gimme culture

What would happen if the UK decided to spend less on arms and imperial misconceptions? Could the money, the trillions, not be used to support education, health, sustainable energy? Surely with all the other big players in the world the US, China, Russia - Britain would do well to stand out of the way, our power is ineffectual and mostly for appearances.

JT gets us thinking about our Imperial Hangover, the shadow that moves the nation and its political leaders like fools.

jeremy taylor: Imperial hangover

“In fact, Britain has long been a second-rank player. It has no business retaining independent nuclear weapons (to use against who?) or renewing its Trident nuclear submarines; it has no business occupying a permanent Security Council seat when countries like Germany, Japan, India and Brazil don’t have one; its remaining colonies like the Falkland Islands (and several Caribbean countries — the Caymans, Turks and Caicos, Anguilla, British Virgin Islands, Montserrat) should long ago have been divested and set up on their own two feet. Britain should be wholly engaged in Europe and the EU, not pretending to be an equal “ally” (i.e. field slave) of the United States.

And the irony is that the “New Labour” government of Tony Blair has been just as gung-ho about this neo-imperialism as Anthony Eden and Margaret Thatcher put together. And even more deceitful.”

I never knew Lloyd Best in the flesh, only ever had the pleasure of his ideas, which in themselves were gift enough. In the ‘Western intellectual canon’ its easy to pick out personal heroes, growing up in London, being schooled there and sharing the ideas of a tradition well and truly engrained in the British academy i never learnt about people such as Best and George John, people outside of this ‘Western canon,’ but people who forged there own equally great line of thought. It was later in my adult life while living in Trinidad when i noted all those Caribbean people i admired, my friends, collegues, family – all adored Best, all spoke with such passion about his ideas, his influence, about his vision of the Caribbean and Trinidad. A vision not just for today or the recent past but also about the possible futures, both good and bad to come. My mother and my aunt were liming partners of Best and can tell a story or three about the intellectual battles they had. My editors and creative influences worked and learned alongside him. i knew i wanted to interview him, or rather just have a conversation for my PhD topic, and i always knew the time was running out. Just this Christmas and the summer before it too i regretfully failed to make the time. In my dissertation work i try to speak using many voices, dialogism as it is called, and one strong booming voice in that plentude of voices - a voice that tells me about creating new political entities in Trinidad, about how to develop the cultural gift of pan, about the economic future, about Trinidad and its people and about so much more, is Lloyd Best. A man whose ideas give me and my work a Caribbean life and space to built from, but who in life i never had the pleasure to meet. Ideas though can live forever, and i guess that means the power of the person can too.

George Lamming on Best

“With the passing of Lloyd Best an irreplaceable light has been put out. Lloyd and I shared a friendship which survived the sharpest of disagreements, but each disagreement deepened my respect for his integrity.

For more than 40 years he put his formidable intellect in the service of one singular cause - independent thought and Caribbean freedom. there was no corner of this archipelago which escaped his political concern, and his politics was the name of an intellectual culture. Best fought to the very end to help us dismantle the imperial boundaries we inherited. We failed because we do not recognise the difference between politics and government; and dare not see our mimicking of a Westminster model as the greatest obstacle to genuine representation.

To find a language of our own creation that would define the Caribbean collective experience was the gospel he preached.”

trinidad express piece

From the chronicle of higher education:

“American military and intelligence agencies have increasingly been turning to anthropologists and other social scientists for “cultural knowledge” about actual and potential adversaries. But many anthropologists are deeply anxious about offering such assistance, fearing, among other things, that their insights might be used simply to help torture and kill people more effectively…

all anthropologists might come under suspicion if some anthropologists were known to be employees of national-security agencies. All scholars doing fieldwork in certain countries might find it more difficult to develop relationships with people who provide cultural information, and they might all be at higher risk of being arrested for espionage.”

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“Something remarkable is going on in a Miami courtroom. The cruel methods US interrogators have used since September 11 to “break” prisoners are finally being put on trial. This was not supposed to happen. The Bush administration’s plan was to put José Padilla on trial for allegedly being part of a network linked to international terrorists. But Padilla’s lawyers are arguing that he is not fit to stand trial because he has been driven insane by the government.

Arrested in May 2002 at Chicago’s O’Hare airport, Padilla, a Brooklyn-born former gang member, was classified as an “enemy combatant” and taken to a navy prison in Charleston, South Carolina. He was kept in a cell 9ft by 7ft, with no natural light, no clock and no calendar. Whenever Padilla left the cell, he was shackled and suited in heavy goggles and headphones. Padilla was kept under these conditions for 1,307 days. He was forbidden contact with anyone but his interrogators, who punctured the extreme sensory deprivation with sensory overload, blasting him with harsh lights and pounding sounds. Padilla also says he was injected with a “truth serum”, a substance his lawyers believe was LSD or PCP.”

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“Cricket is an art, a means of national expression. Voltaire says that no one is so boring as the man who insists on saying everything. I have said enough. But I believe I owe it to the many who did not see the Edgbaston innings to say what I thought it showed of the directions that, once freed, the West Indies might take. The West Indies in my view embody more sharply than elsewhere Nietzche’s conflict between the ebullience of Dionysus and the discipline of Apollo. Kanhai’s going crazy might seem to be Dionysus in us breaking loose. It was absent from Edgbaston. Instead the phrases which go nearest to expressing what I saw and have reflected upon are those of Lytton Strachey on French Literature: ‘(the) mingled distinction, gaiety and grace which is one of the unique products of the mature poetical genius of France.’

Distinction, gaiety, grace. Virtues of the ancient Eastern Mediterranean, city-states, islands, the sea, and the sun. Long before Edgbaston I had been thinking that way. Maybe I saw only what I was looking for. Maybe.”

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“The first man who, having enclosed a piece of land, thought of saying ‘This is mine’ and found people simple enough to believe him, was the true founder of civil society. How many crimes, wars, murders; how much misery and horror the human race would have been spared if someone had pulled up the stakes and filled in the ditch and cried out to his fellow men: ‘Beware of listening to this imposter. Youare lost if you forget that the fruits of the earth belong to everyone and that the earth itself belongs to no one!”

Jean-Jacques Rousseau