The imam's gift to a persecuted community is part of a growing trend of Iranians championing the rights of fellow citizens
Ibrahim Mogra Guardian/UK 21 April 2014
News from Iran has given me tremendous hope and optimism for peace between Iranians, regardless of faith and ethnicity. Ayatollah Abdol-Hamid Masoumi-Tehrani, a prominent imam and scholar, has taken a stand for coexistenc with the country's Baha'i minority. He has reminded us that Islam is a religion of peace that recognises diversity of every kind as part of God's design for his creation. And it all came in the form of a gift – one which I am proud to endorse.
For many, Iran is synonymous with persecution and oppression. Iran's authorities routinely target ethnic and religious minorities, human rights activists, journalists and intellectuals. And the case of the Baha'is is emblematic of these broader violations.
The Baha'is are Iran's largest religious minority with 300,000 followers. For decades they have been arbitrarily detained, denied education and livelihood, harassed, vilified in the media, and executed. Hundreds were killed after the 1979 revolution. More than 130 Baha'is are currently in prison on false charges. Seven former leaders are serving 20-year jail terms, just for tending to the basic needs of their community. Baha'is have no legal protection as a minority because their faith is not recognised under the constitution.
Such a violent backdrop makes Ayatollah Masoumi-Tehrani's gift all the more remarkable. A trained calligrapher and painter, the ayatollah has produced a large illuminated work of art featuring passages from the writings of Baha'u'llah, the 19th-century founder of the Baha'i faith. "Consort with all religions with amity and concord, that they may inhale from you the sweet fragrance of God," reads the inscription. "Beware lest amidst men the flame of foolish ignorance overpowers you." Although I believe Islam is the religion chosen by God, I cannot reject such words.
The ayatollah offered his gift as a "symbolic action to serve as a reminder of the importance of valuing human beings, of peaceful coexistence, of cooperation and mutual support, and avoidance of hatred, enmity and blind religious prejudice". He has a long history of supporting peaceful coexistence between Muslims, Christians and Jews, including with illuminated calligraphic versions of the Qur'an, the Torah, the psalms, the New Testament, and the Book of Ezra.
Ayatollah Masoumi-Tehrani has been repeatedly jailed for his efforts. Speaking directly to the Baha'is of Iran, he said, in giving his gift, that it is "an expression of sympathy and care from me and on behalf of all my open-minded fellow citizens", to a community that has "suffered in manifold ways" the consequences of "blind religious prejudice".
I am proud, as a Muslim and as an imam, to celebrate this enlightened gift, which has such immense spiritual significance. The faiths of the world should be united in promoting coexistence to advance human civilisation. Six thousand Baha'is live in the UK and I am proud to count many as my friends. The community is respected for promoting interfaith harmony. I am sure that Iranian Baha'is have the same hopes to serve their country and to live in peace.
Rowan Williams said the gift represents "a strand within the Islamic world at its best and most creative". The bishop of Coventry, Christopher Cocksworth, called it "an imaginatively courageous step".
The ayatollah has done something unprecedented in Iran. And he is part of a growing trend in that country; others have also championed the inalienable rights of all Iranian citizens. Islam has a history of defending minorities and protecting their religious rights and freedoms. On a recent visit to the Holy Land I was reminded of how this was most emphatically demonstrated by the Caliph Umar when he ruled in Jerusalem. He ensured the Church of the Holy Sepulchre remained a Christian place of worship. Ayatollah Masoumi-Tehrani shows us that Islam's peaceful legacy is not just history: it must also be the future.
http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/apr/21/ayatollahs-stand-bahai-gives-hope-iran
Thursday, 24 April 2014
In One Word: Poof!
By Uri Avnery Gush Shalom 12 April 2014
POOR JOHN Kerry.
In his testimony before the Senate Foreign Relations committee he explained how the actions of the Israeli government had torpedoed the “peace process”. They broke their obligation to release Palestinian prisoners, and at the same time announced the enlargement of more settlements in East Jerusalem. The peace efforts went “poof”. “Poof” is the sound of air escaping a balloon. It is a good expression, because the “peace process” was from the very beginning nothing more than a balloon full of hot air. An exercise in make-believe.
JOHN KERRY cannot be blamed. He took the whole thing seriously. He is an earnest politician, who tried very very hard to make peace between Israel and Palestine. We should be grateful for his efforts. The trouble is that Kerry had not the slightest idea of what he was getting himself into. The entire “peace process” revolves around a basic misconception. Some would say: a basic lie. Namely: that we have here two equal sides of a conflict. A serious conflict. An old conflict. But a conflict that can be solved when reasonable people of the two sides sit down together and thrash it out, guided by a benevolent and impartial referee.
Not one detail of these assumptions was real. The referee was not impartial. The leaders were not sensible. And most importantly: the sides were not equal. The balance of power between the two sides is not 1:1, not even 1:2 or 1:10. In every material respect – military, diplomatic, economic – it is more like one to a thousand.
There is no equality between occupier and occupied, oppressor and oppressed. A jailer and a prisoner cannot negotiate on equal terms. When one side has total command of the other, controls his every move, settles on his land, controls his money flow, arrests people at will, blocks his access to the UN and the International courts, equality is out of the question. If the two sides to negotiations are so extremely unequal, the situation can only be remedied by the mediator supporting the weaker side. What is happening is the very opposite: the American support for Israel is massive and unstinting. Throughout the “negotiations” the US did nothing to check the settlement activity that created more Israeli facts on the ground – the very ground whose future the negotiations were all about.
A PREREQUISITE for successful negotiations is that all sides have at least a basic understanding not only of each other’s interests and demands, but even more of each other's mental world, emotional setup and self-image. Without that, all moves are inexplicable and look irrational. Boutros Boutros-Ghali, one of the most intelligent people I have met in my life, once told me: “You have in Israel the most intelligent experts on the Arab world. They have read all the books, all the articles, every single word written about it. They know everything, and understand nothing. Because they have never lived one day in an Arab country.”
The same is true for the American experts, only much more so. In Washington DC one feels the rarefied air of a Himalayan peak. Seen from the grandiose palaces of the administration, where the fate of the world is decided, foreign people look small, primitive and largely irrelevant. Here and there some real experts are tucked away, but nobody really consults them. The average American statesman has not the slightest idea of Arab history, world-view, religions, myths or the traumas that shape Arab attitudes, not to mention the Palestinian struggle. He has no patience for this primitive nonsense.
SEEMINGLY, THE American understanding of Israel is much better. But not really.
Average American politicians and diplomats know a lot about Jews. Many of them are Jews. Kerry himself seems to be partly Jewish. His peace team includes many Jews, even Zionists, including the actual manager of the negotiations, Martin Indyk, who worked in the past for AIPAC. His very name is Yiddish (and means a Turkey).
The assumption is that Israelis are not very different from American Jews. But that is entirely false. Israel may claim to be the “Nation-State of the Jewish People”, but that is only an instrument for exploiting the Jewish Diaspora and creating obstacles for the “peace process”. In reality there is very little similarity between Israelis and the Jewish Diaspora, not much more than between a German and a Japanese.
Martin Indyk may feel an affinity with Tzipi Livni, the daughter of an Irgun fighter (or “terrorist” in British parlance), but that is an illusion. The myths and traumas that shaped Tzipi are very different from those that shaped Martin, who was educated in Australia. If Barack Obama and Kerry knew more, they would have realized from the beginning that the present Israeli political setup makes any Israeli evacuation of the settlements, withdrawal from the West Bank and compromise about Jerusalem quite impossible.
ALL THIS is true for the Palestinian side, too. Palestinians are convinced that they understand Israel. After all, they have been under Israeli occupation for decades. Many of them have spent years in Israeli prisons and speak perfect Hebrew. But they have made many mistakes in their dealings with Israelis. The latest one was the belief that Israel would release the fourth batch of prisoners. This was almost impossible. All Israeli media, including the moderate ones, speak about releasing “Palestinian murderers”, not Palestinian activists or fighters. Right-wing parties compete with each other, and with rightist “terror-victims”, in denouncing this outrage.
Israelis do not understand the deep emotions evoked by the non-release of prisoners – the national heroes of the Palestinian people, though Israel itself has in the past exchanged a thousand Arab prisoners for one single Israeli, citing the Jewish religious command of “redemption of prisoners”.Palestinians know nothing about Jewish history as taught in Israeli schools, very little about the holocaust, even less about the roots of Zionism.
As usual, the Israeli government has many fears. It fears the outbreak of a third intifada, coupled with a world-wide campaign of de-legitimization and boycott of Israel, especially in Europe. It also fears that the UN, which at present recognizes Palestine only as a non-member state, will go on and promote it more and more.
The Palestinian leadership, too, is afraid of a third intifada, which may lead to a bloody uprising. Though all Palestinians speak about a “non-violent intifada”, few really believe in it. They remember that the last intifada also started non-violently, but the Israeli army responded by deploying snipers to kill the leaders of the demonstrations, and more suicide bombing became inevitable.
President Mahmoud Abbas (Abu Mazen) has responded to the non-release of the prisoners, which amounted to a personal humiliation, by signing the documents necessary for the Palestinian State to join 15 international conventions. The Israeli government exploded in anger. How dare they? In practice, the act means little. One signature means that Palestine joins the Geneva Convention. Another concerns the protection of children. Shouldn’t we welcome this? But the Israeli government fears that this is one step nearer to the acceptance of Palestine as a member of the International Criminal Court, and perhaps the indictment of Israelis for war crimes.
Abbas is also planning steps for a reconciliation with Hamas and the holding of Palestinian elections. IF YOU were poor John Kerry, what would you say to all this? “Poof!” seems the very minimum. [Abbrev.]
http://zope.gush-shalom.org/home/en/channels/avnery
POOR JOHN Kerry.
In his testimony before the Senate Foreign Relations committee he explained how the actions of the Israeli government had torpedoed the “peace process”. They broke their obligation to release Palestinian prisoners, and at the same time announced the enlargement of more settlements in East Jerusalem. The peace efforts went “poof”. “Poof” is the sound of air escaping a balloon. It is a good expression, because the “peace process” was from the very beginning nothing more than a balloon full of hot air. An exercise in make-believe.
JOHN KERRY cannot be blamed. He took the whole thing seriously. He is an earnest politician, who tried very very hard to make peace between Israel and Palestine. We should be grateful for his efforts. The trouble is that Kerry had not the slightest idea of what he was getting himself into. The entire “peace process” revolves around a basic misconception. Some would say: a basic lie. Namely: that we have here two equal sides of a conflict. A serious conflict. An old conflict. But a conflict that can be solved when reasonable people of the two sides sit down together and thrash it out, guided by a benevolent and impartial referee.
Not one detail of these assumptions was real. The referee was not impartial. The leaders were not sensible. And most importantly: the sides were not equal. The balance of power between the two sides is not 1:1, not even 1:2 or 1:10. In every material respect – military, diplomatic, economic – it is more like one to a thousand.
There is no equality between occupier and occupied, oppressor and oppressed. A jailer and a prisoner cannot negotiate on equal terms. When one side has total command of the other, controls his every move, settles on his land, controls his money flow, arrests people at will, blocks his access to the UN and the International courts, equality is out of the question. If the two sides to negotiations are so extremely unequal, the situation can only be remedied by the mediator supporting the weaker side. What is happening is the very opposite: the American support for Israel is massive and unstinting. Throughout the “negotiations” the US did nothing to check the settlement activity that created more Israeli facts on the ground – the very ground whose future the negotiations were all about.
A PREREQUISITE for successful negotiations is that all sides have at least a basic understanding not only of each other’s interests and demands, but even more of each other's mental world, emotional setup and self-image. Without that, all moves are inexplicable and look irrational. Boutros Boutros-Ghali, one of the most intelligent people I have met in my life, once told me: “You have in Israel the most intelligent experts on the Arab world. They have read all the books, all the articles, every single word written about it. They know everything, and understand nothing. Because they have never lived one day in an Arab country.”
The same is true for the American experts, only much more so. In Washington DC one feels the rarefied air of a Himalayan peak. Seen from the grandiose palaces of the administration, where the fate of the world is decided, foreign people look small, primitive and largely irrelevant. Here and there some real experts are tucked away, but nobody really consults them. The average American statesman has not the slightest idea of Arab history, world-view, religions, myths or the traumas that shape Arab attitudes, not to mention the Palestinian struggle. He has no patience for this primitive nonsense.
SEEMINGLY, THE American understanding of Israel is much better. But not really.
Average American politicians and diplomats know a lot about Jews. Many of them are Jews. Kerry himself seems to be partly Jewish. His peace team includes many Jews, even Zionists, including the actual manager of the negotiations, Martin Indyk, who worked in the past for AIPAC. His very name is Yiddish (and means a Turkey).
The assumption is that Israelis are not very different from American Jews. But that is entirely false. Israel may claim to be the “Nation-State of the Jewish People”, but that is only an instrument for exploiting the Jewish Diaspora and creating obstacles for the “peace process”. In reality there is very little similarity between Israelis and the Jewish Diaspora, not much more than between a German and a Japanese.
Martin Indyk may feel an affinity with Tzipi Livni, the daughter of an Irgun fighter (or “terrorist” in British parlance), but that is an illusion. The myths and traumas that shaped Tzipi are very different from those that shaped Martin, who was educated in Australia. If Barack Obama and Kerry knew more, they would have realized from the beginning that the present Israeli political setup makes any Israeli evacuation of the settlements, withdrawal from the West Bank and compromise about Jerusalem quite impossible.
ALL THIS is true for the Palestinian side, too. Palestinians are convinced that they understand Israel. After all, they have been under Israeli occupation for decades. Many of them have spent years in Israeli prisons and speak perfect Hebrew. But they have made many mistakes in their dealings with Israelis. The latest one was the belief that Israel would release the fourth batch of prisoners. This was almost impossible. All Israeli media, including the moderate ones, speak about releasing “Palestinian murderers”, not Palestinian activists or fighters. Right-wing parties compete with each other, and with rightist “terror-victims”, in denouncing this outrage.
Israelis do not understand the deep emotions evoked by the non-release of prisoners – the national heroes of the Palestinian people, though Israel itself has in the past exchanged a thousand Arab prisoners for one single Israeli, citing the Jewish religious command of “redemption of prisoners”.Palestinians know nothing about Jewish history as taught in Israeli schools, very little about the holocaust, even less about the roots of Zionism.
As usual, the Israeli government has many fears. It fears the outbreak of a third intifada, coupled with a world-wide campaign of de-legitimization and boycott of Israel, especially in Europe. It also fears that the UN, which at present recognizes Palestine only as a non-member state, will go on and promote it more and more.
The Palestinian leadership, too, is afraid of a third intifada, which may lead to a bloody uprising. Though all Palestinians speak about a “non-violent intifada”, few really believe in it. They remember that the last intifada also started non-violently, but the Israeli army responded by deploying snipers to kill the leaders of the demonstrations, and more suicide bombing became inevitable.
President Mahmoud Abbas (Abu Mazen) has responded to the non-release of the prisoners, which amounted to a personal humiliation, by signing the documents necessary for the Palestinian State to join 15 international conventions. The Israeli government exploded in anger. How dare they? In practice, the act means little. One signature means that Palestine joins the Geneva Convention. Another concerns the protection of children. Shouldn’t we welcome this? But the Israeli government fears that this is one step nearer to the acceptance of Palestine as a member of the International Criminal Court, and perhaps the indictment of Israelis for war crimes.
Abbas is also planning steps for a reconciliation with Hamas and the holding of Palestinian elections. IF YOU were poor John Kerry, what would you say to all this? “Poof!” seems the very minimum. [Abbrev.]
http://zope.gush-shalom.org/home/en/channels/avnery
Wednesday, 23 April 2014
David Cameron won't win votes by calling Britain a Christian country
Like all humanity, the religious are both good and bad. The PM pretends otherwise
Polly Toynbee Guardian/UK 18 April 2014
A surprise "Dear Polly" message lands in my inbox from the Conservative Christian Fellowship wishing me a blessed Easter and bringing with it a YouTube link to the prime minister's Easter message. David Cameron this week has been love-bombing the Church of England with a radio interview about his children's faith, a speech at an Easter reception for Christian leaders in Downing Street and an article in the Church Times.
It's mostly toe-curling stuff. "My government has a sense of evangelism" and even that "Jesus invented the big society 2,000 years ago". If Cameron's faith is, as he told the Guardian in 2008, "like reception for Magic FM in the Chilterns: it sort of comes and goes", it certainly came on strong this week. It matters little what he actually believes: let's not make windows into our leaders' souls, just watch what they do. His social liberalism winks on and off according to political exigency. For the Catholic Herald just before the election he was for cutting abortion times, anti assisted dying and he voted against lesbian motherhood without a father.
So why God now? His core message, "This is a Christian country", dog-whistles to key voters. Ostensibly, it soothes the noisy but electorally few affronted folk in the pews angry about gay marriage, whose fury he had underestimated. For them Cameron ladled out syrupy retro-visions of the C of E of his Oxfordshire upbringing, its liturgy and heritage, his love of early morning eucharist at his children's school's church. But his "Christian country" message is really whistling to the errant flock fled to Ukip. [UK Independence Party].
Naturally, Cameron is careful to say "this is not somehow doing down other faiths". But those who feel threatened on account of their non-Christian faith won't find Christian branding reassuring. This week, an article on this site described how the far right is using pork to persecute Jews and Muslims, as Marine Le Pen stops schools serving non-pork options in the French towns she now controls. More horrible still, members of the Flemish Vlaams Belang party reportedly stormed into a school and forced pork sausages into children's mouths.
Such abuse by the right in the name of "secularism" outrages British secularists and humanists who stand with Voltaire, ready to die for the right of anyone's beliefs, so long as they don't impose it on others. At a time of anti-Muslim attacks, when Islamist extremism is feared for its terrorist potential, Cameron's "Christian country" is soaked in white nationalist significance. He has great verbal agility in sounding eminently moderate and reasonable while planting darker ideas. Behind a harmless love for country churches is a whiff of culture war politics.
The C of E is a confusing creature. Even while it tussles internally between conservative and liberal wings on gay marriage or female bishops, polls of its members show it's no longer the Conservative party at prayer: more vote Lib Dem and Labour. Look at the 40 bishops' raspberry of an Easter message to Cameron, with their strong rebuke against the "national crisis" of hunger so much worsened by his welfare policies. They know because their churches house the food banks used by almost a million people.
Even the Rev Steve Chalke has taken up arms, though his Christian organisation runs contracted-out social services. He was incandescent at Cameron's refusal to let a girl at one of his schools stay in the UK just a few months longer to take her A-levels. "The Bible is clear: it is our God-given responsibility to take care of the widow, the fatherless and the refugee," he said. Which is why it's unwise for politicians to tangle with God.
How does "Christian" play politically in Britain? I suspect most people, religious or not, shudder at politicians pitching their tents on church turf. The WIN/Gallup International survey finds the UK among the least religious: only a third say religion plays a positive role. Asked in the 2011 census "What is your religion?", 59% said Christian – surprisingly few as most people saw it as a question of culture rather than belief. Asked by YouGov more specifically, "Are you religious?", only 29% said yes and 65% said no. That's good news for us humanists (I am vice-president of the British Humanist Association). Religion imposed on the rest of us is profoundly resented by the great majority. [Abridged]
http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/apr/18/david-cameron-votes-britain-christian-country
Polly Toynbee Guardian/UK 18 April 2014
A surprise "Dear Polly" message lands in my inbox from the Conservative Christian Fellowship wishing me a blessed Easter and bringing with it a YouTube link to the prime minister's Easter message. David Cameron this week has been love-bombing the Church of England with a radio interview about his children's faith, a speech at an Easter reception for Christian leaders in Downing Street and an article in the Church Times.
It's mostly toe-curling stuff. "My government has a sense of evangelism" and even that "Jesus invented the big society 2,000 years ago". If Cameron's faith is, as he told the Guardian in 2008, "like reception for Magic FM in the Chilterns: it sort of comes and goes", it certainly came on strong this week. It matters little what he actually believes: let's not make windows into our leaders' souls, just watch what they do. His social liberalism winks on and off according to political exigency. For the Catholic Herald just before the election he was for cutting abortion times, anti assisted dying and he voted against lesbian motherhood without a father.
So why God now? His core message, "This is a Christian country", dog-whistles to key voters. Ostensibly, it soothes the noisy but electorally few affronted folk in the pews angry about gay marriage, whose fury he had underestimated. For them Cameron ladled out syrupy retro-visions of the C of E of his Oxfordshire upbringing, its liturgy and heritage, his love of early morning eucharist at his children's school's church. But his "Christian country" message is really whistling to the errant flock fled to Ukip. [UK Independence Party].
Naturally, Cameron is careful to say "this is not somehow doing down other faiths". But those who feel threatened on account of their non-Christian faith won't find Christian branding reassuring. This week, an article on this site described how the far right is using pork to persecute Jews and Muslims, as Marine Le Pen stops schools serving non-pork options in the French towns she now controls. More horrible still, members of the Flemish Vlaams Belang party reportedly stormed into a school and forced pork sausages into children's mouths.
Such abuse by the right in the name of "secularism" outrages British secularists and humanists who stand with Voltaire, ready to die for the right of anyone's beliefs, so long as they don't impose it on others. At a time of anti-Muslim attacks, when Islamist extremism is feared for its terrorist potential, Cameron's "Christian country" is soaked in white nationalist significance. He has great verbal agility in sounding eminently moderate and reasonable while planting darker ideas. Behind a harmless love for country churches is a whiff of culture war politics.
The C of E is a confusing creature. Even while it tussles internally between conservative and liberal wings on gay marriage or female bishops, polls of its members show it's no longer the Conservative party at prayer: more vote Lib Dem and Labour. Look at the 40 bishops' raspberry of an Easter message to Cameron, with their strong rebuke against the "national crisis" of hunger so much worsened by his welfare policies. They know because their churches house the food banks used by almost a million people.
Even the Rev Steve Chalke has taken up arms, though his Christian organisation runs contracted-out social services. He was incandescent at Cameron's refusal to let a girl at one of his schools stay in the UK just a few months longer to take her A-levels. "The Bible is clear: it is our God-given responsibility to take care of the widow, the fatherless and the refugee," he said. Which is why it's unwise for politicians to tangle with God.
How does "Christian" play politically in Britain? I suspect most people, religious or not, shudder at politicians pitching their tents on church turf. The WIN/Gallup International survey finds the UK among the least religious: only a third say religion plays a positive role. Asked in the 2011 census "What is your religion?", 59% said Christian – surprisingly few as most people saw it as a question of culture rather than belief. Asked by YouGov more specifically, "Are you religious?", only 29% said yes and 65% said no. That's good news for us humanists (I am vice-president of the British Humanist Association). Religion imposed on the rest of us is profoundly resented by the great majority. [Abridged]
http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/apr/18/david-cameron-votes-britain-christian-country
Wednesday, 16 April 2014
Capitalism simply isn't working and here are the reasons
Economist Thomas
Piketty's message is bleak: the gap between rich and poor threatens to destroy
us
Will Hutton Guardian/UK 12 April 2014
Suddenly,
there is a new economist making waves – and he is not on the right. At the
conference of the Institute of New Economic Thinking in Toronto last week,
Thomas Piketty's book Capital in the Twenty-First Century got at
least one mention at every session I attended. You have to go back to the 1970s
and Milton Friedman for a single economist to have had such an impact. Piketty
is in no doubt that the current level of rising wealth inequality, set to grow
still further, now imperils the very future of capitalism. He has proved it.
It is a
startling thesis and one extraordinarily unwelcome to those who think
capitalism and inequality need each other. Capitalism requires inequality of
wealth, runs this right-of-centre argument, to stimulate risk-taking and
effort; governments trying to stem it with taxes on wealth, capital,
inheritance and property kill the goose that lays the golden egg. Thus Messrs
Cameron and Osborne faithfully champion lower inheritance taxes, refuse to
reshape the council tax and boast about the business-friendly low capital gains
and corporation tax regime.
Piketty
deploys 200 years of data to prove them wrong. Capital, he argues, is blind.
Once its returns – investing in anything from buy-to-let property to a new car
factory – exceed the real growth of wages and output, as historically they
always have done (excepting a few periods such as 1910 to 1950), then
inevitably the stock of capital will rise disproportionately faster within the
overall pattern of output. Wealth inequality rises exponentially.
Inequality
of wealth in Europe and US is broadly twice the inequality of income – the top
10% have between 60% and 70% of all wealth but merely 25% to 35% of all income.
But this concentration of wealth is already at pre-First World War levels, and
heading back to those of the late 19th century, when the luck of who might
expect to inherit what was the dominant element in economic and social life.
Piketty
shows how the period between 1910 and 1950, when that inequality was reduced,
was aberrant. It took war and depression to arrest the inequality dynamic,
along with the need to introduce high taxes on high incomes, especially
unearned incomes, to sustain social peace. Now the process of blind capital
multiplying faster in fewer hands is under way again and on a global scale. The
consequences, writes Piketty, are "potentially terrifying".
Anyone with
the capacity to own in an era when the returns exceed those of wages and output
will quickly become disproportionately and progressively richer. The incentive
is to be a rentier rather than a risk-taker: witness the explosion of
buy-to-let. Our companies and our rich don't need to back frontier innovation
or even invest to produce: they just need to harvest their returns and tax
breaks, tax shelters and compound interest will do the rest.
Capitalist
dynamism is undermined, but other forces join to wreck the system. Piketty
notes that the rich are effective at protecting their wealth from taxation and
that progressively the proportion of the total tax burden shouldered by those
on middle incomes has risen. In Britain, it may be true that the top 1% pays a
third of all income tax, but income tax constitutes only 25% of all tax
revenue: 45% comes from VAT, excise duties and national insurance paid by the
mass of the population. As a result, the
burden of paying for public goods such as education, health and housing is increasingly
shouldered by average taxpayers, who don't have the wherewithal to sustain
them.
Wealth
inequality thus becomes a recipe for slowing, innovation-averse, rentier
economies, tougher working conditions and degraded public services. Meanwhile,
the rich get ever richer and more detached from the societies of which they are
part, not by merit or hard work, but simply because they are lucky enough to be
in command of capital receiving higher returns than wages over time. Our collective
sense of justice is outraged.
The lesson
of the past is that societies try to protect themselves: they close their
borders or have revolutions – or end up going to war. Piketty fears a repeat. His
data is under intense scrutiny for mistakes. So far it has all held up.
The
solutions – a top income tax rate of up to 80%, effective inheritance tax,
proper property taxes and, because the issue is global, a global wealth tax –
are currently inconceivable. But as Piketty says, the task of economists is to
make them more conceivable. [Abridged]
http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/apr/12/capitalism-isnt-working-thomas-piketty
Forgiveness is not something you feel – it is something that you do
Forgiveness as a kindly feeling towards a
wrongdoer is that it is impossible for most of us
On 6 April 1994, the president of Rwanda's private plane was
shot down near Kigali. It was the spark for the 100 days of murder
that we now know as genocide. Neighbours hacked neighbours to death in their
beds with machetes. Bodies and body parts were piled up at the side of the
road. Wild dogs fed off the corpses. In that three months, something like
three-quarters of Rwanda's Tutsi minority were exterminated by the Hutu
majority.
In the 20 years since then there has been much talk of
forgiveness and reconciliation – some of it glib, some of it enormously
impressive. And I'm perfectly aware that someone like me probably can't talk
legitimately about forgiveness when I find it so hard to forgive people myself
– even for things that are pathetically small.
But I am going to risk it only because I suspect there is so
much sentimentalising of forgiveness that it blocks out much of our
understanding of the real thing. And by sentimentalising, I mean the idea that
forgiveness involves person A coming to have warm and kindly feelings towards
person B when person B has done them some enormous harm.
This basic logic of reciprocity is built into our very
understanding of justice, which is why, for instance, there are weighing scales
above the Old Bailey. Crime deserves some punishment in proportion to the crime
committed. It's the same logic that evangelical Christians have built into
their understanding of the cross: that Jesus's suffering and death are a sort
of cosmic payback for human sin.
Forgiveness looks too much like letting people off – that
forgiveness is fundamentally unjust, that it represents unpunished crime. The
problem with reciprocity is that it often just kicks the can of resentment down
the road.
We fantasise that getting even is an end to it. But often it
only prepares the ground for a new set of resentments, and so the wheel of
anger and violence just keeps on spinning. The problem with justice is that it
is sometimes too closely aligned with revenge. And as we know, tragically,
victims can easily become the next set of victimisers.
Forgiveness, as in the refusal of reciprocity,
does not make us feel good inside. We are still bitter and angry. But if this
is the burden we have to bear for peace, then so be it. Forgiveness breaks the
cycle of revenge and makes possible a future that is not trapped in the
violence and hatred of the past. @giles_fraser
http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/belief/2014/apr/11/forgiveness-something-feel-do-rwanda
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