DO BOOKS CHANGE THE WORLD?

A writer with a successful book was interviewed by a journalist at an event recently. Success in this case is measured in awards and sales. The book is an international bestseller. It won a Pulitzer Prize for non-fiction.

It details an horrific incident in the Occupied Territories of Palestine, when young children, caught up in a traffic accident, burned in their school bus, while on a day trip. One teacher and six children died. Many more were injured.

The response to the incident and the treatment of locals, who came to the aid of the people on the bus, is recounted in chilling detail. The responses of forces from the Israeli state and the Palestinian Authority were atrocious. Their treatment of the people first on the scene was dreadful.

The writer was measured and calm. He described the book, how it came into being and how it was organised. His aim in writing it was to interest readers by using one specific horror to open people’s eyes to the reality of the abuse of people in the Occupied Territories and, relatedly, in Gaza. He used the term ‘apartheid’ to describe the situation there.

The conversation centred on the writer’s work and personal experience. The people he wrote about faded into the background. He revealed he had been searching, in a journalistic manner, for an incident from which to develop a book that would galvanise, particularly American, readers and produce action. This idea had the whiff of ‘ambulance chasing’ about it.

In the Q&A, following the interview, it was evident that members of the audience were left helpless and hopeless. We had shared a vicarious experience of the pain of others and, while we might be moved sentimentally, we were unlikely to be moved viscerally.

I offered some suggestions from the floor that might give us some hope, by noting the resilience of the people of Palestine and another response to an instance of apartheid. Mary Manning and a group of workers in a Dunnes Store Supermarket in Dublin in 1984 refused to handle Outspan oranges from South Africa. They went on a lengthy strike. Ireland became the first Western country to introduce a ban on goods from South Africa. I suggested we support Palestinian civil society organisations and also Israeli groups who are anti the Netanyahu regime, anti the Occupation of the West Bank and anti the war on Gaza. Groups and actions such as B’Tselem, Not in Our Name and Zochrot. I suggested we chose Boycott, Divest and Sanction (BDS) at a personal level and advise our organisations and governments to do so also.

The writer’s book was offered as an example of how books change the world.

Noreen Masud writes about ‘books changing the world’ in TOLKA 8, an Irish literary journal of non-fiction. She complains that

The people around me kept saying that books would change the world. But no one was acting on what books told us. Here, books were a fetish object, to be revered and celebrated and admired, but never taken into yourself, to change and steer you forever after.

Masud and fellow members of Fossil Free Books succeeded in putting the run on asset managers Baillie Gifford, who were profiteering from arms sales and fossil fuels industries. Baillie Gifford pulled out of sponsoring literary festivals, thereby reversing their lit-wash - the use of literature to cover nefarious investments in death-dealing products and activities, comparable to sports-washing.

Their success illustrates the truth that people, not books, change the world, though books can help people who want to change the world in the direction of peace with justice.

Edward Said wrote a book that, if it didn’t change the world, did change the language, by intruding a new word and concept into discussions about Palestine and surrounding countries: Orientalism.

Perhaps that’s the best we can hope for. Change the language, so that people can create new words, then act to change the world.

Language creates reality. We can use our shared and limited vocabularies to discourage any single belief system from dominating others, often at the expense of liberty. We can expand our vocabularies. We can expand the range of people we hold as ‘us’ rather than exclude as ‘them’.

Then we can act. Like Mary Manning and her colleagues, singularly and collectively - acting against apartheid and changing the world.

And for a view of the background to the Palestine situation today, consider Rashid Khalidi's Hundred Years' War on Palestine. Khalidi was a friend and colleague of Edward Said. 

A Day in the Life of Abed Salama: A Palestine Story, book, Nathan Thrall, Penguin, London, 2024 

Tolka 8, journal, Dublin, 2024

Hundred Years' War on Palestine, book, Rashid Khalidi, Profile Books, London, 2020

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And the contradiction comes precisely where the economic system cannot possibly satisfy that desire, if only because, as production and automation become more and more sophisticated, unemployment increases, so the public that is being stimulated into desiring more will also have no means to fulfil that desire.*

The elevation of the late Pope Francis to the status of ‘brand’ was achieved at his funeral in Vatican City. The stamp FRANCISCVO on his stone tomb in an ornate basilica marks his elevation into the ranks of single-word human brands such as RONALDO, BONO and TRUMP. He joins APPLE, GOOGLE, TESLA, DUNHILL, AMAZON and NIKE in the pantheon of big brands.

FRANCISCVO’S schtick is humility, a weightless commodification of a widespread human quality, in the same manner as innovation, excellence and performance are also commodified in the service of the world’s leading brands.

There is a hollowness in this abrogation of the words, which the desires of consumers can occupy and thus feel sated, at least temporarily. Images of priests and bishops raising iphones to capture images and selfies at FRANCISCVO’S funeral make this branding manifest. They are not present at a solemn, liturgical rite, but consuming a death-gig.

Sainthood beckons as the next elevation, possibly on a five-year schedule, enabling the brand to become FRANCISCVO SUPERIORE.

TRUMP’S schtick is disdain. He is a lout, delivering disdain on a mass scale. The disdain of the powerful creates fear, which drives consumption.

TRUMP says he favours manufacturing, desiring to bring US production back to America. Behind TRUMP’S desire is a failure to understand that these brands are not American, but global. Manufacturing goes anywhere labour is cheaper, costs are lower, tax regimes more amenable and profits are higher. 

APPLE dodges tariffs by moving production from China to India, not to America. Workers at the INTEL chip-manufacturing plant in Ireland fear for their jobs, as the owners of the brand move to ‘trim non-core activities’ in order to boost profits. Non-core activities are performed by non-core people, who will be disdained and dismissed.

It is good old-fashioned ‘action at a distance’. Like physics, economics inhabits fields of action across which no apparent connections exist in order to benefit the few over the many. It is casino-capitalism. The people holding the most chips gain the most. 

TRUMP is no more than a casino player, a carpet-bagger, in the style of the American Old West. New towns, new frontiers, new wealth, not for universal well-being, but for accumulation and concentration by adherents of the TRUMP brand.

Stocks are tossed about like confetti, as he plays green light/red light with tariffs, so that he and his adherents can make gross profits. The rest of us can have his disdain and nothing else.

ISRAEL’S schtick is self-defence. The brand is tarnishing itself before its consumers’ eyes, with continuing aggression, massacres, denials, cover-ups and lies, as it out-terrorises the terrorists.

Fear and desire drive consumption. 

In each of these instances, the brands act at a distance, stimulating desire that is never satisfied. The desire itself is commodified and gathered for production and automation ends, such as training AI software. Even the trivialising images of the clerics will be gobbled by the digital maws that underpin the brands.

Which is the best brand to consume? FRANCISCVO’S humility, with its gold jewellery, scarlet robes, snow-white finery, and multi-billion dollar property portfolio, and not a woman in sight of the main table? Or TRUMP’S disdain, with its self-interest, exploitation and destruction? Or ISRAEL’S self-defence, fronting self-interest that validates massacres?

Whichever we choose we end up living by a brand, desiring all it offers and never gaining satisfaction.

*The Years Of Theory: Post-war French Thought to the Present Day

Frederic Jameson, Verso, London, 2024 

See also blogpost: The Age of the Lout

https://breathingwithalimp.blogspot.com/2022/07/the-age-of-lout.html

Philosophy is thus both a universal aim of reason and, simultaneously, one that manifests itself in completely specific moments.*

 

Rory McIlroy achieved a specific moment of golf, which may or may not be reasonable, depending on your sporting tastes, when a dimpled, white ball trundled over a pristine green sward to end its chug-a-chug progress by falling into a neat round hole, with a satisfying chutter.

He achieved his aim of universal validation, as millions of viewers, on-site and in front of screens, witnessed the specific moment. That moment achieved the universal aim of commercial success for the tournament organisers, their sponsors and for all the business interests that benefit from golf.

Emotions soared, at the green-side and far away, principally delight and relief.

McIlroy is the well-mannered son of loving parents. He speaks clearly and modestly, when interviewed by public media. He is their darling. 

Being from the north-east of Ireland, he has learned to negotiate a complex triangle of political, religious and national identities that befuddles other public figures. His approach is to use them all, as and when they suit him. And to ignore them when they don’t.

In this, he is like many wealthy people. He can ‘rise above it all’. Nonetheless, specific moments trouble him. The Olympics required him to pick a flag and anthem combo, both versions of which made him uncomfortable. He let the Olympics go by. Besides, there was no money in it.

Being from Northern Ireland, Rory McIlroy can carry both British and Irish passports, thus he can be a subject of a monarch and a citizen of a republic at the same time, a very useful two par. He may have a specific moment of reasoning when, as is likely, the British Crown offers him an honour later this year.

Some people, not all of them golf fans, are uncomfortable with this and advise he choose either/or. Others see him as a celebrity success of the outworking of the Good Friday Agreement of 1998. 

While Article 40.2 of the Irish Constitution says that no Irish citizen can accept a title of nobility or honour from a foreign state without the approval of the government, it’s a hole-in-one certainty that such approval would follow. It’s up to Rory which club to play at this hole, needing to stay out of the water, while still making the green. 

Will he then wheel along in a golf-buggy to appease the US President, who is a golf enthusiast, as the tariff war launched by the Trump regime runs its course, whenever the regime’s inside-market trader profits max out?

Rory is a multi-millionaire. His own financial dealings include substantial gifts to favoured charities, including MENCAP. False reports that he gave his bulging winner’s wallet from the US Masters Tournament to the learning disability charity soured the immediate aftermath of the win. It is all part of being a celebrity sports star and, as with most things in life, Rory will play his way out of the rough.

He persists. 

That is his specific talent and the universal aim for all humans striving for success as the world currently defines it. It leads to various forms of exceptionalism. Rory, and his fellows, comprise the exception, which the media determines universal.

The commercial and sporting worlds follow Rory. Millions of people, oblivious to his activities, experience specific moments of the unreasonableness of these worlds and their universal pursuit of profit.

*The Years Of Theory: Post-war French Thought to the Present Day

Frederic Jameson, Verso, London, 2024 

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The history of philosophy is not a history of ideas: it is a history of problems*

Ideas are problems. 

The idea that a liberal democracy can call itself that, even as it re-commences modern manoeuvre warfare on a human population corralled into a narrow terrain beside the Mediterranean Sea is a problem of politics.

UNICEF reports that 14,500 children have been killed in Gaza since the start of the war, more than the number of children killed in 4 years of wars worldwide. 25,000 children have been injured. Gaza has the highest number of child amputees per capita in the world. 17,000 children have been separated from their parents or find themselves unaccompanied. Over a million children have been displaced. 

These are terrible figures. The war has destroyed almost all essential infrastructure. Sunday newspapers report the finding of a mass grave, where Israeli forces buried 15 paramedic and rescue works near Rafah. 

These figures arise from a programme of terror.

The idea of a liberal democracy responding to terrorist actions in that manner is a problem for humanity. Will the perpetrators survive such an idea? Will humans survive such an idea?

The idea that leading world liberal democracies advance their economies by manufacturing and exporting weapons of war used in the programme of terror on Gaza is a problem.

These are problems of politics and justice. And philosophy. 

The philosophical pursuit of wisdom involves facing into general and fundamental problems.

The idea that mercantilism, as driven by the current US administration, led by President Trump, can provide an approach to world affairs in the 21st century, when it failed in the 18^th century, is a problem of economics. And philosophy.

What philosophy is behind the switch from globalisation with limited tariffs and light regulation to full-on tariff-setting and tightening of export-import regulations? High tariffs, especially on manufactured goods, are a feature of mercantilist philosophy. And a problem.

It is a re-working of Trussonomics: the idea that tax cuts for the wealthy makes economies grow in the long term, regardless of pressure from the casino capitalists in the international stock markets. And that pressure is mounting.

The idea that resources such as land, sea, minerals; great tracts of fertile terrain; large numbers of human beings, can be sacrificed for conversion into profit in the practice of mercantilism is a problem for economics. And for philosophy.

The idea that a globally successful tv drama on Netflix called Adolescence could be used to push back against the behaviour the drama presents has taken hold in many countries. This idea is a problem of child-rearing and of the philosophy of education.

Teachers have just called off strike action where I live, in an effort to address problems with their work-load. Appeals to broadcast Adolescence in schools, in an effort to educate young people away from asocial and violent behaviour, are publicly made. The appeals pay no heed to the workload problems well-documented by teachers. 

Netflix’s interest’s are commercial. The idea that one of their programmes would alter behaviour away from violence is mistaken. Individual artists working on programmes for the platform may have other interests, such as education and social change. Netflix gains by having such ideas associated with their commercial interests. It uses AI-reinforced algorithms to tailor the advertising of content for each of its over 300 million paying viewers worldwide. 

Netflix is a grand scale influencer. The idea behind an influencer is to gain subscribers, who will use products uncritically. This is a problem of social harmony. And philosophy.

Influencers used to be called publicists or advertisers. In this and many other cases, they use fear as a means of controlling behaviour: fear that if I don’t view the platform I will miss out on something; fear that I will not be cool; fear that I will not learn something vital to my life and to the lives of my children.

Clockwork Orange (Heinemann, 1962) by Anthony Burgess and Cathy Come Home by Ken Loach (BBC, 1966) are historical instances of art proclaiming against the social problems of youth violence and homelessness. That both youth violence and homelessness persist today points to a problem of art. And of philosophy.

My theatre sequence Plays in a Peace Process (Guildhall Press, 2008) dramatised problems in the Northern Ireland Peace Process. The fact that these problems, though diminished, still persist is a problem of the philosophy of applied dramatic art.

Ideas are the problems. Solutions are ideas too. 

More philosophy?

* The Years Of Theory: Post-war French Thought to the Present Day

Frederic Jameson, Verso, London, 2024

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TWO TRIBES GO TO WAR …

… and then they ceasefire … 

When two tribes go to war

A point is all that you can score

(Score them all, score them all)

When two tribes go to war

A point is all that you can score

(Working for the black gas)

Frankie goes to Hollywood got it partly right in their 1984 ‘straight to No 1 in the UK Top Ten’ anti-war hit, When Two Tribes Go To War. Forty years on, ‘War’ is still about the ‘black gas’ – oil, gas and lucre. 

The term ‘Tribes’ is a misnomer. The number ‘Two’ is simplistic. ‘Score no More’, however, hits the bulls-eye. 

A perverse calculus operates at the moment of ceasefire. It is based on Judith Butler’s insights into the unequal precariousness and grievability of lives. All loss of life is tragic. Some are considered more tragic than others. Over 40 000 Palestinian lives lost. Almost 1 800 Israeli lives lost. The conflict is assymetric, even in death tolls.

From an early stage, following the atrocious Hamas attack on October 7^th 2023, in which 1 139 people, mostly Israelis, were murdered and over 200 people were kidnapped and held captive, commentators within and without of Israel have said that the Israeli regime is using that atrocity to sustain itself, extend its reign and change regional geo-politics in its favour. 

At least 14 of the dead on that day were killed by members of the Israeli Defence Forces (IDF). The regime is not keeping score. Benjamin Netanyahu, head of the regime, said: “if we don’t fight, we die”, from the safety of his office in a bunker in Tel Aviv.

Since that date the IDF, not a ‘tribe’, but one of the world’s most lethally-armed military forces, right up to and including nuclear weapons, initially developed in the mid-1960s, with the support of French regimes and, more recently, full-frontal support from US and UK regimes, has visited war from land, sea and air, with weapons of mass destruction, blockades and sanctioning of food, water and medicines and the displacement of peoples, kettling them into smaller and smaller enclaves, in Gaza and, latterly, in Lebanon.

The Israeli developers of the nuclear programme insist it is necessary to forestall another Holocaust, the genocide of European Jewish communities, perpetrated by the Nazi Regime in Germany in the 1940s.

Opposition to the IDF comes from Hamas and Hezbollah, heavily armed groups, with Islamic ideologies, supported by the regime in Iran. The IDF is a state army, with Jewish ideologies, backed by regimes infused with Christian ideologies such as USA, UK and France. Hamas and Hezbollah are registered as ‘terrorists’ by a number of countries, but not by the UN. They have contested political support in Gaza and in Lebanon, just as the Netanyahu regime’s political support is contested in Israel. 

Though they are not equivalent, all three military groups - IDF, Hamas and Hezbollah – engage in mass and indiscriminate killing, as well as tactics aimed at raising terror in populations. Consider the exploding mobile phones and walkie-talkies created by the IDF and used in Lebanon.

Part of the prologue to Frankie’s thumping rock and dance anthem is a patrician male voice-over saying:If you hear the airplane coming, you and your family must take cover.

This note foreshadows edicts from the Israeli regime that people in Gaza should move in advance of targeted IDF assaults. Such edicts, often delivered by leaflet drops, were extended to the blue-helmeted soldiers in UN peace-keeping outposts on the Israel-Lebanon border.

The Israeli state is: 

at war with Hezbollah, which has sent a barrage of rockets into Israel almost daily since October 7th 2023;

at war with Hamas, which continues to hold hostages captive; 

at war with Iran and its so-called military proxies from Yemen, Syria and Iraq.  

The people of Israel are gripped by an existential fear.

A colonial irony underpins that fear. 

For over 100 years, the expulsion of an indigenous people, Palestinians, at the behest of Turkish, British, Zionists and American imperialists, sets the political agenda. The release of hostages, a central demand of the Israeli war effort, complicates that politcal agenda.

Rashid Khalidi is a professor of Arab Studies at Columbia University in New York. His family has been involved in negotiations with colonisers in Palestine throughout the 20^th century. His seminal book, The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine, provides a vivid account of the period. He took part in the negotiations for the Oslo 1 Accord in 1993, aimed at setting up a framework for a settlement of the future of Palestine and Israel.

No such settlement has been achieved.

Khalidi writes, in April 2024

… a peace based on acknowledging painful historical realities and dismantling structures of oppression, and grounded in justice, equal rights and mutual recognition, does not appear to be on the horizon. However, I still retain the hope that my grandchildren, whose number since this book was first published has grown to four, will see such a lasting peace, marking the end of this war.

I echo his hope, for my own four grandchildren, for Rashid’s family and for the families of my friends in Israel and Palestine.

When Two Tribes Go To War, pop song, Frankie Goes to Hollywood, ZTT Records, 1984

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nHFqSzuqLSc

The Hundred Years War on Palestine, book, Rashid Khalidi, Profile Books, 2024

Precariousness and Grievability, blog, Judith Butler, Verso Books, 2015

https://www.versobooks.com/en-gb/blogs/news/2339-judith-butler-precariousness-and-grievability?_pos=3&_psq=Butler&_ss=e&_v=1.0

The Human Toll of Israel’s war on Gaza, news report, Al-Jazeera, January 2025

https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2025/1/15/the-human-toll-of-israels-war-on-gaza-by-the-numbers

Hostage deal divides Israel as first captives return home, opinion, Susan Hattis Rolef, Jerusalem Post, January 2025

https://www.jpost.com/opinion/article-838241

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