Everything Sounds Like Propaganda

Is this propaganda too?

Well, they dare to pose the question towards themselves. That might as well be the propaganda test... Real propagandists would never accept questioning their position.

God Bless Iceland

This weekend we lost one hour of our day. You think it's all about saving electricity and giving us more sunlight hours during the day? Well well, the idea was actually intended by a golf player who wanted to play longer in the afternoons... Apparently upper middle-class capitalist lobbies knew how to use propaganda already more than 100 years ago.

I think I will move to Iceland, they do not participate in this fucking up my daily rhythm. And besides that, it seems to be a nice country in other ways too. Not member of EU, the first to recognize my homecountry's independence. And an exotic country both with regards to nature and culture (just think about their language...).

So, I'm almost packing my bags. At least mentally.

Spring Things

This is what makes me feel spring-time also inside...

Sea-buckthorn.
These berries contain 6 times more vitamin C than orange, besides vitamin A and E, and flavonoids and antioxidants... And no, I don't go around crawling in thorny bushes, I buy a health drink at the local food-store. Not too expensive, tastes very good and refreshing. In other words - perfect!






Shakti & John McLaughlin
Indian tunes with a touch of jazz, or the other way around... Simply lovely. Makes you feel like dancing, flying, and being completely free.
And bear in mind - this is not some cheap new age bullshit. This is about a bunch of very skilled musicians doing something profoundly innovative. They are not playing gods, they ARE gods...







John D. Caputo
Brilliant in his elaborations on Derrida and deconstruction. He makes it much easier to digest Jackie's thoughts without unnecessary over-simplifying the content. And on top of that he adds his own insights, which for me seem to be very interesting. And very inspiring, which is of utmost importance of course...


This "list" was of course by no means exhaustive... Waiting for more to come. Á venir, avenir...

Some Sounds

Oh, and here is my 1:41 minutes for Anna Politkovskaya broadcasted by Radio Latvia. Sorry, only in Latvian. BBC has not employed me yet.

Moving On

It is spring, finally. Besides quite a lot of wet snow on Monday the weather has been perfect.

And things are changing, as usual in springtime, hopefully for the best. Just got a new table today, there is a couple of vacancies to apply for, and perhaps taking that course in human rights and modern genetics (what a subject, right?)... The future is still unwritten, but it seems bright.

And of course Israel saying that what happened in Lebanon last year actually was war is a welcome admission. Better late than never.

Some things take time. Just like my job searching.

The Eyes of Anna Politkovskaya

Today I went to the reading in memoriam of Anna Politkovskaya in Stockholm. Such readings were held in different countries, to make a stand against the political lie, and for the truth.

I saw her once. It was at the Gothenburgh Book Fair. She was telling about her newest book, and I made a radio feature about it when I returned to Stockholm.
Look at her eyes... It is said that eyes are the part human body that is least affected by aging. Which means that we keep our childish eyes for the rest of our lives. Though I think some try to hide them, even to the point of looking like dead, like machines and not human beings. Anna still had these eyes, and not only in the physical sense. If there is anything that can be called spiritual, I think that's what I saw in her eyes. And if you read her books, you can feel it too. That stare of truth that cuts right through your heart without any mercy. This world needs more of such eyes - the eyes that are not ashamed to be the eyes of a child, and not afraid to seek and see the truth, at any cost.

At any cost... Also life. But the bizzare thing is that the ones who silenced her have made her voice (through her books, through readings like the one today, through other journalists inspired by her, etc) only louder. Indeed, it is possible to make a lasting impact even by ones death.

Maybe the eyes never die?

And I Thought I Was Pretty Conservative...

ACCORDING
TO YOUR ANSWERS,
The
political description that
fits you best is...

.

LIBERAL

LIBERALS usually embrace freedom of choice in personal

matters, but tend to support significant government control of the economy. They generally support a government-funded "safety net" to help the disadvantaged, and advocate strict regulation of business. Liberals tend to favor environmental regulations, defend civil liberties and free expression, support government action to promote equality, and tolerate diverse lifestyles.

The RED DOT on the Chart shows where you fit on the political map.

Your PERSONAL issues
Score is 80%.

Your ECONOMIC issues Score
is 40%.


You can find the test HERE.

The Mystery of Women and the Mystery of USA

USA has always been, to put it mildly, inconsistent in its policies regarding many different spheres. Also regarding women.

Today Condoleezza Rice gave Courage Award to a number of women who have been especially successful in advocating women's rights and advancement, including Latvian journalist Ilze Jaunalksne. After she made several TV programs on political corruption, recordings of her private phone conversations (taped by Secret Police) were leaked to the media. Now she is about to get a compensation from the state, and I think this prize comes right in time.

Good!

Meanwhile, a well known Swedish singer Eva Dahlgren (if I remember correctly, she was Anna Lindh's (r.i.p.) favourite) has been indirectly blacklisted in USA. Her crime - contribution for CD Lullabies from the Axis of Evil. Apparently, women from the countries of so called axis of evil singing together with western artists is too much for the land of freedom.

Well, what can one say except stealing some words from Morrissey:

In America
The land of the Free, they said
And of Opportunity
In a just and a truthful way
But where the President
Is never black, female or gay
And until that day
You’ve got nothing to say to me
To help me believe
In America

The Rule of Law, Kafka Style

It is about to happen again. Somebody, not me or you of course, but one of those others (arabs, palestinians, immigrants, refugees - you name it), is called a terrorist and is soon going to face deportation to a country where torture is practiced...

Reading news can sometimes be like reading Kafka. What a process... Swedish secret police claims that the man is security risk, but refuses to give any grounds for this accusation. Nothing. Not a single shred of paper. Neither to the terrorist, nor to his lawyer.

The only reason why this terrorist still is not thrown out of the country is his poor health condition. What a nice and humane message - "as soon as you get better, we send you to the torture chamber, so you better stay sick, or what about getting even sicker?"

I think the real sickness is somewhere else though, it's in the heads of those who make decisions such as in this case. The proof is obvious.

And regarding Kafka's writings - I would prefer them to stay where they are, without making apparition in the real life, in Sweden, year 2007.

Union for Workers vs. Workers for Union

Yes, what is meant to serve what - is trade union supposed to serve its members or the opposite? That's the question which appears in my head when I think about this latest trade union's protest action in Gothenburg. Why on earth do they need to start almost a crusade against one young owner of a small restaurant? According to the available information, those few persons who are employed at this place get even BETTER paid than they would be guaranteed by collective agreement, and NONE of them is member in the trade union.

Universal Declaration of Human Rights guarantees the right to join such unions and enjoy the protection offered by them: "Everyone has the right to form and to join trade unions for the protection of his interests." The same declaration guarantees also right to not be member of any association: "No one may be compelled to belong to an association." To put it shortly, it's up to workers THEMSELVES to decide if they want to join the union or not.

Even if the trade union could argue that they have good intentions, namely to protect the interests of those who work in this restaurant, it does not seem to be a good argument for their cause. If the workers themselves are satisfied and get paid more than enough, what interests does the union protect? If they continue acting in the same direction, it will lead to bankruptcy for the restaurant, and accordingly to NO SALARY for the workers. How is that for justice?

Then again, trade union has used the good old argument that what they do is not unlawful, and therefore there is nothing wrong with their activities. Mixing up law with moral judgement seems never been demonstrated so bravely. There are many things that are legal that me or somebody else is still not doing - simply because we choose to do something else, or we consider these specific activities to be of no interest for us, for whatever reason.

What trade union seems to be doing in this case is, in my understanding, stubbornly following hard principles, even if it entails harming the ones they are supposed to protect. Oh, excuse me - of course they do not have to protect those traitors... Or do they? What is more important, trade union or its members?

For me the answer is obvious.

Lost to Live Together

Watching Lost has become very frustrating for me. Really, what's wrong with these people? They don't seem to care about arranging even some very basic model of society... although they are forced to live with each other on this island where you never know what's gonna happen next. You hardly know anything at all.

And here I go, switching my sympathy from Jack to John, then to Sawyer, then to Kate... And so on. Power politics, so exciting - as long as it is just a TV show and does not affect my own life of course.

Learning to live together is not easy, but that's the only way. Indeed, we are all just like passengers of an airplane crashed on an island in the middle of nowhere.

Killing Whom/What in the Name of Whom/What?

Killing Saddam Hussein, by hanging or any other way, is not gonna solve problems that Iraq is facing today. Nor will it be a sentence against all the dark period of his rule, as has been boldly proclaimed by Iraqi Prime minister. Death penalty as such, and also the method of execution, would rather entail giving new life to the norms and cultural patterns of that very dark period. Indeed, it would make the image of the martyr Saddam and the ghost of his rule more alive than ever - this time in the name of democracy, human rights and justice.

Perhaps Iraqi people should have the freedom to do what they see most compatible with their own sense of justice in this case. Why shouldn't they, after all the years of tyranny and oppression? Though this simple assumption should not stop criticism in the name of respect for their choice. Sensitivity does not have to entail silence. And not being silent does not have to entail violence.

Political Family

A very nice point expressed in the words from Latvian poet Māra Zālīte:

Sometimes almost, almost
I believe the newspaper babble,
that in place of a father I have NATO
in place of a mother I have the UN,
and to support me as an orphan
soon in my palm will be a Euro.

United Gangsters Security Council

The nuclear tests done by North Korea might, and should be condemned. But i have to agree with North Korea's UN ambassador on one point. Yes, UN Security Council in its current form is nothing else but gangsters. How otherwise can you call this peace-club of magic five who simultaneously are the biggest threat to the world peace?

The Right to Vote Right

Parliamentary elections is said to be a sort of high time for democracy. Today it happens in Latvia. This time it will be a little bit special. It seems that many voters are tired of the established parties (and rightly so, in my opinion), so the radicals of both right-wing nationalist and pro-Russian parties have some real chance of getting enough votes to get seats in the parliament.

Democracy is, of course, power of the people. Or at least majority of the people. Though, as we know, this entails a risk - no less than risk to lose democracy altogether. Some of the people would love to use democracy as a tool for killing democracy. For example, some of the right-wing parties in Latvia, while frequently referring to their "right to opinion", want to severely restrict rights of sexual minorities. National Power Unity has gone so far as to call homosexuals "sexual criminals" and proposing criminalization of "homosexual propaganda". This very same party has the guts to claim that they are directly continuing the heritage of Latvian human rights group from the 80-ies, "Helsinki-86". Nothing from the goals back then has changed, the claim... Which is a plain lie. While Helsinki-86 stood for human rights, including the rights of national and linguistic minorities (even proposing minority schools in order to prevent assimilation), National Power Unity boldly claim on their website: " We do not support any multi-national policy with liberal tendencies as it serves not to interests of the nation." What do they really claim - the right to opinion or the right to lie?

Now back to the question of democracy. If by democracy we mean simply majoritarian rule, it is easy to see that such rule has the potential of becoming a majoritarian tyranny. We often see also that groups that want to restrict the rights and freedoms put forward bold and radical claims about their own rights and freedoms. In other words, the only interest they have in democracy and human rights is demolcracy and human rights as a way to get power. Not very conducive for the democratic process, to put it mildly... One way to go about it is to say that such claims are not valid, since rights are not to be used for damaging and destroying these very rights ( as is done for example in the European Convention on Human Rights, art. 17). Though we have to admit that determining such abusers of rights sometimes might be very tricky (people will of course try to claim that they have no intention whatsoever to limit or abolish rights), and it also presupposes that people do actually endorse human rights as such (which is not always the case).

Another possible way would be to reshape our understanding of democracy - democracy as a certain political regime. French philosopher Jacques Derrida argues for understanding democracy as a concept (and, notably, one of a kind) that inherits the valuable quality of self-reflection, and thus is indefinitely self-improving. Secret of democracy lies in the process, not in creating some static structure that will later be called democracy. What he means is thus that democracy, in order to be democracy, should never stop, never become static. Rather, it should be always moving, always changing, refining and improving itself. That is why Derrida opposes to democracy defined as a certain political regime. Not because we see variation of different manifestations of democracy in the world today - these different "democracies" could analyzed, compared and evaluated, thus leading to choosing the best model. Derrida takes another turn, for him the heart of democracy lies in its ability for self-reflection. As soon as one regime would be called “democracy”, it would mean the end of democracy itself. Therefore democracy does not exist as a thing, but does exist as a mode of doing things and as a direction.

So the question about radical right-wing parties is not spinning around their right to hold their opinion - it is a question of the existence of democracy and rights altogether. How to deal with such undemocratic democrats is another question, but only legislative measures (criminalisation of hate speech, forbidding racist organisations, etc) will surely not be enough.

Back on Track

The summer is really over, and I am more or less permanently back in Stockholm. Now with master degree in human rights.

And I am back here as well, ready to write, write, write...

The Dream or Nightmare of EU

EU is a fantasy, a specter that is haunting us and giving us more trouble than good. I have been saying this again and again with references to different EU-related incidents in my life. Here is the most recent one.

I have been using Internet services of my Swedish Bank for several years. To do that I have to have a small device which is generating codes to log in to the website. Since I lost this little gadget somewhere in Italy, upon my arrival to Stockholm I went straight to one of the bank offices to get a new one. This is not supposed to be anything complicated, just to pay 250 SEK, and that's it. Well, in my case it became a bit funny. My Swedish ID card had expired, and my bank didn't want to accept my Latvian passport, on the grounds that it does not count as a valid Swedish identification document. Valid Swedish identification document, as I got to know, is either an EU-passport or a Swedish ID card. The problem is that we in Latvia don't have EU-passports yet. So, in order to get this little device that I need to use services of my own bank I need to get a new Swedish ID card. That would take at least 3 weeks, the time I don't have at the moment.

And it is not only about convenience. Paying my bills through the phone costs, well, first of all phone-call itself, and then the bank is taking a fee for every bill paid. Through Internet it doesn't cost anything besides one single fee I pay for a year.

When I opened my bank account a few years ago, I didn't have a Swedish ID card. I could use my Latvian passport. What has happened now? It is the same passport I used back then, but now somehow it's become useless. Of course some would say that since it is a private bank it's their own business how they do with foreign passports. But state is restricting activities of private actors in many different ways. And why should they let a bank refuse to accept an internationally recognized, valid document?

Thank you, EU! Just give me more trouble, and be sure, I will make your existence not easy. It's a promise.

Please, Say Something!!!

"No comments." That was the answer that Ineta Ziemele, the leading human rights expert in Latvia, now working for European Court of Human rights, gave as an answer when she recently was asked by a Latvian newspaper about her opinion on the harsh things certain Latvian politicians have said regarding sexual minority rights.

What is this? Some typical lawyer attitude, or? I mean, seriously, she is well-known and respected person in Latvia, she could have raised her voice and said something. But no. Silence.

If this is what is considered to be impartiality then I don't want to be impartial.

A Quote for Not Just Today

To understand political power aright, and to derive from its original, we must consider what state all men are naturally in, and that is a state of perfect freedom to order their actions and dispose of their possessions as they think fit, without asking leave or depending upon the will of any other man.

(John Locke)

Another Day, the Same Revolution

It doesn't happen very often that I read something and the only reflection I get is expressed by one word. But a quotation from this book, published in 1967... What can I say?

No other problem is as important to me as a difficulty I encounter throughout the long daylight hours: how can I invent a passion, fulfill a wish or construct a dream in the daytime in the way my mind does spontaneously as I sleep? What haunts me are my unfinished actions, not the future of the human race or the state of the world in the year 2000. I could not care less about hypothetical possibilities, and the meandering abstractions of the futurologists leave me cold. If I write, it is not, as they say, "for others." I have no wish to exorcise other people's ghosts. I string words together as a way of getting out of the well of isolation, because I need others to pull me out. I write out of impatience, and with impatience. I want to live without dead time. What other people say interests me only in as much as it concerns me directly. They must use me to save themselves just as I use them to save myself. We have a common project. But it is out of the question that the project of the whole man should entail a reduction in individuality. There are no degrees in castration.
(Raoul Vaneigem, The Revolution of Everyday Life)

Exactly.