Abdelouahab Hammoudi's Blog
November 4, 2017
JMP
“A man in need is a slave indeed.”
Every month, hundreds of poor people are chased outside their country of origin by poverty. They risk their lives to reach richer countries in their hopeless search for survival. We call them “Boat People” or “illegal immigrants”.
Most “Boat People” are the product of the lack of JMP in their homeland. So they commit the imprudence of leaving their homeland to one which is culturally different from theirs, and thus experience being different in the context of the host society.
In the present troubled times, to be a foreigner, in most countries, is often seen with suspicion and disdain, and sometimes associated with racial hatred and exclusion. Consequently, this stranger, being culturally different in the host society, ignoring its language and social codes, feels completely lonesome. Moreover, for lack of communication, this stranger is seen as disruptive and disturbing. Then misunderstanding settles down with its corollary that is violence and intolerance.
This situation creates in the host societies, an unconscious and unseen social behavior which isolates, sometimes humiliates, traumatizes, and depreciates these undesired “immigrants” living on their territories. Through time, this behavior becomes a shaping process of these humans, some of which later rebel against this same society. Unwillingly, these countries manufacture human bombs that later explode at their faces.
Social behavior is a responsible behavior and a producer of human reaction. Thus, we are bound to manufacture the type of reaction that we will have in five, six, or ten years from these people or their offspring, whether we want it or not.
Most people totally ignore that human reaction is a provoked product and in this context the different forms of racial exclusion and iniquities are a human product, a product of the society. And these are the dynamics underlying any fringe of the population’s development in any place of the world.
“Boat People” are the head-side of lack of “JMP” in most parts of the world. If we do not want to have “Boat People”, there should be “JSP” in their homeland. But if this “S” in the JSP cannot be fulfilled, then it must be changed by “M” and instead of “JSP” we will have “JMP”.
In the past, in troubled regions, in order to achieve peace, we used to say “Justice Should Prevail”. But this “should” can hardly be heard today. So “Must” might be holding stronger range of decibels and therefore could be made more audible. So, in order to avoid “illegal immigrants”, somewhere ,somehow
Justice Must Prevail
Otherwise, most of our societies, later or sooner, will have a genuine product of their own creation that will put to hard test their intelligence and their quietude.
Of course nobody wishes that! But remember, only if there is “JMP” somewhere and everywhere.
Just this: JMP.
By Abdelouahab HAMMOUDI
Every month, hundreds of poor people are chased outside their country of origin by poverty. They risk their lives to reach richer countries in their hopeless search for survival. We call them “Boat People” or “illegal immigrants”.
Most “Boat People” are the product of the lack of JMP in their homeland. So they commit the imprudence of leaving their homeland to one which is culturally different from theirs, and thus experience being different in the context of the host society.
In the present troubled times, to be a foreigner, in most countries, is often seen with suspicion and disdain, and sometimes associated with racial hatred and exclusion. Consequently, this stranger, being culturally different in the host society, ignoring its language and social codes, feels completely lonesome. Moreover, for lack of communication, this stranger is seen as disruptive and disturbing. Then misunderstanding settles down with its corollary that is violence and intolerance.
This situation creates in the host societies, an unconscious and unseen social behavior which isolates, sometimes humiliates, traumatizes, and depreciates these undesired “immigrants” living on their territories. Through time, this behavior becomes a shaping process of these humans, some of which later rebel against this same society. Unwillingly, these countries manufacture human bombs that later explode at their faces.
Social behavior is a responsible behavior and a producer of human reaction. Thus, we are bound to manufacture the type of reaction that we will have in five, six, or ten years from these people or their offspring, whether we want it or not.
Most people totally ignore that human reaction is a provoked product and in this context the different forms of racial exclusion and iniquities are a human product, a product of the society. And these are the dynamics underlying any fringe of the population’s development in any place of the world.
“Boat People” are the head-side of lack of “JMP” in most parts of the world. If we do not want to have “Boat People”, there should be “JSP” in their homeland. But if this “S” in the JSP cannot be fulfilled, then it must be changed by “M” and instead of “JSP” we will have “JMP”.
In the past, in troubled regions, in order to achieve peace, we used to say “Justice Should Prevail”. But this “should” can hardly be heard today. So “Must” might be holding stronger range of decibels and therefore could be made more audible. So, in order to avoid “illegal immigrants”, somewhere ,somehow
Justice Must Prevail
Otherwise, most of our societies, later or sooner, will have a genuine product of their own creation that will put to hard test their intelligence and their quietude.
Of course nobody wishes that! But remember, only if there is “JMP” somewhere and everywhere.
Just this: JMP.
By Abdelouahab HAMMOUDI
July 23, 2017
Does fiction have a social function ?
There is no doubt that fiction is an artistic act and its social product is the emotion.
Another undeniable fact is that fiction appears to always cope with a hidden social and psychological demand and need.
Fiction is not the reflection of the reality. It is a facet of this reality, a component that comes to enrich it.
Fiction (in book as well as in movies) is the dream of the human societies.
We dream while watching a film or reading a good novel.
The isolation and loneliness of the reader (or the obscure theatre in movies) recreates a dream-like state of mind.
Everything, in the ceremonial of reading (or screening) participates in deactivating the relationship of the reader (or the spectator) to his immediate reality.
The calm, the sitting position, the comfort preceding the reading (or the darkness preceding the projection) induce a passivity that increases as the reading moves on.
Slowly, the book (or the film) asserts itself as responding to the same imaginary need of the dream.
Aren’t - we therefore entitled to wonder if, like the dream at the individual’s level , the book (and the movies) have not got a repairing function of the spectators’ psyche?
Forbidding books (or closing for any reason a theatre) in any society, would not that amount to a displacement of the spectacle to the street , to satisfy the need that the book (and the theater) can no longer satisfy?
Could we not consider the stories contained in books (and spectacle in theatres) as a means for the audience, to unload their excess of energy of all sorts that has not yet, found its way in real life?
It seems that there is really this social and psychological function that we seem not to acknowledge yet and that keeps a healthy balance on the human psyche.
On the other hand, in the world of the fiction, could we not class it according to the objective that it aims to reach?
So we will have, for example:
1 – The Beacon fiction (orientation).
2 – The Warning fiction.
3 – The Pedagogical fiction.
4 – The Mobilizing fictions.
5 – The Therapeutic fiction.
Another undeniable fact is that fiction appears to always cope with a hidden social and psychological demand and need.
Fiction is not the reflection of the reality. It is a facet of this reality, a component that comes to enrich it.
Fiction (in book as well as in movies) is the dream of the human societies.
We dream while watching a film or reading a good novel.
The isolation and loneliness of the reader (or the obscure theatre in movies) recreates a dream-like state of mind.
Everything, in the ceremonial of reading (or screening) participates in deactivating the relationship of the reader (or the spectator) to his immediate reality.
The calm, the sitting position, the comfort preceding the reading (or the darkness preceding the projection) induce a passivity that increases as the reading moves on.
Slowly, the book (or the film) asserts itself as responding to the same imaginary need of the dream.
Aren’t - we therefore entitled to wonder if, like the dream at the individual’s level , the book (and the movies) have not got a repairing function of the spectators’ psyche?
Forbidding books (or closing for any reason a theatre) in any society, would not that amount to a displacement of the spectacle to the street , to satisfy the need that the book (and the theater) can no longer satisfy?
Could we not consider the stories contained in books (and spectacle in theatres) as a means for the audience, to unload their excess of energy of all sorts that has not yet, found its way in real life?
It seems that there is really this social and psychological function that we seem not to acknowledge yet and that keeps a healthy balance on the human psyche.
On the other hand, in the world of the fiction, could we not class it according to the objective that it aims to reach?
So we will have, for example:
1 – The Beacon fiction (orientation).
2 – The Warning fiction.
3 – The Pedagogical fiction.
4 – The Mobilizing fictions.
5 – The Therapeutic fiction.
July 8, 2017
LOVE
Men have always sung about love, because to humans, it remains an inaccessible and eternal thing.
Love is a perpetual quest.
But, there is an inherent strange aspect in love: Love is a self-destructive phenomenon.
The problem with love is that it is also enslavement! Enslavement folded in pleasure, which makes of it a paradox.
Love, this terrible passion, is unreal. The sentiments that follow love are usually indifference, detachment, and in the end, nothing really lasts, neither love nor friendship nor human relationship.
There is a pretty good definition of love: Love is a self-destruction process in search of a perfection that can never be reached.
Love is inaccessible and versatile. We just find it to watch it fade away. Great love, adoration is an intrinsic peculiarity of the human nature. The problem is not in this sentiment of love and extreme submission, but in the choice of the object to be adored.
To adore something, is to accept to be its slave. Then, the problem that occurs is the following: to choose to be the slave of whom, of what? The less we can say is that it is not advised to adore your executioner!
But this may happen. In the love process, each one wants to be loved exclusively. And lovers are found always trapped by their love. By loving each other, they become captives of their own love. They love a third thing: They love their Love.
And hopeless love seems to be the supreme form of Love. Great love is often a furtive moment in the eternal eternity.
People love to love. And in the quest of its exclusive appropriation, we deny it even to God. We no longer say: For the Love of God or for God’s sake.
Everywhere where we have denied this Love of God, we have found ourselves, by a strange phenomenon, submitted to subcontractors, who are the leaders, the parties, the organizations, fetishes, images and objects of our own creation.
Everywhere where we have “killed” the Divine Love, we have shouted: “the Divine Love is dead, long life to the divine Love” that is to say, the love of he, who came to usurp his place, the leader, the strong man of the moment.
Who said that the Pharaoh is dead?
Love is a perpetual quest.
But, there is an inherent strange aspect in love: Love is a self-destructive phenomenon.
The problem with love is that it is also enslavement! Enslavement folded in pleasure, which makes of it a paradox.
Love, this terrible passion, is unreal. The sentiments that follow love are usually indifference, detachment, and in the end, nothing really lasts, neither love nor friendship nor human relationship.
There is a pretty good definition of love: Love is a self-destruction process in search of a perfection that can never be reached.
Love is inaccessible and versatile. We just find it to watch it fade away. Great love, adoration is an intrinsic peculiarity of the human nature. The problem is not in this sentiment of love and extreme submission, but in the choice of the object to be adored.
To adore something, is to accept to be its slave. Then, the problem that occurs is the following: to choose to be the slave of whom, of what? The less we can say is that it is not advised to adore your executioner!
But this may happen. In the love process, each one wants to be loved exclusively. And lovers are found always trapped by their love. By loving each other, they become captives of their own love. They love a third thing: They love their Love.
And hopeless love seems to be the supreme form of Love. Great love is often a furtive moment in the eternal eternity.
People love to love. And in the quest of its exclusive appropriation, we deny it even to God. We no longer say: For the Love of God or for God’s sake.
Everywhere where we have denied this Love of God, we have found ourselves, by a strange phenomenon, submitted to subcontractors, who are the leaders, the parties, the organizations, fetishes, images and objects of our own creation.
Everywhere where we have “killed” the Divine Love, we have shouted: “the Divine Love is dead, long life to the divine Love” that is to say, the love of he, who came to usurp his place, the leader, the strong man of the moment.
Who said that the Pharaoh is dead?
July 1, 2017
LANGUAGES
Has it ever occurred to anyone to forbid the use of his mother tongue by people of other nationalities, under the pretext that it is his language? That it is a private property?
Of course it will look ridiculous.
English people cannot forbid me to use their language under the pretext that it is their language. All human beings can use the English language. It goes the same for all the other languages. And this very fact shows us clearly the status of the language as a human common patrimony.
Thus, any language, modern or dead, is a common patrimony to humanity since it is free and can be used by any person on earth without any restriction. On the other hand, as a non-British native, by assimilating and by using the English language, I make it undergo a breeding, a crossing. It is no longer “British English”, it is another variant of English and it is an enrichment of the Standard English that is the “British English”.
Similarly, the same logic applies to other languages. The use by someone of a foreign language transforms and enriches it. Americans, Indians, Canadians, Australians, South Africans have enriched the “British English”. Quebecois, Africans, Belgians, Swiss people have enriched the “French French”. In the same way, the Latino-Americans have enriched the “Spanish Spanish”.
This foreign language that I decided to practice is now going to bear the ‘seal of my own culture’, and therefore becomes another graft of the Mother Tongue. I enlarge the expressive faculties of this foreign language.
This is how learning a foreign language can bring closer together nations of very different cultures, establish tolerance and found peace. The language bridge links nations far better than bridges made of steel or stones.
A language is but a particular apprehension by particular people of the same reality surrounding us. But few people seem to be aware of this.
Abdelouahab Hammoudi
Of course it will look ridiculous.
English people cannot forbid me to use their language under the pretext that it is their language. All human beings can use the English language. It goes the same for all the other languages. And this very fact shows us clearly the status of the language as a human common patrimony.
Thus, any language, modern or dead, is a common patrimony to humanity since it is free and can be used by any person on earth without any restriction. On the other hand, as a non-British native, by assimilating and by using the English language, I make it undergo a breeding, a crossing. It is no longer “British English”, it is another variant of English and it is an enrichment of the Standard English that is the “British English”.
Similarly, the same logic applies to other languages. The use by someone of a foreign language transforms and enriches it. Americans, Indians, Canadians, Australians, South Africans have enriched the “British English”. Quebecois, Africans, Belgians, Swiss people have enriched the “French French”. In the same way, the Latino-Americans have enriched the “Spanish Spanish”.
This foreign language that I decided to practice is now going to bear the ‘seal of my own culture’, and therefore becomes another graft of the Mother Tongue. I enlarge the expressive faculties of this foreign language.
This is how learning a foreign language can bring closer together nations of very different cultures, establish tolerance and found peace. The language bridge links nations far better than bridges made of steel or stones.
A language is but a particular apprehension by particular people of the same reality surrounding us. But few people seem to be aware of this.
Abdelouahab Hammoudi
June 27, 2017
The Private Path to Prosperity
'Ever since I was a young boy growing up in the popular area of my town, in Eastern Algeria, I have always had a fascination with the Neighborhood Movie Theater.
All those wonderful movies, westerns, actions films, romance, comedies, war films, grasped my attention from the beginning to the end.
While the film was running on the screen, I was the hero. I was Gary Cooper, Kirk Douglas or Douglas Fairbanks.
What was obvious to me: The hero was an entrepreneur.
Through time, I became aware that every film is a two-folded dream: The dream of the film’s hero to achieve a noble goal and the director‘s dream to make a film.
In the beginning, it was just a single idea of a single man. Then the man became a crowd and the crowd became people and the people achieved the goal: the film as well as the hero’s need in the film. However, this can only be achieved under two things: Freedom and the rule of law.
Freedom means you control your own life, your work, choose freely your partners, keep and enjoy what you earn.
Rule of law means you work in an environment of tolerance, security, mutual respect for the lives and property of everyone and fair commercial competition.
And when this kind of environment becomes available, the inherent contagious process of the hero’s individualist enthusiasm, by its exemplarity, spreads in the mass.
We feel then committed to our work, we make it ours, we make it a private matter and its achievement becomes a matter of personal honor.
We feel self-responsible and endowed with a mission.
Almost all the films I was screening pointed, at the end, to this obvious fact:
- Success is a private endeavor but a collective reward.
Later on, I became a filmmaker and a writer. I know now that successful filmmaking could not be any other thing than a private business because at the beginning, it is a personal idea, a personal challenge.
The proof, the only place where Cinema has remained strong is Hollywood because it has remained faithful to this credo.
But, let us look around.
Does not any human project look like a filmmaking one?
What if we consider any economic project as a filmmaking project?
We will have
• the script (The company plan)
• the actors (the workers)
• the technicians (the staff)
• And the Director (the manager).
As far as a film shooting (and writing a book) is an ever-renewed challenge, and considered under this angle, any working day could be experienced as such and why not, in the end, lived as a sheer pleasure and a pure joy. This is what we call endurance.
But the first one who must experience this feeling should be the director. Then he will have to transfer his enthusiasm to his co-workers.
And in order to transfer his enthusiasm to his co-workers, the director should have an accurate idea of what he wants and the benefits that his co-workers are due to expect, that creativity will be fully rewarded.
In this respect, success is just putting intelligence into action, and action is the word that the director utters when he starts shooting his film.
Lasting development is just but intelligent business done by private undertaking in the way stated above.
And this is what, really, every successful film is.
In «Business and Development: The Path is Private but Prosperity collective”
Thus: Action for a private endeavor:
Putting Intelligence into acts?
All those wonderful movies, westerns, actions films, romance, comedies, war films, grasped my attention from the beginning to the end.
While the film was running on the screen, I was the hero. I was Gary Cooper, Kirk Douglas or Douglas Fairbanks.
What was obvious to me: The hero was an entrepreneur.
Through time, I became aware that every film is a two-folded dream: The dream of the film’s hero to achieve a noble goal and the director‘s dream to make a film.
In the beginning, it was just a single idea of a single man. Then the man became a crowd and the crowd became people and the people achieved the goal: the film as well as the hero’s need in the film. However, this can only be achieved under two things: Freedom and the rule of law.
Freedom means you control your own life, your work, choose freely your partners, keep and enjoy what you earn.
Rule of law means you work in an environment of tolerance, security, mutual respect for the lives and property of everyone and fair commercial competition.
And when this kind of environment becomes available, the inherent contagious process of the hero’s individualist enthusiasm, by its exemplarity, spreads in the mass.
We feel then committed to our work, we make it ours, we make it a private matter and its achievement becomes a matter of personal honor.
We feel self-responsible and endowed with a mission.
Almost all the films I was screening pointed, at the end, to this obvious fact:
- Success is a private endeavor but a collective reward.
Later on, I became a filmmaker and a writer. I know now that successful filmmaking could not be any other thing than a private business because at the beginning, it is a personal idea, a personal challenge.
The proof, the only place where Cinema has remained strong is Hollywood because it has remained faithful to this credo.
But, let us look around.
Does not any human project look like a filmmaking one?
What if we consider any economic project as a filmmaking project?
We will have
• the script (The company plan)
• the actors (the workers)
• the technicians (the staff)
• And the Director (the manager).
As far as a film shooting (and writing a book) is an ever-renewed challenge, and considered under this angle, any working day could be experienced as such and why not, in the end, lived as a sheer pleasure and a pure joy. This is what we call endurance.
But the first one who must experience this feeling should be the director. Then he will have to transfer his enthusiasm to his co-workers.
And in order to transfer his enthusiasm to his co-workers, the director should have an accurate idea of what he wants and the benefits that his co-workers are due to expect, that creativity will be fully rewarded.
In this respect, success is just putting intelligence into action, and action is the word that the director utters when he starts shooting his film.
Lasting development is just but intelligent business done by private undertaking in the way stated above.
And this is what, really, every successful film is.
In «Business and Development: The Path is Private but Prosperity collective”
Thus: Action for a private endeavor:
Putting Intelligence into acts?
