The Antisocial Socialist

State policy forbids migrant workers from having children in the country. If a woman does, she must send her newborn home. If she keeps her baby in Israel, she loses her work visa.

‘To imply that those currently at the top - the Warren Buffets and Roman Abramoviches of this world - are the very best, the nec plus ultra of humanity, is a kind of hate speech toward the species. Dignity demands that we refute it.’

* Richard Seymour, The Meaning of David Cameron



* Okay, unless my victim had a disability.

When the Haitian people get to elect their governments fairly, they consistently want to vote for people whose primary platforms include providing services to the poor. And when that happens, countries like Canada and the U.S. cut aid to Haiti, and start funnelling money into projects like funding the opposition parties. The latest trick is to rig the elections process so that the parties that the poor majority like aren't allowed to run.
...
Even since 2004, Haiti has seen three major disasters. The 2004 Hurricane that destroyed Gonayiv, the two hurricanes and two tropical storms that hit the island in September, 2008 (that, again, devastated Gonayiv, among other areas) and now the 2010 earthquake. You'd think that after the first two disasters, we'd make it a priority to help build up infrastructure: roads, hospitals, emergency response teams, etc. But no. Canada has focused an inordinate amount of "aid" on elections, political reform, police and soldiers. I've sat in both the Canadian and the U.S. embassy in Haiti and listened to officials tell me that security must be the first priority because security is a necessary prerequisite to encouraging business interests. If you wanted security, maybe you shouldn't have overthrown the government in the first place!
—bcholmes, responding to the victim--blaming that's predictably started before the dead bodies of Haïtian earthquake victims have even started to cool.

Yes, I heard about RaceFail '09 some time after the event, and rather regret not having been there while it was going on. The category of Political Correctness is so nebulous that it's rarely very helpful, particularly because it is often used disgracefully as a stick with which to beat anti-racists or progressives. In the broader sense, I absolutely do think that the implicit politics of our narratives, whether we are consciously "meaning" them or not, matter, and that therefore we should be as thoughtful about them as possible. That doesn't mean we'll always succeed in political perspicacity—which doesn't mean the same thing as tiptoeing —but we should try. So for example: If you have a world in which Orcs are evil, and you depict them as evil, I don't know how that maps onto the question of "political correctness." However, the point is not that you're misrepresenting Orcs (if you invented this world, that's how Orcs are), but that you have replicated the logic of racism, which is that large groups of people are "defined" by an abstract supposedly essential element called "race," whatever else you were doing or intended. And that's not an innocent thing to do. Maybe you have a race of female vampires who destroy men's strength. They really do operate like that in your world. But I think you're kidding yourself if you think that that idea just appeared ex nihilo in your head and has nothing to do with the incredibly strong, and incredibly patriarchal, anxiety about the destructive power of women's sexuality in our very real world. These things are not reducible to our "intent"—we all inherit all kinds of bits and pieces of cultural bumf, plenty of them racist and sexist and homophobic, because that's how our world works, so how could you avoid it?

bcholmes

Why? why? why?

And then suddenly he saw. He had a vision of himself as a new kind of Christ as a man who carries within himself all the seeds of a new order of things. He was the new messiah of the battlefields saying to people as I am so shall you be. For he had seen the future he had tasted it and now he was living it. He had seen the airplanes flying in the sky he had seen the skies of the future filled with them black with them and now he saw the horror beneath. He saw a world of lovers forever parted of dreams never consummated of plans that never turned into reality. He saw a world of dead fathers and crippled brothers and crazy screaming sons. He saw a world of armless mothers clasping headless babies to their breasts trying to scream out their grief from throats that were cancerous with gas. He saw starved cities black and cold and motionless and the only things in this whole dead terrible world that made a move or a sound were the airplanes that blackened the sky and far off against the horizon the thunder of the big guns and the puffs that rose from barren tortured earth when their shells exploded.

( ... )

Here you have the catchword around which has long circled a debate familiar to you. Its familiarity tells you how unfruitful it has been, for it has not advanced beyond the monotonous reiteration of arguments for and against: on the one hand, the correct political line is demanded of the poet; on the other, one is justified in expecting his work to have quality. Such a formulation is of course unsatisfactory as long as the connection between the two factors, political line and quality, has not been perceived. Of course, the connection can be asserted dogmatically. You can declare: a work that shows the correct political tendency need show no other quality. You can also declare: a work that exhibits the correct tendency must of necessity have every other quality.

This second formulation is not uninteresting, and, moreover, it is correct. I adopt it as my own. But in doing so I abstain from asserting it dogmatically. It must be proved.