Going Against the Grain – in Bolivia and elsewhere

Re-engineered clock, Congress Bldg, La Paz, Bolivia

Anti-clockwise running clocks have appealed to me since I first saw one years ago on the wall of a colleague’s restaurant back in New Zealand. A year or two later I found the source – a shop in London’s West End specializing in scissors, pens, corkscrews and other equipment designed for perhaps the world’s last unrepresented minority, left-handers.

Maybe there is something about being left-handed that makes one sympathetic to misfits and rebels in general. Possibly that’s why some societies, overtly or covertly, have attempted to discourage left-handedness in children, and why the English word sinister derives from the Latin word for left-handed.

I have to tell you, this awareness dawned upon me slowly. Learning to write in the days of fountain pens, I developed a characteristic ‘left-hander’s hook’ to avoid producing lines of smudged ink. At an early age I must have made the pragmatic decision to use scissors with my right hand, just as, after coming to Turkey, I learnt to make Turkish coffee with the standard cezve[1]. Since, however, I took the decision to ‘come out’ as a left-hander, I find myself applauding every small victory for my cack-handed brothers and sisters.

So, I felt a sense of camaraderie when I read a news item reporting that the government of Bolivia has made the bold decision to re-engineer the nation’s clocks so they run counter-clockwise. I’m quoting from an article that appeared in The Guardian last week:

“Bolivia turns back the clock in bid to rediscover identity and 'southernness'

“In the latest – and by far the most literal – sign that times are changing in Bolivia, the numerals on the clock that adorns the congress building in La Paz have been reversed and the hands set to run anticlockwise in proud affirmation of the Andean nation's "southernness". According to Bolivia's foreign minister, David Choquehuanca, the horological initiative is intended to help Bolivians rediscover their indigenous roots.

" ’We're in the south and, as we're trying to recover our identity, the Bolivian government is also recovering its sarawi, which means 'way' in Aymara," he said. "In keeping with our sarawi – or Nan, in Quechua – our clocks should turn to the left.’

“Clocks are an evolution of the sundial, and in the northern hemisphere a sundial's shadow runs clockwise, while in the southern hemisphere it moves counter clockwise – making the modern clock a representation of light in the northern hemisphere.

“The clock face volte-face is not the first time a left-wing Latin American nation has played with time in recent years. In 2007, the late Venezuelan president Hugo Chávez put Venezuela's clocks back half an hour in an attempt to get Venezuelans biologically more in tune with the sun. The previous year, Chávez decided that the white horse on the country's coat of arms ought to gallop to the left instead of the right to better express the aspirations of his Bolivarian revolution.”

Well, I have documented previously my appreciation of Chavez and his Ecuadorean brother-in-arms, Rafael Correa. It’s pleasing to see Chavez’s successor carrying on the good work. One of the new President’s first acts was to establish a Ministry of Happiness charged with boosting programs for alleviating poverty, disability and social inequality. The article I read reported that Venezuela was ranked the happiest country in Latin America (according to the UN Sustainable Development Solutions Network’s World Happiness Report for 2013), and 20^th happiest in the world, placing ahead of the UK, France and Germany. Such news items make me happy too, and I am happier still to have occasion to learn a little more South American history.

Christchurch wizard avoids census, 1981

Before delving into that subject, however, I would like to pay brief tribute to another revolutionary figure. Not many countries have an official wizard these days – at least not in the developed world – so I take some pride in the fact that we in New Zealand do. Our wizard, born in England as Ian Brackenbury Channell, has filled the role since 1990, having been promoted by the Prime Minister of the day from his previous position as Wizard of the South Island city of Christchurch which he had held since 1974. Prior to that he had served as Official Wizard at Sydney’s University of New South Wales since 1967. Well, that’s quite a career, isn’t it! Check the link above if you want to learn more, but one of his early feats of wizardry was producing a world map using the Hobo-Dyer Projection which placed the South Pole at the top. The purpose was, amongst other things, to illustrate the point that much of our received knowledge is arbitrary, and based on assumptions forced upon us by Western/Americo-European predominantly Northern Hemisphere political and economic systems.

Wizardly world map - rightside up

But to return to South America. Evo Morales has been President of Bolivia since 2006 when he won an absolute majority (53.7%) in a democratic election – two events which have been pretty rare in that country since it gained independence from Spain in 1809. As with most post-colonial states, government seems to have remained in the hands of the economic and social elite, with little of the country’s mineral wealth trickling down to the indigenous poor, until a widely supported revolution in 1952 brought the Revolutionary Nationalist Movement to power. Their policies of universal suffrage, land reform, rural education and nationalisation of the lucrative tin mines kept them there until, surprise, surprise, they were ousted by a military coup in 1964 – with, if we can believe Wikipedia, the assistance of America’s very own CIA, who were also instrumental soon after in the killing of legendary Bolivian revolutionary Che Guevara in 1967.

The remaining years of the 20^th century seem to have been filled with a procession of military juntas and weak coalition governments characterized by corruption charges, violent suppression of opposition, free-market economic policies and privatization of state assets. Large-scale protest action increased from 1999, prompted especially by the transfer of water supply to private ownership and the consequent doubling of prices. Another key issue was the development of Bolivia’s huge reserves of natural gas – who would do it, where they would do it and who would benefit?

Street protests and general chaos continued for the first years of the new century, possibly explaining in part why a majority of Bolivian voters gave their support to Morales. His identity as a cocalero supporter, footballer, trade union activist, and his indigenous Aymara family background are perhaps also relevant. According to 2010 figures, 55 percent of Bolivia’s ten million people are Amerindian, and a further 30 percent Mestizo[2]. The Wikipedia entry claims that the country has 34 official languages – which may account for some of the difficulty in electing a representative government, and certainly adds lustre to Morales’s achievement in gaining a clear majority of votes.

One of Morales’s first acts as President was to reduce his own salary and those of his ministers by 57%. Undoubtedly, his government’s leftist policies of agrarian reform, combatting the influence of United States and trans-national corporations, increasing taxation on the hydrocarbons industry, and aligning the country with other ‘rebellious’ South American states like Ecuador and Venezuela, have provoked serious opposition from conservative groups within Bolivia, as well as upsetting those influential foreign corporations. At the same time, their attempts to compromise a little with the opposition have led to accusations from the left that they are forsaking their socialist agenda. Hard to please everyone.

Still, Morales’s football skills help to offset some of the criticism in a football-mad country – he is said to be the world’s oldest active professional soccer player! And the cocalero label is an interesting one too. Coca is a plant native to western South America whose leaves have been used for millennia by indigenous peoples. When chewed, they act as a mild stimulant while also suppressing hunger, thirst, pain and fatigue. ‘Addiction or other deleterious effects from the consumption of the leaf in its natural form have not been documented in over a 5,000 year time span, thus leading to the logical conclusion that coca left in its natural form causes no addictive properties at all.’

Interestingly, when I googled coca, I got 360 million results – all ten on the first page and 7 out of 10 on the second page referring to Coca Cola! The big problem with coca, of course, is that its active ingredient can be extracted and sold, as cocaine, to serious drug-users, especially in the United States. Isolation of the crucial molecule in 1898 is attributed to a German scientist, Richard Willstatter, who was subsequently awarded the Nobel Prize for Chemistry. While having some limited medical value as an anaesthetic, cocaine’s major use in those early years was apparently to increase the productivity of African American workers, giving them increased stamina and a resistance to extremes of heat and cold.

These days, however, usage has spread to wealthier sectors of Western societies. It is the second most popular illegal recreational substance in the USA, having acquired a reputation as a rich man’s drug – the business is said to have a street value exceeding the revenue of Starbucks. Understandably, then, the United States government is keen to cut off the trade at its source. Unfortunately, with the collapse of the Bolivian economy in the 1980s and the consequent rise in unemployment, profits to be made in exporting the product led to the establishment of coca as an important cash crop. Another example of unintended consequences resulting from meddling in the affairs of foreign states.

So, what is a Bolivian President to do? Clearly the chewing of coca leaf is a relatively innocuous cultural tradition of many of his voters. Equally clearly, imposing a total ban on growing the stuff will have undesirable economic and political consequences. The only long-term solution would seem to be controlling the local market, and developing the country’s economy to improve the conditions of the 53 percent of the population currently subsisting below the poverty line. Probably we should all be wishing him luck – but I suspect not everyone is. Nevertheless, from what I’ve been reading, Bolivia has a longish history of producing nationalist leaders capable of giving foreign interests a run for their money.

Original Tupac Amaru

Rap music arrived in the world too late to get much of a hold on my musical taste buds – but as a teacher of young adults I’ve had some very peripheral contact – at least enough to have heard of Tupac Shakur, if only as a bad boy who was killed in a drive-by shooting in 1996. I was surprised to learn, then, that he is one of the best-selling music artists of all time – and that he took his name from the 18^th century leader of an indigenous uprising against Spanish rule in what later became Bolivia. At that time, the rebellion was unsuccessful, and the Spanish took their revenge in the brutal manner popular with colonial powers.

That original Tupac, however, undoubtedly paved the way for the successful struggle, a few years later, of Simon Bolivar, whose triumph over Spanish forces led to the first union of independent nations in South America. At that time most of the present Latin American countries did not exist as separate entities, so Bolivar is seen as a key figure in the emergence of Venezuela, Colombia, Panama, Ecuador, Peru, as well as Bolivia itself.

I wrote a previous post on the subject of benevolent dictators where I examined the legacy of Turkey’s Mustafa Kemal Atatürk. A key theme of that post was the esteem bordering on idolatry that citizens of modern Turkey hold for the founder of their republic – leading to the question of what other leaders occupy a comparable place in the hearts of their people. Well, according to Wikipedia, busts or statues of Simon Bolivar are about as preponderant in towns and cities of Latin America as are those of Atatürk in Turkey. Bolivia, of course, and, news to me, the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela are named after him, as are the currencies of both countries. More surprisingly, there are also statues to be found in Paris, New York City, Ottawa and two small towns in Missouri and Italy. At least four towns in the United States are apparently named for Bolivar, as was a ballistic missile submarine of the US Navy. Ankara, New Delhi and Cairo have, respectively, a street, a road and a square named after him. Even Spain, despite losing the jewels in their imperial crown as a result of his activities, boasts a couple of monuments in his honour – and an extra-terrestrial rock in the asteroid belt is officially known as 712 Boliviana.

So go for it, Señor Morales. Left-handers of the world are with you!

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[1] These coffee pots are now available in a left-handed version

[2] of mixed native American and European descent – not highly thought of by the 15% white minority

YouTube’s back in Turkey!

Well, I’m not a big YouTube user – to my shame I have never actually uploaded any video content – but I did miss it while it was unavailable. It had happened once before, some years ago, and a younger, more technologically savvy colleague gave me directions to a site that was able to bypass the blockage. As one might have expected, the government was on to that this time around, so the bypass no longer worked. Still, I’m guessing the younger generation in Turkey weren’t unduly disturbed by the ban, except as a matter of democratic principle.

Anyway, I’m delighted to see YouTube up and running again. It’s a marvellous resource, and a further indication of how the Internet and social media have changed our lives in ways that we could scarcely have imagined in that distant 20^th century.

The blocking of YouTube (and, I understand, Twitter, though to my greater shame, I haven’t got into that at all) did, however, get me thinking about larger issues to do with social media, the Internet and the big question of censorship.

Much was made in Western news media of the role played by social media in events collectively referred to as The Arab Spring that began in Tunisia in December 2010 and spread rapidly to Egypt, Libya, Syria, Bahrain, Yemen and other Islamic states. The anarchy of the Internet was credited with empowering a switched-on younger generation to achieve greater political awareness and organize themselves in numbers sufficient to overthrow despotic regimes.

Sad to say, a return to military rule in Egypt and the disastrous ongoing civil war in Syria have taken the gloss somewhat off that brave new vernal world of ‘liberty’ and ‘equality’ – and as for ‘brotherhood’, that seems to have become a dirty word rendering further analysis unnecessary. Those much-vaunted social media, it seems, have their limitations when it comes to producing meaningful long-term political change.

Nevertheless, it’s disturbing when governments use their powers to censor our activities. We have come to depend on the Internet and social media so much in our daily lives that it’s hard to imagine a time when people lived in relative contentment without them. It was natural for people in Turkey to feel angry when their government blocked access to YouTube and Twitter. Some are also complaining that the same government is taking measures to control the sale and consumption of alcohol in public places, and to limit the display of naked female flesh on roadside advertising.

Now I have to tell you, I have mixed feelings about these issues. I confess I enjoy the occasional tipple of fermented and even spirituous liquors for relaxation and social purposes. I can appreciate the sight of a well-turned ankle as much as the next red-blooded male. On the other hand, I am well aware that my own homeland, New Zealand, and our near neighbor, Australia, not renowned either of them for alcoholic moderation, impose quite tight restrictions on the sale and consumption of such beverages. As an example, in Melbourne a couple of years ago, I went to Federation Square with my daughter and her partner to watch Australian Open tennis on the giant screen. One would expect a typical Aussie to enjoy a frosty VB or Fosters on such an occasion – but eagle-eyed private security boys were circulating to ensure that they did not.

I can also say that, despite the importance given to eye-catching advertising in subways and other public places in Auckland, Sydney, London and New York, I don’t recall seeing large-size posters of fetching young lasses clad in skimpy underwear or bikinis, of the kind that are commonplace on the streets of Istanbul. Not sure if there’s a law against it – it just doesn’t seem to be the done thing.

Which brings me to the question of censorship – and I have to tell you, I’m against it, as a matter of principle, as, I suspect, are most modern, broad-minded, right-thinking adults in Western societies. At the same time, I can understand why some people feel there should be some control over the dissemination of child pornography, and material depicting actual physical abuse. I have some sympathy for the argument that says children under a certain age should not be exposed to visual material deemed to be ‘adult’ in nature. Google and YouTube actually include such restrictions as part of company policy.

So we have a paradoxical situation here: a conflict between theory and practice which is not easy to resolve. If we accept that some measure of censorship is socially desirable, the question shifts to one of where we will draw the line – and who will have authority to draw it. Again, few of us have confidence in the willingness of private enterprise to regulate its own activities, so in the end, most of us would reluctantly accept that governments have a necessary role to play.

But now, of course, we have given a dangerous power to politicians who, as we suspect, are not always driven by an altruistic concern for the welfare of their people. In the end, those of us fortunate enough to live in democracies have the power of the ballot box where we can call elected governments to account. Between elections, we have the responsibility of participating in the democratic process by joining pressure groups, working for social change though NGOs, even taking to the streets in protest.

I have written elsewhere on the complex nature of democracy. Most writers on the subject agree that there is a continuum from one extreme of absolute slavery to the other of absolute individual freedom – and most countries lie somewhere on the line between. In fact there may even be several components of democracy, such as press freedom, representative electoral systems, separation of church and state, limitations on corporate power, for example, and countries may be ahead in some while lagging behind in others.

The United States and Europe, for example, place, as far as I am aware, no restrictions on the use of social media such as Twitter and YouTube, and some of their political leaders have been outspoken in their criticism of the Turkish Government for doing so.

On the other hand, they seem to see no contradiction between their position on this matter, and what some might see as a greater danger – their willingness to persecute individuals who use the power of the Internet to question the activities of governments and corporations. I’m thinking here of Wikileaks founder Julian Assange – still, as far as I know, holed up in the Ecuadorean Embassy in London, threatened with deportation if he emerges; Edward Snowden, epic whistleblower stripped of his US passport and similarly unable to leave Russia; Bradley (now Chelsea) Manning, sentenced to 35 years in prison for leaking information many of us think we had a right, even a need, to know. I wouldn’t put New Zealand’s very own Kim Dotcom in the same league as those guys, but nevertheless, I appreciate the light he is shining on the shenanigans of politicians downunder.

What is important, in my opinion, is the responsibility we all have to speak out against corruption and injustice wherever we see it, although doing so will not necessarily win us friends and public acclaim. Our voice of protest, however, will possess greater credibility if we nail our colours to the mast, rather than maintain a safe electronic distance via social media on the Internet. For me, the greatest figures of history are those who were willing to sacrifice personal comfort, even life itself, to achieve a greater social goal:

Not everyone will thank you
for wanting to change the world

Mahatma Gandhi in India, whose 32-year struggle brought no personal wealth, ending in his own assassination – but resulted in independence for his people.

Jesus of Nazareth, who challenged the establishment of his time in unacceptable ways, knowing that they would kill him for it in a most unpleasant way.

Even Turkey’s own Mustafa Kemal Atatürk. Despite widespread public adulation, he assuredly faced opposition from vested interests in his own lifetime – and denied himself the important Turkish dreams of family and dynastic succession for the greater goal of building a nation.

And to be fair, that’s why I don’t rank Mr ‘Megaupload’ Dotcom with that other triumvirate of Internet heroes. I’m not convinced there is quite the same spirit of self-sacrifice underlying his actions.

Well, YouTube is back, and I’m happy. I would, however, make a plea to armchair political activists wishing to bring down the Turkish Government. By all means express your views, but at the same time show a little consideration for your fellow citizens who enjoy using Facebook, Twitter and YouTube for less controversial purposes.

International Hypocrisy – What about Egypt or your own backyard, Mr Gauck?

To be fair, international media didn’t seem to pay much attention to it. Even the German press seemed to have more important things on its collective mind – which may be understandable given that the role of President is largely ceremonial there, as it is in Turkey.

German President speaking at METU -
a diplomatic faux-pas?

Nevertheless, the visit of German Federal President Joachim Gauck generated some heat in our local media. Normally you would expect such a visit to focus largely on PR activities and photo ops. You’d dine with your Turkish counterpart, open a bi-national university (which, to be fair, he did), utter warm fuzzy words in public about long-standing friendship and hopes for positive cooperation in the future – and save any criticism for meetings behind closed doors.

But no. Apparently Mr Gauck had his agenda mapped out (as you would expect) before touching down in Ankara. English language news outlets in Germany say that, ‘according to the German president's office the rule of law and fundamental rights will be at the heart of the four-day trip . . . Gauck intends to talk about freedom of the press and freedom of expression.’

Well, given that Germany and France are the two main opponents of Turkey’s admission to the European Union, it’s probably to be expected that the German President would raise those issues. And so he did. In a joint press conference with Turkey’s President Abdullah Gül on April 28, Gauck posed questions about the Turkish government’s intervention in the judicial process and the blocking of access to Twitter and YouTube. Not surprisingly, he didn’t receive anything resembling an explanatory answer. Gül’s response was to mention attacks by ultra-nationalist groups on Turkish residents in Germany, to imply that all countries have issues with democracy, and to suggest that the important thing was for governments to address these issues in a positive way.

That might have been the end of the matter, except that the German President subsequently made a speech at Ankara’s Middle East Technical University, scene of ongoing anti-government protests over the past year. In what some might see as an unnecessarily inflammatory address, Glauck spoke of ‘voices of disappointment, bitterness and outrage at a style of leadership which many see as a risk to democracy.’ He went on to say that ‘he was shocked by the government's attempts to stamp out street protests and clamp down on the media.’ I don’t know what word Mr Gauck used in German (I assume he was speaking German), but one English language Turkish daily reported that he had said ‘these developments terrify me.’

Turkey’s Prime Minister was characteristically less tactful than his presidential colleague. He was quoted as saying that Mr Gauck should probably keep his opinions on such matters to himself, and that he took a dim view of outsiders interfering in his country’s domestic affairs. In typically abrasive fashion, Mr Erdoğan implied that the former Lutheran pastor was perhaps more accustomed to preaching, and could be having trouble adjusting to his new role as a statesman. You might indeed wonder how US politicians would have viewed the matter if a visiting dignitary from Turkey had made a speech expressing solidarity with ‘Occupy Wall St’ protesters in Zuccotti Park, or how UK parliamentarians would have reacted had Mr Gül sided with rioters in London in late 2011. It’s just not the done thing, as my Grandma Jessie used to say.

Mr Erdoğan went on to question the commitment of Western leaders to democracy when they seemed to be maintaining a determined silence over actions of the military government in Egypt, and I have to say, I’m curious about that too.

News media and politicians in the West were ecstatic when, towards the end of 2010, apparently spontaneous popular movements broke out across the Arab world leading to the overthrow of several manifestly dictatorial regimes. Eighteen days of mass protests in Egypt led to the resignation of President Hosni Mubarak after a 29-year rule under state of emergency regulations. In what was generally accepted as a democratic election, Mohammed Morsi’s Freedom and Justice Party emerged victorious and he became the new president. Morsi, however, only managed one year in office before being deposed by military intervention in June 2013.

Since then, repression of Morsi’s supporters has become increasingly harsh. The so-called Muslim Brotherhood has been declared a terrorist organization, and, in two separate trials, more than 1,200 alleged members have been sentenced to death.

Families of condemned protesters weep in Egypt

In recent weeks, residents of Istanbul have seen US warships steaming through the Bosporus Straits on their way to rattle sabres in the Black Sea in response to the Russian government’s activities in Ukraine. In contrast, the US government and its European allies have been twisting their vocal chords in gymnastic contortions trying to call the military coup in Egypt anything but what it actually was – and maintained a commendably non-interventionist position as the regime killed 1,400 protesting citizens and now condemns a similar number to death with barely a nod in the direction of judicial process.

The CIA website informs me that Egypt has an estimated population of 86,895,099, of whom 90% are Muslims. The country’s ‘constitution’, however, forbids religious involvement in politics – and this seems to be the main justification for the military crackdown. At the same time, Germany lays claim to the democratic high ground while having a President who is a former Lutheran minister, despite nearly 40% of their people not being Christian. I’m not even going to mention the ‘United’ Kingdom of Great Britain, whose Head of State is also head of the state religion – because they’re Christian and so it’s ok. As for born-again George Dubya and his Roman Catholic convert poodle Tony Blah . . .

What the CIA website does not say (but Wikipedia does) is that Egypt has one of the largest armed forces in the world. It has a major arms industry manufacturing equipment under licence from the USA, France and Britain. It has its own spy satellite and the largest navy in Africa, the Middle East and the Arab World. Most of this has been financed by aid from the United States of America, which has reputedly contributed on average $2 billion per year since 1979.

Egypt was one of the early opponents of the new state of Israel when it was founded in 1948. Egypt’s government and people were bitterly opposed to the establishment of Israel, and fought several unsuccessful wars against it. Since 1979, however, successive Egyptian governments, probably against the wishes of most of their people, have adopted a more peaceful stance, established diplomatic relations and even performed a mediating role in Israeli-Palestinian negotiations. Any connection with the provision of that American aid, I wonder?

Most of that period passed under the rule of President Mubarak who came to power in 1981 after the assassination of Anwar Sadat. Mubarak was apparently wounded in the hand during the assassination, though none of my sources made it clear that the wound was sustained in self-sacrificing defence of his president. Sadat’s nephew Talaat spent a year in prison for suggesting that his uncle’s killing had been the result of an international conspiracy involving the United States, Israel and the Egyptian military. Mubarak was ‘elected’ and ‘re-elected’ four times by ‘referendum’, in three of which there was no alternative candidate.

In spite of widespread poverty and serious wealth disparities, and major concerns expressed by Amnesty International and other human rights groups about political censorship, police brutality, arbitrary detention, torture and restrictions on freedom of speech and assembly, Egypt’s GDP increased significantly during the Mubarak years. Apart from the military aid, it seems that the US and its European allies made other financial contributions as well. Gratitude for Egypt’s participation in Bush the Father’s 1991 Gulf War apparently took the form of major assistance, reputed to have been around $500,000 per soldier provided. In addition, it is said that America, the Arab States of the Persian Gulf, and Europe, forgave Egypt around $14 billion of debt.

What happened after Mubarak resigned, and Mohammed Morsi was elected in the first democratic elections since . . .  ever? The economy suffered a major reverse, ‘popular’ unrest manifested itself in political demonstrations, and the army stepped in to ‘restore order’. The subsequent unrest has been portrayed as Islamic fundamentalism and terrorism, and viciously suppressed. I would like to be persuaded that I am being overly cynical here, but I have a bad feeling our Western leaders are less interested in the spread of democracy than they would have us believe.

German police dealing with Blockupy demonstrators
in Stuttgart

I freely confess I am annoyed about the continued inaccessibility of You Tube in Turkey – and I feel government taxes on petrol and alcohol could be a little less swingeing. At the same time, I have to say I am not unhappy to see a political leader of a major European state taken to task for hypocrisy. If you’re going to dish it out, you’d better be prepared to take it. Joachim Gauck’s freedom-fighting credentials apparently trace back to younger days in East Germany before reunification. Two points need to be made here. The first is that no reasonable comparison can be made between the Soviet era German Democratic Republic and the modern Republic of Turkey. Does Mr Gauck imagine he would have been allowed to deliver such an address on a radicalised university campus in such a state? The second is that police in Germany have shown themselves in recent years just as capable as their Turkish counterparts of suppressing the right to assembly with water cannons, gas and physical violence.

Signs of Germany’s unsavoury history of racist violence still lurk not far beneath the surface. Anti-Turk and anti-Islamic violence, right-wing demonstrations against immigrant communities, and aspiring politicians using nationalist rhetoric to advance their careers seem a recurring feature of the political landscape. One such politician is Thilo Sarrazin, a former banker with well-publicised negative views on Muslim communities in Germany. Our Joachim Gauck is apparently on record as having expressed admiration for Herr Sarrazin’s outspoken opinions. Both gentlemen espouse free-market views on finance and economics, and had little sympathy for German supporters of the ‘Occupy’ movement two years ago.

On another related issue, I was somewhat amused to see that PM Erdoğan is asking the United States to extradite ex-patriate Turkish Muslim cleric Fethullah Gülen to answer charges of conspiring to bring down the government. I have no idea whether those charges have any foundation or not, but I’m as close to stone-cold certain as I can be that we will not be seeing Mr Gülen in Turkey any time soon. The US is very keen to get hold of Julian Assange and Edward Snowden for very similar reasons, and they are not at all happy that the governments of Ecuador and Russia are obstructing them – but I can’t see them sending the Pennsylvania Hodja back to Turkey. The New Zealand government would have been only to happy to hand over Kim Dotcom to US legal processes, but the guy is rich enough and smart enough to have kept himself out of harm’s way so far. Interestingly, two of those three are not even US citizens – which doesn’t seem to worry the Americans much in their pursuit of ‘justice’.

Edward Snowden and Abdullah Gül - Influencing the world!

Amidst the doom, gloom and despondency that seems to fill a large part of the news media's daily output, it is  occasionally reassuring to see some glimmer of hope for a positive future. I was delighted to see that Time magazine has included Edward Snowden among its 'Pioneers' in its latest list of the World's 100 Most Influential People. Also on the list is Abdullah Gül, President of Turkey - though sad to say, not Julian Assange, whom the world seems to have forgotten about. I assume he is still holed out in the Ecuadorean Embassy in London. Time magazine and Rafael Correa - brothers-in-arms in the fight for freedom!?

Edward Snowden

By Daniel Domscheit-Berg

The renegade in exile

Edward Snowden’s story is one of choices. He is said to be a computer genius, but he has chosen to do what is right rather than what will enrich him, and he has chosen to do what is right rather than what is lawful. Showing a sense of great responsibility, he has exposed a global system of surveillance whose sheer dimensions are unfathomable.

This system threatens the very foundation of individual freedom throughout the world. And it threatens the basis upon which our democracies are built. Cynically, it does so by undermining and exploiting the very tools of communication and sharing that are meant to enable, engage and enrich us.

Snowden has given us a window of opportunity in which to make an informed, self-determined choice about this system. Our responsibility is to make sure it will not be the last choice we make. We must not waste time—for his sake, for ours and for the sake of our children. Our future is at stake.

(Domscheit-Berg, a German technology activist, is a former spokesman for WikiLeaks)

Social Networks are not always about Democracy

I don't read Time Magazine much these days. My subscription ran out and they forgot to remind me, so after I shudder to think how many years, I no longer have that venerable weekly delivered to my letterbox. Fortunately, I assume from gratitude for my long years of loyalty, they send me regularly a brief summary of what's going on in the world (according to them at least). 

That was then - this is now

I had seen this one reported in our local Turkish daily, but you may like to check the English version:

Report: U.S. Officials Created a ‘Cuban Twitter’ to Overthrow Castro

Washington covertly made ZunZuneo, Cuban slang for a hummingbird's tweet, to woo mobile users with news stories. Once the platform's audience would balloon, the supposed—and failed—goal was to flood it with “content aimed at inspiring Cubans to organize ‘smart mobs'

Fifty-three years after the C.I.A. failed to overthrow Fidel Castro’s government with a group of armed Cuban exiles at the Bay of Pigs, the U.S. government is still trying to dislodge the Caribbean island’s communist regime, according to a new report.

The Associated Press, citing documents and people involved in the project, reports the U.S. government has been working covert backchannels with aid agencies funneling money through front companies for years to create a social media platform designed to “renegotiate the balance of power between the state and society.” Read more