Legomiria and Gnutopia

There was once a planet on which the easiest way to describe its inhabitants was to divide them between the citizens of Legomiria and the peoples of Gnutopia, although in the latter days more and more voices would argue that this divide is not simple but simplifying and is especially used by those from Legomiria. 

The Legomirians called themselves like that from the word legis meaning 'law', because their society was based upon laws that were powerful, absolute, right and true, and these laws were written with golden letters in children’s books and science books, on buildings and in the archives of factories and nursing homes, all around the places and in very different forms. They did not trust the spoken word because, they were saying, the word is volatile, unsteady, hard to understand and easy to retract. 

In time, the laws of Legomiria grew to be so many and complicated that there were entire armies of scholars who were continuously quarrelling about how to interpret a law and the best strategy to apply it in daily matters. Because of that, most people were dying without enjoying the benefits of a certain law, but for the leaders, judges and lawyers this was but a small sacrifice if compared to the great love for truth and the deep respect for law which they were capable of. 

Legomirians were an extremely ingenious and hardworking people, and were living their entire life building towers and warehouses, and improving the shortcomings of their society. But because the promised welfare was nowhere to be seen and one could find a breaking of the law almost everywhere, less and less people would use the old meaning for their name, and now they were saying, jokingly, that Legomirians are called like that because they are like some Lego toys, tiny and always smiling, and who keep enhancing their anthill with boxy buildings made of thousands of bricks, and then they tear them down just to build another one right away.

Gnutopians were totally different from Legomirians. They were ugly, black, stupid and dirty. They had no organizational structure and were godless. They lived in chaos, clutter and anarchy, and in their ignorance they called this state “freedom”, but of course they were not free as long as they had no laws that could draw a clear line between freedom and dependency. They did not know how to write and had no intention to learn it. They relied on spoken word, which they kept in greater honour than anything written on stone or paper. And their words were like chirping of birds and animal squawks. They believed themselves to be free. They were trespassing freely with little regard for borders and yards, free of clothes and etiquette, they had free love, without need for the approval of a priest or the bureaucracy of legal marriages, they were sleeping under starry sky and were wandering all day without caring for their thriving and shared equally everything they had. 

If they ever had a fight, the Gnutopians went to one of their judges who would sing them a song with the right words, a song he had learned from his ancestors. This is how the judge would tell them the law and then they would set at peace.

Sometimes the Gnutopians would call the others “Lemoists”, from the words lemma and emo, because they observed the Legomirians accept so many laws without understanding their meaning or utility, and also because many among them were afflicted by a disease of the soul that would make them shun away from people, be terrible unhappy and have an abnormal fascination for death and technology. When they were hearing about this, the Legomirians were getting very upset and would start calling them names, saying they look like wild goats and other demeaning appellations.

But the Legomirian arrogance got a strong blow one day right from one of their own. A linguist who was studying the emergence of the first written laws was astonished to find out that legis, their most beloved word which meant “law” and would give the name of their civilization, was directly rooted in the Gnutopian word logos, which means exactly “word” and was the name they would give to their law. The oldest writings unearthed from the ruins of the first legomirian city were telling how the dumbest of Gnutopians forgot how to proper say logos and distorted it to legis, and  he also forgot the song with the right words. Then he struggled all his life to remember the song with the right words, writing his attempts on stone and wood, paper and goat skin, and failing that, neither him nor his followers knew how it feels to be at peace with other people and the world.

Call of the forest

Every time I go into a forest I feel like I am walking on holy ground, a wonderful beauty pulsating with divinity. I try to imagine the forest as an immense cathedral, I see the tall trees as the columns and towers, silent but imposing pagan idols, the stumps are tombs of forgotten kings, a stone is an altar or shrine, the light diffuses everywhere as a marvelous canvas of forms and colors, and all the animals and plants as well as wind and streams are partakers to a sacred ceremony. And I stay there in the middle of it all and try to catch and understand the sounds, the chants, the rites, but I can't help but feel like a stranger, an outsider. I can't remember the language... 

Trading Aliens

[Source of image]

They say trade is not only something we can’t live without but a superior and even inevitable step in the evolution of human relations. 

Anyway there’s this alien spaceship coming from outer space sometime in the near future. These aliens are coming from their far away home exploring the galaxy in search of knowledge and resources to fuel their inventions and experiments. They are obviously from a more advanced civilization but unlike what we expected, they are not hostile. They even hold true as a tenet the concept that commerce is a better way to fulfill your goals when interacting with other intelligent life-forms.

So there they are, in our upper atmosphere, probing our planet and our superior culture and civilization, deciphering our languages and exchanging messages with us. They are willing to trade with us whatever we might find useful. They have superior technology capable of interstellar travelling and for efficiently generating vast amounts of green energy, they have superior firepower and cures for cancer, AIDS, violence, and various genetic and degenerative diseases, they have a unified theory of the Universe, quantum computers, the end of famine and poverty, the best ways to deal with stress and conflict management, the art and philosophy beyond modernism, the answer to all the questions regarding our origins, God or the after-life. They even have weird entertainment like time-warble, double-brainers or woogie-machines and the good news is of course that they are friendly and willing to sell all this stuff.

Now while we ponder in awe at this wondrous alien-scape and the magnificent luck that struck us, they, the extraterrestrials, are scanning our planet to find something that can serve them. Unfortunately they find out that we live in urban settlements that sum up to several billions individuals, that our psychological energy is drained out because of overwork, useless entertainment and compulsive accumulations of information, our bodies are a total mess because of medicines we took and genetic manipulations we undergone to become more beautiful, slender, younger, smarter, artistic and to live longer. They find out that all our forests are long wiped out in order to print leaflets, posters, zines, menus, holy books, money, brochures, law codecs and monthly accounting. They find out that all the wild animals have gone extinct long time ago because they couldn’t adapt to our civilizations and the only life-forms beside humans are the mosquitos, rats, stray dogs and cockroaches. They see that all the plants are gone and everything we eat and grow is only commercial variants of genetically modified corn in various colors and tastes. They find out that our water is heavily altered with chemicals and the air is full of dust making it almost impossible to breathe. They test the soil and realize the fertile soil has long been buried under highways, football stadiums, concert halls, parking lots and shopping malls. They grudgingly discover that all our natural resources like sweet water, wood, gold, silver, mercury, iron, copper, fossil fuels, uranium, titan and diamonds have been depleted in the manufacturing of cell phones, LCD monitors, i-pods, home furniture, weapons, ear-rings, door-knobs, wallets, street lights, cars, paintings, suitcases, fences, motorcycle helmets, flags and so much more. 

 
Having discovered all of these, the aliens admit there is nothing left on our planet that can get them any good use so they cannot trade with us because we have nothing to offer. They respectfully thank us for our hospitality and express their joy for finding intelligent life in this part of the Galaxy. After this they gather up the products they had to sell and leave towards another solar system, while we are left behind with unsatisfied lust just like a homeless child staring at a candy showcase on the Christmas Eve.

Mit Afghanistan - livet i den forbudte zone

Imagine an orchard where everything is covered in green grass. In the orchard there are several dozen fruit trees: apple, pomegranate, plum and apricot trees. There is a small stream flowing nearby in which you can find crabs and fish. You are sitting on the porch of your house; on the table there is a plate full of fruits: grapes, figs, plums, apricots and mulberry.  From inside the house comes the smell of fresh bread and meal cooking. The sun is setting down and children can be heard laughing and playing at the stream.

Mit Afghanistan - Livet i den forbudte zone (“My Afghanistan – Life in the forbidden zone” in Danish) is a documentary made by Nagieb Khaja. He went back to Afghanistan, his home country, and handed mobile phones with cameras to several people. Over the next months, these people would record their daily life, and at the end of it the movie is made from their clips. We get to see how people in Afghanistan live, inside the zone where is dangerous for outsiders to enter because there is open conflict, Taliban country or risk of being kidnapped.

I will remember several characters from this movie, like the one who has a lot of younger brothers and sisters, and how scared they are every time they hear bombings and shootings nearby. He goes to school but the classroom looks nothing like we expect. There is a man who is working at a hospital and he is also a refugee, forced to leave his home because people are fighting in his city, and he’s driving a 70 years old car. There is a farmer who’s also a widower, and he is filming when somebody died in an accident or a bombing, as if he is trying to convey us his fear that death might come upon his family also.

But I want to talk about three issues that have come into my mind from watching this documentary: conflict, warfare technology and responsibility.

After the movie there was a debate and people from all over Denmark could ask questions. One of the questions was: “Was there ever peace in Afghanistan?” I have heard this rhetorical question before elsewhere, maybe it was about Afghanistan or maybe about Palestine, but it is a loaded question nevertheless. First, Afghan government did not order Afghan military to invade another country, and historically the present territory of that country has been invaded more times than that society has been an invading force. Secondly, the Western governments’ politics towards Afghanistan have been of aggression, from the United Kingdom to Soviet Russia and USA. The British Empire and the United States has been and are, respectively, two of the most war-mongering and rapacious for resources countries in the world. And because the rest of Europe gravitates and benefits from English and American influence and because of our history also, I don’t think it is ethical for European people to quickly judge other people and see if they are capable of keeping peace or not. It’s like nuclear powers denouncing nuclear arms-race, and unfortunately people who believe that Afghanistan is a place where there has never been peace are echoing an imperialist core belief in which the imperial power is needed to maintain peace among warring lesser kingdoms. This has happened before with the Roman Empire and is happening today again, when invasion forces are called peace corps.

But the most important thing is that whether there is war in a region is irrelevant in a lot of aspects. It might be important for international politics and economics, for history or tourism, but ultimately war is declared by people in power but fought and felt by those who do not rule. Just because there is war in a region doesn’t mean that the population from that region wants the war (let alone provoke it), deserves it or got used to it. Human nature is simple and complex at the same time, loving and grudge-bearing, peaceful and warlike, and it really depends on perspective and purpose. You can say about Afghans that are savage fanatics in constant conflict, or that they are people who are constantly searching for peace. A certain region (in this case, Afghanistan) can be torn apart by war for many generations, but this doesn’t mean that war has been normalised there, that there can never be peace there and that there is nothing we can do to end the war and bring peace again.

As I said earlier, wars are provoked by people with power who want more power, and it is carried by the rest of the society. When we think about war we usually picture small or large groups of male soldiers trying to kill each other. This was the case for most of our history, men’s duty was to defend their territory and deflect the attack perpetrated by other men, and the last 5.000 years have been the history of the arms race, of ever increasing military technology, of groups of people trying to invent more sophisticated weaponry with which to overthrow their enemies.

The truth is that the more (military) technology improves, the more it affects non-combatant people and the lesser the chance of survival or equitable fight. For most of our history we fought with sticks, stones, bows, spears and bare hands. They made up to a very personal, man-to-man fight which was not always ended in killing the opponent, and also the low level of military specialization ensured that more non-combatant people like women or elders had greater chances of survival in times of conflict. Weapons were quite easy to manufacture, and learning to use them was not a very complicated matter. The present times warfare technology is very complex and it is very hard for an individual to survive an attack with tanks, fighter jets, sniper rifle or weapons of mass destruction. These weapons are also commanded from high up the social hierarchy, and this, together with the complexity and lethality of modern weapons creates in the psyche of ordinary people a sense of powerlessness and hopelessness in the face of social change. Modern military gives the feeling that we are too small and weak to be able to react successfully in times of war, and hence the philosophies proclaiming the subordination of man to destiny and history, and the apathy and abandonment into consumerism and whatever is mainstream that is so specific to the present society.

Military specialization – the simpler it is the more chances we have to meet an opponent of equal power. I don’t think it is possible to return to fighting with sticks and stones again, but we must think about the future we step in, nonetheless. And the future is not looking good: drones and other remote-controlled robots, super-soldiers whose capabilities will be enhanced by smart drugs (and will also have their empathy numbed), 1984-like surveillance and God knows what else. We like to think about people in white lab coats as very intelligent scientists who work every day to build a better world, but maybe we’d better look at how much our lives are actually better because of techno-fixes. The age of inventions and garage-inventors is over, and has been over since Los Alamos. Science is made nowadays by highly specialized teams of scientists and their research only works with good funding and good marketing, and because of that they are highly susceptible to corporate and political influence, and their interests are not always the same with people’s hopes and expectations.

My Afghanistan Trailer with Danish subtitles 

The garden that I have described in the beginning used to belong to one of the people filmed in Mit Afghanistan. He had to flee from his hometown somewhere else and he is a refugee now. He recorded how his garden looked like before, and by the end of the movie we get to see how it is now: no more fences and grass, the trees are cut, there is no stream anymore, everything has been levelled down and bulldozed by the army.

I didn’t destroy that man’s garden. Ultimately I can say that I am not responsible for his suffering. However, his life has been invaded by armies from USA, which is the so-called flagship of Western civilization, and from my country and the country I live in now. This makes me and everybody else from Europe responsible for what is happening in Afghanistan, and because of the global economy, everyone else in the world is indirectly involved and responsible. I didn’t call for the war, and so is the majority of people from Europe. We live however in a political system called “democracy” in which we are taught that people rule a system through elected officials, and we, the people, are choosing the acts of political actions, wars included. This means that the people of Europe should be able to choose whether European armies can stay in Afghanistan or not. It is time to say no to occupation and yes to withdrawal. And if our voice is not heard, it is perhaps time to face the truth that we cannot decide what governments do, and the idea that we live in a democracy where the voice of the people is respected and feared is false, that our political system is a myth and the more we choose to live by this myth the worse it’ll get. Once we accept that, we may become responsible for our lives again, and we may also become aware of the lives of people from other countries which “our” governments and “our” corporations destroy every day.  

Krokodil is what the end of the world looks like

Krokodil is what the end of the world looks like.

Without civilization, krokodil’s existence wouldn’t be possible.

No chemists to synthesize the substances it is made from.

No drugstores and no money to buy it.

No ruined natural environment that cannot support living communities anymore.

No children with such a terrible life as to trade it away for a few minutes of normality.

No traumatized people to become so desensitized to other people’s suffering.

No police to ignore, tolerate and maintain drug and human trafficking while pretending to fight them.

No politicians to get richer and more powerful while causing the use of narcotics.

As long as civilization stands, there will be people willing to take any risks necessary to escape from it.

One day there will be enough people willing to take any risks necessary to bring down civilization, and krokodil will be nothing but a bad dream, a ghost from the past.

The title of this writing has been inspired by an essay called “Pornography is what the end of the world looks like” by Robert Jensen. It is something worth reading.

Dummy girl

This is probably one of the best symbols for what woman is in this last installment of patriarchal society. 

She has no face, the first sign of someone’s individuality. How many times men tell themselves and to each other that “women are all the same, whores, bitches, shrews…”? Women’s psychology is so boring, just neuroses and hysteria, it’s not that interesting like men’s, they don’t turn into psychopaths who go on a rampage and don’t have mythological delusions and hallucinations. No, there’s no need for a head. 

The plastic chest is empty and there is no soul in there. The soul is just brain patterns and neurotransmitters, so you need a brain to have a soul. And you also need eyes to be able to express your soul to the outside world. There is also an empty space instead of the womb. There was a time when women were providing food and giving birth by their terms, but with the advent of agriculture this task is now the responsibility of men. Since then the woman has become another tool for helping the man who builds dams, irrigates, plows, sows, harvests and otherwise creates everything else surrounds us.

 

There’s a bosom, but no child in her arms. The image of a mother with a child was used by former versions of patriarchy, but in these times of overpopulation the nurturing mother is not useful anymore or is not selling good, better a young girl, with a body and sexuality just ready to be taken over. 

The hands are cold and devoid of their healing power; the stance is motionless, immovable, suggesting that the fixed image of a young charming sexual body is better than the continuous flow of time and experiences. 

The dummy is in a shop, behind a glass window, with some sexy clothes and the word “sale” over her body. There is no more privacy or intimacy, and as long as you can sell your body (which is the only valuable part of yourself) you are worthy of being seen, measured, compared with others, but never heard (you have no mouth remember?)

Or maybe I am too analytical and put interpretations where they shouldn’t be.