwall calls it, and I am inclined to agree. The weakness of space operas like Smith’s The Skylark of Space and Children of the Lens, or Van Vogt’s Slan, or the innumerable clones of Perry Rhodan popular in 1977 and still going strong today, are many, but two concern us here.

Firstly, all these planets smashing, suns exploding, alien races dying, vast eons and distances crossed in stupendous speeds and times do absolutely nothing; they do not contribute to the plot in any concrete way, and as Lundwall says, all the “mile-long space ships, space fleets of hundreds of thousands of ships, heros brave and bold beyond reason and villains straight out of the nethermost regions of Hell…all seem somewhat repetitious..[and] one cannot even muster the enthusiasm these incredible feats are undoubtedly worth.” They are essentially the distraction, the wall hangings meant to hide the hollow crumbling walls beneath, or even worse, in the Popular Mechanics, Marvel Comics or Hugo Greensback Amazing Stories tradition: the plot and story are just a way to show off the space ships and warfare, gushing in all the heroic battles and destruction as they remain to an extent in American and Japanese military space opera. Either way, all these trappings of Space Opera contribute nothing specifically important to the story.

Secondly, Space Opera used to be, and still seems to be, a rehashing of the old Horse Opera from which it derives its name, or World War 2 adventure stories, one in which the brave, square jawed hero faces off against a menace (once the Indian, then the Jerry and the Jap, and now the Alien) that threatens peace, order, civilisation, and worse still, our women folk! They sublimate racism and violence into an acceptable form, in which things we do not understand can be destroyed without moral or ethical repercussions; it is a fantasy then, too, one shared by many comic books and movies, in which the Good Guy, because he is Good without question and his opponents Evil without remorse, can massacre at his leisure. Dave Weber remains to me the mso prominent of this new breed of old Space Opera, and the continuing popularity of men like Smith and Van Vogt and the Star Wars franchise (though the novels and extended universe has troubled the morally simplistic dichotomies of the original trilogy) would seem to indicate at least in part a longing for a simpler moral order that never existed, and for murderous destruction without any repercussions (a trend pointed out by Norman Spinrad in his fine novel, The Iron Dream).

The Sumatran Tiger Beetle



EXCERPT FROM “A GENERAL HISTORY OF THE INSECTS OF SUMATRA” by
Simeon Van Berger Op Zoom, translated by Jules Fischer, published in Britain by Random
House, 1958.
In general it is the size of Sumatran insects that is most remarkable, rather then any
general deadliness to the species of man; the density, humidity and fecundity of the Sumatran
jungle, especially in the Achinese highlands, guarantees that most insects found there will be large.
Most are harmless, as hopefully this work has done at some lengths to assuage the reader in lands
remote and altogether more civilised then the isle of Sumatra.  There is, however, a curious but
also potentially lethal exception to be found on this tropical island, to which this chapter will now
turn.  The Sumatran Red Tiger Beetle, or Vorocarnisae sumatranus, sole amongst predatory
insects, has a dangerous habit during its larval stage of eating out the insides of a human skull,
brain and all.  Despite this terrifying behaviour, the Sumatran Red Tiger Beetle is practically
unknown outside of Sumatra.  We hope to rectify this situation somewhat.
The Sumatran Red Tiger Beetle is a member of the Cicindelidae family, better known to
the public as the tiger beetles.   Tiger beetles as a whole are identifiable by their large bulging
eyes, long, slender legs and large curved mandibles, in addition to an inability to fly well and a
quickness of foot on the ground; those species common to North America are ground-dwelling
predators, often startled out from under rocks during the day or seen prowling at night.
Vorocarnisae sumatranus shares some of these characteristics, particularly as it is equipped with a
heavy pair of mandibles and long slender legs.  In other ways it is morphologically distinct.
The eyes, for instance, are very diminutive, especially in the adults, and it is unlikely that
vision is heavily used in hunting.   Although its antennae are filiform, the Sumatran lacks the
fivefold segmentation of tarsi found in other Cicindelidae. Indeed, so distinct is the Red Tiger
Beetle from all other species of Cicindelidae that it has a genus all to itself; the closest living
relatives are the large South African beetles of the genus Mantichora.  Even then, the Sumatran
Red Tiger Beetle stands apart, notably in its bizarre and lethal form of reproduction.  To this day,
it is the only species of tiger beetle known to be deadly to man.
The mature adult of the species is not as active a hunter as other members of the family
Cicindelidae.  Its body is considerably more rotund, its double pair of mandibles arranged in a
vertical rather then lateral fashion.  Along its elytral are several brightly coloured ovals, the
vestiges of special glands, phosphorescent in nature, present on the larvae.  Like all tiger beetles,
the Sumatran is brightly coloured, especially on its legs and underside of the thorax, with the
elytra being much duller, variegated only by alternating stripes of light and dark browns.  The
elytral, as in most tiger beetles, is fused and incapable of opening, forming an excellent protective
shield.  The pronotum teeth are especially smooth and well-linked together.
Nearly 2.5 inches in length, Vorocarnisae sumatranus is primarily an ambush predator,
waiting carefully for prey as large as frogs.  The presence of numerous fine hairs on their limbs
allows them to sense vibrations made by prey, whereas the fused tarsi are heavily clawed and
well-adapted for climbing and digging burrows.  The adults are nonetheless usually found on the
forest floor, often hidden by fallen logs or leaves.  They are most commonly seen by humans
around or on corpses, which earned the beetle its popular name in Indonesian, badanmak, or
‘body-eater’.
Like all beetles, Vorocarnisae sumatranus, goes through holometabola, or complete
metamorphosis, changing from a worm-like larva to a quiescent pupa to a beetle during its life.
The Sumatran Tiger Beetle depends upon the decaying remains of higher animals for
reproduction.  The adult female, after a short mating season, lays a cluster of eggs in a cavity on
the corpse of a large animal like a water buffalo or orangutan.  The eggs hatch very quickly, and
the new oligopod grubs, brightly coloured with alternating stripes and possessing a jaw structure
much better suited to chewing and rasping then the adults, burrow into the decaying body through
an orifice.  For unknown reasons the larva have active phosphorescent organs, although this may
be related to driving away other scavengers or startling predators.  The larva, after upwards of ten
days, emerges and crawls away to pupate.  Although this in itself can be ghastly to humans, it is
no worse then what maggots or other scavengers do.  Vorocarnisae sumatranus,, however, has
adapted a considerably more terrifying way of feeding.
Somehow, long ago, the Sumatran Red Tiger Beetle adapted itself to lay eggs in a living
host.  The eggs are usually deposited in the ears, and after hatching, the larva, very small, quickly
crawl down the main cavity and find their way into the brain, where vast amounts of protein can
be rapidly accumulated for growth.  This is extremely painful for the victim, who is often aware of
a kind of burning sensation in the immediate hours afterwards.   The larva usually devour non-
essential sections of the brain first, leaving the basic pulmonary, cardiac and sensory systems
operating until the end.  The pain grows worse and worse with every passing day. In the final
phase of this predation, the victims eyes roll back into the head due to the larva’s actions upon the
main optic nerves.  Still functioning, the victim’s eyes can see the greenish glow of the larva at
work.  Death is almost always inevitable, and there is no known method of prevention or removal
of the larva, short of cutting open the head or pouring pesticide down the ear.  Neither treatment
is likely to save the victim.  Luckily, because the Sumatran Red is a relatively sluggish animal, and
because they are easily spotted, deaths are rare, even if highly visible.  The victim is often
rendered near insane by the larva, perhaps leading to Achinese legends of demonic possession.
The first widespread knowledge of the Sumatran Red only came, however, after the Dutch
invasion of Aceh in the 1870’s; the Dutch soldiers, unused to jungle warfare, often fell prey to the
Vorocarnisae sumatranus, and thus the symptoms came to be known as ‘Dutch madness’.