Citater om Cybersyn

It says a lot for the good intentions of the Government that the work I shall describe been going on in the midst of such obvious turmoil. It wanted scientific tools to help the country’ problems, and it knew that their provision would take time-perhaps long. So it may be proved. The government has so far had to work with the tools governments have used without success. It also wanted to work out the between science and the people, and that too ought to interest us all. We have moved an epoch in which the misuse of science has created a society that is already close to technocracy. The very language - the dehumanised jargon-in which powerful talk about the wars they wage, or powerful companies talk about the people they frankly makes me vomit.
I am a scientist, but to be a technocrat would put me out of business as a man. Yet I was eighteen rnonths ago, intent on creating a scientific way of governing. And here today, proud of the tools we have made. Why? Because I believe that cybernetics can do the job better than bureaucracy - and more humanely too. We must learn how to expunge technocracy, without rejecting science - because the proper use of science is really the world’ brightest hope for stable government. Some people in Chile share that view; and they reject technocracy as strongly as do I. All of us have already been misrepresented in that respect, just as the scientific work we have done has already been misrepresented as analogous to other management control systems that have failed. Both comments miss out the cybernetics, to discuss which we are here - and a subject, which for government in general,is not at all understood.(ved faktisk ikke hvem der har skrevet det, men artiklen hedder Fanfare for freedom er måske minder om Beer.)

Artiklen Fanfare for Freedom ligger som pdf et eller andet sted. Artiklen er ganske oplysende vedr. Cybersyn og kommer ret godt ned også i det tekniske. Derudover er den interesant fordi den er fra 1973 og altså dermed fra tiden omkring Cybersyn.
Her handler det selvfølgelig om et problem som er gået helt i bogen. Forholdet mellem samfund og teknologi og især spørgsmålet omkring hvorledes vi kan implementere tekniske udviklinger i vores samfundsstyring. Det er noget der kommer, som allerede er her og som der på mange måder er rigtig store muligheder for at udvikle.


The viable system model that first appeared in Brain of the Firm (1972) still
stands as one of the guiding concepts behind Beer’s work.45 It is defined as
‘ a system that survives. It coheres ; it is integral _ but it has none the less
mechanisms and opportunities to grow and learn, to evolve and to adapt. ’46
The value of the system ‘variables’ (inputs) determined the system’s resultant
‘ state’; Beer referred to the number of possible states as the system’s ‘ var-
iety ’, a direct reference to Ross Ashby’s important ‘Law of Requisite
Variety’.47 A system able to maintain all critical variables within the limits
of systemic equilibrium achieved ‘homeostasis ’, a quality desired by all
viable systems. From these principles, Beer constructed a five-tier model
for viable systems, which he based on the human neurosystem. In spite of
the model’s biological origins, Beer maintained that the abstract structure
could be applied in numerous contexts, including the firm, the economic
enterprise, the body and the state. (citatet er fra Designing Freedom, regulating a nation: Socialist Cybernetics in Allendes Chile - af Eden Medina, den ligger online på hendes hjemmeside, som ligger på linket i forrige post)

Det er den første overraskelse, at systemet fra udgangspunktet bygges op udfra en model der tager udgangspunkt i biologien. Hele Medinas arbejde omkring Chile og Kybernetik er ganske spændende, fordi det handler om hvor mange steder forskningen faktisk fandt sted. Kybernetikken var måske ikke skjult, men Beers første bog om Viable systems theory hedder Brain of the Firm og er en måske ikke kun en management bog, så i hvert fald også det. Den overraskelse jeg har over biologien og dermed analogiens hovedrolle i de første begyndelser af Cybersyn forsvinder derfor, for der var vægt bagved. Beer har arbejdet med tingende før, han har implementeret sine tanker og faktisk udviklet dem imens han arbejdede med organisationelle problemer og forsøgte at løse dem. Udgangspunktet var altså en analogi. Det kunne vi lærer meget af i Dks undervisnings system og i organisations tanker idag. Analogier er noget vi udvikler i samklang med de problemer vi forsøger at løse og ikke den anden vej rundt. Se Paperts bog Mindstorm for en udvikling af denne tanke i matematik undervisningen.
Det er ufattelig centralt perspektiv for denne blog, virkeligheden og teorien er ikke adskilte, hvis de generelt og i udgangspunktet er det, sker der for det meste dårlige ting, eller ikke en skid. Måske er det netop derfor at Kybernetikken er så interesant, fordi dens felt, interdiciplinære felt voksede frem i og med et arbejde med konkrete problemer (i første omgang hvordan man får en raket til at ramme sit mål præcist - problemet blev løst via feedback processer der kunne beregne rakettens bane og forhold til mål udfra ufuldstændige data-set) og hele tiden forblev forbundet hertil. Man opfandt og tænkte med objekter.
Som sådan skal Cybersyns rolle på denne blog ses, som et eksempel på et objekt, et objekt at tænke med. Og som en litterær histoie om at tænke med objekter.

Det er en senere pointe i Medinas artikle, at ‘information without action
is waste.' - som Beer og Flores gør sig. Nu er information altid handling i en eller anden grad og det er en vital del af arbejdet her på bloggen, at udvikle et begreb, som alligevel gør det klart hvad det er de hentyder til. Citatet henviser direkte til den specefikke opgave med at finde et kommunikations system som kan binde alle ledne sammen i Cybersyn projektet. De ender med et telex system, men som det står i artiklen, fungere dette system meget lig internettet i den forstand, at det skal fungere som et "high-speed web of information exchange." Det giver generelt problemer for systemer hvis der bliver produceret en masse information som ikke bliver brugt, som ikke fungere. Distinktioner for funktioner er altså vigtige.

Stafford Beer coined and frequently used the term POSIWID (the purpose of a system is what it does) to refer to the commonly observed phenomenon that the de facto purpose of a system is often at odds with its official purpose. Beer coined the term POSIWID and used it many times in public addresses. Perhaps most forcefully in his address to the University of Valladolid, Spain in October 2001, he said "According to the cybernetician the purpose of a system is what it does. This is a basic dictum. It stands for bald fact, which makes a better starting point in seeking understanding than the familiar attributions of good intention, prejudices about expectations, moral judgment or sheer ignorance of circumstances."[7] -- fra Wikipedia (selvfølgelig). Her har vi selvfølgelig en sammenhæng med Wittgenstein. Det er ikke nogen tilfældighed, Von Forster har den mange steder. Men dette er ikke det positive program, dette er en påstand man kan bruge til analyse. Man kan bruge den til at påpege ignorance og forudtagethed.

Begge artikler er virkelig oplysende og ganske smukke.

Cyber-syn

Stafford Beer er muligvis tænkeren... Cybersyn var et Kybernetisk styret økonomisk system, eller i hvert fald et forsøg på det, som fungerede i Chile under Allende i ca 2 år.

her er nogle links.
http://vimeo.com/8000921
http://ototsky.mgn.ru/it/lessons.htm
http://www.cybersyn.cl/ingles/home.html
http://www.informatics.indiana.edu/edenm/publications/publications.html -- en ganske fabelagtig side, hun har,hvis hun er en kvinde, skrevet ret interesante artikler må man sige. Kan være der skulle komme en gennemgang af nogen af dem senere.

Entreprenør og ingeniør

Kritikkens (u)mulighed - superflex som sociale entreprenører

17.02.2010

Note 1XNote 1:Mange af informationerne om Superflex og entreprenørskab i denne artikel er hentet fra opgaven "Art-preneurship - kunsten at skabe" skrevet sammen med Isaac Larsen, Jesper Juul Hansen og Mette Nelund på HA(fil.), CBS i foråret 2007, og jeg takker dem for at lade mig bruge meget af vores fælles arbejde i en ny sammenhæng.Mange af informationerne om Superflex og entreprenørskab i denne artikel er hentet fra opgaven "Art-preneurship - kunsten at skabe" skrevet sammen med Isaac Larsen, Jesper Juul Hansen og Mette Nelund på HA(fil.), CBS i foråret 2007, og jeg takker dem for at lade mig bruge meget af vores fælles arbejde i en ny sammenhæng.Med Luc Boltanski og Eve Chiapellos Kapitalismens Nye Ånd fra 1999 blev det klart, at forholdet mellem kapitalismen og den kritik, der rettes mod den, langt fra er så simpelt, som man umiddelbart skulle tro. Boltanski og Chiapello viser med al tydelighed, at hvis man kritiserer kapitalismen, må man acceptere, at der er risiko for, at kritikken bliver indoptaget og brugt til at legitimere og optimere det, der egentlig skulle kritiseres – nemlig kapitalismen selv.
Alternativet til indoptagelsen er nemlig en kritik uden effekt. En kritik, som kapitalismen enten kan ignorere eller en kritik, som den kan undvige og neutralisere ved at ændre sig, og gøre arbejds- og akkumulationsprocesserne sværere at gennemskue for kritikerne.Note 2XNote 2:For en hurtig introduktion til Kapitalismens Nye ånd og nogle af de pointer, der kort refereres i det nedenstående se artiklen Kapitalisme og ånd af filosoffen Anders Fogh Jensen fra vores tematik Kapitalisme og Humanisme. I den og vores tema om kritik er der også mange andre artikler, der kredser om samme problemstillinger.For en hurtig introduktion til Kapitalismens Nye ånd og nogle af de pointer, der kort refereres i det nedenstående se artiklen Kapitalisme og ånd af filosoffen Anders Fogh Jensen fra vores tematik Kapitalisme og Humanisme. I den og vores tema om kritik er der også mange andre artikler, der kredser om samme problemstillinger.

Det efterlader kritikere af kapitalismen i en lidt besværlig situation. For skal kritikken have en effekt, må kritikken i en vis forstand formuleres på kapitalismens præmisser på en måde så kapitalismen kan forholde sig til den. Men så må man også acceptere og affinde sig med, at kritikken kan blive indoptaget og på den måde komme til at fungere som en drivkraft i udviklingen af kapitalismen. Ikke desto mindre er kritik nødvendig for udvikling og forbedring af de bestående forhold. Men hvordan kan et aktuelt bud på en effektiv kapitalismekritik så se ud?
Et bud er det sociale entreprenørskab.

Socialt entreprenørskab
En social entreprenør skaber sociale innovationer, og har som sit mål at ændre den sociale struktur.
Innovationer har altid medført ændringer af den sociale realitet i form af et social impact - dvs. de ændringer af den sociale struktur, kultur, organisations- og tænkemåde, der følger med innovationer, når de etablerer sig og bliver en integreret del af samfundet. Tænk bare på hvilke ændringer i måder at tænke og være på, flyet eller Internettet førte med sig.
Ligesom med kritik er utilfredsheden med tingenes nuværende tilstand også en drivkraft i innovation. Det er en utilfredshed med forskellen på, hvad der er, og hvad der kunne være (Larsen: Social Innovation; Boltanski & Chiapello 1999:27). På den måde kan man se socialt entreprenørskab og social innovation som en måde at kritisere kapitalismen - og en mulighed for at ændre uretfærdighederne. Sociale entreprenører har nemlig netop ændringer af den sociale realitet som sit formål – og ikke blot som en sekundær effekt. Og herved adskiller han/hun sig fra den klassiske entreprenør.

Den klassiske entreprenør
Ifølge den østrigsk-fødte økonom og entreprenørtænker Joseph A. Schumpeter (1883-1950) er der ikke noget i økonomien selv, der driver økonomien fremad. Som system søger økonomien altid efter ligevægt og er dermed ikke fremadskridende og selv-udviklende. Økonomisk udvikling kan ikke forklares rent økonomisk - men må trække på grunde uden for økonomien selv (Schumpeter 2002:405).
Det, Schumpeter mener driver økonomien og samfundet fremad, er entreprenøren. Økonomien er de givne omstændigheder (af Schumpeter kaldet the circular flow), som alle forsøger at få det optimale ud af (Schumpeter 2002:411). Entreprenøren opererer derimod på en anden måde. Ved at kombinere ting fra de givne omstændigheder på en ny måde forandrer han økonomien, men også den sociale realitet for alle andre (Schumpeter 2002:406).
Det er kombinationen af eksisterende forhold på en ny måde, som Schumpeter kalder the carrying out of new combinations, der driver økonomien og samfundet fremad. For Schumpeter er det en forudsætning for al udvikling at bruge eksisterende ressourcer (Schumpeter 1961:68), og det er en sådan nytænkning og -kombinering, der konstituerer hele udviklingens natur (Schumpeter 2002:412). Var det ikke for entreprenøren, ville der slet ikke være nogen udvikling. Udviklingen sker gennem det Schumpeter kalder creative destruction (Schumpeter 1961: 83). Det Schumpeters entreprenør gør, er at hive the circular flow, altså den statiske, ligevægtige økonomi, ud af og væk fra dens equilibrium (Kirzner 1999:7). Når en entreprenør på den måde ødelægger the circular flow, er der mulighed for profit. Når andre så at sige opdager fidusen og begynder at lave det samme, genoprettes ligevægten og entreprenøren må på den igen. Der skal hele tiden skabe nye kombinationer for at udviklingen skal kunne blive ved med at finde sted.
På den måde destrueres det gamle i skabelsen af det nye, derfor creative destruction. Det klassiske Schumpeter-eksempel er bilindustriens opkomst, der overflødiggør og dermed destruerer hestevognsindustrien (Kirzner 1999:14).
Den kreative ødelæggelse ændrer ikke blot økonomien, men hele samfundet som følge af de nye produkter og organisationsformer, der kommer fra entreprenøren. (Schumpeter 2002:406).
Dermed er entreprenøren ikke blot en økonomisk, men i høj grad også en samfundsmæssig og social aktør. Det kan godt være, at den klassiske entreprenør kun har økonomisk profit for øje, men han forårsager også en ændring af de sociale forhold (Schumpeter 2002:416).

Der hvor den social entreprenør adskiller sig fra den ´klassiske´ entreprenør er, at målet ikke er jagten på profit, men derimod den sociale forandring i sig selv. Den sociale forandring er ikke en afledt effekt af innovation, men derimod målet i sig selv. Den sociale entreprenør arbejder på at skabe nye rum indenfor den eksisterende orden, hvor der er en mulighed for at etablere en ny praksis.

Heterotopias
Ifølge professor ved CBS Daniel Hjorth er entreprenørskab en nytænkning og en udnyttelse og skabelse af rum, der endnu ikke er til. Dette sker med udgangspunkt i en sproglig refleksion over ordet entreprenør, der kommer af de to franske ord entre (`in between´, `imellem´) og prendre (`to grab´, `at tage/gribe fat i´) - at gribe fat i det, der er imellem (Hjorth 2003: 91).
Entreprenørskab er for Hjorth en åbning af, og en griben fat i, nye rum overalt i samfundet og bliver derfor set som skabelse af heterotopias (gr. andre steder). Heterotopias er et udtryk hentet fra Michel Foucault. Hjorth bruger det til at beskrive midlertidige rum, der ligger imellem de eksisterende og dermed også imellem og udenfor den dominerende ordens herredømme (Hjorth 2005: 392). Entreprenøren er dermed en aktør, der skaber nye rum imellem de eksisterende. Det er, som hos Schumpeter, en central pointe hos Hjorth, at nye heterotopias hele tiden skal skabes, da den gængse økonomiske orden hele tiden vil overtage, kontrollere og udnytte dem til sit eget formål (Hjorth 2005: 396).
Entreprenørskab er for Hjort en social kreativitet, hvor nye rum skabes indenfor en etableret orden, indenfor hvilke der kan skabes en ny praksis (Hjort 2005: 387). Entreprenørskab er dermed ikke selve skabelsen af det nye, ikke selve den kreative ødelæggelse, men det er en skabelse af (fri)rum hvor creative destruction, skabelsen, en ny praksis, kan opstå. En skabelse af sådanne rum er netop, hvad den sociale entreprenør vil.

Superflex
Det klassiske eksempel på en social entreprenør er Muhammad Yunus, ophavsmanden til mikrolånstanken og grundlægger af Grameen Bank. Pointen med miko-lånene er, at fattige mennesker, der ikke kan låne penge i en `normal´ bank, kan låne penge til at starte et projekt eller virksomhed, og dermed udnytte deres entrepreneurielle potentiale.
Den danske kunstnergruppe Superflex, er også meget fokuseret på, at mennesker skal have muligheden for at udnytte deres entrepreneurielle potentiale, hvilket kommer til udtryk i sloganet all beings are potential entrepreneurs, og deres projekter bygger på mange af de samme principper som ovennævnte mikro-lån. Note 3XNote 3:Læs desuden Turbulens.nets interview med SuperflexLæs desuden Turbulens.nets interview med Superflex

F.eks. i biogasprojektet Supergas, der er et biogas anlæg til brug for familier i underviklede landbrugsprovinser i Afrika. Anlægget er en simpel konstruktion, hvor afføring gærer i en beholder sammen med vand for således at udvinde metangas til køkkenbrug, el og opvarmning. Anlægget er sådan set en kendt konstruktion, men Superflex ville lave en simplere konstruktion, der kunne købes til en billig penge. Pointen er, at det skal være en økonomisk fordel for familierne at investere i anlægget, idet det på længere sigt skal opveje udgifterne til brændstof eller de indirekte udgifter i at bruge tid på at samle brænde, og på samme tid give dem kontrol over midlerne til de primære fornødenheder.
Gruppen beskriver deres projekter som værktøjer eller tools. Det er noget, der skal bruges – og kan bruges på mange forskellige måder, også uafhængigt af den kontekst Superflex skaber dem i: ”If art has traditionally aimed to reach an audience, Superflex' projects hope to find users” (Will Bradley: Biogas in Africa).

To begreber, der er meget centrale i Superflex´ projekter, er selvorganisering og counter-economic strategies.
Selvorganisering betyder i Superflex’ termer et kollektiv, der organiserer sig selv uafhængigt af politiske strukturer, men ikke nødvendigvis i modsætning til dem. Et karakteristisk træk ved disse organisationer er, at beslutningsprocessen afhænger af gruppen som helhed. Der er intet hierarki, og organisationsstrukturen er åben og repræsentativ og eksisterer kun for at træffe kollektive beslutninger (Will Bradley: Superflex/Counter-Strike/Self-organise). Med counter-economic strategies menes der en strategi, der benytter en økonomisk problemstilling til at anskueliggøre og modarbejde en økonomisk magtbalance.
De to begreber er meget centrale i projektet Guaraná power. Guaraná Power projektet begyndte i 2003, da Superflex under et besøg i Amazonas blev bekendt med et kooperativ af guaranábønder (COIMA) og deres problematiske økonomiske situation. Over en periode på 3-4 år var salgsprisen på guaraná bærret blevet sænket med ca. 80 procent pga. en kartelsammenslutning mellem de store multinationale sodavandsproducenter, der købte bærret til deres produktion. Bønderne var forinden gået sammen i et kooperativ for at have en stærkere forhandlingsposition i forhold til den internationale kartelsammenslutning, men havde ikke været i stand til at opnå nogle favorable resultater, hvilket betød, at mange bønder havde været nødt til at forlade deres erhverv.
I samarbejde med bønderne lavede Superflex en projektstrategi, hvor ideen var at lave et kopiprodukt af en af kartelmedlemmernes sodavand, som guaranábærret oprindeligt indgik i produktionen af. Ideen var at give de få involverede bønder en fair pris for deres råvarer og samtidig anskueliggøre den problematiske økonomiske situation, bønderne stod i.
Strategien var altså at sælge produktet som et modprodukt. Som Bjørnstjerne Christensen fra Superflex siger, handlede det om ”at bruge eksisterende brands strukturerer, logistikker og identitet imod dem (det internationale kartel) - simpelthen bruge dem (brands osv.) som råmateriale. I stedet for at det er bønderne, der leverer et råmateriale, som de aldrig selv bestemmer prisen på.” (Interview i Kopenhagen 2005).
For at give sodavanden en egen identitet skabte de mærket Guaraná Power, hvor de benyttede de samme former og farver som én af kartelmedlemmernes produkter. Ved at give deres produkt et andet navn end originalen, forsøgte de at dække sig ind for eventuelle konflikter om ophavsretten (hvilket ikke virkedeNote 4XNote 4: Efter beskyldninger om at have kritiseret globale varemærker måtte sodavanden trækkes tilbage fra markedet, men blev i starten af 2008 relanceret og censureret til at overholde markedsføringens love (www.guaranapower.org; Information: Guarana Power er tilbage). Efter beskyldninger om at have kritiseret globale varemærker måtte sodavanden trækkes tilbage fra markedet, men blev i starten af 2008 relanceret og censureret til at overholde markedsføringens love (www.guaranapower.org; Information: Guarana Power er tilbage).), samtidig med at de i høj grad spiller på netop problematikken om ophavsrettigheder, og forsøger at bruge de andre mærker til at promovere deres eget.
Formålet med projektet blev at vise, hvordan ”man som en mindre gruppe kan organisere sig og lave et modtræk - hvor man er medbestemmende i hele processen.” (Interview i Kopenhagen 2005).
Målet med projektet blev derfor også at give bønderne mulighed for at kunne løsrive sig fra de multinationale selskaber og producere deres varer i kooperativer, således at fortjenesten forbliver i lokalsamfundet og kan give mulighed for at forbedre de lokale forhold.

Superflex som sociale entreprenører
Det, Superflex gør med deres projekter, er at åbne rum, hvor muligheden for en ny praksis bliver mulig, hvor de involverede mennesker får mulighed for at organisere sig selv og ikke være afhængig af f.eks. store selskaber som i Guaraná Power, eller får kontrol over midlerne til deres primære fornødenheder som i Supergas. Det gør de i bogstaveligste forstand ved at kombinere ting fra den eksisterende orden på en ny måde, bedst eksemplificeret ved projektet Guaraná Power. På samme måde i projektet Supergas, hvor de introducerer en forbedret udgave af et produkt på et nyt marked. På denne måde kan man kalde dem entreprenører i Schumpeteriansk forstand. Og så alligevel ikke helt. For målet er ikke profit, men at forbedre den sociale situation for de involverede. Med udgangspunkt i Hjorth kan man sige, at Superflex “play the very role of creating disruptions and breaks with normalizing and regulating forces.” (Hjorth 2005: 396)
Dermed er det en kritik af den eksisterende orden, i og med at de sætter fokus på uretfærdigheder i fordelingen og marginaliseringen i den kapitalistiske produktionsproces. Men det er i høj grad en kritik, der foregår indenfor rammerne af den eksisterende orden. Den spiller med på de eksisterende regler. Den forsøger ikke at ændre eller kritisere hele systemet, men prøver derimod at forbedre forholdende for de involverede og gøre dem mere retfærdige. Idet der sættes spørgsmålstegn ved retfærdigheden i fordelingen, er det en kritik af kapitalismen, men en kritik, der slår ned i enkelte situationer og forsøger at ændre omstændighederne.
Det er en kritik, der er klar over muligheden for, at nogle af de ting de vil fremhæve som problematiske ved den nuværende situation, potentielt kan optages og bruges af kapitalismen til i højere grad at retfærdiggøre sig selv ved at sætte større fokus på de kritiserede elementer. Men hvis kritikken har en effekt på den måde, at de kritiserede elementer bliver en større del af den økonomiske orden, f.eks. med et større fokus på selv-organisering, kan man vel kalde det en forbedring, om end en lille en. Derfor er det vigtigt at blive ved med at kritisere og skabe nye rum. Hos Schumpeter og Hjorth er det en central pointe, at entreprenøren må blive ved med at skabe det nye, blive ved med at åbne nye rum, hvor der er mulighed for forbedringer. Sådan er det også med kritikken. For at samfundet kan blive bedre og udvikle sig, må man konstant kritisere det og se på, hvordan det kan forbedres og gøres mere retfærdigt. Socialt entreprenørskab kan være en måde at gøre dette på.

Referencer
Boltanski, Luc & Chiappelo, Eve (1999/2007): The New Spirit of Capitalism. Verso

Bradley, Will (2005), Biogas in Africa, Published for the exhibition Emergencies at
MUSAC, Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Castilla y León, (tilgængelig på: www.superflex.dk under text/articles)Bradley, Will (2003), Superflex/Counter-Strike/Self-organise, skrevet for Kiasma and
the Superflex Solo Show, (tilgængelig på adressen www.superflex.dk under text/articles)

Hjorth, Daniel (2005): Organizational Entreprenurship – with de Certeau on
Creating Heterotopias (or Spaces for Play) i Journal of Management Inquiry No 4

Hjorth, Daniel, Johannisson, Bengt & Steyaert, Chris (2003): Entrepreneurship as
discourse and life style i Czarniawska, B. & Sevón G.: The Northern Lights: Organization Theory in Scandinavia. Malmö/Copenhagen/Oslo: Liber/Copenhagen Business School Press/Abstrakt

Information (08.04.2008): Guarana Power er tilbage, tilgængelig på
http://www.information.dk/155896

Interview med Bjørnstjerne Christensen fra Superflex i Kopenhagen den 16. maj 2005 (tilgængeligt på:
http://www.kopenhagen.dk/interviews/interviews/superflex_om_guarana_power/)

Kirzner, Israel M. (1999): Creativity and/or Alertness: A reconsideration of
the Schumpeterian Entrepreneur. Review of Austrian Economics 11. Kluwer Academic Publishers.

Larsen, Gitte (2006): Social innovation i Fremtidsorientering no. 3

Schumpeter, Joseph A. (1911/1961): The Theory of Economic Development: An
Inquiry into Profits, Capital, Credit, Interest and the Business Cycle. Oxford University Press

Schumpeter, Joseph A. (1911/2002): Theorie der wirtschaftlichen Entwicklung.
American Journal of Economics and Sociology, Volume 61, no. 2

Ligningsrådets afgørelse vedr. timebank konceptet.

Timebank konceptet - skattefrie vennetjenester



Her står du: Afgørelser, domme, kendelser, SKAT-meddelelser mv. > 2010 > 2006
Timebank konceptet - skattefrie vennetjenester
Dokumentets dato

18 aug 2006
Dato for offentliggørelse

22 sep 2006 11:25
SKM-nummer

SKM2006.573.LSR
Myndighed

Landsskatteretten
Sagsnummer

2-5-1800-0084
Dokumenttype

Kendelse
Overordnede emner

Skat
Emneord

Timebank, koncept, skattefrie, vennetjenester
Resumé

Udveksling af arbejdskraft og naturalier i forbindelse med et timebankprojekt kunne ikke karakteriseres som vennetjenester, men medførte indkomstskattepligt for modtagerne.
Reference(r)

Statsskatteloven §§ 4 og 5
Henvisning

Ligningsvejledningen 2006-4: E.A.1.1.
Henvisning

Ligningsvejledningen 2006-4: A.A.1.1.
Yderligere oplysninger - klik her.
Overemner-emner Personskat, virksomhedsskat, aktionærer og selskaber samt ejendomsavancebeskatning
Informationssegment Juridisk information

Der klages over Ligningsrådets bindende forhåndsbesked af 11. oktober 2005 i henhold til kapitel 2A: Bindende forhåndsbeskeder m.v. i den dagældende skattestyrelseslov, lovbekendtgørelse nr. 868 af 12. august 2004.

Landsskatterettens afgørelse

Spørgsmålet til Ligningsrådet var:

"Kan en ordning beskrevet som nedennævnte karakteriseres som vennetjeneste og dermed være skattefri for deltagerne?"

Ligningsrådets svar:

"Nej".

Landsskatteretten finder ligeledes, at det stillede spørgsmål skal besvares med "Nej", hvorved Ligningsrådets afgørelse stadfæstes.

Sagens oplysninger

Det fremgår af sagens oplysninger, at timebank konceptet opstod i USA i midten af 1980'erne, da borgerretsadvokaten Edgar Cahn iværksatte det første projekt under navnet "Time Dollars". Senere bredte ideen sig til England. Der er nu over 250 timebankprojekter i USA og 142 i England samt projekter i Canada, Israel, Italien og Japan.

Ideen bag timebank er: At en person ved at hjælpe andre mennesker kan tjene timer, som personen kan sætte i timebanken som et tilgodehavende. Dette tilgodehavende kan personen senere "hæve" i form af ydelser fra andre deltagere, når personen selv har brug for hjælp.

En timebank er en non profit organisation ofte organiseret som en medlemsforening. Deltagelse er gratis, og typisk deltager der mellem 50-200 i et projekt. En timebank er et redskab til at støtte og koordinere udveksling af hjælp og service på ukommerciel basis mellem beboere i et lokalområde. Endvidere fungerer timebanken som et lokalt informationssystem og netværk.

For at være deltager i timebanken skal personen udfylde en ansøgningsblanket, interviewes og deltage i en introduktion til timebanksystemet. Alle kan deltage i timebanken uanset alder, social status, etnisk oprindelse o.lign. En deltager tjener en time for hver time, deltageren bruger på at hjælpe andre. Alle deltagernes tid har samme værdi. En deltager kan benytte den deponerede tid, når som helst han/ hun ønsker hjælp og assistance fra andre deltagere. Timerne registreres i timebanken, og en administrator holder regnskab med timebanken.

Registrering er et væsentligt princip for, at timebankideen kan få den tiltænkte effekt. Registreringen har følgende formål:

1. Registreringen synliggør, hvilke ressourcer udsatte grupper har og viser samtidig, at disse ressourcer værdsættes af andre.
2. Registreringen sikrer, at timebanken kan fungere som et lokalt informationssystem med oplysninger om hvem, der kan hjælpe med hvad og hvornår.
3. Registreringen sikrer, at systemet har gennemskuelighed overfor både andre deltagere og for relevante myndigheder.

De ydelser der kan udveksles via timebanken, kan være alle mulige ydelser, og de mest typiske er: Hjælp til husligt arbejde, hjælp til at købe ind eller gå ærinder, hjælp til havearbejde, mindre reparationer i hjemmet, børnepasning, besøge eller ringe til ensomme personer, ledsage handicappede personer, dansk undervisning, lektiehjælp, være tolk, hjælp til brug af computer, hjælpe med at skrive breve eller udfylde blanketter til de offentlige myndigheder.

Det fremgår videre af sagens oplysninger, at spørgeren påtænker at etablere en timebank i det vestlige Århus dvs. Urbanområdet omfattende Gellerup, Hasle og Herredsvang. Urbanområdet består af ca. 20.000 mennesker, hvoraf halvdelen er af anden etnisk herkomst end dansk. Ca. 70 % af disse mennesker har ikke tilknytning til arbejdsmarkedet. Området er således præget af stor arbejdsløshed og manglende integration mellem forskellige etniske grupper og mellem etniske grupper og danskere. Timebankens formål er at modvirke nogle af disse problemer ved at udvikle og opretholde et gensidigt støttende lokalt netværk, som fremmer den sociale integration.

Urbanområdets sociale problemer har bevirket, at området har fået støtte fra EU-Kommissionen (URBAN II) for derved at sætte gang i forbedring af livskvaliteten i et byområde med særligt tunge problemer.

Det er hensigten, at timebanken i Urbanområdet skal organiseres som en medlemsforening. Foreningen kan have op til 200 medlemmer, der forventes at udveksle ca. 10.000 timer hjælp til hinanden i lokalsamfundet. Timebanken er bemandet med to fuldtidsansatte en projektkoordinator og en timebankadministrator.

Det fremgår endelig af sagens oplysninger, at Ministeriet for Flygtninge og Indvandrere og Integration havde bevilget timebankprojektet 600.000 kr. betinget af, at Ligningsrådet godkendte projektet.

Ligningsrådets afgørelse

Ligningsrådet har anført, at timebanksprojektets udveksling af arbejdskraft og naturalier er skattepligtige for modtageren, jf. statsskattelovens § 4. Det fremgår således, af statsskattelovens § 4, at alle indtægter (såvel løbende som engangsindtægter) i form af kontanter eller naturalier er skattepligtige, når de er tilgået skatteyderen. Det kræves blot, at indtægten skal være realiseret og have økonomisk værdi.

Ligningsrådet har herefter anført, at det traditionelt er accepteret i praksis, at vennetjenester og hjælpsomhedsydelser og socialt arbejde ikke beskattes. Den nærmere begrundelse er ikke klar men beror formentlig på, at vennetjenester og bistand mellem nærtstående er et normalt led i privatlivet og måske endda en væsentlig forudsætning for, at relationer mellem mennesker kan bestå. Selve afgrænsningen af, hvornår vennetjenester og tilsvarende bistandsydelser er skattepligtige, ligger ikke fast i praksis. De typisk anvendte kriterier til denne afgrænsning er bl.a., at der arbejdes vederlagsfrit, at der ikke erlægges nogen modydelse, at der ikke er tale om gensidig bistand eller krav på værdier samt at der ikke føres regnskab med udvekslingen af ydelserne. I virkelighedens verden er vennetjenester vel egentlig styret af en fælles opfattelse af "at den ene tjeneste er den anden værd", selvom alle er indforstået med, at begrebet ikke rummer noget aktuelt krav.

Det er Ligningsrådets opfattelse, at arten af de ydelser, der leveres gennem timebanken og det faktum, at deltagerne ikke har noget egentligt krav på en bestemt modydelse samt det bagvedliggende sociale formål kunne trække i retning af at karakterisere ordningen som udveksling af skattefrie vennetjenester.

På den anden side skal der føres regnskab med ydelserne, netop fordi en af ideerne bag ordningen er at "opdrage" beboerne til at "den ene tjeneste er den anden værd" qua en økonomiseringsproces. Netop timeregnskabet er en utvetydig markering af "at giver man en time kan man få en time igen". Der sker en prissætning af ydelser (time for time), der gør det nemt at udveksle, og som får deltagerne til at forstå, at der er en sammenhæng mellem at "yde og nyde". Selve økonomiseringen af ydelserne på timebasis skaber implicit et nøjagtigt afmålt krav på modydelse. Dette styrkes af det forhold, at ydelserne som udgangspunkt ikke ligger i et på forhånd naturligt miljø for vennetjenester og hjælpsomhed (familie, vennekreds o.lign.), men systematiseres til at foregå mellem fremmede, der blot har til fælles at bo i det samme område.

Ligningsrådet har henvist til Skatteministeriets rapport af 4. november 2002 om "Vennetjenester/ sort arbejde, eget arbejde, forbrug af egne varer, produkter og ydelser samt personalegoder". Rapporten konkluderede, at det ikke er hensigtsmæssigt at lovgive på området, fordi det af afgrænsningsmæssige årsager ikke vil skabe større klarhed. Men undervejs i rapporten formulerede arbejdsgruppen forslag til en juridisk bestemmelse som en kodificering af gældende praksis:

"Til den skattepligtige indkomst medregnes ikke værdien af vennetjenester. Som vennetjenester betragtes sædvanlige ydelser mellem familie, venner og lignende, som skyldes almindelig hjælpsomhed, gavmildhed eller socialt engagement. Vennetjenester skal ydes uden for erhvervslivet og indenfor privatsfæren, og de skal være af uformel og ikke-kommerciel natur. De må ikke bestå i samtidig udveksling af forskellige ydelser inden for de pågældendes erhverv eller i penge og lignende likvide midler. De må ikke udveksles på basis af deltagelse i klubber, foreninger og lignende eller på anden måde, hvor formålet helt eller delvis er at levere ydelser til hinanden."

Det er herefter Ligningsrådets opfattelse, at spørgsmålet, om en ydelse kan betragtes som en vennetjeneste, må afgøres helt konkret fra sag til sag, idet der herved sædvanligvis fokuseres på følgende forhold:

1. Personlige relationer.
2. Fraværet af modydelser.
3. Ydelsernes art.
4. Ydelsernes omfang.

Told- og Skattestyrelsens har fremført følgende bemærkninger til disse 4 punkter. Ligningsrådet har tilsluttet sig styrelsens bemærkninger:

....

"De personlige relationer

Der foreligger - som udgangspunkt - ikke andre personlige relationer mellem deltagerne, end et medlemskab i foreningen. Sådanne relationer mellem en bred kreds af personer er ikke tilstrækkeligt grundlag for at kunne udveksle skattefrie vennetjenester. Vennetjenester ydes normalt på helt uformelt grundlag, alene på baggrund af de (moralske) normer, der gælder for venskaber. Selve behovet for normering af den hjælp, der skal ydes taler imod, at opfatte hjælpen som ydet i kraft af de personlige relationer.

Der vil i forbindelse med foreningens aktiviteter naturligvis kunne opstå personlige relationer mellem deltagerne, men de tjenester, der ydes i kraft af disse relationer, vil følge sine egne regler ("venskabets normer").

Fravær af modydelser

Det anføres, at deltagere i Time-Bank-projektet ikke har et egentligt retskrav på modydelser, og at der nærmest kun er tale om en moralsk forpligtelse.

Uanset om der består et egentligt retskrav på at få hjælp, er det ToldSkats opfattelse, at der under alle omstændigheder foreligger rettigheder og forpligtelser, der rækker videre end det, der følger af moralske rettigheder og forpligtelser.

Hvis formålet alene var gensidig nabohjælp baseret på moralske forpligtelser, ville det ikke være nødvendigt med et timeregnskab. Det ville i så fald være tilstrækkeligt, at det af vedtægterne fremgik, at personer, der modtager hjælp må tilstræbe at yde ligeså mange timers hjælp selv.

Deltagerne i projektet har som udgangspunkt ikke krav på ydelser, hvis de ikke selv leverer til andre. De, der ikke kan yde, kan modtage timer via en "hjælpefond", men en forudsætning herfor er, at andre har doneret til denne. Foreningen kan således ikke ensidigt disponere over de af medlemmerne opsparede timer. Deltagerne bestemmer selv om de vil beholde opsparede timer (og dermed få et vist krav på modydelser) eller om de vil donere dem til hjælpefonden.

Det er efter ToldSkats opfattelse ikke afgørende, om der - ved levering af egen ydelse - opstår et retskrav på en modydelse. Det forhold, at deltagerne optjener timer, uden at det ligger klart, om hvilken ydelse, der modtages til gengæld, kan højst bevirke en udskydelse af beskatningstidspunktet. Det er ikke de ydelser deltagerne afgiver, der er skattepligtige, men de ydelser, de modtager. Som udgangspunkt kan deltagerne ikke modtage ydelser uden selv at have leveret, og de ydelser, der faktisk modsvares vil således være modydelser for de timer modtageren selv har leveret.

Ydelsens art og omfang

Modtagelse og levering af typisk erhvervsmæssige ydelser i større omfang - især inden for yderens erhverv - falder udenfor begrebet vennetjenester. Det er tanken, at professionelle erhvervsydelser ikke kan indgå i systemet, og at man således ikke kan få renoveret sit hus, få udført professionelt VVS- og el-arbejde eller få professionel regnskabsbistand gennem systemet.

De eksempler, der er nævnt om erfaringer med Time-Bank projekter i andre lande (havearbejde, reparationsarbejder, sprogundervisning, ansættelse af personale og zoneterapi) illustrerer de problemer, der vil kunne opstå i afgræsningen heraf, og dermed de misbrugsmuligheder en generelt formuleret skattefritagelse for ordningen vil indebære. Der vedlægges i den forbindelse et notat om den skattemæssige behandling af "Barber-Clubs"/Byttecentraler" i USA, (Bilag 6).

Vennetjenester/sort arbejde

Som anført af den kommunale ligningsmyndighed, har en arbejdsgruppe under Skatteministeriet i november 2002 udarbejdet en rapport om bl.a. vennetjenester og sort arbejde. Rapporten er vedlagt som bilag 7. Arbejdsgruppen konkluderer, at dens forsøg på at opstille en afgrænsning af skattefri vennetjenester ikke har den fornødne objektivitet og klarhed og den kan ikke forhindre misbrug.

Kontrolmæssigt vil det afstedkomme meget store problemer at indføre bestemmelser om skattefrihed for "Time-Banker", idet der uophørligt ville opstå grænsetilfælde ovenfor vennetjenester og sort arbejde.

Det ville være en næsten uoverskuelig opgave at fastlægge i praksis, hvornår der forelå en vennetjeneste af normal kaliber, og hvornår ikke.

Det ville yderligere komplicere situationen, såfremt der forsøgtes indført retlige standarder, hvor skattevæsenet skulle "fastsætte" værdien af den enkelte ydelse i relation til den konkrete person/persongruppe."

Spørgerens påstand og argumenter

Spørgeren har over for Landsskatteretten nedlagt påstand om, at svaret ændres til "ja" og har i den forbindelse gjort gældende, at timebankprojektet ikke har nogen skattemæssige konsekvenser for deltagerne, idet der er tale om skattefrie vennetjenester.

Spørgeren har oplyst, at det grundlæggende sigte med timebanksystemet er af social karakter og ikke af økonomisk karakter. Formålet med timebanksystemet er at styrke udsatte lokalsamfund og grupper af mennesker gennem netværksdannelse og at øge adgangen til service og ressourcer for alle i lokalsamfundet.

Det er herefter gjort gældende, at den hjælp og service, der udveksles i timebanksystemet, er almindelig nabohjælpsydelser. Der er primært tale om ydelser, der foregår i hjemmet og på personlig basis. Det er hjælp og service, som familiemedlemmer og venner normalt vil yde hinanden, hvis de boede i lokalområdet. Professionelle erhvervsydelser kan ikke indgå i det timebankssystem, der ønskes etableret i Danmark. Man kan således ikke via timebankssystemet få udført professionelt byggearbejde, få renoveret sit hus, få udført professionelt VVS- og El-arbejde eller få professionel regnskabsbistand. Selvstændige, der er medlem af timebanken, kan ikke bruge deres opsparede timer til at få ydelser i deres virksomhed.

Der er ifølge spørgeren ikke nogen værdistigning i timebankssystemet, idet alle deltageres tid har samme værdi. Værdien af den service og hjælp, der udveksles, er udelukkende baseret på det antal timer af service, der ydes uden hensyn til hvilken form for service eller hjælp, der er tale om. Timebanken opkræver ikke medlemskontingent eller gebyr for at deltage i systemet.

Der er ikke nogen juridisk sikkerhed for, at deltagerne kan modtage hjælp og service for de timer, de selv har ydet service. Der er alene en moralsk forpligtelse. Der skabes således ikke kontraktmæssige rettigheder eller forpligtelser mellem deltagerne i forbindelse med udvekslingen af ydelser. Deltagerne kan ikke konvertere eller sælge de opsparede timer med den undtagelse, at deltagerne kan donere timer til deres familie og venner.

Timebanksystemet sætter endvidere ingen grænser for, hvornår en deltager skal modtage service. Der kan derfor være et interval på flere år fra en deltager har ydet service og hjælp, til deltageren selv første gang modtager hjælp og service. Der er i denne forbindelse henvist til en optegnelse fra en amerikansk timebank, der viser, at der er stor forskel på deltagernes konti i timebanken mht. det antal timer, der ydes, og det antal timer der modtages.

Spørgeren har under kontorforhandlingen anført, at lovgiver bør give Skatteministeren en bemyndigelsesparagraf til at igangsætte timebankprojektet med de af spørgeren stillede forudsætninger.

Spørgeren har ligeledes under kontorforhandlingen fortalt om tilsvarende ordninger i USA og England, der er skattefrie og har stor succes. Ud fra disse erfaringer vil projektet i Danmark i løbet af det første års tid formentlig omfatte ca. 50 personer og i løbet af de første 2 år omfatte ca. 100 personer. Det er spørgerens skøn, at en deltager i gennemsnit vil udveksle 2-4 timer om måneden. Der vil således ikke være tale om et egentlig arbejde på deltid eller på fuld tid.

Endelig er følgende bemærkninger fremført:

* Der er tale om ydelser, som ikke kan afsættes på det danske marked, idet omhandlede personer ikke kan få job. Derfor har ydelserne reelt ingen værdi.
* Timebankprojektet vil have stor samfundsmæssig værdi. Der er tale om personer, som adskillige gange har fået afslag på job, og som via projektet vil komme i gang igen og bidrage til den sociale økonomi. Deltageren vil via projektet forstå, at hans/ hendes arbejde har en værdi.
* En bagatelgrænse for beskatning må medføre, at de omhandlede ydelser er skattefrie. Der er henvist til, at et firma kan give hver medarbejder en julegave på op til 500 kr. skattefrit.
* Det er mærkeligt, at Ligningsrådet hævder, at deltagerne ikke kan være venner, bare fordi de bor i lokalområdet. Det er som om, Ligningsrådet forudsætter, at vennetjenester kun kan ske indenfor familien.
* Man vil gennemføre ordningen, selvom deltagerne bliver beskattet.

Landsskatterettens bemærkninger og begrundelse

Det fremgår af statsskattelovens § 4, at alle indkomster som hovedregel er skattepligtige. Skattepligten efter statsskattelovens § 4 omfatter således alle erhvervelser med økonomisk værdi, uanset om der modtages penge eller naturalier. Undtagelser til skattepligten efter statsskattelovens § 4 fremgår af statsskattelovens § 5 og af særlovgivningen, herunder en række bestemmelser i ligningsloven. Herudover følger det af praksis, at vennetjenester ikke omfattes af skattepligten og derfor er skattefrie for modtageren.

I Skatteministeriets rapport af 4. november 2002 om "Vennetjenester/ sort arbejde, eget forbrug, forbrug af egne varer, produkter og ydelser samt personalegoder" fremgår følgende om vennetjenester:

"Til den skattepligtige indkomst medregnes ikke værdien af vennetjenester. Som vennetjenester betragtes sædvanlige ydelser mellem familie, venner og lignende, som skyldes almindelig hjælpsomhed, gavmildhed eller socialt engagement. Vennetjenester skal ydes uden for erhvervslivet og indenfor privatsfæren, og de skal være af uformel og ikke-kommerciel natur. De må ikke bestå i samtidig udveksling af forskellige ydelser inden for de pågældendes erhverv eller i penge og lignende likvide midler. De må ikke udveksles på basis af deltagelse i klubber, foreninger og lignende eller på anden måde, hvor formålet helt eller delvis er at levere ydelser til hinanden."

Det er herefter Landsskatterettens opfattelse, at ydelserne i omhandlede timebank ikke kan karakteriseres som skattefrie vennetjenester, idet der føres systematisk regnskab med deltagernes ydelser, hvorved der sker en prisfastsættelse af hver ydelse i forholdet 1 time for 1 time. Regnskabet med ydelserne skaber et nøjagtigt afmålt krav på modydelser. Hertil kommer, at deltagerne ikke yder hjælp i kraft af personlige relationer (venskab eller familie), men i kraft af deres medlemskab af timebankforeningen. Der henvises endvidere til Ligningsrådets afgørelse og bemærkninger, som retten i det hele kan tilslutte sig.

Landsskatteretten finder på denne baggrund, at modtagelse af ydelser via timebanken er skattepligtig indkomst for modtageren, jf. statsskattelovens § 4. Retten stadfæster derfor Ligningsrådets afgørelse, hvorefter det stillede spørgsmål er besvaret med "nej".

Wuhu

Act Natural

Fiction writers as a species tend to be oglers. They tend to lurk and to stare. The minute fiction writers stop moving, they start lurking, and stare. They are born watchers. They are viewers. They are the ones on the subway about whose nonchalant stare there is something creepy, somehow. Almost predatory. This is because human situations are writers' food. Fiction writers watch other humans sort of the way gapers slow down for car wrecks: they covet a vision of themselves as witnesses.

But fiction writers as a species also tend to be terribly self-conscious. Even by U.S. standards. Devoting lots of productive time to studying closely how people come across to them, fiction writers also spend lots of less productive time wondering nervously how they come across to other people. How they appear, how they seem, whether their shirttail might be hanging out their fly, whether there's maybe lipstick on their teeth, whether the people they're ogling can maybe size them up as somehow creepy, lurkers and starers.

The result is that a surprising majority of fiction writers, born watchers, tend to dislike being objects of people's attention. Being watched. The exceptions to this rule - Mailer, McInerney, Janowitz - create the misleading impression that lots of belles-lettres types like people's attention. Most don't. The few who like attention just naturally get more attention. The rest of us get less, and ogle.

Most of the fiction writers I know are Americans under forty. I don't know whether fiction writers under forty watch more television than other American species. Statisticians report that television is watched over six hours a day in the average American household. I don't know any fiction writers who live in average American households. I suspect Louise Erdrich might. Actually I have never seen an average American household. Except on TV.

So right away you can see a couple of things that look potentially great, for U.S. fiction writers, about U.S. television. First, television does a lot of our predatory human research for us. American human beings are a slippery and protean bunch, in real life, as hard to get any kind of univocal handle on as a literary territory that's gone from Darwinianly naturalistic to cybernetically post-postmodern in eighty years. But television comes equipped with just such a syncretic handle. If we want to know what American normality is - what Americans want to regard as normal - we can trust television. For television's whole raison is reflecting what people want to see. It's a mirror. Not the Stendhalian mirror reflecting the blue sky and mud puddle. More like the overlit bathroom mirror before which the teenager monitors his biceps and determines his better profile. This kind of window on nervous American self-perception is just invaluable, fictionwise. And writers can have faith in television. There is a lot of money at stake, after all; and television retains the best demographers applied social science has to offer, and these researchers can determine precisely what Americans in 1990 are, want, see: what we as Audience want to see ourselves as. Television, from the surface on down, is about desire. Fictionally speaking, desire is the sugar in human food.

The second great thing is that television looks to be an absolute godsend for a human subspecies that loves to watch people but hates to be watched itself. For the television screen affords access only one way. A psychic ball-check valve. We can see Them; They can't see Us. We can relax, unobserved, as we ogle. I happen to believe this is why television also appeals so much to lonely people. To voluntary shut-ins. Every lonely human I know watches way more than the average U.S. six hours a day. The lonely, like the fictional, love one-way watching. For lonely people are usually lonely not because of hideous deformity or odor or obnoxiousness - in fact there exist today social and support groups for persons with precisely these features. Lonely people tend rather to be lonely because they decline to bear the emotional costs associated with being around other humans. They are allergic to people. People affect them too strongly. Let's call the average U.S. lonely person Joe Briefcase. Joe Briefcase just loathes the strain of the self-consciousness which so oddly seems to appear only when other real human beings are around, staring, their human sense-antennae abristle. Joe B. fears how he might appear to watchers. He sits out the stressful U.S. game of appearance poker.

But lonely people, home, alone, still crave sights and scenes. Hence television. Joe can stare at Them, on the screen; They remain blind to Joe. It's almost like voyeurism. I happen to know lonely people who regard television as a veritable deus ex machina for voyeurs. And a lot of the criticism, the really rabid criticism less leveled than sprayed at networks, advertisers, and audiences alike, has to do with the charge that television has turned us into a nation of sweaty, slack-jawed voyeurs. This charge turns out to be untrue, but for weird reasons.

What classic voyeurism is is espial: watching people who don't know you're there as they go about the mundane but erotically charged little businesses of private life. It's interesting that so much classic voyeurism involves media of framed glass-windows, telescopes, etc. Maybe the framed glass is why the analogy to television is so tempting. But TV-watching is a different animal from Peeping Tourism. Because the people we're watching through TV's framed-glass screen are not really ignorant of the fact that somebody is watching them. In fact a whole lot of somebodies. In fact the people on television know that it is in virtue of this truly huge crowd of ogling somebodies that they are on the screen, engaging in broad non-mundane gestures, at all. Television does not afford true espial because television is performance, spectacle, which by definition requires watchers. We're not voyeurs here at all. We're just viewers. We are the Audience, megametrically many, though most often we watch alone. E unibus pluram.(1)

One reason fiction writers seem creepy in person is that by vocation they really are voyeurs. They need that straightforward visual theft of watching somebody without his getting to prepare a speciable watchable self. The only real illusion in espial is suffered by the voyee, who doesn't know he's giving off images and impressions. A problem with so many of us fiction writers under forty using television as a substitute for true espial, however, is that TV "voyeurism" involves a whole gorgeous orgy of illusions for the pseudo-spy, when we watch. Illusion (1) is that we're voyeurs here at all: the voyees behind the screen's glass are only pretending ignorance. They know perfectly well we're out there. And that we're there is also very much on the minds of those behind the second layer of glass, the lenses and monitors via which technicians and arrangers apply no small ingenuity to hurl the visible images at us. What we see is far from stolen; it's proffered - illusion (2). And, illusion (3), what we're seeing through the framed pane isn't people in real situations that do or even could go on without consciousness of Audience. What young writers are scanning for data on some reality to fictionalize is already composed of fictional characters in highly ritualized narratives. Plus, (4), we're not really even seeing "characters" at all: it's not Major Frank Burns, pathetic self-important putz from Fort Wayne, Indiana; it's Larry Linville of Ojai, California, actor stoic enough to endure thousands of letters (still coming in, even in syndication) from pseudo-voyeurs mistakenly berating him for being a putz. And, if (5) isn't too out-there for you, it's ultimately of course not even actors we're espying, not even people: it's EM-propelled analog waves and ionized streams and rear-screen chemical reactions throwing off phosphenes in grids of dots not much more lifelike than Seurat's own impressionistic "statements" on perceptual illusion. Good lord and (6) the dots are coming out of our furniture, all we're spying on is our own furniture; and our very own chairs and lamps and bookspines sit visible but unseen at our gaze's frame as we contemplate "Korea" or are "taken live to Amman, Jordan," or regard the plusher chairs and classier spines of the Huxtable "home" as illusory cues that this is some domestic interior whose membrane we have, slyly, unnoticed, violated. (7) and (8) and illusions ad inf.

Not that realities about actors and phosphenes and furniture are unknown to us. We simply choose to ignore them. For six hours a day. They are part of the

belief we suspend. But we're asked to hoist such a heavy load aloft. Illusions of voyeurism and privileged access require real complicity from viewers. How can we be made so willingly to acquiesce for hours daily to the illusion that the people on the TV don't know they're being looked at, to the fantasy that we're transcending privacy and feeding on unself-conscious human activity? There might be lots of reasons why these unrealities are so swallowable, but a big one is that the performers behind the two layers of glass are - varying degrees of Thespian talent aside - absolute geniuses at seeming unwatched. Now, seeming unwatched in front of a TV camera is a genuine art. Take a look at how civilians act when a TV camera is pointed at them: they simply spaz out, or else go all rigor mortis. Even PR people and politicians are, camera-wise, civilians. And we love to laugh at how stiff and false non-professionals appear, on television. How unnatural But if you've ever once been the object of that terrible blank round glass stare, you know all too well how self-conscious it makes you. A harried guy with earphones and a clipboard tells you to "act natural" as your face begins to leap around on your skull, struggling for a seemingly unwatched expression that feels impossible because "seeming unwatched" is, like the "act natural" which fathered it, oxymoronic. Try driving a golf ball as someone asks you whether you in- or exhale on your backswing, or getting promised lavish rewards if you can avoid thinking of a rhinoceros for ten seconds, and you'll get some idea of the truly heroic contortions of body and mind that must be required for Don Johnson to act unwatched as he's watched by a lens that's an overwhelming emblem of what Emerson, years before TV, called "the gaze of millions."

Only a certain very rare species of person, for Emerson, is "fit to stand the gaze of millions." It is not your normal, hard-working, quietly desperate species of American. The man who can stand the megagaze is a walking imago, a certain type of transcendent freak who, for Emerson, "carries the holiday in his eye."(2) The Emersonian holiday television actors' eyes carry is the potent illusion of a vacation from self-consciousness. Not worrying about how you come across. A total unallergy to gazes. It is contemporarily heroic. It is frightening and strong. It is also, of course, an act, a counterfeit impression - for you have to be just abnormally self-conscious and self-controlling to appear unwatched before lenses. The self-conscious appearance of unself-consciousness is the grand illusion behind TV's mirror-hall of illusions; and for us, the Audience, it is both medicine and poison.

For we gaze at these rare, highly trained, seemingly unwatched people for six hours daily. And we love these people. In terms of attributing to them true supernatural assets and desiring to emulate them, we sort of worship them. In a real Joe Briefcase-type world that shifts ever more starkly from some community of relationships to networks of strangers connected by self-interest and contest and image, the people we espy on TV offer us familiarity, community. Intimate friendship. But we split what we see. The characters are our "close friends"; but the performers are beyond strangers, they're images, demigods, and they move in a different sphere, hang out with and marry only each other, seem even as actors accessible to Audience only via the mediation of tabloids, talk show, EM signal. And yet both actors and characters, so terribly removed and filtered, seem so natural, when we watch.

Given how much we watch and what watching means, it's inevitable - but toxic - for those of us fictionists or Joe Briefcases who wish to be voyeurs to get the idea that these persons behind the glass, persons who are often the most colorful, attractive, animated, alive people in our daily experience, are also people who are oblivious to the fact that they are watched. It's toxic for allergic people because it sets up an alienating cycle, and also for writers because it replaces fiction research with a weird kind of fiction consumption. We self-conscious Americans' oversensitivity to real humans fixes us before the television and its ball-check valve in an attitude of rapt, relaxed reception. We watch various actors play various characters, etc. For 360 minutes per diem, we receive unconscious reinforcement of the deep thesis that the most significant feature of truly alive persons is watchableness, and that genuine human worth is not just identical with but rooted in the phenomenon of watching. And that the single biggest part of real watchableness is seeming to be unaware that there's any watching going on. Acting natural. The persons we young fiction writers and assorted shut-ins most study, feel for, feel through are, by virtue of a genius for feigned unself-consciousness, fit to stand gazes. And we, trying desperately to be nonchalant, perspire creepily, on the subway.

The Finger

Weighty existential predicaments aside, there's no denying that people in the U.S.A. watch so much television because it's fun. I know I watch for fun, most of the time, and that at least 51 percent of the time I do have fun when I watch. This doesn't mean I do not take television seriously. One claim of this essay is that the most dangerous thing about television for U.S. fiction writers is that we yield to the temptation not to take television seriously as both a disseminator and a definer of the cultural atmosphere we breathe and process, that many of us are so blinded by constant exposure that we regard TV the way Reagan's lame FCC chairman Mark Fowler professed to in 1981, as "just another appliance, a toaster with pictures."(3)

Television nevertheless is just plain pleasurable, though it may seem odd that so much of the pleasure my generation gets from television lies in making fun of it. But you have to remember that younger Americans grew up as much with people's disdain for TV as we did with TV itself I knew it was a "vast wasteland" way before I knew who Newton Minow or Mark Fowler were. And it's just fun to laugh cynically at television - at the way the laughter from sitcoms' "live studio audience" is always suspiciously constant in pitch and duration, or at the way travel is depicted on The Flintstones by having the exact same cut-rate cartoon tree, rock, and house go by four times. It's fun, when a withered June Allyson comes on-screen for Depend Adult Undergarments and says "If you have a bladder-control problem, you're not alone," to hoot and shout back "Well, chances are you're alone quite a bit, June!"

Most scholars and critics who write about U.S. popular culture, though, seem both to take TV seriously and to suffer real pain over what they see. There's this well-known critical litany about television's vapidity, shallowness, and irrealism. The litany is often far cruder and triter than what the critics complain about, which I think is why most younger viewers find pro criticism of television far less interesting than pro television itself. I found solid examples of what I'm talking about on the first day I even looked. The New York Times Arts & Leisure section for Sunday, 8/05/90, simply bulged with bitter critical derision for TV, and some of the most unhappy articles weren't about just low-quality programming so much as about how TV's become this despicable instrument of cultural decay. In a summary review of all 1990's "crash and burn" summer box-office hits in which "realism ... seems to have gone almost entirely out of fashion," Janet Maslin locates her true anti-reality culprit: "We may be hearing about |real life' on television shows made up of 15-second sound bites (in which |real people' not only speak in brief, neat truisms but actually seem to think that way, perhaps as a result of having watched too much reality-molding television themselves)."(4) And one Stephen Holden, in what starts out as a mean pop music article, knows perfectly well what's behind what he hates: "Pop music is no longer a world unto itself but an adjunct of television, whose stream of commercial images projects a culture in which everything is for sale and the only things that count are fame, power, and the body beautiful."(5) This stuff just goes on and on, in the Times. The only Arts & Leisure piece I could find with anything upbeat to say about TV that morning was a breathless article on how lots of Ivy League graduates are now flying straight from school to New York and Los Angeles to become television writers and are clearing well over $200,000 to start and enjoying rapid advancement to harried clip-boarded production status. In this regard, 8/05's Times is a good example of a strange mix that's been around for a few years now: weary contempt for television as a creative product and cultural force, combined with beady-eyed fascination about the actual behind-the-glass mechanics of making that product and projecting that force.

Surely we all have friends we just hate to hear talk about TV because they so clearly loathe it - they sneer relentlessly at the hackneyed plots, the unlikely dialogue, the Cheez-Whiz resolutions, the bland condescension of the news anchors, the shrill wheedling of commercials - and yet are just as clearly obsessed with it, somehow need to hate their six hours a day, day in and out. Junior advertising executives, aspiring filmakers, and graduate- school poets are in my experience especially prone to this condition where they simultaneously hate, fear, and need television, and try to disinfect themselves of whatever so much viewing might do to them by watching TV with weary irony instead of the rapt credulity most of us grew up with. (Note that most fiction writers still tend to go for the rapt credulity.)

But, since the wearily disgusted Times has its own demographic thumb on the pulse of news-readerly taste, it's safe to conclude that most educated, Times-buying Americans are wearily disgusted by television, have this weird hate-need-fear-6-hrs.-daily gestalt about it. Published TV scholarship sure reflects this mood. And the numbingly dull quality to most "literary" television analyses is due less to the turgid abstraction scholars employ to make television seem an OK object of "aesthetic" inquiry - cf. an '86 treatise: "The form of my Tuesday evening's prime-time pleasure is structured by a dialectic of elision and rift among various windows through which ... |flow' is more of a circumstance than a product. The real output is the quantum, the smallest maneuverable broadcast bit"(6) - than to the tired, jaded cynicism of television experts who mock and revile the very phenomenon they've chosen as scholarly vocation. It's like people who despise - I mean big-time, long-term despise - their spouses or jobs, but won't split up or quit. Critical complaint degenerates quickly into plain whining. The fecund question about U.S. television is no longer whether there are some truly nasty problems here but rather what on earth's to be done about them. On this question pop critics are mute.

In fact it's in the U.S. arts, particularly in certain strands of contemporary American fiction, that the really interesting questions about end-of-the-century TV - What is it about televisual culture that we so hate? Why are …

Interview med Jacques Verges og læg mærke til at aritklen kommer fra slobodans hjemmeside.

THE ROBERT CHALMERS INTERVIEW: TRIALS AND TRIBULATIONS; WHETHER YOU ARE A NAZI HENCHMAN, INTERNATIONAL TERRORIST OR A DICTATOR
Independent on Sunday (London) - May 9, 2004, Sunday

BY: ROBERT CHALMERS



[GRAPHIC] Clockwise from left: Verges (front) at the trial of Gestapo chief Klaus Barbie, 1987; Isabelle Coutant-Peyre (right), a one-time lover of Verges who later became involved with his client Carlos the Jackal (left); and Verges (wounded) after a demonstration in Paris over the death of Patrice Lumumba, 1961 Left: Saddam Hussein, shortly after his arrest by US forces. Below, from left, a few of the lawyers friends and acquaintances: Mao; Slobodan Milosovic; Tariq Aziz; and Pol Pot

BODY:
Shaking his hand, I tell Jacques Verges, it's impossible not to feel a direct connection to all those other palms he's pressed. His friends have included such men as the Cambodian dictator Pol Pot, and Illich Ramirez Sanchez, better known as Carlos the Jackal, who blew up Marseille railway station and shot dead - among others - two French policemen: a soldier, as Verges once described the Venezuelan terrorist, "in a noble cause". Then there's the Gestapo chief Klaus Barbie, who the lawyer addressed as "Mon Capitaine" and joined in a rendition of "Lili Marlene" in the German's cell during his 1987 trial, and Slobodan Milosevic, who has called on his support throughout his trial in The Hague. Many assumed that Verges ("I like him," Carlos the Jackal once said, "because he is a bigger terrorist than I am") had exhausted his capacity to shock. Recently, however, they were proved wrong, when the French barrister announced that, at the personal request of the imprisoned dictator's family, he is preparing the defence of Saddam Hussein.

"I carry the memory of all my clients inside me," says the man who called his autobiography The Shining Bastard. "We are bonded forever."

Verges's imposing office, here in his Paris chambers, is lined with bookcases and decorated with African sculptures. The room is dimly lit, with blinds drawn over the windows. On his desk there is a crystal snake. It faces away from him, its head rearing as though poised to strike at any visitor. It was a gift from Marlon Brando's daughter Cheyenne, explains Verges (which sounds like "says"). She hanged herself nine years ago; the lawyer had unsuccessfully defended her half-brother, who was charged with the murder of her lover.

"That ornament reminds me of the snake in Amazonian legend," he explains. "Its skin is encrusted with the eyes of every human it has swallowed." Like the mythical serpent, he says, "I observe the world simultaneously through the eye of an infant and of an old man; an Indian and a conquistador."

His assassination has been commissioned at least twice by the French secret services; the former agent Paul Barril told me he had personally seen an order to kill him.

"How old are you?" I ask Verges.

"Seventy nine," he says. "Or I might be 80."

"Don't you know?"

"Some say I was illegitimate, so my father changed the date on the certificate."

Seventy-nine or 80, you've been lucky."

"I'm not lucky," he says. "I'm bullet-proof."

The lawyer is suspected by some of having been involved in more than a legal capacity with certain clients, notably Carlos the Jackal; it has also been suggested, by Le Monde, that he helped plan an aborted rocket attack on a French nuclear-power station - charges he vehemently denies.

It isn't easy to imagine this urbane figure - who quotes Voltaire, De Quincey and Oscar Wilde in his elegant, rather formal French - handling explosives. There is something about Jacques Verges - I'm not sure if it's his natural composure, his Asiatic features, or simply the sight of a small man with such a large Havana - that recalls the actor Edward G Robinson, and especially his character in the 1945 melodrama The Woman in the Window. Robinson plays a fastidious man of refinement, introduced as the picture of respectability. We first see him sending up whorls of cigar smoke from his leather armchair in a gentlemen's club. Twenty minutes later, he is dumping the body of a murdered woman in a copse.

Verges ponders this comparison.

"In France they like a man who stands alone against the establishment," he says. "Like D'Artagnan. Or Arsene Lupin, the gentle- man burglar."

Brought up on the island of Reunion, in the Indian Ocean, Verges came to Paris after serving with De Gaulle's Free French army. He is recognised, even by his enemies, as one of the greatest defence lawyers of his time. He says he was appointed to begin work on Saddam Hussein's case about a month ago.

"His nephew called me," he explains. "He said that he felt his uncle had been publicly humiliated, in contravention of the Geneva Convention."

Verges himself has had no contact with the former Iraqi leader.

"We believe him to be in Qatar," he says. "But we don't know for certain where he is. He has been described by Mr Rumsfeld as a prisoner of war. In which case Saddam Hussein is entitled to the privileges of any such prisoner, including the right to silence."

The nephew - Ali Barzan al-Takriti, who lives in Amman - "told me that he was afraid the Americans would kill his uncle, because in the event of any free exchange in open court, the US is aware that it will be heavily implicated in his crimes."

Murdering their prisoner would hardly enhance the Americans' global reputation.

"My worry isn't that he will be killed by automatic gunfire," Verges replies, "but that he might suffer a convenient accident which results in a stroke or a heart attack. His nephew told me - and I quote - This danger is imminent. I ask you to make our fears public, so as to render his murder less likely.'"

Verges flourishes his thick Havana like a wand.

"In the opinion of his family, the Saddam Hussein we have seen paraded on television is heavily drugged. When a man is a prisoner of people who obey neither faith nor law," he adds, "they can despatch him in ways that do not require a machine gun or a knife."

"Are you saying that Bush and Blair are faithless and lawless?"

"I am saying that in this affair they have lied from the start. That's the first thing. We all know that their stated motive for war was bogus. And then there is the question of this public ex- hibition of their captive. It shows no regard for human dignity. You may recall that last month General Myers, Chairman of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff, referred to Fallujah as a rat's nest'. I don't recall even Hitler," Verges adds, "calling enemy combatants rats'."

The US has declared its intention to try Saddam Hussein in Iraq. The process is theoretically under way: the director of the tribunal has been named as Salem Chalabi, a US-educated lawyer, and nephew of Ahmad Chalabi, leader of the Iraqi National Congress. But the location, time and judicial framework remain undecided. Chalabi's mandate could be revoked, if and when power is handed over to a new administration on 30 June this year.

"For a fair trial to be held in Iraq," Verges says, "it would require a penal code and a democratically elected administration. Neither exists."

Saddam Hussein will be defended by a team of lawyers, Verges chief among them, if the Iraqi's family is allowed any say in the matter. He is already representing former deputy prime minister Tariq Aziz ("a gentleman") who surrendered a year ago. That said, there is probably no lawyer the allies would less like to see coaxing the former leader to reminisce on those happier days when the US counted him among its friends. His proclamation of his leading role is thought by some to be premature: it's possible the Americans might seek to exclude him, for instance by stipulating that all participating attorneys hold a permit to practise in Iraq.

"If and when a trial does take place," Verges says, "I will argue that Mr Rumsfeld cannot escape being charged as a co-conspirator, since he was the intermediary for arms sales to Saddam Hussein. I am preparing the case on that basis."

Though Verges is frequently referred to as the Devil's Advocate, not all of his clients have been monsters. I first met him in the early 1990s, when he was defending Omar Raddad, a Moroccan gardener charged with killing his employer, an heiress who appeared to have scrawled the words "Omar Killed Me", in her own blood, as she lay dying in the basement of her villa in Nice. It turned out to be the only convincing evidence against him. Raddad had a credible alibi; the police, having read the message, didn't trouble themselves with other scene of crime duties, such as taking fingerprints. The illiterate Moroccan got 18 years; he served seven before he was released in 1998 on the personal order of President Chirac.

Verges's critics argue that, had Raddad's lawyer confined himself to a simple examination of the facts, his client would have been acquitted. But Verges employed his trademark technique of what he calls rupture - challenging the legitimacy of the court, and turning the trial into a debate of the injustice that has most exercised him throughout his career - the crimes and hypocrisies of colonialism, of which he sees the United States as the most shameless perpetrator.

"A few days ago," Verges says, when I mention Raddad's name, "I had a call from a man who claimed he was a friend of Omar's. He said he had news from Morocco that he had to deliver in person."

When his visitor arrived, "he was not an Arab but an American. He was about 45. He looked like a college graduate. He explained that he'd never met Raddad, but he knew the name would get him into my office. Then," the lawyer goes on, "he handed me a file. It is a CIA document of 200 pages or so. It clearly demonstrates, and gives precise details of, high- level contacts between the US and Saddam Hussein dating back to the days before he was in power."

At this point I notice that, in a vase next to his crystal snake, a bunch of wilting tulips are leaning towards both of us at a suitable angle for concealing a microphone.

"Don't worry about the tulips," Verges says. "If there is one office in the world which is under US surveillance at the moment, it's this one."

"So what was in this document?"

"It's in English," Verges said, "a language I don't speak fluently. I've sent it to be translated. But I can tell you that the papers contain a word-for-word exchange between an Iraqi diplomat and Henry Kissinger. And Kissinger is basically saying: "Our intelligence is disheartening - it indicates that you are supported by the USSR. Conditions exist whereby contacts may be re-established; the US and Iraq can become allies."

"Whatever the level of western hypocrisy in this affair," I ask Verges, "how can you contemplate defending a man who ordered the gassings at Halabja and who, according to a study by the group Human Rights Watch, was responsible for the death of up to 100,000 Kurdish non-combatants in the first eight months of 1988 alone?"

"My position on that, as a defence lawyer," replies Verges, "is that you must first prove to me those acts were committed, and secondly that they were committed by Saddam Hussein. But in any case - even if those things were done on his orders - they were done with weapons supplied by the US. If you provide a country with poison gas and biological weapons it is for one purpose only. When a crime is committed, you can't pursue only one of the guilty parties."

"The charge against the US being?"

"Complicity, by reason of supplying the means to commit a crime. I don't see how, in an international court of law, the Americans could begin to justify supplying Iraq with chemical weapons. And there is absolutely no doubt that they did."

"While we're on the subject, wasn't it Jacques Chirac who provided Saddam Hussein with nuclear materials, for a power station, at a time when it was known he might have alternative ambitions for those supplies?"

"Yes," says Verges, "but nothing came of that, because the Israelis destroyed the material on the ground."

The Americans, he insists, are guilty of complicity "at every stage". "They gave Saddam Hussein the green light for the attack on Kuwait," he alleges, referring to remarks made by April Glaspie, US ambassador to Iraq, eight days before the August 2 1990 invasion; Glaspie told Saddam Hussein the US had "no position" on the dispute between Iraq and its neighbour.

"After the Gulf War," he adds, "the US dropped leaflets inciting the Shi'ites and the Kurds to rebel and, when they did rise up, abandoned them. I will argue that the ultimate effect of that was to make the US co-conspirators with Saddam Hussein." Then there were the economic sanctions, says Verges, "that resulted, in that famous assessment by the World Health Organisation, in the death of 500,000 children."

Is Tony Blair, according to his thesis, guilty of indictable offences?

"I believe I can demonstrate that the Geneva Convention is breached in Iraq on a daily basis. These are war crimes that can be punished under international penal accords to which Britain is a signatory but the US is not. I am not ruling out action against the British on those grounds."

Throughout this conversation, Verges remains softly spoken and impassive. It is his ability to mask his fiercely rebellious instincts - the kind that normally stoke the hottest of heads - and maintain a glacial, austere demeanour, that makes him a uniquely fascinating figure, and an anti-hero for many of his compatriots. Discretion, wit and intelligence have allowed Maitre Verges, to give him his formal lawyer's title, to operate at the highest level of the establishment he professes to despise.

One of the few lawyers who is constantly pestered for autographs, Verges tells me how he recently came out of court in Aix-en-Provence, and walked across a crowded square.

"A colleague who was with me said, It's amazing how people look at you - not as a lawyer, but as an accomplice." Verges smiles. "Then he added: So what do you say, Maitre - shall we carry on stirring the shit?'"

Not everybody finds him so congenial. There are those who maintain that, at certain times in his extraordinary life, Verges's place in court should have been not the advocate's bench, but the dock. During the trial of Carlos the Jackal, when the judge asked what the accused had meant when he called Verges a terrorist, the lawyer replied: "I believe he is referring to my ideas, your honour."

I mentioned this exchange to the journalist Jean-Louis Remilleux, who collaborated on The Shining Bastard. "The most terrifying thing about Verges," Remilleux told me, "is not his ideas. It's his life."

Verges was born in Siam (now Thailand) where his father, a physician, was French consul. But Raymond Verges was dismissed from the diplomatic service after he married Jacques's mother, who was Vietnamese: inter-racial marriages were prohibited by the French authorities.

Jacques Verges had cause to rage at injustice before he could speak the word. Shunned by polite society, his father left to practice medicine in the French colony of Reunion, where his wife died of fever when Jacques and his twin brother Paul (a leading Communist politician in Reunion) were three. Raymond's most desperate patients, the lawyer recalls, had no means of paying medical bills and came directly to the family home.

"My father treated them all," he says. "My earliest memories are of a parade of physi- cal suffering through the house. I saw people with leprosy, cancer and lupus; elephantiasis and bullet wounds."

He has few recollections of his mother, but the legacy of his infancy has not been forgotten.

"My mother had no need to wear the yellow star," he told the judge, during Klaus Barbie's trial in Lyon. "She was yellow from head to foot."

In 1942, when he was 17, "dreaming of wounds and bruises", he sailed into Liverpool and enlisted with the Free French Army, as an artilleryman. After the War he spent 11 years in the French Communist Party where he was "a particularly violent and uncontrollable influence", according to one history of the movement. Though he left the party in the 1950s, his opinions retain a certain robustness.

"When I see that photograph of Stalin smiling and shaking Ribbentropp's hand," Verges explains, in The Shining Bastard, "I say to myself: there is a man who knows how to stand alone."

He completed a history degree in Paris, where he first met Pol Pot: the kind of guy, according to Verges, "who enjoys a good laugh". Newspaper photographs, he complains, "always show the same heap of 30 skulls. I do not believe there was genocide."

In 1951 he became secretary of the International Union of Students in Prague (where he rubbed shoulders with Honecker, Mao and Mandela) then spent four years travelling with his first wife, Colette. On his return to France, he joined the Paris bar and espoused the cause of Algerian independence. His first client in Algiers was Djamila Bouhired. A 22-year- old suspected of having blown up a cafe in the name of the FLN (National Liberation Front) - widely regarded in France as a terrorist movement akin to ETA or the IRA. She had been brutally tortured by French police. Friends say her lawyer "fell head over heels in love" at the first interview. Bouhired was sentenced to death in 1957, but pardoned the following year. The couple married in 1965. Throughout the Algerian War he was chief lawyer for the FLN.

For Verges, members of the FLN, like members of Hamas, or Iraqi "insurgents", are comparable to his former comrades in the fight against the German occupation of France; he has long adhered to the philosophy that a terrorist is somebody who has a bomb but not an air force.

One of his fellow combatants in Algeria was the leading French cartoonist "Sine" - Maurice Sinet.

"There was always so much to do - people to smuggle across the border, money to collect," Sinet told me. "But when we were back in Paris, we used to unwind. We'd go out on the Champs-Elysees in my Mercedes. Verges would take my water pistol and pick off pedestrians. After a bombing, because he knew his phone was tapped, he'd call me and say: Hey Bob. Did you see that mortar hit the power station? One hundred and eighty!' With Verges," he explained, "the end justified the means. He used to tell me: "You know what your trouble is? You've got principles". He didn't have any. He was wild."

The pair have since fallen out.

"Sinet's sulking," says the lawyer, "because I'm not anarchistic enough."

The real problem seems to be the incrementally homicidal nature of Verges's client list.

"In Algeria," says Sinet, "he wasn't a law- yer. He was a brother and a comrade. And he frightened a lot of people. In those days he was frightening the right people. It's horrendous, the people he will defend these days. There have to be other ways of making money."

Verges has made his fortune by serving some of Africa's less-palatable leaders. They included General Gnassingbe Eyadema of Togo, whose human- rights record is dismal even by the standards of West African despots, and Moussa Traore of Mali, the first African leader to turn machine-guns on his own citizens. In 1961, Verges was beaten up by police while protesting against the killing of Patrice Lumumba - the Prime Minister of the Independent Republic of Congo. Six years later he was acting for his executioner, Moise Tshombe.

"Why should I worry," the lawyer asks, "about defending men who have been welcomed on the steps of the Elysee, as friends of the French Republic?"

In 1970, Verges was living with Djamila and their two children in Algiers, acting as a defence lawyer for the PLO, when he casually announced that he was taking a short trip to Spain. He wasn't seen again until he resurfaced in Paris in 1978, practising law as though nothing had happened. Bouhired had no idea of his whereabouts. French intelligence experts I spoke to had different theories, but none claimed to know for certain where he had been. Many believe he was in Syria, working for the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine. Others suggest the Congo. It has been alleged that he was in Cambodia with Pol Pot, a notion he likes to encourage but which the journalist John Pilger told me is "highly improbable".

"My obituaries were touching," says Verges. "Such promise snuffed out so young - that kind of thing."

To vanish for almost a decade, then return with your secret intact, sounds a more challenging task than Lord Lucan's one-way ticket to oblivion.

"Very challenging," he replies. "Unless you are discreet by nature."

"If you won't say where, say why."

"To say why," says Verges, with a mischievous smile, "is to say where."

Divorced by Bouhired during his absence, Verges has not remarried since his return. He lives alone, above his chambers. He had an affair with a junior colleague, Isabelle Coutant-Peyre; she later took up with Carlos the Jackal, explaining that the Venezuelan is "completely different from Verges - straightforward and sincere," and has fewer secrets.

"She said he's more open than me? Why should that surprise you?"

Frankness, I suggest, is not his strong point.

"You call a dog," Verges replies, "it comes. I belong to the cat family."

"You could tell me he spent the 1970s running guns for the Khmer Rouge, feeding orphans in Kenya, or serving at a McDonald's in Le Touquet," one French reporter told me. "No explanation - the best or the worst - would surprise me of Verges."

The lawyer went missing just a few months after the death of Moise Tshombe, leading some to suspect that the disappearance of Verges and the Congolese assassin's vast fortune had been simultaneous.

Verges denies the accusation. The amount of cash he had when he resurfaced has been exaggerated, he says. What money he had was from a publisher.

All of which makes it curious that one of his then friends, a lawyer called Jean-Claude Cain, claimed, in a 1987 interview with the newspaper Liberation, that he had occasionally hidden Verges in Paris during his exile.

"Jacques would ring up and say: Don't ask where I have been,' he said. I have no money.' Cain, who is no longer willing to speak publicly on the subject, added that, when his friend returned for good, he had debts and "a suitcase full of banknotes. He told me: "Pay them with that". I said "Where did you get it?" He said "From Tshombe".

Utterly untrue, insists Verges.

So why did Cain say it?

"It sounds to me as if he was hallucinating."

As he says this, the lawyer scratches his left earlobe - the kind of abrupt, nervous movement that police interviewers are supposed to interpret as an indication of a lie, though with Verges such a gesture might equally be a mischievous double bluff.

For all his discretion, the lawyer enjoys recounting one anecdote relating to his lost years, from which he returned, to use his own phrase, "battle- hardened."

"When I came back to Paris," he says, "I was in hiding for a while. One day I went to the grocer's to buy bread and cheese. Behind me, in the queue, I saw the widow of a former colleague. I could see her staring at me in amazement, getting ready to tell everybody she'd seen Verges. So I turned to her and shouted the lawyer assumes a coarse voice , "Hey fat girl - what's happening?" She recoiled as though I'd undone my flies. I knew that if she told anyone, nobody would believe her."

If the current state of preparations for Saddam Hussein's trial can be likened to the chaos that sometimes takes hold at the starting line just before a National Hunt race, there is one thoroughbred in its stall and pawing the ground. For Verges, the trial of the Iraqi must represent the next best thing to defending Adolf Hitler at Nuremberg: another brief, I suggest, that he wouldn't have had the slightest hesitation in accepting.

By way of reply, Verges reaches behind him and picks up a slim volume: The Portage to San Cristobal of AH by the writer and academic George Steiner.

"In this novella," Verges says, "Steiner supposes that Hitler didn't die in his bunker but survived among the Amazonian Indians. Mossad kidnap him, and put him on trial in the jungle. As the Israelis are good democrats," he adds, his expression unaltered by the sarcasm of this remark, "they allow Hitler the last word. Which goes as follows."

" I learnt everything from you. Everything. To set a race apart. To keep it from defilement. To scour the land of its inhabitants. Woe unto the Amorities, the Jebusites and the Kenites, the half-men outside God's pact. My racism was a parody of yours, a hungry imitation. What is a 1,000-year Reich compared to the eternity of Zion?'"

Verges glances further down the page.

"You have made of me some kind of mad devil, the quintessence of evil, hell embodied. When I was, in truth, only a man of my time. Average, if you will. Had it been otherwise, how then could millions of ordinary men and women have found in me the mirror of their needs and appetites? It was, and I will allow you that, an ugly time. But I did not create its ugliness, and I was not the worst. Far from it. How many wretched little men of the forest did your Belgian friends murder or leave to starvation when they raped the Congo? Some 20 million. What were Rotterdam or Coventry compared to Dresden or Hiroshima? Did I invent the camps? Ask the Boers... Gentlemen of the tribunal: I took my doctrines from you."

He closes the book.

"Professor Steiner wrote that," he says. "He is an Austrian Jew. A man who feels profoundly Jewish, though he is not a Zionist."

The relish with which he recites this passage - a classic variation on his strategy of rupture - gives you some idea of the kind of dark rhetoric Verges will seek to employ, should he be permitted to cross-examine Saddam Hussein in open court.

"Of course, there is one crucial difference between the cases of Hitler and Saddam Hussein," says Verges. "Had the Fuhrer been put on trial, the allies could not be said to have collaborated in the crimes they were judging. The Americans believe they can control this trial," he goes on. "They are wrong. It will be impossible to control. A trial is never a binary operation that can be programmed, like a computer. What you might call Frankenstein Syndrome is ever-present in international affairs. The Americans helped al-Qa'ida at the beginning. Al-Qa'ida got out of control. They supported Saddam Hussein; he got out of control. This trial will be no different."

Is there no criminal, past or present, whose crimes are so grotesque that he wouldn't represent them?

Verges draws on his cigar.

"Do you know something?" he says. "I believe I am even capable of defending George W Bush."

He tilts his head slightly in the direction of the tulips.

"Even Bush," he repeats. "So long as he promises to plead guilty."

Licens

Hvad siger reglerne?
januar 1, 2007

På familieadvokatens hjemmeside gives nogle praktiske oplysninger:

Du har ikke pligt til at lade kontrollen komme indenfor:

Licenskontoret kan ikke komme ind i en beboelse for at se, om der er tv, – selv ikke med fogedens bistand.

Du har ikke pligt til at lukke DR ind.

Oplysningen er dog 2 år gammel.

På liberator kan man finde følgende:

Nu kan det jo være, at det er en rigtig tungnem Licens Lars, du har haft stående og palaverende udenfor din dør. Måske er han også en rigtig hidsigprop. Han ringer nu til politiet og fortæller harmdirrende og bedende om den forfærdelige ting, han lige har oplevet.

Politiet meddeler så denne tungnemme Licens Lars, at det er de fuldkommen ligeglade med, og at han i øvrigt gerne må holde op med at optage deres tid med den slags ligegyldigheder. Politiet ved nemlig godt, at de heller ikke kan gøre en snus ved det. Politiet har ikke adkomst til hjemmet på grundlag af en sag om
tv-licens.

Dertil skal der bruges en dommerkendelse.

Til det med dommerkendelsen er der kun én ting at sige … der kan ikke googles et eneste eksempel på, at en dommer har gidet give en kendelse til at undersøge en borger for, hvorvidt denne har et tv-apparat.

Der er ganske vist beskrevet ét eksempel på en dommerkendelse; men da havde borgeren truet Licens Lars med et gevær, og politiet kom med en dommerkendelse for at se geværet, der dog i mellemtiden var forsvundet – case closed.

Hovedprincippet er at nægte over for Danmarks Radio at man har TV, også selvom begge parter er overbeviste om at man har det. Som retstilstanden er idag, får de ikke adgang til boligen. Mht internetforbindelsen er det nok mere speget. Pt skal hastigheden på forbindelsen være over en vis størrelse, for at man regner det for muligt at tage signalerne. Spørgsmålet er så om internetudbyderen medvirker til at kontrollere borgeren for DR. Endnu er totalitarismen dog ikke kommet dertil, og man skal altså bare benægte overfor DR at man har en licenspligtig forbindelse, hvis man skulle blive spurgt.

DRs egen Spørg og Svar kan i øvrigt findes HER

Se evt. også piratgruppens debat

Opfordringen herfra er selvfølgelig at nægte at betale en skid.