Spirit of '45

This weekend, watching Ken Loach’s Spirit of ’45, amongst the documentary footage I noticed a number of things that gave a strong impression of how life has changed since the years after the Second World War. There is a shot of a woman beating out a rug, doing the very laborious work of hitting the thing hard against a wall. There are quite a lot of bicycles, be they in footage of men wheeling them alongside themselves at protests, or simply of people getting around a city. In scenes inside the home, people are reading or writing, and while I’m not about to mourn the loss of a fictitious golden age when people read books and weren’t lazy, the images all illustrated how society has been automated, and how we can now passively consume processes – be it of transport, entertainment or domestic living - that we once had to provide for ourselves. While I think this extremely significant, Ken Loach evidently didn’t, and so the Spirit of ’45 remains eminently dogmatic and one-dimensional, it’s greatest service is as a master class in how not to go about making a documentary or communicating a political message.

Propaganda is a word I’ve seen written a couple of times in reviews of the Spirit of ’45, nostalgia is the other word that seems similarly useful, and I don’t share the feelings of those left-leaning commentators who seem to feel these sins can be forgiven in what is – broadly – an important and valuable film. A film such as Spirit of ’45 cannot be judged by an ability to motivate those on the left who would agree with its basic principles anyway, its success would have been measured in whether it could make a dent in the views of those who value free-market fundamentalism and myths of Exceptionalism and the self-made man. In my mind, it wouldn’t, the film simply takes up a wandering journey through the simple idea that the world was once better and it’d be nice if it could be again.

One very obvious example of this tendency is coal, encapsulating the problem by which those on the left must reconcile affection for the salt-of-the-earth coal miner with the concern that coal is bad for the environment. At one point, Loach laments the mass closure of coal mines as crucial in the destruction of society, without touching on the fact that coal mining isn’t the most pleasant activity for those mining it, nor for anyone who wants to breathe the air it's burnt in. In the hour and a half documentary, the word “green” is shoehorned clumsily in by a single interviewee, a solitary acknowledgment of the fact that our world and our understanding of it has maybe changed a little across the last seven decades. The interviewees, moreover, give the impression that everyone in Britain is from the north of England, and white, so that whatever the increase of different ethnic groups in public life since 1945, the documentary shows a Britain that few might now feel part of, leading one to question the relevance of what Loach was trying to make. Although some aging interviewees do speak with deep emotion, and no doubt from grave personal experience, the feel of the film becomes little more than old, white people talking of how life was better. True or otherwise, Spirit of ‘45 offers very little constructive for how that ‘better’ might be regained.

There are other inconsistencies too, and even before Loach closes out with black-white footage that turns colour as happy people inexplicably start putting up bunting and throwing streamers, the film is painfully simplistic. Nye Bevan is championed for riding roughshod over the British Media Association when he nationalised healthcare, Loach disregards that the exact disregard for expert opinion and the BMA is now invoked as one of the most heinous crimes in Tory plans for the NHS; Spirit of ’45 only briefly touches on the idea that Labour’s welfare state was imposed by decree as much as consensus. One interview raises the valuable point that the idea of capitalism remains incredibly strong in the UK, despite the failure of its institutions. Another urges pensioners to turn off their televisions and reach out to young people so as to communicate the ideas that gave rise the welfare state, and footage shows one man questioning the psychology and chain of command that leads a police officer to beat a man with a stick. These are all incredibly important questions that Loach gives all but no attention, and nor does the documentary confront the peculiarity that no political party has a promise to renationalise the railways, despite the fact that the majority of the country – even without seeing Loach’s film – are strongly in favour of such a policy.

For those who value the idea of a stronger, fairer and more humane society, I’d just about advise going to watch the film. After it finishes, go home and start the harder task of how to make that vision a reality, a question Loach seems to have afforded precious little time.

The 'hauntingly beautiful' death... of someone else

I haven't read much about the collapsed Bangladeshi factory where (to the relief of the world media) the significant milestone of 800 deaths was reached this afternoon. I haven't read much about it because the disaster is not exactly a surprising feature in a notoriously cruel world economy, the unfairness of which is a very poorly kept secret. When disaster strikes, media and society rush to pay brief attention to the need for some public soul-searching and profundity, thereafter returning to business-as-usual, convinced of our own goodness on account of the very public and very sentimental display of grief we've shown ourselves capable of. Well done us.

I'm only writing now because of this article, and the image that secured it. Most unsettling of all is the journalist who thought two dead human beings (and they suffered and died less than three weeks ago) looked "hauntingly beautiful" in their death position, which - conveniently enough - happens to look like an embrace. I find it even more unsettling that X number of editors left in the words "hauntingly beautiful" to describe a photo of the bodies of two recently dead human beings. "Hauntingly" and "beautiful" are two words that should never be used together in good writing, because they are frequently used together in bad writing. "Hauntingly beautiful" should never be used to describe the picture of two recently dead humans, because that gives the impression that dead humans can at least provide an aesthetically valuable commodity. The fact is that, beautiful or otherwise, nobody in their right mind gives a shit if a photo of recently dead people has a"haunting" effect on a journalist or audience, because people have died, and that ought be so much more significant that we shouldn't care how the photo of their death makes us living people feel for a little while.

I also think it's significant that these are two Bangladeshi bodies we are seeing buried beneath the rubble. In as much as this, it has all the hallmarks of the disaster photography genre, something that - either due to sensitivity or a lesser supply of disasters - is not peddled so enthusiastically where documenting western (read: white) victims of catastrophe. In this photo essay from the Haiti earthquake, we have the privilege of white doctors helping the helpless Haitians, who in other shots are hard at work with some pistol-toting looting. It likewise seems significant that the Bangladeshi photo has been taken and described by a Bangladeshi journalist, in the abstract, emotional but apolitical terms by which it is most easily digestible to the western audience.

The issue also makes me think of the New York Post front page, where the photograph of a man about to be hit by a train prompted a public debate on the sanctity of life and death, and the invasiveness of photography and media. Of course each case has its differences, significantly that the man on the New York subway was in America (although of Korean origin) and the dead man and woman in Bangladesh are Bangladeshi, one of the many darker-skinned and economically disadvantaged people who - in the world of a Time editor - swarm vaguely over most of the earth's surface. These people are required to sew our endless new clothes, or to assemble the increasing variety of computer devices our apparently growing sophistication seems to require. Occasionally, misfortune dictates that these people will die in photogenic disasters such as the one at the Bangladesh factory. "Hauntingly beautiful" as they are, these opportunities reliably prompt an outpouring of goldfish sadness, all the more worrying because people believe it to be sincere. The apparent grief and soul-searching is made sufficiently colossal that once again we can feel better about ourselves as a conscientious society, thereby recovering from the cause of the injustice without changing a thing.

Mayday with the Spacehijackers

At 17:45 the answer phone message changes to reveal the address, “emergent service workers of the world unite…” is the command. I am told to make my way to the party, at the garish coloured buildings on Saint Giles High Street, and wished a happy May Day.

The setting is the new London headquarters of Google, who occupy five floors of the Central Saint Giles redevelopment, a place where residential and retail possibilities combine to make “more than an office building”. The premises are managed by Stanhope PLC, and are the sort of location preferred by the party organisers, who call themselves Space Hijackers. Self-identifying “middle class art school wankers”, the group peddle a playfully subversive politics; they daubed black paint across a dozen BP billboards prior to the Olympics, they have organised games of cricket in private developments of public space.

The crowd is clean-cut, some partygoers have arrived with their families, children are dressed in fencing masks and are using keyboards as foils. A keyboard maypole is wheeled in on a cargo bicycle, and May Day observers in white jumpsuits begin to dance around it with computer cables. A small-time drug dealer shuffles through the crowd trying to sell wraps of cannabis, off to one side, a familiar-looking band of freelance photographers have made the short journey from where I’m used to seeing them, waiting for celebrities at the BBC studios on Great Portland Street. They stand about in utility waistcoats and hooded sweaters, looking altogether disappointed with the small turnout. One by one, they take it in turns to visit a nearby café.

I arrive with the fundamental misgiving of whether a modern May Day is a cause for celebration or commiseration. The organisers refer to the event as an “after party”, their flier a wandering but lyrical complaint against workfare and overtime, they joke that the campaign for an end to the wage economy has been left half-finished, with the economy still intact and only the wages removed. In Turkey, I hear 27,000 police had been deployed that morning on the streets of Istanbul. Tear gas was fired, authorities suppressed turnout by cancelling public transport to the area. In Central Saint Giles, the Worker’s Day protest is suffering a distinct lack of workers.

The altogether strange environment is leant a final eeriness by the empty buildings, the bare concrete without interior. Most of St Giles’ ground floor premises have been filled with a pastiche of Latin or Mediterranean dining culture, but overhead and all around, quite clearly there are vacant lots. In Ground Control, her chronicle of the privatisation of public space, Anna Minton opens with the admission that the manuscript had been conceived of in a boom and written in a bust. She talks of how investors jumped at the promises of new developments, only to dry-up as the financial crisis came about. A party organiser passes me by, clutching an armful of beer cans, and I watch the Space Hijackers as they dance around their maypole, in the shadow of what looks like a development failure. From a corner, a unified screech rises momentarily above the volume of the sound system… “We love Google!”… from a group of women sitting outside a franchise Italian restaurant. The head of building security marches into the huddle of partygoers, he shouts orders into a phone, reprimands the masked children for fencing with keyboards.

Exceptionally quick thoughts on the death of Thatcher

I'm sure somewhere in the Lao Tzu there must be something quick and sensible on the wisdom of gloating over the death of an enemy. Without having my Lao Tzu to hand, or off the top of my head, I'll go for something marginally longer than a sentence.

Today, I fear that all over the UK, people who define themselves as 'Left', will demonstrate to those who define themselves as 'Right', why Leftists are generally seen as a bunch of losers. When you celebrate the death of your adversary, you help make of them a hero. As is being widely pointed out, the politics of Thatcher (and Reagan) is alive and well in governments around the world, it is alive and well in the heads of voters around the world; helping to make a legend out of the architect of such politics is no sensible way of going about dismantling these ideologies.

Mortality has finished off Thatcher in a way that the Left is failing to do her legacy. Celebrating her death is, as expected, to be a sad and temporary emblem of what it means to have social-minded politics in this country... and after that... then what? The Left will go from berating a frail woman with a scummy legacy to fighting a myth that, in death, will be made further larger than life. The reaction unfolding at present will help in this process, and the Left will perhaps play an even greater role in doing so than the Right.

Thatcher was possessed of ideologies, of a disregard for community, and for human beings, that I personally find disgusting. She obviously had the same sense of mission that comes with most politicians, and which makes most politicians bad politicians. As idiotic as the Left's swift response will be the Right's rush to talk of a great and noble Briton, both were to be expected, but it's that of the Left that I find more depressing. When you rely on another individual's death for a sense of victory... it's truly then that you have lost.

Walking Istanbul

I was in Istanbul recently, working on a project that hopefully you'll one day hear more about. I write pages and pages of this sort of thing, and rarely type it up, but perhaps some of you will appreciate it.

Thanks as always for reading, thanks for the feedback, I promise one day I'll reformat the blog to give everyone a nicer, easier-on-the-eye read.

Good weekends all round....

*****

I first started spending time in Istanbul in 2007. I know some who could say they first visited the city in 1976, but while that might convey how much has changed over a quarter of a century, it doesn’t express just how dramatically the speed of that change has picked up. In 2007 I was teaching English, and moved in with a colleague of mine in the district of Cihangir, where he told me the area was experiencing an aggressive gentrification. My Turkish family, a little behind this curve, gave me a different warning, they told me to watch out in the backstreets of Cihangir, and with a small laughter, they also warned that the area was home to Istanbul’s surprisingly large community of transsexual prostitutes.

A year later I left, and when I returned again for a month in 2010, Cihangir had electricity sockets hanging on coiled cables above the bare wood furniture of an espresso bar, and both the transsexual prostitutes and my friend had moved in search of cheaper rents to Tarlabașı. Tarlabașı was, to be cruel, a slum. Tarlabașı was, to be fair, a community for those whose main crime in life was to have been born poor. People sold fruit and bread on the street corners, children played football in the roads between high kerbstones painted yellow and white. This March, I returned again to Istanbul, my friend has moved a little to the north, to Kurtuluş, and Tarlabașı is being levelled – neoclassical apartment buildings and all – to make way for luxury flats. The area is to be regenerated, which means you will now find the poor who lived there thirty miles away, trying to piece together the fragments of their community. In the streets they left behind, I find a postmodern touch; an Austrian in shades and a leather jacket, wearing blue espadrilles as he sets up a tripod. In truth, the slum clearance makes for excellent photojournalism, and the photographer is there for reasons not so different to my own. My one-time colleague has by now become one of my closest friends, an American who has settled in Turkey and made it is home. In March 2013, where once we sat in apartments with a breeze blowing through the window frames, I meet him in a new shopping centre in central Istanbul. Before finding him, I slide through three floors packed wall-to-wall with vacuum cleaners, food processors and vibrating cushions that can be strapped to a regular chair to fulfil the aspiration of any self-respecting chair, making it a massage chair. On the basement floor, I find my friend amongst the laptops, with two days until his Turkish girlfriend’s birthday, and faced with the universal dilemma of convincing someone you love them without coughing-up for a MacBook Pro.

On every level, Istanbul has changed. Police officers now ride segues up and down the main shopping thoroughfare, perched on that wheeled platform as it glides absurdly a little way above the crowds, while others patrol in a well-polished Mini Cooper. The Turkish are masters of aesthetics, and since Istanbul was awarded European Capital of Culture in 2010, there’s been a concerted effort to keep up appearances. Istanbul is very much dressing for the world. For those who don’t make it to the ruins of Tarlabașı… it must be quite convincing.

I walk the city… I’ve spent weeks of my life just walking around this city. Most of all I like the Bosphorus, because that’s the only thing that never changes. Sure, humans are only temporary… but we’ve already been made temporary enough for my liking. It was a better writer than me that once said that. In Turkish, the Bosphorus is called Boğaz… it means ‘throat’, and it’s a great name for a strait… for me… Bosphorus just never does it justice. When the sun shines it turns blue, and when the clouds come it turns black, with the crown of each breaking wave leaving a trace of silver in the dark waters. The wind blows so stiff, up from the Sea of Marmara, so that leaning forward I walk from the castle of Rumelihisarı back into the city, coat forced back against my body, eyes half-closing, tearing with the wind, face flushing cold. I’ve had breakfast… you wouldn’t believe the breakfast I’ve just eaten, the best in a city that is as good a place to eat breakfast as anywhere I’ve ever been. The tomato salad, the fried halloumi, the olives and the kaymak… the cream of the yoghurt with a gold bar of honey poured over the top of it. I’m not going to tell you where I’ve just eaten breakfast… because if I did then you’d go there, and then one day I'd return to find it had been ruined forever.

Slowly it begins to drizzle, and then to rain, and as it does then I smile again at the immutable force of Turkish capitalism, another thing as unfailing as the Bosphorus. A man hops down from a tram, calls out to crowds lifting clipboards and files to cover their heads… he pulls open the clasps of a bag… and starts selling umbrellas. Down at Kabataş, and in spite of all Istanbul’s renewal, I find a market for another timeless Turkish industry, where a man has set a string of balloons floating on the water. He sells shots with an air rifle, and into eternity fathers, husbands and boyfriends are still eager to prove their aim. Along the concrete quay are tiny inlets, like little crenellations, and each landing wave explodes out of the gap, bursts of white spray shooting skywards so that one by one… boom… boom… boom… the wave works along the promenade. A young girl in pink coat and wellington boots stands on the parapet, jumping in puddles against the curtain of falling white. Down on the quayside are strewn the plump bodies of jellyfish thrown from the water, their tiny electric hearts still glowing against the seaweed and concrete.

I escape the rain in the café of the Istanbul Modern Gallery, where you find the summits of Turkey’s high society. And me. We call them “White Turks” and were it not that I’m a foreigner in Istanbul, were my Turkish better, my clothes smarter, then I don’t doubt I’d be seen as one of them too, a liberal class pretty much reviled by the average Turk, especially conservatives. The archetype of the White Turk lives a life that is not hard and has tastes that are not Turkish. They sit in the Istanbul Modern in well-cut shirts, drinking expensive wine, the women checking the reflection of their mouths in the back of a knife, like urban MacGyvers of the face they go about making sure no herbs have stuck to the white of their smile. Hatred of White Turks is a key ingredient in the success of the eleven year government of the AKP… all you have to do is point out what workshy, self-satisfied schmucks they are and the Common Man goes nodding agreement all the way to the ballot box. To be honest, the White Turks deserve everything they get… they vote for the AKP too, even though they have entirely opposing social values. White Turks are rich, and for all the social conservatism, the AKP government have offered a neoliberal agenda that – for now – has provided a decade of comparative currency stability. Inflation recently hit 8 per cent, which in Turkey is good news. When life seems positive, memories get shorter, and nobody pays much attention to words like ‘leverage’ and ‘construction’ written all through the economy. I sit in the bar at the Istanbul Modern, wondering if there will come a day when the government takes away the red wine, the plunging necklines and plumes of falling hair. Perhaps then politics will mean something to them, and they'll realise they had something in common with the human rights activists after all.

I leave the Bosphorus via the two hundred steps that climb the hill back to Cihangir. At the top of the steps people sit, drinking beers, turning over sunflower seeds in their teeth and spitting out the husks. There are young couples here, old socialists too… the steps at Cihangir are like an informal office for Turkish bohemia. In the past, as they watched the Bosphorus fade to dusk, the lights flickering on in Florence Nightingale’s hospital at Üsküdar, people sat here and sang traditional songs together. The songs are still the same, but this evening, they come rattling out of a smart phone, held open between the knees of a young man.

The last place I look in on before returning home is Gayreteppe, where an Englishman has opened a brewery. Rising out of the Metro, the most noticeable thing is the heights of the buildings, how far back your head must tilt before your eyes hit sky. I used to work in Gayrettepe, dull copy about developing world economies, written for a journal in a skyscraper called Maya Tower. When they heard I’d got a job in the Maya Tower, my Turkish family were proud of me, visibly impressed that I had business in the tallest address in Istanbul. Maya Tower isn’t so tall anymore. Gayrettepe’s skyline has turned Babel, the streets are buried beneath glass and steel, gusts of wind go barrelling along the roads, turning right-angled corners at the foot of each skyscraper. Trees, blackened by exhaust fumes, stand lank and leafless in the concrete. The flow of yellow taxis is now dotted with black 4x4s, there are suits appearing from the subway beneath me, endless suits, standing motionless upon the escalators as they come sliding out of the earth.

Istanbul – March 2013

Newroz, Öcalan and a possibility of peace

A bonfire is burning in Istanbul’s working class district of Zeytinburnu, it’s been raining in the city for most of the last week, and black smoke is rising into a cloudy sky. From through the flames a silhouette emerges, getting closer and gaining detail, until a young man in jeans and a black jacket has passed through the flames to land, a large scarf in the Kurdish colours of red, green and yellow around his neck. As he does so, the position of the sun is moving north over the line of the equator, marking the spring equinox as the earth tilts. Every year this happens, between the 18^thand 24^th of March, and each time it brings with it the most important day in the Kurdish calendar; Newroz. Even the spelling of the name is charged with the history of Turkey’s Kurdish conflict, the Turkish alphabet, switched from Arabic during the 1920s, does not contain the letter W. The W in Newroz, just as the traditional names Kurds were once banned from giving their children, was always seen as an affront against the founding ideas of the Turkish state. Though pronounced much the same, authorities still write this celebration Nevruz.

As with most political conflict, the tragedy is that it doesn’t have to be this way, Newroz will this week be celebrated all over the Caucasus and Middle East. A Persian festival with pagan beginnings, it is contradictory that Turkey’s Muslim Kurds have taken to it with such gusto, and it is unfortunate that what was a tradition of springtime has been all but lost to the political symbolism of the occasion. Turks are no less culpable than Kurds, for decades the festival was strictly prohibited, and even in today’s more moderate climate, still the state maintains a fearful compulsion towards control. Last year in Diyarbakır, the second-largest city of Kurdish Turkey, authorities tried to suppress turnout by only legislating for the festivities on a weekday. When Kurds defied these instructions, turning out by the hundred thousand for their chosen day of Sunday, a heavy-handed police response prompted rioting; cars were burnt, tear gas and rubber bullets fired, and lives were lost on both sides. In a country enthral to Internet and social media, the violence soon spread across eastern Turkey. That the nation’s reaction to as much was so muted is a sign only of how Turks and Kurds have grown accustomed to such a long and brutal source of bloodshed.

The twin themes of this year’s festival-cum-protest are freedom for Ocalan – the imprisoned leader of the terrorist Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) – and status for Kurds. There is an annual tendency to claim that every Newroz is significant, some sort of last chance for Turkey and its Kurds, recent years have come with a growing awareness that Kurds who remember a pre-conflict life are dying out, to be replaced by younger generations who have known only warfare with the Turks. In spite of having heard as much before, this year the statement seems notably harder to resist. The Kurdish diaspora have paid for adverts in UK newspapers, bearing Öcalan’s photo and an appeal to the need for such a figurehead in any prospective peace process. The adverts are unreserved in their likening Öcalan to Martin McGuiness or Nelson Mandela. On London streets, similar posters have appeared, and at a recent meeting in Westminster Palace, where Turkish Leader of the Opposition, Kemal Kılıçdaoğlu, had been invited by the Labour Party, protesters in the audience rose when he appeared, removing jackets to reveal “Free Öcalan” messages on their T-Shirts as they walked from the room. Six hundred Kurdish activists, imprisoned on the flimsiest grounds, recently ended a hunger strike at Öcalan’s say-so. Himself born of a Turkish mother, that Öcalan is the leader of Turkey’s Kurds is beyond dispute, the peace road map that he is said to have devised in jail is central to the expectations that are developing in Turkey.

Now beginning the fifteenth year of his incarceration, demands for Öcalan's release, though still far-fetched, are more plausible than at any previous time. Öcalan is locked away on the small island of Imrali, some fifty miles offshore of Istanbul, way out in the Sea of Marmara, where his confinement is interrupted only by visits from a lawyer and a brother, still a farmer in their home village. Whatever the ineffectual relationship between Turkey and the European Union, that Öcalan is even alive is thanks largely to Turkey’s bid for membership, and a 2002 law that banned capital punishment in accordance with EU entry criteria. Having long since renounced violence in the Kurdish cause, and urging a peaceful resolution to the crisis, Öcalan is the best hope the Turkish government has in its quest to have the PKK disarm. As such, the tone has changed of late, and Öcalan, still seen as a murderer, and known occasionally as The terrorist, has been humanised through data releases on his detainment. The public has learned of the 2300 books he has read since his 1999 capture in Nairobi, we have heard he sometimes plays basketball, and that like many middle-aged men, the monster, unremarkably enough, has actually developed a prostate condition. An unprecedented dialogue has opened, Turkey’s National Intelligence Organisation has been sent to meet with Öcalan on Imralı, and so too members of the Peace and Democracy Party (BDP), the political wing of the PKK. After over a decade in which Öcalan was only a prisoner and figure of hate, very quickly the Turkish state seem to have realised and accepted that his participation is unavoidable.

Reconciliatory noises are coming on both sides, and following a particularly bloody eighteen months, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, Turkey’s unashamedly populist Prime Minister, is also in the mood for peace this Newroz. The leader of Turkey’s governing AKP, Erdoğan has stated that his goal is to “halt the mothers’ tears”, and though the Prime Minister is generally a leader in the Putin-mould of governance, securing lasting peace for Turkey is the sort of task that might just satisfy an egotist in his need for legacy. What form the prospective peace will take is another question altogether. Perhaps more than anything, Turkey’s Kurds now expect a new constitution, one which makes reference to “citizens of Turkey”, rather than the current emphasis on “Turks”, an ethnicity to which Kurds could never belong without abandoning their own heritage. The idea of a free Kurdish state, promoted by domestic extremists and many flippant international commentators, will almost certainly not come to pass, a prospect by which most Kurds are untroubled. Research by a Diyarbakır think-tank found 59 per cent of Kurds to oppose the idea of statehood, whereas 71 per cent of Turks believe Kurds want exactly that; as always, misrepresentation has been key to such an intensely hostile impasse.

Returning home through Istanbul’s rundown Tarlabașı district, where the houses of local Kurds and Turks are being demolished to make way for luxury flats, I speak to a young man named Firat, standing beside glowing refrigerators, bunches of spinach and crates of fruit. Firat tells me he’s Kurdish, but seems uncertain in speaking to a stranger who asks such direct questions on a day such as Newroz. He shakes his head when I ask what he thinks of the PKK and Öcalan. He points to the shop that we’re standing outside of, “this is mine,” he tells me proudly, and with a smile he says, “I don’t want anything but peace.”

An equinox passes, and across the middle east and beyond, spring starts anew. With drums, car horns and firecrackers heard through the streets of Istanbul until late in the evening, often it seems Newroz has become steeped in the bravado of separatism. Where once young men jumped over bonfires in pagan ritual, the act has since taken on the machismo of a conflict. Newroz was never meant to be Kurdish so much as Persian, just as the tradition has roots that are pagan rather than militant. After thirty years of warfare, there are good signs that perhaps the spring equinox will one day be celebrated for its original meaning again, rather than as part of a nationalist feud. If this can be brought about, then both Kurds and Turks will find themselves all the better for it, and Anatolia can start to remember how it felt to be at peace.

Last thoughts on Hugo Chavez

Hugo Chavez was elected in 1999... I was fourteen years old, he didn't mean much to me. At the age of fifteen I got the internet, and by the age of sixteen I was getting home from school each day to read world news and find out where global revolution was waiting to kick off. Capitalism was my enemy, socialism my mantra, Che Guevara and Fidel Castro my heroes; I pretty much spoke in these terms, and I certainly thought in these terms. You can probably guess, therefore, what I thought of the socialist Hugo Chavez, especially after the CIA-backed coup that failed to oust his democratically elected government in 2002.

Slowly, however, I stopped caring about Hugo Chavez. I still cared about politics, but I started to reach an age at which I valued knowledge about events more directly relevant to me, and about issues I was in a position to be better-informed upon. In 2004 I went to university, where a large population of identikit radicals meant all I wanted was to distance myself from the emblems of socialism. I also became disinterested in the pastime of speaking up for a leader or regime in which I wasn't qualified to have an informed opinion, and in which - the media led me to believe - I might be compromising many of my values by endorsing. Bob Dylan's My Back Pages sum-up what happened to me, "Equality, I spoke the word as if a wedding vow, Ahh but I was so much older then, I'm younger than that now"

Over the last few years I've warmed back towards Chavez, and although I don't like to think myself too susceptible to as much, the fact that he just died probably has something to do with the things I'm thinking right now. The most insightful articles I read on him recently were this piece, in the New Statesman, and a piece by Owen Jones for The Independent, which more than anything made clear that all international observers had ruled Chavez's recent election victory to be transparent and legitimate, despite some of the inferences western media might have made.

I'm not 16 any longer... I'm not now going to say that Chavez was a faultless leader, he clearly wasn't, but such a thing doesn't exist anyway. More than anything, his leadership and the criticism it attracted is useful in bringing out the double-standards of western governments and their advocates. As one person noted on Twitter... "Why is it always 'socialist president, Hugo Chavez' but never 'Capitalist Prime Minister, David Cameron'?"

This is the bottom line in the case against Hugo Chavez - that he was a deviant, and had he not been around, then no doubt Morales in Bolivia or Lula in Brazil would have become the go-to fall guy for ideas of loony Latin socialism. Where he was not criticised for human rights violations, Chavez was accused of mismanagement of the Venezuelan economy, particular attention being given to reliance on oil. Somehow we manage to get over the human rights-violating, oil dependency of the Arabian peninsular, we don't get our knickers in a twist that the Chinese are reliant on cheap exports, the German economy could be criticised for reliance on manufacturing exports, the British should certainly be more troubled about reliance on financial services, and until it was too late, nobody raised any concerns about the construction-reliance of the Spanish economy. Chavez's crime was not an unbalanced economy so much as using an unbalanced economy towards a socialist project.

A common tack from our almost ubiquitously centre-right political class is that the world is not perfect. We must resort to many expedients (48 hour detention, state secrets acts, drone-strikes, stop-and-search profiling, paying for bankers' bonuses, kettling protests, ad infinitum) because we cannot be soft on crime, immigration, the causes of recession, terrorism, anti-social behaviour (etc. etc.) Our liberties as a society are frequently flouted, and where politicians take the time to justify as much, they will do so with answers that boil down to the idea that ugly reality faces tough decisions. Where neoliberalism is a society's end-goal, realpolitik is justifiable, where socialism - or any form of wealth redistribution - is the guiding principle, realpolitik becomes inexcusable, brutal, cynical. This is the crux of why Chavez was painted as he was, and this is why equally severe human rights violations around the world do not raise the same eyebrows of most politicians or media. Many suggest Chavez was a tyrant for not renewing the license of a private TV station that openly encouraged insurrection against him... as if our own governments would sit idly by in a freedom of speech love-in, while a national TV station encouraged people onto the streets to overthrow them. Many of the same voices who think Chavez a repressive autocrat manage to remain very calm about the fact that western powers have, for over a decade now, incarcerated hundreds of men in the Caribbean, on no grounds more strenuous than their being bearded and happening to have been in the Hindu Kush circa 2001.

Chavez was no doubt flawed, but to his opponents his biggest crime was to kick against neoliberal norms, and the institutions in which those norms are represented.  We are all aware the world is not perfect, which is why a left-wing leader like Chavez was no saint; it is that he was expected to have been that is most in need of questioning here. For those who will continue to paint Chavez as tyrant, or at least as autocrat, they must also be asked to explain the crowds in Caracas that have mourned his passing. They should ask themselves what western leader would receive such adoration, and if Chavez was able to provoke as much, he must have been doing something right.

openDemocracy: The price of principles

An article is a formula. Fabricating a good article from words is the same as fabricating a good table from wood, you take your time, you follow rules, it will stand. In order to do this, you start writing with a certain style, ease towards the subject that you mean to broach, something gentle, easy to read, so that before your reader realises it they're interested in your article and might as well carry on reading. This is what I'm doing right now, following a formula. I'm about to stop doing it.

openDemocracy is set to close. openDemocracy is set to close unless they can raise the last £30,000 of a £250,000 needed to clear the foundation's debts. I'm abandoning journalistic protocol and the subtleties of a good article because... well... frankly, this is important, and whilst hijacked oil tankers and horse meat and bankers' bonuses are also important, openDemocracy is more important because it is a media by which we can discuss problems in a way that seeks to address them, rather than merely to create real life cinema or high-brow gossip.

I've contributed around a half dozen articles to openDemocracy in the last two years... I've received £0 in return for my work. Over the years I've been paid to write for magazines and journals, and of all the work I've produced, it's that which appears on openDemocracy that means most to me, I'm most proud of, and is most important to the world. oD does not abandon an issue after the 48 hour window in which newspapers seek to profit from it, oD is committed to ideas that mean something to how we live, rather than only the quick titillation of a headline scandal. oD does not play to the lowest common denominator, and it believes humans are on this world to do more than just buy stuff... it is for these reasons that writers contribute their work for free, and it is for these reasons that oD does not make profit.

If you care about the world you live in, and are not a regular reader of openDemocracy, then start reading. If you want to go on reading openDemocracy, if you have enjoyed the articles I've written for them, then pay a little money for it. Our mainstream media resides in the gutter, it assumes the worst in people, tells them the worst about one another, and operates more as a bullshit carousel than as an integral component in a functioning democracy. You cannot have a high standard of democracy without a high standard of media, and if the mainstream media is to be removed from the gutter, or held to account for its promotion of organised ignorance, we need sources like openDemocracy. As much as anything else, that's the issue here... there is no other source like openDemocracy.

The current funding shortfall is the result of growth, but not growth for only the sake of growth, or growth for the sake of greed. Ten years after its foundation, with readership rising internationally, oD restructured with new sections, campaigns, and editors to manage the new interest and adapt to a changing world. It is evidence of just how oD pre-empts politics and news that growth has been greatest in such politically significant regions as India and north Africa. The organisation's finances have since been returned to a sustainable footing, with expenses balanced against revenues, but the debts of restructuring must be cleared in order for oD to continue. The world is constantly changing, and this crisis is the price of oD's willingness to take bold steps in order to stay relevant. Our media is funded by advertising revenues from supermarkets, banks, oil corporations, automobile manufacturers and purveyors of consumer goods; news intended to challenge a flawed world is intermingled with promotions by companies that will sacrifice all principles and human values in return for profit. Through our consumerism we pay for this to happen, and it does not need saying that the world will become a steadily darker place if the production of news is paid for by corporations. The cost of principled media, free for all to read, is a donation to openDemocracy. The £216,000 of donations raised so far shows how many people believe in this cause, and how strongly they believe in it.

You will not save a child from hunger, you will not take a rough sleeper off the streets, provide a blanket for an elderly person or stop a rainforest being felled. You will be paying for the ideas, and the promotion of the ideas, that can help us all deal with these problems before they become problems. You will be paying for media that is not worn-down by cynicism or distracted by hysterics, openDemocracy is written and edited by people who care deeply about the world, and who still have the courage to believe that world can be made better. You cannot put a price on these ideals, but they have to survive.

Hospices and other lessons from death

An Italian doctor once explained to me that hospices were a particularly British creation, designed to gently illustrate the inevitability of death for those getting closer to the inevitability. Hospices bring with them a new set of norms, helping the transition from what have been our everyday behaviours and thoughts. For our famously stuffy island nation, the Italian thought it a remarkably progressive approach to death. Whether or not this is so, it’s the sort of idea I’d have happily left untested, to have taken his word for it rather than to take a look for myself. This new year I had my first experience of a hospice, when I spent a few days with a relative suffering advanced cancer.

I didn’t have any pre-existing opinions of hospices, only what I’d deduced from their heroic reputation as places where humanity secures moral victories over death. The other side of the experience and I’m still not entirely sure what I think; as with many issues surrounding death, a dominant theme is a general sense of confusion for those left behind. Foremost it is obvious the patient’s peace of mind becomes the primary concern in the healthcare on offer. There is a drinks trolley, so a patient who has spent three years under a strict diet aimed at resisting the spread of cancer can have a gin and tonic again. I know of a woman who spent a year with her husband in a hospice, but for the most part, with hospices the thinking is that the struggle is over and the patient should be able to enjoy the last of their living. Despite the very human intent, however, there is no escaping the fact that hospices are still institutions. There are the endlessly repeating tiny triangles on the floor of a carpeted lobby, the disinfected smell, the corned beef sandwiches and the pneumatic mattress that hisses on the bed beneath you. That a bank can profit from making lives harder, and then sponsor the bed in which you die, seems like a particularly impersonal touch. It’s not hard to see why statistics show people prefer dying in hospices to hospitals, but most of all would like to die at home.

Since the new year, Baader-Meinhof style, hospices seem to be jumping out at me. There are the change boxes on the newsagent counters, chosen charities behind supermarket checkouts, what grabbed my attention most was a headline in a local paper, announcing that hospices had the highest satisfaction rates of any area of the NHS. Looking into the statistics, I find that 20,000 of us will die each year in a hospice, about 4% of all deaths. Although heart and kidney failure present a small minority of cases, almost all these deaths will be the result of cancer. The charity, Help the Hospices, corroborated the newspaper headline for me, they cite research showing 97% satisfaction rates amongst those whose loved-ones have received care in a hospice.

Judging by what I saw in the hospice I visited, I don’t find this surprising. The reception desk was covered in ‘Thank You’ and Christmas cards, I heard the relatives of another patient talking of how they felt the staff had become their new family. I have to agree that the staff were very attentive, they were very nice, they could have done better with my relative’s requests that his soup be bought in a mug rather than a bowl, but it would be a cruel critic that judged them for as much. At the same time, I wasn’t exactly blown away in the way the reputation might lead one to expect; to be honest, the style and standard of service didn’t seem particularly removed from that I’ve experienced and seen elsewhere in the NHS. Hospice staff have the advantage of a less urgent and less expectant working environment, but in saying so I’m not trying to either elevate the staff of the regular NHS or criticise those of the hospice.

It’s the part about expectations that I find most interesting, and the satisfaction statistic actually reinforces what I felt in a previous job delivering flowers in London. Delivering flowers involves a lot of hospitals, probably about one a day on average. Over the course of eighteen months I became familiar with both London’s NHS and private hospitals, in the latter of the two you find the undignified spectre of a cashier, and one indication of the high-end clientele is that signs will sometimes appear in Arabic as well as English. In both types of hospital, however, and overwhelmingly in the case of the NHS, I was aware that I found most of the traits that people generally bemoan the loss of from our daily lives. Of course there are also the posters that warn graphically against abuse of staff, but I never witnessed any abuse, while what I saw regularly were places where people hold doors for one another, where people take the plunge and start the conversation with the stranger in the lift, where people smile – uncertainly, but a smile nevertheless – at the unknown stranger walking the other way down a corridor. As a society we can be so disgustingly impatient where even the most inconsequential seconds and milliseconds are concerned, and in a hospital you will find people waiting two patient hours for a heart scan because they understand the hospital is short staffed. As much as it is the staff that form the atmosphere of hospitals and hospices, it’s the patients and the visitors who make them remarkable places.

None of this is very much like empirical research, and I certainly don’t say it to lessen the dedication of the staff, but even more than their tenderness I’d say something else is at play in our hospices. In hospitals people still have expectations, still have demands, patients might still hold-out on the magical disappearance of their every ailment. To paraphrase the French novelist-physician, Louis-Ferdinand Céline; they want us to make poetry from their every fart, Céline remarked that nobody ever got sick the day before a long weekend. Come the hospice it’s past that, hope fades into reality and the dark truth is that death is good for people, it brings out the best in us all, it’s only a shame it can’t happen more often and a little less painfully. If life constituted our dying at the age of forty but somehow resurrecting to live out the rest of our days conscious of that first death, I’m sure the world would be a better place for it. Hospices in particular benefit from the blessing of diminished expectations, when life becomes little more than continuing to live, and the material worries and rituals we allow to ruin so many years of our lives have all evaporated into the nonsenses they always were.

Inadvertently it’s impossible not to learn from the dying and the sick. Forget yourself, consider someone else’s situation a while and they show you what a miracle your own life is. Whether that miracle is perceived in scientific or religious sense, anyone determined to analyse all shred of beauty out of human existence should hurry up and donate their organs to someone a little more appreciative. In a hospice you see clearly how vulnerable we humans are, you become grateful for what you have, empathetic towards others, and if our society wants for many traits then perhaps we lack these two most of all. The dying give us pangs of mortality guilt, a suffering to show up our own and put it in its rightful place. It’s only right that we work hard to allow our loved ones to die with dignity, but perhaps the most fitting way to honour their memory as a society would be to try as hard to live with it. Generosity of spirit is implicit to human beings, the biggest tragedy is that we wait for death and suffering to bring it out of us.