I bought a book by Stieg Larsson for the first time (reading it is something else), pretty much on the backs of this piece. I’ve since then came across various other reviews of Larsson’s work, many have marveled at the the explosive genre that is the Swedish crime novel, and many see the common themes of dystopian discontent that runs through the stories.
But none was able to put into context the hard realities behind fictionally politicized setting of those stories, significance of Larsson’s protagonists, the ironic manner in which his fictional world collided with the pettily bureaucracies and hypocrisies of everyday life, in quite the same way. I wasn’t sure how someone could so succinctly capture the tired and over-sold cultural superiority of those northern states, until I read the author actually lives in Norway.
There’s a tendency for the international community—and, if my Swedish friends are to be believed, Swedes themselves—to view countries like Sweden as morally superior, gender-equal socialist paradises. But the welfare state, like any utopia, is never finished. For many years now, crime has been on the rise in Sweden. Close to a fifth of the population is unemployed or on long-term sick leave or disability, paid for by the state. Immigrants have been arriving since the 1950s and Sweden’s Ministry of Integration and Gender Equality still hasn’t figured out how to assimilate them. The Swedish industrial base has all but crumbled. To believe in the gemütlichkeit of the “people’s home”—as the Swede’s call their welfare state—amid all these inadequacies is to give up on the future, to make the perfectable present into a dystopia by accepting its failures along with its successes.
As for gender equality, perhaps a source of great pride for the Nordics, Larsson is on the offence.
Statistics introduce each section of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo: “46% of the women in Sweden have been subjected to violence by a man”; “92% of women in Sweden who have been subjected to sexual assault have not reported the most recent violent incident to the police.” These entr’actes, with their reliance on hard facts, suggest that the crime novel we’re reading is not a work of pure imagination. Even in progressive Sweden, more than a few men don’t treat women the way they should, and the elaborate welfare system meant to ensure and enforce Sweden’s progressive ideals hasn’t been doing its job.
And in a sad twist of fate, having died without a will in 2004 just before his books got published, Larsson’s lucrative estate was left in the hands of his estranged father and brother. Both played right into the kind of drama Larsson himself would’ve written. They promptly declared his partner – a woman whom had supported Larsson’s writings both financially, and no doubt, emotionally, for 30+ years, to be mentally unstable, thus cutting her off from the money.
Any hopes to dealing with the translation gap that’s been blocking these non-English international blockbusters books?
If this trend is any indication, then perhaps we have little to worry about – since everything will converge to the same blend of McDonalized dullness. In an attempt to appeal to a global, and more importantly, English-speaking audience, the art of literature has been reduced to ploys and strategies.
[C]ontemporary authors like the Norwegian Per Petterson, the Dutch Gerhard Baaker, or the Italian Alessandro Baricco, offer us works that require no such knowledge or effort, nor offer the rewards that such effort will bring.
More importantly the language is kept simple. Kazuo Ishiguro has spoken of the importance of avoiding word play and allusion to make things easy for the translator. Scandinavian writers I know tell me they avoid character names that would be difficult for an English reader.
What seems doomed to disappear, or at least to risk neglect, is the kind of work that revels in the subtle nuances of its own language and literary culture, the sort of writing that can savage or celebrate the way this or that linguistic group really lives.
In a society where confrontation is hardly desired nor practiced, the Japanese’s reluctance to engage in face-to-face has created a whole new level of creepiness. Where wannabe models and actors elsewhere wait tables and tend bars, the ones in Japan find employment as wakaresaseya, or splitter-uppers.
Rather than pleading with him face to face, a woman whose husband is having an affair may hire a splitter-upper to seduce his mistress away from him. Parents may engage their services to prise off the unsuitable lover of a son or daughter. Dozens of wakaresaseya companies advertise on the internet, under names such as Lady’s Secret Service and Office Shadow. They employ models, actors and personable people of different backgrounds first to trail and then to seduce their quarry.
But looking at the grander picture, these soap opera-ish home wreckers are merely one symptom of much larger problems in Japan.
Where most people are indifferent, if not amused by the lot, Germans really do not like scientologists. A few years ago, the state went on the offensive when it was reported that Tom Cruise was supposed to play a Hitler assassin.
This week, a TV-movie will air on German television, based on the true story of a former Scientologist.
For years, Scientology has been considered a business rather than a religion, and whose members’ activities are monitored by German domestic intelligence agencies.
The Office for the Protection of the Constitution, which monitors activities by the Church of Scientology in Germany, still considers the organization to be as danger as ever. In a 2004 ruling, an administrative court in Cologne ruled that there was good reason to “monitor” the organization “especially using the methods of the intelligence services.”
The US media, which is normally hostile towards the Scientologists, have been consistently supportive of the Church over its treatment in Germany, which it claimed discriminatory. But back in 1997, an open letter from a slew of celebrities (including the most famous ones, Cruise, Travolta, to Goldie Hawn and Oliver Stone) to the German Chancellor drawing comparisons between the government’s hostile attitudes towards Scientology and the Nazi party. Needless to say, it did not go over too well with the Germans, nor with the State Department.
End of the day, the Germans are still working through the process to determine whether Scientology is working under the pretense of a religion, when it is really a business seeking tax-exempt status. Unlike most other states that goes about it quietly, the German government goes after the organization with zeal. That’s pretty nervy.
What is going on in Switzerland to warrant this kind of populist posturing from its politicians?
SVP, the Swiss populist party that got the whole minaret ban passed with posters like these, have now turned to bashing Germans. The absurdity of it all is trumped by concerns that this kind of right-wing bashing may actually turn mainstream.
While the attacks on what it calls “German sleaze” in the Swiss ivory towers fits into the party’s populist rhetoric, the tendency towards German bashing — like the rejection of the minarets — looks like it may be going mainstream.
Let’s see if SVP will up the ante after the Zurich municipal election, whom is no doubt waiting to see whether this little maneuver will win them votes.
It looks to me as though Europe’s right-wing political parties are going from strength to strength, with the Austrian, Italian, Dutch and many others’ gaining traction and name-recognition on the global stage. Is the danger light on yet?
Not the best week for Berlusconi on the PR front.
After getting called stingy and vain by Bill Gates for Italy’s miniscule contribution to foreign aid, members of the Italian judiciary system staged a walk out to protest against Berlusconi’s abuse of the legal profession, and his proposals to reform the courts.
The Parliament – controlled by Berlusconi, is looking at laws that would limit the length of legal cases, which opposition say would effectively shut down the two ongoing cases against Berlusconi himself.
“The government has now approved the 19th measure of the Berlusconi era, expected to have effect on a trial against the prime minister. [The government’s] priority has been private interests. In this way, justice for many Italian citizens will be denied”, said Anna Finocchairo, senator of the opposition Democratic party.
In 2009, as a reflection of Berlusconi’s own dodgy affairs and a lack of positive measures that clean up the Mafia-infiltrated economy, Italy placed number 63 (out of 180 surveyed) on the Corruption Perception Index. Ahead of Italy? Turkey, Cuba, Namibia, Malaysia, South Africa, Jordan, Botswana, and many, many more.
While the west flounders: with liberal democracy project stalls, unlimited expansion of capitalism convulsing internally and beat down with populist pitchforks, identities of staunch republican states scrutinized through public eyes, China’s confidence is growing by the day.
Increasingly assertive (some may say aggressive) in its participation of global relations, China is following the path paved by al-Jazeera, in staking out its territory in the game of media and PR.
And it starts with the state media Xinhua sending a team of reporters to an Indian reservation in New Mexico, to dig up some American dirt.
Adam Cathcart says, and I concur:
[T]his might be a hidden “emerging trend” in US-China relations: the reciprocation from the East of the missionary impulse, the desire among young Chinese elites to see poverty, political inequality, and urban decay in the United States.
America is just the start. If China wants to draw political parallels, whether it’s to contextualize political situations like Tibet or Xinjiang vis-a-vis other independence movements around the world, or downplay social ills (i.e. an underclass of migrants, gender inequalities and corruption) compared to organized crime and corruption elsewhere, there is plenty to be found.
Some say with social media, citizen journalism, and all kinds of grass-root reporting, we’re getting a better picture of the world as it happens. Many cite the roles played by witnesses and bystanders during the Delhi siege and Iranian protests, as a testament that we are better off and more informed now with the likes of Twitter and Facebook.
I am still somewhat skeptical with those claims.
It’s certainly easier for news items to go viral and bombard us from every direction (in that, yes, if the news is important enough, it will get to us). But there’s a lot of politicking that goes on behind the scene, in deeming what kind of news are worth the fanfare, and which ones are not.
Case in point: Egypt versus Iran.
Iran is deemed a hostile state by most of the western world, a scourge in a volatile region of the world. So unsurprisingly, it got ample coverage last year during the election and protests that followed.
Egypt, on the other hand, poor but a steady ally (the second largest aid recipient of the US, next to Israel), is only heard in the western media in connection to the Gaza, its vastly oversold tourism industry, or at worst, pollution in Cairo or of the Nile.
I lived in Cairo for three months a couple of years ago. From what I’ve seen and experienced, and continue to hear through friends, it is a police state through and through. It’s a place where dissents are repressed and persecuted, where the majority of its people live in poverty, many in utter misery. There is nothing hyperbolic about the sorry state of Egyptian politics, where one strong man has dominated the regime for three ruthless decades.
But against all odds, some people do want to speak out. But nobody’s listening. Consider a rough comparison of our contestants again, Egypt versus Iran:
[P]opular feeling against the Mubarak oligarchy here is just as real as anti-Ahmedinejad sentiment in Iran, and the potential for monumental political upheaval just as substantial.
There is no space in this forum to detail all the ways in which the unelected political elite of the Arab World’s biggest country consistently rejects democratic freedoms, subverts the rule of law to protect its hegemony, and encroaches on the human rights of its citizens day in, day out – although a brief perusal of this week’s country report on Egypt by Human Rights Watch would provide a taste – the organisation has helpfully pointed out that despite the media frenzy over the number of post-election arbitrary detentions in Iran, Egypt’s estimated tally of detentions without charge is 150% higher.
Still think crowd-sourced, Twitter-ified, FB-grouped news have no political agenda nor editorial pushes behind them? Then why didn’t we hear about any of these? Read more...
The business of child-trafficking has turned international adoption into a dubious affair in the last couple of decades. Poverty and gender biases don’t help.
For decades, there has been a steady exodus of abandoned baby girls leaving China for a better life elsewhere. All good and well, until one delves deeper into where those children really come from, count how much money had changed through how many pairs of hands, before they were stamped for foreign adoptions.
The economics of adoption leads to almost inevitable corruption and ethical trespassing, when orphanages get a $3,000 donation from each pair of adoptive parents every time a child is adopted.
In some cases, the children were not abandoned, but kidnapped by traffickers, whom then falsified records as to the origins of the children before selling them to orphanages.
An even more callous set-up has been operating in Ethiopia for years. With little government regulation nor policing of the process, adoption agencies flashing Christian credentials have been coercing and recruiting families from rural areas to give up their children.
Does this make you sick?
In a remote village in the country’s south, the agency openly recruits children with parents. Each child offered for adoption is then filmed for a DVD catalogue which in turn is shipped out to potential adoptive parents.
Elsewhere, Vietnam has suspended its adoption program with the US, as well as Ireland, in order to deal with corruption and ratify various accords that protect the children.
America’s second largest source of babies, Guatemala, where 1 in 100 children born is adopted by Americans, also briefly suspended its adoption program back in 2008, amidst evidence of rampant fraud and corruption.
It looks to me as though the bilateral trade of children is now back on. But with this kind of money involved – as much as $25,000 per child adopted, how can anybody be sure that they are not complicit in this morally deplorable trade?
Caspian, west Africa, and Balkans, where drugs move through
Not that anybody should be surprised at the inroads drugs have made in our globalized world.
In the town of Astra, Azerbaijan, where it’s just across the border from Iran, the town is known as the Tijuana of the Caspian.
Iranians line up daily to cross the Astara River to buy and sell jeans, chickens, bras, laptops—and often sex and schnapps and heroin.
In Albania, the problems lies with its location as a popular transient country for all kinds of illegal substances. The prevalence of transient drugs have turned the country into one that also consumes.
Albania lies on the Balkans trafficking route used by organised crime gangs to smuggle drugs, arms and people into Europe from the Far East, Africa and the Middle East. Its health ministry says there are now between 40,000 and 60,000 addicts in the country of 3.1 million inhabitants, up from an estimated 5,000 in 1995.
Albania’s demographic and socio-economic situation have since altered dramatically, with a tide of people moving from rural areas to cities, and unemployment rising. Struggling with the demands of capitalism, many farmers who remained on their land began producing cannabis as a new source of income
And in Guinea-Bissau, the effect of transient drugs are even more devastating. In March 2009, both its president, and its head of state were assassinated within 9 hours of each other. Many suspected both deaths connected to rampant drug trafficking in the country.
Since 2007, Guinea-Bissau, a former Portuguese colony and one of the poorest nations in the world, has become the new hub for cocaine trafficking. The drug is shipped from Venezuela, Colombia, and Brazil to West Africa en route to Europe.
Many looked upon Lebanese, and more specifically, Hezbollah presence in the country as alarming.
According to reports from Interpol and United Nations agencies, cocaine traded through West Africa accounts for a considerable portion of the income of Hezbollah. These reports say Hezbollah uses the Lebanese Shiite expatriate population in South America and West Africa to guarantee an efficient connection between the two continents.
Argentina also admitted involvement in the growing drug trade.
On March 12, ten days after Vieira was killed, the Argentine government declared that the Consulate of Guinea-Bissau in Buenos Aires was involved in criminal activities related to money laundering, drug trafficking, and illegal arms trade.
Image via Wikipedia
There’s been a lot of reporting from the British and the international press on Iceland’s rejection of the Icesave bill. The bill outlined basic compensation scheme from the Icelandic to the British and Dutch governments that repays the money lost from the collapsed Icesave.
Most of the discussion so far has focused on Iceland’s increasing isolation from the international community, dimmed prospects on its EU membership as a result of not playing ball, the potential for further debt downgrades by credit agencies, etc.
But questions linger. Questions like, why did the Icelandic reject the bill, knowing fully the long-term implications of such action – i.e. no loans from the IMF, no loans from neighbours Norway or Denmark, certain further currency devaluation and sovereign debt default?
And even if the government’s handling of the situation reflects the popular will of the constituents, does it truly represent the best interest for its people, in the long run? So why are the Icelandic is effectively playing Chicken with its debtors?
As expected, there’s talks of little else on this island of 300,000. At last no longer fretting about being forgotten – at least not when it still owes others money, its people are nevertheless jittery over a future that looks increasingly uncertain, insignificant, and more irrelevant by the day.
There’s looking to countries like Argentina, which defaulted on its debt back in 2001, and seems to have recovered without foreign credit. And there’s the legal argument that a government is under no obligation to assume debts racked up by the offshore division of a private bank.
I’ve been following an excellent Icelandic blogger on this issue, and comments on her posts are usually the most interesting.
Going from the measured pessimist envisioning a Eastern German existence:
I’m pessimistic about the future of Iceland, but I think the government could forestall disaster by a variety of heavy-handed, interventionist measures. Curiously, the country could end up as control-economy like the old East Germany, where everyone had jobs and housing and all the beets and potatoes they could eat, but no foreign goods.
To an anti-imperialist that prefers default to “economic occupation”:
Fear-mongering is going to come to a fevered pitch as we get closer to the vote. Don’t believe it! Things are going to be bad regardless of the decision. If you reject Iceseave, then you will at least have a country to call your own at the end of the day. The social unrest that is sure to come will be Icelandic business, not UN or EU business, i.e., no foreign troops to protect foreign property as is on display in Haiti right now.
To the true pessimist, whom seems Iceland losing either way:
The Icelandic people need to think long and hard about the aftermath. Paying Icesave, and their other debts, saddles them with a heavy tax burden and the possibility of losing social benefits for decades. Not paying Icesave may lead to massive inflation, limited access to foreign goods (including oil), and limit their ability to expand their economy again. Which would you choose? Read more...
If you can’t persuade them, force them.
More countries around the world are clamping down, or rather, jacking up taxes on everything from tobacco to alcohol.
Findland, always at the forefront of such battle, not content with its attempts at curbing binge drinking, now wants to “eliminate” smoking in the next 30 years. It’s doing so by basically hiding cigarettes from those under 18.
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- By the spring, smokers in Finland will only be able to buy tobacco by asking for cigarettes from under the counter.
- Tobacco vending machines are also being phased out over the next three years.
- It will be illegal to smoke in a car carrying passengers under the age of 18.
In Russia, a similar crusade is on to halve drinking in the next 10 years.
In the UK, concerns over Britons’ binge drinking habits have resulted in talks of price floors for cheap liquor. Both the medical association and the police want to see more expensive drinks to curb anti-social behaviours brought on by drinking, as the price of booze relative to income has declined 70% since the 1980s.
In the past 50 years Britons’ consumption of alcohol has more than doubled, though it remains somewhat lower than it was at the start of the 20th century. British livers are feeling the strain: cases of cirrhosis are on the increase, just as they are declining elsewhere in Europe.
And in Romania, a “fat tax” is due to be introduced to counter the obesity trend. Once again, such tax will kill two birds with one stone:
The Romanian Health Ministry has outlined plans to levy an extra charge on fatty, salty and sugary foods; a move that will tackle two problems simultaneously — the poor quality of its citizens’ diets and a plunging public-sector budget as a result of the recession.
Image via Wikipedia
It’s the new year and there are more eyes on you, if you live in those neck of woods.
The preface is as expected, always security and crime-fighting.
In Bulgaria, parliament are unveiling crime-fighting measures that will give police the right to monitor emails and phone calls.
In China, text messages are now subjected monitoring. Yes, billions of them. The government’s pledge to crackdown on pornography has now extended to handsets.
So what’s considered an “illegal” text? Any messages that include “pornography, violence, fraud, suggestions of terrorism, instigations to crime and gambling”.
Curiously, the monitoring is starting just as text service resumed in Xinjiang, 6 months after the riots in this western frontier.
As for gambling? Good luck with that.
In the fair land of Denmark, not letting a good disaster go to waste (possibly reacting to a recent attempt on the Prophet Muhammad cartoonist’s life), the government is debating on a law that will allow local councils extended use of CCTVs in “volatile housing estates and soccer stadiums.”![Reblog this post [with Zemanta]](http://img.zemanta.com/reblog_e.png?x-id=79d6f59f-b20b-47a1-a880-3acdb2f202e7)
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Far away from the global recession and genuine economic uncertainty brought by, arguably, too much globalization; North Korea is convulsing in its own form of cash crunch in utter isolation.
After revaluing its currency late last year (read: chopping off two digits and obliterating what meager savings its people had over the past decades), the mass can no longer smuggle food from China into the North Korean black market, where a large number of people get their foods from.
In a new year message that tried to both assuage its external enemies while placating rising internal dissent, North Korea has promised to work on “food security”.
But facing almost unprecedented protests – which is most likely still very low considering it is North Korea, Dear Leader is getting desperate.
So desperate that it’s willing to open up the country more to tourism, and perhaps not just the tour-group led ones that showcase massively choreographed performances with slogans and cards?
Last year, the country took in 280 US visitors only. But they may very well want to open the door a tad wider, especially if Kim Jong Il’s arms exports continue to get seized.
Collapsed currency, mass starvation, export seizures, and rebuffed by South Korea, Japan, and the US.
Will North Korea buckle under so much pressure?![Reblog this post [with Zemanta]](http://img.zemanta.com/reblog_e.png?x-id=f7ca07b6-a72e-4878-bd68-15589391a761)
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