My Log 477 June 9 2015: A world full of unimaginable things opens up before our eyes, every day of every year

Administrative Division of Bangladesh. March 2011 (UTC) (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Satellite image of New Zealand in December 2002. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

We live in a world in which more or less unimaginable things seem to be happening every day.

For example, the news that there are reported to be 1,000,000 people in Libya, waiting to make it into Europe, by whatever means they can. It is understandable that impoverished people should want to get into Europe to share in its wealth, but still is hard to imagine that so many people could have gathered with that objective, right now.

I remember writing in a little book I wrote in 1972, that the impoverished people of what was then called the Third World knew how we lived in what we then called the First World, and some day would come banging on our doors, demanding to have some of it for themselves. So the million of them gathered in Libya (if in fact they are there) may be incredible, but they are no longer really unimaginable.

For another example, the news that several thousand illegal refugees from Bangladesh have been returned to their home by Myanmar, where they ended up, is the visible end of something else that is unimaginable, and that is, the population pressure that has grown up in Bangladesh.

I have been viscerally aware of this since 1975 when, in the comparative ease of isolated New Zealand, with its 4,000,000 people, I attended a conference, and heard a man say that Bangladesh, then with 72 million people, would by the turn of the century have a population of 125,000,000. It sounded a pretty incredible figure, so I looked up the area of the country, and found it was almost the same size as the South Island of New Zealand, where I was born. Whoa there, 125 million?  Further investigation convinced me that to accommodate that many people, my home island would need to have a million people in every village hamlet and town of 1000 or more. It seemed, and still seems to me inconceivable.

And my incredulity has simply been increased by what has happened since: by the year 2000 the population was already 130 million and today it has grown to 164 million. The country suffers from repeated, intensive floods, that wipe out the homes of hundreds of thousands of people at a stroke. Up to 45 per cent of the people a few years ago were living below the poverty line, which seems to have been established at equivalent to US$2 a day, 80 per cent live in rural areas, a high percentage of them mired in relentless poverty. Still apparently they are well on their way to meeting the UN Millennium aims of reducing the impoverished to 26 per cent, those below the poverty line having been reduced in recent years from more than 60 million, to a mere 40 million. Reports of repeated disasters in the slum-infested cities indicate that conditions of work for urban workers are sub-par. And, as far as one can tell all this can be put at the door of their high population increases, which are one of the results of the low social status of women in their society.

This is not designed to put down Bangladeshis, who are no doubt performing daily miracles as they struggle to overcome their horrendous basic conditions of life. Although these miracles have not been sufficient so far to prevent their escape, by legal or illegal means makes not much difference, to anywhere that might promise them a better chance in life.

While I am at it, another incredible thing is the advance of automation in the developed economies of the world --- that is to say, the rich ones, which benefit from high educational achievements for everyone, higher incomes, more hygienic conditions of life, and better opportunities for personal fulfilment.  I watched a TV programme this morning about this automation --- it was on AlJazeera, the TV news network that seems to be most closely in touch with the world’s disadvantaged people, and whose reporter kept asking the masters of  automation difficult, and sometimes embarrassing questions. The basic question is, if everything is to be done by machines, as is becoming more and more the prospect, will this not lead to a world in which not only will there be fewer jobs, but it will be almost impossible for the generality of human kind to find a job?

It was interesting to hear these “masters of the universe” --- to use a familiar term applied to ultra-scientists --- prevaricating as they were forced to grope for a convincing answer to this question.  Many of them simply denied it, saying the lost jobs would be made up by the new jobs necessary to manufacture and run these machines. Not very convincing in terms of scale.  Asked what could be done to deal with this problem, some of them were even forced to admit that the main hope might be for a guaranteed wage, payable to everybody --- heresy in the heartland of market capitalism, surely --- or that, to quote another, “some form of redistribution will probably be necessary.”

What? Redistribution?  Is this guy joking? The capitalist masters of the globe expected to agree to redistribute their wealth to those left behind by the scientific revolution?

Not without a hell of a struggle…they talk of “labour deregulation”, by which I take it they mean more of the recent trend to get rid of unions, so that the workers are left defenceless before their masters.

Incredible! Inconceivable!

First, look at how much of the recent accumulation in the world’s wealth has been snaffled by the richest one per cent. They love things the way they are!

Second, look what the bankers are demanding of the Greeks, half of whose young people are permanently unemployed: cuts in wages, increased taxes,  savage reductions  in welfare benefits, privatization of everything, and reductions in pensions to the very poorest.

Some kind of immense social battle seems to be just opening up as human beings try to find their ways through these challenges.

My Log 477 June 3 2015: Residential schools: as the TR Commission says, they were only one aspect of our legislative, cultural, economic and social onslaught against the original inhabitants

Monument to aboriginal war veterans in Confederation Park, Ottawa, Canada. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Formerly St. Michael's Residential School Building, Alert Bay. Turned over to 'Namgis First Nation and renamed 'Namgis House in 2003. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

St. Paul's Indian Industrial School, Middlechurch, Manitoba (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Algonquin Couple, an 18th-century watercolor by an unknown artist. Courtesy of the City of Montreal Records Management & Archives, Montreal (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

I have not yet read the report of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission on the issue of residential schools. But the reports about it, and the quoted comments of Judge Murray Sinclair indicate that they make what seems to me to be the most important point that could emerge: that is, the residential schools, established as they were to detach native children from “the barbarous life” of their parents, did not stand alone in the landscape of government action towards the original inhabitants of this country.

They were, in fact just one element of a long-running process, including years of oppressive legislation passed by our Parliament, whose whole purpose was to detach the original inhabitants from their land, by, first destroying their economy, and later destroying everything that meant anything to them --- their beliefs, their institutions, their world-view, and so on and on.

I could give endless examples of native groups who had to struggle with this assumption that they were no longer owners of anything, no longer of any use to anyone, and that their traditional way of life was a nuisance standing in the way of what the white invaders called “progress.” I always think back to the Stoneys, displaced by our declaration of a national park in Banff right in their traditional lands. Their roaming across their lands living on the animals they could catch and developing a finely balanced rapport with the nature that surrounded them was unwelcome to the dominant society, which herded them into small reserves. Unfortunately, in these reserves they could not feed themselves, so limited were the resources at their disposal. So the band was placed in the position of being unwanted outside the reserve, and unwanted inside the reserve, because of the drain on government through having to provide this proud people, reduced to poverty and misery, with enough food to keep them alive.

All across the country, similar stories can be told. The history of the Algonquins, masters of the Ottawa valley, is very similar. Those living on the Ontario side of the river were pushed aside to make way for loggers, as the industrial machine began to get its claws on the country. Of course, they protested, petitioned, year after year, in a vain effort to get some recognition of their country and their right to it, but gradually they were gathered together by the religious army of the assault, and in 1851 Church and State, twin oppressors,  combined to set up a large reserve at Maniwaki into which all Algonquins were intended to be deposited. It didn’t quite work: the Algonquins who lived in the upper reaches of the river valley --- which winds its way tortuously across the northern wilderness before descending in a majestic curve down to join the St Lawrence – these people never went to the reserve, but continued to live their traditional life in their very own forests.

Of course, that is another story, as well: the treatment of these Quebec-dwelling Algonquins is another horror story, as I discovered in the later years of the last century when the people of Barriere Lake attempted to stop logging companies from cutting their forest to pieces. Their experience in this regard was so bitter that their community had been reduced to what must have been one of the poorest in Canada.  The catalogue of how governments treated them traditionally, and of how they have continued to treat them right up to the present day, is something that should be known --- but isn’t—to every Canadian.

So the bitter experiences of the residential school were only a part of the treatment meted out to these original inhabitants of the land, who, when whites first came among them and tried to stay over  their first Canadian winter, had rallied around the visitors as they neared starvation, and generously saved them from extinction. A generosity that, looking back on it from a distance, they might well have come to regret.

What is one of the almost miraculous stories of Canadian history is how these people have survived, how their leaders, generation after generation, have fought the good fight to preserve themselves, against the huge machine of government, courts, and institutionalized racism.

What we Canadians are only slowly realizing is that as the needs of industrial society are bleeding the lifeblood out of our living environment, it is these people with their concern for the health of the land --- they traditionally regard the Land as their Mother --- who are leading us today in an effort to pull the rampaging machine to a halt, to preserve the essential life-giving qualities of Nature.

These people we have always denigrated, we need them, and their concern for the future, more than ever before.

My Log 476 May 26 2015: I once again delight in a third reading of the great Norman Lewis’s unforgettable masterpiece, Naples ‘44

I don’t often read a book twice, but I have just finished reading for the third time one of the most vivid, amusing and touching books to emerge from the Second World War --- Norman Lewis’s diary of his year spent in Naples as a British Intelligence Officer, attached to the Allied Military Government, with the assignment to look out  for  the interest of the British troops. The book is called Naples ’44, and is widely considered to be his masterpiece from among the 35 books he wrote between 1935 and the year of his death at the age of 95 in 2003 (with yet another book, his last,  ready for publication).

His book on his Naples experience was not published until 1978, 34 years after the events, and his last book is about a journey he made through Spain and Portugal 69 years before.

What a remarkable career for a writer whose books had in common that they were an expression of his delight in the human condition, expressed with a modesty so entrenched that he once wrote that he could walk into a room full of people, stay there for some time, and leave before anybody had noticed his presence. In other words, a born observer.

It is remarkable how his prose, while maybe dealing with the events of seven decades before, can still portend to our present times. As a Guardian obituary published right after his death, said, he had been among the first “to witness the idiocy of American policy as it drove countries to embrace communism”, he had foreseen by 15 years the superb efficiency of the aeroplane for bombing communities into oblivion, and he had in another book predicted the brutal dictatorship that was already shaping up in Burma.  All of this foresight had not been thrust upon the reader, but had sort of made itself apparent in the detailed descriptions in which he delighted to reveal the basic characteristics of the countries he was visiting, and the peoples he had rubbed up against. Yet for all the acclaim with which his books were greeted, he himself considered that the most important thing he ever wrote was an article in The Sunday Times of London in 1968 about genocide being carried out against Amazonian tribes by the Brazilian government, an article that had resulted in formation of the influential NGO Survival International, which is still working away on the same issues 47 years later.

I found the same revelation, reading again his description of the landing of the American forces at Salerno a day after the signing of an armistice with Italy. The behaviour he describes of American soldiers, falling out of their tanks after retreating from a German counter-offensive, terrified at the possibility that a Panzer division might strike down to cut the landing force in half, their panic leading to them to shoot down three Spitfires and shoot wildly around them at friend and foe alike, with accompanying rumours that the American General Mark Clark was “proposing to abandon the beachhead and had asked the Navy  for the Fifth Army to be re-embarked”, made one realize how years later it came about that the Americans, for all the might of their armies, have failed in Vietnam, and have managed to ruin Iraq and Afghanistan years after declaring that their mission was “accomplished.” They are trigger-happy.

What Lewis found when he did reach Naples, and was assigned to look after a ring of small nearby towns, was that the Allied Military Government was being run, in effect, by Vito Genovese, The head man in the American mafia, who had been deported back to his home village somewhere around Naples, and had been eagerly grabbed by the invading army for his knowledge of the language and the local culture. He had used this authority to impose on the whole city and on all surrounding towns, members of the so-called Camorra, a local rival to the more famous Sicilian underworld criminal organization the Mafia. This was all done with the support of the AMG, who turned a blind eye to the criminal behaviour of the Mayors appointed by the underworld in all the small towns where Lewis was active.  He describes this behaviour as that of communities whose people were starving, with  unemployment of 100 per cent, and in which even the best-paid functionaries were paid a fraction of what an ordinary private in the American Army was paid.  He described many examples of well-dressed, respectable-seeming women who would arrive with their teenage (and even younger) daughters, offering them to the responsible soldiery for mere trifles, a can of meat, as bottle of wine, a jacket or blanket.  Most of these women would rather have had paying jobs, Lewis observes, and he could not find it in his heart to condemn them, even when they were quite clearly engaged in criminal activities.  He describes how the markets were full of goods that had been quite clearly stolen from the Americans, but says that these thefts were on such a scale --- one ship I every four that docked at Naples was skinned clean, he says --- as to be unmanageable by the authorities. Time after time, he describes meetings which, as a law-abiding citizen of a stable industrial country, he would deplore, but he realizes how counter-productive would have been anything he tried to do about it. One of his major jobs was to carry out the vetting of Italian women whom some soldier was hoping to marry. In most cases their determination to marry was caused by their burning desire to escape the poverty in which they were irrevocably trapped.

At the end of his time in Naples, he had this to say: “A year among the Italians had converted me to such an admiration for their humanity and culture that I realize that were I given the chance to be born again  and to choose the place of my birth, Italy would be the country of my choice.”

When, just over a year after arriving there, he learned that he was being transferred out, he descibes it thus: “The thunderbolt has fallen. Today I was ordered to prepare to leave immediately for Taranto, to embark on the Reina del Pacifica for Port Said….So I am left with only hours to spare and no time to say goodbye to any of the friends scattered through so many towns. There will be no time for a last glass of marsala with any of the scheming sindacos or the Machiavellian chiefs of police, who have always, for all their innumerable shortcomings, shown hospitality to me as a stranger. There will be no time for a last coffee substitute in the Gran Caffe in the Galleria to say goodbye and good luck to several girls who are virtually fixtures of the place, and bear me no ill-will because I was unable to help them to marry Allied personnel. I realize I have had my last meal at Zi’Teresa’s and will never again shake the gnarled paw of the old aunt herself…”

Such an elegiac farewell, after a year mixing with prostitutes and their pimps, criminals and their underlings, crooked black-marketeers, and the AMG which he had finally to describe as “completely corrupt.”

Wise enough to know he could do nothing to change things, Lewis settled for describing it all in a way that few people engaged in the business of war have ever done.  A book that instructs us, without ever seeming to, about the meaning of humanity.

My Log 475 May 22 2015: A wonderful film about Cuba’s Arts Schools, that succeeds in telling everything good and bad about revolution

School of Music near the Jaguey Tree, uphill from the stream (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

School of Plastic Arts, Ricardo Porro (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

School of Dramatic Arts, Roberto Gottardi (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

School of Ballet, Vittorio Garatti (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

English: View downhill towards stream and the School of Ballet (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

View towards entrance from the School of Modern Dance (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Having made documentary films in my day, I know how difficult it is to express ideas and issues in any form that will not bore the audience to tears. Which is why I have such astonished admiration for a film recently broadcast on Al Jazeera called Cuba’s Unfinished Spaces made by Alysa Nahmias and Benjamin Murray.

Although the ostensible subject of this film is the saga of the construction of five Art Schools in Cuba in the early years of the revolution, the filmmakers have managed to make revolution, in the full meaning of that word, its real subject --- the delights, excitements, inspirations of revolution on the one hand, and the despairs and crushing disappointment that sets in as the revolution hardens, becomes bureaucratic, and the romance and excitement gradually  degenerates, as one of the architects in this film said, “into a rule.”

This film, in other words, is absolutely worthy of the revolution which inspired it, of the marvellous old men who, as youngsters, seized their chance and managed to create the Schools of  Modern Dance, Ballet, Music, Dramatic Arts, and Plastic Arts that have been recognized by authorities outside Cuba as precious examples of modern architecture, while within Cuba they have been neglected as trees and plants have overgrown them.

The story begins when Fidel and Che one day go to the immense layout of the local golf course, in the Country Club, a preserve of the rich before the revolution, and Fidel says how wonderful it would be to use this space for the use of students of the arts. The next act comes when Fidel, driving in Havana one evening, spots Selma Dias, a young woman described as “a real revolutionary and an architect”, stops the car, orders to get in, and drives her to the golf course  ---she can see nothing because it is already dark --- where he announces she is to be in charge of the creation on this land of Art Schools at which thousands of young Cubans will be educated. She accepts the charge, goes to an architect of her acquaintance Ricardo Porro, tells him of this revelation, and asks him to be the architect in charge. He is amazed, staggered, of course, he says, he will accept. But says Selma, there is a condition. The work has to be up and under construction in two months. Two months! says Ricardo. Impossible! That's the offer, says Selma, take it or leave it. I take it, says Ricardo.

Soon thereafter, Fidel gathered the architects of Cuba together and told them the era of big buildings, of luxury projects, is over. “We are building now for the people,” he said.  Porro said some architects left Cuba immediately, but he recruited  two Italians who had previously worked with him in Venezuela, Roberto Gottardi and Vittorio Garatti . He was interested in the work that an elderly man called Gumensindo had been doing experimenting with ways to enclose space without using expensive materials, and he decided that this work, the placing together of bricks in such a way as to form vaults --- very similar to the way an Inuit igloo is constructed --- would be the basic method used in building the schools. Some people did not believe in the vaults, because the architects were men with very little experience, “but everything we did was daring,” one of them said. “We unleashed our dreams and visions.” The designs had no doors, temples or columns. “I thought of my school as an initiation ritual,” said one of them. “That is why it is full of indirect passages, mysterious and tortuous.” Porro said: “I tried to make the school of plastic arts as an image of this romantical moment of the revolution. I wanted to express in the School the atmosphere I felt in Cuba during the revolution. I thought of the Schools as if there were one million people in a piazza, and then they would each go in their own different direction.”

The construction started almost as soon as the first drawings were made, and before the Schools were finished, students were already at work. Everyone from Porro at the top down to the youngest student, was moved by the absolute  freedom they were given, and this was, perhaps, the source of their downfall. Porro kept urging his architects and workers --- at the maximum they would have 800 workers busy with the construction ---- not to waste time on minor things, because “perhaps one day it is all going to be stopped.”

He was a wise man. During the sixties the Soviet Union became Cuba’s main supporter, and the events of the Cold War became important and changed national priorities.  Soviet ideas begin to influence the leaders, and nothing in Soviet attitudes as translated to Cuba had to do with beauty, and those who were concerned to make these beautiful Art Schools began to come under criticism as being  bourgeois, intellectual, elitist. Pretty soon the workers made available were down to twenty-five, and, as Porro remarked he found himself in a situation like that described by Kafka. “One day you learn that you have been accused of something, then you have been judged, then you realize you are guilty, and nobody tells you of what.” Porro, who had been a friend of Castro’s when they were both students, and had in fact been arrested before the revolution, and had to leave the country, again had to leave for France, where he worked across Europe with distinction as an architect until his death in 2014 at the age of 89. The film-makers, who spent ten years putting this film together, were lucky to have interviewed him extensively before his death.

Eventually Che wrote an article in which he criticized the freedoms exercised in the Art Schools, which found themselves thereafter subject to military discipline, and were forced to expel gay students. In the end only Porro’s Plastic Arts and Modern Dance School ever got finished, and Garatti who had designed the Music and Ballet schools was forced out of the country in 1974.

Gradually, however, word spread around the world of the tragic neglect suffered by what so many regarded as the greatest architectural achievement of the Cuban revolution, and the film has a brief statement in which Castro declares that when someone showed him a drawing of one of the  Schools, “it was like falling in love with a young girl.” He declared that the work must be rehabilitated and completed, and said, “I was ignorant.” (Quite an admission for a man whose word was law.) So began the slow process of reconstruction and rehabilitation, which, according to the film has slowed since the resignation of Fidel.

The rehabilitation of this work at an international level was signalled by the publication in 2011 of a book by a Californian John Loomis called Revolution of Form: Cuba’s Forgotten Art Schools. Subsequently many exhibitions have toured showing photos of he work, and it has even been the subject of an opera. The World Monuments Fund placed the Art Schools on their watch List, and all this attention persuaded Cuba to recommend the project as a World Heritage site that has outstanding universal value to the world.

I believe this film about this extraordinary achievement is itself  wonderful in that it gives such a clear-headed, in some ways inspiring, and in other ways depressing, view of the meaning of revolution. Something a guy like me, who tends to sympathize with revolutions, is in dire need of.