My studies of writing

Everybody writes. I started studying writing in the high school writer’s craft course. I don’t remember many craft lessons from that class but I do remember writing a lot of stories, which is what was important – to get writing. Since 2010 but intensifying in 2015 and 2016, I have spent a lot of time reading about writing, taking courses about writing, and trying to apply the lessons I’ve learned. Here’s some of what I’ve read and thought.

Style

I started around 2010 because in that year I tried to submit my writing to a bunch of magazines that I had never submitted to before. I thought my writing was pretty good. I’d been in Znet and Z Magazine with the best of them, so why not try some other publications? I got a raft of decisive rejections and very little feedback. What feedback I did get, suggested that they didn’t like my style. Style, and voice, are elusive terms. I started on a quest to figure out first what they meant, and then, whether we would have to agree to disagree (which I have mainly concluded) or whether I could improve my style (which maybe I have done).

I had already read Strunk and White’s The Elements of Style, which is mainly about writing concise and clear prose. Followed that with Zinsser’s On Writing Well, which didn’t stick with me very much but which I remember liking. I had also read Orwell’s Politics and the English Language, very important stuff about avoiding bureaucratic, deliberately muddled language and cliched images.

Recently picked up Steven Pinker’s The Sense of Style, which had some interesting stuff in it – what I took from it mainly was his prescription to use classical style, in which you describe exactly what you mean using visual metaphors and talking across to your reader (as opposed to talking down to your reader). Very recently I read Roy Peter Clark’s Writing Tools, in which he talks about a “ladder of abstraction”, of using higher and lower levels of abstraction, and the placement of nouns and verbs in the sentence (at the beginning and at the end). Along the same lines, I was recommended Sol Stein On Writing, and Theodore A. Rees’s Getting the Words Right – 39 ways to improve your writing.

After all that, I still didn’t have a completely solid idea of style. Until this past summer, when I took a class on creative nonfiction for academics. One day was devoted to reading your writing out loud and listening for how the writing sounds. The patterns of consonants and vowels, the beats, basically thinking of writing as a piece of music. And then the images the writing brings up – what kinds of metaphors and similes the writer uses. That, I concluded, is style. And once I thought about it that way, I realized that Ursula K. LeGuin’s great little book, Steering the Craft, spends a lot of time on the way sentences sound.

Voice

Voice remains a bit elusive to me. I guess the idea is that someone should be able to tell it’s you writing just from reading a few sentences. There are many writers that I can identify instantly – because of their choices of style (see above). So, my definition of voice is the elements of your style that are unique to your writing. If you work on style, you’re working on voice. So, I wouldn’t worry too much about voice as distinct from style.

Story telling

Beyond the fact that they didn’t like my style, I was also getting criticisms that I needed to improve my story telling. Again, that was elusive to me, because I heard things like, stories have a beginning, middle, and an end. Hardly enough guidance to actually improve one’s story telling.

But Chris Roerden’s Don’t Murder Your Mystery! Was a life changer for me – Roerden shows twenty-plus rookie mistakes that get groans from editors everywhere. It turned out that in the early 2000s I was racking up nearly double digits in the rookie mistakes category. After editing for Roerden’s mistakes, I had much cleaner writing.

Trying to figure this out, I had a story critiqued by a professional writer. She relied on Joseph Campbell’s Hero With a Thousand Faces and the book that adapts it for writers, The Writer’s Journey, to criticize my story. The idea was that a story has a protagonist that undergoes an internal change as they take action out in the world to attain their goal through obstacles. A mythic structure that has come down through the ages. These ideas on storytelling came up again and again. I recently read a book called Story Genius that makes this point, and another called Write a Novel Using the Snowflake Method.

A great book on non-fiction story telling was Jack Hart’s Storycraft. He takes you through stories that he worked on with writers at the Oregonian newspaper, many of which, he mentions casually, won the Pulitzer. There are lots of style guides that tell you to use active instead of passive verbs, but it took Jack Hart to tell me to use not just active but transitive verbs – in which someone does something to someone or something else. Beyond that, listening to This American Life, and the Serial podcast, have been my best examples of nonfiction storytelling in action.

Screenwriters have a lot of good stuff to say about storytelling. The best book I found was Robert McKee’s Story, which was very recently recommended to me. In that vein, there’s John Truby’s Anatomy of Story, and a very nice and fun book called Save the Cat! By Blake Snyder. I also liked Film Crit Hulk’s Screenwriting 101, which I picked up because I really liked his reviews of George RR Martin’s books.

Getting the work done

A colleague recommended Paul Silvia’s book How to Write a Lot, which is mainly about having a writing schedule. Stephen King’s book, On Writing, had the same message. Same with books like Odd Type Writers or Daily Rituals – all these people wrote around the same time every day, whether late at night or early in the morning. Write every day, at the same time every day, and you’ll produce enough words that you can have something to work with. Don’t have a schedule? Then you won’t be able to get your writing done. Schedule your time, and do your writing.

And now the worst part: promises of how to get published!

Aaaand then there’s my least favourite topic. Publishing. To me, publishing is more or less synonymous with rejection. And also, with getting marketed to. Everybody writes. And everybody who writes thinks thinks getting published means becoming JK Rowling. But publishing is a superstar system. You are as likely to win the lottery as to become a superstar writer.

And like the lottery, your role as a consumer or buyer of tickets is very important. A lot of marketing goes towards prospective writers: how-to books, MFAs, courses, seminars, workshops – all on how to get published. A lot of these experiences can be valuable. I’ve taken two online courses at the University of Iowa’s free massive open online courses (MOOC), and a series of coursera courses from Wesleyan university on creative writing, and gotten a lot out of them – including meeting other writers and forming critique groups. But it’s also easy to lose perspective and get sucked into this market, in which you, as a would-be-writer, are being lured along as a consumer by the promise of becoming a published writer – when what writing is really about is a connection between a writer and a reader. That is an ongoing struggle for me – how much am I learning, how much am I succumbing to being marketed to, how much am I getting shaken by constant rejection into trying to mold myself into something or someone I am not.

On writing queries, I read Lane Shefter Bishop’s Sell Your Story in a Single Sentence and The Writer’s Digest Guide to Query Letters. I bought the Guide to Literary Agents for 2016. I used Thinking Like Your Editor and The Essential Guide to Getting Your Book Published (many of these recommendations I got from Liza Dawson’s website resources section – http://www.lizadawsonassociates.com/resources/).

My own notes

My own observations from writing mainly political analysis for left online publications aren’t profound. My 2010 run of rejections were by publications I don’t read very much. The publications that I like a lot and read every day are also the ones that I found most open to publishing my work. What is this strange mystery? Could it be that I write like the material I spend most of my time reading? As I’ve branched out in my reading a bit, spending more time enjoying long-form narrative non-fiction and reading novels as fanatically as ever, I’ve had ideas for writing in these genres and pursued them. It takes a long time to learn a new way of writing (or working on anything), it has taken me a long time, and I am still learning. I like to think the real reason I want to be published in these new areas is because I want to contribute to the communities whose work I have enjoyed as a reader. Keeping that as far forward in mind as possible, I think will help anyone weather the inevitable rejections that are part of writing.

Héctor Mondragón: The plan to Gaza-ify the Colombian Peace Process

[This important article is by the Colombian economist and activist Héctor Mondragón and argues that Colombia’s landowning elite are not interested in peace, even though negotiators have gone to great lengths to placate them. Originally in Spanish – translated by Justin Podur.]

To understand what is happening with the Colombian Peace Accords, it is necessary to identify the enormous political power held by Colombia’s large landowners. Without understanding the problem of the concentration of land ownership, it is impossible to understand anything that has happened in the country in the past eighty years.

The Socialist Worker’s Party of Germany in 1875 identified in their program the problem that the means of production were under the monopoly control of the capitalist class. Marx criticized their formulation for neglecting the “monopoly of the land owners (the monopoly of property in land is even the basis of the monopoly of capital)”. He added that even “in England the capitalist class is usually not even the owner of the land on which his factory stands.”

Now, in the 21st century, in Colombia the economic and political power of the large landowners is notorious. The prolonging of the armed conflict unleashed an agrarian counter-reform and millions of peasants are displaced. Colombia has become the country with the most expensive land in the region (1) and the majority of arable lands are not cultivated. (2). 

The armed conflict has become an anchor weighing down social movements and an obstruction in the path of workers and peasants’ struggles for their rights. It serves as the pretext for repression and murder of popular leaders. Indigenous Peoples, Afro-Colombians, peasants and unionists, and human rights defenders have paid the highest price in lives and suffering for the continuation of the armed conflict. They want an end to it.

The landowners have made their profits throughout the period of war. They have no interest in returning the lands they have stolen and want to continue the process of displacement. The war also serves those who impose mineral, petroleum, and other megaprojects that devastate the environment because it provides the pretext for the physical elimination of the leaders of opposition to these projects. These assassination campaigns are not unique to Colombia – they occur throughout Latin America and elsewhere in the world.

Those who profit from war will not accept any peace accord – not even one they were able to edit and redact – because they know that the main effect of the end of the armed conflict will be that the people, especially the peasantry, will be able to organize and mobilize as mass movements for their rights. This will not be tolerated unless it is imposed on them by a mobilization of millions of determined Colombians who refuse to accept a return to war and who refuse to believe systematic campaigns of lies.

Neither the peace accord signed in Cartagena on September 26, 2016 nor the one signed in Bogota on November 24, 2016 will be accepted by the spokespeople of the landowners and megaprojects because they will not accept any peace accord, ever.

The hope generated by the accord signed in Cartagena resembles the hope awoken by the Oslo Accords of September 13, 1993 between Israel and Palestine, for which Yitzhak Rabin and Yasser Arafat received the Nobel Prize in 1994.

The religious right never accepted the Oslo accords. Assassinations and attacks were the path by which the accord was eroded and finally torn apart. On November 4, 1995, after a huge demonstration of support for peace, Yitzhak Rabin was assassinated by a religious extremist. Rabin had just said in his speech: “I was a military man for 27 years. I waged war as long as there was no chance for peace. I believe there is now a chance for peace, a great chance, and we must make the most of it.”

As fighting resumed between the Israeli Army and Palestinian armed groups, Yasser Arafat was under Israeli house arrest in Ramallah from 2001, a violation of what was left of the Oslo Accords of 1993. The Israeli government has continued to build colonies on recognized Palestinian territory, bombed and invaded Palestinian towns hundreds of times, and converted Gaza into a ghetto where Palestinians are systematically murdered and massacred. Israel is governed by those who opposed the peace accords, those who declared Rabin a “traitor” – instead of peace, there is a racist nightmare.

Colombians have to do whatever we must to defend peace, to avoid what has occurred in Palestine – to resist the planned Gaza-fication of Colombia’s peace process. Unfortunately, things are moving in the direction of Gaza-fication.

First, through a massive fraud, thousands of voters were misdirected by messages that told them their retirement pensions would be reduced and their social services eliminated if peace accords were approved; that the peace accord “promoted homosexuality” and the “gender ideology”; that taxi medallions would be seized to be given to demobilized guerrillas; that many respected and famous people (who were pro-peace accords and voted “Yes”) were going to vote “No”. The result of the failed plebiscite on the accord was the consequence of a fraud – but it was used to modify the accords.

Second, the modifications of the accords have come at the expense of the peasants, communities, and the promised rural reform.

The deterioration of the text of the peace accords could only be justified if the new accords would bring in an armed actor that has, so far, not agreed to peace. At the end of the day a peace accord is between enemies – it is not a piece of legislation defined by voting by the population. A peace accord is what it is precisely because it does not reflect the thinking of any of its signers who agree to it – it is essentially an agreement on mutual concessions by those who had been at war. And yet in this case concessions to landowners were given without any promises by them to agree to peace. Indeed, they continue to advance their own plans for the continuation of the war.

Third, and worst, since the days before the signing of the accords and more so in recent weeks, a new wave of assassinations of Indigenous, peasant, and Afro-Colombian leaders has been unleashed. Those who have questioned gas fracking in Cesar have been arrested and detained. In Caqueta, they have been assassinated. The young governor of Putumayo, who challenged traditional landowners and is a firm defender of peace and rural rights, has been ousted. The leftist former mayor of Bogota, Gustavo Petro, was fined 67 million dollars because he lowered bus fares while in power.

Fourth, the mayor of Bogota, Enrique Peñalosa, sent the police to destroy the Campamento de Paz, a camp which had been set up in the Plaza de Bolivar in anticipation of the ratification of a peace accord that would end the armed conflict.

Fifth, before ratifying the new peace accord, the national government ratified a law that seeks to regulate prior consultation with Indigenous, Afro-Colombian, and other groups in the country. According to Indigenous organizations, it is an “affront without precedent”, one which contravenes national and international jurisprudence and, if adopted, would violate the fundamental collective rights of these groups.

Remember that among ex-president Alvaro Uribe’s proposals to modify the accord was “limiting prior consultation”. In the new accord, Uribe’s proposal was rejected, but the government has put the proposal into legislation instead.

The changes in the new accord that affect peasants all came from Uribe – in some cases they had input from Andres Pastrana and Marta Lucia Ramirez. The changes are motivated by a desire to confront, weaken, or neutralize the important definitions in the original accord on the peasant economy.

The accords recognize “the fundamental role of the peasant, family, and community economy.” But this is precisely what the successive governments have denied. Uribe, in his first electoral campaign, stirred the Agricultural Society of Colombia (SAC) when he declared his lack of confidence in any autonomous role for the peasantry and proclaimed the need to subordinate peasants to the big landowners: “We will install in Barrancabermeja a peasant association, and demand that the contractors integrate with an efficient enterprise in San Alberto, so that associated peasants and business owners with a tradition of efficiency can take responsibility for the success of these projects.” (3)

This subordination of the peasant has already been imposed in practice through strategic growers’ associations, especially palm oil growers, during the years that Andres Pastrana was president. Pastrana was also the president that brought in Plan Colombia (4). The subordination of the peasant continued under Uribe’s governments, which received funding from the World Bank to support “associations of producers” of “small agricultural producers” with “private enterprise” (5). This experience did not help Colombian agriculture. By the end of Uribe’s second government, it was in one of the worst crises the sector has ever seen.

The following has been added to the peace accords:

“1.3.3.6: Associations. The government will foment and promote associations, links, and alliances between small, medium, and large agricultural producers along with processors, sellers, and exporters with the goal of guaranteeing economies of scale and competitiveness and value-added to contribute to the improvement of the living conditions of rural inhabitants in general and small producers in particular. Technical, legal, and economic (credit or finance) assistance will be provided to small producers with the goal of guaranteeing family and community economies that are balanced and sustainable.”

In this manner, the plans of the past three presidents, also the doctrine of the Chicoral Pact of 1972 – which stated that large producers were necessary to guarantee competitiveness – has been inserted into policy through the peace accords. In reality peasant agriculture can reach and in some cases exceed the efficiency of large-scale cultivation. And besides, independently of the scale of production, small producers are efficient when they have access to resources and when the environment permits. (6)

This modification works with the other: “The government will pass a law with the goal of promoting other forms of access to state lands, such as the assignment of usage rights.” The origin of this change lies in the government and the Zidres law, which states that the occupiers of vacant lands that do not meet the requisites for being granted title may “conclude contracts to real surface rights, which allow the use, enjoyment and layout of the rural properties they occupy.” Although the agreement limits this to medium producers, there is no doubt that land grabbers are very interested in this modification of the accord and have taken advantage of the “No” vote.

The traditional discourse has been inserted in the new agreement so that “big producers” and “medium producers” can try to neutralize – as they always have – any programs that favor the peasants.

One “principle” added to the proposal of the “No” promoters says:

“Rural Development: Rural development depends on a balance between different forms of production – family agriculture, agro-industry, tourism, commercial agreculture – on competitiveness and the necessity of promoting and encouraging investment in the countryside with a business vision of production as a condition of development; promotion and encouragement, under equitable conditions, of chains of rural production with other models of production, which could be vertical or horizontal at different scales. In all cases the peasant, family, and community economy will be supported and protected, strengthened and developed.”

The modified accord fortunately maintains the recognition of the fundamental role of the peasant economy, as well as the principles of Welfare and “Buen Vivir”. But it cannot be denied that even though they did not agree with the peace accord, the big landowners have succeeded in introducing their discourse into it. They will later be able to use it to impose their “balance” of activities, and to erode what was agreed upon about the participation of communities in planning and management.

The Colombian Constitution, from the preamble and first article, defines the country as a democratic and participatory republic. It is not a mere representative democracy. The text of the original accord developed this point when it sought “decision-making bodies at different territorial scales that include the presence of communities”. The modified accord now speaks of bodies “that guarantee the participation of communities in the process of decision-making.” That is, communities now participate – they don’t make the decisions.

The modified accord says that the mechanisms for participation “in no case will limit the powers of government or of its legislative bodies (Congress, Councils and Assemblies).” What the spokespeople for “No” denied to rural communities, they have claimed for themselves, limiting the powers of the President of the Republic to define the peace accords.

On the question of the campesino reserve lands, the modified accord simply adds that they will be “made by the competent authority in accordance with current regulations” – that was obvious in the previous agreement since there are clear existing regulations on these zones. Their application was frozen, first by decision of Uribe and after – by request of the Ministry of Defense! The original and modified agreement both seek the enforcement of the law on campesino reserve lands, which has been in force since 1994.

What has happened with the campesino reserves in the past 22 years shows that it is not about what a law, decree, or accord says, but about how the government can use the armed conflict to displace peasants from their lands and prevent peasants from exercising their rights.

In order to not return to the peasants what has been stolen from them, in order to continue with land grabs, in order to impose large-scale, open-pit mining, fracking, diversion of rivers for coal or for dams – the despoilers need for the conflict to continue. They need for there to not be peace and for Colombia to continue under the thumb of those who promoted the “No” vote in the peace accord.

This is no matter of simple parliamentary opposition to the peace accords. There is a new deployment of paramilitary groups, operating with their usual impunity, to enclose each community and convert it into a ghetto, like Gaza. In Colombia the communities most affected by the war voted massively for the “Yes” side in the referendum – especially the Afro-Colombian and Indigenous communities. The enemies of peace are on the other side.

The defense of rural communities is also the struggle for food sovereignty. Donald Trump says he will protect the US from imports, but will promote exports, repeating the old history of The Big Stick to impose the consumption of North American exports, especially agricultural exports, on Latin America, produced specifically in the areas that voted massively for Trump. Without peace, they will continue to impose the destruction of our food sovereignty.

The struggle for peace is fundamental. It is the most important struggle right now for the defense of Colombian workers and especially for campesino, Indigenous, and Afro-Colombian communities.

1. Portafolio (2009) “Colombia tendría la tierra más cara de la región, según estudio de la SAC”, 30 de octubre de 2009.

2. DNP (2010) “Bases del Plan Nacional de Desarrollo 2010-2014: Prosperidad para todos”. Bogotá: Departamento Nacional de Planeación, p. 172.

3. Discurso en el congreso del la SAC el 8 de noviembre de 2001.

4. Gobierno de Colombia. “Plan Colombia: plan para la paz, la prosperidad y el fortalecimiento del estado”, 8 de marzo de 2000.

5. Grupo del Banco Mundial. Colombia. “Banco Mundial aprueba préstamo por US$30 millones para mejorar la productividad rural”, 21 de agosto de 2007.

6. Forero, Jaime et al. 2013. “La eficiencia económica de los grandes, medianos y pequeños productores agrícolas colombiano”; EfiAgrícola.

 

The Case of Hassan Diab: a 3-part podcast series

hassan_diab

This is a 3-part podcast series on the case of Hassan Diab, a Lebanese-Canadian sociology professor extradited from Canada and currently in a French jail, accused of a bombing that happened in Paris in 1980.

Part 1 looks at the bombing of the synagogue at Rue Copernic in 1980 – the turn French investigators made from suspicion of the extreme-right anti-semitic terrorism to suspicion of “middle eastern terrorism”.

Part 2 looks at the way French investigators created a story about Hassan Diab to try to match the bombing – the perils of using intelligence as evidence.

Part 3 looks at why Canada handed Hassan Diab over to France – the nature and price of Canadian diplomacy.

The Ossington Circle Episode 7: The Case of Hassan Diab Part 1 of 3

The Ossington Circle Episode 8: The Case of Hassan Diab Part 2 of 3

The Ossington Circle Episode 9: The Case of Hassan Diab Part 3 of 3

 

Three Lessons this Leftist Takes from Trump’s Victory

I have been surprised by two electoral events in a few months: Trump’s election victory and the Colombian referendum on the peace accords. Both votes were very close, had low participation rates, and were expected to go the other way. If I were a closer watcher of British politics, I would no doubt have been equally surprised by the Brexit vote. In trying to learn from my own errors of analysis, I have come to these conclusions.

1. This is a world of bubbles.

One important and constant argument made on the left is for the need for independent media. The reason we believe in devoting resources and energy to creating and supporting independent media is to try to reduce our dependence for information on analysis on corporate media sources. Whether those sources support Democrats or Republicans, whether they are liberal or conservative, their corporate values and their business models trump the political considerations of their journalists or editors.

We used to focus our analysis of media bias against the corporate, agenda-setting media and especially their flagship newspaper, namely the New York Times. The NYT would receive the most criticism, not because it was the most biased, because there have always been many outlets to the right of it, but because it had the most influence. With the decline of newspapers and more and more people getting their information from different media – TV, social media, other web sources – audiences fragmented.

That fragmentation process is now complete. The agenda-setting media set agendas for only one bloc of Americans. Another bloc, the one that just elected Trump, uses a different set of media – one with its own set of assumptions and biases.

So my daily media routine goes like this: I use a carefully curated Twitter feed, following journalists and writers that I like and trust. When I have analyzed what I end up reading via Twitter, it seemed to me that I was clicking a lot of links to The Guardian, The Intercept, and Al Jazeera.

I make a daily round of outlets that I like and contribute to – Znet, TeleSUR, Ricochet, rabble, and some foreign outlets like El Tiempo in Colombia. I avoid material that depresses me except when I’m doing direct research on a topic. Because I don’t like to be made miserable constantly, I also look for news that is already presented with some analysis or even comedically – like John Oliver’s show. Because I actually want to write and do things, I don’t have time for much more than this or I would be consuming news all day.

In other words, I live in a bubble of my own selection. Being in that bubble is helpful to me because I know I have a community of people who I respect, who are like-minded and I get to spend time reading their insights. But left media outlets don’t have systematic surveying of every part of the US. For that kind of resourced, comprehensive coverage, I looked to the corporate media for insight – the NYT, CNN, etc. I relied on their news and their polling and tried to build my own analysis from there. And consequently, I was completely wrong.

I don’t think that there’s some alternative like scanning every bubble or spending lots of time interacting with media that supported Trump. You can get insights from inside your bubble. Arlie Russell Hochschild did serious research on what was driving support for Trump, and delivered it straight into my bubble on Democracy Now. Michael Moore predicted a Trump victory. The starting point though has to be that there is very little that forms a common basis for a national conversation – there are several different conversations going on with different assumptions and starting points. Fox News and Clear Channel on the one hand and the NYT and MSNBC on the other are all corporate media, but their audiences don’t understand each other and underestimate each other.

2. The poll that matters is the election.

Campaign strategists and voters relied on polls, and the polls were wrong. Politicians use polls to try to campaign scientifically, focusing attention where they can make gains according to how they are polling in the elections. But the polls are pseudo-science. In the last three elections I have followed closely (Canada 2015, Colombia referendum, and this last US election) I had a completely incorrect idea of what was going to happen because I relied on the polls.

With everybody, politicians and public alike, watching the polls, the election becomes more like a pseudoscientific exercise about watching percentage points go up and down and less like a public conversation about politics, policies, and laws.

3. The conservative base is not growing.

In Canada 2015, Stephen Harper lost the election with nearly the same number of votes (5.6 million) with which he won a majority in 2010 (5.8 million). Trump won the presidency in 2016 with 60.3 million votes, while Romney lost in 2012 with 60.9 million. In both countries the conservative base is not growing, but slowly shrinking. When they lose it is not because their base grows, but because the other side gets more votes (in the cases of Trudeau and Obama, a lot more votes).

Obama (2008, 2012) and Trudeau (2015) were able to generate enthusiasm that Clinton was not. Perhaps Sanders would have generated that kind of enthusiasm, but he did not win the nomination. Many leftists who want substantive moves towards greater equality and peace were excited about Sanders, but neither Obama nor Trudeau really promised such moves. They won anyway. The Democratic Party might not see a move to the left as the best strategy after this loss.

Trump may have won by promising to make America great again, but he is incapable of solving or even understanding any of the problems we face. Solutions for environmental, social, and international crises will have to come from the left. Surviving the Trump presidency will be a challenge.

Independence of thought will be an important survival skill.

No to Peace in Colombia?

In the four years that it took to negotiate this peace deal, Colombia has been moving inexorably towards October 2, the day that the people could have their say about the deal that would end the five-decade long war. The polls predicted an easy win for the “yes” side. The government’s negotiators and the guerrillas (FARC) campaigned for a strong “yes” vote. This was the best deal that could be had, they said.

There are around 34 million Colombians eligible to vote out of a population of around 48 million. My own prediction was that about half of that would vote in the referendum and around 70% of them would vote “yes”.

But the ‘No’ won with 6,422,136 votes, defeating the ‘Yes’ who came in with 6,361,762. A difference of 60,374 voters. A difference of less than half a percentage point of the 12.8 million who voted. An even smaller fraction of the 21.2 million who didn’t vote.

With peace at stake, why was abstention so high? High abstention is a feature of recent elections – it was high in the 2014 election as well – with 32.9 million eligible voters in 2014, just 14.7 million voted, and only 7.8 million of those voted for the winner, President Santos.

But Santos and the peace bloc weren’t able to get that number to vote “yes”. What happened?

The polls predicting an easy “yes” victory may have played a role. Why would “yes” voters feel the need to vote if the outcome was a foregone conclusion? The “no” side, by contrast, was mobilized by the ever-polarizing ex-President and war candidate Alvaro Uribe Velez.

The areas most affected by the war voted “yes”, while most of the cities voted “no” (Bogota and Cali, however, voted “yes”). Hurricane Matthew may have played a role, since the Caribbean Coast has been severely affected by the war and was expected to be a “yes” stronghold.

Disenchantment with the process played a role. After four years of negotiations, the people were being asked to show up to rubber-stamp a process the parameters of which they did not have a say in setting. Most of them chose not to show up at all, and half of them voted not to give the rubber stamp. Though Colombia’s social movements voted “yes”, they had critiques of the process – that the war against the people would continue under this peace, that the economic model had been left untouched, that their voices were heard only in tokenistic ways at the table. These feelings, and not just the right-wing opposition organized by Uribe, may have contributed to the lack of enthusiasm for the “yes” side.

Before despairing of eternal conflict, however, let us clarify what this result was and was not.

It is certainly not a mandate for war. At a virtual tie (50.23% no, 49.76% yes) and with almost twice as many abstainers as voters, this can only be read as a sign of division and a lack of consensus, not the unequivocal statement of a vengeful electorate.

It is not driving FARC straight back into the jungle – certainly not right away. FARC immediately communicated that they view this result as a sign that they must work even harder for peace, and reiterated that they will continue to use only words as their weapons in the days ahead. The cease-fire stands. The negotiators will be back in Cuba this week.

President Santos walked out of the palace to a spontaneous demonstration of people chanting “We Want Peace! Not One Step Back!” and told them, and the media that he would continue to work for peace and that the peace process would continue to move forward. His next step was to call a meeting of all political parties to find a consensus process to move forward. It is unfortunate but inevitable that Uribe’s spoiler party will have to be a part of this process.

The most likely way forward will be to try to make adjustments to the accords that will make it acceptable to at least a substantial number of the “no” campaigners and try to pass them. The “no” side’s main issues were with the “transitional justice” proposals for guerrillas who had committed crimes, with some of the land reform and redistribution proposals, and with the conversion of FARC into a political party. Unfortunately these were also the key points making the deal acceptable to FARC – so the work of making the adjustments will not be straightforward or easy.

One of the campaigners for the peace deal, liberal former senator Piedad Cordoba, tried to find a silver lining, telling TeleSUR that voters had given Colombians an opportunity to dialogue again. Perhaps the “yes” side took the support of the people for granted. As the process moves forward after this turn, proponents of peace are unlikely to forget this hard lesson.

Free Homa Hoodfar

UPDATE SEPTEMBER 26/16: Homa Hoodfar was released from prison.

At the end of August, Iran’s Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif traveled to six Latin American countries: Cuba, Nicaragua, Ecuador, Chile, Bolivia, and Venezuela. On what was mainly a business tour, Zarif discussed megaprojects like the Grand Interoceanic canal. An Iranian foreign ministry spokesman said that “Iran has such a position that it can pick its political friends and trade partners and does not have to cooperate with a specific country or region in the world.” After the successful diplomatic conclusion of the nuclear agreement last year, Iran is pursuing a foreign policy to break the isolation that the US has sought to impose on it.

Good for Iran. The economic sanctions did nothing but harm and those in the US and elsewhere who fantasize about war with the country, after so many decades of destruction in the region, should be made to wait in frustration. Latin American countries who have suffered so much under imperialism have every reason to forge closer relations. And businesses like Boeing, currently hammering out a multi-billion dollar (perhaps $25 billion) deal with Iran for passenger planes, have no special reason to not do business with Iran, despite attempts by US legislators to stop the deal.

In recent decades, as efforts to demonize Iran in the West have proceeded, sensible people have stepped forward to try to point out some basic truths: Iran is a vast, diverse country of nearly 80 million people; These people cannot be reduced to racist caricatures about Islam; From a foreign policy perspective, Iran has good reasons to want stability in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Syria; Western cooperation with Iran could help the region, while demonization can only do more damage.

People with an even deeper knowledge of Iran published scholarship that undermined these caricatures and stereotypes. Homa Hoodfar is one such scholar. Hoodfar is a 65-year old Iranian-Canadian dual citizen and professor at Concordia University in Montreal. A quick look at her publications shows nuanced research and careful analysis, presenting specifics of what women in the region are actually doing and the decisions they make, rather than blanket statements and polemics. Her fellow scholar, Sherene Razack, describes Hoodfar’s research in some detail in a Globe and Mail article.

Her imprisonment occurred on one of her frequent visits to the country in February 2016. Her plan was to visit family and conduct some archival research. In March, her place was raided, her passports and belongings confiscated. She spent from March to June being interrogated, and on June 6, she was imprisoned. She has been in solitary confinement. Her health is deteriorating, and she has been hospitalized. There has still been no charge, only a newspaper article on June 24 claiming that Hoodfar was “dabbling in feminism and security matters.”

The idea that this 65-year old ethnographic scholar was “dabbling in security matters” is preposterous. As for “dabbling in feminism”, that is no crime even in Iranian law. Writing in The Guardian, Islamic scholar Tariq Ramadan has pointed out that “Hoodfar’s treatment contradicts Islamic legal principles. In an Islamic system of criminal justice, the accused are innocent until proved guilty, and are entitled to certain rights including access to counsel and an adequate defence, freedom from torture or inhumane treatment, and a fair and speedy trial.”

For many reasons, anti-imperialists want to see diplomacy replace warmongering, to see Iran’s isolation broken. But it is impossible to overlook something deeply rotten about Iran’s judicial and prison system. Iran is one of the touchstones for the mass executions of prisoners. Iran’s prison system is where another Iranian-Canadian woman, Zahra Kazemi, was tortured and murdered in 2003. British-Iranian woman Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe was just sentenced to five years for supposedly trying to topple the regime. The court authorities have been violating Iran’s laws over the entire course of this case, doing end-runs around Hoodfar’s lawyer, ignoring bail requests, and keeping her in isolation.

If Iranian government officials want to hold their heads up in their diplomatic encounters in Latin America and elsewhere, they should stop tormenting a friendly 65-year old scholar and let her return to Canada. Anybody who is talking to the Iranian government about anything should impress upon them the need to immediately free Homa Hoodfar.

First published simultaneously on ZNet and Countercurrents.org

Haiti 101 Years After US Invasion, Still Resisting Domination

US invaded and occupied Haiti 101 years ago today, and remained there for nineteen years. Accomplishments of the occupation include raiding the Haitian National Bank, re-instituting forced labor, establishing the hated National Guard, and getting a 25-year contract for the US corporation, United Fruit.

There was a pretext for the invasion – the assassination of Haiti’s president in 1915. But to understand the event, which has lessons to draw from a century later, it is necessary to look more closely at the invader than the invaded.

In 2016, the United States is living through a presidential campaign with a candidate willing to exploit racism and pander to anti-immigrant sentiment. Police are killing black people in cities across the US. Having drawn down troop levels in its two big wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the US still runs air srikes and drone strikes in the region, and covert actions all over the world. The US is still the determining voice in Haiti’s politics and economy. In other words, one hundred and one years after its invasion of Haiti, the US retains two features of what it was then: violent racial inequality, and empire.

The US presidential candidates can be looked at from the perspective of Haiti. One candidate has an extensive record there. The other has some historical parallels.

The Clintons have treated Haiti as a family business. In 2010, after an earthquake devastated the country, the Clinton Foundation was among the horde of non-governmental organizations (NGOs) that stepped up their role in the still unfinished rebuilding phase. Haiti’s social sector had already been taken over by NGOs and its streets, since the 2004 coup and occupation, were patrolled by United Nations troops. The Clinton Foundation received pledges of hundreds of millions of dollars in development aid to rebuild Haiti. The crown jewel of the Foundation’s work: the disappointing Caracol Industrial Park, opened in 2012, which promised and failed to expand Haiti’s low-wage garment-processing industry, long a source of foreign profits and little internal development.

Hillary Clinton made her own interventions into Haiti politics as secretary of state. At a key moment in Haiti post-earthquake politics, Clinton’s State Department threw its weight to presidential candidate Michel Martelly. His electoral legitimacy was dubious and his presidency led the country to a constitutional crisis when people mobilized against another stolen election in 2015. That crisis is still ongoing, and will no doubt provide pretexts for the next US intervention.

To try to imagine the impact of Trump on Haiti, one need only look back a century. As Trump continues his seemingly unstoppable march to the presidency, he is compared to Italy’s Silvio Berlusconi and other populist buffoon-politicians have been made. Woodrow Wilson, the invader of Haiti in 1915, may be a better example of the damage a president can do.

When Woodrow Wilson became president, he set about doing what today would be called “Making America Great Again”. Decades had passed since the US Civil War. The post-war Reconstruction involved efforts to desegregate cities and government workplaces and make a place for newly freed Black people. Wilson reversed these efforts, strengthening racial apartheid in the US. His administration made sure there were separate bathrooms in federal government offices. Although Trump is unlikely to re-introduce segregation, something else happened under Woodrow Wilson’s rule that is relevant in this context: white vigilante violence and lynching spiked.

Wilson created a permissive environment for such atrocities. First elected in 1912, Wilson only got around to making a statement against the organized white violence – called “mob violence” or “race riots” – in mid-1917.

When more riots broke out in 1919, this time designed to suppress the democratic impulses of black soldiers returning from WWI, the NAACP implored Wilson to make a statement. But it was Wilson, himself, who had restricted black soldiers to non-combat roles during the war.

In foreign policy, Donald Trump’s pronouncements have been predictably incoherent and uninformed. But Woodrow Wilson’s presidency suggests that domestic policies of racism will not be confined to the domestic arena.

Wilson sent US troops all over Latin America – Mexico, the Dominican Republic, Cuba, Panama, Nicaragua and and of course, Haiti – which may have got it the worst of all. Racist wrath has been a constant in Haiti’s history since it became independent in a slave revolt, and Wilson unleashed that wrath on the island in the 1915-1934 occupation. Chomsky’s Year 501 gives a flavor for what US occupiers were thinking and doing:

“Secretary of State William Jennings Bryan, found the Haitian elite rather amusing: “Dear me, think of it, Niggers speaking French,” he remarked. The effective ruler of Haiti, Marine Colonel L.W.T. Waller, who arrived fresh from appalling atrocities in the conquest of the Philippines, was not amused: “they are real nigger and no mistake…real nigs beneath the surface,” he said, rejecting any negotiations or other “bowing and scraping to these coons,” particularly the educated Haitians for whom this bloodthirsty lout had a special hatred. Assistant Secretary of the Navy Franklin Delano Roosevelt, while never approaching the racist fanaticism and thuggery of his distant relative Theodore Roosevelt, shared the feelings of his colleagues. On a visit to occupied Haiti in 1917, he recorded in his diary a comment by his travelling companion, who later became the Occupation’s leading civilian official. Fascinated by the Haitian Minister of Agriculture, he “couldn’t help saying to myself,” he told FDR, “that man would have brought $1,500 at auction in New Orleans in 1860 for stud purposes.” “Roosevelt appears to have relished the story,” Schmidt notes, “and retold it to American Minister Norman Armour when he visited Haiti as President in 1934.”

Chomsky concludes this section of horrifically racist quotes from the US elite about Haiti with a warning: “the element of racism in policy formation should not be discounted, to the present day.”

Nor should Haitian resistance.

The US occupiers of 1915-1934 faced a rebellion led by Charlemagne Peralte. Marines assassinated him and circulated a photograph of him crucified. Rather than intimidating Haitians, the photo enraged them, and cemented Charlemagne Peralte’s place as a national hero.

If Haitians had a say in the US presidential election, a case could be made for the devil-you-know of Clinton rather than the risk of a new Woodrow Wilson in Trump. But subjects of the empire can’t vote, only citizens. Worse, Haitians have been punished if the US didn’t like who they chose in their own elections. The US tried to set the tone 101 of master years ago.

But people still resist.

First published at TeleSUR English: http://www.telesurtv.net/english/opinion/Haiti-101-Years-After-US-Invasion-Still-Resisting-Domination-20160727-0048.html

Colombia: The possibilities opened by the peace agreement

On June 23, at the end of a four-year long peace negotiation, the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) and the Colombian government signed a ceasefire agreement in Havana. In cities around Colombia, people left signs on the streets reading: “R.I.P. Civil War, 1964-2016”. There are good reasons to date the civil war’s origin even further back, all the way to 1948. In either case, this is a historic moment, the signing of a peace to end one of the world’s longest-running conflicts.

Like many other guerrilla movements in Latin America the FARC took up arms in part to defend peasant lands from powerful interests: local big landowners, the state, and multinational corporations, and their military and paramilitary forces. The peace agreement they signed contains a mandate for land reform, as well as for restitution for the victims of the conflict, a transitional justice process for guerrillas who committed crimes during the war, and a process for the guerrillas to enter Colombia’s electoral political system.

The process isn’t finished: the final agreement will be signed in Colombia. It will have to be approved in a referendum, and legislation to support it will have to be passed in the Colombian Congress. But the FARC said on June 28, in a sign of how far the process has advanced, that they would not return to war even if the people rejected the accords. There are also other cautions, caveats, and limitations to the process to dampen the understandable celebration.

We have been here before. There have been two peace processes that took years, became very popular in Colombia, and ultimately failed. In the 1980s, a peace process saw thousands of revolutionaries associated with the guerrillas enter politics through the Patriotic Union (UP) party only to be killed by state-backed paramilitaries. From 1999-2002, peace talks ran at Caguan, while the Colombian government built up its military through Plan Colombia. They ended with the Colombian Army driving the FARC out of their safe zone, and another decade and a half of massacres, assassinations, and kidnappings.

While it is the largest, the FARC isn’t the only guerrilla group in Colombia. The National Liberation Army (ELN) is also in a peace process with the government, but it is in relatively early stages. Until that process is also concluded, the armed conflict cannot be declared over.

By every measure, the deadlier force in Colombia, and the bigger problem, is paramilitarism. The paramilitary strategy was introduced in Colombia from the very beginning of the civil war, with US support. Counterinsurgency doctrine starts from Mao’s dictum that the guerrilla is a fish and the people are the water; paramilitaries are supposed to drain the water (“drain the swamp”, is the way it is written in the US). In Colombia, “draining the swamp” has involved massacres against peasant and indigenous communities, campaigns of assassination against progressive politicians, union activists, journalists, human rights and women’s rights activists – anyone seeking any sort of positive change in the country has been targeted.

It is important to understand that despite their self-declarations, these paramilitary forces did not arise in response to the guerrillas, but operate according to their own political logic of terror and control of the population. An example: some of the worst paramilitary massacres were committed after the 1991 Constitution, which guaranteed indigenous and Afro-Colombian rights to land. Paramilitaries slaughtered their way down the pacific coast as the number of people killed grew to thousands each year and the number of displaced people grew into the millions. It is much more difficult to claim territorial rights guaranteed by the constitution when you have been forced to flee your territory.

The evidence linking these paramilitaries to the US-backed Colombian Army, to Colombian politicians, to narcotrafficking, and to multinational corporations, is voluminous.

The leader of the camp dedicated to spoiling the peace agreement is ex-President Alvaro Uribe Velez, who initiated a theatrical peace process to demobilize the paramilitaries in 2003. The paramilitaries spent the next few years demobilizing, bringing rusty weapons to photographed ceremonies and getting special benefits like the right to keep the profits of their crimes. Despite all this demobilizing, the paramilitaries are as active as ever. During Uribe’s tenure as president, a scandal called “para-politica” or “para-Uribismo” emerged, in which paramilitaries revealed signed pacts between their groups and elected politicians in Uribe’s party. He also had the ‘wiretapping scandal’, which revealed that Colombia’s intelligence agency was wiretapping government officials, journalists, and supreme court judges. Uribe continues to have his own intelligence network and has leaked things on twitter about the peace process well before they were public. To get a flavor of what the paramilitaries have been up to recently, read a communique from Colombia’s social movements (see for example this one translated by the Colombia Support Network: http://colombiasupport.net/2016/03/s-o-s-for-our-lives-for-human-rights-and-for-peace-guarantees-that-there-will-be-no-repetition/).

Like many ongoing conflicts, Colombia’s civil war has been deadlier for civilians than combatants. Unarmed social movements argued throughout this peace process (and previous ones) that the unarmed people who have suffered the most from the war should have a say in the peace. Just this past April, in Northern Cauca, Afro-Colombians marched in defense of their traditional lands against mining encroachment and were met with riot police beatings and tear gas. The movements understand very well that inequality, and the violence required to sustain it, did not begin with the armed conflict with the FARC and will not disappear after the FARC lay down arms and enter politics.

But even looking at it with no illusions, the peace process can be celebrated for the possibilities it opens.

Paramilitarism may not be a mere reaction to the state-guerilla confrontation, but it has certainly fed from it. Popular repudiation of specific guerrilla tactics, such as kidnapping civilians, also helped create a stronger right-wing constituency. The Colombian civil war became a laboratory for counterinsurgency, paramilitarism, and covert action that devastated not just Colombia, but other countries as well. Colombian paramilitaries popped up in countries from Venezuela to Honduras. Counterinsurgency experts took the Colombian experience on their resumes and went to Afghanistan and beyond. With peace in Colombia, all of this could change.

On the other side, the state’s first line of defense against every social movement has been to accuse it of collusion with the guerrillas. An unarmed organization would then be treated like a military target. Without the armed conflict as a pretext for the state, Colombia’s movements could end up on a more level political playing field in their struggles for land, union rights, and social justice.

The fine print will have to be read carefully and there will be many traps and risks ahead. But a negotiated end to the Colombian armed conflict has been a demand of Colombia’s unarmed social movements for many decades. They have struggled for it and many have died for it. This peace is their victory, as much as it is that of the two parties who signed the accords.

First published at TeleSUR English: http://www.telesurtv.net/english/opinion/Colombia-The-Possibilities-Opened-by-the-Peace-Agreement-20160629-0009.html

The Ossington Circle Episode 6: Listening to Ayotzinapa with John Gibler and Manuel Rozental

The Ossington Circle Episode 6: Listening to Ayotzinapa with John Gibler and Manuel Rozental

I interview John Gibler, author of An Oral History of Infamy: The Attacks on the Students of Ayotzinapa, and Manuel Rozental of Pueblos en Camino. We discuss the disappearance of the 43 students in Mexico, the changes in Mexico over recent years, and the idea of “political listening”.

The Ossington Circle Episode 5: Indigenous Resurgence with Glen Coulthard

The Ossington Circle Episode 5: Indigenous Resurgence with Glen Coulthard

I interview Glen Coulthard, author of Red Skin, White Masks: Rejecting the Colonial Politics of Recognition. We discuss the revolutionary theories of Frantz Fanon, the relevance of one revolutionary experience for another, the indigenous resurgence, and the importance of solidarity.