Cunning Hired Knaves

Nina Simone

I was thinking about all the talk about anatomy in the air these days. The womb. The foetus. The ‘heartbeat’. The fingernails.

Sometimes this just washes over as normal. As if it is perfectly normal that our way of talking about other people should be rigorously anatomical.

Clearly it’s a good idea to have a strong grasp of anatomy if you are a medical practitioner, and it certainly helps to know one’s arse from one’s elbow when receiving medical advice about one’s condition.

But what about when it comes to other people? By coincidence, as I started writing this, I Got Life by Nina Simone was playing.

‘Hey, what have I got?
Why am I alive, anyway?
Yeah, what have I got
Nobody can take away?

Got my hair, got my head
Got my brains, got my ears
Got my eyes, got my nose
Got my mouth, I got my smile
I got my tongue, got my chin
Got my neck, got my boobies
Got my heart, got my soul
Got my back, I got my sex’

In Nina Simone’s singing, this about someone who is deprived of so much, yet who recognises that as a living, breathing human being she is still endowed with the basic means of fighting for liberation. Or to put it another way, she has nothing to lose but her chains.

It’d be an entirely different song if the possessive pronoun ‘my’ didn’t feature. It’d stop being an affirmation of possibility, and become a rather desperate list of anatomical objects instead.

What happens when this merely anatomical register is used, when people are discussing the laws by which they will agree to be governed?

If you find yourself talking -in the abstract- about ‘the womb’ as an object to be governed by law, you have most likely forgotten that each and every such organ is part of a human being who has to live their life among others, with all the variety, diversity and adversity that human life brings. And when you forget about it, you take it for granted that the people affected have no say in it.

Sometimes, you don’t even notice. Or at least I don’t notice. And maybe part of that is down to the fact that I have never heard any high-flown radio panels or read any earnest op-eds about how best to legislate for ‘the penis’, or ‘the testicles’.

I would ask men reading this: what do you think would be the best legislation to introduce governing the penis? What kind of basic laws should be introduced that ensures that the best use is made of the life contained in the semen stored in the testes? And please don’t try and argue that the sperm isn’t alive: I’ve seen the opening scenes of Look Who’s Talking.

If you find the above scenario absurd, to say nothing of inhuman, then you must, if you have a vote, vote to Repeal The 8th.

To whomever sings ‘I Got Life’, the Eighth Amendment says: no, you haven’t.

A referendum on the repeal of the 8th Amendment of the Constitution of Ireland is to be held this year. It is likely, as with previous referendum campaigns, that a great deal of attention will be devoted to the matters of ‘fairness’, ‘impartiality’, ‘objectivity’, and that broadcasters, particularly the State broadcaster RTÉ, will devote equal airtime to voices for and against.

If an article in the constitution is the subject of a referendum, it follows, in the interests of the ‘impartiality’ regularly cited to ensure that both sides are given equal hearing, that the assertions of that article should not be reported as valid.

Some people will argue that the article is valid and others will argue that it is not. So, having regard for the declared need to ensure ‘impartiality’, it follows that a broadcaster should not do anything to give the impression, from its own coverage, that the article is valid. Or not valid, for that matter.

Yesterday afternoon RTÉ Radio 1 ran a news report during its Drivetime programme on Fianna Fáil leader Micheál Martin’s speech in support of repealing the 8th Amendment.

Introducing the speech, household name Eileen Dunne referred to “the 8th Amendment that recognises the equal right to life of the mother and her unborn child”. This is a paraphrasing of the wording of the amendment. It is also -perhaps coincidentally- the exact wording used on the Wikipedia article on the 8th Amendment (as of today).

Given that the amendment in question will be under consideration for removal through a referendum, you might conclude that impartiality means not taking a stance on whether the right mentioned by the text, or the categories associated to that right, exist in fact. Some people think the right exists, others do not.

If we say “the 8th Amendment recognises the equal right to life”, which is what RTÉ News says, then we are tacitly proposing that this equal right to life actually exists, and that the 8th Amendment recognises it. Hence its removal would not remove this right from existence: it would simply remove it from the constitution.

If we refer to “mothers” in this way,, we are tacitly proposing that anyone who is pregnant is a mother, regardless of whether they want to be or not.

If we refer to the “unborn child” in this way we are tacitly proposing that anyone who is pregnant ought to be considered as carrying an unborn child, regardless of whether they wish to give birth to a child. Or in other words, the question of whether they are going to give birth to a child is not a matter for whoever is pregnant.

The point is that the validity of what the constitutional amendment says is being contested by a referendum, but RTÉ in this instance (and I would venture that this happens regularly, not only with RTÉ) has effectively reported that what the constitutional amendment says is valid, and in so doing has conveyed the political perspective that informs this constitutional amendment as simple fact. Such reporting cannot be considered impartial.

Later on in the Drivetime programme, RTÉ played a 42-second recording of Micheál Martin’s speech, and a one minute long recording of Fine Gael anti-choice TD Peter Fitzpatrick’s malign drivel.

via.

One of the striking things that about Miriam O’Callaghan’s interview with Kingsmills massacre survivor Alan Black was the presenter’s emphasis given to atrocities being committed on ‘both sides’ -and also humanity on ‘both sides’.

I was never part of a ‘side’. So many people I know did not consider themselves part of a ‘side’, least of all a side from which people perpetrated atrocities on their behalf. Like many others I never supported any kind of killing. I was very much aware, however, that there were others who were very much inclined to kill me, and others like me, because they deemed that I was on an opposite ‘side’.

My religious denomination meant I was automatically part of the ‘pan-nationalist front’. This was a common phrase used by the DUP at the time. and an entity that the Mid-Ulster UVF in its Portadown murals proclaimed it would smash.

The effect of the commonplace rhetoric of ‘both sides’ -or, on occasion, ‘both tribes’, is to present the Northern conflict as borne primarily out of sectarianism. Sectarianism viewed in this light has little to do with the character of institutions in Northern Ireland, or how life is organised by and large. Rather, it is considered more of a mindset: it reflects a poverty of vision among those who fall prey to it, in contrast to those who observe it.

In describing the Northern conflict in terms of ‘both sides’, or the ‘two sides’, the role of the British State in prolonging that conflict is effaced. Its sponsorship of loyalist death squads is ignored. Instead, the British State is elevated it to its desired status as an honest broker seeking to keep a lid on warring sectarian ‘tribes’, just as it has claimed to do in a whole swathe of territories around the globe.

A frequent self-satisfied diagnosis is whataboutery. This is supposedly an inability of members of one side to recognise their side’s own crimes and misdeeds while decrying the crimes and shortcomings and blindspots of the other side. Diagnosticians of whataboutery, of course, have neither crimes nor shortcomings nor blindspots of their own. 

If the role of the British State is left out of consideration, massacres appear as savagery emerging from the dark side of human nature, manifestations of pure evil. The Kingsmills massacre, a brutal sectarian atrocity, was preceded immediately by the Reavey and O’Dowd killings. These were carried out by the Glenanne Gang, a group of loyalists, British solidiers, and RUC and UDR members responsible for dozens of murders. John Weir, one of the members of the Glenanne Gang, said that the purpose of their activities was to provoke a “civil war” in which the IRA would eventually be crushed.

Kingsmills did not emerge out of some unfathomable tribal savagery, or that strange apparently natural phenomenon known as the ‘cycle of violence’. It was a retaliation, just as the Greysteel massacre was a retaliation for the Shankill bomb. To describe it as a retaliation is not to justify it. It does not render the perpetrators any less culpable for the sectarian bloodbath. It is simply to point out that the role of the British State in inciting the event should be considered important, if one is interested in the truth of these matters, and in ending the possibility of future violent conflict.

To categorise this and other such questions as the ‘whataboutery’ of ‘one side’ is to acquiesce in the preferred logic of forces that have blood on their hands, and no inclination to come clean. It takes no small amount of gall to polish one’s halo about the depravity of IRA violence and simultaneously let the British State off the hook, in effect conceding to the latter its right to murder whoever -including Irish citizens- in defence of the realm.

The idea that I, or anyone else, Catholic, Protestant, nationalist, unionist or otherwise, are automatically part of a ‘tribe’ or a ‘side’, whereas people in Dublin or London sit in splendid Olympian detachment from the whole thing, borne by higher ideals and more civilised inclinations, is one of the main factors in prolonging the prospect of sectarian barbarism.

Unintended faux pas do happen

Some quiz questions:

Which date is the anniversary of the McGurk’s Bar bombing?

Which date is the anniversary of Bloody Friday?

Which date is the anniversary of the La Mon restaurant bombing?

Which date is the anniversary of the Birmingham pub bombings?

Which date is the anniversary of the Droppin Well bombings?

Which date is the anniversary of the Teebane bombing?

Which date is the anniversary of the Shankill Road bombing?

Which date is the anniversary of the Omagh bomb?

Which date is the anniversary of the Loughinisland massacre?

Which date is the anniversary of the Dublin and Monaghan bombings?

I don’t know about you, but I didn’t know the exact answer to any of these questions. The year and the month of some, at a stretch.

Barry McElduff, the Sinn Féin MP suspended from the party for three months, is supposed to have known the date of the Kingsmills massacre. He is supposed to have known that it was a very bad day to put a Kingsmill loaf on top of his head. He is supposed to have known, at the very least, the brand names of the products he puts on top of his head for videos shared online have potentially damaging connotations for people who might watch those videos.

Some people think Barry McElduff was deliberately making a joke at the expense of the victims of the Kingsmills massacre. They think that he knew very well it was the anniversary of the Kingsmills massacre, and that he went down to the local shop, picked up a Kingsmill brand loaf, and placed it on his head. They think the MP then posted it on his Facebook page for the world to see, maybe because he thought some of the viewers would find it funny, or maybe because he thought, with calculated malevolence, that other viewers would find it desperately hurtful.

Some people say they do not know if Barry McElduff was deliberately making a joke at the expense of the victims of the Kingsmills massacre. However, they say, he should have known what date it was. Or he should have made the association between the brand of the loaf he picked up, and the massacre.

I guess it is easier to say that he should have known the date when you know all the dates of all the atrocities conducted in the Northern conflict over 30 years. Maybe there are lots of people who keep a close watch on such dates, but I don’t think I’ve ever met any.

I guess it is easier to say that he should have known the association between the brand name of the loaf and the massacre when this is what you yourself think whenever you pick up a Kingsmill loaf in the supermarket. Or maybe you do not pick up such products, because of what they connote for you.

But Kingsmill is one of the most common bakery brand names in Northern Ireland. Perhaps hundreds of thousands of people in Northern Ireland eat these branded products every day. They lift the packet from the bread bin or wherever, take out a couple of slices, and put them in the toaster, or maybe they make a sandwich. I have done this many times myself.

How many people, would you say, are put off eating the sandwich when the association with the massacre comes to mind, as it is supposed to? If it’s a common association, which is what people appear to think, then there are tens of thousands of people who are regularly reminded of the massacre by the food in front of them, but they carry on eating regardless, their appetite undimmed. What kind of person does something like that? I cannot help think of the regular scenes from House of Cards, with the monstrous Frank Underwood preparing himself a white bread sandwich in his kitchen late at night, unmoved by the carnage that surrounds him. Would it not be a society of monsters, if so many people have the stomach for that?

Is Northern Ireland a society filled with monsters? Some would have you think that is, and that there are significant numbers of people whose fuel for living is the purest hate. One of the most horrible images in my mind -it seems no less horrible even though I wasn’t even there when it happened- is of one group of teenagers passing through a schoolyard, crying and bewildered because two of their classmates had been shot, and another group, from inside a classroom, banging on the windows, laughing and shaking their fists at those outside in taunting celebration. What do you do with images like that? You could give in to them, let them take hold of you. You could build an entire outlook on the idea that there is an enemy out there, ever present, hiding perhaps, but ever willing to seize the opportunity to humiliate and annihilate. You would find it easy to find others who have the same enemy as you. There are plenty of Facebook groups devoted to that kind of thing. And one of the attractions -for want of a better word- for this outlook is that you can never know, for sure, that some other person isn’t secretly harbouring some pure hate towards you under an outwardly friendly disposition.

It seems sensible to me, though, to try and avoid making out that there is some malign force at work when there might be good grounds for believing that there may not be, to try and avoid stocking up on fuel for nightmares. In the response to Barry McElduff’s video what is striking is how seemingly few people are open to the possibility of pure coincidence. As if pure coincidence were some sort of logical impossibility, let alone a likely explanation. If it is right and proper that people should do nothing that adds to the pain of victims of atrocities -and of course it is- then we can’t confine this to the initial circulation of an image, but also to the act of lending it a significance and weight that it may not have. In this regard I don’t know what good purpose anyone thinks they are serving by calling upon a victim of an atrocity and asking them to weigh up whether or not such and such a thing relates to that atrocity or not. Or worse, presenting them once again with their painful memories, and asking them to relive it once more. It seems sensible to me, as well, to try and distinguish between ghoulish opportunism on the one hand, and, on the other, a disinterested effort to prevent a flare-up of sectarian paranoia.

For what it’s worth, which is very, very little, I believe Barry McElduff is telling the truth when he says he did not intend any hurt with his silly video. Believing it doesn’t mean I know for certain what he intended, because I can’t. I just choose to live in a world where I’m not fetching up monsters at every turn. And maybe you should too.

The other day, the head of the Housing Agency Conor Skehan made widely reported remarks that homelessness ought to be considered as a normal thing and that it was wrong to consider the current situation in Ireland as a crisis.

The idea of a ‘normal’ rate of homelessness is not all that different from the idea of a ‘natural’ rate of unemployment, a conventional enough concept in economics. Both will occur in the best of all possible worlds. The ‘natural’ rate of unemployment hold that even when there are more than enough jobs to go round, there will still, at any given moment, be people who are unemployed, because people will still lose jobs due to the dynamism of the economy, and it will take time for them to find other jobs. Similarly, with a ‘normal’ rate of homelessness, there will always, as Conor Skehan himself said, be people who find themselves on the streets as a result of events in their lives.

One major problem with both ideas is that there can never be a best of all worlds under a capitalist system. Ultimately, the only possible world worth having, as far as capitalism is concerned, is one in which profit rates are on the up. Since profits are little more than the appropriation of a surplus produced by labour power, a world of rising profits entails a world in which labour power -the ‘hand and brain’ exertions of human beings- is increasingly subjected to the rule of capital.

The Housing Agency headed by Conor Skehan claims it is concerned with ‘sustainable communities’ and ‘affordability’ in housing. Yet the rule of capital requires the elimination of collective solidarities that make communities truly sustainable. Moreover, the concept of ‘affordability’ in housing, by definition, treats housing as a commodity, rather than a right. ‘Affordability’ here is little more than the counterpart to profitability in the production and provision of housing.

This evening on RTÉ’s Drivetime, in an interview with Solidarity TD Ruth Coppinger, the presenter described current levels of homelessness as arising from the failure of the state to build sufficient levels of public housing to cater for people’s needs. This description was true, as far as it went. What it omitted, and what is omitted by and large from media coverage of this issue, is any questioning as to why the amount of public housing built has been so paltry for so long.

From the dominant point of view, it is inconceivable that the best of all worlds could be one in which a home is not a commodity, but a right. It is also inconceivable from the point of view of many in the general public too. If a salaried worker is accustomed to looking upon their home as an asset that ought to appreciate in value -a habit that is strengthened by a sense of poor prospects for one’s wages and pension- they are less likely to take a positive view of the idea that a decent home should be a matter of right.
At best, they are likely to look upon public housing schemes as a form of charity. This predicament can breed a stew of reactionary resentment: why should they get anything laid on for nothing when I have had to toil for all that I have? A ‘sustainable community’, from this point of view, is one in which the price of one’s house continues to rise and the riff-raff are given the bare minimum to be kept out of sight and out of mind.

In the Drivetime interview, Ruth Coppinger rightly questioned the wider implications of the remarks of another public official, Eileen Gleason, director of the Dublin Region Homeless Executive, who said that homelessness arose, in many instances, from a longstanding pattern of ‘bad behaviour’, from people who were ‘not like you and me’. If this is what such people said in public, Coppinger asked, what do they say behind closed doors? In other words, how much is the real view of public officials, who are charged with dealing with housing and homelessness, a view founded upon on reactionary resentment?

The idea that everyone has the right to a decent home is fundamentally at odds with the idea that housing ought to be a commodity. Yet the latter idea is the outlook of Fine Gael and the broader political establishment, along with the media establishment. But it is also an outlook shared widely among the better-off sections of Irish society. This tension is addressed through a resort to charity. It is charities who should deal with the matter of homelessness, since those who are homeless, if housing is to be considered a commodity, are best thought of as unfortunate supplicants at best, and feckless miscreants at worst. The prominence given to charity -institutionally and rhetorically- also has the nice effect of dignifying the people shown to be providing it.

To give his view of homelessness as normality some moral ballast, Conor Skehan quoted “the man from Nazareth”. Assuming this was Jesus of Nazareth and not Hayek or Friedman of Nazareth, Jesus, according to Skehan, said “the poor will always be with us”. This is not what Jesus of Nazareth said, at least not according to biblical sources. He said that ‘you will always have the poor with you’. The remark had a specific context. They were made in the house of a leper, not a radio studio. A woman broke open an expensive flask of ointment and poured it over Jesus’s head, and his disciples had given out to her, since they calculated that such ointment could have been sold and the proceeds given to help the poor.

When Jesus says to his disciples that ‘you always have the poor with you’ it is not an observation on some eternal feature of the economy. It is a reference to the way in which his disciples are already supposed to be living in solidarity among the poor, and, foreseeing his death at the hands of the authorities for standing with the poor, Jesus welcomes the woman’s gesture, since he will not always be around. Considered in their entirety, the remarks of ‘the man from Nazareth’ are not a doleful recognition that all societies will have some degree of poverty or exclusion, but rather the expression of an idea that Skehan and the rest, institutionally and ideologically, reject altogether, and that is far closer in meaning to a popular expression from more recent times: that nothing is too good for the working class.

Translation of an article by Manuel Castells, published in La Vanguardia, 21st October 2017, on the Spanish government’s planned suspension of autonomy for Catalonia.

“Spaniards: We Catalans love you. It is the State that we hate”

While you are reading this, the Council of Ministers is finalising details on the intervention on the autonomy of Catalonia via article 155 of the Constitution, prior to passing through the Senate. It is possible that the Parlament will respond with its Unilateral Declaration of Independence. Thus a period of uncertainty opens, the consequences of which are unforeseeable but undoubtedly harmful for public coexistence. The calls for dialogue have come to nothing, because what is at stake is whether or not to accept the possibility of a legal referendum through which Catalans may decide where their institutions ought to belong.

It is useless to invoke constitutional legality when the issue is that a substantial part of the Catalan public does not recognise said constitution. Constitutions cannot nail down social reality. The text that in 1978 obtained a consensus conditioned by de facto powers inherited from the dictatorship has proven incapable of containing the consciousness of new generations of Catalans who grew up in a climate of freedom in which disagreements are resolved democratically. In other democratic places, among them Quebec and Scotland, referendums serve to reconcile law and reality. Three-quarters of Catalans wanted to vote. According to surveys, the No vote against independence would have won. But Spanish nationalist essentialism blocked off democratic exits from a conflict that has been gradually poisoned.

Legally sanctioned police repression has become more problematic for the State since the 1st of October. The images of police violence have scandalised international opinion and have driven European leaders to recommend dialogue, behind the facade of supporting their partner. Tusk views the situation as ‘worrying’, but the EU cannot intervene in the intervention. Even so, the image of Europe as an example of democracy could be affected by its support for authoritarian decisions that have no regard for the political substance of the conflict. There is, moreover, another important limit to the intervention on autonomy: the stance of conditional support adopted by the PSOE. Though in Catalonia the socialists are being reviled for backing the application of article 155, this backing is constrained by their recognition of Catalonia’s reality as a nation. For Rajoy, the support of the PSOE is indispensable due to a strategic concern of Spanish politics that goes beyond the Catalan question. The political project of Spain’s financial and political elites remains a grand coalition that stabilises its domination, that is, the alliance of PP/Ciudadanos with the PSOE. This project was weakened by the reaction of the Socialist grassroots and the re-election of Pedro Sánchez. This opened up the possibility of a left alternative to the Partido Popular government once the PSOE, Podemos and its confluences accepted that their alliance was the indispensable condition for this alternative.

The crisis with Catalonia has allowed Rajoy to drive an almost unbreakable wedge between the PSOE on the one hand, and Podemos, its confluences and the Basque, Catalan and Galician nationalists on the other. Because although Podemos and Els Comuns are not in favour of independence, they are in favour of a legal referendum to resolve the conflict -democratically. A referendum in which Pablo Iglesias says he would campaign for a No vote. This is a starting point that the PSOE cannot accept because it is weighed down by the Spanish nationalism of its past leaders and the resistance of socialist-ruled autonomous regions who fear losing resources if there are concessions to Catalonia. The move works out sweetly for Rajoy: he presents himself as the champion of Spain, isolates Podemos, and rebuilds a constitutional front dominated by the right.

The Government’s dilemma is how to defeat the independence movement in the most bloodless way possible. In one area, it has prosecutors and judges who, by simply applying the constitutional framework in a strict manner, are closing in and punishing what is already being classed as sedition, a grave accusation. Elsewhere, the relocation en masse of business headquarters (nearly a thousand and counting), in reaction to the institutional uncertainty, is gravely damaging the economic credibility of an independent Catalonia. In this context the objective of the Spanish government, and the PSOE, is to force new regional elections, whether by the hand of Puigdemont or the route of article 155. They hope that enough fear and uncertainty has been created for an electoral defeat of the independence movement, which will allow for a Catalan government with which a new arrangement on autonomy can be negotiated, including a future decaffeinated constitutional reform. Thus everything would be restored to normal.

This strategy of gradually wearing down the independence movement, through exhaustion, isolation and repression, has serious obstacles. It continues to ignore that it is a social movement that can become active and spread without leaders and without institutions. On the contrary, the more intervention there is in the institutions, the greater the role played by civil society and the more diverse the forms of resistance. And the more there is perceived repression, the greater the outrage generated and mobilisation activated. Elsewhere, the Parlament assumes itself legitimate and representative, and as such Puigdemont cannot call elections unless it is with the understanding that if a pro-independence majority wins it is to organise a legal referendum. Square one. And even if the Spanish government were to intervene on autonomy and call elections, the fact that they were imposed would mean they would not have the participation of the parties opposed to intervention, that is, Junts pel Sí, the CUP, and Els Comuns, which represent the majority of the electorate. Article 155 is not an exit from the crisis, but rather its deepening and its extension in time, as Catalonia and Spain fracture and neo-falangism resurges. The alternatives are simple: either permanent state of exception in Catalonia, albeit an undeclared one, or dialogue, without preconditions, between Catalan nationalism and Spanish nationalism.