The Hypocrisies of Recognition: The Supreme Court, Native Americans and the McGirt Case

in Uncategorized — by Dr Binoy Kampmark — July 10, 2020

The Supreme Court of the United States has barely had time to gather its collective breath this last few days.  Among its decisions, including those dealing with President Donald Trump’s financial records, was that of McGirt v Oklahoma. The case furnishes a detailed discussion on the extent Native American self-governance survived the assaults of the US Congress and the creation of the State of Oklahoma in 1907.

The Creek (Muscogee) Reservation itself arose from circumstances of predation and cruelty.  Forcibly relocated from Georgia and Alabama, “the Creek nation,” wrote Justice Neil Gorsuch, “received reassurances that their new lands in the West would be secure forever.  In ceding their land East of the Mississippi River, a pledge by the 1832 treaty was made that the “Creek country west of the Mississippi shall be solemnly guaranteed to the Creek Indians.”

By the narrowest of decisions, the court found 5-4 against the state of Oklahoma.  The state authorities had claimed that the Creek Reservation did not survive the “allotment era” and had been “disestablished”.  Jimcy McGirt, convicted by an Oklahoman state court of three sexual offences that had taken place on the Creek Nation Reservation in the north-eastern part of the state, had claimed otherwise.  As a member of the Seminole Nation, he submitted in post-conviction proceedings that the State lacked jurisdiction to prosecute him.  The relevant statute was the federal Major Crimes Act, which provided that, within “the Indian country”, any Indian committing certain offences “shall be subject to the same law and penalties as all other persons committing any of [those] offenses, within the exclusive jurisdiction of the United States”.  His initial effort to seek a new trial in federal court failed, leading to the Supreme Court petition.

That period of central government nastiness in the late nineteenth century known as the “allotment era” had a purpose common to other frontier societies: the assimilation of the native intransigents through means designed to wean them off their traditional customs.  As the zealous Captain Richard Pratt opined in 1892, the United States needed to “kill the Indian in him, and save the man.”  Enough with the physical massacres; what was needed was a concerted effort to Americanize and civilise, a form of spiritual genocide.  Pratt envisaged doing so through education, including the US Training and Industrial School he founded in 1879 at Carlisle Barracks in Pennsylvania.  Out with the “savage” habits: tribal language, identity and long hair; in with the new American, albeit a stunted one with his nerves extracted.  Such education was to be rudimentary or, in the words of President Teddy Roosevelt, “very, very limited.”

In terms of property, the allotment era was trumpeted by the passage of the Dawes Act of 1887, also known as the General Allotment Act.  This entailed breaking up tribally owned reservations and allocating them to individual households, though the process came with a nasty catch: such divided land would initially be held in trust; Native American households would have to prove their competence in exercising full “fee simple” property rights.  The result, in many instances, was also the selling of Indian land to non-Indian purchasers.

In his address to Congress in 1901, Roosevelt gave his boisterous assessment of the statute.  “The General Allotment Act is a mighty pulverizing engine to break up the tribal mass.  It acts directly upon the family and the individual.” The Act had enabled sixty thousand Indians to become US citizens.  It was now essential, Roosevelt suggested, to “break up the tribal funds, doing for them what allotment does for tribal lands; that is, they should be divided into individual holdings.”

The majority, ruling in favour of McGirt, affirmed that the land in question remains a reservation that gives the federal government exclusive jurisdiction over crimes committed on it.  In doing so, the court also confirmed the continuing existence of a reservation stretching some 19 million acres including eight counties and most of Tulsa.

In their skirt through the legislative record, the majority found no statute “evincing anything like the ‘present and total surrender of all tribal interests’.”  The transfer of individual plots, whether to Native Americans or others, “did not disestablish the reservation”.   A body of statutes and treaties over time confirmed the legal standing of the Creek Reservation.  The majority rebuked the argument that States had claimed powers “to reduce federal reservations within their borders”.  To imagine such a power would enable States to “encroach on the tribal boundaries or legal rights Congress provided, and, with enough time and patience, nullify the promises made in the name of the United States.”  Despite various efforts by Congress to intrude upon Creek self-governance, these were not sufficient to suggest disestablishment.  “Oklahoma and the dissent have cited no case in which this Court has found a reservation disestablished without first concluding that a statute first required that result.”

Chief Justice John Roberts, who managed to avoid being in the majority in all 5-4 court decisions this term, was glum about the consequences.  The decision was a torch taken to state governance.  “Across the vast area, the State’s ability to prosecute serious crimes will be hobbled and decades of past convictions could well be thrown out.  On top of that, the Court has profoundly destabilized the governance of eastern Oklahoma.”  The majority judgement had also created “significant uncertainty for the State’s continuing authority over any area that touches Indian affairs, ranging from zoning and taxation to family and environmental law.”

Roberts further bristled at the idea that Congress needed to be wordily explicit in terminating a reservation, having “made abundantly clear its intent to disestablish the Creek territory”.  Just look at the historical record, the chief justice urged.  Congress “supplanted the Creek legal system with a legal code and court system that applied equally to Indians and non-Indians.”  It “systematically dismantled the governmental authority of the Creek Nation, targeting all three branches.”  It “destroyed the foundation of sovereignty by stripping the Creek Nation of its territory.”

Justice Gorsuch, in his judgment for the majority, had little time for such worries.  To suggest an army of inmates rushing to seek new trials in federal courts was “admittedly speculative, because many defendants may choose to finish their state sentences rather than risk prosecution in federal court where sentences can be graver”.  Besides, no actual intention to terminate the legal standing of the Creek Reservation could ever be found.

In all the excitement, it would have been easy to have overlooked the predecessor case of Sharp v Murphy, in which the court heard argument on the same question as that of McGirt.  The case stalled in its tracks in 2018 as Gorsuch had recused himself, having served on the 10th circuit of the US Circuit Court of Appeals, comprising Oklahoma.  Instead of going through re-arguments there, Sharp was restored to this calendar term and duly decided in favour of the inmate Patrick Murphy “for the reasons stated in” McGirt.  Murphy had also committed his crime within the boundaries of the Creek Nation.

Having anticipated the decision, somewhat, Oklahoma Attorney General Mike Hunter, along with all Five Tribes affected by the decision, including the Cherokee, Chickasaw, Choctaw, Seminole Nations, issued a statement committing the parties “to ensuring that Jimcy McGirt, Patrick Murphy, and all other offenders face justice for crimes for which they are accused.  We have a shared commitment to maintaining public safety and long-term economic prosperity for the Nations and Oklahoma.”

The decision of McGirt masks the crude realities of institutional, colonial violence.  It perpetuates an illusion, a discredited understanding between Native American nations and the US federal government.  That was the lingering “promise”, as Gorsuch claims, “[o]n the far end of the Trail of Tears”, one that was never kept.  Chief Justice Roberts was very much on to it.  In letting the cat out of the bag on Native American-Indian relations, he suggested that Congress had acted in a manner entirely inconsistent with preserving any semblance of Creek sovereignty.  We are left with the Native American Indian in confused legal dress, trampled, abused, deceived by history but with only a symbolic heartbeat.

Dr. Binoy Kampmark was a Commonwealth Scholar at Selwyn College, Cambridge.  He lectures at RMIT University, Melbourne.  Email: bkampmark@gmail.com

About half of Oklahoma is Native American land, rules U.S. Supreme Court

in World — by Countercurrents Collective — July 10, 2020

The U.S. Supreme Court ruled Thursday that about half of the land in Oklahoma is within a Native American reservation. The court ruling will have major consequences for both past and future criminal and civil cases in the U.S.

The U.S. court’s ruling hinged on the question of whether the Creek reservation continued to exist after Oklahoma, one of the 50 states constituting the United States, became a state.

The case was steeped in the U.S. government’s long history of brutal removals and broken treaties with Indigenous tribes, and grappled with whether lands of the Muscogee (Creek) Nation had remained a reservation after Oklahoma became a state.

“Today we are asked whether the land these treaties promised remains an Indian reservation for purposes of fed­eral criminal law. Because Congress has not said otherwise, we hold the government to its word,” Justice Neil Gorsuch wrote in the majority opinion.

The decision was 5-4, with Justices Gorsuch, Sonia Sotomayor, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Elena Kagan and Stephen Breyer in the majority, while Justices John Roberts, Brett Kavanaugh, Samuel Alito and Clarence Thomas dissented.

Some 1.8 million people, of whom about 15% are Native American, live on the land, which spans three million acres.

The ruling will have significant legal implications for eastern Oklahoma. Much of Tulsa, the state’s second-largest city, is located on Muscogee (Creek) land. The Muscogee (Creek) Nation cheered the court’s decision.

Dissenting opinion

In a dissenting opinion, Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. wrote that the decision “will undermine numerous convictions obtained by the State, as well as the State’s abil­ity to prosecute serious crimes committed in the future,” and “may destabilize the governance of vast swathes of Oklahoma.”

John G. Roberts Jr. warned in a dissenting opinion that the court’s decision would wreak havoc and confusion on Oklahoma’s criminal justice system.

“The state’s ability to prosecute serious crimes will be hobbled and decades of past convictions could well be thrown out,” Chief Justice Roberts wrote. “On top of that, the court has profoundly destabilized the governance of eastern Oklahoma.”

The ruling has a number of significant consequences for criminal law in the relevant portion of Oklahoma.

The first is that going forward, certain major crimes committed within the boundaries of reservations must be prosecuted in federal court rather than state court, if a Native American is involved. So if a Native American is accused of a major crime in downtown Tulsa, the federal government rather than the state government will prosecute it. Less serious crimes involving Native Americans on American Indian land will be handled in tribal courts. This arrangement is already common in Western states like Arizona, New Mexico and Montana, said Washburn.

Then there is the issue of past decisions — many of them are now considered wrongful convictions because the state lacked jurisdiction. A number of criminal defendants who have been convicted in the past will now have grounds to challenge their convictions, arguing that the state never had jurisdiction to try them.

The case before the court, McGirt v. Oklahoma, concerned Jimcy McGirt, an enrolled member of the Seminole Nation of Oklahoma who was convicted of sex crimes against a child on Creek land. In post-conviction proceedings, McGirt argued that the state lacked jurisdiction in the case and that he must be retried in federal court. The high court agreed.

The ruling will affect lands of the Muscogee and four other Oklahoma tribes with identical treaties. Civil court issues are also affected.

Jurisdiction, not land ownership

It is important to note that the case concerned jurisdiction, not land ownership.

Ruling that these lands are in fact reservations “doesn’t mean the tribe owns all the land within the reservation, just like the county doesn’t own all the land within the county. In fact, it probably doesn’t own very much of that land,” said Kevin Washburn, dean of the law school at the University of Iowa, where he teaches a course on federal Indian law, explained. “That’s not what a reservation is these days.”

Washburn compares a reservation to a county — terms that describe jurisdictional boundaries.

Oklahoma Attorney General Mike Hunter released a joint statement with the Muscogee (Creek), Cherokee, Chickasaw, Choctaw and Seminole nations on Thursday, indicating that they “have made substantial progress toward an agreement to present to Congress and the U.S. Department of Justice addressing and resolving any significant jurisdictional issues.”

Ian Heath Gershengorn, an attorney at Jenner & Block, argued McGirt’s case before the Supreme Court. He said his team was thrilled with the result and had felt optimistic knowing that Gorsuch could prove to be the deciding vote.

Gorsuch joined with the court’s more liberal members in the decision. Prior to his appointment to the high court, Gorsuch was a judge on the 10th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, which frequently sees cases involving Native American lands.

“Justice Gorsuch has made very clear in his short time on the bench that he takes the text deeply seriously,” Gershengorn said. “And I think you saw that the core of his analysis today was a textual one. We felt like we had the right argument at the right time for the right justice.”

The court decision, potentially one of the most consequential legal victories for Native Americans in decades, could have far-reaching implications for the people who live across what the court affirmed was Indian Country.

The decision puts in doubt hundreds of state convictions of Native Americans and could change the handling of prosecutions across a vast swath of the state. Lawyers were also examining whether it had broader implications for taxing, zoning and other government functions. But many of the specific impacts will be determined by negotiations between state and federal authorities and five Native American tribes in Oklahoma.

Establish sovereignty

“The Supreme Court today kept the United States’ sacred promise to the Muscogee (Creek) Nation of a protected reservation,” the tribe said in a statement. “Today’s decision will allow the Nation to honor our ancestors by maintaining our established sovereignty and territorial boundaries.”

An extraordinary time

The ruling comes at an extraordinary time for Native Americans.

They are being ravaged by the coronavirus both in the soaring numbers of cases and deaths and the economic distress caused by closed casinos. But at the same moment, the U.S.-wide movement to confront systemic racism has infused new energy and attention to generations-long fights by tribal nations and Indigenous activists over land, treaty rights and discrimination.

In the past few weeks, tribal activists garnered international attention after they blocked the roads outside Mount Rushmore to condemn President Trump’s visit to what they called stolen lands. They won a fight to shut down an oil pipeline that crossed sacred ground in North Dakota. In the face of growing pressure from corporate sponsors, the Washington Redskins of the N.F.L. recently promised to re-evaluate their team name, which activists have denounced for years as racist.

On social media, people celebrated Thursday’s decision with the declaration Native Lives Matter.

Earlier, the Justice Department raised concerns about how federal prosecutors would cope with a new onslaught of cases they would be suddenly responsible for investigating. Lawyers were parsing whether the decision might affect taxes, adoption or environmental regulations on the reservation lands.

But experts in Indian law said the decision’s effects would be more muted, and would change little for non-Natives who live in the three-million-acre swath of Oklahoma that the court declared to be a reservation of the Muscogee (Creek) Nation.

“Not one inch of land changed hands today,” said Jonodev Chaudhuri, ambassador for the Creek Nation. “All that happened was clarity was brought to potential prosecutions within Creek Nation.”

Jonodev Chaudhuri, also a former chief justice of the Muscogee Nation’s Supreme Court, dismissed talk of legal mayhem.

He told the Tulsa World newspaper: “All the sky-is-falling narratives were dubious at best.

“This would only apply to a small subset of Native Americans committing crimes within the boundaries.”

The decision could have far-reaching implications on tribes beyond the reservation boundaries in eastern Oklahoma.

McGirt argued that Congress had created the reservation and had never clearly destroyed the sovereignty of the Creek Nation over the area, even as much of the land was parceled off to private ownership.

Forced relocation

Justice Gorsuch’s opinion, tracing that history, began: “On the far end of the Trail of Tears was a promise.” The reference is to the forced relocation of some 100,000 Native Americans from their home in the Southeast in the 1800s.

The opinion said that the promise was that Congress had guaranteed the Creek land for a permanent home in what became Oklahoma in exchange for forcing them from their ancestral lands in Georgia and Alabama during the 1830s.

The court was faced with the question of whether lands of the Muscogee (Creek) Nation had remained a reservation after Oklahoma became a state and the tribe’s lands were fractured and sold off and its powers of self-governance were attacked by Congress.

Some Indigenous activists and lawyers said they were not surprised that Justice Gorsuch had broken with his fellow conservatives.

On the court, he had provided the pivotal vote in favor of Indigenous rights in cases dealing with a Native American cited for illegal hunting in Wyoming, and about fuel taxes imposed on a business owned by a member of the Yakama Nation.

“Reading it, the understanding of what has happened to our people was nice to see acknowledged at this level of the government,” said Sarah Deer, a lawyer and a professor at the University of Kansas, who is also a citizen of the Muscogee (Creek) Nation. “It’s not something we’ve seen from the court very often. It has a lot of meaning.”

Legal scholars

Some legal scholars said that Justice Gorsuch did not favor the tribes, but had simply adhered to the language of the treaties. For generations, tribes have been asking the U.S. to honor the written agreements they made.

Kevin Washburn said: “It’s basically 15 weeks of how the law in the United States has failed my people.”

He served as assistant secretary of Indian affairs from 2012 to 2016, and he is a citizen of the Chickasaw Nation of Oklahoma. He called the court’s ruling “a great decision.”

“For Indian people, their land is really important, and treaties are really important. They are sacred. And this reaffirms the sacredness of those promises and those treaties.”

“Now and then there is a great case that helps you keep the faith about the rule of law,” he said. “And this is one of those.”

Lindsay Robertson, who teaches federal Indian law at the University of Oklahoma College of Law, said Justice Gorsuch did just that: “It does not matter that a million-plus non-Indians live there now. It does not matter that the state of Oklahoma has been acting as if it were subject exclusively to state jurisdiction. What matters is what the language said.”

In arguing against the tribes, the solicitor general of Oklahoma took the opposite view, saying during arguments in May that “it was never reservation land, and it’s certainly not reservation land today.”

The case, McGirt v. Oklahoma, No. 18-9526, an appeal from a state court’s decision, was the Supreme Court’s second attempt to resolve the status of eastern Oklahoma.

In November 2018, the justices heard arguments in Sharp v. Murphy, No. 17-1107, which arose from the prosecution in state court of Patrick Murphy, a Creek Indian, for murdering George Jacobs in rural McIntosh County, east of Oklahoma City.

After he was sentenced to death, it emerged that the murder had taken place on what had once been Indian land. Murphy argued that only the federal government could prosecute him and that a federal law barred the imposition of the death penalty because he was an Indian.

Murphy and McGirt are expected to be retried in federal court. Legal experts said that other Indigenous people who had been prosecuted by the state for crimes on Creek land would have to ask federal courts to review their cases.

The war continues

Madonna Thunder Hawk, an organizer with the Lakota People’s Law Project, said the court’s decision and a recent federal ruling that ordered the shutdown of the Dakota Access Pipeline in North Dakota had been cause for celebration. Just not too much.

“It’s a war for us,” she said. “There are some victories, but the war continues.”

The Trail of Tears

The Trail of Tears is the forcible 19th Century relocation of Native Americans, including the Creek Nation, to Oklahoma. The U.S. government said at the time that the new land would belong to the tribes in perpetuity.

The rape case

The ruling overturned McGirt’s prison sentence. He could still be tried in federal court. McGirt, now 71, was convicted in 1997 in Wagoner County of raping a four-year-old girl. He did not dispute his guilt before the Supreme Court, but argued that only federal authorities should have been entitled to prosecute him. McGirt is a member of the Seminole Nation.

An analysis by The Atlantic magazine of Oklahoma Department of Corrections records found that 1,887 Native Americans were in prison as of the end of last year for offences committed within the boundaries of the tribal territory.

But fewer than one in 10 of those cases would qualify for a new federal trial, according to the research.

Other tribes

In a joint statement, the Five Tribes of Oklahoma – Cherokee, Chickasaw, Choctaw and Seminole and Muscogee Nation – welcomed the ruling.

They pledged to work with federal and state authorities to agree shared jurisdiction over the land.

“The Nations and the state are committed to implementing a framework of shared jurisdiction that will preserve sovereign interests and rights to self-government while affirming jurisdictional understandings, procedures, laws and regulations that support public safety, our economy and private property rights,” the statement said.

Muscogee leaders hailed the decision as a hard-fought victory that clarified the status of their lands. The tribe said it would work with state and federal law enforcement authorities to coordinate public safety within the reservation.

“This is a historic day,” Principal Chief David Hill said in an interview. “This is amazing. It’s never too late to make things right.”

“This brings these issues into public consciousness a little bit more,” said John Echohawk, executive director of the Native American Rights Fund, a nonprofit organization that has spent five decades fighting for issues like tribal sovereignty and recognition. “That’s one of the biggest problems we have, is that most people don’t know very much about us.”

Morality: The Lust For Pleasure -The Case of Peter Kropotkin

in Life/Philosophy — by Milan Djurasovic — October 23, 2016

According to N. Lebedev, Kropotkin’s editor with whom he frequently corresponded both in person and through letters, two central reasons prompted the celebrated anarchist to devote the last years of his life to writing about the fundamental questions of ethics. The last decade of the nineteenth century saw an influx of ideas about the relativity of ethical conduct and even its obsolescence, particularly in the a-moralist and deeply individualist interpretation of Friedrich Nietzsche’s philosophy.[1] Russian literature of the mentioned period is replete with Nietzschean influences and extremely subjective and individualist themes (the abstract ideas of Helena P. Blavatsky and Nicholas Roerich, the obsession with the notion of fin de siècle of many artists and Symbolist writers such as Alexander A. Blok and Andrei Bely, the preoccupation with eternal life, the overbearing fear of the looming Asiatic invasion, etc.). Additionally, a number of predominantly English influential thinkers and scientists had isolated and focused only on the Malthusian aspects of Darwin’s theory of natural selection (intraspecific competition and overpopulation), and had manipulated these ideas to justify the brutal conquests of foreign lands as well as the extreme economic inequality in their own country.[2]

Noticing the signs of approaching death, Kropotkin set out to write a book that would extract and highlight the foundation of moral behavior, a book that would serve as a reliable guide and inspiration for people in their daily conduct, and a book that would delineate the harmful consequences of seeking moral guidance in mysticism, religion, and the apocryphal conclusions of social Darwinists. Such a book would serve as a clarification of moral goals, which was especially needed at the time when human thought was going back and forth from Nietzsche to Kant. Kropotkin was adamant in his belief that ethics ought to be a concrete scientific discipline, a distinct study that had to distance itself from the unconfirmed claims and teachings of religion and/or metaphysics. But just as dangerous were the views of those scientists (e.g. Thomas R. Malthus and Thomas H. Huxley) whose reasoning was muddled due to their inability to zoom out of their surroundings and shield their judgment from the cultural influences and traditional ways of interpreting information.

After analyzing the discoveries of his scientific research as well as careful observations of everyday life, Kropotkin arrived at the conclusion that individualism leads to psychological alienation and physical isolation, consequences that have a negative impact on the development of one’s physical and mental faculties. Moreover, Kropotkin set out to demonstrate that nature was not a-moral but quite the opposite, “that morality constitutes the natural product of the evolution of social life not only of man, but of almost all living creatures, among the majority of which we find the rudiments of moral relations.”[3]

…

After a meticulous study of the major works of Western philosophy, starting with the ancient Greek philosophers and ending with his own contemporaries, Kropotkin concluded that there are three elements of moral conduct without which a society cannot claim to care about ethics, and they are: mutual aid/cooperation, justice/equity, and self-sacrifice. It is only with the full realization of these elements that a society can create an atmosphere in which the optimal physical and intellectual development of an individual can take place. If any of the three elements is neglected, the society is not going to possess the necessary foundation for the best possible development of its inhabitants and therefore deserves to be criticized and altered. I believe that this is the essential idea of Kropotkin’s revolutionary thought and it will be elaborated later on in this article. I will only add that Kropotkin’s support for resistance against any form of authority is based on the idea that the very existence of authority automatically neglects at least one of the mentioned principles, that of justice/equity.

Kropotkin believed that science has infused man (at least those who engage in it and understand it) with modesty by revealing that he/she is a tiny speck in a vast universe. It has taught him that a single individual, regardless of his/her intelligence and strength, cannot achieve anything on his/her own, but that with others, the advancement of knowledge can guide him/her in his/her march forward. In other words, scientific discoveries ought to be used for the benefit of all. Since exploitation and manipulation of the masses by a minority continued after the Russian Revolution, Kropotkin set out to write about a branch of knowledge which he thought trailed behind all other scientific advances so that it can “give to the civilized nations the inspiration required for the great task that lies before them.”[4]

Kropotkin judged all ethical theories based on the extent to which they emphasized the importance of mutual aid, justice, and self-sacrifice. He admonished those philosophers who ignored these three components and he lauded those who stressed their significance. In his work on ethics, Kropotkin traces the teachings of various schools of Western ethical thought, explains their evolution and what new contributions they brought to the field of moral principles, and elaborates on the essential points they neglected. To summarize Kropotkin’s critiques of each philosopher he wrote about would be an unproductive digression, primarily because each critique points in the direction of the same conclusion: that mutual aid, justice, and self-sacrifice are the three indispensable principles of moral conduct. Each school of moral thought and each philosopher are judged by the extent to which they emphasized the significance of these three principles. Kropotkin lauds some philosophers for abandoning religious and metaphysical explanations of the origin of moral conduct and for seeking answers in the natural world. However, Kropotkin writes that since these great minds perished before they were able to witness the major scientific discoveries of the nineteenth century, most of them could only hint at but not fully explain the origin of morality and the roles that mutual-aid, justice/equity, and self-sacrifice had played in the evolution and progress of the humankind.

According to Kropotkin, a great number of Western philosophers had correctly hinted at the symptoms of moral feelings in human beings, but they had failed to elaborate on the origin of these symptoms. He writes that throughout different historical periods philosophers and scientists tried to explain the origin of the moral instinct; however, most of them, due to the lack of knowledge of natural sciences, have either wrongfully attributed the existence of moral behavior to some kind of divinity (e.g. Lev N. Tolstoy’s religious convictions) or a metaphysical construct (e.g. Immanuel Kant’s “Categorical Imperative” or Arthur Schopenhauer’s philosophy of the “Will”) or, in the case of those who attempted to secularize the study of moral behavior by seeking answers in nature, many had not fully explored the question or were overly influenced by the cultural and political events of their day (e.g. Kropotkin thought that Thomas Hobbs’ concept of “Social Contract” was apocryphal due to the omission of the fact that human beings are and have always been social creatures).

Because each new system either took away or added a new element that had been omitted in the previous systems, according to Kropotkin, the study of ethics is an open-ended domain that ought to continuously acquire new elements as humanity enters and goes through new stages of development. The rise of the late 19th century mystico-religious idealism served as proof that previous ethical systems with a positivist foundation had failed to inspire the masses. Instead of science, the source of all reliable knowledge, the new generation of writers and intellectuals had returned to St. Bernard and Neo-Platonism, and had placed “symbolism” and the “incomprehensible” above the concrete and observable.[5] A different cluster of intellectuals bought into the idea of “superior natures,” or “superior individualization”. Then there were the Darwinists who tried to justify the status quo by emphasizing competition and struggle and completely disregarding another aspect “of another set of facts, parallel to those of mutual struggle, but having a quite different meaning: the facts of mutual support within the species, which are even more important than the former, on account of their significance for the welfare of the species and its maintenance.”[6]

In a pamphlet titled Anarchist Morality, Kropotkin succinctly explains the origin of moral instinct, and this elucidation, I believe, sheds light on his decision to support those who resorted to assassinations and other violent tactics in their revolutionary struggle. Kropotkin believed that moral sense which steers our conduct is instinctive. The moral instincts could be dulled and remain dormant for a long time, but as soon as a favorable opportunity for their reawaking presents itself, as soon as one encounters an example of valor, those moral instincts undergo an unconscious stimulation.

Kropotkin believed that both moral and immoral acts “arise from a single motive: the lust for pleasure.”[7] A man/woman who drinks, robs, murders, or commits some other kind of offense does so because at that moment he/she is either attempting to augment his/her life with momentary pleasure or to expel from it undesirable pain. Similarly, a man/woman who gives his/her only clothes to a fellow human being freezing on the street, he/she does so because it pains them more to see another man suffering than to endure the chill. In both cases each man/woman acts because their deed brought them pleasure or spared them suffering, but “so vastly different for humanity are the results of these two lives; so much do we feel ourselves drawn towards the one and repelled by the other.”[8] Kropotkin then explains that benevolence is the most rewarding feeling there is and that those who help, even if they were to be executed for their actions, would not exchange their lives “for the life of the petty scoundrel who lives on the money stolen from his work-people.”[9] Kropotkin writes that in their struggle, the martyrs feel the highest joy: the inward peace that one feels after rectifying a previously caused harm or preventing an act of injustice.

“Without this quest of the agreeable, life itself would be impossible. Organisms would disintegrate, life cease.”[10] The innate, contagious, and uncontainable urge to deter injustice was the reason why revolutionaries frequently chose the path that led to death, both their own and of those they regarded as tyrants. Many of them, due to the lack of opportunity to devise more effective means of resistance, never clearly articulated or understood what it was that compelled them to put their lives in peril for the sake of people they had never met. Kropotkin was well aware that haste and confusion comprise a significant part of any insurrection. During this period rational thinking and thoroughly planned decisions are often unfeasible. Some revolutionaries rush into action without consulting their peers; they inconsiderately hurl bombs and aim their revolvers at people they regard to be symbols of oppression. They blunder and often are responsible for unnecessary suffering. While Kropotkin was critical of such acts, he was generally forgiving of those who carried them out because he understood the circumstances in which the revolutionaries made their decisions. Moreover, and most importantly, Kropotkin thought that their actions stemmed from a moral impulse, and for this reason, he was unable to categorically condemn them.

This is precisely how Peter Kropotkin viewed the actions of Sophia L. Perosvkaya and other members of Narodnaya Volya who participated in the orchestration of the assassination of the Emperor of Russia. Kropotkin believed that the assassination was not a useful act because it was clear that the majority of Russian people would condemn it. However, Kropotkin believed that the general public did not emphatically denounce Perovskaya and other Pervomartsovtsy because it was clear to everyone that “not for all the gold in the world would Perovskaya and her comrades have consented to become tyrants themselves.”[11] What prompted Perovskaya to organize the assassination of the Russian Emperor was not glory, material wealth or some other personal advantage. According to Kropotkin, who had personally known her during the time he spent in the circle of Tchaykovsky, it was her sincere aversion of tyranny that led her to the conclusion that regicide was morally permissible. Kropotkin believed that “the right to kill must be conquered.”[12] What he meant by this is that a revolutionary ought to completely adhere to the moral principles described in this article. Only when one accepts that equality in everything, sympathy and mutual aid in times of joy and sadness are the principles to be followed do they earn the right to criticize and overthrow those who reject these same principles.

In various places in his writings on morality, Kropotkin stresses the importance of the age-old moral guide better known as the Golden Rule: “Do to others what you would have them do to you in the same circumstances.”[13] At this point one might ask whether those revolutionaries who used explosives to tear apart the Russian Emperor were breaking their devotion to the just mentioned principle. Kropotkin anticipated this inquiry and he answered it in the following way: “Any man with a heart asks beforehand that he may be slain if ever he becomes venomous; that a dagger may be plunged into his heart if ever he should take the place of a dethroned tyrant.”[14] Kropotkin believed that those who wish to oppress automatically forfeiting the right to be treated with compassion. The masses do not condone such hypocrisy, and only those who are fighting for equality for everyone everywhere have the moral standing to lead, not by accumulating wealth or climbing the socioeconomic ladder, but by practicing comprehensive egalitarianism.

Milan Djurasovic is a Bosnian American collage artist, blogger, and a book author. He currently lives and works in St. Petersburg, Russia. His educational background is in psychology and history. He can be reached via Face Book https://www.facebook.com/milan.djurasovic

[1] N. Lebedev, Introduction by the Russian Editor (London: George E Harrap Co, Ltd., 1924), pp. iii-ix, http://dwardmac.pitzer.edu/Anarchist_Archives/kropotkin/ethics/intro.html (accessed 2 December, 2014).

[2] Ibid.

[3] Ibid.

[4] Peter Kropotkin, Ethics: Origin and Development (London: George E Harrap Co, Ltd., 1924), pp.11, http://dwardmac.pitzer.edu/Anarchist_Archives/kropotkin/ethics/intro.html (accessed 5 December, 2014).

[5] Ibid., pp. 15.

[6] Ibid., pp. 16.

[7] Peter Kropotkin, Anarchist Morality, pp. 84.

[8] Ibid., pp. 86.

[9] Ibid.

[10] Ibid., pp. 88.

[11] Ibid., pp. 100.

[12] Ibid., pp. 101.

[13] Ibid., pp. 92.

[14] Ibid., pp. 100.

KROPOTKIN ETHICS AND MORALITY HARDCOVER PDFhttps://rowlandpasaribu.files.wordpress.com/2013/09/pc3abtr-kropotkin-ethics.pdf

COMMENT
K SHESHU BABU
October 23, 2016 at 5:20 pm

The works and thoughts of Kropotkin have been elaborately dealt in these essays. The anarchist principles based mainly on morality should be analysed in modern context and applied to specific situations

The teachings of Kropotkin are valid even in modern day world. The elaborate discussion of his life and works would go a long way in understanding him in historical perspective.

Artificial intelligence/Machine learning
If AI is going to help us in a crisis, we need a new kind of ethics

Ethics for urgency means making ethics a core part of AI rather than an afterthought, says Jess Whittlestone.

by Will Douglas Heaven  June 24, 2020

MS TECH | PIXABAY

Jess Whittlestone at the Leverhulme Centre for the Future of Intelligence at the University of Cambridge and her colleagues published a comment piece in Nature Machine Intelligence this week arguing that if artificial intelligence is going to help in a crisis, we need a new, faster way of doing AI ethics, which they call ethics for urgency. 

JESS WHITTLESTONE

For Whittlestone, this means anticipating problems before they happen, finding better ways to build safety and reliability into AI systems, and emphasizing technical expertise at all levels of the technology’s development and use. At the core of these recommendations is the idea that ethics needs to become simply a part of how AI is made and used, rather than an add-on or afterthought.

Ultimately, AI will be quicker to deploy when needed if it is made with ethics built in, she argues. I asked her to talk me through what this means.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Why do we need a new kind of ethics for AI?

With this pandemic we’re suddenly in a situation where people are really talking about whether AI could be useful, whether it could save lives. But the crisis has made it clear that we don’t have robust enough ethics procedures for AI to be deployed safely, and certainly not ones that can be implemented quickly.

What’s wrong with the ethics we have?

I spent the last couple of years reviewing AI ethics initiatives, looking at their limitations and asking what else we need. Compared to something like biomedical ethics, the ethics we have for AI isn’t very practical. It focuses too much on high-level principles. We can all agree that AI should be used for good. But what does that really mean? And what happens when high-level principles come into conflict?

For example, AI has the potential to save lives but this could come at the cost of civil liberties like privacy. How do we address those trade-offs in ways that are acceptable to lots of different people? We haven’t figured out how to deal with the inevitable disagreements.

AI ethics also tends to respond to existing problems rather than anticipate new ones. Most of the issues that people are discussing today around algorithmic bias came up only when high-profile things went wrong, such as with policing and parole decisions.

But ethics needs to be proactive and prepare for what could go wrong, not what has gone wrong already. Obviously, we can’t predict the future. But as these systems become more powerful and get used in more high-stakes domains, the risks will get bigger.

What opportunities have we missed by not having these procedures in place?

It’s easy to overhype what’s possible, and AI was probably never going to play a huge role in this crisis. Machine-learning systems are not mature enough.

But there are a handful of cases in which AI is being tested for medical diagnosis or for resource allocation across hospitals. We might have been able to use those sorts of systems more widely, reducing some of the load on health care, had they been designed from the start with ethics in mind.

With resource allocation in particular, you are deciding which patients are highest priority. You need an ethical framework built in before you use AI to help with those kinds of decisions.

So is ethics for urgency simply a call to make existing AI ethics better?

That’s part of it. The fact that we don’t have robust, practical processes for AI ethics makes things more difficult in a crisis scenario. But in times like this you also have greater need for transparency. People talk a lot about the lack of transparency with machine-learning systems as black boxes. But there is another kind of transparency, concerning how the systems are used.

This is especially important in a crisis, when governments and organizations are making urgent decisions that involve trade-offs. Whose health do you prioritize? How do you save lives without destroying the economy? If an AI is being used in public decision-making, transparency is more important than ever.

What needs to change?

We need to think about ethics differently. It shouldn’t be something that happens on the side or afterwards—something that slows you down. It should simply be part of how we build these systems in the first place: ethics by design.

I sometimes feel “ethics” is the wrong word. What we’re saying is that machine-learning researchers and engineers need to be trained to think through the implications of what they’re building, whether they’re doing fundamental research like designing a new reinforcement-learning algorithm or something more practical like developing a health-care application. If their work finds its way into real-world products and services, what might that look like? What kinds of issues might it raise?

Some of this has started already. We are working with some early-career AI researchers, talking to them about how to bring this way of thinking to their work. It’s a bit of an experiment, to see what happens. But even NeurIPS [a leading AI conference] now asks researchers to include a statement at the end of their papers outlining potential societal impacts of their work.

You’ve said that we need people with technical expertise at all levels of AI design and use. Why is that?

I’m not saying that technical expertise is the be-all and end-all of ethics, but it’s a perspective that needs to be represented. And I don’t want to sound like I’m saying all the responsibility is on researchers, because a lot of the important decisions about how AI gets used are made further up the chain, by industry or by governments.

But I worry that the people who are making those decisions don’t always fully understand the ways it might go wrong. So you need to involve people with technical expertise. Our intuitions about what AI can and can’t do are not very reliable.

What you need at all levels of AI development are people who really understand the details of machine learning to work with people who really understand ethics. Interdisciplinary collaboration is hard, however. People with different areas of expertise often talk about things in different ways. What a machine-learning researcher means by privacy may be very different from what a lawyer means by privacy, and you can end up with people talking past each other. That’s why it’s important for these different groups to get used to working together.

You’re pushing for a pretty big institutional and cultural overhaul. What makes you think people will want to do this rather than set up ethics boards or oversight committees—which always make me sigh a bit because they tend to be toothless?

Yeah, I also sigh. But I think this crisis is forcing people to see the importance of practical solutions. Maybe instead of saying, “Oh, let’s have this oversight board and that oversight board,” people will be saying, “We need to get this done, and we need to get it done properly.”

WHOSE ETHICS

https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/petr-kropotkin-ethics-origin-and-development

Ethics And Artificial Intelligence: An Unethical Optimization Principle

July 11, 2020

By Eurasia Review

Artificial intelligence (AI) is increasingly deployed around us and may have large potential benefits. But there are growing concerns about the unethical use of AI. Professor Anthony Davison, who holds the Chair of Statistics at EPFL, and colleagues in the UK, have tackled these questions from a mathematical point of view, focusing on commercial AI that seek to maximize profits.

One example is an insurance company using AI to find a strategy for deciding premiums for potential customers. The AI will choose from many potential strategies, some of which may be discriminatory or may otherwise misuse customer data in ways that later lead to severe penalties for the company. Ideally, unethical strategies such as these would be removed from the space of potential strategies beforehand, but the AI does not have a moral sense, so it cannot distinguish between ethical and unethical strategies.

In work published in Royal Society Open Science, Davison and his co-authors Heather Battey (Imperial College London), Nicholas Beale (Sciteb Limited) and Robert MacKay (University of Warwick), show that an AI is likely to pick an unethical strategy in many situations. They formulate their results as an “Unethical Optimization Principle”:

If an AI aims to maximize risk-adjusted return, then under mild conditions it is disproportionately likely to pick an unethical strategy unless the objective function allows sufficiently for this risk.

This principle can help risk managers, regulators or others to detect the unethical strategies that might be hidden in a large strategy space. In an ideal world one would configure the AI to avoid unethical strategies, but this may be impossible because they cannot be specified in advance. In order to guide the use of the AI, the article suggests how to estimate the proportion of unethical strategies and the distribution of the most profitable strategies.

“Our work can be used to help regulators, compliance staff and others to find problematic strategies that might be hidden in a large strategy space. Such a space can be expected to contain disproportionately many unethical strategies, inspection of which should show where problems are likely to arise and thus suggest how the AI search algorithm should be modified to avoid them,” says Professor Davison. “It also suggests that it may be necessary to re-think the way AI operates in very large strategy spaces, so that unethical outcomes are explicitly rejected during the learning process.”

Professor Wendy Hall of the University of Southampton, known worldwide for her work on the potential practical benefits and problems brought by AI, said: “This is a really important paper. It shows that we can’t just rely on AI systems to act ethically because their objectives seem ethically neutral. On the contrary, under mild conditions, an AI system will disproportionately find unethical solutions unless it is carefully designed to avoid them.

“The tremendous potential benefits of AI will only be realised properly if ethical behaviour is designed in from the ground up, taking account of this Unethical Optimisation Principle from a diverse set of perspectives. Encouragingly, this Principle can also be used to help find ethical problems with existing systems which can then be addressed by better design.”

WHOSE ETHICS
https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/petr-kropotkin-ethics-origin-and-development

CANDYMAN 

More Criminal Cases Launched Against Former Ukrainian President Poroshenko

July 11, 2020 (RFE/RL) — The Ukrainian Prosecutor-General’s Office has launched four additional criminal cases against former President Petro Poroshenko, his lawyer Ihor Holovan said on June 10.

According to Holovan, the probes were launched at the request of tycoon Ihor Kolomoyskiy, who accuses Poroshenko of interference with the activities of PrivatBank — once owned by Kolomoyskiy — revealing sensitive information regarding PrivatBank’s activities, abuse of office, and money laundering.

Holovan called all the accusations against Poroshenko “politically motivated.”

Kolomoyskiy, Poroshenko’s long-time foe, lost control over PrivatBank in 2016 when the central bank took it over after it failed stress tests and was deemed to be undercapitalized. Poroshenko was president at that time.

Kolomoyskiy lived in self-imposed exile for nearly two years and returned after Volodymyr Zelenskiy’s election as president in April 2019.

Kolomoyskiy’s ties to Zelenskiy, who rose to fame as an actor on a TV channel owned by Kolomoisky, had raised concerns over the president’s independence from the oligarch.


On July 1, Poroshenko said that, in all, there are 24 probes launched against him, claiming that his successor “is behind all of them.”

Ukraine’s Prosecutor-General Iryna Venedyktova rejected Poroshenko’s claims, saying that the probes have nothing to do with politics.

On July 8, Venedyktova withdrew its request to place Poroshenko under pretrial arrest in one of the cases against him. The case is related to his alleged illegal appointment of a deputy chief of the country’s foreign intelligence service. Venedyktova said that the investigations in that case had been completed.

A billionaire confectioner, Poroshenko currently serves as a member of parliament.

His party ran on a pro-European, anti-Russian ticket in July parliamentary elections, winning 25 seats.

Home

India-Canada Energy Cooperation – OpEd

Canada has been one of the biggest success stories in oil over the past few years. India should consider financial investments in Canadian energy assets as a means to secure its energy supplies.

By Amit Bhandari*

July 11, 2020 Gateway House 


India's Prime Minister, Shri Narendra Modi with the Prime Minister of Canada, Mr. Justin Trudeau, at Hyderabad House, in New Delhi . Photo Credit: India PM Office.

By Gateway House

India is now the world’s third largest consumer of petroleum, and is expected to be a major driver for growth in global oil demand from 2020 to 2040. In 2019, India imported 4 million barrels per day (1.4 billion barrels per year), and this is projected to increase to 9 million barrels per day by 2040, as the country’s economy expands. Canada has the world’s third largest reserves of petroleum in the form of oil sands, and it is also the third largest exporter of oil worldwide. Canada’s oil production is expected to increase from 5.2 million barrels per day to 6.3 million barrels per day by 2030.

Is there an India-Canada oil match to be made?

It could be promising, if Indian companies and investors can be brought into Canada’s vibrant oil producing entities. India’s dominant state-owned oil companies can take minority stakes – purely financial – in Canada’s top oil producers. The investments can be made via a special purpose vehicle, with a mandate to make financial investments, rather than take direct stakes in those companies. The returns will move in line with oil prices, insulating India against fluctuations in the market, especially in higher prices, of oil.

A financial investment will also shelter Indian investors from the political and technical complexities of Canadian oil sands, and will not run foul of Canadian law on acquisitions by foreign state-owned enterprises. Over the longer term, Indian retail investors can be brought in via exchange-traded funds listed in India, which hold shares in major Canadian oil companies. This will bring stability to the market and deepen the bilateral.

How can this work for both sides? For India, investment in overseas oil and gas assets are one way to bring down the risk of high energy prices and disruptions due to geopolitical factors. Canada is among the most stable geographies across the world and is ideally placed to be a hedge against such risks.

For Canada, the big issue has been getting a fair price for its oil – Canadian oil trades at significant discount to common benchmarks due to lack of market access and a limited number of buyers. Getting investors and consumers from a growing market such as India into the upstream sector will also give Canadian companies a source of capital – a major competitive advantage in a world with surplus oil.

*About the author: Amit Bhandari is Fellow, Energy & Environment Studies Programme, Gateway House.

Source: This article was written for Gateway House: Indian Council on Global Relations.

Home » India-Canada Energy Cooperation – OpEd

Gateway House

Gateway House: Indian Council on Global Relations is a foreign policy think-tank established in 2009, to engage India’s leading corporations and individuals in debate and scholarship on India’s foreign policy and its role in global affairs. Gateway House’s studies programme will be at the heart of the institute’s scholarship, with original research by global and local scholars in Geo-economics, Geopolitics, Foreign Policy analysis, Bilateral relations, Democracy and nation-building, National security, ethnic conflict and terrorism, Science, technology and innovation, and Energy and Environment.

Iran Under Attack – Analysis

July 10, 2020  Neville Teller 1 Comment

According to Iran's Defense Ministry this explosion at the Parchin complex near Tehran was caused by an exploding gas-storage tanker. Photo Credit: Tasnim News Agency

By Neville Teller

Iranian media reported an explosion in western Tehran in the early hours of Friday, 10 July, causing electricity to be cut in surrounding suburbs. It was the latest in a string of mysterious blasts to rock the country. At least three are known to have occurred in or around Iranian nuclear facilities, and initial reports claimed that the latest explosion was at a missile depot belonging to Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC). Occurring over some ten days, they cannot be easily explained away. The regime is undoubtedly under attack. The question so far unanswered is, from whom?

Is this a covert onslaught masterminded by Israel, the US, or the two acting in concert? Did Israeli F-35 fighters actually bomb one of the sites? Are a group of anti-regime activists, working within Iran’s nuclear industry, taking covert action to prevent the regime acquiring nuclear weapons? Were the incidents the result of sophisticated cyber attacks, or were they sabotage, caused by old-fashioned explosives? There is a great deal of speculation, but so far nothing definitive has emerged.

It was on June 26, 2020 that the first of this series of incidents occurred. Despite initial assertions by the Iranian Defense Ministry that there had been a minor detonation in the Parchin military complex, satellite images showed that it was at the nearby missile production complex at Khojir that a bomb had damaged a cache of gas tanks. The blast was later described as “a massive explosion” that had “burned a hillside”. Parchin, near Tehran, is where Western powers suspect Iran carried out tests related to nuclear warhead detonations more than a decade ago.

On June 30 a detonation inside a medical center in Tehran resulted in a fire and the death of more than a dozen people.

The third, and perhaps the most serious, of this series of incidents occurred on July 2. The Atomic Energy Organization of Iran (AEOI) announced that there had been an explosion in one of the industrial sheds under construction at the Natanz uranium enrichment plant. US analysts identified it as a new centrifuge assembly workshop. Centrifuges are needed to produce enriched uranium, which can be used to make reactor fuel and nuclear weapons.

Hours before the AEOI statement, however, according to reports on the BBC’s website, journalists working for BBC Persian had received an email from a hitherto unknown group calling itself “Cheetahs of the Homeland”, claiming that it had attacked the building. The group said its members were part of “underground opposition with Iran’s security apparatus”, and that they had deliberately arranged for the attack to take place above ground so that it “couldn’t be denied”.

That the BBC did indeed receive an email with advance information about the Natanz explosion, and that the mysterious “Cheetahs of the Homeland” claimed responsibility, must be accepted. What remains unclear is the source of that message. Is there really a covert group within Iran, seeking to disrupt the regime’s nuclear program? Or was that email a piece of disinformation designed to camouflage the true source of the explosions?

Then on July 4 another massive fire damaged a power station in Khuzestan province. According to the on-line Intelli Times, the plant’s method of operation − regulating electricity through automation and industrial controllers – makes it open to a cyber attack.

As for the Natanz attack, the New York Times reported that two well-placed, but anonymous, sources had confirmed that that explosion was not the result of a cyber attack, but had been caused by a “powerful bomb”, and that Israel had masterminded the operation

This version was countered by the Kuwaiti newspaper Al-Jarida which maintained that Israeli F-35 fighters had bombed the Parchin site (not the nearby Khojir nuclear facility), but the Natanz incident was an Israeli electronic attack targeting computers controlling storage pressure devices.

Whichever agency carried out the Natanz attack, Iran has not attempted to deny that it has had a significant effect on the country’s nuclear program.

“The incident could slow down the development and production of advanced centrifuges in the medium term,” said the AEOI spokesman, quoted by the State news agency. “…Iran will replace the damaged building with a bigger one that has more advanced equipment.”

However, the damage to Iran’s nuclear project may be considerably more serious than this. Al-Jarida pinpoints the target as UF6 gas (uranium hexafluoride), used specifically for uranium enrichment. Iran has recently begun to produce UF6 for injection into the advanced IR-6 centrifuges it has been constructing at Natanz. The paper asserts that Iran has now lost 80% of its stock of this gas. Moreover, the Natanz explosion led to a “crack in the reactor building. Specialized groups went to the reactor to discover whether there was leakage of radioactive materials.” The building, which took six years to construct, became operational in 2018.

At a recent press conference Israel’s defense minister, Benny Gantz, said: “A nuclear Iran is a threat to the world and the region, as well as a threat to Israel and we will do everything to prevent that from happening.”

Israel’s foreign minister, Gabi Ashkenazi, was somewhat more succinct. “We take actions that are better left unsaid.”

Neville Teller
Neville Teller’s latest book is “The Chaos in the Middle East, 2014-2016” (2016), and writes the blog "A Mid-East Journal". He is also a long-time dramatist, writer and abridger for BBC radio and for the UK audiobook industry. Born in London and educated at Owen's School and St Edmund Hall, Oxford, he is a past chairman of the Society of Authors' Broadcasting Committee, and of the Contributors' Committee of the Audiobook Publishing Association. He was made an MBE in the Queen's Birthday Honours, 2006 "for services to broadcasting and to drama."