Excellent Paul ! - I can't add more to that.
Mark
Paul@home wrote:
> re: discussion about war
>
> It is really dangerous rhetoric to state that those who have not
> directly exprienced a social issue (e.g., war) cannot speak out
> against a social issue. What would have happened to apartheid in South
> Africa if those who had no direct experience of apartheid felt that
> they could not speak out against apartheid? If you feel the need to
> self-destructively acquire some existential privilege in regard to
> war, you can burn (irreversibly) a few of the horrors of war into your
> scull by visiting Robert Fiske's website where he carries uncensored
> photographs of the human costs of war .
>
> In any case, I believe we should focus on all, not some, systemic
> patterns of violence - not just those that involve a fight between
> B-52 bombers and AK47 rifles. Annie reminds us how this is powerfully
> captured by Cathy McCormack's idea of 'the war without bullets'. Let's
> not get seduced by arguments that 'being shot down by a comment on a
> discussion list is petty compared to being shot down by a gun'. If you
> start trying to calibrating pain in that way you do nothing more than
> advocate a system of arbitrary judgements on other people's social
> experiences (who has got the deepest scar) and you risk falling into
> problematic sets of xenophobic discourses (e.g., ask the homeless of
> Birmingham to acknowledge how lucky they are compared to the homeless
> in Dafur), that do nothing more than censor discussion of oppression
> within our own communities and displace reflection on the horrors we
> live with onto the horrors of imagined others. 'We' are not safe in so
> many ways. We live in a country with: high levels of crime/criminality
> (including corporate crime); high levels of
> socio-economic inequalities; a rampantly individualistic contemporary
> culture; and a cultural history/legacy scarred by ethnocentricism,
> colonisalism and deep seated xenophobia.
>
> War is just one highly visible form of violence. To focus on war in
> isolation of other forms of coporate and state sponsored violence
> deflects attention away from the killing spree such sponsors are
> engaged in our own and others' communities (death and injury caused by
> mass industrialisation, urbanisation, environmental degradation and so
> on). Being anti-war can be a rallying point to talk about all forms of
> violence, not just about one.
>
> Now, the point about being critical with one another as something that
> is negative and as more to do with members negotiating their positions
> of power within the network than anything else. Sychophancy (showing
> unconditional, positive agreement with others) could be charged
> similarly if we chose to conceptualise our interactions in
> individualistic ways. I still think that a list like this is a good
> place to engage with ideas, not with the individuals expressing those
> ideas or individualistic ways of reading the dynamics of the list..
>
> In fact I find sycophancy is more of a problem than criticality
> because at least the latter causes us to question our thinking (though
> admittedly to find ouselves fawning for Bush/Blair can also lead us to
> question our thinking or at least the sincerity of theirs!). We cannot
> assume that because we are a collective who have subscribed to this
> vague notion of community psychology that we will share similar
> politics and express our values in similar ways and that therefore we
> need not critically scrutinse each other's beliefs and actions. For
> example, members in both the European Association of Community
> Psychology and in the Society for Research and Action (USAmerican
> community psychology organisation) have talked positively about the
> prospect of securing future sponsorship from the World Bank. Of
> course, some on this list might think this is a postive step forward
> also (not me!). I have no problem in seeking, at certain times, to
> paralyse action through critical thinking (though to stop an action,
> is still an action e.g., the 'STOP the War coalition are active about
> their passivism!). In fact, I would like to botox vast areas of
> psychological practice. I would also want to be stopped in my own
> actions if I did decide to embark on a World Bank sponsored tour of
> Birmingham showing homeless people Robert Fiske's pictures of dead
> bodies on the streets of Baghdad and tell them to 'count their
> blessings'. And, I would not want someone to give me a hug for having
> a go.
>
> For me, the web of deceipt that has been woven by the corporate world
> and their state sponsors is so complex, nebulous and sticky that it
> takes a lot of work to get unstuck from the ways such sponsors would
> like us to think and act. It also takes a lot of work for some of us
> to grasp the thread and then rethread the ways we relate towards and
> think about each other so that we might regain a semblance of justice
> in the world. It is also a web of deceipt that connects us all
> directly with the horrors of the world, whether we convince ourselves
> that we feel those horrors or not. I would like us to engage in more
> active passivism and seek to paralyse the sources of systemic violence
> through critical thought and action.
>
> p
>
>
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