For example.
While working on these particular pages I happened
to pass by our community library where I found that one member of our community
had decided to make room on his personal shelves by donating some old books to
the library. Some of these were classics of the sixties, and I picked up A
Dying Colonialism by Frantz Fanon simply to leaf through it and perhaps bring
back some memories. The first place I opened the book to was Page 7, where I read:
The Algerian people accepted the radio when it ceased
to be an instrument of the enemy and was useful for the revolution. In the same
way the Cuban people accepted literacy and achieved it in a year when this became
a goal of the revolution, when they saw it was tied to their own concrete interests
and not to those of capitalist governments.
Today this reads like total doubletalk (though in this particular case it can't
be blamed on Fanon, but on the person who write the introduction, Adolfo Gilly).
However, disregarding that fact, and the uncomfortable feeling of having to admit
that this nonsense is the sort of thing which I apparently once saw as deep (are
we supposed to believe that the Cuban people chose to remain illiterate
until after the revolution because until then being literate served the needs
of the ruling class?), this is most definitely an example (accurate or not) of
the same thing that the Amish do - evaluate the technologies available to them,
via whatever criteria they determine as fitting for them, and then decide whether
or not to adopt them.
Go to: Picking and choosing, or
Go to: Confessions of a conservative technology
freak.