kirbycairo

I would like to thank everyone for the remarkable and surprising support. It is heartening. Rather ironic to stop posting on the very week in which occurs what is arguably the biggest (as in most public) ethical scandal to clearly involve the Prime Minister.

Anyway, for a while I am going to turn my attentions away from politics and to one of my other interests, literature. I am going to start a new blog entitled Footnotes; Adventures in 19th Century Literature. You can see it here. Please visit me there if you have literary interests. (I hope to start posting at the end of the weekend) Well, Marx retreated into the British Museum after the disappointing events of 1848. I am no Marx and my personal library pales in comparison to the British Museum but it will be my own small retreat.

I have two books that I am just finishing on 19th century literature  one is about Mary and Charles Lamb and the other is a biography of Mary Mitford. But I hope to use my new blog to develop ideas for a longterm project on the large tapestry of interconnected friendship that existed between the authors of the English Romantic period. It is something I have been working on little by little over the past few years and I will continue to explore on my blog as the project slowly coalesces.

As for politics, I am sure I will explode back into this more political blog sometime in the not too distant future.

Thanks again for all the support.

I have always been something of a reluctant warrior for the left. My reluctance was not motivated by lack of belief in principles because I really believe that corporatism and the rightwing ideology are spectacularly wrong and will lead to nothing but disaster. Furthermore, I believe that the only way forward for our race and our planet is a genuine pursuit of greater cooperation and equality. But my reluctance was motivated by the early realization that the majority of people not only tolerate their own exploitation and oppression, but they actually seem to revel in it. For reasons that I am sure I will never understand, the majority of people seem to actively court their own exploitation and want to cede power to those who will keep most people poor and powerless. And even when people work together to make things better, as when they form unions, they are surprisingly quick to create institutional frameworks that further solidify structural inequalities and  hierarchies.

Of course, on the other side of the argument, there has always been an indispensable group of tireless activists who have pushed back the tentacles of power and the only reason that we have any justice and generalized prosperity is because of these activists who have dragged the world forward despite the stupidity and reluctance of the majority.

But I feel like I have been fighting for a long time and on days like this I am looking into an abyss of depression and desperation. At least for now, I don't think I can fight any more. In my dark moments I just think that most people are stupid and probably deserve to be exploited and oppressed. If they can't act in their own interest (as the rich and powerful do all the time), I have to ask myself why I should bother.

With this in mind, I leave the rest of you to it, and wish you good luck. I am done.

Yesterday the former dictator of Guatemala, Efrain Montt, was convicted of 80 years in prison for Genocide. The sentence is, in a sense symbolic considering that Mr. Montt is now 86 years old and very unlikely to survive any significant time in prison. But the sentence is interesting at least because it is one of the very few examples in which a nation is actually trying to come to grips with its fascist past. The sad fact is that Guatemala has seen a string of dictators and brutal militarists (the current president was an military officer under the Montt regime). Central America (and Latin America in general) is awash with former dictators and political murderers, almost none of which have been brought to justice. In 1954 the CIA orchestrated a coup in Guatemala and in 1973 they orchestrated another in Chili. But few (and certainly no one in the US) has ever been properly brought to account for these events. The sad truth is that Montt is a drop in the bucket.

As the years have past I have come to realize that, for the most part, nations really don't really want to come to terms with their past. Nations (and nationalists) want to wave flags and sing anthems and are very good at ignoring the negative aspects of their country's past. I was shocked with I visited Spain with my partner (who was born and raised there) and realized that not only was it a country that had not come to terms with the fascism of the Franco but the country is full of young people who think he was a pretty good guy. If good ol' George Santayana was right, then counties that fail to come to grips with their past are in real danger of slipping back into the fascism that their country once embraced.

I grew up amid the Watergate scandal and as I have gotten older I have been amazed at the way that people in the US have gradually rebuilt the public image of Richard Nixon. Now, as countries go, the US is surely one of the most rabidly nationalistic and as a result even the so-called left in the US is not eager to keep the memories of Nixon's crimes in the public mind because they feel that it hurts the nation in general. A couple of nations (including South Africa and El Salvador) have used national reconciliation commissions in an attempt to come to grips with their past while avoiding the logistical mess of bringing potentially tens of thousands of people to justice. But it seems almost that, as a general rule, countries want to ignore the anti-democratic, brutal, dictatorial elements in their past. And in many cases they are inclined to even vocal defend such misdeeds. (I think that there is little question that George W. Bush and Dick Cheney could, and should, have been brought up on charges of crime against humanity be we all knew that wouldn't happen.) It is not just that the victors write history but nationalists and so-called patriots simply don't want the "wrong" kind of history written.

And the saddest part of all is that Montt, his supporters (and his ilk elsewhere) actually believe that their crimes against humanity were not crimes in the first place, but that their deeds were harsh but necessary.

This brings us to our own dear leader. As far as I am concerned, Stephen Harper is a criminal. He has actively contravened the constitution, he has operated through electoral fraud, he has attempted to dismantle our democratic institutions, he is destroying the environment in ways that will be a terrible burden on future generations, and he has poisoned the political discourse in Canada to a degree from which it may never recover. But despite the fact that Harper makes the previous Liberal government (which he never tires of condemning) like a bunch of honest and honourable public servants, a good swath of Harper supporters believe that ANYTHING Harper does is justifiable and continue to hold to the untenable postion that he is an excellent Prime Minister.

I have no sympathy for a brute like Efrain Montt. But the truth is that this 86 year old man is little more than a scapegoat, a meaningless symbol for people to hold on to as though dictators and brutes really are held responsible for their murderous and anti-democratic past. As a general rule they aren't and perhaps never will be.