Category: Popular & established authors

Ecology of the absurd, Featured blogs, sites & lit works, FLASH!, Popular & established authors, USA

Jeanine Didn’t Want to Add One More Sound to The World

!Epic Tomorrows

By Nina Hart: This story originally appeared in the book of short stories, Somewhere in a Town You Never Knew Existed Somewhere

Out stepped Jeanine. Out into the street after slamming her car door shut. Jeanine. Her upper back jumping from the sound of the slam. Jeanine’s right thumb reaching for the lock button on the car’s keyless device. Jeanine’s sharply manicured thumb about to press down to emit the piercing beep sound that signaled the locking of the doors. She paused though. She could not hit the button. She could not press that button. Because she didn’t want to add one more sound to the world. She wondered What will the birds think? She did this for the birds. She didn’t want to hurt their ears or obstruct their songs. Obstruct their signals to one another. So Jeanine left her car doors unlocked. She even left the doors of her red Pontiac Bonneville wide open on their hinges and all the baby bird chirps came in. Like waves she loved the chirping sounds of no sound no sound no sound coming through like a whale in the wilderness of junkyard love. No sound no sound no sound she said no sound.
Ecology of the absurd, Featured blogs, sites & lit works, Germany, Popular & established authors

Origins of the climate movement (extracts from an upcoming book by Tadzio Mueller: #4)

!Epic Tomorrows

Republished with permission from the blog of Tadzio Mueller, Peaceful Sabotage

Note: this repost continues from the last extract from Tadzio`s upcoming book published on COTW here. Tadzio is happy to receive feedback from activists all over the world. Visit his website for more details.

Capable of taking action in the face of the climate catastrophe?

…But after the frustration of the anti-war movement, I didn’t go directly into activism. Instead, I returned to university, where I had the enormous luck and privilege of writing my dissertation on anti-capitalist activism within the anti-globalization movement—essentially a critical retrospective, a strategic debrief on the movement that had so profoundly changed my life and, at least a little, the world. The research question was essentially: what means do we “anti-capitalists” in the anti-globalization and other movements actually use to fight our great enemy, the final boss, whom we hold responsible for so much of the world’s evil, and how effective are these means?

When I finally finished my dissertation in the autumn of 2006, not only was I finished with university, but the world was also finished with the anti-globalization movement: one of our last major actions in the Global North was the attempt to disrupt the G8 summit in Gleneagles, Scotland. But while a few hundred or a few thousand radical leftists were chased through the Scottish Highlands by well-organized police, the vast majority of people who had come to Scotland to protest were not demonstrating against the G8, but rather under the banner of “Make Poverty History” for an expansion of the powers of precisely those multilateral political-economic institutions whose delegitimization had been one of the central strategies of our movement. The radical wing isolated, the moderate wing co-opted (integrated into the power project), the British government transformed from antagonist of the movement into its tamer: the movement was dead .

Long live the movement!

And what do people do for whom “movement” and “struggle” are central parts of their identity, what do “activists” do when a movement, when their movement ends? Of course, some of us then go home for good, start some well-paid or overly demanding job, have two, three, many children – but for activist self-efficacy junkies like me, it was clear that it had to continue with a new movement. Cold turkey – brrrr, absolutely not.

Fortunately, our British comrades had already shown a way out of the now irrelevant anti-neoliberal globalization movement: while the black-red wing of the movement, to which I belonged, was still preoccupied with the major global summits in 2005, having been convinced in Seattle that these were the key levers on which to apply our limited energies to achieve maximum change, and therefore mobilized for Gleneagles, the influential eco-anarchist wing in the UK had long since abandoned this idea, this illusion, and was instead planning the first “climate camp.” At the end of August 2006, precisely when I was sitting at my desk in Brighton finishing my dissertation on a movement that was by then no longer relevant, a new cycle of social struggles, a new social movement, began at the first Camp for Climate Action at the Drax coal-fired power station , the largest CO2 emitter in the UK: we would later come to know it as the “climate movement.”

2007 wasn’t just the year of my gay coming out and move to the queer-hedonistic mecca of Berlin; it was also the year of my personal climate conversion. Like many German leftists and radical leftists, I had previously held an absurdly arrogant attitude towards anything that even remotely resembled an “environmental issue.” I thought, as many leftists still do, that environmental issues were privileged, bourgeois feel-good nonsense, that environmental issues were about cute megafauna like polar bears and turtles, maybe trees, perhaps a little bit about agriculture, but that the truly important issues were the classic leftist themes: control of the means of production, class struggle, redistribution, socialization, etc. Without ever having really engaged with them, I had internalized the anti-ecological leftist prejudice that the real leftist issues were about people, about exploitation versus liberation, while environmental issues were luxury topics to be addressed sometime after the revolution.

The climate question

The mid-2000s, when the world’s first climate agreement came into force (the now justifiably largely forgotten “Kyoto Protocol”), when a climate policy slide show by a former US Vice President won the Oscar for Best Documentary, was also the time when the Global North, in the context of increasingly escalating climate catastrophe consequences, slowly began to take the climate issue seriously. Hurricane Katrina, which struck New Orleans in August 2005, played a particularly important role here: until then, the wealthy world (myself included, as a scion of the cosmopolitan upper middle class) had happily indulged in the illusion that the climate catastrophe was a “somewhere, sometime” problem. But when the richest and most powerful country in the world experienced an “environmental catastrophe” that, due to historical racial and class-based injustices, immediately manifested itself as a social catastrophe as well, when Mexican troops entered Texas to provide food for evacuees …When George W. Bush and his Republicans suffered a crushing defeat in the 2006 midterm elections, partly because they had so disastrously botched the disaster response , and especially because all of this took place in the USA, where the rest of the West can always see a bit of its own future – it began to become clear to the rich world that this “climate change” had probably received too little attention so far.

Institutions like the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund began talking about “green loans,” positioning themselves, after years of quite effective delegitimization by our movement, as the institutions that could finance and enable a global ” green transition .” And when, in 2007, during what was truly the last major anti-globalization action in Europe, at the G8 summit in Heiligendamm, the brilliant political tactician Angela Merkel actually managed to completely thwart our summit blockades by positioning the G8 not as the neoliberal governess of the world, but as a globally solidarity-based institution of savvy climate saviors, I began for the first time to recognize the world-changing relevance of the issue. Initially, not because I considered the topic important myself, but because I understood that our old adversaries – the global institutions and factions of capital that had driven the project of “neoliberal globalization” – were beginning to reorient themselves, adopting a new rhetoric in the midst of the emerging major crisis of capitalism: “Look, we are no longer evil neoliberals; we recognize that a potential catastrophe is looming, and we will not only solve it, we will use the energy it releases to unleash a new, enlightened, sustainable, green growth cycle that can pull us out of the deepest global economic crisis since the Great Depression .”

The climate movement…

So I began to engage with the climate issue both activistically and academically, and I quickly got the impression that it could be a bigger deal than I had previously understood. A number of German activists participated in the 2nd Climate Camp (Camp for Climate Action) in the summer of 2007, and we were so enthusiastic about this form of action that we decided to organize the first climate camp in Germany in 2008, which then took place in Hamburg-Moorburg as the first German “Anti-Racist and Climate Camp.” From there, we moved on to the “Copenhagen Mobilization,” when the emerging activist climate movement, along with pretty much the rest of the world, pinned its hopes on the possibility that success at the COP15 climate summit in Copenhagen could somehow influence the already rapidly escalating “climate change.” But as some of you may remember, the summit flopped, as did the large demonstrations and actions that took place around and against it , and after 2009 things became pretty quiet around the climate issue. From 2010 to 2015, the young, primarily left-wing radical climate movement plodded along rather unnoticed in the coal-mining regions, trying to pull new levers after the summit… and nobody gave a fuck.

Modern poetry is anarchism, Popular & established authors, South Korea

Meet Me at Three O’clock at the LerDevagar Bookstore

!Epic Tomorrows

By Jo Eun Young, Republic of Korea; translated by Jung Slin. See also: The Summer We Once Wanted and The Woman Not On Any List

Dear Zeze’s one and only Mister Portuga,

My teacher asked about Papa and

Got a packed lunch from Mama, but the next day

He left a thick book only in the next desk over.

So I tear out the last page and go

To Lisbon

To the bookstore LerDevagar

The workwoman who bikes across the store each day

Wrote poetry and was fired from the print shop, they say

Against the screaming pages

Her fingertips come into bloom

When her feet hum round and round the pedals

Songs in canon rouse from slumber to form a path

I cut the wire around my chest

And put up my hair in a gentle bun

When the sun shines at a three o’clock tilt

The scenery hiding underfoot unwraps its belt

A shadow has sunk its teeth into my dusty feet

And when its slant leans to the left

I take one slow stroll around the bookstore

In the bookshelf, three sections from the leftmost end

I’ll hide two books, and between the pages will be

Dried carnations once slipped into the muzzles of guns

I’ll ask for an Espresso• with one drop of ink

Only when the dust peeled naked by the sun

Falls onto the shattered mirror

Sound out my name backwards, Dear Mister Portuga

The name my teacher never said

And meet me at three o’clock

At the LerDevagar bookstore

•The LerDevagar bookstore was once a print shop, where the first issue of the Portuguese newspaper Espresso was printed. It was also the epicenter of the bloodless 1974 revolution known as the CarnationRevolution.

Featured blogs, sites & lit works, Germany, Popular & established authors, Reflections

Incapable of acting in war: without leverage, there is no power (extracts from an upcoming book by Tadzio Mueller: #3)

!Epic Tomorrows

Republished with permission from the blog of Tadzio Mueller, Peaceful Sabotage

Note: continuing from the last extract from Tadzio`s upcoming book published on COTW here, this is the second part of the latest introduction. Tadzio is happy to receive feedback from activists all over the world. Visit his website for more details.

Incapable of action in war: no movement without leverage

Seattle changed me: before, I saw my likely career path in some more or less progressive UN institution—perhaps in some environmental department of the World Bank, or in one of those small, left-leaning UN research institutes like UNRISD—but afterward, I knew that my political future lay in activism, in social movements. Everything else seemed like utter nonsense. What could be better than the experience I had in Seattle? What better response to major political anxieties than to build a social movement around and against them, within which we could then collectively and powerfully address the fear and the problem that triggered it?

The next political problem was not long in coming: during 2002, when I was living in England to write my dissertation on anti-capitalist activism at Sussex University, it became clear that the US empire, led by Dick Cheney and his glorified sock puppet George W. Bush, would attack Iraq without any legal or moral basis, and would be supported in this by the British poodle Tony Blair. I know that it has now become completely normal again to constantly see fighter jets and other military aircraft overhead, even in the privileged countries of the world, but at the beginning of the 2000s, after a good ten years of the “peace dividend”—the rather silly and hyper-privileged assumption in retrospect that after the end of the Cold War a kind of permanent global peace would prevail, that the Pax Americana would extend forever across the entire world—it was deeply frightening to live in a country that, together with the global bully hegemon, was planning an illegal war of aggression that would result in bombers taking off from British Air Force bases ” to murder Iraqi children ,” as we somewhat polemically put it at the time. But the protests were of course not only about humanitarian concern for people in Iraq, however present that was: many of us in the British anti-war movement were driven by the fear of a world in which wars would once again become a perfectly normal form of enforcing imperial or even “national” interests – a world that we had been promised was over since 1989.

Anti-War Movement 2002-2003

Since Seattle, I had become an “activist” and experienced “limitless agency” through shared radical (disobedient, rule-breaking, even confrontational) street activism, so the reaction to the looming war, which was simultaneously a kind of moral bankruptcy for the victorious side in the Cold War – the “new world order” apparently wasn’t so different from the old one, in which the rich, late-imperial societies of the global North simply take what they want and provide some kind of bullshit justification (just like in Iraq back then, and in Venezuela today) – was almost predetermined: let’s build an anti-war movement .

And so we did . But not all activism is successful, not every movement conveys heroic agency—on average, unfortunately, quite the opposite is true. “Activism” is a very particular kind of magic that can only unfold its full effect under very specific, and in most cases not truly predictable, conditions, and these conditions are usually not met. A key condition for success that was lacking in the British anti-war movement is the existence of leverage .

Sure, a collective mass of people on the streets is important and encouraging, and organizing a huge demonstration, or an action that successfully achieves its goal and (for example) blocks or peacefully sabotages something, is definitely a great feeling. But if these demonstrations or actions repeatedly come to nothing, if they don’t generate any expanding momentum in the sense of a constantly growing wave of mobilization, especially if what is being fought against eventually becomes irrevocably real: then the movement produces the exact opposite of the empowering experience that motivates people to become active as “activists” (or “organizers,” if the term “activist” has acquired too many negative connotations these days), to get involved in social movements. Then the movement feels just as lame as sitting around in the shrinking local grassroots organization of some political party, waiting at just after 10 p.m. for the secretary to correctly present the minutes from last week’s meeting. Even worse, since the promise of activism is precisely that of an almost explosive capacity for action, regardless of how long it actually takes to achieve political success, this very promise then becomes a problem, because while party work is deliberately designed for the long term, it is a major challenge for movements to survive the rigors of the political level and to secure their internal stability and resilience between peak mobilization phases: if movement work falters, the movement is often immediately threatened with extinction.

That’s exactly what happened to the British anti-war movement. While we achieved incredible mobilization successes in 2002, the year of war preparations, with local anti-war groups organizing themselves practically across the entire country and very, very clear majorities positioning themselves against an illegal war of aggression, we as a movement seemed to think that would be enough. Sure, there was a radical wing, to which our Sussex Action for Peace group also belonged, which repeatedly attracted attention with acts of civil disobedience, street blockades, and other forms of protest, but at its core, the strategy was the same one that the German climate movement would later rely on: large demonstrations and attention-grabbing actions were supposed to generate clear societal majorities for or against something, then the government would cave in, because alienating societal majorities should be a problem for a democratically elected government.

Leverage

But is it ? The statement sounds plausible at first, but consider the (then) British two-party system: if, realistically, the only choice is between Labour and the Tories, and the Tories are generally in favor of war, and Labour is pushing for this specific war, then “shifting public opinion” isn’t a viable tool because there were no effective electoral sanctions if Labour went to war. “Whatcha gonna do – vote for the effin’ Tories, ey?”

The whole sorry spectacle of a huge, well-organized movement without any real power reached its climax on February 15, 2003, when 1.5 million people, in the largest political demonstration in British history, laboriously and relentlessly wound their way through the streets of London: the outbreak of war was just weeks away, and the movement’s stated goal was to prevent it. At the same time, the Blair government had loudly and clearly signaled that it didn’t care about public opinion; it would definitely support the USA in this war, so crucial for human rights and democracy. This, in turn, meant that there was actually no reason at all for 1.5 million people to be in the streets, except for mutual reassurance. If we had used this boring demonstration, which never decided to, for example, sit down in the street and block London, or perhaps have a small party in front of 10 Downing Street, during which, and I’m just spitballing here , one could indeed have beautified the facade of the house in which an illegal imperialist war of aggression was being planned, then something could have been achieved.

But nobody sat down, nobody celebrated exuberantly with pyrotechnics in Downing Street, nobody decided to resort to any means other than friendly persuasion. And so it happened as it had to: we went to London, the demonstration was huge (and terribly quiet: England doesn’t really have a strong slogan-chanting culture, but to see 1.5 million people marching through the city virtually silently was quite oppressive), then we went back home, and nothing, absolutely nothing, had changed regarding the war plans. February 15, 2003, was the day I lost my last bit of respect for what we radical leftists disparagingly call “walking demonstrations,” and finally and completely dedicated myself to mass civil disobedience, to breaking the rules together for a good cause. ( A side note on the history of the movement : Roger Hallam, later co-founder of Extinction Rebellion and Just Stop Oil/Last Generation, was also at this demonstration, and his entirely correct insight that a government and/or society that will not listen may have to feel was formed there.)

A few weeks later, on Thursday, March 20, 2003, the war actually began. I remember it very clearly: we, a group of radical left-wing activists, drove to a ” last ditch” action at the Fairford Air Force Base, how we, along with others from the radical wing, tried to storm the base ( crazy idea : in retrospect, I’ve often wondered what would have happened if we had succeeded) to prevent bombers and the like from taking off. But what I remember most vividly is the feeling of utter powerlessness as I lay in a small ditch in front of a fence after a police officer pushed me back, and I saw the bombers taking off overhead, flying towards Baghdad, Kirkuk, and Mosul: I howled, screamed, and trembled with frustration and helplessness. That moment is seared into my memory, much like its opposite in Seattle: never again such powerless activism, I swore to myself back then…

Popular & established authors, SHORT short stories, South Korea

The Memory Pawnshop (Everyone Remembered Him Except Me)

!Epic Tomorrows

By Hyoungshim Choi; Hyoungshim Choi is one of the most popular authors on COTW. After this piece, try her excellent short story, Tongue.

In the shop tucked away in the corner of the alley, there hung a heavy atmosphere. A grey-haired man stared intently at an old set of scales, placed on a display stand. The reading, steeply rising, eventually came to a stop. 

—You hit the jackpot with this one. 

The eyes of the man in the jeweler’s loupes gleamed keenly. 

—Please give me a good price for it.

I mumbled, as if pleading. The man carefully removed the device that was connected to my head. You’d have thought this device for stimulating the brain might have gotten some upgrade by now, but he was sticking to the old ways. However, he was a veteran with a great many clients, reliable. He knew indeed how to distinguish valuable memories and extract them without damaging them. He was famous in particular for implanting memories neatly and noiselessly. While the man priced my memory, I, after hesitating several times, found the courage to open my mouth. 

—I’m here today to propose a very special deal.

This place where precious memories are bought and sold is called the soul’s pawnshop. I’m a regular here. Mainly as a seller. The memories I sell are to do with romance. Some people might call it love, but I just call it romance. So people call those who do this kind of work, like me, the prostitutes of the soul. As the name suggests, it’s not a particularly well-regarded job.  

I’ve been doing this for almost 5 years now. The first time I sold a memory was when I had just left the childhood care facility. Since I had nothing, I decided to sell off the memories of what I wouldn’t exactly call my first love. When I sold one of these memories for the first time, I experienced a miracle where my body felt lighter. Perhaps selling that memory had taken some of my darker childhood memories with it. Those memories had been woven into the background of my first love. It’s somewhat regrettable that the memories cannot be removed completely even when they are supposed to be, since some traces are left behind that might be considered as afterimages. In any case, I got into this work because of the lightness of heart I got from sloughing my dark memories, and because I was attracted to the fact my experiences went for a pretty high price to the wealthy.

Memories sold in this manner are sometimes used for basic construction of virtual reality, and if there are people who want to make these memories more vividly their own, then the memories are transplanted after undergoing some slight processing. The kind of people who buy the memories of people like me, I was told, are the ones who are unwilling to experience things in this busy world by putting their own mind and body under stress but who still would like to indirectly have those experiences. Of course, there is no reason to undergo all the sorts of hardships that people like me have to, people who have no place to stay, no parents, and no proper social protection. Plus, they are busy competing to survive in this high-tech world, nor can they afford to use up their mental and physical energy struggling to have and maintain romantic relationships. People who have been closely managed from the time that they were a fertilized egg and have to live their best lives are different from those like me who were conceived and born naturally and have to deal with all sorts of pain and diseases. That is to say, I am of the lowest caste in this society. 

—How was the person you went out with this time?

Anna, sitting next to me in the waiting room, asked me while we were waiting for our memories to be transferred to the computer simulation. Anna looked at me with her face all swollen up. She must’ve come here to sell the memory she acquired from staging some tear-jerking melodrama.

—He was okay. Very much so.

I choked up as I responded.

—What does he do?

Anna asked, still wiping away her eyes.

—Space explorer. He went all the way inside a black hole and managed to escape, just about.

—Sounds fun. How did you meet?

—At a space communication club. I became friendly with a man who lives on Planet Titan, and he invited me over to his.

—That’s cool. Then why did you break up?

I could not give an answer. I always used to think of Anna as a silly goose, immersed in self-pity and overly sentimental. But this time around, I was the one crying. In an attempt not to cry I ground my teeth, but the sound of my choking up still escaped. Anna looked at me astounded, then, without words, she wiped my eyes with her sleeves.

As I sat there, the memory surfaced with painful clarity. Once again I was aboard the shuttle, staring through the window at the familiar black sky and starlight. The afterimage of Ian, disappearing into the darkness beyond, was still vivid. Looking at the blue Earth slowly nearing, I touched the empty seat next to mine.

The last night on Planet Titan, he handed me two tickets to Earth. With the words that he wanted me to be with me forever. Except for the check-in process being strangely slow at Titan Space Station, everything went smoothly. That is, before Ian pressed the emergency evacuation button with the terrorist in his arms. For a long time after the spaceship departed from Planet Titan, Ian and I could not sleep at all because of our expectations for a new life. As the passengers went into hibernation for the long journey to Earth, a terrorist tried to force his way into the cockpit. We were just about to go into hibernation. I had absolutely no clue that it was going to be like this when Ian quietly rose and wrapped his arm around the terrorist.

They put him as missing. The terrorist had already broken the security camera in the cabin before he tried to force his way into the cockpit. I, the only witness, testified at the top of my lungs to his heroic sacrifice, but nobody gave ear to what I had to say.

My memories with him—these, I really did not want to sell. I wanted to remember him for long (for a long time / forever) and I wanted to miss him until the day I died. But I had to sell my memories, so at least I could make other people remember him for long (for a long time / forever)

First, I made up my mind to sell all of my memories that might be worth any money except for the scene where Ian, nestled within the emergency evacuation capsule with the terrorist in his arms, disappears into the starlight. Recollections of my mother, faceless and remembered only as warmth deep down in my memories, all the way up to him proposing to me. They were worth pretty good money, for they were ones I had intended not to sell and to cherish for a long time. But then, I placed a very special order with the owner of the soul pawnshop. I asked him to simultaneously insert the scene into the memories of a great number of people—the scene where Ian escapes into space with the terrorist in his arms to save the lives of hundreds of passengers. We agreed that I would pay for this with the money I earned from my memories.

Lying on the memory-harvesting machine, I felt my left arm. On it, I had tattooed Ian’s name. For I wanted to be left with it, only this, even though all of his memories would be erased. Soon enough, the machine lit up. I closed my eyes.

—You may come out now. 

The machine stopped and I woke up. As always, my head was hazy. A finalized bill was waiting for me at the cashier. As I was about to step out of the pawnshop having picked up the papers, the owner said wistfully that the new memory-transplant program is astonishingly good. I just smiled at him, not understanding what he meant. My eyes teared up as I was pushing the glass door, strange. The owner’s countenance bidding me goodbye was dark. The door closed behind me and the sight of the street caught my eyes. The sun was shining brightly. The sky was as clear and clean as it’s ever been. A strange man was smiling on the big news billboard erected at the end of the street. His face seemed somehow familiar.

—We all shall remember his noble sacrifice for a long time.

The news anchor was struggling to keep under his control the emotions surging within him. I thoughtlessly put my hands into my pockets and walked up to the end of the street. Anna, recognizing me at the far end, smiled brightly. Tears, whose meaning I could not understand, kept flowing from my eyes.