Institutionalised violence

A quote from Michael Burleigh's The Third Reich - A New History which I featured in yesterdays teaser. He's talking about the reactions to ReichKristallnacht

Hot violence, being driven by passion, was liable to peter out as moods changed; cold bureaucratic violence was a full time career option.

And when it's 'just' concerned with filling forms it is far easier to get collusion by the majority.

Energy photos

Some sensational (IMHO) photos in todays Guardian of various power plants by Mitch Epstein.

In Britain, this might be regarded as somewhat cranky though pretty harmless, but in the mass paranoia of the post-9/11 Bush era, Epstein's journey became the act of an enemy of the state.
He was regularly stopped, searched, followed, run out of town, shouted at and interrogated by state police and the FBI. Simple pictures of electrical power production in the everyday landscape of middle America became an exploration of political and corporate power, a portrait of the American landscape and people defined by an energy-dependent consumer lifestyle.

We were lucky last week in our tour of Welsh power plants! His book is available here with some more photos.

Teaser Tuesday - 7 July

Teaser Tuesday
The rules are:

• Grab your current read.
• Let the book fall open to a random page.
• Share with us two (2) 'teaser' sentences from that page, somewhere between lines 7 and 12.
• You also need to share the title and author of the book that you’re getting your 'teaser' from .. that way people can have some great book recommendations if they like the teaser you've given!

Teaching English to a high standard from beginners to university level became our main task, mine in particular. The library and the busy programme of play-readings, exhibitions, lectures and debates were designed to promote the British way of life and culture in stimulating and even provocative ways and were meant to attract the Lebanese.

Donald Reeves "The memoirs of 'a very dangerous man'" (Margaret Thatcher's view of the author) the life of a radical Anglican clergyman. That teaser reflects his early career teaching in Lebanon very much the end of Empire! I haven't got to the St James' Piccadilly but am looking forward to it!

Hatred and Intimidation in the USA

From Mark Doty's blog:

Later, my legs feel liquid, my heart isn't ready to slow down. Thinking about how strange it is for a woman alone to come after two six-foot guys. Thinking how she wanted this to happen, somehow -- singling us out for her rage instead of the people in the car ahead of her, coming back to provoke us, then running into the restaurant to fetch the men. So that she could feel her power over them, or us?

But go and read the whole thing!

Thought for the day

Institutional religion, by its very nature, always looks for a way to be authoritative. The process of transformation into enlightenment is itself authority. When we have been through such a process of transformation, we do not need to look outside of the experience for authority: the process itself becomes our authority.

Richard Rohr (a Roman Catholic...)
Hmm, maybe I should have stuck with the first sentence?

Teaser Tuesday

Teaser Tuesday
The rules are:

• Grab your current read.
• Let the book fall open to a random page.
• Share with us two (2) “teaser” sentences from that page, somewhere between lines 7 and 12.
• You also need to share the title of the book that you’re getting your “teaser” from … that way people can have some great book recommendations if they like the teaser you’ve given!

Cheating slightly (not quite random) but the book is tending to fall open here

They were beaten and hanged, they died of starvation and disease, they lived with the treasure and they slept alongside it in that dank subterranean world. And although they were dirty the treasure was clean. The cruel masters called the treasure Vengeance.

Three sentences too! Ann-Marie McDonald's The Way the Crow Flies - not a short read but very rewarding (so far!)

An orphan

Democracy is an orphan in Zimbabwe, Since the infamous universal declaration of independence in 1965 made by the white government of Ian Smith in what was then Rhodesia - in an effort to block the extension of suffrage to the country's black majority - the cry of democracy has been ignored. Mugabe's 28-year rule has similarly undermined the development of institutional democracy.

Tsvangirai writing in April 2008

We won't be Berlusconi's scapegoats

We won't be Berlusconi's scapegoats, say Gypsies From the Observer:

In a desolate field just beyond the Rome ring road, a single line of caravans is a stark sign of the times in the new and increasingly anti-immigrant Italy. The vehicles are the modest homes of 25 Gypsy families, who have become the first victims of a campaign waged by the city's new right-wing mayor to crack down on foreign criminals and illegal Gypsy camps.

Oblivious to their parents' distress, children laugh and duck behind cars, squirting water pistols at each other as the adults contemplate an uncertain future. But the white sheets waving on clothes lines seem to symbolise a mood of surrender and gloom. Police, accompanied by dogs, have just chased this community from the city centre site it had occupied for 20 years.

'We work for a living, but in a couple of hours, everything we had created, the relationship we had built with locals over decades, was wiped out,' said Alessandro, 36.

Difficult to say more, I'm in the midst of reading Jessica Duchen's Hungarian Dances which also treads on this ground exposing the hypocrisy.

Nearly choked over my breakfast..

from a letter in today's Church Times

Anglican leaders in Nigeria have been working closely to uphold human-rights issues in the proposed legislation on homosexuality.

Ha-ha-ha! How Michael Lawson, Ben Enwuchola and Chris Sugden can say that with a straight face, I don't know.

Shotgun wedding in Cana?

From Madpriest and a Video from CANA:

The Nigerian Anglican Church fully intends to attack every denomination in North America. Any church congregation that sees itself as "bible based" that feels its denomination is not "bible based" will be encouraged to leave their denomination and join the Nigerian church, preferably along with their wealth and property.

You have been warned (sorry to remove the shouting from the original blog entry!). Though this intent from Nigeria has always IMHO been pretty clear.