Category : Blog

[vc_row][vc_column][vc_column_text]by Giles Jackson

Growing up in the seventies in London’s rural hinterlands, we had very little to worry about. There was the IRA’s bombing campaign, but targeting the city this seemed worlds away. Besides, social media hadn’t been invented yet, so we hardly ever saw graphic images of real-world violence. About the scariest thing I had to face was Grandpa’s weekly Gaelic lessons.

I don’t know how well he spoke this indecipherable tongue, but I remember him testing our vocab and our failing miserably. Mind you, he set the bar high with intimidatingly long words like: Llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerychwyrndrobwllllantysiliogogogoch (the name of a small Welsh town, meaning ‘St. Mary’s Church in the hollow of white hazel near a rapid whirlpool and the Church of St. Tysilio near the red cave’).

I thought of him the other day as I stumbled across Transactions of the Gaelic Society of Inverness (1894-96) while researching the origins of the ‘sporran’ (Gaelic for purse and worn with kilt). Unfortunately the Society failed in its mission keep ancient Highland culture alive. For reasons that should be abundantly clear from the following excerpt, Gaelic wound up on UNESCO’s list of ‘Definitely Endangered’ languages.

These days there’s so damned much to worry about that keeping track is a worry in and of itself. Not to worry! The all-seeing, all-knowing World Economic Forum has worked it all out for us:

Whereas large scale involuntary migration is the most likely threat, failure of climate change mitigation and adaptation will have the most far-reaching impact on global security, they say. But not everyone would agree. When asked what he was most scared of, the novelist Norman Ohler (author of Blitzed: Drugs in the Third Reich) simply replied, “capitalism”.

That capitalism isn’t on the list should come as no surprise, given that WEF is an elite capitalist forum. However what Ohler surely means is neoliberal capitalism, “a self-serving racket”, according to The Guardian. Neoliberalism emerged in the late nineteen thirties. It was a distinctive, innovative philosophy promoted by a network of thinkers and activists led by Ludwig von Mises and Friedrich Hayek, both exiles from Austria who saw social democracy as just another form of collectivism. Ironically, what started out as a well-meaning attempt to prevent totalitarian control evolved over the coming decades into a brutal form of social Darwinism.

“It [neoliberalism] has played a major role in a remarkable variety of crises: the financial meltdown of 2007‑8, the offshoring of wealth and power, of which the Panama Papers offer us merely a glimpse, the slow collapse of public health and education, resurgent child poverty, the epidemic of loneliness, the collapse of ecosystems, the rise of Donald Trump” ~ George Montbiot, The Guardian

Montbiot suggests that the most dangerous impact of neoliberalism is not the economic crises it has caused, but the political ones. Indeed, populism is the result of representative democracy’s failure to meet the collective interests of the mass of the working population, as it had in the post-war era. “I suspect the answer is we need a more socialist model” ponders Mark Henderson, chairman of the Savile Row tailor Gieves & Hawkes, a bastion of the establishment if there ever was one.

My own sense of outrage came to a head in the summer of 2011, three years after the financial crisis, when it became clear that the pernicious effects of austerity programs were being felt disproportionately by the less well off. The repercussions of widening inequality extend far beyond economics, as Martin Wolf points out. In his mind, “the greatest costs are the erosion of the republican ideal of shared citizenship. As the US Supreme Court seeks to bend the constitution to the will of plutocrats, the peril is to the politically egalitarian premises of the republic. Enormous divergences in wealth and power have hollowed out republics before now. They could well do so in our age”. I fear this has already come to pass.

Ensconced in a cabin in Cape Cod, Massachusetts, I set about designing a tartan to capture the prevailing sense of injustice, disempowerment, and disenfranchisement. Shortly thereafter, Occupy erupted and spread like wildfire. I called Occupy Wall Street to brainstorm ideas for a name (predictably, Zuccotti Park’s owners ignored my requests). OWS saved the day with ‘Liberty Square’, their nickname for the park. Happily, this was good enough for the Scottish Register of Tartans.

The Liberty Square tartan

Liberty Square symbolises the golden rule of contemporary capitalism: ‘Those with the Gold make the Rules’. In a throwback to the gilded age, the spoils go to a very few (represented by the gold stripes), while the ordinary citizen (centre) is gradually disempowered. In the US, real wages for average workers are slightly below their 1970 level, whereas the top 0.1 per cent has increased its share nearly fourfold, with the 400 richest people now having assets equal to the poorest 140 million.  Writing in the Financial Times, Jeremy Grantham, head of asset manager GMO, admitted the system is “designed to prolong, protect and intensify the wealth and influence of those who already have the wealth and influence”. This tartan honours the Occupy protesters around the world who have recognised the danger and stepped up to demand transparency, reform and equality of opportunity.

As much as I detest the current state of affairs, neoliberal capitalism isn’t my worst fear. Thanks in large part to the amazing work of B Lab, a US nonprofit organisation, we now have proven alternatives to the classically shortsighted, profit-maximising, socially and environmentally exploitative C Corporation (I’m not sure what the C stands for, but ‘Capitalist’ seems fitting). The ‘Benefit Corporation’ is categorically different because it bakes stakeholder values into its legal DNA — the corporate charter.

Governed by Title 13.1, Chapter 9, Article 22 of the Virginia Code, Liberation Kilt Co is organised for the purpose of creating a general public benefit. Our principal purpose is to create and commercialise textile designs to advance social causes, while considering the impact of our decisions on shareholders, employees, suppliers, the overall community, and the local and global environment. This goes beyond traditional Corporate Social Responsibility, a kind of window dressing used by old-school capitalists to appease the public while avoiding lawsuits from their shareholders for failing to maximise profits.

Social entrepreneurs are an underappreciated resource and indispensable for addressing many of the world’s ills, many of them caused of exacerbated by benighted neoliberal capitalists. I’m not sure what I’m most scared of, but I do know what to work for: the glorious day when neoliberal capitalism joins the Definitely Endangered list.

The writer is cofounder of Liberation Kilt Co.[/vc_column_text][/vc_column][/vc_row]

[vc_row][vc_column][vc_column_text]by Prof Giles Jackson

“I am convinced that those societies (as the Indians) which live without government enjoy in their general mass an infinitely greater degree of happiness than those who live under European governments”, wrote Thomas Jefferson to Edward Carrington in 1787. “Among the former, public opinion is in the place of law, and restrains morals as powerfully as laws ever did anywhere. Among the latter, under pretence of governing they have divided their nations into two classes, wolves and sheep. I do not exaggerate. This is a true picture of Europe”. Jefferson must be rolling in his grave. Everywhere you look, it seems, nations are being overrun by authoritarian alpha wolves.

The greatest threat to a reigning alpha wolf is freedom of speech — uninhibited, robust, and wide-open debate on public issues. Chapter 1 of the yet-to-be-written 101 Ways to Grab & Retain Power should be devoted to muzzling free speech — a sure-fire strategy for breeding sheepishness among the people. Turkey is the exemplary case. While locking up journalists is an old tradition there, President Erdogan is taking full advantage of the recent coup to set a new national records for repression. Indeed, Turkey is on track to imprison more journalists each year than China.

In November of last year, Can Dündar, editor-in-chief of the Turkish national Cumhuriyet newspaper, was arrested on charges of espionage, aiding and abetting a terrorist organisation, trying to topple the government and revealing state secrets. In truth he’d published photographic evidence of a covert arms shipment to radical Islamist organisations fighting government forces in Syria. Canis Erdogan called for two life sentences. Dündar was held in solitary confinement while awaiting trial. However awful, this turned out to be the most productive three months of his life, and his enthralling We Are Arrested is the result.

I think I can relate. In May of 2009 Chesapeake Climate Action Network staged a protest against Congressman Rick Boucher’s pro-fossil fuel energy policies, lubricated by the $375,000 poured into the coffers of House Energy and Commerce Committee members (including Boucher) by electric utilities, oil and gas corporations and coal producers during the first three months of that year. Fifteen of us were arrested and jailed for disorderly conduct (all we did was sing a few songs, while preventing anyone from entering or leaving Boucher’s office on Capitol Hill). Sitting on metal chairs in a completely bare and unplugged jail room, we launched into the kind of wide-ranging, stimulating and uninterrupted debate I’d only ever dreamed about in grad school.

Photo Matt Stern

“Freedom of expression is a fundamental human right. It also underpins most other rights and allows them to flourish. The right to speak your mind freely on important issues in society, access information and hold the powers that be to account, plays a vital role in the healthy development process of any society” ~ Index on Censorship

The Index on Censorship’s interactive Mapping Media Freedom project identifies threats, violations and limitations faced by members of the press throughout EU member states, candidates for entry and neighbouring countries. PEN International, the world’s leading association of writers, encompasses the entire globe with 149 active centres. Holding Special Consultative Status at the UN and Associate Status at UNESCO, PEN has been campaigning against human rights violations of writers since the 1960s when its Writers in Prison Committee (WiPC) was established. In 2014 the WiPC team documented over 900 cases of attacks, killings, arrests and imprisonment of writers across the globe.

PEN has fought repression and violence tooth and nail for almost a century, with no end in sight. I wanted to do something to help the cause, and designing a free speech tartan seemed like a good idea because it could only help raise awareness of the survival value of writers willing to confront reality head-on, as well as the high price paid by those who are targeted, few of whom ever recover their lost freedoms, as Nilanja Roy said. (Who knows, this tartan might even shift the boundaries for what can and cannot be said in the writer’s favour, but that’s wishful thinking on my part).

Anyway, I pitched the idea to the PEN American Center in NYC. Lo and behold, this set things in motion. They put us in touch with Sara Whyatt, Programme Director at WiPC in London. Sara shook some trees over at Czech PEN, who then consulted with the Dagmar and Vaclav Havel Foundation, whereupon Mrs. Havel kindly gave her blessing to name our tartan in honour of her late husband, the dissident playright and former Czech president Vaclav Havel. Twenty per cent of profits from the sale of Havel fabric and finished goods goes to PEN International.

What’s next? A lambswool Havel scarf for Can Dündar seems fitting. It gets cold in exile.

The Havel tartan portrays an endless succession of prison cell windows struck through in red, protesting the persecution and imprisonment of writers of conscience in the knowledge that free expression is an essential component of every healthy society. It is named in honour of the late Vaclav Havel, the dissident playwright and co-author of Charter 77, the landmark human rights declaration for which he was imprisoned for several years, only to lead the ‘Velvet Revolution’ that peacefully overthrew communism and installed him as Czechoslovakia’s president. Charter 77 was also the inspiration for Charter 08, the petition demanding the end of one-party rule in China for which author Liu Xiaobo is currently serving an 11-year sentence. Permission to adopt the Havel name was graciously granted by his wife, Dagmar Havlova Veskrnova, with assistance from the Dagmar and Vaclav Havel Foundation VIZE 97 and PEN International, the worldwide writers’ association promoting literature and defending freedom of expression. Scottish Tartan Register No. 10625; UK Patent Office No. 4022092

* “Liberty for wolves is death to the lambs” attributed to Isaiah Berlin, the philosopher and historian of ideas

The writer is cofounder of Liberation Kilt Co. 

Wolf image >Copyright: <a href=’http://www.123rf.com/profile_antarts’>antarts / 123RF Stock Photo</a>[/vc_column_text][/vc_column][/vc_row]