thoughts about religion and democracy

No religion can or should be expected to be made to be consistent with modern liberal democracy. Such an expectation of a religion is as violent as the extremism of IS criminals defacing and ruining ancient statues in former Mesopotamia. Religion, like poetry (one of these originated the other) can also not be made consistent with liberal or neoliberal democracy. There is no Green Party poem or Social Democratic poem and no consciously intended ”feminist” poem, except in an totalitarian speculative scenario. Poetry and religions concern the most primal expressions and ancient human drives. If such a chameleonic religion came into being, a religion compatible so perfectly with neoliberal democracy, a religion that did not make the traffic in Paris stop on a friday, or that failed to disgust the good secular Anglo-American middle classes (the protestants and anglicans) of California with the sight of flamboyant and flowery saints or weeping, a religion that could be sanitized–that would mean a religion-sans-religion, a faceless humanoid golem, and without any poetry of the older or ancient religions. Such a construct would prove more authoritarian and deadlier than the most extreme days of the medieval catholic church or the inquisition. For this reason, the demand that was so prevalently heard coming from liberal establishments, particularly in Europe but also in the United States over the years, that faiths (particularly one religion, Islam, as well as Judaism, Christianity, Hinduism and Bhuddism) prove themselves adaptable or prove themselves machines that are useful to liberal democracy, was a polemic that became an industry of violence. That repetitive polemical industry of integrationism of relgion, heavily involving the press media, has bred a devastating monstrous weapon. Political Islamism and its sympathizers (not merely “ISIS” but also those of the moderate, soft left, for example Sadiq Khan, the UK labour party politician who is now character-assassinating Jeremy Corbyn); the New Age religiosity of the careerist neoliberal society; the Orientalist defence of Islamism prevalent among the Left, liberals and greens, all form some of the manifestations of religion-bred-for-neoliberal-democracy, tested and tried in Europe and the United States.

POEMS

Source: POEMS

Greece is ungovernable (while the euro’s derailment continues): On ABC tv 7.30 Report

Yanis Varoufakis

Following the latest Greek election, I was interviewed on the ABC’s 7.30 Report. In the interview (which you can watch here), I presented a gloomy, yet realistic, view that it really matters little now what happens in Greece. “Greece is finished”, I argued, as long as the derailment of Europe’s euro-system is proceeding unhindered. Read on for the transcript:

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Here is a hypothetical situation that becomes unnecessary with so many real examples in the countries devastated by wars today like Iraq and Syria: If the Mossad or an American missile had attacked a newspaper like Al-Ahram in Egypt and killed 15 journalists, and afterwards a pundit on the Israeli or the US news channels had attempted to justify the killings by pointing to a supposedly anti-semitic or anti-Zionist cartoon running in their newspapers, it still would not have made such a murder less than an atrocity, less than a total tragedy and a violation of freedoms. For this reason the condemnation by non-Francophone, French-illiterate writers and left-wing intellectuals of Charlie Hebdo after the February attack, while the corpses were still cooling, was a parodical inanity that has shown how authoritarian, dogmatic and forensic the articulate Left commentary machine, spurred by academia, has become as it manifested in the opinion columns of European newspapers and in the blogosphere, echoing in the letter written to protest the Pen award. Either one joined in on the grotesque circus of ”je suis charlie”, hosted by the centrist parties and war-profiting world powers, or one stood with ”the left”: in condemnation of the dead bodies of cartoonists (some of whom were either French Arab or who left a French Arab widow) while ignoring completely the victims of the attack on a Parisian kosher supermarket the next day.

The left could have instead united in pointing to all the writers and artists in the Francophone Muslim world who come regularly under attack by Salafists with the identical ideology and affiliations as the two brothers who rampaged in the cartoonist’s office; but only the leftists in some Arab countries partook in the more necessary and more courageous condemnation. The columnists so eager to put quotation marks on the right to offend, forget that Hebdo was first shut down for mocking Mitterand’s funeral and therefore obviously picked fights with the powerful and not only with the discriminated marginalized people in the banlieus. It is cause for alarm that satire is not understood by today’s left wing intellectual and is taken out of context or censored for its power to offend is another sign of how far the left has dwindled from days it stood by the beliefs of Voltaire, that of ”I may hate what you say but will defend, unto death, your right to say it”

Beautiful Rowdy Prisoners ~ Hafiz

Poemgranat

Poemgranat Buenos Aires 2013

BUENOS AIRES READER

I usually boast that I am from the 19th century
but reality dawned yesterday
really I am from the middle ages,
evidence: these latest attempts to avoid falling in love
trying from a hiding place in a cloud to lower a bucket
from the corruptor sun
and shower acid down on the pomegranate tree
whose branches unfurled with fruit
from our embrace in the night-bar
unto the iciness of lunar light in the Argentine winter,
the night Videla died

I am ruthless as the king of the pomegranates
and a megalomaniacal jackal for the comparison
They should have made Videla kneel in corn
for twelve December heatwaves

At my hospital-white computer, the social-hope-generator,
the cinema porno reels gyrate as saws
against new branches and entanglements
in the pomegranate tree of lovers,
smaller than a porcupine it contains a copy of the planets in its dew drops
I seek to impose…

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Preview of an Imax exhibition for my drawings in an online Pop-up gallery of the Caribbean.

https://www.facebook.com/media/set/?set=a.1615142545392259.1073741828.1464335467139635&type=3

Many thanks to the curator Avantia Damberg, a Curaçaoan artist who made an online virtual exhibition space for my drawings! It is currently publicized on the Pop-up Gallery Online facebook page, soon to evolve into a blog, administered from Willemstad, Curaçao. Thank you Avantia, your name befits you!

Poems in Drunken Boat #22

My poems “Pavane: For a Gypsy who sometimes went by the name Charles, and was murdered earlier that year” and ”What the Headlines Said” about the systematic persecution of the gypsies by the French state, are in issue 22 of Drunken Boat which is devoted to the theme of the Romani and the gypsies in Europe. This page has audio recordings by me and by the French singer Marie Möör, she reads her French translation of the poem Pavane. http://www.drunkenboat.com/db22/romani/arturo-desimone

From the section with translations of romani child poets from Milan:

*

My house I feel it
like a tree
that little by little breaks
like death.

—Petruz, age 10  (translated by Olivia Sears and Chandra Livia Candiani) Link: http://www.drunkenboat.com/db22/romani/olivia-sears-and-chandra-livia-candiani

Sephardi songs of Tessaloniki. Only the language remains in the unraveling wind.