On Heroism

Heroic?

hero: late 14c., “(person) of superhuman strength or physical courage,” from Latin heros “hero,” from Greek heros "demi-god" (a variant singular of which was heroe), originally “defender, protector”.

-Online Etymology Dictionary

'He won't always follow orders,

for he dares to answer “Why?”

and unless he likes the reason,

he refuses to comply.'

-The Sultan, Quest for Glory 2

'Being a hero has a lot of perks, you know. You get the respect of the people, cheap rates at inns, and you can even walk into people's houses and take stuff.'

-Luka, Monmusu Kuesto

Increases melee, ranged, and spell casting speed by 30% for all party and raid members. Lasts 40 sec.

Allies receiving this effect will be unable to benefit from Heroism again for 10 min.

-'Heroism' ability available to players of the Shaman class in World of Warcraft

'Heroism by order, senseless violence, and all the pestilent nonsense that goes by the name of patriotism – how I hate them!'

-The World as I See It, Albert Einstein (1931)

'Nice job breaking it, hero.'

-GLaDOS, Portal

Heroes and heroism. Treacherous territory, this. The kind of territory where, no matter where you stand at a given moment, you can expect that someone somewhere would very much like to shoot you. Nonetheless, let's have a brief exploration – and let's keep moving.

Let distinctions between fictional and non-fictional heroism be of no concern for this discussion. Heroism, after all, is one topic where the line between is not so easy to place; where one person's reality may be another's most monstrous nonsense. And vice versa.

Rhossili, Gower - Ancient Winds of Wales

Look closely at the west coast of Britain. Notice how the land reaches out, extending, fragmenting, as though desperate for release from the island's core.

So for people as for land. Overseas, the red buses and telephone boxes and royal family in England may well be synonymous in popular imagination with “Britain” or the “United Kingdom”, but over half of the UK's territory is in fact home to heritages and identities foreign to the English. Indeed, for most of their history, the Celtic peoples of Scotland, Wales, Ireland, and even Cornwall, have struggled against ruthless English conquest and oppression. These nations were some of the very first to experience the bloodshed and cultural vandalism of what became the British Empire, whose search for people to plunder and terrorize soon took it beyond its own neighbourhood, and on to the Americas, Africa and Asia.

But these are tenacious cultures, who in spite of hundreds of years of this struggle, still retain their own sense of themselves, although only Ireland – most of it – has won complete independence. The others have Welsh or Gaelic spoken alongside or instead of English; compete in their own teams in international sport, passionately expressing themselves in football and rugby; and have continued to struggle for political autonomy within the UK, or outright separation.

This uncomfortable history feeds straight into Britain's current mire of socio-economic repression and collapsing ethic of care. The country is now in deep subjection to the Conservative Party's austerity programme, which has involved the systematic dismantling of the welfare state, the removal of measures protecting the vulnerable and poor, the deliberate cultivation of popular ignorance and prejudice of all stripes, and the concentration of resources and influence in the hands of political, financial and big business elites, effectively selling out the country to thugs, thieves, and the acolytes of a renewed and remorseless cult of the market.

This process's regional dimensions have been obvious. A privileged, insulated, hankering southeast has become a tentacular Laputan monstrosity, siphoning off resources, jobs and dreams from Britain's north and west, to further service the coffers and egos of the London elites while leaving behind the rest of the country in suffering, stagnation, and a constant bombardment of brazen southeastern contempt. The debates surrounding Scotland's coming independence referendum have become as much about an opportunity to claw back a paradigm of socio-economic fairness and political accountability, not to mention basic human decency; that is, to say no to the campaign of national cannibalization orchestrated from Westminster, over and above questions of Scotland's geopolitical interests or long historical grievances.

And then there is Wales.

Subjected, often brutalized, by England for 700 years, Wales now has its own national assembly with considerable autonomy over its own affairs. More thoroughly integrated into the UK than Scotland, its present independence ambitions are more muted, though one wonders how a positive outcome in the Scottish referendum might affect this.

Wales, like Scotland and Ireland, is a land of wild and beautiful landscapes. Unlike England it actually has mountains, and its moors and coastlines carry that same sense of distinct direction as Wales's culture: that freedom of remoteness, whose systems and secrets, not like those that call themselves British, make themselves known beneath your footsteps.

Here, then, are some landscapes and themes from the Gower Peninsula, an outstanding region of natural beauty just out of Swansea's back door.

Bristol - To Bear an Unbearable Burden

Here's a challenge. How do you find the right tone to discuss a city of lively waterfronts, picturesque woods, stunning rock faces...and a foundation of half a million foreigners tortured to death and the heart of humanity split asunder?

In Bristol, the principal city of southwest England, the hopes of present and future generations were doomed by their ancestors to play out forevermore in the shadow of the hellish horrors those ancestors loosed on the world, in the form of the triangular Atlantic slave trade. The Bristol industrialists made a choice, to profit from the ruin of humanity; and made it so that their city would in the first instance be defined, then and now and forever, by a burden no-one should wish on the heritage of any society.

The result bears some comparison to Japan's Sapporo, a very different city with a nonetheless similar burden at the depths of its conscience. How do you do justice, to the agonized and humiliated ghosts of nightmares that should never have been made real, in a city which once grew by feeding on their cries – but without dragging down those who live there now, hundreds of years on, who had no hand in those atrocities?

How do you celebrate and support the good things that present generations strive to build, while not permitting the suffering of those broken, so that Bristol could rise, to fade from memory? How do we keep those memories alive, that they may stand down the ignorance, the pride, the xenophobic nationalistic supremacism which twists the prospects of Britain today, and which still swaggers, blustering that no lessons were ever there to be learnt?

It is a tightrope, a trial of balance: one that must test even a city as Bristol of hill slopes, cliffs and gorges.

The Clouds on the Tyne

In England's far northeast there is a river. Its waters are calm, not pristine but not particularly befouled. The air is silent. From heart to mouth there is little traffic upon it: perhaps a little patrol boat nosing around, or a massive tanker asleep on its banks. Someone, at some moment, might be fishing in it. It is far removed from the crowded, noisy, money-spinning concentration of madness that is London and England's southeast, in the cold, the wet and the wind of what one Conservative MP recently disdained as the 'desolate north'.

Keep opinions like that out of the earshot of the thousands of ghosts on this river, or their still-living descendents, for the heritage of that region defines their identities, their fears and their hopes to this day. This river, as they know it, is the river that made them who they are: a river of life and of death, teeming with ships – trade vessels, tankers, battleships of the royal fleet, birthed in its never-sleeping docks and set forth upon the waves, or ploughing in from or out to the sea, a maritime network connecting this region inextricably to the world. A river that was once one of Europe's mightiest industrial heartlands, whose people broke their backs to contribute to their society, and endured, in turn, far more than their fair share of its injustices and pains. Its story is a paradox of pride and sorrow, its waters a reflection of some of England's bitterest struggles of sustainability, of development and of peace, throughout the past and to this day. It is – of course – the River Tyne.

The former Baltic flour mills, now a museum of contemporary art.

The Struggle to Establish Sexual Diversity on the United Nations Agenda (Master's Thesis)

The primary result of my two years' research at the United Nations University in Tokyo, which I am making public here as promised. It is too long to post here in full, so if the abstract and contents attract your interest, you can view the complete text by clicking here.

I am not an academic, and write things like this with the sole purpose of making a contribution to a better world. So though I am aware my written English is a bit of a minefield at times, I deliberately do my best to reject academic jargon and politically-motivated euphemisms throughout this kind of work; write without any consideration for the effect on my own prospects; and will make no pretence at impartiality, for sometimes there is no such thing. So if you are not of an academic background but still take interest in the subject matter, then please do not feel daunted by the scale of this work, and feel free to ask me if you want anything explained more clearly.

Abstract

The great diversity of human sexual and gender identities, senses, behaviours and feelings is a central part of the human experience. Hostility to this diversity, along with the prejudicial violence, discrimination and ostracization that hostility produces worldwide, constitutes today one of the gravest challenges to the United Nations's founding pursuit of the rights and dignity of the human person. Nonetheless, this issue has been marginalized and misunderstood in international politics until recent decades, becoming recognized and addressed only during the 1990s and 2000s, primarily on the human rights agenda: and then only through a painstaking struggle that still endures against hostile forces who seek its exclusion. This study thus inquires into the current state of sexual diversity as a human rights concern in international policy discourse and practice, particularly in the United Nations agenda. It examines the recent history of sexual diversity as a complex political and human rights issue; the movement whose efforts have advanced it; and the hostile counter-movement's drivers, methods and contexts. Ultimately, in pursuit of an international system free of heteronormative biases and the recognition of the full relevance of sexual diversity across all its major policy fields, the thesis explores and asserts the significance of sexual diversity for the vision and practice of the United Nations – and above all for the integrity and prospects of universal human rights.

CONTENTS

Introduction

Chapter 1 – The UN Agenda: Overcoming Exclusion

a) Human Rights

b) Development

c) Peace and Security

d) Convergence

i) Gender

ii) Sustainability

iii) Health

iv) Towards Sexual Diversity Rights

Chapter 2 – Sexual Diversity: The History and Movement

a) Sexual Diversity as Politics

b) Sexual Diversity as a Human Right

c) The Sexual Diversity Rights Movement: Academics

d) The Sexual Diversity Rights Movement: NGOs and Social Activists

e) A Case Study: Gaya Nusantara, and the Sexual Diversity Rights Movement in Indonesia

Chapter 3 – Hostility to Sexual Diversity: The Counter-Movement

a) Counter-Discourse and Counter-Practice

b) Analysing Hostility

i) Cultural Relativism

ii) Construction of History

iii) Moral and Medical Pathologization

Chapter 4 – Sexual Diversity Rights: The Challenge

a) Conclusion: Universal and Diverse – Not One or the Other, but Both

b) Recommendations

i) The UN

ii) Activists

iii) Moral Authorities

iv) Academics

c) An Exhortation

Again, you can access the full text here. In addition, the International Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Trans and Intersex Association (ILGA), one of the foremost international sexual diversity rights organizations bringing together over 750 groups around the world, has also made the text available on their website here (angry photo included!).

The Repressive Culture of the Necktie

A curious observation.

There is one particular freedom, like most freedoms as old as humanity itself, which keeps a suspiciously low profile in everyday concern. Like freedoms of speech and expression, of belief, association, or the fulfilment of social and economic needs, this one has been commonly ripped from us by tyrannical governments, institutonalized prejudices, social pressure, or ideologies that try to convince us it's for our own good. But unlike those other freedoms, we find ourselves far less inclined to mobilize to try and get this one back.

Why is it that in almost every land, we have allowed the complete suppression of the freedom to wear what we choose?

 

One piece of sundry clothing has become today's ultimate embodiment of this suppression: the necktie. From its obscure origins in early-modern European militarism and fashion, ties have since become globalized across the societies of every continent as a standard, exclusive, pan-professional marker of serious respectability.

The Fiend with Seven Faces

Let's have a story today.

Maybe this story is true. Maybe it is not. Likely it is as most stories, and lies somewhere in between.

Consider a time between humanity's origin and today. A moment, or period, when our kind was displaced from its prior trajectory; turned away from the set of potential future storylines it had at the time. The coming of a Corruption: an external agency, which interrupted the natural development of this unsuspecting race – "natural" as in, determined completely within the cosmic system it existed in – and left it proceeding in a very different direction.

Perhaps it was fifty thousand years ago; perhaps just ten thousand; or perhaps a million and a half. Somewhere in those ill-defined reaches of history, long before we set about trying to record it, an abomination came from outside the system. It shambled upon the Earth.

And we don't know what it looked like, so here's a random shambly-looking-type thing instead.

It did not consume us for sustenance, or aggress us in self-defence. Indeed, its nature and will were beyond our understanding, for the thing was not of a logical universe.

Instead, it inhaled our senses of ourselves; our relationships; our very being. It had us look upon those we once loved, and decide they meant nothing at all. It consumed our courage to be free, such that when threatened with force, we fell to our knees. It cast a haze over our horizons, such that we could not imagine the future, could not even know of tomorrow; only of today. It dripped its venom upon our identities, such that these were lost: we became without meaning; faceless. Truly the thing was a horror whose name no words can speak.

But in spite of it all, we were better than it. We knew we were better than it. So we fought it. And against all odds, we won.

And yet, as sizzling blood oozed forth from the wounds in its unspeakable mass, its seven broken heads each found it in themselves to let loose a final, terrible breath. Gales which infused the air and harrowed the soul – and so did humankind inhale them. And to this day, in our world, in ourselves, we sustain the essence of that which is not of our reality.

Still the breath of the seven heads churns in our lungs today.