Showing posts with label Naomi Kllein. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Naomi Kllein. Show all posts

Saturday, May 2, 2020

Guest post by Antoni Cardona on the Corona virus: "Imagine"



The lockdown that we have been suffering through these days could easily generate a lot of questions about now, of course, but also about the next period of the future.

I think that maybe the first issue is the psychological effort that every individual has to make to maintain normal mental conditions, or at least to try to overcome a number of challenges.

First of all, I’d like to say that I have a lot of confidence in Science in the abstract sense, but the Scientific World gives me very little belief in it because it is very often controlled by political and economic Power. I hope and expect that the mysteries of Coronavirus and its infection of human beings will be clarified in a few months and some treatments and vaccines will probably be discovered but  more in the long term.

 Researchers, health and social care, some government decisions -as people live in confinement or making the face mask compulsory-, all this will help to stabilize the expansion of Covid-19 illness around the world and achieve very low levels of newly affected people and death. We have to take into account the great number of government mistakes and indecisions in some other countries. How long will be needed to finish with Covid-19? What will be the final death toll? How much impoverishment will people have to suffer?

            On the other hand, I don’t trust countries – neither their governments and politicians - nor in global Economy. It’s very well-known that some countries intend to defeat their rivals or enemies, not so much by directly spreading viruses. Instead of that, these countries, generally rich and powerful ones, can try to suffocate their opponent's economy, steal or pollute their natural resources, prevent access to new knowledge and so on.
            
Moreover, in some supposedly democratic countries, people have their rights limited and the Power is extended, centralised and militarised. All of this is done with the excuse of fighting the Enemy, the Virus.
           
I’d like to imagine the world, humankind, having the ability to learn the lesson that nature has been given to us. After thousands and thousands of dead people, hundreds of thousands of infected people, millions of people having lost their jobs or seeing their incomes decreased, after all that, we can expect at least two possible ways out. One would be very bad and the other would be excellent.

The evil way out would be that Power in different countries acts as it is defined in the Shock Doctrine [by Naomi Klein.] To take advantage of shocked people (sad, disconcerted, scared or perhaps ill people) by way of the big disaster, then the Power cuts off a lot of social benefits, causing a regression of human rights and democratic values in general. For the people being hit like this it’s very difficult to notice the magnitude of the tragedy that is falling down onto them.

The best way out would consist of people reacting against the pandemic and its associated causes, such as the feeling of depression, fear, general impoverishment and the tendency towards a totalitarian society. How could people lose their fear of the authorities and their orders without being paralysed by the terrible Coronavirus threat? That’s the question.

My wish is that people, confined or not at home, look for imaginative solutions to empower themselves and go back to all kinds of  organisations in different fields and countries.

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Born in 1949, Antoni Cardona is a retired doctor, specialised in Psychiatry, who worked in different public health institutions.
At a very young age, he started writing poetry but later made the decision to more often concentrate on creating short stories.
Over a number of years, Antoni trained in various writing techniques at the Aula de Lletres de Barcelona then the Escola d'Escriptura de l'Ateneu, also in the Catalan capital.
He has contributed a story to each of the following literary collections: "Setze Petges" (2004), “Edició Especial” (2011), a food-themed title "Contes per menjar-se'ls" (2015) and “Passió pel conte” (2018).
Antoni has received a number of prizes at literary competitions such as the Narrativa del Col·legi de Metges (medical association.) Other awards for his short stories came from the professionals of the Taulí Hospital in Sabadell and the Crime Fiction Festival of l'Espluga de Francolí.
“Desoris endreçats” (“Ordering disorders”) is his first solo publication.


https://www.voliana.cat/llibres/desoris-endrecats/

"ORDERING DISORDER" (2018)

In this book of short stories you will find characters, some of whom are everyday people, and others that are difficult to come across in the streets.
These are characters who are suffering in silence or maybe without being fully aware of their pain and having different ways of coping: irony, indifferently acting in an off-hand manner, making life-changes, feeling desperate and intense hopelessness or even somehow adapting to their disasters. 
There are those as well who attract danger and play with it. The reader will also encounter characters that cause the cruellest suffering and physical hurt with contempt for their victim. 
Watch out too for those who operate using subtle over protection.


Saturday, May 19, 2018

"Why not Australia?" -- My latest opinion column for Catalonia Today

I spent the first thirty years of my life in Australia and the last twenty trying to stay out of it.


Plenty of local people in this part of the world regularly ask me why we are living so far from Australia. There are a number of reasons but visiting there always reminds me that it is landmass with a population that now badly lacks what I call ‘public intellectuals.’


I grew up in the Canberra suburbs seeing brainy egomaniacs like Richard Neville, Clive James, BA Santamaria (though he was also a genuine bigot) and inspirational Prime Ministers Gough Whitlam and Paul Keating on television -- and here I mean free-to-air-TV.
But apart from someone like journalist, author and broadcaster Phillip Adams or a humorist like Andrew Denton there are now precious few deep thinkers in popular media.
The same claim could reasonably be made about the United States today where figures like Gore Vidal, Noam Chomsky and perennial US Presidential candidate Ralph Nader have been replaced by a small number of quality satirists such as Jon Stewart.
Even someone like the brilliant (Canadian) writer/activist Naomi Klein has been sidelined from  being heard on a scale that her ideas deserve. The most popular networks and cable TV stations pull in large numbers of viewers who are instead fed a daily diet of polished lies and exaggerated fear-mongering.
Australia is a part of the world where talented, clever people in the creative arts industries have to leave if they genuinely desire to have a wide and mainstream audience.

Germaine Greer, Robert Hughes, Clive James, Nicole Kidman, Jason Donovan,Toni Collette, Rod Taylor, Guy Pearce, Kylie Minogue, Nick Cave, Hugh Jackman, Cate Blanchett, Tim Minchin, Geoffrey Rush, Naomi Watts, Sia, Rebel Wilson and Barry Humphries simply could not have achieved the high quality of what they have done by remaining in Australia.

There, sport is number one and everything else cultural is a distant second.


Self-styled Australian ‘feral futurist’ Richard Neville wrote a rare, honest assessment of Australia for Adbusters not long ago. He explained why “the lucky country” still tends to rely on superpowers such as the USA (and most recently, China) and how it’s leaders prefer being an international sycophant.

“Australians are easily distracted,” he argued. “The focus of mass media [in Australia] is shopping promotions and light entertainment: cooking, sport, gossip, stock shifts, celebrity trials, soft porn and big-ticket ‘must see’ events.”


The question then has to be why has this happened? 

I think it’s partly because there is no developed interest in real politics in Australia, as opposed to the personality/leader-rivals "slugging it out in a boxing match" type-journalism that Australians are served.

The internet should have been a factor in leading to discussion on politics being less mediocre but it does not appear to be in Australia, unlike the USA where Obama then Bernie Sanders were able to break new activist ground. Instead, the news cycle “downunder” is dominated by a merry-go-round of opinion polls about leadership -- both state and federal -- and that passes for proper political analysis.


Australians are generally not only politically apathetic.

As one anonymous (European) online poster who had lived in Australia for 12 years wrote: “Australians as a whole are quite conservative. Just look at the government they elected! I find it increasingly frustrating. It's all about family, building a house, having a garden, a big 4WD and a BBQ on the weekend with the other families talking footy, house prices and gardening/fishing... I think maybe more adventurous Aussies leave.”


Australia is a very isolated country, but not only geographically. It is rich with beautiful landscapes (particularly the underrated desert) and its people have a lot in their favour. I just don’t want to live there because it doesn’t suit me and we wanted our son to grow up in culturally-rich Europe .

[This article was first published in Catalonia Today magazine, May 2018.]


Saturday, December 23, 2017

VIDEO: "Meet DiEM25"


"Almost two years ago, we got together under DiEM25’s broad umbrella [Democracy in Europe Movement] to challenge old-style politics, to shatter TINA (“There Is No Alternative”) at the pan-European level, to turn Europe’s democratisation into a radical, realistic, uniting project.
2017 was an awful year for European democracy. But it was an amazing year for DiEM25. We:
  • Rallied tens of thousands of people in cities including Amsterdam, Brussels, Berlin, Dublin, Belfast, Hamburg, and London, and toured the breadth and length of Greece & Italy, demonstrating that There is An Alternative; that Another Europe Is Already Here!
  • Nurtured our activists. There are now 70,000 DiEMers in almost every country on the planet!
  • Launched and pushed specific campaigns to expose the Establishment’s worst abuses – and we just filed a lawsuit against the European Central Bank to force them to release #TheGreekFiles
  • Launched our European New Deal, our concrete social and economic Policy Agenda, crowd-sourced from DiEM25ers and experts across the world
  • Influenced elections with our interventions, like in Germany, France and the UK, and supported/partnered with candidates or parties that embraced them, like in Catalonia, Zagreb, Denmark and Poland
  • Welcomed progressive leaders to our movement, like Naomi Klein and Richard Sennett
  • Kickstarted the process for taking the European New Deal to a polling station near every European – at the Volksbuehne Theatre, in Berlin
  • Began electing our Coordinating Collective
  • Presented the Real State of the Union in Brussels, at the Bozar Theatre
  • Set in motion the ‘Not Just Another Political Party’ endeavour
  • Elected our first National Collectives (NCs), taking to new levels our ambitious experiment in grassroots transnational democracy – with all members (despite nationality) voting for different national collectives..."

Read more about DiEM25 here.

Saturday, November 4, 2017

Colau and Klein debate in Barcelona: "Facing the politics of change and fear"

This Thursday the 9th of November at 7pm the Barcelona Mayor Ada Colau and progressive international author/journalist Naomi Klein will be speaking together.

In a very timely moment for this part of the world in particular, the organisers say that "the starting point of this debate will be the imposition by antidemocratic powers of global policies that challenge our lives, our security and survival..."

The event is open to all the public but seating is limited to 700 people. It will also be broadcast live on their  Facebook Live and the YouTube channel of La Comuna, Escola del Comú. There will also be a simultaneous translation service and translation into sign language.

Location:


Auditori de Cotxeres de Sants
Carrer de Sants, 79
L1 Plaça de Sants; L5 Sants Estació

Saturday, March 28, 2015

Video: Naomi Klein launches her new book in Barcelona


"Si hi ha un desig democràtic per la... by vilawebtv

Canadian journalist and activist Naomi Klein this week launched her new book, "This Changes Everything, Capitalism vs The Climate" at the Centro de Cultura Contemporanea de Barcelona (CCCB).

In this short [VilaWeb] video (with Catalan subtitles) Klein links the idea of political independence with a more independent energy policy.

She was my first journalistic interview in 2000 at the time her excellent first book "No Logo" came out and (even over the telephone) was one of the nicest people I've ever talked to for an article.