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14th February, 2015<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n I write this on a significant date. No, not St. Valentine\u2019s day (3id l-7ubb, \u2018The Festival of Love\u2019 in the Arabic-speaking world), but the fourth anniversary of Bahrain\u2019s 14th February revolution, a revolution that was suppressed by a lethal combination of Saudi tanks and British political and diplomatic cover. I lived in Bahrain at the time of the revolution, first teaching Comparative Literature at the University of Bahrain, and later Teacher Training at Bahrain Teachers College. Many of the students who I taught between 2007 and 2011 were activists directly involved in the uprising.<\/p>\n The Kill Your Pet Puppy website did a feature on my old fanzine, Toxic Grafity (1978-82), early in 2009. I don\u2019t think I\u2019d quite got it back in 2009, but post 2011 I now see that what the KYPP website was about was a new way of taking Punk seriously.<\/p>\n Of course, Punk (broadly defined) has always been taken seriously in some ways, first and foremost by \u2018old\u2019 punks (nowadays \u2018old\u2019 in multiple senses) who had always, in one way or another \u2018kept the faith\u2019, but also musicological and as a minority interest in Cultural Studies.<\/p>\n But where I think the online KYPP circa 2009 was ahead of the curve was in taking Punk seriously not simply as a \u2018counter-culture\u2019, but as a movement which, if not \u2018revolutionary\u2019 in direct political sense, was, very significantly, a sustained reaction against and attack on the political-economic phenomenon that would later be called \u2018neo-liberalism\u2019. In this regard, Punk was as important as, indeed was perhaps (in a way that we participants didn\u2019t quite see at the time) an extension of the counter-cultural revolutionary movements of the 1960s.<\/p>\n Since the end of the first decade of twenty-first century, the serious scholarly study of the Punk phenomenon has blossomed, in large part through the use of \u2018life history\u2019, and ethnographic and auto ethnographic qualitative research approaches. The lazy 1980s and 1990s stereotypes of punks as yobby, mouthy, slightly comical nothings has, I\u2019m sure been laid to rest. In their place, in the second decade of the C21st punks are beginning to re-emerge, I think, not just as counter-cultural figures, but as revolutionaries, of a sort.<\/p>\n In the light of this, I have to revise the glib response I gave in 2009 to KYPP\u2019s feature on TG. Not least of all because of my witness of, and involvement in, a real revolution during the so-called \u2018Arab Spring\u2019 of 2011. In early 2009 I\u2019d just been appointed to a senior position at the teachers\u2019 college, and had been involved in its 2008 start-up. This in turn had been part of a significant reform initiative, the Bahrain 2030 Vision, which was supported by the reformist faction of Bahrain\u2019s ruling Al Khalifa family, and in extension the Bahrain regime\u2019s British backers.<\/p>\n On 20th February 2009 I wrote some short reminiscences for KYPP to go with their TG feature. However, the version of \u2018me\u2019 that wrote that now seems a very distant figure, writing from a complacent middle age how:<\/p>\n “I\u2019ve repudiated so much of what I used to believe in during those days in the late 1970s, but the closing words for Crass\u2019 \u2018Bloody Revolutions\u2019 track \u2018but the truth of revolution, brother, is Year Zero still appeals to the Burkean in me \u2026.”<\/p>\n I kidded myself that that was a smart thing for me to write at the time, looking back at 2009 me from the perspective of 2015 it just seems smart-arse, smug and deeply reactionary.<\/p>\n But that\u2019s how I was at that time, insufferably smart-arse, smug, sliding into an abyss of reactionary complacency. True, I had to be careful of what I wrote about myself: even before the vicious counter-revolution that murderously suppressed the 2011 uprising, the Al Khalifa family-state in Bahrain was a surveillance state and a police state with a nasty reputation for torture; yet I was, as a well-paid British expatriate professional a beneficiary of that state.<\/p>\n Looking back from the perspective of 2015, the \u2018me\u2019 of 1978 or 1979 seems far closer to the \u2018me\u2019 of 2015 than does the \u2018me\u2019 of 2009. That \u2018me\u2019 is no more. I hesitate to say \u2018dead\u2019 because I doubt one\u2019s earlier selves can ever really be \u2018dead\u2019 to one\u2019s present self. Rather, I see that 2009 self as having been distilled away by a kind of alchemy, as dross burnt away in a crucible, as a fragile construct devastatingly de-constructed, shattered, and blasted across the four cardinal compass points by a tsunami of fire.<\/p>\n Stripped of the fa\u00e7ade-like persona I had constructed around the \u2018me\u2019 of 2009, I now see a person remarkably like the \u2018me\u2019 of 1978, although I hesitate to say that is the \u2018real\u2019 me: to what extent can any of our constructed persona’s be \u2018real\u2019 in a fundamental, existential sense? Although I have a sense of there being a kind of essential core to my being, I am skeptical about that core being anything at all to do with any of the conscious persona’s I have sought during my life to project into the world.<\/p>\n Nonetheless, the transformation has been remarkable. The immediate question that arises when contemplating that transformation, then has to be \u2018What were the factors that brought it about?\u2019 These factors are easy to identify, but hard to write about.<\/p>\n Firstly, there is the experience of revolution. I don\u2019t mean reading about revolution or merely witnessing one, but of experiencing that inexorable movement that draws one \u2013 almost drags one, in some ways reluctantly \u2013 from bearing witness to a revolution to becoming part of it. In so far as there is any sort of essential essence to \u2018me\u2019 (and I\u2019m not sure such a thing exists), that essence found itself yearning to become part of the world of the revolutionary students whom I taught. Perhaps it wasn\u2019t any sort of \u2018essence\u2019, but was merely a survival of the \u2018me\u2019 of 1978 lurking about unnoticed among the cacophony of conflicting voices that constitute my consciousness.<\/p>\n Whatever it was, it was able, with a daring and disturbing deftness of touch to take over from the more cautious personae within me and direct my actions in the world. As this happened the part of \u2018me\u2019 that is supposed to direct my actions in accordance with rational self-interest retreated to the edge of my consciousness, letting the \u2018me\u2019 of 1978 (or something very like it) dictate my actions, even though \u2018rational self-interest me\u2019 knew in doing so I would be writing the execution warrant for 2009 \u2018me\u2019: deprived of the material and professional symbols that announced my 2009 \u2018me\u2019 to the social world beyond me, it would wither.<\/p>\n But if such a transformation is to be anything other than a form of neurosis, it cannot take place entirely within one\u2019s self. Rather, the re-emergence of the 1978 \u2018me\u2019 was only possible through my interaction with the social and political world beyond me. That this social and political world was the world of the revolutionary students rather than the world of reactionary expats in their exclusive clubs (of which I was a member) is almost entirely a result of my work in higher education.<\/p>\n Specifically, this brought me directly into contact with the revolutionary youth, and that my reflexive philosophy of education meant that I experienced each and every teaching and learning encounter as a co-construction of knowledge in which both myself and my students were active agents, and in which I was learner as well as teacher, and in which I sought to enable my learners to teach. In the context of pre-revolutionary Bahrain, this inexorably meant that my students educated me in revolution, as I educated them in Comparative Literature, Pedagogy, and the rest of it.<\/p>\n When the revolution happened, I was amazed to witness the world I had dreamed about, fantasised about, in the late 1970s actualize before my eyes: the world in which vast numbers of individuals en masse self-organize autonomously of the state and state structures to become a great collective entity expressing with powerfully a collective political will.<\/p>\n Hundreds of thousands of people out of a population of 1.1 million occupied social space and in an atmosphere of carnival-like creativity organizing not only the essentials needed to maintain everyday bare life \u2013 food, water, shelter, waste management \u2013 but articulated a revolutionary culture and aesthetic of awesome. The state seemed about to wither away before my eyes and the words of the young Wordsworth on the French Revolution \u2018Bliss it was that dawn to be alive \u2026.\u2019 hardly seemed to do it justice.<\/p>\n My 2009 \u2018me\u2019 had allowed itself to be convinced that these things were merely a whimsical fantasy, a delusion, a platform for the adolescent showing of and grandstanding of the emotionally insecure and immature. This, had I even thought of it in such depth at the time, was probably 2009 \u2018me\u2019 critique of the 1978 \u2018me\u2019, and perhaps there was validity in that critique. I still see aspects of 1978 \u2018me\u2019 as having been hopelessly immature, insecure and perhaps inadequate.<\/p>\n But be that as it may, what I was witnessing in 2011 was something altogether different to immature fantasies of revolution. Rather, it was a people, young and old and of all walks of life making history, becoming the subject-objects of their own revolutionary becoming. This was bigger than \u2018me\u2019, of any of the \u2018mes\u2019 that have noisily occupied the conscious space of my individuality. I saw how social and political forces flowed through my subjectivity, shaping it and in turn being shaped by it, as a river forms the landscape even as its course is determined by it.<\/p>\n I saw subjectivity not as a stasis, but as a process, that my \u2018me\u2019 was a construct that would always be a work in progress, never complete. I further saw how this transformation of one\u2019s understanding of self and society was inherently part of the revolutionary process. That in rejecting the static social and political structures in which both coercion and ideology corral us, revolutionary consciousness, life-as-becoming, is re-initiated.<\/p>\n But I also saw how vulnerable this is. How, its awesome social power notwithstanding, revolutionary consciousness mobilized on the streets was vulnerable to the state\u2019s ruthless projection of military force. I have no desire to denigrate the Western \u2018occupy\u2019 movements, but in the Arab world the occupation of social space is a far more dangerous act, and a far more overt challenge to the power of the state than it is in the West. It is not so much to \u2018occupy\u2019 social space as to bring social space into being.<\/p>\n As social space comes into being so the space in which the state can ceremonially display its power, a kind of \u2018ceremonial violence\u2019 diminishes. When this happens haybat al-dawla, the \u2018fear\u2019 or \u2018awe\u2019 of the state that maintains unfair power relations vanishes, and if it is to survive the state then turns ruthlessly on its own people.<\/p>\n This is what happened in Bahrain, and this is also what I personally witnessed. No, more than merely witnessed, what I experienced and participated in, most notably on 11th March 2011 when an attempted occupation of the University of Bahrain was viciously crushed by the state\u2019s police, military, and vigilantes.<\/p>\n When protesters oppose live fire with their bodies, or seek to fight off tanks with bricks or Molotovs, they are making a moral case to the outside world, \u2018help us\u2019. Yet the ways such messages are mediated in the global media are geopolitically determined, and the Al Khalifa family-state\u2019s status as a regional \u2018ally\u2019 of the trans-Atlantic West ensured that that moral case went unheard, that Bahrain\u2019s was the \u2018forgotten\u2019 or \u2018inconvenient\u2019 revolution, that the tank tracks could roll across blood and brain-soaked pavement with impunity.<\/p>\n Yet the resistance continues, although seldom now is it a contestation for control of the prestige social spaces of the capital, Manama. As the family-state\u2019s forces sought to push into the villages, the heartlands of the revolution, the villages fought back, continue to fight back.<\/p>\n I returned to the UK a shattered, broken person. My wounds opened afresh and salt poured in them by my realization of the sickening extent of Britain\u2019s complicity in atrocity in Bahrain, the bloodthirsty, greedy hypocrisy of its wider Middle East policy, at the realization of the re-establishment of colonial relations in the region: in 2014 Britain announced the building of a new naval base in Bahrain, a drastic reversal of Britain\u2019s 1971 \u2018withdrawal from east of Suez\u2019, and the de facto return of Bahrain to protectorate status. But the British public seems hardly aware of this.<\/p>\n The years since 2011 have seem me struggle with mental illness, specifically with post-traumatic stress disorder and major depressive disorder. I have come close to suicide, but now I now longer see this as illness, although the pain and anguish continue. Rather, I try to feel the pain as the death-agonies of my 2009 \u2018me\u2019 as it burns in a hell of its own construction, and as the re-birth cry of the \u2018me\u2019 of 1978, but older, more mature, far better educated, hopefully wiser.<\/p>\n The pain of this coming-into-being I am learning to live with, and I am struggling now to see my painful inner experiences not in pathologized terms as mental \u2018illness\u2019, but as a form of rage against a gross injustice that is being perpetrated on us by a neoliberal elite in Britain as well as in Bahrain and elsewhere. The 1978 \u2018me\u2019 has been reborn in and of fire, and this rebirth is of itself a revolutionary act.<\/p>\n Perhaps I\u2019ve been too harsh on myself, but only on my 2009 \u2018me\u2019. And I\u2019ve been a bit critical of my 1978 self, and Toxic Grafity, Crass, and in extension the rest of them. Really, back in the day the whole lot of us were more than a bit virgins-talking-about-sex about revolution. All of us. But my main point in this reflective essay, I think, has been about the shifting nature of subjectivity, and how this relates to revolution, and how the latter shatters and then reformulates the former.<\/p>\n In some ways, 2011, on a subjective level, was about the exorcism of my 2009 self, a persona that led to the embodiment and re-enactment on my part of a whole heap of neoliberal, late capitalist values that have been rammed down all our throats over the past thirty years. As such, I suspect that what I experienced in the Middle East might be some sort of vanguard of a process which, I fear, we might all have to go through in Britain lest we are to fall into the thrall of some sort of fascism.<\/p>\n I have the people of Bahrain to thank for this rescuing of \u2018me\u2019 from the \u2018self\u2019 I had constructed. Toxic Grafity and Crass\u2019s \u2018Tribal Rival Revel Rebels\u2019 \u2013 \u2018the truth of revolution, brother, is Year Zero\u2019 \u2013 were a kind of meditation, a kind of reflection, on revolution, albeit essentially an imagined revolution. There are ways in which I still see both as having been hopelessly ill-informed, but I can no longer \u2018repudiate\u2019 them as my 2009 \u2018me\u2019 did. Instead, I value that meditation, mistakes and embarrassments of a youthful past notwithstanding, for without them the \u2018me\u2019 that writes these lines would not exist.<\/p>\n Although I didn\u2019t understand it as such at the time, the Bahrain 2030 Vision reform movement I participated in 2007-11 was itself a failed attempt to offer \u2018reform\u2019 as a sop to buy of an earlier revolution, the Bahrain Intifadha of 1995-2002. This Intifadha had developed into a stalemate between the family-state and the revolutionary masses. In 2002, this reform had had some credibility, when I naively blundered into Bahrain as a professional expatiate, it was morally and politically bankrupted. I got up to speed quite quickly on this one.<\/p>\n While the Bahrain revolution of 2011 may have \u2018failed\u2019 in its immediate objective of overthrowing the Al Khalifa family-state, it has succeeded in transforming consciousness. The pre-2011 genie cannot be put back in the bottle, change is coming, big time, not only in Bahrain, but in Saudi Arabia and the wider Gulf region. Punk failed in the sense that bands sold out to major record labels, and punk became a kind of fashion and consumer statement, before finally becoming a kind of safe TV dinner ‘Young Ones’ joke.<\/p>\n But another Punk continued, the counter-cultural, revolutionary Punk that fed into the Western \u2018Occupy\u2019 and similar movements. I was involved in the early days of this with \u2018Stop the City\u2019, before I became a deluded reactionary. These guerilla-Punk \u2018occupy\u2019 strategies and tactics, the occupy asthetics and modes of protest-as-performance were in turn, in far more drastic and violent contexts, adapted in the Arab world, and elsewhere in Greece and Latin America from 2011 onwards. I suspect that in this altered form they will yet return to the UK as the crisis deepens further in this decade.<\/p>\n It was an honour to have been part of both 2011 and 1978, and for fate, in the form of social forces that determine the shape of my subjectivity, to have intervened to connect my youth with my later middle age. MIKE DIBOLL<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n BELOW IS THE 2009 ESSAY THAT MIKE DIBOLL SUBMITTED TO KYPP RE-PRODUCED.<\/span><\/p>\n THE ORIGINAL KYPP POST WITH MORE THAN THREE HUNDRED COMMENTS ATTACHED MAY BE VIEWED<\/span> HERE\u00a0<\/strong><\/a><\/p>\n INDEBTED TO MIKE DIBOLL FOR BOTH OF THE ESSAYS THAT HE SUBMITTED TO KYPP IN 2009 AND FURTHER IN 2015.<\/span><\/p>\n![\"\"](\"http:\/\/i192.photobucket.com\/albums\/z149\/pengy1966\/pengy1966121\/KYPPMD3_zpsrg1zuhpp.jpg\")
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\nFuck the system.<\/p>\n
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