The Uzbek Connection

I had no sooner blogged earlier in the week about media restrictions – and inserted a link to a good Craig Murray lecture and interview on the topic than he posted the news that these 2 videos had been removed from the site of the Institute of Cultural Diplomacy in Berlin (the only two videos from the Conference on Free Expression (!) to be subject to this treatment)
One of the discussants on the discussion which followed suggested that this might be connected with some uncomplimentary things Craig had said about German politicians and foreign policy somewhere else in Berlin at the same time, namely -

The former British Ambassador to Uzbekistan, Craig Murray, has also roundly criticized the relationship between Germany and the Karimov regime in Uzbekistan. Speaking at the High Level Hearings on Uzbekistan, held in Berlin on 1 March, Murray said that Termez was the first military base Germany had taken over beyond its own borders since the end of World War II. “It is ironic that Germany’s first overseas military base is being used to reinforce the totalitarian system in Uzbekistan,” said Murray.
He also revealed his contempt for the hypocrisy of European and particularly German politicians who try to justify their cooperation with Karimov by citing dubious ‘progress’ in Uzbekistan’s approach to human rights.
It would be more honest, Murray said, if politicians in the EU and Germany admitted that they cooperate with Karimov because of the military base in Termez which is essential to them in supporting their military campaign in Afghanistan.

Uzbekistan finds itself in a very advantageous position because of the war in Afghanistan, said Scott Horton, editor of the influential Harper’s magazine, at the same Hearings in Berlin Uzbek - Greater security is not all that Karimov has gained by cooperating with NATO, said Horton. A company belonging to his elder daughter Gulnara makes money from supplying goods to NATO troops in Afghanistan, he claims. “All goods that are imported are processed through Gulnara’s company; it’s a win-win situation,” Horton said.

It was, therefore, highly ironic that, on Monday, I was suddenly asked by a German company if I would take over as Team Leader of an EC project with the Uzbek Parliament!
Part of me was keen to see the country again – not least to visit Khiva and Bukhara and to take the proper opportunity this time to see (and perhaps acquire) some of the country's fascinating art work.
But another part of me, however, questioned whether I could ethically justify this – given how much more repressive the regime has become in the decade since I last lived and worked there. Since I left the country in 2002, several hundreds of people were massacred at Andijan (in 2006); and Craig Murray has exposed the scale of torture And, given the opinions I have about the "political class" everywhere (let alone in Uzbekistan where they are mere ciphers), could I really sleep at night if I was part of a project supposed to be strengthening it????
At a more personal level, I have read cases since I left the country of foreigners driving cars being arrested and held to ransom for several thousands of dollars. I drove myself around Tashkent and the countryside 1999-2002 and had no trouble with the police. But I had a red Cabinet Office pass – which commanded deep respect.
I had to respond immediately – and sent an ambivalent reply, asking whether the team has the same sort of official pass I had a decade ago. I heard no more! So fate solved my ethical dilemma! And, to date, I have had no response from the Institute of Cultural Diplomacy to my query.

update

And, three weeks on, a story appeared which indicates the strength of the set of cards which Uzebistan has as countries such as the UK prepare to pull out of Afghanistan. And how the UK prostitutes itself to ensure a base in this Dictatorship....

setting priorities in municipal services

Razgrad's Ivan Petrov Gallery proved worth the wait. Housed in a superb, modernised and specially-designed building (with EC funding) in the heart of the town right next to the well-kept mosque, it has an enthusiastic Director, Todor Todorov, who personally showed us round the collection on display. This included about 6 Danail Dechevs, a Tanev, a Boris Denev, several Vladimir Dimitrovs and two painters so far unknown to me - Maxim Tsankov (1877-1965) and Kosta Petrov (1894-1973).

Unfortunately Vodaphone here in Romania does not give me the capacity to upload a photo from my camera - that will have to await my return to Bulgaria (on Sunday we go to a workshop at Balcik on the Black Sea for a couple of days. The art gallery there is also well worth a visit - as befits an area which has  attracted so many painters.)  In the meantime I post another example of Dechev's work which has smaller capacity.

Razgrad's permanent exhibition also includes an excellent graphics collection.

The gallery’s catalogue is the best I have seen – with coloured reproductions and English as well as Bulgarian notes on the paintings and painters. It also has a website – although still, clearly, in the process of construction.

Razgrad's gallery, therefore, must go to the top of my unofficial list of best housed, managed and documented regional galleries in Bulgaria - with Stara Zagora a close second. Russe is the worst. Of course, these are not necessarily the best criteria - for example the poorly-housed Targovishte Gallery was abuzz with a group of school-kids - and the unheated Skitnik gallery in Sliven sponsors an annual Plein Air summer school. Such local acess and use should clearly be the core of the mission of any art gallery.

I find these differences an interesting example of the effects and importance of local government - although I've made the point here before that the proper maintenance of older paintings which are part of a country's national patrimony has national significance. The lack of heating which threatens so many paintings in Bulgaria's regional art galleries is a disgrace - but perhaps it is too easy to put this down to lack of municipal funding. I found it curious that one of the galleries I visited had  7 staff.  Of course I never like to recommend job-shedding but, in this case, perhaps lack of heating simplyshows a poor sense of budgetary priorities!

The Razgrad Gallery is the only one I have seen which has used Regional Funds to make such a major refurbishment - which shows both official initiative and political support. I still have to visit Balcik, Burgas, Dobrich, Veliko Tarnovo and Pleven Galleries - and pay homage at Svishtosh to Nikola Tanev. I doubt, however, whether I will find a better gallery!

A Year Ago;
I offered a very useful annotated bibliography on the economic aspects of social change.

The way we live now

This blog has mentioned several times the advantages of the semi-nomadic life. Since renting the flat in Sofia last April, I’ve accumulated a fair number of books and paintings and may well end the rental shortly (the delight of the Carpathian mountains in spring beckons). So each trip north means a box of books, of clothes and a pile of at least 10 paintings. And therefore an opportunity to dip into some books as I travel. Yesterday I started to read, for the second time, Tony Judt’s short Ill Fares the Land (2010). The link gives the book's entire Introduction and is therefore well worth reading. It starts very powerfully "Something is profoundly wrong with the way we live today," Judt begins - We are obsessed with money and have lost any sense of community.

In the 30 years following the Second World War, there was a widespread belief that the state could do a better job than the unregulated market. A benign welfare state would keep us from the poverty of the 1930s. It would protect us from cradle to grave. These assumptions underpinned Butskellism in Britain, the Great Society in the United States and European social democracy. In the 1970s, confidence in the state and a larger public realm fell apart. Since then, many have lost any sense of the state as either efficient or benign. Instead, we have come to believe, as Margaret Thatcher said, that: "There is no such thing as society; there are individual men and women, and there are families."

Judt pulls no punches. This new obsession with wealth, privatisation and the private sector is disastrous. The evidence of public squalor is all around us: "Broken highways, bankrupt cities, collapsing bridges, failed schools, the unemployed, the underpaid and the uninsured: all suggest a collective failure of will." The first chapter, "The Way We Live Now", is a passionate argument against the rise of inequality, the collapse in social mobility and the "pathological social problems" that follow. "Economic disadvantage for the overwhelming majority," he writes, "translates into ill-health, missed educational opportunity and - increasingly - the familiar symptoms of depression." Inequality is "corrosive". "It rots societies from within," he says.
I suspect we can all save ourselves a lot of time by asking about the motives which spurred an author to write – mostly it has to do with academic reputation, money or hubris. When a man is on his death-bed and takes incredible trouble (and pain) to draft a book for posterity it will generally be worth reading. Here is how historian Judt explains its origins in the Introduction -

For thirty years students have been complaining to me that ‘it was easy for you’: your generation had ideals and ideas, you believed in something, you were able to change things. ‘We’ (the children of the ’80s, the ’90s, the ‘aughts’) have nothing. In many respects my students are right. It was easy for us — just as it was easy, at least in this sense, for the generations who came before us. The last time a cohort of young people expressed comparable frustration at the emptiness of their lives and the dispiriting purposelessness of their world was in the 1920s: it is not by chance that historians speak of a ‘lost generation’.

If young people today are at a loss, it is not for want of targets. Any conversation with students or schoolchildren will produce a startling checklist of anxieties. Indeed, the rising generation is acutely worried about the world it is to inherit. But accompanying these fears there is a general sentiment of frustration: ‘we’ know something is wrong and there are many things we don’t like. But what can we believe in? What should we do?
This is an ironic reversal of the attitudes of an earlier age. Back in the era of self-assured radical dogma, young people were far from uncertain. The characteristic tone of the ’60s was that of overweening confidence: we knew just how to fix the world. It was this note of unmerited arrogance that partly accounts for the reactionary backlash that followed; if the Left is to recover its fortunes, some modesty will be in order. All the same, you must be able to name a problem if you wish to solve it. This book was written for young people on both sides of the Atlantic.

The title of his book is taken from these lines of Oliver Goldsmith’s famous 1770 poem -

Ill fares the land, to hastening ills a prey,
Where wealth accumulates, and men decay.''

and, for me, one of significant things about the book is that each of its chapter headings echoes a famous book of the past century thus eg The World We Have Lost;  What is to be done?; Shape of Things to Come – thus subtly emphasising the recognition (as Google Scholar puts it) that we "stand on the shoulders of Giants”. Our selfish world has too few writers who properly spell out the relevant work by other writers and too many who pretend to have blazed a unique trail (modern book publishing seems to require such hyperbole). The academics go the opposite extreme of referencing so much and so generally that you are left with no real sense of intellectual development.
One extensive review summarised the book’s arguments thus -

He is the most important contemporary representative of a nearly extinct political tendency – the anti-communist, social-democratic Left. His manifesto is driven by his conviction that in rejecting social democracy 30 years ago the West stumbled badly, and by his hope that the social-democratic tradition can now be revived. His manifesto is sober but also urgent, written by a man who knows that time is not on his side, and for this reason deeply moving.

For Judt, social democracy is multifaceted and complex. Originally, social democracy was a response to the barbarity of communism, where the utopian socialist dream was moderated by a commitment to liberal democracy and where eventually a historic compromise with capitalism was struck. After the shock of the Great Depression, social democracy became, in addition, a distinctive form of political economy, inspired by Maynard Keynes. For a generation, under the Keynesian consensus, worldly wisdom triumphed over neo-classical academic orthodoxy. Social democracy was, accordingly, no longer merely one kind of politics but the animating spirit of an era lasting from 1945 until the election of Margaret Thatcher. During this era, social democracy was associated with a series of policy prescriptions: progressive taxation and the “mixed economy” of public and private ownership. It was also primarily responsible for the creation of the protective social-welfare state, its greatest achievement. Yet, for Judt, social democracy is even more than this. It is the most humane moral–political idea, in which, for once, both the two great values unleashed by the French Revolution – freedom and equality – are valued and pursued.
What went wrong for social democracy? Although Judt rather perfunctorily recognises that in the mid-1970s the social-democratic state hit unanticipated economic troubles, his explanation of the collapse places greater weight on cultural factors. By the 1970s, a younger postwar generation had begun to take the achievements of the postwar social-democratic era for granted, and even to chafe at the dullness of the security it had delivered. In addition, the New Left was by now more interested in the politics of personal identity – of race and gender, rather than class – than it was in defending the achievements of the postwar Left. Both factors made the social order vulnerable to an intellectual attack that was mounted by the Austrian émigrés – not only Friedrich Hayek and Ludwig von Mises, but also Karl Popper, Joseph Schumpeter and Peter Drucker – who were mesmerised by the interwar collapse of liberalism throughout central Europe and who, grotesquely, mistook the creation of the social-democratic welfare state for a way station on “the road to serfdom”.
There is strength in Judt’s explanation of the fall of social democracy, but also weakness. Judt underestimates the degree to which the ‘stagflation’ crisis knocked the confidence of the conventional Keynesian economists, whose thought was premised on the idea that inflation and stagnation were the alternative illnesses to which the capitalist economy might succumb. He is also rather unbalanced about the legacy of the New Left. Even if there was a narcissistic tendency in identity politics, it is also true that the eruption of the ’60s helped trigger a vast cultural revolution that shook centuries-old habits of mind on issues related to gender and race. Not only did this transform Western sensibility unambiguously for the better, it also extended to women and non-whites one idea that Judt places at the heart of social-democratic values: equality.
For Judt it is because of the victory of neo-liberalism, especially in the UK and the US, that the land now fares ill. Most important for him is the toleration shown for the return to pre-Great Depression levels of inequality. Judt begins with tables taken from a remarkable recent study, The Spirit Level. They show that measuring almost everything we value – health, mental wellbeing, social mobility, trust, levels of crime – the more equal societies of north-west Europe perform notably better than the less equal societies of the UK and, especially, the US.

Because of the return of gross inequality, the participatory element of democratic politics has withered. For too long citizens have watched as the wealthy have fashioned the world according to their desires. Without the feeling of belonging to a common world, participation has no point. For Judt, the rise of the “gated” community is a potent symbol of the loss of this common world. Even political leaders – “pygmies”, such as Tony Blair and Bill Clinton, compared to their predecessors, Winston Churchill and Franklin Roosevelt – have become passive, leaving decision-making to the neo-liberal economic “experts” (the descendants of the Austrian school) whose central role has been to make the world safe for the bankers and brokers. The orthodox economists have, long ago, displaced political thinkers and convinced the world “there is no alternative” to their nostrums. Although discredited by the Global Financial Crisis, so far nothing has filled the void. At the coming of the crisis, Keynesianism made a return of sorts, but this was little more than a neo-liberal “tactical retreat”. At the moment of crisis everyone looked to government for action. Yet, according to Judt, no one is presently thinking afresh about the role of the state.

It is clear that for him the damage done will not be easy to repair. Although the welfare state has proven somewhat resistant to the neo-liberal assault – even Margaret Thatcher could not abandon the National Health Scheme – privatisation has made rapid gains in many areas, especially social services and transport, where its influence has been negative, or worse. But the spirit of neo-liberalism has also paralysed the vital organs of the culture. Universities are now overwhelmed by an economistic language of “outputs” and “impacts”. We have taught the young to value nothing more than the pursuit of wealth. Even intellectuals do not escape his scorn. Most are conformist and afraid to dissent. Even when they are not, they prefer to speak about morally straightforward issues rather than the complexity of public policy. (Ouch!) No one now seems capable of expressing, or indeed of feeling, the appropriate anger. Perhaps dangerously, Judt calls on intellectuals and others to trust their “instincts”.

Judt knows that contemporary social democracy is feeble. Since the collapse of communism, the Left no longer believes that its goals are, in the words of Bernard Williams, “cheered on by the universe”. More deeply, it has lost its language; its crisis is thus “discursive”. But he is still convinced that a rebirth of social democracy is possible. In part this is because neo-liberalism has been discredited. In part it is because the quest for equality has not lost its grip on our moral imagination. And in part it is because we live at a time of unprecedented uncertainty – about the economic future, about the dangers of global warming, about the pace and unpredictability of change. The Right is certain to try to exploit the mood of deep uncertainty. Yet, there is on the Left a long tradition of fighting to conserve the human world from the forces that threaten it. If there is to be a return to social democracy, it is almost certain to be what Judt calls “a social democracy of fear”.

The European Commission Terrorists

Daniel Cohn-Bendit has been a breath of fresh air in European politics since 1968. Ensconced in the European Parliament for the past couple of decades (as a Green), his disparaging term for Commissioner Barrosso and his advisers has, apparently, been “The Chicago boys” - a nice conflation of mafia and the source of academic neo-liberalism. Recently, he has started to call them “The neo-liberal Taliban”  and Social Europe has a useful post outlining the various positions taken by the EC which justify this term. So, let’s look at the facts:

• According to the Commission’s reading, the deepest financial and economic crisis since the 1930s is simply a state debt crisis and has little to do with the crash of Lehmann Brothers and other banks. Yet, in reality, states were forced to step in to save the banks and their markets due to the meltdown in the financial industry. Many member states with previously reasonable debt levels assumed private debts and thus increased their public debt. But for the Commission, only the last link of the chain is important: austerity regimes must be established all over Europe to counter the “debt challenge”, to introduce “debt brakes” and the name for these austerity regimes is “economic governance”.
• Under the Troika regime, Greece has been asked to cut debts. The Greeks are willing to save money by cutting the defence budget but the Commission’s reaction has been negative: it recommends cutting pensions instead.
 The Troika regime is asking Ireland to cut salaries. The Irish trade unions have challenged the approach as neoliberal but the Commission’s maintains that it’s all just economics!
• The Commission’s country recommendations follow the same pattern: Belgium should see its long existing wage indexation as a cause of the debts and abolish it; Spain should let collective bargaining agreements extinguish without renewal; France should limit the rate of increase of minimum wages. The Commission will enforce these recommendations via a system of fines and sanctions.
• The recent White Paper on pensions claims to support workers’ mobility. What it actually seems to promote is the mobility of insurance companies and the uniformity of insurance products all over Europe.
• There is still no breakthrough on a Financial Transaction Tax, Eurobonds, strict regulation of financial markets, a split of the banking system etc.
• The so-called “reform agenda” is still under the banner of more smart regulation, more labour market reform, more flexicurity etc.

Europe needs to be protected against this neoliberal dismantling. The financial industry brought the system close to a breakdown and the “neoliberal Taliban” are bringing Europe close to collapse. They overlook the symptoms of growing euroscepticism all over Europe and they fail to deliver solutions. Whether or not austerity works, seems not so important for them.

Another interesting Social Europe post is here

A painting privilege in Shumen

Another workshop at Targovishte – and the morning swim and exercise we have now started in Sofia (just round the corner in at Rodina Hotel) left no time to pop in to see the Veliko Tornovo Gallery (about which I haven’t heard anything in any case). But I had learned that Shumen has an interesting gallery from this link I had accidentally come across. The town of Shumen (80 kms from Varna and the Black Sea) is a bit unprepossessing as you drive in – with decaying 1950s residential blocks. But its centre is a pleasant surprise, with one the largest pedestrian areas I have ever seen – with trees, a theatre, statues and a mountain range behind. Its upper side is graced with a series of old, large official buildings – of which a mock Italian palace (the police station) is perhaps the most interesting.  

The Elena Karamihaylova Gallery was known only by two elderly ladies and was initially a disappointment – since the second floor containing the permanent collection was closed for reconstruction. But conversations with 3 (of the 7) staff managed to convey our love of Bulgarian painting and the Director graciously presented us with an attractive pack containing 20 postcards of the paintings, a CD and a small booklet giving the history of the collection and short notes on the artists.

When, however, I mentioned the name Alexander Moutafov (who was apparently born in Shumen), it was literally the key to open an Aladdin;s Cave.

Valentina Velikova, the paintings expert, took us to the archives where we saw the collection (of 1,300 items) stored and filed. And she was kind enough to find and pull out for our inspection various portraits by Elena Karamihaylova and paintings by Nikola Tanev, Alexander Moutafov and Stanio Stamatov. Marvellous to have a chance to handle such work. And great that a small gallery should have developed such a nice pack. They are rare amongsdt Regional galleries in having a CD - only Kazanlak (so far on my travels) has offered such a product. It is so simple, cheap to creat - and so necessary given the large numbers of paintings which are doomed to spend their life in basement archives!

 During the journey, I had said that I did not think that Brits had made their home in this part of the country - but, on the way back to the hotel, we popped into a Lidl supermarket and got into conversation with a british couple who have been living in a village outside Shumen for the past 5 years. They told us that quite a few Brits were in the area.

Fighting Big Brother

A year ago I had a rather brief post about the decline of journalism (three of my readers have already beaten me to this today!!) and hinted about the role which media concentration and corporate power was playing in the restriction of our democratic freedoms. By sheer coincidence, I came across yesterday a gripping video on how precisely lobbyists and deregulation made this possible in the USA in the 1990s and early 2000s (with propaganda calculated to make George Orwell spin in his grave) - and with what results. There are some great interviews with media people who clearly have taken risks in being so outspoken – and a stunning interview with a Republican appointee who acts like a programmed Alien in her responses to some critical questioning. The video focuses on serious abuse of power which never made the news - vetoed by those who feared corporate power sponsors. Another video is here

Rather belatedly, perhaps, some centres have been formed to fight this – in the US the Center for Public Integrity; in the UK,,a Centre for the Freedom of the Media; and a more recent The Bureau Investigates

Two useful papers are Mapping global media policy; and Media pluralism and concentration; the UK case
For those who care about democracy, these are the organisations which deserve and need public support.

Craig Murray had posted a couple of videos from a recent Conference in Berlin on Freedom of Expression which show, for example, how the BBC elite has clearly made him a non-person because of his courage in exposing the lies and deciet which pass for foreign policy. I hope this link works - since the first link I put up quickly disappeared from the Institute for Cultural Diplomacy's site!! I have asked the Institute for an explanation of this.........

A dig at the Aid business

 I'm not a cynical person - it is rather scepticism I celebrate. But satire is a useful wepaon against the pomposity and hubris of large organisations - and I did enjoy a piece on the genesis of the aid business of which this is an excerpt -

In the beginning, the Donors said, “Let us make development in our image, and in our likeness, so that we may bring about changes in developing countries”. And other Government Departments replied, “Yes, but not too much change, and not all at once, who knows What might Happen.” And the Donors did reflect upon this, and after a time they did say, “Let there be Aid Programmes”.
And lo, having completed the appropriate paperwork and then randomly recruited staff members on the basis of spurious social connections, the Aid Workers did create a great many Aid Programmes upon the land, with rather fewer in the sea.
Now at first many Aid Programmes were formless and empty, there was darkness over any possible engagement with intended beneficiaries, and attribution of impact was absolutely nowhere to be seen. With naught else to look at, the Donors did peck at the financials like bureaucratic vultures.
And the Donors did say, “Let there be light on this programme”, but there was no light, merely quarterly reports cut and pasted from other endeavours. But the Aid Workers saw that the reports were sufficient to get the donors off their backs. They called the reports “evidence-based” and they did construct programme narratives, after a fashion. And there were visits and some more reports.

But upon reading the reviews, the Donors said, “Let all the programmes under this sky be gathered to one place, and let duplication and waste disappear.” But it was not so. Instead the Aid Workers did gather in the bar and Grumble about it over numerous beers. The next day, the Aid Workers said those programmes whose representatives had gathered in that bar formed ‘a new Coordinated Operational Network System, or CONS’. And the Donors did scratch their heads, and then said, “Well, Okay”.

Then the Donors said, “Let the programmes produce results: monitoring systems and impact-bearing evidence, both qualitative and quantitative, according to their various kinds.” But again, it was not so. The programmes produced reports bearing more narratives and nice photos on the front. But the content was heavily skewed according to pre-defined objectives and indicators that could have been copied off a cereal box.

And the Aid Workers saw that it was rather woolly and vague, and were satisfied. And the Donors saw that it was not Actually very good, but would at least keep the Right Wing Press off their backs for a little longer.
And then one Aid Worker did Stand up and Say, “Let our Programmes be shaped by those we seek to serve, and Let them tell us what is good and right, and let us shine a true light into these programmes of ours, so that a light may then shine forth from them. And let that Light be Truly called ‘Development’.”
But the other Aid Workers did say, “Shut up and sit down, What are you playing at, Dost thou wish to get us all into the Deep Excrement?”
Thankfully the Donors were too busy creating new Declarations of Aid Effectiveness, within which all new and existing efforts should be fixed, according to their kind, and so did not notice.
And so this Aid Worker did leave that place, and became a Participatory Monitoring and Evaluation Specialist.
The other Aid Workers blessed her departure and said “Come back when our next mid-term review is due, and verily your rates will be good.” And they were.

The amorality of Professions

I see that rule of law has not improved in Azerbaijan since I worked and lived in Baku between 2003-05. Those attending the Eurovision Song contest being held there in a couple of months should be told about the evictions which have taken place to house the stupid event. I went to work there (for 2 years) immediately after I had spent 3 years in Uzbekistan, For me, the repressive nature of the regimes which ruled the 2 countries was so similar - but the oil and geography ensured that Azerbaijan remained a Western favourite while Uzbekistan was increasingly demonised. These evictions are just a very public example of the way the authorities in that country trample all over its citizens' basic rights.

A good vignette about professionals

Sometimes you find real gems in discussions threads. Here's a great comment on the legal system from someone whose name I didn't note in a now-forgotten discussion thread. It could be used of any professional system -

Judges, lawyers, barristers and other professional morality men work consciously and unconsciously to create unnecessary needs and ensure that there is no other means of meeting them than through their profession. This they do in five ways.

• Firstly, they make truth, justice and authority inseparable from an abstract and extremely complicated code that only they are trained to understand. In this they are no different from scientists, doctors or politicians; or from the priests they took over from, who, before printing and wide-literacy, had sole access to the word of God.
• Secondly, and connected with their abstraction of truth, they create and use a nomenclature, or jargon, to describe both their own activity as well as normal life. Laws are couched in such obscure language that only those who have spent years learning the code are able to interpret and discuss them.
• Thirdly, going to court involves a series of ceremonial, formalised rituals, invested with all the mystique of a religion, that bewilder, terrify or pacify outsiders into further dependence and unnecessary “respect”.
• Fourthly, there is little and usually no provision for the independent litigant to represent herself. She is given little or no help or encouragement to defend her case. She is unprofessional, and so is treated, by judges and lawyers alike, as incompetent, untrustworthy and irresponsible. Witnesses are treated in a similar way: only professionals can give opinions; everyone else must stick to facts.
• Finally, “nobody is above the law.” This demonstrable lie ensures that justice cannot be done outside of court. This does not just include legal disputes, crime and so forth, but also marriage, divorce, buying a house and making a will, all of which are invalid without a trip to the lawyer.

I am reminded, as I read this, of the historical critique - The Third Revolution; professional elites in the modern world by Harold Perkins which I have referred to several times on this blog. And who better than Daumier to offer a graphic comment on the legal profession! Here is a wonderful video on the Daumier caricatures.
Bulgarian caricaturists such as Ilya Beshkov are worthy successors to Daumier - here is one I bought recently.

A year ago -

I had a good post about social change in which I referred to Robert Quinn’s book Change the world; how ordinary people can accomplish extraordinary results as an excellent antidote for those who are still fixated on the expert model of change – those who imagine it can be achieved by “telling”, “forcing” or by participation. Quinn exposes the last for what it normally is (despite the best intentions of those in power) – a form of manipulation – and effectively encourages us, through examples, to have more faith in people. As the blurb says –

the idea that inner change makes outer change possible has always been part of spiritual and psychological teachings. But not an idea that’s generally addressed in leadership and management training.

 Quinn's book looks at how leaders such as Christ, Gandhi and Luther King have mobilised people for major change – and suggests that, by using 8 principles, “change agents” are capable of helping ordinary people to achieve transformative change. These principles are -
• Envisage the productive community (ie imagine a better system)
• Look within
• Embrace the hypocritical self
• Transcend fear
• Embody a vision of the common good
• Disturb the system
• Surrender to the emergent system
• Entice through moral power