Reference:
Dr. Ursula Franklin is a retired University professor, Quaker, an activist for peace and justice, a feminist and member of Voice of Women. The following article was part of her talk at the Toronto-Central TEN DAYS event on February 1, 1997, at which she addressed this past year's theme - "The World We Want".
I find the current situation both here and anywhere else only bearable and understandable with the help of two things: One is a picture that I made of the reality in which we live and the second is a look back into history. I picture the reality in which we live in terms of military occupation. Some of you may have seen an article that was published in Peace Magazine about a year ago where I reflected on the observation, "Why is it that in spite of the disappearance of the Soviet Empire, in spite of the falling of the Berlin Wall, there has neither been peace nor a peace dividend?" The sort of thing that those who argued for peace had hope for, that resources would be available to meet human needs once the arms race had stopped, obviously didn't happen.
The question for me in that article was, "Why?" I suggested that the mechanism of war, that brought us the planning of Star Wars and notion of the Evil Empire, that same mechanism was transposed in the way you would transpose a piece of music. The war theme was transposed from what might be called the military key to the commercial key. It meant that the war that had overtly stopped when the cold war stopped, (and I'm quite mindful of how many actual shooting wars are still going on) remained the theme; but now the war activity was transposed into an economic war activity in which the political hegemony became commercial hegemony. You may say that, surely, every war needs an enemy. Now that the official enemy, "the evil empire", refused the role that they played so well for thirty years, who is going to be the enemy? I'm afraid that the enemy is us. The enemy is people, not THE people, not people identifiable from a passport, but the enemy is the collectivity of ordinary people and what they hold in common: i.e. the commons. What binds us together, activities and institutions that are indivisible, that are conducted for profit but are there as common holdings and ventures, whether this is involves culture, education, nature, sport, health, housing, everything that is common and previously administered and regulated in the public sector is the new theatre of war.
The goal of that war is privatization; in the most brutal terms, it means to provide and open up investment and profit opportunities in all those areas that people previously had set aside as commons - whether it's publishing, culture, healthcare, prisons or education. The purpose of dismantling the public sphere is to occupy its territory and turn it over to what I call the Empire of the Marketeers. These warlords will, in the end, make the ill health or misery of our neighbours into investment opportunities for the next round of capitalism. In my opinion, this is what is going on: We are occupied the way the French and Norwegians were occupied, but this time by an army of the marketeers. We have, as they did, their puppet governments who run the country for the benefit of the occupier. We have, as they did, their collaborateurs. We, like the French and Germans at the time, have to protect our families and on many occasions have to work with the occupiers in order to save lives. We, as they, have to develop strategies on how do you build resistance under occupation. We are, as they were, threatened by deliberate wilfulness, by people who have only contempt for those they occupy and see their mission to turn over this territory to those who are their masters. Unfortunately our occupiers don't wear uniforms. We can't identify them as clearly as military occupiers be in the past but this, in fact, is more of a technicality than a matter of substance. One of the things that anyone who has lived under occupation will tell you is that they refused to speak the language of the occupier. I think that is a good lesson to remember. We too should refuse to speak the language of the occupier; it is not now German or Russian but the language of the market, where they speak of "service providers" and clients, of stake holders and of the bottom line. It's a language that reflects, as all languages do, the moral values of those who speak. One path of resistance is to refuse to communicate in the language of the occupier. Don't talk stakeholders, about users and providers of health care, consumers of education. They are for us teachers and students, nurses, doctors and patients; they are friends, families and communities. This particular option of resistance is open to all of us and we should use it. We must analyze the language of public discourse and have to point out what those words really mean. It is amazing how much such clarification can help to build a resisting community.
We can also look at how in the past resistance worked in cases involving activities designed to slow down the progress and process of occupation. Do you remember "Les Enfants du Paradise", a very long and beautiful French film? It was a beautiful film with vast and impressive mass scenes, but the director's artistry was also the attempt to keep as many people out of the clutches of the occupying army, to try and shield as many young people from being drafted into the German army or into the labour contingencies. Now we must remember such tactics as we need to protect people, particularly the most vulnerable. We have to develop, with each other, ways in which we can slow down and frustrate the occupation. In our case such means can take the form of court challenges, but also critiques and factual corrections as well as creative use of electronic media to bypass the occupation forces' control of information. At the same time we need to enlist the help of the people with whom we are in solidarity in other countries. Urge them not to push what is called progress, because often the process of schooling, of training for production and global commerce can be the means by which marketeers who are getting their dirty paws on yet another conquest. Whether it's here among ourselves or whether it's while working with people in other countries, practices such as not using the language of the market, such as developing and articulating processes of resistance, are applicable. These are the building blocks of solidarity. Every problem that people have with their particular occupying army is the problem that we all have.
And that's where we have work to do and coalitions to build and to join, if global justice is to become a reality.
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