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Pankaj Mishra · Memory Failure: Germany’s commitment to Israel
▻https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v46/n01/pankaj-mishra/memory-failureMany well-placed men worked to compromise West Germans’ understanding of their complicity in the Third Reich.
Franz Josef Strauss, a veteran of the Wehrmacht in the ‘bloodlands’ of Eastern Europe who became Adenauer’s defence minister and later prime minister of Bavaria, thought that the ‘task of leaving the past behind us’ was best accomplished by defence deals with Israel. Ralf Vogel, who claimed that ‘the Uzi in the hand of the German soldier is better than any brochure against antisemitism,’ now seems an early exponent of this mode of leaving the past behind – what Eleonore Sterling, a survivor of the Shoah and Germany’s first female professor of political science, was by 1965 calling ‘a functional philosemitic attitude’ that replaces ‘a true act of understanding, repentance and future vigilance’ .
Frank Stern’s unsparing diagnosis in The Whitewashing of the Yellow Badge (1992) holds true today: German philosemitism, he wrote, is primarily a ‘political instrument’, used not only to ‘justify options in foreign policy’, but also ‘to evoke and project a moral stance in times when domestic tranquillity is threatened by antisemitic, anti-democratic and right-wing extremist phenomena’.
This is not the first time invocations of Staatsräson have been used to conceal democratic deformations. In 2021, for example, while pursuing defence deals with Israel, Germany challenged the right of the International Criminal Court to investigate war crimes in the Occupied Territories. In mid-December, with twenty thousand Palestinians massacred and epidemics threatening the millions displaced, Die Welt was still claiming that ‘Free Palestine is the new Heil Hitler.’ German leaders continue to block joint European calls for a ceasefire. Weizman may seem to exaggerate when he says that ‘German nationalism has begun to be rehabilitated and revivified under the auspices of German support for Israeli nationalism.’ But the only European society that tried to learn from its vicious past is clearly struggling to remember its main lesson. German politicians and opinion-makers are not only failing to meet their national responsibility to Israel by extending unconditional solidarity to Netanyahu, Smotrich, Gallant and Ben Gvir. As völkisch-authoritarian racism surges at home, the German authorities risk failing in their responsibility to the rest of the world: never again to become complicit in murderous ethnonationalism.
#Allemagne #
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Big Six v. Little Boy : The Unnecessary Bomb
▻https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v45/n22/andrew-cockburn/big-six-v.-little-boy
Où il est pas mal question de Henry Stimson, l’homme qui dans Oppenheimer mène la petite réunion pour savoir quelles villes bombarder et raye Kyoto de la liste parce qu’il y a fait sa lune de miel.Stimson, who had half-heartedly pressed for an investigation of the American role in the Dresden atrocity, was meanwhile enthusiastically supervising the development and plans for use of the atomic bomb, though permitting himself some private agonising over the prospect of ‘the terrible’, ‘the awful’, ‘the diabolical’. As a recipient of Clarke’s intelligence reports, he was cognisant of Japanese peace moves, and understood that the major obstacle was Emperor Hirohito, who felt implicitly threatened by the Allies’ demand for unconditional surrender. An intercepted message to Tokyo’s ambassador in Moscow on 12 July 1945 stated: ‘His Majesty the Emperor ... desires from his heart that [the war] may be quickly terminated, but so long as England and the United States insist upon unconditional surrender, the Japanese Empire has no alternative but to fight on.’ In response, Stimson supported an initiative to let the Japanese know that the emperor would be left unmolested on his throne. This was to be conveyed in an official message from the Allied leaders at a summit in Potsdam scheduled for mid-July.
But Stimson and other powerful figures who favoured this approach were outmanoeuvered by James Byrnes, a wily politician from South Carolina whom Truman had appointed secretary of state. As a senator, Byrnes had shepherded Roosevelt’s New Deal legislation through Congress, and as head of the Office of War Mobilisation controlled much of the country’s industrial economy. A master bureaucratic infighter, he had no truck with half-measures on the bomb’s use, such as prior warning or a demonstration. Any failure to deploy a potentially war-winning weapon, he asserted, would spark public outrage and lead to furious investigations in Congress regarding the $2 billion it had cost to develop. As is usually the case, domestic political considerations were the dominant factor in determining foreign policy. ‘The president would be crucified,’ Byrnes declared, if he settled for anything less than unconditional surrender. He steered an Interim Committee on bomb policy, established by Stimson, to decide that the weapon would be used as soon as it was available, without warning, on a war plant surrounded by workers’ homes. Stimson was mollified by the suggestion that the target would principally be military, and took pride in removing the shrine-city of Kyoto from the target list.
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Florence Sutcliffe-Braithwaite · ‘We’ve messed up, boys’: Bad Blood
▻https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v45/n22/florence-sutcliffe-braithwaite/we-ve-messed-up-boysBayer’s heat-treated Factor VIII product was licensed in the US in February 1984, but it kept making the untreated version until August that year and didn’t stop selling old stock until the following summer. Armour’s parent company was told in October 1985 that its heat-treatment method wasn’t completely effective against HIV, but denied everything; only after two children in Birmingham and four patients in Newcastle were infected with HIV did the company admit to the DHSS that its product was unsafe. If non-heat-treated Factor VIII was banned in one country, the companies just sold it elsewhere. In the first quarter of 1985, #Bayer exported twenty thousand vials – more than five million units – of its old Factor VIII from the US to other parts of the world. Competition between pharmaceutical companies sometimes stimulated innovation, but it could just as easily generate a race to the bottom. The head of the CDC’s Aids taskforce told the companies that their actions ‘ultimately led to not only a lot of death and misery, but a destruction of your customers’. As McGoogan points out, the parallels with the present-day opioid crisis in the US are clear.
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Amjad Iraqi · After the Flood · LRB 21 October 2023
▻https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v45/n20/amjad-iraqi/after-the-floodReferring to the hospital attack, Rishi Sunak, who also made a publicity visit to Israel, told Parliament: ‘If we don’t treat what comes out of the Kremlin as the gospel truth, we should not do the same with Hamas.’ The West’s distorted notion of the powerful and the powerless in Israel-Palestine has never been clearer.
It is in part because of that response that many Palestinians, to the frustration of some of their supporters, have been unable to contend, at least publicly, with the moral travesty of Hamas’s massacres. As they see it, Hamas inverted the violence of the occupation, inflicting on the oppressor a taste of the suffering it metes out routinely. On the streets and online, many Palestinian activists have dropped the language of diplomacy and stopped appealing to international laws that have failed them. They are no longer willing to accept the amnesiac narrative that says their grievances date to 1967 rather than 1948, and that their future lies in a quasi-state on only a fifth of their former homeland. Many are tired of apologising for violent resistance, as if violence were not inherent to all anti-colonial struggles. They are tired of Western governments and media that treat their resistance as more egregious than the Israeli occupation, while non-violent acts are deemed antisemitic or decried as ‘terrorism’. For Palestinians, the enemy is and has always been a settler colonial project intent on their erasure. And they fear that Gaza is at this moment on the verge of annihilation.
Hamas’s brutal attack demolished a psychological barrier more surely than it could any physical one. Since the end of the Second Intifada, Israeli society has tried to insulate itself from the military occupation it has imposed for more than half a century, maintaining a bubble punctured only occasionally by rocket barrages from Gaza or shootings in Israeli cities. It is telling that the mass protest movement which has been agitating since January against the government’s plans to overhaul the judiciary has kept the Palestinian question off its agenda. Apart from a small bloc of anti-occupation protesters, most Israelis have seemed to believe that the current system could bring them lasting safety.
That bubble has now burst. But the Palestinians are now the objects of the wrath of an Israeli government prepared to destroy Gaza and, if possible, expel its population. The recent – and unprecedented – pro-Palestine demonstrations in Cairo, Baghdad, Beirut, London, Paris, Washington and elsewhere make clear that millions recognise this moment for what it is and are ready to challenge their governments’ complicity in apartheid and its gruesome logic. But it will take much more than flags waved many miles away to help Palestinians fend off the ghost of Sharon in Gaza.
21 October
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Adam Shatz · Vengeful Pathologies · LRB 20 October 2023
▻https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v45/n20/adam-shatz/vengeful-pathologiesWhat happened on 7 October was not an explosion; it was a methodical act of killing, and the systematic murder of people in their homes was a bitter mimicry of the 1982 massacre by Israeli-backed Phalangists in Sabra and Shatila in Lebanon. The calculated posting of videos of the killings on the social media accounts of the victims suggests that revenge was among the motives of Hamas’s commanders: Mohammed Deif, the head of Hamas’s military wing, lost his wife and two children in an airstrike in 2014.
One is reminded of Frantz Fanon’s observation that ‘the colonised person is a persecuted person who constantly dreams of becoming the persecutor.’ On 7 October, this dream was realised for those who crossed over into southern Israel: finally, the Israelis would feel the helplessness and terror they had known all their lives. The spectacle of Palestinian jubilation – and the later denials that the killing of civilians had occurred – was troubling but hardly surprising. In colonial wars, Fanon writes, ‘good is quite simply what hurts them most.’
#Fanon #persécuté #persécuteur ##Gaza #vengeance
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Determined to overcome its humiliation by Hamas, the IDF has been no different from – and no more intelligent than – the French in Algeria, the British in Kenya, or the Americans after 9/11. Israel’s disregard for Palestinian life has never been more callous or more flagrant, and it’s being fuelled by a discourse for which the adjective ‘genocidal’ no longer seems like hyperbole.
In just the first six days of air strikes, Israel dropped more than six thousand bombs, and more than twice as many civilians have already died under bombardment as were killed on 7 October. These atrocities are not excesses or ‘collateral damage’: they occur by design .
As Israel’s defence minister, Yoav Gallant, puts it, ‘we are fighting human animals and we will act accordingly.’ ( Fanon: ‘when the colonist speaks of the colonised he uses zoological terms’ and ‘refers constantly to the bestiary ’.)
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Fanon : « le colonisé est un persécuté qui rêve constamment de devenir persécuteur. »
[...]
It is, of course, true that Fanon advocated armed struggle against colonialism, but he referred to the use of violence by the colonised as ‘disintoxicating’, not ‘cleansing’, a widely circulated mistranslation. His understanding of the more murderous forms of anti-colonial violence was that of a psychiatrist, diagnosing a vengeful pathology formed under colonial oppression, rather than offering a prescription. It was natural, he wrote, that ‘the very same people who had it constantly drummed into them that the only language they understood was that of force, now decide to express themselves by force’. Evoking the phenomenological experience of anti-colonial fighters, he noted that in the early stage of revolt, ‘life can only materialise from the rotting cadaver of the colonist.’
But Fanon also wrote hauntingly of the effects of war trauma – including the trauma suffered by anti-colonial rebels who killed civilians. And in a passage that few of his latter-day admirers have cited, he warned that
racism, hatred, resentment and the ‘legitimate desire for revenge’ alone cannot nurture a war of liberation. These flashes of consciousness which fling the body into a zone of turbulence, which plunge it into a virtually pathological dreamlike state where the sight of the other induces vertigo, where my blood calls for the blood of the other, this passionate outburst in the opening phase, disintegrates if it is left to feed on itself. Of course the countless abuses by the colonialist forces reintroduce emotional factors into the struggle, give the militant further cause to hate and new reasons to set off in search of a ‘colonist to kill’. But, day by day, leaders will come to realise that hatred is not an agenda.
To organise an effective movement, Fanon believed, anti-colonial fighters would have to overcome the temptations of primordial revenge, and develop what Martin Luther King, citing Reinhold Niebuhr, called a ‘spiritual discipline against resentment’. In line with this commitment, Fanon’s vision of decolonisation embraced not only colonised Muslims, freeing themselves from the yoke of colonial oppression, but members of the European minority and Jews (themselves a formerly ‘indigenous’ group in Algeria), so long as they joined the struggle for liberation. In A Dying Colonialism, he paid eloquent tribute to non-Muslims in Algeria who, together with their Muslim comrades, imagined a future in which Algerian identity and citizenship would be defined by common ideals, not ethnicity or faith. That this vision perished, thanks to French violence and the FLN’s authoritarian Islamic nationalism, is a tragedy from which Algeria still has not recovered. The destruction of this vision, upheld by intellectuals such as Edward Said and a small but influential minority of Palestinian and Israeli leftists, has been no less damaging for the people of Israel-Palestine.
‘What fills me with dread,’ the Palestinian historian Yezid Sayigh told me in an email,
is that we are at an inflection point in world history. Deep ongoing shifts over at least the past two decades that have been giving rise to right-wing and even fascist movements (and governments) were already building up, so I see Hamas’s slaughter of civilians as roughly equivalent to Sarajevo 1914 or maybe Kristallnacht 1938 in accelerating or unleashing much broader trends. On a ‘lesser scale’, I’m furious at Hamas for basically erasing all we fought for over decades, and aghast at those who can’t maintain the critical faculty to distinguish opposition to Israeli occupation and war crimes, and who turn a blind eye to what Hamas did in southern Israeli kibbutzim. Ethno-tribalism.
The ethno-tribalist fantasies of the decolonial left, with their Fanon recitations and posters of paragliders, are indeed perverse. As the Palestinian writer Karim Kattan wrote in a moving essay for Le Monde, it seems to have become impossible for some of Palestine’s self-styled friends to ‘say: massacres like those that took place at the Tribe of Nova festival are an outrageous horror, and Israel is a ferocious colonial power.’ In an age of defeat and demobilisation, in which the most extreme voices have been amplified by social media, a cult of force appears to have overtaken parts of the left, and short-circuited any empathy for Israeli civilians.
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Adam Shatz · Dynamo Current, Feet, Fists, Salt: What did you do in the war? · LRB 18 February 2021
▻https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v43/n04/adam-shatz/dynamo-current-feet-fists-saltAnxious not to be outflanked on the right by Marine Le Pen’s Rassemblement National, Macron has shown little desire to make conciliatory overtures to French Muslims. And since the beheading of the schoolteacher Samuel Paty by a young man of Chechen origin, he has dug in his heels, attacking anyone who dares to criticise the increasingly repressive application of laïcité as a terrorist sympathiser or ‘Islamo-gauchiste’. In a recent interview with Mediapart, Stora was asked how Macron could preside over the reconciliation process while fulminating against Muslim ‘separatism’; he carefully finessed the question. But Macron’s Algerian war initiative is losing out as he struggles to appeal to an electorate whose sympathies lie elsewhere. The latest poll puts Le Pen almost level with Macron in next year’s elections.
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Nathan Thrall · The Separate Regimes Delusion · LRB 8 January 2021
▻https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v43/n02/nathan-thrall/the-separate-regimes-delusionThe only way for the Zionist left to oppose ethnic domination in the West Bank while preserving ethnic privilege in pre-1967 Israel is to assert that there is an ‘apartheid regime’ in the West Bank separate from the Israeli state. For pre-1967 Israel to be part of an apartheid state would therefore require formal annexation of the West Bank, ‘amalgamating’ the two regimes. But this is a misunderstanding of the crime of apartheid as described in international law. Like torture, apartheid does not need to be applied uniformly or everywhere in a country to be criminal: in international law there is no such thing as an ‘apartheid regime’, just as there is no such thing as a ‘torture regime’. The word ‘regime’ doesn’t appear anywhere in the original 1973 International Convention on the Suppression and Punishment of the Crime of Apartheid. And, although the 1998 Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court does use the word ‘regime’ in its definition (it was added to satisfy the US delegation, which was concerned about the possible prosecution of US citizens belonging to white supremacist groups), it was clearly not inserted to allow apartheid to be restricted to regions or units of a state.
Yet the notion that only formal annexation can turn Israel into an apartheid state has become intrinsic to left-wing Zionist ideology. In June last year, more than five hundred scholars of Jewish studies, many of them prominent supporters of Israel, such as the American Jewish philosopher Michael Walzer, signed a letter stating that ‘annexation of Palestinian territories will cement into place an anti-democratic system of separate and unequal law and systemic discrimination against the Palestinian population. Such discrimination on the basis of racial, ethnic, religious or national background is defined as “conditions of apartheid” and a “crime against humanity”.’
The same month, Zulat, a new think tank headed by the former chair of the liberal Zionist Meretz party, Zehava Gal-On, published a report entitled ‘Whitewashing Apartheid’. In a section on the consequences of de jure annexation it performed a whitewash of its own, arguing that apartheid in the West Bank is currently practised not by Israel but by a separate regime: ‘Even if we annex only one square metre, the state of Israel will be relinquishing its democratic pretensions and abandoning its 53-year declared intention to end the conflict, reach an agreed settlement with the Palestinians and cease ruling over them.’ Even annexation, however, ‘does not necessarily make Israel an apartheid state but rather preserves it as a state operating a regime with apartheid characteristics in the occupied territories’. By this standard, apartheid South Africa was a democracy – like all democracies, an imperfect one – operating a regime with apartheid characteristics in the townships and Bantustans. Those Bantustans, incidentally, had their own flags, anthems, civil servants, parliaments, elections and a limited degree of autonomy not unlike that of the Palestinian Authority.
Perhaps no organisation has promoted the idea of separate regimes more forcefully than Yesh Din , a human rights organisation that has conducted important legal advocacy on behalf of Palestinians subjected to settler violence, unlawful killing and destruction of property by Israeli security forces, Israeli land confiscation and Israeli restrictions on access to farmland. Last year, Yesh Din became the first Israeli organisation to publish a significant report accusing government officials of apartheid. At the same time, it is one of the staunchest defenders of the separate regimes theory. Yesh Din’s shifting, inconsistent answers to the question of at which point Israel would cease to be a democracy have been emblematic of the broader weaknesses in the separate regimes argument.
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Traduction française :
L’illusion des régimes séparés
Nathan Thrall, London Review of Books, le 7 janvier 2021
▻https://agencemediapalestine.fr/blog/2021/01/11/lillusion-des-regimes-separesLe postulat qu’Israël est une démocratie repose sur la croyance qu’on peut séparer l’État d’avant 1967 du reste du territoire sous son contrôle...
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On Quitting Academia
In May, I gave up my academic career after 27 years. A voluntary severance scheme had been announced in December, and I dithered about it until the pandemic enforced focus on a fuzzy dilemma. Already far from the sunlit uplands, universities would now, it seemed, descend into a dark tunnel. I swallowed hard, expressed an interest, hesitated, and then declared my intention to leave. A settlement agreement was drafted, and I instructed a solicitor. Hesitating again, I made a few calls, stared out of the window, then signed.
My anxiety about academia dates back to my first job, a temporary lectureship in history at Keele University. I had drifted into doctoral research with a 2.1 from Cambridge and an unclassified O-Level in self-confidence. My friends from university, many headed for work in London, had initially been sceptical. One of them, later the deputy prime minister, worried that academic pay was crap and I’d have to read everything. Besides, decent posts were scarce. But I liked my subject, was taken on by a charismatic professor, scraped a grant, and switched Cambridge colleges as a gesture towards a fresh start. Reality had been evaded. To an extent unthinkable today, arts postgrads were left alone to read. At lamplit tutorials and seminars, held in book-lined rooms in dark courtyards, it was hard not to feel like an impostor, though, looking back, I now realise that others were also straining to suspend disbelief in themselves. Then, suddenly, I was out of time and needed a job. It was the end of what feels now like one long autumn of snug teas and cycling through mists.
The day I arrived in Keele, it was raining. I’d split up with my girlfriend and had arranged to share a house with a colleague I’d never met; my office was still in the process of being built. Ahead lay the prospect of cobbling together dozens of lectures while at the same time somehow writing up my PhD. I was gloomy and apprehensive, but things fell into place. My housemate hadn’t finished his thesis either: we laboured through early mornings and evenings, eventually submitting on the same day. The teaching was exciting and rewarding. There were a lot of mature students, some of them displaced by the closure of the Staffordshire collieries, all eager to learn. My impostor syndrome went into remission. I had articles accepted by peer-reviewed journals, passed my PhD viva, and ascended through a series of jobs. In 2007 I joined the University of East Anglia and four years later was made a professor. I published books, essays and reviews, received grants and fellowships, spoke at seminars and conferences, assessed manuscripts, supervised postgraduates, served as an external examiner and sat on committees. I had become the person I once impersonated. There were still Billy Liar moments: doodling in meetings, dreaming up titles for novels, imagining the present as prelude. But the masquerade was over. What I did was who I was.
Then, two years ago, things took a turn. A viable application for a big research grant fell at the first hurdle. Two articles I’d spent months on were rejected, one quite quickly, the other after a long ordeal of consideration and resubmission. Some of the assessors, cloaked in anonymity, seemed affronted by what I was trying to say. It was crushing, but also an awakening. They had pecked so viciously because I was an injured hen in the brood. They sensed disingenuousness, ebbing engagement, slippage from relevance, and, behind it all, a loss of faith. When I felt I’d been faking it I was the genuine article; now I was established I’d become an interloper. I realised I’d said all I had to say. So when my wife accepted a job in Dublin and I took a career break to look after our children, settling into non-academic life was easy. I didn’t miss it, any of it.
It used to be more interesting. In 1993, Keele still bore a resemblance to the world Malcolm Bradbury captured in The History Man (1975): lecturers taught whatever enthused them – one medievalist offered a course on the Holocaust – and the cooler professors held parties to which students were invited. There were eccentrics straight out of Waugh’s Decline and Fall: loveable cranks who had written one or zero books, drank at lunchtime and liked a flutter. They smoked in their offices and let ferrety dogs roam the corridors. They were amused by the arrival of career-minded scholars, and panicked when the Higher Education Funding Council for England (HEFCE) demanded to know how taxpayers’ money was being spent. The Research Assessment Exercise found them wanting in research, and a dawning age of inspection exposed worryingly heterodox teaching methods. Immediately before a HEFCE visit, a dusty sculpture was rinsed under the tap to make a good impression, as if the inspectors were a bevy of exacting aunts rather than fellow academics pressed into public service. In my next job, a wall of photocopied ‘evidence’ was adduced in the department’s cause, and a crate of booze was bought, in contravention of HEFCE rules, to relax the inspectors. Alas, it was stolen by some students.
These were in many respects the bad old days, unworthy of anyone’s nostalgia. There was too little transparency, permitting countless small abuses. There was favouritism and prejudice; a policy of laissez-faire concealed unequal workloads and, in some cases, sheer indolence. The tightening of central controls in the 1990s introduced accountability to the system, and the expansion of the higher education sector generally, which happened around the same time, did good by allowing more young people from working-class backgrounds to earn a degree, something that, to their parents as to mine, had previously represented a social distinction as remotely glittering as a knighthood. When I began my PhD, there were fewer than fifty universities in the UK, awarding around 80,000 first degrees annually; twenty years later the number of HE institutions had nearly trebled, and the number of degrees had increased by a factor of five. In 1999 Tony Blair vowed that the 33 per cent of school-leavers then in higher education would rise to 50 per cent in the next century, a goal that was reached in 2018.
Widening opportunity in education is the noblest of social and political projects. But the cost is now clear. In the ‘bad old days’ students were, as they are today, taught with commitment and passion, but sometimes eccentricity added a spark. Provided he – and it was usually a he – turned up fully dressed and sober and didn’t lay hands on anyone, the crazy lecturer could be an inspiration. Expectations were less explicit, the rhetoric and metrics of achievement were absent, which made everyone feel freer. Even applying to a university seemed less pressured, because it was so unclear what it would be like when you got there. You absorbed teachers’ anecdotal experiences and sent off for prospectuses, including the student-produced ‘alternative’ versions mentioning safe sex and cheap beer. Even after matriculation I had only a vague sense of the structure of my course. The lecture list was to be found in an austere periodical of record available in newsagents. Mysteries that today would be cleared up with two clicks on a smartphone had to be resolved by listening to rumours. This news blackout has been replaced by abundant online information, the publication of lucid curricular pathways, the friendly outreach of student services and the micromanagement of an undergraduate’s development. Leaps of progress all, if it weren’t for the suspicion that students might develop better if they had to find out more things for themselves. We learned to be self-reliant and so were better prepared for an indifferent world; we didn’t for a moment see the university as acting in loco parentis. Excessive care for students is as reassuring as a comfort blanket and can be just as infantilising.
Academics lament the local autonomy that has now been arrogated to the centre, where faculty executive committees and senior management teams call the shots. Lecturers no longer exercise the discretion that once supported students’ pastoral welfare, and are instead trained to spot mental health problems and to advise students to consult GPs and book university counselling sessions (waiting lists tend to be long: anxiety is the new normal, sometimes reported as dispassionately as one might do a cold). Instances where essay extensions have been granted only on submission of proof of bereavement are not unheard of: procrustean bureaucracy in the name of consistency. Team-teaching is preferred to the one-lecturer show because university managers have an aversion to cancelling an advertised module should the lecturer take research or parental leave, move to another university, or run off screaming into the night. This was once an acceptable risk; now it threatens to infringe students’ consumer rights. Overseeing such concerns are marketing departments of burgeoning complexity and swagger, which manage public relations and promote the brand. National rankings based on several ‘key performance indicators’ – research, teaching, student satisfaction (a revered metric deriving from an online survey) – are parsed and massaged by these departments into their most appealing iterations, in the hope of pushing their institution as close as possible to pole position in an intensely competitive race. The Russell Group, a self-selecting club of 24 elite UK universities, content to be thought of as ‘the British Ivy League’, admits some new members and excludes others. Those refused entry make ingenious claims to be as good as those inside the charmed circle. But it’s a struggle. The Russell Group’s members attract three-quarters of all research income, which matters not least because world-class research-led teaching is a strong selling point for recruiting undergraduates.
The key factor is tuition fees – currently £9250 per annum for full-time study – which in 2012 replaced most direct funding of universities. Today half of UK universities’ £40 billion annual income comes from fees. Universities are businesses forced to think commercially, regardless of any humane virtues traditionally associated with academic life. Academic heads of department – otherwise known as ‘line managers’, some of whom control their own budgets – are set aspirational admissions targets which often prove unachievable due to the vicissitudes of an unstable market. The usual outcome, in Micawberish terms, is misery over happiness. Academics, already demoralised by declining real wages, shrinking pensions and the demands of the Research Excellence Framework – not least the demand to demonstrate the public ‘impact’ of their research – report feeling not just overburdened by marketisation, but victimised. Some administrators, especially those without teaching duties, can make ‘underperforming’ academic staff feel like spanners in the works, rather than labourers who own the means of production and create the very thing marketing departments have to sell.
University mottos, with all their classical hauteur, have been displaced by vapid slogans about discovering yourself and belonging to the future. Universities are centres of excellence, hubs of innovation, zones of enterprise. The gushing copy has limited relevance on the shop floor. Lecturers deserve more respect than is found in Dalek-like emails demanding 100 per cent compliance with this or that directive. An infinitely expanding bureaucratic universe displays authoritarian indifference to variety and nuance in the very work exalted in their promotional material. Vice-chancellors and deans always remember to give thanks and praise at graduation ceremonies and other festal moments; but what lecturers want is understanding, not least about the manifold claims on their time.
So how has all this affected ‘the student experience’? Undergraduates today can’t know how it felt to belong to a state-funded institution whose low-pressure otherworldliness allowed for imagination and experimentation, diversity and discovery. The student experience didn’t need defining because it wasn’t for sale: it magically happened within a loosely idealistic, libertarian countercultural framework. The last thing anyone at a university wanted to wear was a suit: now you can’t move for them. Today’s watchwords are value and satisfaction. Even if it’s a good thing for fee-paying students to have a say in what their money buys, a transactional mentality has led to paradoxical demands for more contact hours and the right not to use them. Whereas lectures have long been optional, seminars and tutorials have remained compulsory. This is now under threat, along with the basic principle that attendees at a lecture are passive consumers and seminar participants are active producers. These days the customer is usually right and the lecturer more like a generic service provider. Supporting observations include students’ failure to learn their tutor’s name after 12 weeks, a tendency to refer to ‘teachers’ and ‘lessons’, dependence on prepackaged fillets of text – whatever happened to ‘reading round the subject’? – and unabashed admissions that set work has not been done. Why pretend the dog ate your homework when you own the homework?
Students miss out if they duck challenges they imagine to be beyond their capabilities. Punching above your weight can be stressful and tiring, but without doing a bit of it students ironically fail to develop the independent learning skills and confident self-expression that employers value (here I’m talking mainly about the arts and humanities). Unlike other commodities and services, where typically the customer wants no involvement in the manufacture or delivery of their purchases, students get out of a degree what they put in. One of the worst outcomes would be if they unwittingly believed that fees entitled them to a good degree, and when awarded a 2.2 (or that endangered species, a third) reflexively blamed anything and anyone other than themselves. As bad would be a reluctance to award degrees below a 2.1 for fear of complaint, even legal action.
Universities obsessed with student satisfaction are finding it harder to navigate their obligations. It doesn’t help that students have been hit by waves of strikes, followed by the further disruption caused by Covid-19. As for academic staff, feelings of discontent, disenfranchisement, disillusionment and disorientation are increasing, as academic careers become less and less appealing. The financial impact of the pandemic on universities has been catastrophic, with individual losses over the next financial year predicted to be in the tens of millions. In July, the Institute for Fiscal Studies estimated a combined long-term deficit of £11 billion. Deprived of fees from foreign students (especially for postgraduate courses), revenue from rental accommodation, income from the conference trade and returns from other investments, universities are facing Herculean challenges – hence redundancies both voluntary and, in due course, compulsory. The IFS predicts that, without cutting workforces, universities will save only £600 million. I jumped while there was still a lifeboat in the water. UEA has a broad regional base, and will survive with some belt-tightening and structural changes. According to some reports, however, 13 institutions will go bust without government bailouts, which no doubt they will receive in exchange for pruning courses devoid of obvious vocational benefit.
What will the student experience be now? A new order of one-way corridors, social distancing, teaching bubbles, screened and sanitised everything, and ‘dual-delivery synchronous and asynchronous learning activities’: a minimal amount of face-to-face teaching combined with online lectures, pre-recorded so that lecture theatres can be freed up for use as spacious seminar rooms. Lecturers have been racing to refine lockdown protocols into coherent products, now widely advertised as ‘blended learning’. Many have spent their summers taking training modules in ‘generic breadth and depth e-learning provision’, the warp and weft of embedded skills that look neat on a ‘weave diagram’ but are harder to apply in real life. To keep class discussion buoyant, lecturers are told to ‘encourage students to practise the verbalisation aspect of knowledge’. Multiple ‘learning outcomes’, sacred buzzwords before the pandemic, have been supplemented with ‘learner journeys’, promising against the odds a positive experience as well as a realistic hope of achieving something. But mostly lecturers have been tasked with filming multiple bite-size video ‘segments’ suited to modern attention spans (complete with subtitles and credited imagery), setting ‘interactive tasks’ and building bespoke websites for their modules.
Who knows how long this set-up will last. Currently we can only applaud the pragmatism and stamina of lecturers, beg the forbearance of students, and wish them well. But if the R-number creeps up, or if there are more strikes (a prospect made likely by redundancies), even the contingency plan will stall and dissatisfaction will soar. School-leavers may question the wisdom of paying so much for so little. As it is, calls for universities to refund fees and rent have fallen on deaf ears. The student experience has already been compromised and the brand damaged. The path to recovery is pegged out with proposals for retrenchment, mostly effected by shedding staff.
I had dreaded telling colleagues in my field that I was quitting, imagining incredulity and a hushed inference that I was terminally ill or at least having a breakdown. Academia is vocational: people don’t usually pack it in or switch careers – although that may become more common. When I finally broke the news, most of the people I told said they would retire early if they could afford it – a few had made calculations about payouts and pensions and most had at least contemplated it in glummer moments. It’s just no fun any more, they said. One or two admitted that their self-identity was so bound up with academic life they could never give it up, but even this wasn’t a judgment on my decision: they were entirely sympathetic and acknowledged that a wonderful career had lost a lot of its glamour.
Of course, none of us is lost in space, rounding the lip of a black hole. Higher education will always be worthwhile, if only because for students it provides three unique years removed from family, school and a career. In spite of uncertainty and austerity, versatile and resourceful young people will create their own networks and forums conducive to study and sociability. Academics will carry on doing research that informs their teaching. Learning for its own sake may suffer as courses are honed to a fine utilitarian edge and students evolve into accomplished grade accountants, expert in the work required for a 2.1 – playing the system they themselves finance. But degrees will retain value, and, for those who find graduate entry-level jobs, they will remain value for money. Above all, even allowing for a likely contraction of the HE sector, our universities will still promote social mobility, having already transformed the profile of the typical student, in terms of gender as well as class. There will be no return to sixty years ago when only 4 per cent of 18-year-olds went on to higher education, most of them men. The change is permanent. I’m glad to have played my part in this revolution.
Perhaps this is why I feel uneasy, and why my future feels more suspenseful than exciting. I’ve had dreams in which I’ve strolled across a platonically perfect ivy-clad campus, been enthralled by a perfect seminar, and had engaging discussions with old colleagues, including my Cambridge supervisor and the people I knew when I was doing my PhD, back in the halcyon days when everything had a point and a purpose. There’s guilt there: a sense of loss, of potential squandered and maybe even betrayed. UEA has made me an emeritus professor, which is an honourable discharge and something to cling to, and my wife insists we can live on her salary. But I still can’t decide whether I’ve retired or just resigned, or am in fact redundant and unemployed. I’m undeniably jobless at 53, able-bodied (I hesitate to say ‘fit’), with a full head of hair and most of my teeth, and haunted by St Teresa of Avila’s dictum that more tears are shed over answered prayers than unanswered ones.
I keep thinking about a short story we read at school, Somerset Maugham’s ‘The Lotus Eater’. It is the cautionary tale of a bank manager who drives off the toads of work, gives up his comfy pension and goes to live like a peasant on a paradisal Mediterranean island. Needless to say it doesn’t end well: his annuity expires, his mind atrophies, he botches suicide. He sees out his days in a state of bestial wretchedness, demoted in the great chain of being as a punishment for rebelling against nature. I don’t see the story as a prediction, and would always choose industry over idleness, but Maugham’s contempt for someone who dodges life’s challenges – the story satirised an effete acquaintance from Heidelberg – resonates. Still, I couldn’t go back. Goodbye to all that.
▻https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v42/n18/malcolm-gaskill/diary
#UK #Angleterre #université #ESR #quitter #fin #jeter_l'éponge #taxes_universitaires-
Extrait : “I had dreaded telling colleagues in my field that I was quitting, imagining incredulity and a hushed inference that I was terminally ill or at least having a breakdown. Academia is vocational: people don’t usually pack it in or switch careers – although that may become more common. When I finally broke the news, most of the people I told said they would retire early if they could afford it – a few had made calculations about payouts and pensions and most had at least contemplated it in glummer moments. It’s just no fun any more, they said. One or two admitted that their self-identity was so bound up with academic life they could never give it up, but even this wasn’t a judgment on my decision: they were entirely sympathetic and acknowledged that a wonderful career had lost a lot of its glamour”.
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Adam Tooze · Whose century? After the Shock · LRB 30 July 2020
▻https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v42/n15/adam-tooze/whose-centuryThe question asked by the American left, as well as more hard-nosed right-wingers, is not whether the US negotiators were naive or incompetent, but whose interests they were representing. Were they negotiating on behalf of the average American, or American business? As Davis and Wei show, US economic policymakers were committed to advancing the interests of American business more or less as business articulated those interests to them. [...]
In 1949, ‘Who lost China?’ was the question that tortured the American political establishment. Seventy years later, the question that hangs in the air is how and why America’s #elite lost interest in their own country. Coming from Bernie Sanders that question wouldn’t be surprising. But it was more remarkable to hear William Barr, Trump’s attorney general, describe American business as ‘part of the problem’ because its corporate leaders are too focused on their stock options and have lost sight of the ‘national view’ and the need to ensure that ‘that the next century remains a Western one’. He warns corporate executives lobbying for China that they may be treated as foreign agents. This is all a long way from the 1990s, when America’s corporate leaders could confidently assume that their way of seeing the world was so deeply entrenched in the US political system that their desired version of integration with China would go unchallenged, whatever the costs it imposed on American society. They folded China into their corporate planning as though all that was involved were private business decisions, not a wholesale rewiring of the global order. Today, that wager on the world as a playground of corporate strategy is unravelling.
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شنشون sur Twitter : “It’s worth repeating that #Edward_Said got pretty much everything right back in 1993. The road here from Oslo was overdetermined if not inevitable” / Twitter
▻https://twitter.com/humanprovince/status/1223176080955269120Sur la #prescience d’Edward Said concernant la catastrophe qu’ont constitué les accords d’Oslo.
The Morning After · LRB 21 October 1993
▻https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v15/n20/edward-said/the-morning-afterThe fact is that Israel has conceded nothing, as former Secretary Of State James Baker said in a TV interview, except, blandly, the existence of ‘the PLO as the representative of the Palestinian people’. Or as the Israeli ‘dove’ Amos Oz reportedly put it in the course of a BBC interview, ‘this is the second biggest victory in the history of Zionism.’
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#métaliste de documents (surtout cartes et visualisations) qui traitent des #migrations_intra-africaines et qui peuvent servir à combattre les #préjugés de la #ruée vers l’Europe de migrants d’#Afrique subsaharienne...
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Voir notamment le livre de #Stephen_Smith qui entretien ce #mythe :
La #ruée vers l’#Europe. La jeune #Afrique en route pour le Vieux Continent
►https://seenthis.net/messages/673774–------------
Les documents pour contrer ce mythe...
Le #développement en #Afrique à l’aune des #bassins_de_migrations
▻https://seenthis.net/messages/817277–-------
Les migrations au service de la transformation structurelle
►https://seenthis.net/messages/698976–-----------
Many more to come ? Migration from and within Africa
▻https://seenthis.net/messages/698976#message699366–-----------
#Infographie : tout ce qu’il faut savoir sur les migrants intra-africains
▻https://seenthis.net/messages/615305–-----------
Une population en pleine expansion, fuyant les régions sous tension
▻https://seenthis.net/messages/615305#message763880–-------------
Les #migrations_internes vont-elles recomposer l’Afrique ?
▻https://seenthis.net/messages/615305#message800883–----------
African migration : is the continent really on the move ?
▻https://seenthis.net/messages/605693–-------------
Africa : International migration, emigration 2015
https://seenthis.net/local/cache-vignettes/L600xH307/ehR4HUQpng-cc73c-e481b.png 
https://seenthis.net/local/cache-vignettes/L600xH570/4bHAxr6png-bbd71-9a1e7.png
▻https://seenthis.net/messages/526083#message691033–-----------
Un premier atlas sur les #migrations_rurales en Afrique subsaharienne - CIRAD
https://seenthis.net/local/cache-vignettes/L576xH534/RrmyAQJpng-33de4-b34ce.png 
https://seenthis.net/local/cache-vignettes/L600xH420/11H0gVYpng-ee731-e80d4.png
►https://seenthis.net/messages/647634-
@reka
Stephen Smith, je suis pas sûre que ça soit un problème de vieillesse.▻https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v33/n06/stephen-w.-smith/rwanda-in-six-scenes
▻https://survie.org/publications/livres/article/negrophobie-reponse-aux
▻https://www.arenes.fr/livre/negrophobiepuis
►https://blogs.mediapart.fr/les-invites-de-mediapart/blog/021018/stephen-smith-ravive-le-mythe-des-invasions-barbares-macron-et-l-aca
▻https://www.liberation.fr/debats/2018/10/09/la-ruee-d-africains-vers-l-europe-une-these-sans-valeur-scientifique_1684
▻https://journals.openedition.org/belgeo/29709 -
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Sylvie Bredeloup : « Les routes de la migration africaine mènent rarement à l’Europe »
▻https://seenthis.net/messages/971968 -
Cartographie. Les migrants africains vont d’abord en Afrique
▻https://seenthis.net/messages/1011629#message1013017 -
I dati reali. Dove migrano gli africani? Solo il 2% di chi si muove va verso l’Europa
▻https://seenthis.net/messages/1022377 -
Migration between poor countries rising faster than to rich ones – study
►https://seenthis.net/messages/482464–—
voir aussi (même lien: ►https://seenthis.net/messages/482464):
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"Les routes de la migration africaine mènent rarement à l’Europe"
▻https://seenthis.net/messages/904355 -
Voici la visualisation qui cassera vos idées reçues sur l’immigration
►http://rue89.nouvelobs.com/2014/04/08/voici-visualisation-cassera-idees-recues-limmigration-251335
L’article dont parle le Nouvelobs :
Quantifying Global International Migration Flows
►http://science.sciencemag.org/content/343/6178/1520
Et la #visualisation :–-
Et ça :
►https://seenthis.net/messages/241513
source :
Where everyone in the world is migrating—in one gorgeous chart
►https://qz.com/192440/where-everyone-in-the-world-is-migrating-in-one-gorgeous-chart -
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Les Africains qui migrent viennent de moins en moins en #France
►https://seenthis.net/messages/786643
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