To all citizens of Scotland, & Scots in the diaspora, (no comments version)

Pilkington Jackson's Bruce statue at Bannockburn: did Pilkington know that Bruce was a thug?

have any of you not yet read Andy Wightman's The Poor Had No Lawyers: Who owns Scotland and how they got it (2013)? If not, you really should, attentively, in its entirety. By the term 'Citizens of Scotland' I mean all those currently resident in Scotland, irrespective of whether or not these people have got permanent resident status, or whether these people are asylum-seekers or people born in Scotland, whether they're living off benefits or going out to a paid-job everyday. If you argue in detail for intelligent, low-cost policy like Wightman does, then you don't waste your time supporting or enforcing stupid, high-cost policy, like over-policing borders – apparently in Salmond's future models we'll still be paying for an over-policed UK border – or persecuting minorities who can't be squeezed into the template of Mrs & Mr Normal. Wightman's is the first book I've ever read on public policy that's electrified me. He campaigns for diversifying Scottish land-ownership – our current pattern is the most feudal, most concentrated in western Europe – and taxing speculation on urban & rural land, so that people who want to get up & do something with their hands & minds get rewarded. Rather than rewarding those who happen to have the hundreds of thousands spare to invest in chunks of land, do nothing with it and enjoy returns of up to 200% – value added by the economic activity of normal workers, i.e. us – for that doing of nothing.

Cold Country - my next book?

Kaltland -- or Cold Country, a translation that even those of you out there not much into your German might have got -- is the book I'd like to translate next. It's the hidden story of what happened to ordinary Germans during reunification. Or, as the books editors write in their foreword, it's a story of dislocations, of seeing through & beyond a polarised debate:

"One group prefers to remember, with tears in their eyes, their GDR of shiny-happy kid’s TV-programmes, while another group remains unremittingly furious about the Socialist Unity Party state, and the Stasi terror. The West Germans have, for their part, largely accepted that they don’t need to remember the social and cultural conditions in their Federal Republic of Germany (FRG), because they were ‘the winners’, and the bigger Germany today is still the same state in which they grew up. This error has been made possible by the marginalisation, from the start, of the dislocations of the post-reunification period, which have been marketed as collateral damage. Damage which, in any case, seems largely to occur on the ‘territory joining the parent organisation'. (This is the standard German legal terminology to describe the new states, which made up the former GDR. The German word is Beitrittsgebiet.) Massive violence against asylum-seekers, leftists, homosexuals, people with disabilities and the homeless was one part of these dislocations, as were the mass redundancies of women in paid work, who had to go ‘back to the kitchen.’ Add to this the Boer-like mentality of West-Administrators, drawn by the the bait of the ‘Bush Bonus’ (A sizeable salary bonus for civil servants from West Germany, paid for relocating to the new, former East German states). Add the often downright criminal decisions of the receivers administering former state institutions and enterprises, the versatile, widespread petty fraud enacted against gullible New-Citizens, the use of young unemployed people to clear contaminated military land, the exploding human-traffic in girls and women from Eastern Europe, and a violent black-market in Russian weapons. Just to mention a few examples."

(My own translation from the foreword written by The Editors, Karsten Krampitz, Markus Liske & Manja Präkels. Pub. by Rotbuch, 2011. I refer to the German law of quotation for my right to quote from this, my own translation.)

Das Hamburger Literatur Haus im Wahlkampf, mit Stephan Heym am 10.8.

Liebe Neugierigen,

heute bekam ich die unten aufgehängte Einladung zur o.g. Lesung. Nun, weiß ich ehrlich gesagt, nicht wirklich wer Stephan Heym war, mir wurde aber neugierig, nach ich gesehen habe, dass die 'Szenische Lesung' u.a. von vier MdB der Linke Partei besetzt wird. So nah zur Bundestagswahl, und die Linke kriegen eine Art kostenlosen Heimspiel vom Literaturhaus angeboten? Oder ist es für die Linke gar nicht kostenlos, haben die schlichtweg den Raum gebucht? Dürfte jeder das, nach dem die vorgeschlagene Literatur, das 'Lit.-Test' des Lit. Haus Managements bestanden hat? Wann wurde zuletzt Ulrike Meinhof Schriften beim Lit. Haus vorgelesen? Bestünde sie den Test? Die (linke?) Gerechtigkeit wegen, müsste zwischen nun und September vier weiteren politisch-literarischen Abende dazu kommen. ''Die große literarische Nacht der CDU'': Kommt man so rein, oder nur nach dem man Bezahlung entgegen genommen hat? Und welche Literaten und LiteratInnen läse die CDU vor? Ernst Jünger und seinem Brüder? Wenn die nur den Mut dazu hätte ..... Welche bücherische Freuden bereitet uns heute schon die FDP vor? Ich denke, dass Martin Walser die Art von Ehemaliger-Sozi ist, der man jetzt ohne Scheue für den Neo-Liberalismus  beschlagnahmen sollte. Das Gerücht, dass Ildikó von Kürthy die Buchungs-Anfrage der SPD – die angeblich vom Scholz persönlich am Telefon gestellt wurde – mir den Wörtern ''für so 'ne Summe bin ich nicht käuflich!'' die Anfrage ablehnte, finde ich wiederum fies. Von Kürthy gegenüber. 

Page-Turners & Anti-Politics

PLAN D

by Simon Urban

Random House, 551 pp., €11.99 (German Price), March 2013, 978 3 442 74442 8

Much has happened in the three months it's taken me to get sucked in & through Simon Urban's breakthrough novel. Katy Derbyshire's English translation of the book was published last month by Harvill Secker, priced £15. Around the same time, over the first weekend in June, Hessen's police force, working under orders from Hessen's CDU Minister of the Interior, brushed off a well-organised, 10,000 strong Blockupy demo in Frankfurt, against the European Central Bank. The kettling tactics used to crush a protest overwhelmingly non-violent in its motivation were upsettingly similar to tactics used by the Metropolitan Police to suppress student and anti-cuts demos in London over the last two years. The Frankfurt law-enforcement officers didn't even have to use their water cannons. Managed-democracy's most expensive hardware has its greatest effect simply by standing there, martially: its bad PR for a state to allow sufficient uncontrolled dissent to get itself into a position where it actually has to make use of it. Two weeks after no one outside of the left was saying anything about violations in Frankfurt – where does the democratic masses' disinterest in freedom of assembly & of collective action spring from? – the German government's Human Rights Spokesman, the Free Democrat's Markus Löning started feigning panic about Turkey:

“It makes me really worried when I see the water-cannons and other big machinery being deployed.” ⁱ

Why Gysi didn’t sue Simon Urban

Back in August 2011, the Hamburg based Simon Urban released Plan D, his first novel. The reaction of the German Feuilleton – something like a Grand Central Committee of Literary Taste, housing inside the press – was so unanimously, screamingly positive, that you might suspect its unanimity had been argued through in advance; that tactics were at play. The novel is itself set in 2011, in an East Germany to which reunification has never happened. In Urban’s alternative future the collapse of the iron curtain was followed, in 1992 already, by Die Wiederbelebung – The Resucitation – of the old East Germany, which has slugged on, stubbornly & monotonously socialist, with as much restriction on emigration – i.e. almost total – as there was in the GDR up til 1989. This author combines this gimmick with a whodunnit, airport thriller genre – the victim found hanging right at the start; both shoes tied together being the boasty stamp of a Stasi ritual revenge murder – to milk every West German sterotype about the old East for all it is worth. And these stereotype’s are worth more than a bit. Hard on the heels of the Holocaust industry, an ‘Ost’-algia industry – complete with torchlit tours through the old Stasi interrogation cells – has followed. I had to wait til February of this year for the paperback to gorge myself on those sterotypes; and now I’m glad I waited.