Maybe it’s because of MLK day approaching, but I’ve had this persistent thought (surely I am not the first to think it) since the latest violence in Gaza that what the Palestinians need is a Ghandi, a Martin, or a Tutu.  I am very sympathetic with their plight, and I don’t think that the violence of the many jihadist groups justify the kind of massacre that is going on now in Gaza and has gone on periodically over as many years as I can remember.  But do they seriously believe that lobbing rockets into Sderot, or blowing up a cafe is going to accomplish anything but more massacres?  Israel has and always has had the upper hand.  They have a military second (or maybe first) only to that of the US, more financial support, are an actual sovereign nation, and have the US vote at the UN.  Palestinians will never, ever, win a physical battle with Israel.  And whatever they might believe, they will also never win enough international sympathy to pressure the Israeli government into credible peace negotiations.

There are very few instances in history when a weaker party has bested their goliath opponent, and only three that I can think of off the top of my head: India’s independence, South Africa’s abolition of apartheid, and the Civil Rights Act in the US.  These three have one thing in common — the employment of non-violent resistance.  That doesn’t mean, of course, that all resistance was non-violent.  In each case there was violence.  But a just resolution did not come from violent uprisings but through non-violent protest and resistance.  Hopefully there is a young man or woman in Palestine right now studying the lives and teachings of the great non-violent resisters throughout history.  Hopefully they will not be killed before they have a chance to lead a movement for peace.

Memorial had its digital archives seized in a police raid last month. "This was 20 years' work. We'd been making a universally accessible database with hundreds of thousands of names."

The BBC last week took on the story Dagmaraka started telling here three months ago, picking up roughly where she left off. Rossiya TV, one of Russia’s biggest TV channels, last year launched a show that, over the course of the year, grew into much more than just another TV program: vote for the Greatest Russian in history!

In the first round, no less than fourtyfive million votes were cast for the initial fifty candidates. In the second round for the top 12 vote-getters, another four and a half million votes were phoned or texted in or cast online by the time the vote was concluded last weekend. But there was a problem. Throughout the year, those pesky viewers kept voting Stalin to the top of the list.

Anxious to avoid embarassment, the organisers tried to change the ranking by hook or by crook. The producers appealed to viewers to vote for someone else and, as Dagmaraka recounted, at one point claimed a massive hacking incident to remove one million votes for Stalin. But he kept bouncing right up again.

When the BBC reported the story on Saturday, Stalin was in fourth place. In the final tally, he still passed Pushkin and came in third. He missed the top spot only by a hairwidth: Alexander Nevsky and Pyotr Stolypin beat him by just six and five thousand votes respectively. Lenin didn’t do badly either: he came in sixth, squeezed in between Peter the Great and Dostoyevski.

Now the success of the show in itself is striking. It’s tempting to speculate that it must have something to do with how Russians don’t have many opportunities anymore to vote on a wide-ranging ballot of candidates, but earlier versions of the show in the UK and Holland saw a similar mass participation (and the Dutch version triggered a similar controversy). The BBC report, however, takes the story into a different direction, and places Stalin’s success in the poll in a context of progressive efforts by the Putin-era state to rehabilitate him.

It may be a little all too embarassing to have Stalin right at the top of a list of Russian heroes, but his showing is actually right in line with the state’s recent push to take him out of history’s doghouse:

The primary evidence comes in the form of a new manual for history teachers in the country’s schools, which says Stalin acted “entirely rationally”.

“[The initiative] came from the very top,” says the editor of the manual, historian Alexander Danilov. “I believe it was the idea of former president, now prime minister, Vladimir Putin.”

First, an anecdote. Back in 2006, I was visiting Amsterdam. A friend and I were wandering around downtown, and came across an exclusive cigar shop. Very fancy. They had some of their most eye-catching products in the shop window. I am no cigar afficionado, I don’t even smoke, so none of it meant much to me. Something caught my attention though. What was that we saw? A true prize item. A large, beautiful wooden box (humidor is the word, apparently) of real Cuban cigars … adorned with a picture – that picture – of Che Guevara.

The box even featured, in a handsome scrawl, the famous appeal: “Hasta la Victoria Siempre!”

Price of said humidor: Euro 3,000.

It was designed, apparently, by the exclusive Parisian manufacturer Elie Bleu, which produces “some of the world’s finest humidors [..] handcrafted from natural or tinted mahogany and sycamore.” Each box features a “meticulously brilliant finish, a delicate process done by hand.” The Che Guevara range was, of course, a strictly limited edition.

The box in question is still on sale online: here, for example, for $5,000, or here for $4,785. Or you can order it here at the smart price of just 2,340 euro. Bizarrely, it comes accompanied by a Che-themed ashtray, available online for just $350.

Hasta la Victoria Siempre!

Hey, didn’t Jay-Z rap, “I’m like Che Guevara with bling on”? Now, Che is the bling. 

In the same spirit, I want to take you through some of the Che-related, Creative Commons-licensed photos on Flickr. I always trawl through Flickr to find illustrations for these blog posts. For the Che post from the other day, there was more than could fit with the post. Hence, this photo gallery. Oh, the humanity.

Taking the biscuit: Using Che to promote the stock exchange. Photo by patapat, used under CC license.

“Be realistic: demand the impossible”. Billboard for Swissquote, “the Swiss leader in online trading”. Discover the world of the stock exchange with the Swissquote Box for 29,90 Swiss Francs!

Mixed message? Photo by TobiasAC, under CC license.

How the Finnish market recycles the Che icon. The photographer keenly observes: “What I don’t understand is the political implications: does owning this mean “I love you, Che Guevara, so much that I want you to greet me every day as I come home” or “Up yours, Che Guevara — I wipe my feet on you!”? This, I do not know.””

Gay Che, donning the pink. photo by s.o.f.t. under CC license.

“Gay Chevara” with pink beret: Part of the Art Below exposition in the London tube.

Che at the ration card office. Photo by Alex Barth, under CC license.

“Ration card office, La Habana, 2000”
 

(Image by mikebaird used under CC license)

The holiday season is often used to reflect back on items that are not exactly current news, but worth a re-read over time. This selection is inspired by an off-hand blogger’s comment about Che, but any occasion would have been a good one to dig this one up from the archive.

On a forum,  a couple of years ago, I recommended an article by Alvaro Vargas Llosa that was published in TNR in 2005 with these words:

Everyone adores Che as a pop icon.

But the icon means ever less.

For me the following article was an absolute eye-opener.

First, it fillets the visible postmodern reduction of “Che” into what is, in effect, merely an extraordinarily successful market brand. A feel-good product for the young and rebellious. A pre-fab idealistic dream; an instant badge of revolutionary street cred. This part may make you laugh. In recognition; and at the surreality of it.

But then, having wrapped off the countercultural commerce of Che as icon, it also digs into the actual historical record. To recount the rather more sordid story of who “Che” really was. Because filmic sketches of the man’s soul are fine — but what did he mean to those who lived under his actions?

The filmic and biographic portraits of Che seem to almost portray him in a vacuum; an individual soul, a romantic one-man story. But Che held real power. The Cubans and others who had to suffer his idealism are strangely absent in the iconic version of Che. This author puts them back into the spotlight.

This article is very long, and doesnt always make for comfortable reading. But it should be an obligatory read for anyone ever caught wearing a “Che” t-shirt.

Seriously.

Don’t be mistaken about the ironic birds’ eye view of Che-the-icon in the beginning of the article. The rage of the author is real – and very well-informed. It is not that of just another reactionary, either – note the very last section. It is that of one who sees history and fashion reward bloody zealots, and forget those who fought tyrants without killing a fly, and actually achieved results. Because those gentle reformers are so much less glamorous than your failed, bloodthirsty revolutionary.

You can still love the myth if you will. But before you put on the shirt, know about the politics behind it.

The TNR archive is still lost in the site’s technological fail, but the article can be read in full here: The Killing Machine: Che Guevara, from Communist Firebrand to Capitalist Brand.

(Image by нσвσ used under CC license)

About Che as icon, by the way — did you know that the famous Che image now adorning the t-shirts of millions of rebellious teenagers came about through a little bit of what we’d now call Photoshopping? To get the “t-shirt Che”, just take the real Che’s photo and make him “slimmer and his face longer, by about one-sixth”.

That was noted in a New Statesman article from 2007, found via the opening post of an instructive thread about Che on the forum Able2Know, Che Guevara … Forty years on.

That thread also features this post on a more serious note: how has Cuba’s death toll under communism compared with that of the brutal Batista dictatorship that preceded it? Not well at all, according to the work of one statistician, R.J. Rummel, who recorded that the Batista regime “killed 1000 of its citizens from 1952 to 1959, for an average rate of 143 per year,” while the Castro regime “killed 73000 of its citizens from 1959 to 1987, for an average rate of 2607 per year”.

According to his data, then, the Castro regime killed at an 18 times faster rate than even the despicable Batista had done, or at a 12.6 times higher proportional rate if you take population growth into account. Admittedly Rummel appears to be a highly controversial figure, so I’d love to hear about alternative estimations, though I can’t imagine an alternative computation would suddenly reverse the roles.

.. of a slightly dark, and very odd sort:

Little Blue Pills Among the Ways CIA Wins Friends in Afghanistan (via The Stump)

The Afghan chieftain looked older than his 60-odd years, and his bearded face bore the creases of a man burdened with duties as tribal patriarch and husband to four younger women. His visitor, a CIA officer, saw an opportunity, and reached into his bag for a small gift.

Four blue pills. Viagra.

“Take one of these. You’ll love it,” the officer said. Compliments of Uncle Sam.

The enticement worked. The officer, who described the encounter, returned four days later to an enthusiastic reception. The grinning chief offered up a bonanza of information about Taliban movements and supply routes — followed by a request for more pills.

Fake money isn’t what it used to be (via Kevin Drum)

The Secret Service agent in Kansas City peered hard at a counterfeit $100 bill, ran a finger over it and grimaced in disgust.

It was bad, ugly work.

“Too slick, too,” said Charles Green, special agent in charge.

More counterfeiters are using today’s ink-jet printers, computers and copiers to make money that’s just good enough to pass, he said, even though their product is awful.

In the past, he said, the best American counterfeiters were skilled printers who used heavy offset presses to turn out decent 20s, 50s and 100s. Now that kind of work is rare and almost all comes from abroad.

Among American thieves, the 22-year veteran said sadly, “it’s a lost art.”

"Sweatshirt I bought @ Target," Flickr user Eshm (photo used under CC license)

Living in the Netherlands, ca. 1998, meant increasingly being confronted, not just with that ubiquitous icon of wannabe rebel teenager identity, the drearily mass produced Che tee, but training jackets and the like saying DDR, or CCCP. Not because there was any suddenly resurging affinity for the former Eastern Bloc regimes, but because those were the thing to have for any self-respecting ironic hipster.

It went with, say, nodding your head to the latest abstract beats, or dancing to the soundtrack of a soft lesbo porn movie from the seventies with a knowing smile. Aren’t we being cool!

I never got it. Stunned at the baffling lack of … awareness, I suppose. Even if I knew that no disrespect was intended toward, say, the victims of communism — all was tongue-in-cheek, after all! The postmodern game being played out transformed me, instantly, into an old crank. It did so right at the moment that I refused to acknowledge the legitimacy of that irony; the moment I failed to think, “oh that’s OK then”.

… in Kenya, that is.

On election night, or rather the morning after as it was 7 AM in Kusumu by that time, reporter Shashank Bengali witnessed the local Luo erupt in celebration:

The young jobless men, the bike taxi drivers who may be Obama’s strongest constituency, the women who clean the place – all cheered and hugged each other. [..]

People are saying, “We won.” Talk show hosts are joking that the fish in Lake Victoria are getting stake because all the fishermen are watching TV. The radio is playing Obama songs in Luo [..]. “George Bush said only John McCain could lead America,” goes one particularly jaunty guitar-and-drum tune, “but the rest of the world said no.” [..] President Mwai Kibaki declared Thursday a national holiday.

But it’s a globalised world, as Bengali realised when watching Al Jazeera in the Kisumu fairgrounds and hearing the pundit say, “I can’t offhand recall how many electoral votes Indiana has.” And the consumer society works just the same the world around:

This is starting to get ridiculous.

Less than a week after the election, you can’t walk 10 feet in Nairobi without seeing Obama’s name. [Y]ou can buy Obama campaign buttons in the supermarkets, beaded Masai bracelets with “Obama” stitched into them [..], souvenir Obama hundred-dollar bills, mini U.S. flags bearing Obama’s face, [..] electronics at one store’s “Obama sale” (not sure what this means exactly) — and the list goes on.

I was at an opening Saturday in Nairobi’s Industrial Area for a talented young Luo artist named Kota Otieno. [..] Kota, 28, was exhibiting about a dozen original works. At least three featured Obama’s name. [..] The one at right is called “The Proffet.”

While I appreciated Kenya’s election-day euphoria as much as the next guy, with the inauguration still 10 weeks away Obama already risks becoming a cliche here — not unlike the endless Man U and Arsenal logos that plaster all the minibus taxis. This is what’s almost happened in South Africa to Nelson Mandela, whose family has tried unsuccessfully to keep his face off of every T-shirt and backpack going. Obama’s not there yet, but it’s coming.

Hey, it’s better than Che tees …

Alex Massie featured an encouraging dispatch from a Democratic operative in Ohio last Wednesday: The Ground Game: The View From Ohio. It’s impressive stuff:

I got placed in Bowling Green, right by Bowling Green State University. [..] The county is a swing county, but that is mostly because there are 50,000 rural families and 25,000 Bowling Green residents combined with 25,000 Bowling Green students. [..] No candidate has carried Ohio without carrying Wood County (BG is the county seat). One would think that this historical oddity would almost mandate a heavy McCain presence, but alas there is none to speak of.

I spent a little bit of time at the Obama state HQ in Columbus yesterday. It was jaw dropping. They had taken over an old mega-church. The first floor was a warren of staffers running around all very young and all very busy. The basement was probably the size of a supermarket, lined with table after table. Each table was staffed by four youngsters, all responsible for a different city, county, task etc. It looked like the command center for a massive army. No windows, no natural light, but filled with kids who probably had no idea it was 8am all hovering over computers, maps, data sheets. There were 600 staffers there, all dedicated to Ohio, at 8am. I’m amazed.

Volunteers phonebanking in San Francisco (Images used under CC license from Flickr user SanFranAnnie)

In another recent dispatch from the trail, the Denver Post emphasised the mindboggling extent to which the ground games of both campaigns are driven by sophisticated micro-targeting:

George Bush and what appears to be the prime minister of Canada

Reliable media reports now confirm that Canada held an election this week. Most Americans, upon hearing this news, would probably respond by asking: “the who did what now?” But it’s all true. Last Tuesday, Canadians from Gander to Whitehorse and several species in between emerged from their mud huts, their igloos, or their local Tim Horton’s so that they could trudge through a desolate wasteland of snow and ice and cast their ballots for the federal parliament. It was a thrilling spectacle of democracy and it meant, in the end, very little indeed.

After the 2006 federal election, the Conservative Party under Prime Minister Stephen Harper held 124 seats in the lower house of parliament. That made it the largest party in the parliament, but it fell 31 votes short of a majority. The Liberals, who had been in the majority for the previous twelve years, dropped to 103 seats. Two other parties, the New Democratic Party (NDP) and the Bloc Québécois (BQ) made up the difference.

Now, in any other parliamentary democracy, after such an indecisive election the parties would start negotiating with each other in an attempt to form a coalition that could command a majority. Not so in Canada.

Joefromchicago was straight on the case here yesterday to comment on the death of Jörg Haider, the charismatic far right leader who has left such an imprint on Austrian politics these last two decades.

Joerg Haider

Haider was the scourge of Austria, and his self-inflicted death by speeding will not be mourned by many democrats. Unfortunately though, his death does little to stop the renewed momentum for the extreme right in the country.

After suffering an electoral rout in 2002 and a bitter split in 2005, the Austrian far right has demonstrated its resilience, regrouping and coming right back up again to score its best elections result ever earlier this year. And the story of its resurgence offers a sobering lesson for those European democrats who believed that the far right could be defeated through cooptation. It provides a similar reality check for those who were still betting on the far right’s dependency on rare charismatic leaders.

Over time, the place which the Afghanistan war retains in the American political conversation has become reduced to a marginal subject with an overwhelmingly symbolic role. As debate raged over the rightness or wrongness of the Iraq invasion, Afghanistan became more of an abstraction: the blank screen upon which the opponents projected the contrast and comparison they needed for their argument.

Image used under a CC license from Flickr user vendrán mañana

For Republicans, Afghanistan was Iraq’s little brother, mostly ignored but useful as illustration for the case that we’re fighting a global, interconnected War on Terror. For most Democrats and Obama supporters, meanwhile, Afghanistan has become “the good war”, the other war, the war you do support. The waning fortunes of the allied troops in Afghanistan appear most only as useful demonstration for the argument that Bush dropped the ball on Al-Qaeda and that Iraq was a ‘distraction’.

Either way, the answer seems almost unanimous: we need to stay in Afghanistan. And finish the job. The Republicans think it’s important – they’re totally about the War on Terror. Hey, it was their idea! The Democrats, too, want to invest more resources in Afghanistan; their very urge to do so is the proof of their military toughness bona fides, the deflection of any accusation of pacifism.

In the Axis of Evil, there is one evil that stands above the rest, a country whose president will cause protests and allows commentators to rant for days in advance of his visits.  Of course that country is Iran.

Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad

President Ahmadinejad visited the UN last week and we were treated to all the usual fireworks.  Senator Clinton and Governor Palin jostled to attend a National Coalition to Stop Iran Now protest, President Ahmadinejad made more anti-Zionist remarks and generally heaped ridicule on the US and both Senators McCain and Obama vowed to prevent Iran from getting the bomb in last Friday’s debate.  More important though, are Obama’s and McCain’s positions on negotiating directly with Tehran.  Are we missing a rare opportunity to actually make some progress with a country that has been a thorn in our side for twenty five years?