Libya. Viva la Revolution!

Yet again, Mr Fish gets it in one:

The young people are revolting and their revolution is live

One of the interesting things about being largely isolated from the world and self-absorbed in the priorities of getting power, water and food during and immediately after Cyclone Yasi, was hearing snippets of information about the people's revolution in Egypt.

This morning our time, Mubarak as essentially given the people of Egypt the finger by installing his vice-president to "lead" the nation.

I suspect that today the real revolution starts in Egypt. 

Image: Tahrir square crowds, Feb. 11, 2011. REUTERS/Dylan Martinez

Watching all of this unfold this morning reminded me of the fantastic Gil Scott-Heron track The Revolution Will Not Be Televised.  Written for an earlier young people's revolution, it still hits the mark.  (I'd also argue as others have that Scott-Heron was one of the originators of rap and hip hop, or street poetry as it use to be known)

I love it when young people are revolting - after all, it is they who create change, not self-interested old men like Mubarak.  However, we know from previous revolutions large and small that, without a clear idea of and manifesto for the change you want to create, the revolution will be unlikely to achieve it's potential, let alone its objectives.

I fear the young people of Egypt aren't organised in this way and as such their organic revolution will either flounder or, in the long-run, result in a worse than status-quo outcome. 

I hope I'm wrong.

Great activists never die - their tactics live forever

This story about residents of the small British town of Stony Stratford borrowing every single book from their local library in an attempt to stop it from being closed reminded me of an extraordinary 70-something who led a similar revolt (invented the tactic?) some 35 years ago - against the State Library in Adelaide.

Arthur Mortimer was what you'd call a radical librarian - as I remember him, a rather eccentric retiree who rode a bike, read nooks to children and kept time with a alarm clock (wind-up and with bells) that he carried in his shoulder bag.

The post-Vietnam 70's in Adelaide were (amongst other things) the days of the community media movement - a reaction during the late-60's and 70's to the corporatisation of the mainstream media and governments' manipulation of them during the Vietnam days. Pre-Internet and before Julian Assange was born, the community media movement ultimately gave rise to the network of community based non-profit broadcasters we have today.

Interwoven with the community media movement, community information activists (a combination of welfare workers and librarians such as Arthur) were agitating for community access and control over information - activism which led to the network of Citizens Advice Bureaus and Community Information Centres we see today around the country.

And it was within this context that Arthur committed himself to getting library services into the information and cultural desert that was the working class western suburbs of Adelaide.

Again, as my memory records it, Arthur's first step was to get a few mates together and create the organisation C.R.O.W. ("Concerned Residents of the West") - giving his one-man movement organisational legitimacy and gravitas and a base from which to launch his demands for a fair go for the West. 

From there, Arthur launched two most stunning (and ultimately successful) tactics:

• Assembling about 100 mates and mates mates, Arthur led a march from the SA Parliament down North Terrace past the Gov's place to the State Library where they preceeded to borrow all of the fiction under 'A' and warn that they would be back the following week for the B's etc.  As I remember he got front page of The Advertiser on Monday and we never had to go back for the B's

• Creating a national security alert (and national press coverage - about library funding!!!) when he sent egg powder in envelopes to federal Cabinet (or was it all federal MPs?) along with extracts from Horton Hatches the Egg by Dr. Seuss (a slightly obtuse reference to the '75 Whitlam Government's Inquiry into Public Libraries chaired by one Mr Horton).

All great fun at the time but, the thing is, Arthur won!! - as Susan Marsden notes in her A History of Woodville (1977) (pdf here):

The "West" had long been deprived of good, local library services, and public agitation, led by the humorous, but determined C.R.O.W.'s ("Concerned Residents of the West") stimulated a profound change at State library level to a direct involvement with local libraries. The most dramatic period of expansion in public library services, provided in co-operation with Councils, was between 1977-1979 when 10 new services came into operation in the Western region, three of these in Woodville.

You won't find much about Arthur on-line although I did find this reference which is held in the SA State Library: Information and power : an activist view.

I wonder if Julian Assange has read it?

Enough for now.  Sometime remind me to tell you the story of the Dewhurst's - a couple who saved some 300 young men from going to Vietnam from their Northern suburbs lounge room.

All power to the cartoonists

I've long thought that the newspaper article that has most influence on public opinion is the editorial cartoon. It is the one piece that everyone reads and absorbs - otherwise they wouldn't chuckle at the good ones.

Seeing this Ron Cobb 'toon from '73 reminded me again of the power of a good cartoon.  As a young adult this, amongst others (eg Captain Goodvibes), had a hugerole in shaping my understanding of the world that lasts to this day.

As Dave Riley at Left Click notes, 38 years later Cobb's 'toon is "archetypal of what underpins contemporary Australia and the meaning is as potent and relevant today as it was when the image was first drawn.

Scary isn't it if you pause long enough to consider it?"

Could Wikileaks take us here? (or are we already there)

Found this good post by  Johan Lagerkvist at onlineopinion.com.au* discussing the implications of how the powerful might responds to Wikileaks, including this quote

It can be foreshadowed that governments will craft laws that target citizen-journalist activities. Citizens’ unauthorised storing of leaked material could be made illegal. Another potential outcome could be state eavesdropping, monitoring and storing information on a broader spectrum of the citizenry than hitherto possible.

Chilling - especially when you've just read this story from Stephen Martin at The Mirror:

Boy of 12 hauled out of class by police over David Cameron Facebook protest

Scary!  Maybe the proponents of the Julian Assange Statue on Magnetic Island will need to re-think their personal security!

* Originally posted on YaleGlobal Online. Copyright © 2010, Yale Center for the Study of Globalization, Yale University

The most wanted man in the world

Bob's still got it

I'm a big Bob Dylan fan and, along with many others, consider him the greatest songwiter of his generation if not the last century so I was pretty impressed to see this headline (although I bet the article was written by a 25 year old that had to look up his entry on wikipedia in order to write the last couple of throw-away lines):

China refuses Bob Dylan right to perform

Keep shakin' 'em up Bob

The war for the future

From "The Fire this Time: Copenhagen and the War for the Future" by Alex Steffen in WorldChanging.com:

And this is what most older observers seem to refuse to understand: The world looks dramatically different if the year 2050 is one you’re likely to be alive to see. To younger people, Copenhagen isn’t some do-gooder meeting; it’s the first major battle in a war for the future.

Their future. I’m in my middle years, in between the two groups, yet even I can see that this war is about to get a lot more heated—far more heated than anything we’ve seen in half a century. To younger people, this isn’t just policy, it’s personal.

To be young and aware today is to see your elders burning our civilization down around our ears. To hear scientists tell us we’re in the final countdown, with the risk of runaway climate change (along with the ecosystem collapses and horrific human suffering it will bring) mounting with every day we run business as usual. To hear nearly a chorus of credible voices—from doctors and scientists to retired generals and former bankers— warning that to lose this fight is to lose everything that makes our world livable and gives the future hope.

You wouldn’t think a war could start over such simple ideas.

To be young and aware is to see old people—from the U.S. Senate to Wall Street, from newspaper editorial desks to corporate boardrooms—stalling action on every front, spouting platitudes about “balance,” committing themselves wholeheartedly to actions to be undertaken long after they’ve retired and died. To be told that the world’s scientists are participating in a giant hoax; to be chided for not understanding how the real world works; to be warned that doing the right thing will bankrupt us; to be told that not wanting to melt the ice caps and circle the equator in deserts makes you too radical to take seriously.

To be young and aware is to know you’re being lied to; to know that a bright green future is possible; to know that we can reimagine the world, rebuild our cities, redesign our lives, retool our factories, distribute innovation and creativity and all live in a world that is not only better than the alternative, but much better than the world we have now.

To be young and aware is to suspect that, in the end, the debate about climate action isn’t about substance, but about rich old men trying to squeeze every last dollar, euro, and yen from their investments in outdated industries. It is to agree with the environmentalist Paul Hawken that we have an economy that steals the future, sells it in the present, and calls it GDP. It is to begin to see your elders as cannibals with golf clubs.

Myself, I worry: not that the young grow radical—hell, if I were 10 years younger, I’d be on the barricades myself—but that they grow despondent. Because what the world needs now, more than ever, is what the young have always given most: their optimism.

So if nothing else happens in Copenhagen, I pray that all of us who have years and a voice and a conscience will say at least this to the world’s youth: Your fight is ours, too. Don’t give up

It brings a tear to the eye of an old radical yoof.