Enda O’Doherty writes: The 27th European Meeting of Cultural Journals is to take place in Gdańsk in Poland this weekend. The theme for the gathering, fittingly for such a venue, is solidarity ‑ have we lost it, can we get it back? ‑ we, of course, in this case being Europe.

Gdańsk is the spiritual home of the Polish trade union-cum-political movement Solidarnośc, which fought a long battle, both openly and underground, for democracy in Poland, a battle that was finally successful in 1989.

Words of course do not always translate neatly, in spite of obvious connections. Solidarnośc may not exactly be French solidarité, Italian solidarietà or English solidarity. The Germans, quite unusually, do not use a word from their own linguistic resources and are content with Solidarität, but can we be sure that these words mean the same thing in different languages or carry the same connotations?

I grew up in a very political milieu in Northern Ireland but the key words of our discourse as teenage activists and participants in political activity which – for want of anywhere else to go – took place chiefly on the streets were “rights” and “justice”, important concepts for a community that felt itself to be excluded and looked down upon. Solidarity was not a word I heard very much until, in the mid-1970s, as a young man, I worked in Paris and found myself fairly briefly, but quite intoxicatingly, participating in grassroots trade unionism through membership of the communist union the CGT (Conféderation Génerale de Travail).

The point, I think, is that while justice might be the rallying point for an oppressed group (either a minority or a majority) which is just beginning to organise and “raise consciousness”, solidarity is a concept which is of more use to an already coherent group which has some experience of what the far left likes to call “struggle” (or lutte or lotta) under its belt. Though it is a word that was to be much abused by empty rhetoricians, at its most basic level solidarity is an extremely important element of the resources of any campaigning group facing an opposing repressive power, and perhaps particularly important for a trade union. It is to be expected that they (oni, as they say in Poland) will try to grind you down, demoralise you, divide you, even terrorise you. In reponse to this you are SOLID. You support each other, both in moral and practical ways. This is what kept Solidarnośc together in the 1980s in spite of a huge effort by the police state to infiltrate and suppress it. It is not a fancy story of heroism. We are not all heroes. But we can, in a mutual organisation, help each other to be as strong as we are capable of being and also perhaps find it in our hearts to forgive, or at least understand, those who are less strong.

A secondary meaning of solidarity, though it was perhaps the most common one in Western Europe in that tawdry decade the 1980s, conveyed a mental gesture, a genuflection, towards something one approved of (or wished to be seen as approving of) but which existed in a different world over which one had really no influence whatsoever. Thus, one could scarcely attend any political meeting (of the left, that is; the right didn’t bother with meetings) in the 1980s without being asked to support a “motion of solidarity” with, let us say, the Sandinista regime in Nicaragua (the phrase used, of course, was “the people of Nicaragua”). The practical aspects of this solidarity occasionally extended to buying coffee. There were also the miners in Britain, who were endlessly proffered solidarity at events all across the British Isles, but to no avail as Mrs Thatcher and her government ground them into non-existence.

Interestingly, the most advanced sections of the left in Ireland did not feel any solidarity with Solidarnośc: the movement quite clearly had the full support of the Polish Catholic church, a reactionary outfit there, as everywhere else, many thought; Solidarnośc was also confronting socialist (that is communist) power and, as likely as not, was being helped by Western security services. There was of course strong evidence that most Polish people supported the organisation, but as the far left has ample reason to know, the people can often be quite seriously mistaken.

Moving from historical notions of what solidarity might mean to current ones, it strikes me that there are three main areas of concern and three to some extent distinct meanings of the word. Will we have solidarity within our individual national societies? That is, will we take care of all of our citizens, including those who cannot take care of themselves and those who have, to use a biblical phrase, fallen by the wayside in our rush to modernisation, competitiveness and “best practice”? Secondly, can there be solidarity and sweet reasonableness between the twenty-eight (soon to be twenty-seven) rather various members of the EU? Thirdly, do we have enough solidarity to accept refugees from distressed areas not in Europe but relatively near it – Syria, Libya, Eritrea, Saharan Africa?

In the first sense of the word, I would argue that solidarity cannot simply be wished into existence. Nor can people who seem to have it in their bones somehow magic it into society (the entity, let us remember, that Mrs Thatcher said did not exist). In a liberal democracy, solidarity is a proposition, and individual self-interest is another. In the last general election in the United Kingdom, the political offer of the Labour Party under Ed Miliband’s leadership was a fairer Britain, a Britain in which poorer people would not be ground down or left behind in the rush to greater prosperity. The voters rejected this offer, re-electing, with a larger number of seats, the Conservative Party, whose mission is, as always, to advance the interests of the wealthy and powerful. The Labour Party membership’s response to this rebuff, after Miliband’s resignation, was to elect a more radical left-wing leader. The party is now between fourteen and seventeen points behind the Conservatives in opinion polls.

In spite of Ed Miliband’s defeat, it still seems to me that the best chance of facilitating solidarity in our individual societies is through the valorisation of the concepts of fairness and inclusion (and by spelling out clearly what this means in practical terms) rather than through proposing a radical restructuring of economy and society. There is very little evidence of any appetite for such a restructuring in a society as conservative as the United Kingdom – and not a great deal anywhere else in Europe either.

As regards solidarity between the member-states of the European Union, there is of course strong evidence that the ties that bind are increasingly frayed. Indeed in the case of our English (not quite British) friends they have snapped. In addition, many liberal and left-wing analysts have recently criticised actions of the governments of some of the accession countries of 2004 which are seen as undemocratic, illiberal or unEuropean. Such strictures have often been welcomed by liberal and left-wing activists in the countries concerned – chiefly Hungary and Poland – who regard them as a form of, well, solidarity. Others (including the present writer) have made the point that citizens of countries which host very successful right-wing populist parties (France, Britain, the Netherlands, Denmark, for example) should be a little wary of getting up on a moral high horse to condemn ideological aberrations in other (and poorer) countries. This position has something to recommend it, but there is a distinction to be made. While the presence of the populist right is undoubtedly an important political influence in states where it is not (yet) part of the governing majority, there is an important distinction to be made between, say, France, where the Front nationale is very strongly supported but is shunned by the left and a considerable part of the centre-right, and Poland and Hungary, where the nationalist right is in power and seems to be using that power to change the rules of democratic engagement and hobble its political adversaries.

This is a serious concern. The European Union is not just a project to promote economic liberalism (a doctrine whose benefits to its citizens have been, in its most recent phase, at best mixed). It is also a union firmly based on political liberalism, and if it does not vigorously defend encroachments on that article of faith (by imposing sanctions on offenders) it seriously risks losing credibility. In the 1950s, “Europe” was an idealistic project; and for some people – just about and to some degree – it still is: man doth not live by competitiveness alone.

As regards what I have called the third aspect of solidarity – Europe’s response to the violent shocks and ensuing large movements of people that can happen on its much poorer periphery – perhaps it is the case that the various meanings of the word are like the ripples we see when we throw a stone into a pond, the outer concentric circles each appearing progressively weaker and fainter than the inner ones. Though it cannot absolutely be taken for granted, it is not so difficult to create and maintain a sense of purpose and coherence in a group which has much in common, politically and culturally, and this may be particularly the case when that group faces an external threat. If the ties that bind are perceived as being less natural and organic and as emanating more from “an elite project”, as in the case of the EU, then it may well be the responsibility of those elites to persuade the demos that solidarity is not just a desideratum but an imperative if the project, and its known benefits, are to survive. Few of us, I think, believe that European elites have done anything like enough – or indeed have shown much energy or imagination – in this regard.

When it comes to the third ripple, we notice a further weakening of the more or less natural human response of solidarity. Here we may be dealing with people whose distress is evident but who, to many if not all of us, seem strange and different and – an equal problem ‑ perhaps likely to remain so if they settle in our society. If, however, the international community – or the sub-section of it to which we belong in Europe – has decided that it will act to alleviate the distress of refugees and accept numbers of them into individual states, each according to its resources and ability rather than its inclination, it should not be permissible for any state to say “Yes, we will accept a thousand people, but only if they are not Muslims.” That is neither a European position nor indeed a Christian one, and it should not be tolerated in the European Union.

Perhaps when it comes to a willingness to help those whom we may perceive to be very different from ourselves, the idea of solidarity becomes stretched and the Christian idea of caritas (charity) is more appropriate. It is worth remembering that in the New Testament, a book or collection of books thoroughly imbued with impractical and counter-intuitive notions, it is the other, the Samaritan, who comes to the aid of the injured Jew whom his fellows have ignored. Christianity is, of course, as much a part of the heritage of the European Union as liberalism, though the ideas of hospitality and offering aid to the stranger extend well beyond that creed: for the nineteenth century medical reformer Rudoph Virchow, an agnostic, the point in human history where strangers were first offered hospitality and safety was the point at which civilisation began. I would like to think that Europe – more so perhaps than some equally wealthy or powerful parts of the world – is a place where civilisation is still highly valued.

3/11/2016

For Philip Larkin, life began to change in a rather major way around 1963. I’d put it a bit later than that for provincial Ireland, and of course things were regionally differentiated in Britain too, with those particularly anxious to lead lives with –in our elders’ phrase– “no morals” heading for London as fast as they could. By the mid- to late sixties we’d all heard of the Liverpool scene, and of course there’d also been, a few years earlier, laying down a new socio-cultural background, the appearance of a new kind of film and drama, social realism, some called it; others kitchen sink drama. We had Saturday Night and Sunday Morning (1960) with Albert Finney, A Taste of Honey (1961), with Rita Tushingham and Dora Bryan, and Billy Liar (1963), with Tom Courtenay, among others.

John Mills, Kenneth More, even Dirk Bogarde, the stars who filled the picture houses during the 1950s, all talked in a certain way – the same way, that is, that David Niven and Trevor Howard had talked a generation earlier: properly. Finney (born Salford), Courtenay (born Hull), and Tushingham and Bryan (Lancashire lassies both) didn’t, sticking, for the most part, to the local accents of where they’d been brought up. Soon a handful of talented and hungry types from the English North began to make it in London medialand, a phenomenon which was only to gather pace over the next twenty years. The hugely successful Michael Parkinson (born near Barnsley) first appeared on television in 1971, but for a good few years before this a variety of lads and lasses who wouldn’t have got past the door of Broadcasting House in 1959 had been softening up the southern audiences. Mind you, a bit of eeh ba gum had always been all right in its place: didn’t everyone love George Formby? But quite soon it was OK out of its place too, even, in due course, in the upper middlebrow sphere of arts programming, with the arrival of the Cumbrian working class grammar school lad Melvyn Bragg, now Baron Bragg of Wigton.

It was in the middle of this period of great cultural change that my secondary school hit on the bright idea of teaching us how to speak proper. And since no one on the staff of the school at the time had any expertise in this difficult skill, someone was brought in. Bridget Keenan was a remarkable woman. She stood at around five feet, arrived each day in a Morris Minor, which she parked not in the teachers’ car park but in the place most convenient to her and nearest to where her classroom might be. She could frequently be seen between classes standing beside the car, left hand on hips and a cigarette in the right, puffing away, presumably to calm her nerves. We never actually saw those nerves in class: I am just guessing from the hugely intimidating nature of the task that she faced that she had them. She was the only female teacher out of a staff of about forty, and she was part-time, also putting in some hours in the equivalent Catholic girls’ grammar school, Thornhill College.

She came from somewhere in north Down, a prosperous part of Northern Ireland (“the Gold Coast”) that provides one of the few secure electoral homes for liberal unionism. As her name suggests, however, she was a Catholic – otherwise she wouldn’t have been teaching in our school. But she may well not have been a nationalist: that bit wasn’t compulsory.

With Miss Keenan’s help we learned to enunciate our vowels clearly and unashamedly:

Yeast, black treacle and wheatmeal are rich in vitamin B.

And to keep a tight rein on our consonants, even in the most difficult circumstances.

Are you copperbottoming those pots, my man?
No, I’m aluminiuming ’em, mum.

But did some of the exercises contain a hidden social justice, even Marxian, message?

‘The early bird catches the worm.’
This proverb always makes me squirm.
The early earthworm, stirring first,
Does not deserve to be so curst.

My favourite, however, was the following, an exercise to strengthen the proper enunciation of the long ‘a’ vowel. It has stood to me since at many a diplomatic party.

Father’s car is a Jaguar,
And Pa drives rather fast.
Castles, farms and draughty barns,
We go charging past.

Arthur’s cart is far less smart
And can’t go half as far.
But I’d rather ride in Arthur’s cart
Than in my Papa’s fast car.

What was the purpose of all these exercises? Were we actually supposed to start speaking like this (“like a fuckin’ Englishman”, as we might have said)? Well perhaps not. Such a radical change could not be expected. What Miss Keenan – and, one must assume, those who employed her, the reverend fathers of St Columb’s College – hoped for was that a little bit of it would rub off and that we might be not quite as uncouth as before. She also allowed us to act (speak) Shakespeare at considerable length, to test out our cocksure ideas on an audience of each other, to mimic the procedures of (BBC) radio and television discussion programmes, to speak out our opinions, which she seemed to think were valuable: at least she treated them as such. That she always looked just slightly amused was something we did not take offence at.

I have said that she may not have been a nationalist. This was a curious time, the (Terence) O’Neill era: the good captain, who was reaching a very tentative hand out towards Catholics, was about the only politician in Northern Ireland who himself spoke proper. Republicanism, in Derry at any rate, had no very large following and the early civil rights movement, which was to come along just a couple of years later, made great play initially with the slogan of “British rights for British citizens”, which was always roundly cheered at demonstrations. But that is to jump ahead a little.

Miss Keenan found herself frequently the butt of our self-righteous teenage anger, sometimes laced with a bit of class animus (and no doubt sexism too), particularly when she seemed to suggest that, if we (Catholics, that is) were to behave just a little bit better, be a little more civilised, they might see fit to admit us into their tennis clubs. I have no difficulty to this day grasping the disbelief and outrage with which this was greeted. Tennis clubs and the world of Miss Joan Hunter Dunn were indeed very far from our minds, but the idea that we might, if we were very good, be admitted there on sufferance was offensive. Yet I doubt if Miss Keenan was actually disliked by anyone. Her silly but engaging rhymes did not induce us to speak with posh accents, but we mimicked that accent endlessly, as young people do, to our own huge amusement, and as you can see, the words have stuck. She also contributed splendidly to that “bringing one out of oneself” thing that is so necessary for adolescents and whose effects are sometimes not felt until a little later on.

Most people, but perhaps particularly those who do a little writing later in life, remember a particular teacher fondly. Often it is an English teacher. I had one of those too, the late Peter Mullan, who came to us fairly fresh from Queen’s University and introduced us, aged seventeen, to twentieth century fiction by organising the mass buying of Penguin novels. He also, being a member of one of the organising bodies, the Derry Labour Party, rather gingerly invited a few of us to participate in a civil rights march on Saturday, October 5^th, 1968. That march was batoned by the RUC in front of British television cameras and the footage shown an hour or so later on the six o’clock news, thus beginning the slow process of realisation in London that the rotten borough of Unionist-dominated Northern Ireland could not be allowed to remain unchanged. I do indeed have a great fondness for the memory of Peter Mullan, and a few others, but for me the school laurels must go to Bridget Keenan, the most engaging, surprising, freshest and bravest teacher I ever had.

1/10/2016

Space to Think, an anthology bringing together more than fifty of the best pieces to have appeared in the Dublin Review of Books since its foundation ten years ago, will be published this month. Selling in the shops at €25, it is available now for pre-order at a special price of €20 (to collect in Dublin) or €20 + post and packing charges as appropriate for shipping to addresses in Ireland and internationally. To buy online, follow the steps from the home page of our website. One piece featured in Space to Think is this blog post from 2013 on the place of the ball in the world of Jane Austen. Here is an extract:

John Mullan, author of the splendid What Matters in Jane Austen, writes in The Guardian (May 4th) on the significance in her novels of dancing and balls in a piece written to link to a forthcoming BBC2 programme, Pride And Prejudice: Having a Ball.
“The ball,” he writes, “was the occasion for a couple to perform together in front of others. It was their opportunity for physical intimacy.” These things of course being relative: “They could not clinch each other or even touch each other’s flesh, yet they were brought closer than they could be on any other occasion.”
Of course the dance has long been a metaphor for sexual coupling, and not just the act itself but, in its elaborate rituals, its comings and goings, approaches and withdrawals, ins and outs, the prelude to the act (though of course at the time one doesn’t quite know, one cannot be quite sure, that one is engaged in the prelude to anything). Miss Austen was a great believer in what she calls “the felicities of rapid motion”. The main purpose of the dance, of course, was to pair off, not just for the evening ‑ still less for a quick snog round the back of the coachhouse ‑ but for life. This Jane did not succeed in doing, but that was down to bad luck rather than any lack of inclination. Still, as she was to find, if you are not to be a full participant in the business of courting, and marrying, and mothering, there are always the pleasures of the observer, and some of them can be enjoyed at the ball too.

Philip Raphael McCann writes: Like a monstrous corpse, Kathmandu lay sprawled out on the sandy earth. I was in a swarm of congested traffic: ten-year-old motorbikes; trucks, buses, minivans from the 1960s. I gasped in dust and gusts of thick black diesel fumes. I reached the red bridge north of the city an hour late for the environmental law specialist. I heard my name called in the cacophony of vehicle horns.

“LB Thapa”, as he dubs himself these days, straddled my bike and directed me along an oozy riverbank to a building in construction where his family occupies a bare room: two beds, planks stacked in an alcove, jars of water against the partly plastered wall. His standard of living is typical of those Nepalese lawyers “who won’t lie”, he told me as we removed our shoes in the dank staircase.

“Pollution in the Kathmandu Valley is like an earthquake every day, beyond an emergency,” is the forthright view of the high-profile public interest litigator, a man once notorious in the city and under death threat. “But there is no judicial enforcement, no redress for denied justice and corruption, no rule of law. So there can be no civic responsibility in Nepal. Look at it, collapsing all around us. Here it’s just – what the hell!”

I wouldn’t have guessed, sipping tea on a cement floor, that I was a guest of a member of the “caste of kings”. He is forty-eight but looks much older as he speaks proudly of his distant relationship to those who ruled in Nepal and India in former centuries. His wife, who follows our English from the edge of a pull-out bed, is, it seems, of the “business caste” beneath him and a Newari speaker. They both understand well the need for translation of official documents so that speakers of minority languages can understand and scrutinise how government institutions act, or more often fail to act. Tackling the environmental emergency is impossible, he explains, without an end to the overwhelming sense of public helplessness and this requires inclusion of all through official use of minority languages.

Nepal experienced a rare eruption of public violence when the issue of minority language rights was contested twenty years ago by Thapa himself. Government was taken aback by the strength of feeling on the issue and in 1996 Kathmandu’s mayor recognised other languages as official; regional government followed; soon taxpayers’ money poured in to fund a mountain of translation. Monday will be the first anniversary of the new Nepalese constitution, which allows for any language to be granted official status by a government authority.

In the country’s most notorious legal case, and the first to be reported daily in print, Thaba and five plaintiffs challenged at the supreme court the office of the mayor and local government across the country for acting unconstitutionally on the issue of language rights. At the time government had no jurisdiction to address this popular demand as the constitution provided for a single official language.

Nepal has had a long period of political instability, with governments rarely lasting longer than a few years, swings from democracy to monarchy and back again, massacres, states of emergency, political impasses. According to many, this heightens the importance of constitutional law, which endures. Conversely, the government’s arbitrary action on language status was unsatisfactory to Nepalese speakers, afraid of being dominated by loud minorities. The previous census report showed only 35 per cent of Newari speakers in the Kathmandu valley. Nor did minority language rights on an unconstitutional basis provide long-term protection for them. These fine points, however, were lost on vociferous crowds and this case marked the peak of Thapa’s life troubles.

The Young Taman Tigers Association, backed by the Communist Party, had already circulated pamphlets offering a 500,000 rupee reward for Lal Bahadur Thapa’s severed head for opposing their rights. Now it was too risky for him to continue fighting for environmental responsibility. He went into hiding, adopted his current moniker and gave up on the legal profession. “Anyway, I was tired proving government neglect to no avail. Finally when it did seem to act in the public interest, it did so illegally. It’s a cruel joke.”

It was getting late for me and I needed to return my motorbike to the rental store before it closed. Thapa rode with me in the rain shouting out directions. In our last few minutes together we strolled among crowds through Thamel, the grimy tourist area. This active Nepalese citizen who compelled the supreme court to clarify minority rights in a new constitution was clearly an anonymous man today, neither hunted nor revered.

28/9/2016

Nicholas Birch writes: Five days after Turkey’s failed coup, early on the morning of Wednesday June 20th, in Taksim, the Istanbul square that saw anti-government protests in 2013, the entire five-storey facade of the Ataturk Cultural Centre was hidden behind a banner which read “You devil’s dog Feto, we will hang you and your dogs by your own leashes.” The signature read “The brave young men of this holy nation”. The same day, the editor of the pro-government daily Yeni Şafak published a column arguing that “those who shot people in the streets and attacked the voice of the people, the Parliament, were acting on orders given by the US administration”. In a poll organised by another pro-government newspaper, 77 per cent of respondents expressed varying levels of agreement with him.

It is now clear that Turkey came close to regime change during the night of July 15^th/16th. If 1st Army Chief Ümit Dündar hadn’t got on the phone from Istanbul to warn him to get out, President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan might have been sitting in the hotel in the Aegean resort town of Marmaris when soldiers burst in looking for him. If the pilot of the jet flying him to Istanbul hadn’t had the presence of mind to pass himself off as a standard Turkish Airlines flight, he might have been shot down by two Turkish F16s which had the plane locked in their sights. If the minister of the interior had gone to a bogus emergency meeting called in Ankara late on July 15th, he might have met the same fate as one unfortunate senior civil servant who did go and was shot dead.

It is now also abundantly clear who Erdoğan and his followers blame for what happened that night. Feto, the devil’s dog on the banner in Taksim, is Fethullah Gülen, a charismatic preacher who has lived in exile in the United States since 1999. Over the weekend, Turkey filed a request to the US asking for his extradition. Gülen of course denies any involvement in the coup, hinting in an interview on Monday that Erdoğan organised it himself. The US ambassador to Turkey has also strongly rebuffed allegations of US involvement.

And it has to be said that it does all sound pretty far-fetched. Fethullah Gülen as “chief terrorist”? In the televised homilies he’s beamed out to followers from his retreat in Pennsylvania over the years, he comes across as a saintly old man. He is a diabetic, and he looks uncomfortable slumped in his pale brown armchair, hopping from one buttock to the other at the end of each extended harangue in florid, old-fashioned Turkish. His eyes, when they are not turned up rapturously like statues of the Virgin in Lourdes souvenir shops, fill easily with tears.

Yet it is not just Erdoğan and his supporters who see him as responsible for the attempted coup. Some impartial observers (as impartial as it is possible to be in a country as polarised as Turkey now is) do too. Writing for the online news portal T24, one of very few independent sources of news left, the former army officer and military expert Metin Gürcan has no doubt officers linked to Gülen “were the brains behind the night of 15 July”. His belief is that they probably intended to stage the coup later, but brought the date forward when it became clear that many of them faced imminent indictment by prosecutors investigating a military spy ring. The former head of military intelligence Ismail Hakkı Pekin, meanwhile, relates how, in 2013, the then chief of staff told him he had been given a list of around 1,250 officers allegedly linked to Gülen. When Pekin asked him why nothing was being done to sideline them, the chief of staff replied that evidence was not strong enough. “We’re afraid of making a mistake”, he said. “Let’s not damage the morale of the army.”

Some wider context here. When Erdoğan was elected prime minister in 2002, his popular support gave him only nominal control of the country. The secular establishment, the army and the judiciary, remained a powerful and hostile force, and he needed allies to bend it to his will. Western journalists like myself helped, accepting too willingly his self-presentation as a “Muslim democrat”. So did Turkey’s English-speaking liberal commentators, who – largely out of a hatred for the military ‑ continued to back him despite his increasingly overt authoritarianism.

His third and probably most important ally was Gülen, who had one crucial thing that he, the scion of an overtly Islamist party that had been closely marked by the establishment for decades, lacked: a foothold in Turkey’s state institutions. Right back to the 1960s, Gülen had always avoided clashing with the state. While the Islamists were taking the high rollercoaster ride to political power, sometimes in government, sometimes not, sometimes slapped down by the army, their followers purged from ministries, Gülen told his growing band of followers to keep their heads down, be good Muslims, avoid communism and pre-marital sex, get themselves a good education and a good job. By the early years of the twenty-first century, the movement he set up had become a sprawling and rather opaque business empire. Followers ran Turkey’s biggest-selling newspaper, the country’s biggest Islamic bank, a network of schools across Turkey and the world and a powerful business association that spearheaded Turkey’s expansionary international trade policy. They also had followers in the police, the judiciary and the ministries.

To cut a very complicated story very short, it now seems clear that some of these were the people Erdoğan turned to when he decided to go to war on the establishment in 2008, following an attempt to close his party down. A series of investigations into alleged coup plots spiralled out of control. Hundreds were jailed. Gülen’s media played the role of judge, jury and executioner. Journalists, senior police officers, anyone overtly critical of the movement, was character-assassinated in the press and then arrested. And always the same journalists and policemen and prosecutors seemed to be involved. The movement benefited from the upheaval. When Erdoğan purged the judiciary of secular elements following a referendum on the constitution in 2010, it was Gülen supporters – people said – who filled the vacated upper echelons of the profession.

But 2010 was also the year when tensions between Gülen and Erdoğan first surfaced. Busy rebranding himself as the Arab world’s new Saladin, Erdoğan kicked up a storm when Israeli commandos boarded a ship chartered by Turkish Islamists that was sailing to Gaza and killed several on board. Gülen urged caution. Turkey should not alienate Washington or Tel Aviv, he said. For old-guard Turkish Islamists who had always despised him, this was the latest proof of what they’d always known: Gülen was a CIA agent.

Tensions came to a much more dramatic head three years later. All-powerful now, Erdoğan moved to close down private schools, which form the engine room of the Gülen movement’s wealth. Within days, prosecutors had indicted four of his cabinet ministers for corruption. A week later, following an internet sermon during which Gülen called down God’s wrath on the sinful (“May God rain down fire on their houses, may he destroy their households”), another prosecutor began investigating business links between Erdoğan’s own son and a man the US considers a terrorist. A few weeks later, in January 2014, Turkish police stopped trucks driving to Syria escorted by members of Turkey’s staunchly pro-Erdoğan intelligence services, and found guns. As the US-based Turkish analyst Svante Cornell wrote, “these probes …  perhaps cemented western suspicions of Erdoğan’s collusion with anti-western regimes and Islamic extremists, thus serving to further weaken Western support for his government”.

(It is details like this which provide the substrate for the conviction of Erdoğan’s supporters that the July 15^th coup attempt was an American job, along with the widespread belief, held by people across all sections of Turkey’s ideological spectrum, that Washington had a hand in the country’s other military interventions, three full-on coups between 1960 and 1982 and one “post-modern” coup in 1997/1998.)

The icing on the cake, as far as Erdoğan was concerned, came in February 2014, when audio recordings allegedly tapped from his own mobile phone appeared on the internet. In them, we hear him telling his son to “get rid of” $30m stashed in a safe in the family house. Erdoğan of course has said it is all a mock-up, but since then Gülen’s followers have been enemy number one in Turkey. Erdoğan’s newspapers refer to them as FETÖ, an acronym for Fethullah Terrorist Organisation. The business association has been dismantled. So have the Islamic bank and the flagship newspaper. On a vast scale early in 2014, purges of alleged Gülen supporters in the police and judiciary had been rumbling on intermittently ever since.

“We will track them back down into their lairs”, Erdoğan had said after the corruption/phone-tapping scandals. In the aftermath of the July 15^th coup attempt, he has started digging furiously again. Even before he announced the imposition of a three-month state of emergency on Wednesday night, over fifty thousand people had been placed under investigation. Fifteen thousand teachers have lost their jobs, as have eight thousand employees of the interior ministry and one thousand five hundred employees of the finance ministry. A quarter of Turkey’s twelve thousand prosecutors and judges are under investigation. All university rectors have been ordered to submit their resignations. “These are losses the state apparatus simply cannot cope with,” says Tarhan Erdem, a veteran observer of Turkish politics.

What to think then? Is Erdoğan right? Is Metin Gürcan – the military expert – right? Is Gülen behind the coup? Is he a CIA operative? I don’t think anybody knows, and I doubt – looking at the controversy that continues to swirl around every other case of military intervention in Turkish history ‑ if anybody ever will. It is likely some of the men involved in the events of July 15^th were sympathisers of Gülen, but you don’t have to be one of these to feel despair at the direction Turkey is taking. There is also the fact that the army had long been the only Turkish institution which had successfully kept the Gülen movement at bay. The announcement coup plotters put up on the army website early in the morning of July 16th, with its emphasis on republican values, suggests the coup attempt could just as well have been the work of that much commoner military type, the secular-minded nationalist.

Two or three things are clear. Judicial investigations are unlikely to clear things up. The history of Turkey since Erdoğan came to power has been one of smoke and mirrors. It’s not the truth that matters, but the narrative. Turkey has a new generation of huge palaces of justice, but the quantity of justice to be found in them – never very much – has shrunk so as to be entirely negligible. Courts in Turkey do not shed light on things; they distract attention; they muddy the water their political masters wallow in.

Erdoğan is the great expert at negotiating this world. He has the knack of converting every suspended filament of filth he comes across to his own advantage. So it is likely to be in the aftermath of July 15th. Even his own supporters were sceptical of his desire to give himself monarchical powers. When the Turkish people failed to give him a mandate for these at elections last year, he took them anyway. The state of emergency, and the climate of fear, make it easier for him to solidify his absolute power. Perhaps before the coup he feared a slow weakening of the bonds linking him to his support base. The huge purge, and the chance to fill thousands of state positions with people of his own choosing, now opens up for him yet more vistas of potential political patronage.

22/7/2016

Nicholas Birch was based in Turkey as a freelance journalist between 2001 and 22011.

John Fanning writes: Over the last decade, social media has transformed the way we work, communicate and play. And inevitably a new publishing category has grown up alongside this phenomenon analysing and debating its implications.

Revolutions tend to make some things better but invariably have some unforeseen and unwelcome side-effects too, and so the battle lines are being drawn between the tech evangelists and the technophobes. The former believe that the digital age heralds a new dawn, where everyone will be free to express their creativity and reach the highest self-actualised rung in Maslow’s hierarchy.

Clay Shirky, who famously declared that “no one reads War and Peace anymore, it’s too long and not all that interesting”, is a committed enthusiast, who has argued that “we are living in the middle of the largest increase in our expressive capacity in the history of the human race”. The more restrained English evangelist Charles Leadbeater makes a similar point: “in the twentieth century everyone was a worker by day and a consumer at weekends; in the twenty-first century more people will see themselves as participants, contributors, innovators”.

The early critics concentrated on the nasty things that excessive exposure to the new devices was supposedly doing to our brains, our psyches, ourselves. One of the most prominent was US business and technology commentator Nicholas Carr, whose 2010 bestseller The Shallows, was one of the most apocalyptic of analyses, warning of brain damage, leading to intellectual decay. because we will become less able to absorb complex information: “we are becoming skimmers, scanners and scrollers”. In Alone Together (2011) US academic Sherry Turkle argued that “technology makes us less human; under the illusion of allowing us to connect better it is actually isolating us from real human interaction in a cyber reality that is a poor imitation of the real world”.

The problem with this first wave of comment on the digital revolution is that both sides are so committed to their cause that they lack balance. The enthusiasts are so awestruck they forget to take into account Marshall McLuhan’s dictum: “we shape our tools and therefore our tools shape us”. The critics ignore the fact that no matter how we are being affected we are where we are and you can’t put the toothpaste back in the tube. Technology correspondent Aleks Krotoski’s advice is worth bearing in mind here: “It is an insidious trait of the adults of one generation to point a finger at a technology they can’t understand and blame it on a generation they can’t control.” Fortunately a new wave of less excited analyses, taking a more balanced approach to our brave new world, is now starting to appear.

Michael Harris’s The End of Absence (2014) reminds us that every revolution, from papyrus, to the printing press to Twitter, provides us with new opportunities but also represents a loss of something that we once valued. Every new technology is an invitation to enhance a part of our lives, but at the expense of another part and Harris believes we may be losing the benefits that solitude, silence and stillness once provided; “the daydreaming silences in our lives are filled, the burning solitudes are extinguished”. This could result in a loss of creativity and innovation because we are at our most creative when we are in state of reverie, as when staring out of a train window. The period between sleeping and being fully awake has long been recognised as a time of heightened creativity but if, as surveys of young people’s behaviour suggest, we check our Facebook page the instant we regain consciousness, these opportunities will have been forsaken.

Harris also suggests that we are missing out on chance encounters because we have surrendered too much to algorithmetic management. For example, Amazon make much of their “if you liked that you’ll like this” book recommendations, but the results are highly predictable and are no substitute for the serendipity of bumping into a less predictable but more rewarding title as a consequence of visiting a real bookshop. In the same way the Googleisation of knowledge doesn’t allow for the strange vagaries of human intuition and creative leaps: “we need our searching to include cross wiring and dumb accidents not just algorithmetic surety”. Harris suggests that we need to be conscious of what we are losing ‑ “the impulse to hold more of the world in our arms leaves us holding more of reality at arm’s length” ‑ and then to consciously and regularly take digital time out.

Laurence Scott, a young Dublin PhD now making a name for himself in London intellectual circles, has recently published The Four-Dimensional Human (2015) whose imaginative title suggests that the digital age does represent a different space. Scott argues that if you dabble in other realms you shouldn’t expect to remain unchanged. The fact that in the UK text messaging has now overtaken phone calls and speaking face to face as the main focus of daily communication being a case in point. The fourth dimension was a concept much loved by science fiction writers and Scott introduces the word “everywhereness” to stand for the experience of being in this new state of mind where life is lived more robustly and intensely. However he suggests a contradiction at the heart of the digital age; our “everywhereness”, and he could have added “allthetimeness”, although undoubtedly intense, is nevertheless accompanied by diminishing empathy and increasing feelings of alienation. In explaining the reason for this he comes very close to Harris’s thesis: “we have an everywhereness to us now that inevitably alters our relationship to those stalwart human aspects of self-containment, remoteness and isolation”. Where Harris recommends some form of digital detox as a partial remedy Scott opts for the currently fashionable “mindfulness” movement

Both Harris and Scott suggest that Homo Digitalis is in the process of becoming a different species but are not unduly worried, implying that this is merely another evolutionary stage in the ascent of man. Naomi Baron’s Words Onscreen (2015) examines whether digital reading, especially the use of eBooks is reshaping our understanding of what it means to read. For over twenty years we have been reading on computers, then tablets and mobile devices, and Baron believes that the world of reading has been shaken up “to a degree not seen for centuries”. She is a professor of linguistics in Washington and has carried out numerous studies comparing how we read on paper to how we read on screens. She comes to two main conclusions. The first is that the two reading experiences are different: digital devices are better for searching and consuming gulps of information but physical books are better for “deep reading” and for argument and reflection. She refers to the former as “reading on the prowl” and the latter as “continuous reading”.

More worrying is her finding that screen content is shortening our attention span, “making us more literal-minded and reducing opportunities to engage with abstract content”. However Barron’s second main theme is that respondents in all her surveys overwhelmingly prefer to read text in printed books rather than on screen, finding the experience more rewarding, not only in terms of greater concentration but for the whole physical experience. She notes that in an effort to overcome the superior aura of the printed book there is now an aerosol eBook enhancer called ‘Smell of Books’ that you can spray on your Kindle to provide a “clean musty smell”.

Finally, Bernard Harcourt’s Exposed: Desire and Disobedience in the Digital Age (2015) is the most pessimistic of all the recent publications, believing that the degree of exposure we actively collude in through our engagement with the internet and social media is profoundly disturbing. He agrees with the other three authors that we have entered a different space but believes that it is by no means a friendly or benign territory. The author believes we are under constant surveillance by the big digital beasts, particularly Google and Facebook. Foucault is a major influence in this connection and is quoted repeatedly.

In his studies of power and punishment, Foucault analysed how prisons involve social conditioning and identity formation because prisoners are aware that they are under constant surveillance. Harcourt suggests that we are now under surveillance by the large tech businesses. He doesn’t really pursue how this is affecting us, concentrating rather on how the results of the surveillance. Google can draw up a fairly comprehensive picture of our lives in disturbing detail ‑ “who we are, what we do, what we like, where we go, who we talk to, what we think about, what we are interested in –all these things are seized, packaged, commodified and sold on the market”. This represents an unprecedented level of surveillance which Harcourt calls “the expository society” and he suggests that we surrender our privacy because of the consumer convenience and because we crave the exposure facilitated by social media. I think he’s correct in stating that we are sleepwalking into an enhanced surveillance state yet I suspect that if people were more conscious of the volume of data being collected about them they would still accept it as a reasonable price for the benefits of Google’s bottomless pit of information every time they press the search button.

The author is even more critical of Facebook, described as “neo-liberal technology par excellence”. This is a business which encourages its users to turn themselves into entrepreneurial entities by “updating their status” on a regular basis in the same way a corporate brand would regularly update its advertising. Facebook urges its users to think like a brand and create a new “invested self”. Harcourt’s conclusion is that “we have witnessed a distinctive shift from the dominance of humanist sentiment in the post war years to a reign of economistic attitude in the 21st century”.

It’s hard to argue with that but the reign of a dominant economistic attitude started long before the digital revolution and people have always been endeavouring to present themselves in a more attractive light. Harcourt concludes that we should engage in acts of disobedience ranging from leaking official secret documents to aggressively encrypting personal information. He’s a fan of Julian Assange, who started WikiLeaks, where whistle-blowers could upload secret documents, and Ed Snowden, who leaked hundreds of thousands of National Security Agency documents in 2013.

We may all not want to take disobedience to these extremes, but Harcourt’s book is a timely reminder of how the boundaries between the state, the market and the private realm are becoming seriously blurred. All four books agree that the digital revolution is not merely a question of new channels of communication; it represents, in Laurence Scott’s phrase, a new dimension. This is a space of undoubted benefits, but it comes at a cost. The loss of solitude emphasised by Harris and Scott is one. Picasso reminded us that “without great solitude no serious work is possible”. If we now check our mobile phones every six minutes we are not likely to experience solitude. Baron alerts us to the likelihood that reading on screens inhibits our ability to concentrate but Harcourt warns of a more troubling potential loss, privacy. When Mark Zuckerberg blithely announced that “privacy is no longer a social norm” nobody shouted stop. Just because the new masters of the universe are chronically underdressed doesn’t mean they are all benevolent lovable bunnies. A recent editorial in the Observer put it well; “they may look different than arms dealers and oil companies but they are ultimately members of the same species: powerful corporations with their own imperatives, some of which may be anti-social if not actively sociopathic ‑ they need regulation”.

They undoubtedly need regulation and it looks like the EU is starting to move in that direction. At an individual level we need to be conscious of the underlying implications of the new digital age and these books represent a good starting point. At a national and European level we need to ensure that the big beasts of the digital jungle are not allowed untrammelled freedom. Charles Handy, the Irish-born business philosopher who has written over a dozen books on modern corporations, made this observation in his latest publication, The Second Curve (2015); “If Facebook can rustle up $19b from its own resources to buy up a possible competitor, if Google can use its wealth to corner all the artificial intelligence around, are we seeing the need for a new trust-busting Teddy Roosevelt?

Main books referred to:

Words Onscreen, Naomi S Barron, Oxford University Press 2015
Exposed: Desire and Disobedience in the Digital Age, Bernard Harcourt, Harvard University Press 2015.
The End of Absence, Michael Harris, Current (Penguin) 2014
The Four-Dimensional Human, Laurence Scott, William Heinemann 2015

13/7/2016

‘Don’t it always seem to go that you don’t know what you’ve got till it’s gone?’ was Joni Mitchell’s question. And the wonderful British Twitter poet Brian Bilston, echoing perhaps the French novelist Georges Perec, who wrote a novel  (a ‘lipogram’ apparently) that did not use the letter ‘e’, imagines Britain’s sad future outside – and without – the EU.

Com  ppance

Things work both ways, of course,
and so the EU left our language,
waited not for any half-mumbled   logy,
bade no adi  .
And the   rosceptics,
Felt no   phoria,
outmano  vred as they were.

Words found themselves misconstrued.
There were bitter f  ds
raised fists, Fr  dian slips,
few remained n  tral.
Unemployment rose
amongst mass  rs, chauff  rs, n  roscientists.
Some mus  ms closed.

The country got roomier,
and rh  mier,
a mausol  m to memories of imperial grand  r,
mixing racial slurs
with a sip from a glass of Pimms
and a snip of secat  rs.

Brian Bilston can be found @brian_bilston on Twitter and you can support his first collection, You Took the Last Bus Home: The Poems of Brian Bilston, at this link.

On the Saturday before Britain voted in the Brexit referendum I was sitting eating my breakfast in a north London kitchen and listening to BBC 4’s Any Answers, on which, under the chairmanship of David Dimbleby, Peter Oborne, Polly Toynbee, Max Hastings and Claire Fox were discussing the murder of Jo Cox, the mood among the British electorate, the behaviour of the media and the public standing of politicians. At a small social gathering later in the evening in the same house I carried out an informal poll of voting intentions: six voters, six votes for Remain ‑ among two Irish people, one Australian, one English person, one English of Irish family and one English of Cypriot family. Of the six, four were (I’m fairly sure) Labour voters and two Tories. My sample of course suggested that Remain would walk it.

The liveliest person on the Any Answers panel – and the one who, by far, most annoyed me – was Claire Fox, a former leading member of the curious Trotskyist sect the Revolutionary Communist Party, now turned libertarian and an avowed foe of “the liberal left”, whom she has said she likes to wind up. There may well be reasons to question some of the nostrums of the liberal left –which is indeed a fairly solidly established (and often predictable) ideological formation, both in Britain and in Ireland, but Claire Fox manages to do the winding up in a pretty obnoxious and mendacious way.

Discussing the apparent socio-economic indicators predicting voting behaviour (rich people for Remain, poor people for Leave, to simplify), Polly Toynbee, perhaps herself representing the liberal left, blamed the general “kick the establishment” mood on widespread poverty and hopelessness as globalisation and the migration of jobs to southern Britain had left whole communities in provincial England behind.

Claire Fox might have partly agreed with this, but she wanted to make a different point and one that in effect flattered the Leave side and undermined those who politically opposed them. I’m pretty sure I heard her saying also that she was voting Leave herself. No surprise there: for Trotskyists, worse is always better.

There is a huge gap between all politicians and the mass of people in society, Fox said. The demos – “particularly those people who are voting to leave, are treated with contempt … people say ‘we don’t know what’s wrong with these people – are they ignorant or stupid?’ – and the experts tell them what to think …

“I think that one of the difficulties,” she continued, “is that both politicians and the media are united in this one thing, which is they underestimate the intelligence of the public … and try and simplify everything … and what’s even worse they imagine that if you’re young you’re particularly idiotic, or if you’re working class you have to go ‘ARE YOU FOLLOWING MY WORDS?’”

And for anyone who thought that the stirring up of hatred against immigrants was a particular worry right now in England, Fox had an important corrective view: “I have been incredulous at the bile aimed at Nigel Farage and UKIP [not that she agreed with them, mind you; oh God no] … I don’t know why everyone thinks that UKIP’s elected public servants should be treated like scum by polite nice-sounding broadsheet newspapers … “

This is of course not merely contrarian but breathtakingly cheeky. Fox, however, is a quite impressive talker (Irish Catholic immigrant background ‑ words at will, I suppose). Her method of argument, if not her philosophy (that may well still be Trotskyist even though she now campaigns for ideas more associated with the right) is a familiar kind of “come-off-it” populism which she likes to portray as rationalist, but in fact her reasoning is largely emotive and rather slippery. It is a discourse in which the heroes are always “ordinary people”, who, it cannot be said loudly enough or often enough, are fed up being sneered at or patronised by the wealthy or the educated. Its Irish equivalent, some years ago, was the oft-repeated mantra “the people aren’t stupid, you know”. But if people (or some people) aren’t stupid, why do we need the word? Surely it wasn’t coined just for Afghan hounds?

There is of course something to the idea that many people in England feel they have been taken for granted, if not abandoned, by what everyone, it seems, is now calling “the political elites”, including those of the Labour Party (many of whom, local councillors for example, are really quite far from elite). And it is surely a kind of inadequate head-in-the-sand “left liberalism” which does not see that it is highly likely that elderly people living in poor economic circumstances and seeing the areas where they have been brought up and have always lived transformed by the arrival of significant numbers of new, non-English-speaking populations will be hostile to these changes and perhaps open to endorsing “radical measures”, measures which are in fact very unlikely to bring any improvement in their circumstances – and which therefore should of course be combated vigorously on the ground.

Those whose politics is based on the aspiration to more equality and greater life chances for both white working class and immigrant Britons have the right, indeed the duty, to challenge the positions of the likes of Farage (and of course his many ideological fellow travellers in the Tory Party), creepy lectures about supposed condescension or contempt from Claire Fox notwithstanding. The point is very well made by novelist Catherine O’Flynn, among a group of writers contributing to a forum on Brexit in The Irish Times:

I find a lot of the [post-Brexit vote] analysis pretty infuriating. I keep being told that we need to listen to working-class fears about immigration and take them seriously. I have listened and what I hear doesn’t make any sense to me.
I keep being told that it’s patronising to say that swathes of voters had their justified anger shamelessly manipulated and fell for lies and insinuations. I think it’s patronising not to say that. I’m sick of a certain kind of middle-class guilt that holds this superficial reverence for “working-class” views. Yes we need to listen but we also need to challenge. I’m the child of immigrants. I grew up in the middle of a council estate in inner-city Birmingham. Racism is neither inevitably nor exclusively a “working-class” delusion. But anger, despair and poverty make the perfect compost for fascists like Farage to sow the seeds.

28/6/2016