no saints no sinners no devil as well no pearly gates no thorny crown
Creesus, I needed this, like I know you do too:
Was the issue in Scotland then debt relief, or destruction of the system that created that debt and dire poverty, or acknowledgment of the evils of neoliberalism, or the capitulation of Bush and Blair? It is easier, and in some ways more likely, to achieve something colossal like debt cancellation that will affect millions of the planet's poorest than to get those in power to admit that they or their system are wrong.
Activists often have a real distaste for hailing anything that comes from those regarded as the enemy, and the distaste is understandable; but the refusal, or inability, to recognize the messy ways in which change for the better comes is another thing altogether. There aren't a lot of saints in politics, and you can wait forever for change to come only from them. You can always argue that what we need is systemic change and nothing less, but humanitarianism often means accepting lesser steps along the way, and sometimes those steps lead toward something more revolutionary. A friend pointed out to me that when your client is facing the death penalty, you might like to abolish capital punishment and reform the system, but your courtroom victory will consist, first of all, of keeping him off death row.
The alternative position is caught well by a story I heard fifteen years ago from an activist just out of jail. She had been convicted for destroying nuclear missile guidance systems. She related a parable about a group of washerwomen on a riverbank who see a baby floating by, rescue it, and then find themselves plunging into the river regularly to grab babies. Finally one washerwoman walks away. Her comrades ask her if she doesn't care about babies. She replies, "I'm going to go upstream to find the guy who's throwing them in." She is the revolutionary ideologue who will take on the system, but in the meantime there's something to be said for pulling out the babies who will drown before -- in the case of debt relief -- the end of neoliberalism. Both positions are needed and they can be symbiotic rather than competitive. There are a lot of babies at stake. And a lot of slimy politicians kissing babies and then throwing them in the river.
Full-fledged debt cancellation, rather than, say, debt restructuring, may be an ideological change that acknowledges the profound suffering indebtedness creates and the failure of the system that created it. (After all, those loans were officially supposed to fund prosperity.) It seems to open the door for further transformations -- and the stubborn Jubilee activists who have been working on the issue for a decade have not gone home and not been satisfied. In June, the organization declared:
"The announcement that a deal to cancel the debts of some of the world's poorest countries had been reached at Saturday's G7 Finance Ministers' meeting must be welcomed as the first step on the road towards writing off the debt burdens that are preventing developing countries from attaining their Millennium Development Goals. Nonetheless it remains a wholly inadequate response to the demands made by NGOs and civil society debt campaigners for a total cancellation of unsustainable debt at the G8 Summit in July. It has been clear for 20 years that many indebted countries were effectively insolvent and required their debts to be written off, and that the debt problem itself was part of a systemic failure of the present economic system. Until a fundamental reform of international finance and trade is undertaken, debt cancellation -- though necessary in the short term -- can only address the symptoms and not the cause of chronic poverty in the developing world. In the absence of such comprehensive changes, the high hopes of debt campaigners will ultimately be disappointed."
The question then is whether the measures taken this summer are steps along the way to more substantive change.
In honor of Tony Blair, I have revised Gandhi's famous dictum to read: "First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then they co-opt your issue and pretend it was always theirs, and then if you don't get all muddled, you still might win." But here's the catch: it won't look like victory. It won't satisfy the way victory is supposed to satisfy. It will come in dribbles rather than in a glorious burst; it will arrive in the hands of those you loathe; it will appear in some unanticipated form hard to recognize. Changes come sneakily, like the thieves they are, stealing the familiar world. By the time you win, your victory no longer belongs to you; it belongs first to the annoying former adversaries who have taken it up and now espouse it as though it had always been their own, and then it belongs to history.
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