Her initial refusal was a predictable reaction in a country where abortions are illegal in the majority of circumstances, but in 2006 Dr Lima was confronted with a case that brought home the devastating scale of the hardships faced by Afghanistan's women. It would change her mind on the need for access to safe abortion.

"The girl was 17 years old and pregnant. After her parents found out they secretly gave her some medicine to weaken her – medicine that made it easier for them to suffocate her with a pillow and kill her. After that incident, I decided to help people like her," Dr Lima recalls.

Dr Lima's decision – to start using her medical training to provide healthcare and other support to women – put her own and her family's lives in constant danger.

"Whatever I do, I do in secret. The only person who knows is my husband," she says.

Many of the women that Dr Lima has provided abortions to had become pregnant as a result of rape. She also helped women to take contraceptives secretly when their husbands were forcing them to have more children.

She explains: "That was risky too, sometimes when women did not become pregnant for some time the husbands would ask why and may beat their wives. Then the woman would bring them to me and I would explain to the husband that because his wife had too many children without a [break], her body is now weak and it needs times to return to normal. Then the husbands would accept my [explanation] and the women could stay healthy and enjoy their lives for one or two years before they got pregnant again."

Dr Lima's mission took her to eastern Afghanistan, to a remote, poverty-stricken province on the border with Pakistan. It is a region where the influence of the Taliban is at its strongest, and respect for women's rights is almost non-existent.

Girls are not given access to education, husbands routinely abuse their wives and for many families the preferred response to a girl becoming pregnant outside marriage – even by rape – is to murder her and cover it up as an illness or accident.

In some areas tribal rules dictate that if the people in the community find out that a girl is pregnant outside marriage they will kill the girl in order to "preserve honour" and if the girl's family resist, they too will be killed. If the rapist is identified, he and the victim will both be killed publicly.

One girl in a tribal region who became pregnant as a result of being raped came to Dr Lima to ask for an abortion. The girl told Dr Lima that the pregnancy served as a constant reminder of her ordeal. She was also terrified she would be killed and her family would be torn apart by a "blood feud".

Another woman, a mother of six, was locked up with the livestock by her husband, who had married another woman. "When she came to me I helped her to get in touch with the Ministry of Women's Affairs and after many months of legal arguments she finally managed to get a divorce."

"No matter what a man does in these areas, he will get away with it," says Dr Lima.

While working in Kunar, Dr Lima would wear a burqa to help protect her identity, but that didn't stop the death threats from the Taliban.

"I started to receive warning letters, saying that what I was doing was un-Islamic," Dr Lima says.

In 2009, the peril of Dr Lima's courageous mission was brutally laid bare.

"My son was playing in the front garden of our home in the evening. I heard an explosion and rushed outside the yard to see my son covered in blood," she recalls.

The 11-year-old boy had been the victim of a Taliban grenade attack to Dr Lima's family home. Despite suffering a debilitating leg injury, he survived and is now able to walk with the aid of a stick.

But worse was to come six months later.

After receiving further threats and warnings from the Taliban, Dr Lima's 22-year-old brother was killed in another grenade attack opposite her clinic.

She was forced to move to a secret location, but the experience did not dent Dr Lima's commitment to help the women of Afghanistan. "I want to serve my country and my people who have suffered a lot. I cannot just sit in the corner of my house," she says.

"My son was injured and my brother was killed as a result of my work, but I have never given up. These activities cannot be done without suffering. In Afghanistan, all women are suffering."

Details of an Amnesty campaign calling for greater protection for professional Afghan women like Dr Lima are available at www.amnesty.org.uk/afghanistan

A pseudonym has been used to ensure the security of Dr Lima and her patients

—

This article originally appeared on NewStatesman.com

The artist created a series of supportive illustrations, called "Women", that helps motivate women in their struggle against gender prejudices and women discrimination. The on-going project started in May, and Rossetti publishes her work on her blog and Facebook. Although the images were originally created in Portuguese, the popular illustrator got some help in translating them into other languages.

The message couldn't be clearer: girl power!

—

This article is taken from BoredPanda.

Last month I hitched 400 miles from Glasgow to London, an eight hour drive that took me twelve. I had read a review that The Land had published of Beyond Flying, a book to which I had contributed, that explores alternatives to aviation.

"Sadly", Simon Fairlie wrote, "the book fails to mention the only motorised form of transport that entails no carbon emissions and is the most challenging and rewarding of all, namely hitch-hiking. It is missing because nobody hitchhikes any longer."

I hitch-hike, I thought. I have hitch-hiked for half a lifetime since I first stuck out my thumb on Long Island at the age of 16 and a Cadillac with its top down pulled to a stop five minutes later.

Aftter thousands of miles on four continents, despite being able to afford the train these days, and although Megabus could get me there for ten quid, I've never got sick of it.

"The sudden disappearance of the hitch-hiker in the Thatcher years is a sociological mystery that remains unexplored", the review continued. It felt like something worth exploring.

The Glasgow to London route is one I have taken many times. I have my spots I like to stand, the roads I know I must avoid, my favourite service stations. I have been picked up by bands on tour, by truckers, by soldiers, by canoe instructors and canal boat enthusiasts and by plenty of travelling salesmen.

I have squeezed in amongst families and I have kept lone drivers company and I have tried to act calm and cool as two mechanics felt the need to show me that their car could reach 160mph. I have heard stories of the most personal nature, of family breakdowns and of secret love, and once I was dropped at my front door. I have never bumped into another hitcher.

It is voyeuristic, educational, tedious, addictive. It feels like a relic of a bygone age and it feels revolutionary. I know of few forms of transport that give you that, few forms of transport that feel like accomplishment upon arrival, and all without costing you a penny.

"Until human nature changes for the worse", Chapman Milling wrote in 1938, "rides are going to be given to decent-looking people who ask for them."

And still they stop

There is widespread belief that no one stops anymore. I have been told it by car drivers who have picked me up ("none of the other bastards will stop for you"), told it by former hitchers who believe that the world has moved on, and told it by the media.

When the Automobile Association, in 2011, announced that 91% of drivers would not pull over for a hitcher, the headline writers seized upon it. The end of the road for hitchhiking, they said. Thumbs down for hitchhiking. That one in ten drivers consider stopping is actually fantastic odds.

Only one percent of drivers, the survey continued, said that they would definitely stop. The game lies in that eight percent, the undecided, who really believe they might stop when answering a survey, but who need a bit more convincing when confronted by an actual situation.

"The signal, which includes the whole movement of the body", writes Georges Limbour in La Chasse au Merou, "is so vital that you can say it's as often the hitch-hiker who picks the driver up as the other way about." Like fishing, you choose your spot. You employ everything that you know about the habits of what you want to catch, and then you leave the rest up to chance.

The term 'hitch-hiker' blew in from across the Atlantic and arrived here in the 1930s, though there were people flagging down wagons and lorries long before there was a word for it. During two weeks of a General Strike in 1926 the culture momentarily flared, and when it ebbed again the Daily Herald was moved to write:

"Civilisation must, if it has any reality, any value, make us ready to give anyone a lift in any way possible, not only at moments of crisis, but in ordinary humdrum times."

But it took another crisis, the Second World War, for hitching to truly become commonplace. Servicemen hitched home on leave, parents visited their evacuated children and commuters thumbed to work five times a week. It was part of the war effort, sanctioned by the Ministry of Transport. But as with the General Strike, goodwill faded along with the Fascist threat.

"In November 1945", recounts Mario Rinvolucri, "an airman hopefully thumbed a large Buick saloon - the driver cowed down and shouted through the window: 'Don't you chaps realise the war is over?'."

Fear of the stranger

The post-war boom created a new sort of hitcher. "Nothing behind me, everything ahead of me", Kerouac wrote, "as is ever so on the road", and with his writing stuffed into a backpack, the next generation thumbed their way into a Europe still torn by the war, but suddenly without boundary.

The coming decades were fuelled on the twin benefits hitching provided, travel on a shoestring and guaranteed adventure. The road is a ripe candidate for metaphor, and a form of travel upon it that defied order and regulation was particularly potent.

Since then it has been downhill. There is still the occasional pocket in some remote parts of Britain where the public transport is creaking or non-existent, but they are few. I often feel like a relic, as likely to get photographed as to get picked up.

The reasons given for the decline are predictable enough: the rise in cheap cars, the gap year and the budget flight, the stigmatisation that the stranger has undergone. The stranger is a wild and uncertain concept, and hitch-hiking, when two strangers are placed in an enclosed and intimate space, is a particularly good situation to gauge current attitudes towards them.

Fear of the stranger, the paedophile or the terrorist has grown pervasive, while the slasher films of the 80s, targeted Public Service Announcements, and media focus upon the occasional tragedy have all contributed to demonising hitchhiking.

And yet despite all that, I always get a ride. There is no shortage of those that once hitched who are looking to return the favour. Many are eager to invite me in and relive something of their youth, to hold up the other end of a bargain they made when they were hitching forty years ago.

If there is a decline in trust, a rising fear, then it is most prevalent in my generation, in the hitchers. The AA survey bears this out. It is the 18-24 year olds who are least likely to have hitchhiked, followed by the 25-34 year olds. It is us who have grown up in a society more ordered and controlled than any that has gone before.

Maybe we like our travel more predictable, our strangers kept at arm's length. With rising petrol prices and record youth unemployment, along with a need to cut carbon emissions, I have long thought it time for a renaissance, but hitch-hiking steadfastly refuses to make a comeback.

Clicking a ride

But whilst some of us sit about pining for hitching's heyday, BlaBlaCar, the leading car share website in Europe, has been gathering 10 million users. Last month they secured another $100 million of funding. Drivers post their journeys, passengers search for journeys and contribute to the petrol costs.

A million journeys are made every month, from which BlaBlaCar pockets €2 per ride. It's not possible to offer a journey for free. Along with many other websites and apps now proliferating across every continent, it's being called 'digital hitch-hiking'.

The sharing economy is hip right now. Airbnb, Zipcar, Taskrabbit, Poshmark, the internet is awash. Sharing bikes, sharing rooms, sharing skills, sharing cars, sharing, as the New York Times has reported, illegal handguns.

The industry is valued at £15 billion, much of it little more than platforms that allow users to rent out and cash in on the excess in their lives. Their manifestos buzz with words like 'community' and 'trust', of cutting out the middle man.

"It's like the UN at every kitchen table", said Brian Chesky, Airbnb's CEO. But as his company floats on the stock market and Zipcar is bought by Avis, it becomes harder to suspend disbelief that this is not just capitalism dressed up, once again, in sheeps' clothing.

Breathless editorials speculate that the sharing economy has the power to do anything from liberating workers from the nine-to-five bind, to creating a slow-burning revolution that could overthrow the current economic system.

But it could also be seen as the free market par excellence, as we work 24/7 with no contracts or safety nets, branding ourselves in order to market every aspect of our lives, whilst the companies that provide the platforms sit back and rake in the billions. Wasn't hitch-hiking better than that?

Going digital, London to Bristol

I tried hitch-hiking digitally for this piece. I thought I should. I was feeling somewhat curmudgeonly, like I was longing for the days of steam. I found a ride for £9 from London to Bristol. A train would have cost me £42. Even getting the tube out of London far enough to stick a thumb out would have been more than a fiver.

I waited in a car park in Stratford and a woman turned up and took me where I wanted to go, to arrive at the time we had agreed upon. Money changed hands, few words were spoken. Did I feel the same thrill of adventure? No, I manifestly did not. I felt like a consumer paying for a commodity.

If my arguments for hitch-hiking are environmental, social, economic, perhaps even anti-capitalist, then such transactions make good sense. Not only does a car get taken off the roads, the structured nature of the trip opens it up to those who do not have the time or inclination to wait for hours by the roadside in the rain, which, let's face it, is almost everyone.

Last year 61% of car journeys in the UK had just one occupant, and this is one step to reducing that.

I once wrote an article for The Ecologist making the case for a resurgence in hitchhiking couched in environmental arguments, but I conveniently ignored this boom in car shares to make a case for something which, I realise now, I felt sad about on a more personal, poignant level.

If it's about adventure, well that seems like it's no one's concern but mine. And yet, as I looked out at the M4 rolling past, I realised that, for some reason, I still didn't feel quite ready to let it go.

HitchBOT or Hitchcock?

Over the course of three weeks this past summer a robot named HitchBOT, standing the height of a six year old child, thumbed its way 3,500 miles from Halifax to Vancouver. Frauke Zeller, one of its creators, speaks like a concerned but loving parent of letting their offspring fly the nest.

They left it at the roadside outside Halifax Airport, followed the updates it posted on Twitter, and went to meet it three weeks later on the other side of the country. "We said well, we give it freely. We couldn't do anything really. We never once thought about stopping the experiment. All we wanted to see was it arrive safe and sound in Victoria."

HitchBOT is made from a beer cooler and has rubber gloves for hands. Speech recognition software and a link to Wikipedia allow it to keep up a conversation. There are pictures on Instagram of drivers taking it camping, to weddings, to football games.

When Zeller met up with it in Vancouver at the end of its journey she described it as looking a little like a shuttle after re-entry, its speech somewhat garbled, but being otherwise unharmed. I have returned home in a similar state after several weeks on the road.

The experiment was conceived as a way of exploring whether robots can trust humans, and hitch-hiking seemed an appropriately vulnerable situation for their creation to enter into.

"The cultural perceptions, notions like security and safety, all that is very closely connected to the discourses around robots. That's why we thought it might be interesting to bring those areas together."

"When we had the welcome party in Victoria we met someone who had just hitchhiked across Canada who was just a couple of days behind HitchBOT. He got at least five rides from people telling him that they only stopped because of HitchBOT. Before HitchBOT they would never take hitchhikers with them."

We can only suppose how this human hitch-hiker must have felt. Probably grateful. But also perplexed that a three foot high machine with a smiley face, cobbled together with junk from a dime store, had cleared the way before him of cultural stereotypes many years in the making.

That a robot was able to change attitudes in five people is heartening, if not irrational. The ways that we choose to trust, or not, are curious: because some money has changed hands, or a profile on the internet, or a good experience with a robot.

Is letting a stranger into our house through Airbnb inherently safer than picking up a stranger from the kerbside, or has there simply not been a horror film about the sharing economy yet?

When the journey is the destination

Maybe I grew up reading too much Kerouac, and maybe I'm getting old. But I do think that there is something important about hitching that the carshare websites miss. At its heart it is an exercise in trust, of challenging what we thought we knew about people.

Putting ourselves in a position of vulnerability and seeing what happens; those unplanned interactions between strangers where anything is possible. I am writing this as a man in my thirties, and I realise that other people will have their own approaches to risk. But there seems to me benefit in making our own choices, learning for ourselves, rather than outsourcing them to a company and paying for the privilege.

Hospitality does entail risk, but it is no less worthwhile for that. By subjecting it to the treatment of screening and profiling, by attempting to eliminate that risk, we end up by eliminating the hospitality itself.

Being able to rely on strangers, on communities, on trust, are values that are worth preserving, and if we destroy them we are perversely destroying things that can truly keep us safe. As one driver put it: "I wouldn't pick up hitch-hikers either. I'm not nuts. I do that to protect myself. But protecting myself has no value to society."

I worry for hitch-hiking's future. If we don't hitch then the next generation of hitchers will have no one looking to return the favour.

If 'sharing economy' websites continue to thrive then we may come to the idea that any bit of kindness that we might once have offered has monetary value. It will still be easy to get from A to B. Travel will become cheaper, more environmentally friendly.

But I will arrive in B exactly the same person as when I set out from A, and it's worth remembering, sometimes, standing by the side of the road with a hopeful thumb out, that it could be about more than that.

—

Text taken from www.theecologist.org. 
Originally published on The Land Magazine.

Four years later, in order to regain her freedom to be an artist, she divorces from Parviz leaving their son with him. She becomes one of the most important contemporary poets, directors and independent Iranian women.

In her lifetime she published four books of poetry and directed an internationally awarded documentary about a lepers colony – The House Is Black. In the meantime she suffered from a breakdown, went to a mental hospital and, later on, traveled across Europe where she fell in love again.

Famous Italian director Bernardo Bertolucci visited Iran only to do an interview with Forough. One minute of the interview: 

On her way back from lunch, after the best conversation she had ever had with her mother, Forough Farrokhzad died in a car accident at the age of 32.

This is one of her poems:

The Wind-Up Doll

More than this, yes
more than this one can stay silent.

With a fixed gaze
like that of the dead
one can stare for long hours
at the smoke rising from a cigarette
at the shape of a cup
at a faded flower on the rug
at a fading slogan on the wall.

One can draw back the drapes
with wrinkled fingers and watch
rain falling heavy in the alley
a child standing in a doorway
holding colorful kites
a rickety cart leaving the deserted square
in a noisy rush

One can stand motionless
by the drapes—blind, deaf.

One can cry out
with a voice quite false, quite remote
"I love..."
in a man's domineering arms
one can be a healthy, beautiful female

With a body like a leather tablecloth
with two large and hard breasts,
in bed with a drunk, a madman, a tramp
one can stain the innocence of love.

One can degrade with guile
all the deep mysteries
one can keep on figuring out crossword puzzles
happily discover the inane answers
inane answers, yes—of five or six letters.

With bent head, one can
kneel a lifetime before the cold gilded grill of a tomb
one can find God in a nameless grave
one can trade one's faith for a worthless coin
one can mold in the corner of a mosque
like an ancient reciter of pilgrim's prayers.
one can be constant, like zero
whether adding, subtracting, or multiplying.
one can think of your --even your—eyes
in their cocoon of anger
as lusterless holes in a time-worn shoe.
one can dry up in one's basin, like water.

With shame one can hide the beauty of a moment's togetherness
at the bottom of a chest
like an old, funny looking snapshot,
in a day's empty frame one can display
the picture of an execution, a crucifixion, or a martyrdom,
One can cover the crake in the wall with a mask
one can cope with images more hollow than these.

One can be like a wind-up doll
and look at the world with eyes of glass,
one can lie for years in lace and tinsel
a body stuffed with straw
inside a felt-lined box,
at every lustful touch
for no reason at all
one can give out a cry
"Ah, so happy am I!"'

NI: What's The War You Don't See about?

JP: The film asks: 'What is the role of the media in rapacious wars like Iraq and Afghanistan? Why do so many journalists beat the drums of war and not challenge the spin and lies of governments? And how are the crimes of war reported and justified when they are our crimes?' It's a film about truth and justice. In the opening sequence, I refer to David Lloyd George, Britain's prime minister during much of the First World War, who had a private chat with the editor of The Guardian, CP Scott, at the height of the carnage. 'If people really knew the truth,' said Lloyd George, 'the war would be stopped tomorrow. But of course they don't know and can't know.' My film is about people's right to know. It has always seemed odd to me that as journalists we examine people's professional lives, but not our own. We treasure our myths. Edmund Burke called the press a 'fourth estate' that would check the other great institutions of democracy. It was a quintessentially liberal view. It was also romantic nonsense – honourable exceptions aside. Up till the arrival of the corporate press at the turn of the 20th century, newspapers were often fiercely independent and saw themselves as voices of ordinary people. The media – press and broadcasting – has long since become an extension of the established order, and frequently its mouthpiece and valet. These days, we surely owe it to the public to come clean about the pressures and seductions, crude and subliminal, that subvert our independence. War – the industrial killing of people and the destruction of their society – is the ultimate test. One of my favourite quotations is Claud Cockburn's: 'Never believe anything until it's officially denied.' I suggest some of us might engrave that on our bathroom mirrors.

What led you to do a film on this theme? Was there a specific trigger for it?

The first trigger was the sight of children burned almost to death by Napalm B – which keeps on burning beneath the skin – then finding out that such an atrocity was not an aberration. It was realizing the racism in colonial warfare, and how apologetic reporting perpetuates this.

You've said 'the media is not covering war. It is promoting war.' Are there any media outlets whose activities have especially shocked or outraged you?

Well, you get crude examples of war promotion on Fox television in the United States. However, Fox has the virtue of leaving us in no doubt where it stands; and that's true of most of the Murdoch empire. Murdoch himself has said that war is OK. Too bad about the innocents; war is necessary, says the great baron. Certainly, it is necessary for the arms corporations which are a pillar of the US war economy. The more insidious and perhaps more powerful war promoters are in the respectable media, such as the New York Times and the BBC. Two important studies following the invasion of Iraq received little media attention. Cardiff University found that the BBC overwhelmingly promoted the Blair government's war agenda; and Media Tenor, based in Berlin, found that of the world's principal broadcasters, the BBC gave just three per cent of its pre-invasion coverage to anti-war voices. Only CBS in the United States was worse. Censorship by omission is, in my view, the most virulent form of warmongering. 'When the truth is replaced by silence,' said the Soviet dissident poet Yevtushenko, 'the silence is a lie.'

Do you think the reporting of war is actually worse now than it was at the beginning of your career? Is the modern 'embedding' of journalists a major factor?

It's not worse, it's just better organized – though in many respects it's far less successful. The last British war completely free of state censorship was the Crimea, which produced some of the greatest war reporting of all time: William Howard Russell's exposé of the disaster of the charge of the Light Brigade. He and his editor at The Times, John Delane, were almost charged with treason for telling the truth. This changed completely during the First World War, when journalists saw their job, wrote Philip Gibbs of the Daily Chronicle, as telling 'only tales of gallantry'. The modern idea of 'embedding' is similar. More than 700 journalists were embedded with US and British forces during the invasion of Iraq. They told good action stories and showed us a little of the obligatory 'bang-bang' but they managed to pass over or obscure the truth that the brutal conquest and plunder of a defenceless country was under way. That said, the reporting on the worldwide web was an important antidote; look at Dahr Jamail's powerful, independent reporting from Fallujah and the independent filmmaking that gave civilians a voice. We show some remarkable examples in The War You Don't See.

You have talked about 'wars of perception' in which the news media plays a major role. What do you mean by this?

The term belongs to General David Petraeus, the current US commander in Afghanistan, who wrote in the 2006 US Counterinsurgency Manual that what mattered was not so much military superiority as persuading the public at home that you were winning, regardless of the reality. In other words, the public is the true enemy of governments that pursue unpopular colonial wars which can only be 'won' if the public is successfully deceived. This owes much to Edward Bernays, who is said to have invented the term 'public relations' soon after the First World War. Bernays' dictum was that the facts didn't matter as much as the success of 'false reality', and that the manipulators of public thinking belonged to an 'invisible government that is the true ruling power in our country'. Of course, none of this can succeed without the media as its transmitter and amplifier. And these days it hasn't really succeeded. Some 77 per cent of the British public is opposed to the colonial adventure in Afghanistan, and most were against the invasion of Iraq.

What do you think can be done to improve the coverage of war, so that the public gets a picture of what is really going on?

The answer is: tell the obvious truth; and the truth of war is the grotesque. It is trees hanging with the body parts of children. It is people going insane before your eyes. It is terrified soldiers with their trousers full of shit. It is human damage that runs through countless families: civilians and soldiers. That's war. The coverage of war should be this eyewitness but it should also try to tell us the why. That means journalists not colluding but investigating. One of the most revealing documents released by Wikileaks was a 2,000-page Ministry of Defence document that equated investigative journalists with terrorists. That reflects the lethal stupidity that runs like a current through the war-making industry. It says they are afraid of the truth.

Should we be giving more space to local reporters who are from the regions where the wars are being fought?

Only if they try to tell the why of a war, not dispense sentimentalized tales about soldiers from local families – which the military relish.

You have also talked about 'a war against journalism'. What do you mean by this?

Journalism ought to be about telling as much of the truth as possible in the circumstances. And governments can be expected to wage a constant war on truth-tellers, be they whistleblowers or fearless reporters. That's why the Pentagon recently set up a department to fight 'cyberwar'. To the military propagandists, cyberspace is unconquered and, worse, populated by mavericks they can't control. This is only partly true, of course, but there are enough good journalists writing exclusively for the web to justify the war-makers' alarm.

Do you draw a distinction between the corporate media world of Murdoch, CNN and the BBC and independent media in terms of which stories are told and the ways in which they are told?

Yes, but mostly in style. Look at Andrew Marr's recent interview with Tony Blair to mark, or celebrate, Blair's self-serving memoirs. Marr didn't ask a single probing question about Blair's record on Iraq and allowed Blair to promote an attack on Iran. That's not much different from an interview conducted in the Murdoch media, which I doubt would be as compliant. Look at the BBC's coverage of the day of the invasion of Iraq; it's an echo chamber: the message is that Blair is vindicated. Fox did the same in America for Bush.

Do you see any glimmers of hope in the way important issues are being discussed in the mass media?

There are some superb reporters in the mainstream – Patrick Cockburn in The Independent has been a most honourable exception in Iraq. Ian Cobain of The Guardian has brilliantly exposed the torture and injustice of the so-called War on Terror. On the web, there is some exciting new journalism – not to be confused with top-of-the-head blogging. Look at some of the work posted on Tom Feeley's excellent Information Clearing House and on ZNet. In Britain, Media Lens has broken new ground with the first informed and literate analysis and criticism of the liberal media. This is the new fifth estate.

Is there another issue on which you think the public is currently being massively deceived?

The major deception in Britain today is the political/media consensus that there is an economic crisis requiring a devastation of public finances and people's lives. If you look back on the coverage of the 'crash' in the autumn two years ago, the shock of it forced the media to tell the truth: corrupt banks and an unregulated financial sector were rightly identified as the source of the problem, and that was the news. Within a year, journalists were back 'on message' and the assumptions of the media echoed the nonsense of the political élite that 'we are all in this together': a deception so gross it insults the nation's intelligence. Britain is not on the edge of bankruptcy: this is one of the world's wealthiest economies; the richest 10 per cent control $6,300 billion with an average per household of $6.3 million. An equitable rate of tax would see off the so-called deficit in no time. In any case, the 'deficit' is ideological: the product of an almost cultish obsession of central banks and financiers with shifting the wealth of nations to the very top and keeping it there. At the end of the Second World War, Britain was officially bankrupt yet the Labour government created some of the country's greatest public institutions, such as the National Health Service. None of this would be a mystery to a media that saw itself as an agency of people, not power.

What is the good news?

The good news is that much of direct and indirect propaganda is not working. As I say, most people oppose colonial wars. There is a critical public intelligence that runs counter to the authority of the media in all its wondrous digital forms. Perhaps people sense the historical moment: that their social democracy is being appropriated by insatiable corporatism, regardless of which party is in power. In many countries – Greece, France, Spain – this is well understood and is being translated into direct action. In Britain, it is still a seed beneath the snow. But that will change; it has to.

Such beautifully elusive words is what writer and illustrator Ella Frances Sanders, a self-described "intentional" global nomad, explores in Lost in Translation: An Illustrated Compendium of Untranslatable Words from Around the World, published shortly before Sanders turned twenty-one.

 —

The article originally published on brainpickings.org. 

The article was adapted by The Travel Club editorial staff.

"We've seen photos of the journey migrants take through Mexico, and I'd been on the trains with them as they made their way to the border," Pindado said. "But I also knew that something was missing, that there were moments that we were still not capturing."

MigraZoom launched in early 2013, supported by a grant from the United Nations Development Program.

Pindado, collaborating with other Mexico-based photographers, headed to Mexico's southern border with Guatemala. There, Central American youth tend to congregate and regroup to continue their journey north.

The MigraZoom team handed out about 200 Kodak cameras and gave a quick photo workshop. They also told the migrants they would move up the usual migrant path, too, following the railroad lines, and gather the cameras along the way.

In the end, MigraZoom collected about 70 percent of the cameras they gave out. In return, they made prints for the participants to keep.

On the top is a selection of photos taken by migrants, with observations from Pindado. The names of the photographers are omitted to protect their identity, as many have likely crossed the US-Mexico border without documentation.

—

Photo credits: MigraZoom participants

The article originally published on www.pri.org.

"The collapse of the stellar universe will occur—like creation—in grandiose splendor."

—Blaise Pascal

The words attributed to Blaise Pascal which preface my film Lessons of Darkness are in fact by me. Pascal himself could not have said it better.

This falsified and yet, as I will later demonstrate, not falsified quotation should serve as a first hint of what I am trying to deal with in this discourse. Anyway, to acknowledge a fake as fake contributes only to the triumph of accountants.

Why am I doing this, you might ask? The reason is simple and comes not from theoretical, but rather from practical, considerations. With this quotation as a prefix I elevate [erheben] the spectator, before he has even seen the first frame, to a high level, from which to enter the film. And I, the author of the film, do not let him descend from this height until it is over. Only in this state of sublimity [Erhabenheit] does something deeper become possible, a kind of truth that is the enemy of the merely factual. Ecstatic truth, I call it.

After the first war in Iraq, as the oil fields burned in Kuwait, the media—and here I mean television in particular—was in no position to show what was, beyond being a war crime, an event of cosmic dimensions, a crime against creation itself. There is not a single frame in Lessons of Darkness in which you can recognize our planet; for this reason the film is labeled "science fiction," as if it could only have been shot in a distant galaxy, hostile to life. At its premiere at the Berlin Film Festival, the film met with an orgy of hate. From the raging cries of the public I could make out only "aestheticization of horror." And when I found myself being threatened and spat at on the podium, I hit upon only a single, banal response. "You cretins," I said, "that's what Dante did in his Inferno, it's what Goya did, and Hieronymus Bosch too." In my moment of need, without thinking about it, I had called upon the guardian angels who familiarize us with the Absolute and the Sublime.

The Absolute, the Sublime, the Truth . . . What do these words mean? This is, I must confess, the first time in my life that I have sought to settle such questions outside of my work, which I understand, first and foremost, in practical terms.

By way of qualification, I should add at once that I am not going to venture a definition of the Absolute, even if that concept casts its shadow over everything that I say here. The Absolute poses a never-ending quandary for philosophy, religion, and mathematics. Mathematics will probably come closest to getting it when someone finally proves Riemann's hypothesis. That question concerns the distribution of prime numbers; unanswered since the nineteenth century, it reaches into the depths of mathematical thinking. A prize of a million dollars has been set aside for whoever solves it, and a mathematical institute in Boston has allotted a thousand years for someone to come up with a proof. The money is waiting for you, as is your immortality. For two and a half thousand years, ever since Euclid, this question has preoccupied mathematicians; if it turned out Riemann and his brilliant hypothesis were not right, it would send unimaginable shockwaves through the disciplines of mathematics and natural science. I can only very vaguely begin to fathom the Absolute; I am in no position to define the concept.

The Truth Of The Ocean

For now, I'll stay on the trusted ground of praxis. Even if we cannot really grasp it, I would like to tell you about an unforgettable encounter I had with Truth while shooting Fitzcarraldo. We were shooting in the Peruvian jungles east of the Andes between the Camisea and Urubamba rivers, where I would later haul a huge steamship over a mountain. The indigenous people who lived there, the Machiguengas, made up a majority of the extras and had given us the permit to film on their land. In addition to being paid, the Machiguengas wanted further benefits: they wanted training for their local doctor and a boat, so that they could bring their crops to market a few hundred kilometers downriver themselves, instead of having to sell them through middlemen. Finally, they wanted support in their fight for a legal title to the area between the two rivers. One company after another had seized it in order to plunder local stocks of wood; recently, oil firms had also been casting a greedy eye on their land.

Every petition we entered for a deed vanished at once in the labyrinthine provincial bureaucracy. Our attempts at bribery failed, too. Finally, having traveled to the ministry responsible for such things, in the capital city of Lima, I was told that, even if we could argue for a legal title on historical and cultural grounds, there were two stumbling blocks. First, the title was not contained in any legally verifiable document, but supported only by hearsay, which was irrelevant. Second, no one had ever surveyed the land in order to provide a recognizable border.

To the latter end, I hired a surveyor, who furnished the Machiguengas with a precise map of their homeland. That was my part in their truth: it took the form of a delineation, a definition. I'll admit, I quarreled with the surveyor. The topographic map that he furnished was, he explained, in certain ways incorrect. It did not correspond to the truth because it did not take into account the curvature of the earth. In such a little piece of land? I asked, losing patience. Of course, he said angrily, and pushed his water glass toward me. Even with a glass of water, you have to be clear about it, what we're dealing with is not an even surface. You should see the curvature of the earth as you would see it on an ocean or a lake. If you were really able to perceive it exactly as it is—but you are too simple-minded—you would see the earth curve. I will never forget this harsh lesson.

The question of hearsay had a deeper dimension and required research of an entirely different kind. [Arguing for their title to the land] the Indians could only claim that they'd always been there; this they had learned from their grandparents. When, finally, the case appeared hopeless, I managed to get an audience with the President, [Fernando] Belaúnde. The Machiguengas of Shivankoreni elected two representatives to accompany me. [In the President's office in Lima] when our conversation threatened to come to a standstill, I presented Belaúnde with the following argument: in Anglo-Saxon law, although hearsay is generally inadmissible as evidence, it is not absolutely inadmissible. As early as 1916, in the case of Angu vs. Atta, a colonial court in the Gold Coast (today Ghana) ruled that hearsay could serve as a valid form of evidence.

That case was completely different. It had to do with the use of a local governor's palace; then, too, there were no documents, nothing official that would have been relevant. But, the court ruled, the overwhelming consensus in hearsay that countless tribesmen had repeated and repeated, had come to constitute so manifest a truth that the court could accept it without further restrictions. At this, Belaunde, who had lived for many years in the jungle, fell quiet. He asked for a glass of orange juice, then said only Good god, and I knew that we had won him over. Today the Machiguengas have a title to their land; even the consortium of oil firms that discovered one of the largest sources of natural gas [in the world] directly in their vicinity respects it.

The audience with the President granted yet another odd glimpse into the essence of truth. The inhabitants of the village of Shivakoreni were not sure whether it was true that on the other side of the Andes there was a monstrously large body of water, an ocean. In addition, there was the fact that this monstrous water, the Pacific, was supposedly salty.

We drove to a restaurant on the beach a little south of Lima to eat. But our two Indian delegates didn't order anything. They went silent and looked out over the breakers. They didn't approach the water, just stared at it. Then one asked for a bottle. I gave him my empty beer bottle. No, that wasn't right, it had to be a bottle that you could seal well. So I bought a bottle of cheap Chilean red, had it uncorked, and poured the wine out into the sand. We sent the bottle to the kitchen to be cleaned as carefully as possible. Then the men took the bottle and went, without a word, to the shoreline. Still wearing the new blue jeans, sneakers, and T-shirts that we had bought for them at the market, they waded in to the waves. They waded, looking over the expanse of the Pacific Ocean, until the water reached their underarms. Then, they took a taste of the water, filled the bottle and sealed it carefully with a cork.

This bottle filled with water was their proof for the village that there really was an ocean. I asked cautiously whether it wasn't just a part of the truth. No, they said, if there is a bottle of seawater, then the whole ocean must be true as well.

The Assault of Virtual Reality

From then on, what constitutes truth—or, to put it in much simpler form, what constitutes reality—became a greater mystery to me than it had been. The two intervening decades have posed unprecedented challenges to our concept of reality.

When I speak of assaults on our understanding of reality, I am referring to new technologies that, in the past twenty years, have become general articles of everyday use: the digital special effects that create new and imaginary realities in the cinema. It's not that I want to demonize these technologies; they have allowed the human imagination to accomplish great things—for instance, reanimating dinosaurs convincingly on screen. But, when we consider all the possible forms of virtual reality that have become part of everyday life—in the Internet, in video games, and on reality TV; sometimes also in strange mixed forms—the question of what "real" reality is poses itself constantly afresh.

What is really going on in the reality TV show Survivor? Can we ever really trust a photograph, now that we know how easily everything can be faked with Photoshop? Will we ever be able to completely trust an email, when our twelve-year-old children can show us that what we're seeing is probably an attempt to steal our identity, or perhaps a virus, a worm, or a "Trojan" that has wandered into our midst and adopted every one of our characteristics? Do I already exist somewhere, cloned, as many Doppelgänger, without knowing anything about it?

History offers one analogy to the extent of [change brought about by] the virtual, other world that we are now being confronted with. For centuries and centuries, warfare was essentially the same thing, clashing armies of knights, who fought with swords and shields. Then, one day, these warriors found themselves staring at each other across canons and weapons. Warfare was never the same. We also know that innovations in the development of military technology are irreversible. Here's some evidence that may be of interest: in parts of Japan in the early seventeenth century, there was an attempt to do away with firearms, so that samurai could fight one another hand to hand, with swords again. This attempt was only very short-lived; it was impossible to sustain.

A couple of years ago, I came to grasp how confusing the concept of reality has become, in a strange way, through an incident that took place on Venice Beach in Los Angeles. A friend was having a little party in his backyard—barbecued steak—it was already dark, when, not far away, we heard a few gunshots that nobody took seriously until the police helicopters showed up with searchlights on and commanded us, over loudspeakers, to get inside the house. We sorted out the facts of the case only in retrospect: a boy, described by witnesses as around thirteen or fourteen years of age, had been loitering, hanging around a restaurant about a block away from us. As a couple exited, the boy yelled, This is for real, shot both with a semi-automatic, then fled on his skateboard. He was never caught. But the message [Botschaft] of the madman was clear: this here isn't a videogame, these shots are for real, this is reality.

Axioms of Feeling

We must ask of reality: how important is it, really? And: how important, really, is the Factual? Of course, we can't disregard the factual; it has normative power. But it can never give us the kind of illumination, the ecstatic flash, from which Truth emerges. If only the factual, upon which the so-called cinéma vérité fixates, were of significance, then one could argue that the vérité—the truth—at its most concentrated must reside in the telephone book—in its hundreds of thousands of entries that are all factually correct and, so, correspond to reality. If we were to call everyone listed in the phone book under the name "Schmidt," hundreds of those we called would confirm that they are called Schmidt; yes, their name is Schmidt.

In my film Fitzcarraldo, there is an exchange that raises this question. Setting off into the unknown with his ship, Fitzcarraldo stops over at one of the last outposts of civilization, a missionary station:

Fitzcarraldo: And what do the older Indians say?

Missionary: We simply cannot cure them of their idea that ordinary life is only an illusion, behind which lies the reality of dreams.

The film is about an opera being staged in the rainforest; as you'll know, I set about actually producing opera. As I did, one maxim was crucial for me: an entire world must undergo a transformation into music, must become music; only then would we have produced opera. What's beautiful about opera is that reality doesn't play any role in it at all; and that what takes place in opera is the overcoming of nature. When one looks at the libretti from operas (and here Verdi's Force of Destiny is a good example), one sees very quickly that the story itself is so implausible, so removed from anything that we might actually experience that the mathematical laws of probability are suspended. What happens in the plot is impossible, but the power of music enables the spectator to experience it as true.

It's the same thing with the emotional world [Gefühlswelt] of opera. The feelings are so abstracted; they cannot really be subordinated to everyday human nature any longer, because they have been concentrated and elevated to the most extreme degree and appear in their purest form; and despite all that we perceive them, in opera, as natural. Feelings in opera are, ultimately, like axioms in mathematics, which cannot be concentrated and cannot be explained any further. The axioms of feeling in the opera lead us, however, in the most secret ways, on a direct path to the sublime. Here we could cite "Casta Diva" in Bellini's opera Norma as an example.

You might ask: why do I say that the sublime becomes accessible to us [lit. "experience-able"; erfahrbar] in opera, of all forms, considering that opera did not innovate in any essential way in the twentieth century, as other forms took its place? This only seems to be a paradox: the direct experience of the sublime in opera is not dependent on further development or new developments. Its sublimity has enabled opera to survive.

Ecstatic Truth

Our entire sense of reality has been called into question. But I do not want to dwell on this fact any longer, since what moves me has never been reality, but a question that lies behind it [beyond; dahinter]: the question of truth. Sometimes facts so exceed our expectations—have such an unusual, bizarre power—that they seem unbelievable.

But in the fine arts, in music, literature, and cinema, it is possible to reach a deeper stratum of truth—a poetic, ecstatic truth, which is mysterious and can only be grasped with effort; one attains it through vision, style, and craft. In this context I see the quotation from Blaise Bascal about the collapse of the stellar universe not as a fake ["counterfeit"; Fälschung], but as a means of making possible an ecstatic experience of inner, deeper truth. Just as it's not fakery when Michelangelo's Pietà portrays Jesus as a 33-year-old man, and his mother, the mother of God, as a 17-year-old.

However, we also gain our ability to have ecstatic experiences of truth through the Sublime, through which we are able to elevate ourselves over nature. Kant says: The irresistibility of the power of nature forces us to recognize our physical impotence as natural beings, but at the same time discloses our capacity to judge ourselves independent of nature as well as superior to nature . . . I am leaving out some things here, for simplicity's sake. Kant continues: In this way nature is not estimated in our aesthetic judgment as sublime because it excites fear, but because it summons up our power (which is not of nature) . . .

I should treat Kant with the necessary caution, because his explanations concerning the sublime are so very abstract that they have always remained alien to me in my practical work. However, Dionysus Longinus, whom I first came to know while exploring these subjects, is much closer to my heart, because he always speaks in practical terms and uses examples. We don't know anything about Longinus. Experts aren't even sure that that's really his name, and we can only guess that he lived in the first century after Christ. Unfortunately, his essay On the Sublime is also rather fragmentary. In the earliest writings that we have from the tenth century, the Codex Parisinus 2036, there are pages missing everywhere, sometimes entire bundles of pages.

Longinus proceeds systematically; here, at this time, I cannot even start in on the structure of his text. But he always quotes very lively examples from literature. And here I will, again, without following a schematic order, seize upon what seems most important to me.

What's fascinating is that, right at the beginning of his text, [Longinus] invokes the concept of Ecstasy, even if he does so in a different context than what I have identified as "ecstatic truth." With reference to rhetoric, Longinus says: Whatever is sublime does not lead the listeners to persuasion but to a state of ecstasy; at every time and in every way imposing speech, with the spell it throws over us, prevails over that which aims at persuasion and gratification. Our persuasions we can usually control, but the influences of the sublime bring power and irresistible might to bear, and reign supreme over every hearer . . . Here he uses the concept of ekstasis, a person's stepping out of himself into an elevated state—where we can raise ourselves over our own nature—which the sublime reveals "at once, like a thunder bolt." No one before Longinus had spoken so clearly of the experience of illumination; here, I am taking the liberty to apply that notion to rare and fleeting moments in film.

He quotes Homer in order to demonstrate the sublimity of images and their illuminating effect. Here is his example from the battle of the gods:

"Far round wide heaven and Olympus echoed his clarion of thunder;
And Hades, king of the realm of shadows, quaked thereunder.
And he sprang from his throne, and he cried aloud in the dread of his heart
Lest o'er him earth-shaker Poseidon should cleave the ground apart,
And revealed to Immortals and mortals should stand those awful abodes,
Those mansions ghastly and grim, abhorred of the very Gods."

Longinus was an extraordinarily well-read man, one who quotes exactly. What is striking here is that he takes the liberty of welding together two different passages from the Iliad. It is impossible that this is a mistake. However, Longinus is not faking but, rather, conceiving a new, deeper truth. He asserts that without truth [Wahrhaftigkeit] and greatness of soul the sublime cannot come into being. And he quotes a statement that researchers today ascribe either to Pythagoras or to Demosthenes:

For truly beautiful is the statement of the man who, in response to the question of what we have in common with the gods, answered: the ability to do good [Wohltun] and truth.

We should not translate his euergesia simply with "charity," imprinted as that notion is by Christian culture. Nor is the Greek word for truth, alêtheia, simple to grasp. Etymologically speaking, it comes from the verb lanthanein, "to hide," and the related word lêthos, "the hidden," "the concealed." A-lêtheia is, therefore, a form of negation, a negative definition: it is the "not-hidden," the revealed, the truth. Thinking through language [im sprachlichen Denken], the Greeks meant, therefore, to define truth as an act of disclosure—a gesture related to the cinema, where an object is set into the light and then a latent, not yet visible image is conjured onto celluloid, where it first must be developed, then disclosed.

The soul of the listener or the spectator completes this act itself; the soul actualizes truth through the experience of sublimity: that is, it completes an independent act of creation. Longinus says: For our soul is raised out of nature through the truly sublime, sways with high spirits, and is filled with proud joy, as it itself had created what it hears.

But I don't want to lose myself in Longinus, whom I always think of as a good friend. I stand before you as someone who works with film. I would like to point out some scenes from another film of mine as evidence. A good example would be The Great Ecstasy of Woodcarver Steiner where the concept of ecstasy already shows up in the title.

Walter Steiner, a Swiss sculptor and repeat world champion in ski-flying, raises himself as if in religious ecstasy into the air. He flies so frightfully far, he enters the region of death itself: only a little farther, and he would not land on the steep slope, but rather crash beyond it. Steiner speaks at the end of a young raven, which he raised and which, in his loneliness as a child, was his only friend. The raven lost more and more feathers, which probably had to do with the feed that Steiner gave him. Other ravens attacked his raven and, in the end, tortured him so frightfully that young Steiner had only one choice: Unfortunately, I had to shoot him, says Steiner, because it was torture to watch how he was tortured by his own brothers because he could not fly any more. And then, in a fast cut, we see Steiner—in place of his raven—flying, in a terribly aesthetic frame, in extreme slow motion, slowed to eternity. This is the majestic flight of a man whose face is contorted by fear of death as if deranged by religious ecstasy. And then, shortly before the death zone—beyond the slope, on the flat, where he would be crushed on impact, as if he had jumped from the Empire State Building to the pavement below—he lands softly, safely, and a written text is superimposed upon the image. The text is drawn from the Swiss writer Robert Walser and it reads:

I should be all alone in this world

Me, Steiner and no other living being.

No sun, no culture; I, naked on a high rock

No storm, no snow, no banks, no money

No time and no breath.

Then, finally, I would not be afraid any more.

—
The article was originally published on the website of Boston University College of Arts and Sciences. Translation by Moira Weigel. Corrections to the translation by The Travel Club.