The Danger of Vertigo
Frontal attacks on the unconscious mind usually create defence or fight postures. If our task as artists is to find ways to keep a light burning, we need the cunning of a smuggler.
Over the weekend I listened to an extraordinary conversation between the psychiatrist Gabor Maté and the investigative journalist, and researcher Naomi Klein. The conversation, called Minds Under Siege, can be found easily online.
Many of us will know the work of these two intellectuals. Both are internationally recognised, both are published authors, broadcasters and teachers. Yet apart from this evident recognition they are also vilified, denigrated, and abused by others including governments, corporations, media and well organised lobbyists. As Brecht once wrote:
Today anyone who wants to fight lies and ignorance and to write the truth has to overcome at least five difficulties. He must have the courage to write the truth, even though it is disguised everywhere; the skill to make it fit for use as a weapon; the judgement to select those in whose hands it will become effective; the cunning to spread it amongst them. These difficulties are great for those who write under Fascism, but they also exist for those who were driven out or have fled, indeed, even for those who write in the lands of the bourgeois freedom.
Three days ago a St. Petersburg court sentenced a 19-year-old woman to three years in a penal colony after she was accused of repeatedly “discrediting” the Russian army, including by gluing a quotation on a statue of a Ukrainian poet. Darya Kozyreva was arrested on February 24, 2024, after she glued a verse by Ukrainian poet Taras Shevchenko onto his monument in St Petersburg, according to an independent Russian human rights group, OVD-Info.2 The verse from Shevchenko’s My Testament read:
Oh bury me, then rise ye up
And break your heavy chains
And water with the tyrants’ blood
The freedom you have gained.
Should we not feel vertigo as we read what has happened to this young woman? Yet even I feel somehow numb. It’s too much to take in.
I had a similar response to seeing the photo-reportage by Gladys Serrano a few days ago. In 2024 she reported for El Pais from the Cecot mega prison in El Salvador. You may be aware that this is the concentration camp that Trump is using to send people despite instructions to desist from the US courts. I hope to be talking to Gladys about her photographic work in a short while.
US historians of fascism Jason Stanley3 and Timothy Snyder have both left their positions at Yale University and moved to Canada. Stanley’s book How Fascism Works: The Politics of Us and Them is a useful and quick read, especially those who work with young people and who are not historians. While Stanley directly states that Trump’s actions over recent months led to his decision to leave the US, Snyder’s declined to make a direct link. But his argument, as ever, is subtle and interesting:
I did not leave Yale because of Donald Trump, or because of Columbia, or because of threats to Yale — but that would be a reasonable thing to do, and that is a decision that people will make. More scholars will leave the United States if universities cannot make the case for themselves and stand together while doing it. The business of universities is to exemplify and create the conditions of liberty. There are reasons why tyrants come after universities first, and this is the main one. I never once felt at Yale the slightest sense that I should or should not say or write anything in particular; it is important that everyone have that sense. What is coming to the United States now is an attempt by the federal government to encourage conformism and denunciations for the purpose of spreading terror and idiocy. This is hugely challenging to all of those who run our universities; self-defence begins with claiming the concepts. Universities are and should name themselves champions of freedom.
In some respects, all of those mentioned above have something in common through the principle question they ask. Maté, Klein, Kozyreva, Stanley and Snyder all use their respective disciplines, (psychiatry, journalism, activism/poetry and history) to ask why is our history so often mis-remembered or suppressed? Why is the act of remembering treated so harshly by states and other powerful forces, ending with prison for some or exile for others?
Read the full article at #ClickbaitCitizen.
