Students taking on the legacy of Pinochet in Chile

When the Chilean military under General Augusto Pinochet, bankrolled & goaded by the US government & trained by the CIA, overthrew the democratically-elected regime of Salvador Allende on September 11th, 1973, an estimated 50,000 people were indiscriminately arrested & held in the National Stadium where many were lined up before firing squads & executed. In less than a week the new regime waged raids, summarily executed, disappeared, arrested, & tortured thousands more indigenous peoples, trade unionists, political activists, & others just in the wrong place at the wrong time. Human rights groups estimate 250,000 were arrested in the first four months after the coup.

This was under the Nixon regime, the psychotic tutelage of Henry psycho-Killinger, & the neoliberal economic & political policies of “the Chicago Boys.” (Just coincidentally, the law firm of Bill Gates, Sr. collaborated with psycho-Killinger in this coup.)

When the military government relinquished direct rule in 1988, they passed an amnesty law protecting members of the military from being prosecuted for their crimes during their reign of terror & giving Pinochet immunity from prosecution. The stinking corpse of Pinochet has long-since been buried--after being protected not only by Chilean courts but by governments like the US & UK. Baltasar Garzón, the Spanish judge who ordered the arrest of Pinochet in 1998 under the doctrine of universal jurisdiction has himself been prosecuted & disbarred in retaliation. Many collaborators & officials of the Pinochet regime continue to be influential in Chilean politics. In other words, justice has not yet had its day in court.

The thing about vengeance (justice) is it has a long, unforgiving memory--especially when justice has been mocked so deplorably & so arrogantly. So it is no surprise that as we near the 40th anniversary of this bloodiest of coups, the grandchildren of that generation of Chileans are battling the regime over the neoliberal policies installed under the dictatorship. For a few years now we have observed pitched street battles between riot cops with tear gas, grenades, & tanks & students demanding free & quality public education. Last Thursday, there was a National March for Education in Santiago where this protestor defied an armored vehicle holding up a book by former president (now deceased) Salvador Allende.

Of course, justice will not be served until both the Chilean & US collaborators are exposed, indicted, & prosecuted. Part of that effort is supporting the students taking on not just the armored vehicles but the entire murderous regime installed in 1973.

The stinking corpse of Henry psycho-Killinger is still walking around, still advising US treacheries, still guiding US policy. We look forward to his demise; it’s likely to be long before he faces justice.

(Photo by Ariel Marinkovic/EPA)

From the annals of South African apartheid

From the annals of South African apartheid: although segregation in South Africa began under Dutch & British colonial rule, apartheid as an official policy wasn’t installed until 1948 & didn’t end until 1994. Hard to believe there are distinctions of consequence between segregation & apartheid but there are--especially in the forms & brutalities of social control.

This elderly worker is part of a group of striking textile workers in Gauteng, South Africa in 1961 being charged by truncheon-wielding cops. Note how the apartheid regime borrowed from the annals of US genocide against Native Americans by employing Black cops to enforce apartheid--as the US used Native Americans to police reservations.

So what has changed in South Africa in the nearly 20 years since apartheid ended? Well now the cops wear full riot gear & supplement their truncheons with live ammunition. In August 2012, when thousands of mine workers in the Marikana region went on strike to demand better wages & living conditions, the regime ordered riot cops to massacre them. Forty-four people were killed & (if you can believe it, after over one year) a yet undetermined number were injured. Most of the victims were shot in the back. Cops say they acted in self-defense against a mob armed with clubs & machetes--illustrating that the post-apartheid regime is not averse to using racist imagery to justify its barbarisms.

The disreputable government set up a commission of inquiry into the massacre but over a year later they still can’t bring themselves to indict or prosecute their own asses for egregious violations of human & worker’s rights & for murder. The response of South African workers has been increased labor rebellions & wildcat strikes. The so-called post-apartheid regime would be advised to remind itself that miners played a key role in the anti-apartheid struggle. They damn might well be the wrong people to go after with cattle prods & bullets. Once again, being exploited doesn’t make you stupid; it often makes you real pissed off.

So if apartheid has ended but violence against South African Blacks only crescendoes perhaps the problem of racist exploitation has become so integrated into modern capitalism that you cannot definitively destroy one without destroying the other & replacing it with a system of liberty, equality, & human solidarity.

(Photo by Ian Berry)

No US war in Syria!

An antiwar activist at a protest outside the US embassy in Awkar, Lebanon uses fake blood to dramatize his opposition to US intervention in Syria. The US ordered “non-emergency” personnel & their families out of Lebanon yesterday due to threats. Emergency personnel are of course CIA & special operation forces--the criminal element attached to the US embassy.

We only wish fake blood was so threatening to US embassies everywhere--or at the White House & the Pentagon. We could use it to drive the warmongers off the planet. But massive antiwar mobilizations are required to stop the real bloodshed in Syria & there will be plenty of them around the world today & in the next few weeks.

All out to demand “US hands off Syria!”

(Photo by Mohamed Azakir/Reuters)

No US-NATO wars! Out now!

Here’s another example of the emancipatory largesse of US-NATO troops in Afghanistan: two laborers at a coal dump outside Kabul working without a stitch of protective clothing in an industry where silicosis has been recognized as an occupational disease for over 400 years. Silicosis has many symptoms which must wreak havoc with already malnourished & war-stressed workers: fatigue, weight loss, coughing, chest pain, fever, blue skin, heart disease, susceptibility to TB, & you can’t friggin breathe.

To the achievements of the US-NATO war we can add lack of worker’s rights to child labor, massive homelessness, thousands of amputees from land mines, indiscriminate massacres of civilians, political repression, & millions of refugees. That lone beauty parlor in Kabul repeatedly cited by war propagandists as evidence of women’s new freedoms in Afghanistan is taking quite a beating by comparison. Somehow manicured toenails don’t compensate for a husband or son or brother who can’t breathe.

There are antiwar protests coming up this fall in cities around the world. Make a placard demanding “US out of Afghanistan!” “US out of Iraq!”--& hope you don’t have to add “US out of Syria!”

No US-NATO war! Out now!

(Photo by Mohammad Ismail/Reuters)

US tourists want mural of Che Guevara destroyed in Ireland

There’s something comforting about knowing idiocy is an international phenomenon not particular to the US. It’s not really a negative kind of solidarity so much as a helluva consolation in a crazy-assed world. Today we learn that an iconic, world-renowned 20-ft. mural of Che Guevara (whose full name is Ernesto Guevara Lynch with Irish ancestry traced to Galway) has been painted over by local authorities just weeks ahead of a Latin American cultural festival in Kilkee, County Clare, Ireland. The annual festival was established in 2011 to mark the 50th anniversary of Guevara’s visit in 1961 when he & his entourage were grounded at nearby Shannon Airport. Irish media reports that US tourists left Kilkee in a huff after seeing the mural though we aren’t told how many packed their bags & left. Was it just a couple of big tippers or were there caravans of them? Or was it just those Cuban politicians from Florida who made a similar flap last year about a proposed monument of Guevara in nearby Galway?

Now to be fair to the bozos on the Clare county council who made the cowardly decision, Kilkee’s main source of income is the tourist industry--though presumably many tourists come for the Latin American festival & to honor Guevara. Money tends to have a numbing affect on dull minds but it’s positively lethal for those with cash register mentalities like the local chamber of commerce who insisted the festival was cultural, not political.

The artist for both the mural & the monument is Jim Fitzpatrick from Dublin who had a chance encounter with Guevara in Kilkee during the 1961 visit. We leave it to our man to decide what to do next but protests to the county council might be in order.

Guevara was murdered in Bolivia in 1967 with strong evidence suggesting involvement of the CIA. In an interview two years later his father said, "The first thing to note is that in my son's veins flowed the blood of the Irish rebels.” Ireland has produced many remarkable rebels (regrettably also quite a few rogues who migrated to the US) but every nationality has produced great fighters for social justice which is why freedom fighters around the world continue to honor Guevara for his immense humanity & commitment to the oppressed & why he will remain a beacon & inspiration--with or without the mural homage in Kilkee.

(Photo of destroyed mural on Alley Wall in Kilkee, Ireland)

"A Fine Balance"

If anyone is looking for a good piece of fiction to read, I recommend “A Fine Balance” by Rohinton Mistry. Don’t be deterred because it was selected for Oprah’s Book Club or its daunting 700 pages. It was suggested in a discussion on Mumbai tailors since two of the four central characters are tailors. It gives an extraordinary portrait of the oppression suffered by Dalits & other untouchable castes, the plight of the urban poor in India, the perils of homelessness, political repression under Prime Minister Indira Gandhi, & forced sterilization programs on males & females under her regime (in the course of one year, the government recorded over 8 million sterilizations: 6.2 million men & 2.05 women).

It’s a harrowing book not given to sentimentality but despite the regrettable fates of the four characters & the absence of “they lived happily after,” it’s not a cynical book because it captures not only the cruelties of class society but the dignity & courage of the most oppressed.

No truth or reconciliation in Peru for deaths of 70,000 people

In the 1960s & 1970s, influenced by Che Guevara & the Cuban Revolution, Vietnamese resistance to US aggression (partly by guerrilla forces & partly by a regular army experienced in warfare after 40 years of fighting the French occupation), & by Mao Zedong’s concept of  people’s war, political activists around the world became attracted to guerrilla warfare as a military/political strategy for changing the world. Although it set off a furor of political debate, it’s regrettable consequences soon became apparent when it justified extreme repression & violence against activists or those suspected of being sympathetic. That legacy remains the basis of the so-called “war against terrorism” now used to justify war, occupation, Islamophobia, Guantanamo & other CIA torture chambers.

Many activists, either of the obtuse kind or those unfamiliar with the history or those debates, continue to argue for guerrilla warfare--but then some of the worst ideas in human history have been among the most enduring. There are many problems with guerrilla war strategy--not the least of which are its catastrophic failures. No matter how ardent or committed its proponents & activists, it is a military solution to political problems because it is an attempt to substitute small bands of armed combatants for the massive intervention of working people to fight for their own interests & it expresses cynicism about the possibility of that intervention.

Militarizing the struggle for social transformation necessitates a certain kind of leadership regime: elitist, autocratic, secretive, exclusionary & not at all democratic--in other words a breeding ground for tyranny under a different regime in place of social transformation. What the hell is the point of that!? Alliances & coalitions with political forces who don’t agree with armed struggle are not just eschewed; these forces become seen as “the enemy.”

Perhaps the most unforgiving feature of this strategy is its romanticism, its failure to see that poorly armed, untrained rookies at war are no match at all for high-technology armies bankrolled by the US, with generals trained in military strategy at the US School of the Americas & by US special forces, & operations led by US counterinsurgency experts & psycho-killers. You don’t organize political movements at their weakest points where they cannot win without a deus ex machina or a miracle; you organize them where they actually exert power.

The power of working people to change this world rests in what we control--which is not military arsenals. Where we are strongest & cannot be defeated is that nothing is planted or harvested, not an article of clothing is made, not a car or tractor or truck or tank or bulldozer rolls off an assembly line, nothing is moved or transported to market, nothing is made or built without working people. Nada, nothing, zip happens unless we say so. If we sit down, the planet stops. That’s our power & that’s what needs to be organized because that’s where we can’t lose. Even though this is a much more daunting strategy it is the only effective one when they hold all the guns & they’re shooting live ammunition.

In this strategy there will be some scuffles--or several. If they’re coming after us now with tear gas & tanks just for exercising our right to protest, imagine what military force they will employ when we demand the reins of power before they run this planet & us any further into barbarism!

Shining Path was a Peruvian guerrilla group that declared guerrilla war in 1980 against the government on behalf of the Quechuan Indians who were & remain subject to crushing poverty & racist oppression. In going after Shining Path the Peruvian military did not distinguish between guerrilla combatants & indigenous civilians & engaged in severe repression, including rapes, torture, disappearances, massacres. Of the 70,000 murdered (including an estimated 25,000 disappeared) it is estimated that no more than a few hundred were combatants but by the late 1980s, Peru led the world in civilian disappearances & massacres.

Through all this, Shining Path activists were no paragons of idealism; they engaged in despicable acts of terrorism & human rights violations, allegedly assassinating trade union activists, uncooperative Quechuan civilians, & those they considered compromising with the regime. But the Peruvian military were solely responsible for turning the misguided strategy of people’s war into a bloodbath--& this is not for one moment to render impunity to Shining Path for its bankrupt & reckless politics that ended up using the Quechuan people as cannon fodder. When Mao said "Political power grows out of the barrel of a gun” he should have clarified for obtuse disciples which side of the gun they should be on.

In 2003, a government-appointed Truth & Reconciliation Commission (without a single Quechuan participant) issued a report & made recommendations. The report claimed the majority of violence & human rights crimes were by Shining Path & let the Peruvian military essentially off scot-free. They held ceremonies & press conferences, unveiled plaques in memory of the victims, brought in marching bands for concerts of Peruvian music--all to mask the real truth that the whole damn report was a bag job. As of August 28th, 2013, not a single recommendation for reconciliation has been implemented--& the truth has certainly not been served. Not by a long shot! There have been no reparations, no prosecutions, no official searches for grave sites. It is family members scouring the countryside looking for the graves of their beloved who have recovered 2,478 bodies of the disappeared.

On the anniversary of the report’s release (Aug. 28th) hundreds marched in Lima in remembrance of the victims. Absent & remaining mute were the country’s political & military leaders. This woman points to a stone with the name of her murdered relative at the commemoration in Lima.

(Photo by Ernesto Benavides/AFP/Getty Images)

Defend Palestinian political prisoners

Since the Israeli military occupation of Palestinian territories in 1967, an estimated 650,000 to 800,000 Palestinians have been arrested by Israeli troops & stuffed into Israeli prisons. That estimate includes 10,000 women jailed since 1967 & 8,000 children arrested since 2000. As of April 1, 2013, there were 4,900 Palestinian political prisoners in Israeli prisons, including 236 children.

According to the Fourth Geneva Convention, arrestees in occupied territories must be held in prisons within the occupied territory but since Israel thinks its US-bankrolled tanks & bulldozers put it above the law, only one prison out of 17 is in fact outside Israel.  The result is that many prisoners have trouble meeting with Palestinian defense counsel or cannot get family visits if their relatives are denied permits to enter Israel.

Palestinians are arrested under Israeli military regulations for “hostile terrorist activity” (i.e., rock throwing), disturbance of public order (i.e., protesting land expropriations or even carrying a Palestinian flag), illegal presence in Israel (i.e., trying to find work), or traffic (you go to jail for failing to make a turn signal?) & criminal offenses.

A detainee can be interrogated for up to 90 days & denied lawyer visits for up to 60 days. Interrogation includes physical & psychological torture--beatings, tying prisoners in “stress positions”, sleep & other sensory deprivation, isolation & solitary confinement, & threats against the lives of relatives--all suggesting the Israeli military is well-tutored in the methods used in CIA torture centers. “Confessions” extracted by such methods are admissible in Israeli kangaroo courts even though they flout international law. But of course, the CIA has probably assured Israel that international law is formulated for suckers & there are no consequences to pay for defying them.

This young Palestinian was arrested by Israeli riot cops at a protest outside the al-Aqsa mosque in Jerusalem on September 4th. We are told the “disturbances” caused the temporary closure of the mosque. No further explanation is given but it’s likely the Israeli cops were barring entrance to the mosque--not that imams were blocking the doors.

Support Palestinian political prisoners by boycotting all Israeli products (barcode beginning 729), supporting the cultural boycott of Israel, & demanding “No US aid to Israel!”

(Photo by Marco Longari/AFP)

Children & rebellion against oppression

When I posted the photo of the little guy from Belfast marching off to take on the occupying British army with his home-made lance, I commented that nothing is so ardent as the indignation of children. One person objected. saying, “Shouldn't that say there's nothing as vile as a hatred that's indoctrinated into unknowing children from a very young age?”

When children grow up privileged by class or nationality or gender (or in other ways), indoctrination in supremacist views is essential. It’s how the status quo justifies itself to its young. Children who grow up on the short end of things receive a very different kind of indoctrination, a far more brutal sort that relies on deprivation, insult, degradation, & demeaning imagery--though imagery plays a central role in enforcing the social postures of both subordination & supremacy.

The role of children in society & social conflict is not taken for granted by the ruling elite & nothing makes that clearer than racist imagery prior to the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s. For decades prior to that movement, the most frequent racist imagery was pickaninny “art.” Pickaninny was the racist term for a Black child. In magazines, newspapers, postcards, & posters, caricatures of Black infants were depicted being menaced in some form--most frequently a wee child would be hanging by one arm from a small limb over a swamp loaded with snapping crocodiles. Pickaninny caricature is only one of the “art” forms to hit the skids as a result of the Civil Rights Movement. (Cowboy & Indian movies is another genre, though racist depictions remain the norm in films & on TV.)

I once viewed an entire exhibit of this crap in Washington, DC & it makes your skin crawl with its sentimentalized & disguised depiction of hatred. Immersed in this repugnant imagery, I tried to grasp its psychology & pathology; what could possibly explain such venom & violence directed at small children? My conclusion was that every generation of the oppressed presents a problem to the status quo, a challenge, a new batch of potential rebels that must be chastened & broken. Pickaninny caricature reflected the anxieties of white supremacy about their ability to break Black resistance. Despite historic setbacks for Blacks after their emancipation (like the violent reversal of Black Reconstruction, the reign of terror in the US South, Jim Crow, & the present war on Black youth), white supremacists have never been able to curb Black defiance without extreme violence.

And this is where the indignation of children comes in. Since it is beyond dispute that children who suffer persecution understand early in life that something is wrong & begin to “act out” against it. That's why they're often on the front lines in social rebellions--including the US Civil Rights Movement.They don’t need to be indoctrinated into hatred but they do need to be supported in their rebellion against oppression & not in taking it out against themselves. Hatred is often maligned as a social evil but that entirely depends on what it is you hate. If it’s social inequality you hate, then beat the drums loudly; if it’s others you’ve been taught are inferior, then you’re going to have to learn the hard way that your head has been stuffed with horse manure.

I didn’t want to post a photo of pickaninny “art” since it emits a toxic miasma hard to dispel, so I’m posting a photo of child workers with the question, does anyone actually believe they require indoctrination in hatred?


(Photo by Daniel Berehulak/Getty Images)

The indignation of children

There’s nothing so ardent as the indignation of children. This small boy in Belfast prepares to take on the British army with a home-made lance (in 1981).

In 1981, the second hunger strike ended after ten Irish political prisoners, including Bobby Sands, had died in prison. The hunger strike was in response to the British government criminalizing political prisoners & eliminating the status of political prisoner (akin to prisoner of war status).  

I visited Belfast (& Derry) at that time & asked a group of small boys in Belfast to show me the murals painted on walls in the Catholic neighborhoods to support the hunger strikers. The murals were extraordinary but as the 8 to 10 year-olds guided me through the streets they would stop to lob rocks at constantly passing caravans of British armored vehicles. I, being no coward (at least all of the time) stayed with the boys though I was scared silly. Their bravado may have been partially to impress me--& that sure worked--but it was also heartfelt. When I parted with the group at the end of the day I asked them if they would like me to send them copies of the photos I had taken. “No,” said one young boy. “Use them to show people what is really going on here.”

(Photo by Ian Berry)

Immigration is a human right! Open the borders!

“Enrique’s Journey” is a 2006 book written by Sonia Nazario based on her Pulitzer prize-winning series of articles in the LA Times in 2002. Enrique was a 5-year-old Honduran boy when his mother, Lourdes, unable to feed her two children, left to find a job in the US. At the age of 15, he left Honduras to take the treacherous journey north to the US to reunite with the mother he felt bereft without. This book is the grisly account of that journey.

Pulitzer Prize or not, it isn’t a great book because Nazario pulls her punches politically & settles for evoking pity rather than igniting fury. She followed the journey made by Enrique & the 50,000 unaccompanied minors per year who leave Central America to find mothers in the US who had previously left to find work. Nazario made this arduous trip riding on train tops with the help of Mexican authorities & the train companies.

These immigrants--some as young as 7-years-old--endure assault, robbery, rape, kidnapping, murder, repeated deportations back to their own countries. Nazario describes these with wrenching frankness but she skims the surface of the important problems exposed & identified by the children themselves. Why can’t their parents find work in their own countries? Why is there such violence against them in Chiapas & who are the perpetrators? Why are Mexican police officials identified by immigrants as the most frequent robbers & rapists? Why do train lines not allow immigrants to board stopped trains but require them to leap aboard moving trains--resulting in hundreds of dismemberments & injuries? Why do US immigration policies & border patrol agents cause such gruesome deaths for so many immigrants with impunity rather than criminal prosecution?

The book was written before passage of Central American immigrants through Mexico was legalized by the Mexican senate--which has not lessened the violence they sustain by an iota. In fact it has increased, with mass executions, dismemberments, & mass graves. Piles of dismembered bodies are dumped on highways & exposed to public view--while 50,000 Mexican troops are prowling the countryside for drug peddlers they can’t manage to find. The story doesn’t add up!

One of the heartening stories Nazario tells is of the state of Veracruz on the Gulf of Mexico--a key transit point for the trains. Here the working poor who live on the side of the train tracks have organized themselves to provide assistance & defense for the immigrants. With each passing train they line up with bags of food, clothing, blankets, & solidarity. In some instances they have defended immigrants from attacking police agents & other goons. This photo is the hands of residents passing food to Central American immigrants as they pass through the town of Fortin de las Flores, Veracruz. (One of the most gruesome mass crimes against immigrants was in Veracruz--most likely as a warning to residents to cease their humanitarian aid & solidarity.)

One important thing Nazario highlights--albeit in a moralistic way--is how immigration has fractured family relationships in societies which cherish them. Men forced to migrate are torn from children & spouses, mothers are torn from small children, children are left bereft & grieving. Addiction among immigrants & among those left behind is often a consequence. These are not reasons for pity & crocodile tears. These are reasons to demand the US open its damn border & tear down its monstrous wall.

This moving video shows the faces of Central American immigrants (refugees really) & the dangers they face getting on & off moving trains. They are our brothers & sisters, not marauding enemies from the south:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GODYdoACCeQ

Immigration is a human right! Open the damn borders!

(Photo by Don Bartletti)

Intifada against tyranny

Young children standing up against bulldozers has become an iconic image not only in Palestine against the Israeli military but in Kashmir against the Indian military. It’s part of intifada in both countries. But regrettably it has become a common David vs. Goliath experience in the Israeli-occupied West Bank & around the world--because military occupation & brute force are increasing to enforce tyranny.

Unarmed civilians of every age, from young kids to the elderly stand with rocks, slingshots, & burning tires against tear gas, water cannons, grenades, rubber bullets & live ammunition, attack dogs, armored vehicles, & 60-ton tanks & bulldozers. The most memorable moments include the anonymous Tank Man standing unarmed against a line of tanks in Tiananmen Square in 1989; fifteen-year-old Palestinian Faris Odeh in 2000 holding off a bulldozer with only rocks (10 days later he was fatally shot by Israeli soldiers); Rachel Corrie, the US activist mowed down by an Israeli bulldozer in 2003; the small Kashmiri boy facing off an Indian army tank after another young boy shot by the Indian army died in his arms in 2009.

But from resistance to English occupation of Northern Ireland to the uprisings in Egypt & Bahrain to resistance against slum eviction in the Philippines, we have seen the oppressed defy superior military might with nothing but rocks & defiance. This photo is from a protest in the West Bank village of Kfar Qaddum. This is not an iconic moment but a weekly event as Palestinians resist continuing Zionist land grabs of their property. Armored bulldozers serve many aggressive purposes in the ongoing land theft--in particular demolishing Palestinian homes. These vehicles, used mainly by the Israeli military, are made by Caterpillar & paid for by the US government as part of its aid to Israel.

Media commentaries on this phenomenon draw on the least enlightened sources for explanation. Little brother Odeh is called an “adolescent daredevil” who didn’t understand the dangers; a French philosopher made himself comprehensible for one brief moment to utter the Islamophobic banality that martyrdom like this is due to the Islamization & “culture of death” of Palestinians; mental health practitioners without a political bone in their bodies claim intifada is a distraction for children who don’t understand the dangers. Which doesn’t explain the old ladies throwing stones.

These worthless commentators don’t have a clue about commitment to justice that is not reckless or fearless but that will brave all against tyranny & oppression & occupation; in their privilege & sniveling cowardice before power, they cannot hope to understand this spirit of rebellion & resistance to oppression, especially in the young.

Cynics & ideologues of Zionism claim the conflict between Palestinians & Jews is too intransigent for resolution & necessitates a separate, apartheid, “Jewish” state. But the only thing that separates Palestinians from Jews is Zionism--a repugnant, right-wing, racist & colonial ideology that promotes Jewish isolationism & religious & ethnic superiority over human solidarity. The symbols of Zionism are this bulldozer & the apartheid wall.

Palestinian & Israeli visionaries have long fought for a unified democratic, secular state incorporating Jews & Palestinians as brothers & sisters. There is nothing intransigent or impossible about this political perspective. It is the imperative of progress & justice. If we want to facilitate this political process, it begins with demanding “No US aid to Israel,” with boycotting all Israeli products (barcode beginning 729), & supporting the cultural boycott of Israel.

(Photo by Jaafar Ashtiyeh/AFP/Getty Images)

Fury in technicolor

If riot cops in South Africa, Kashmir and elsewhere can use water cannons filled with purple dye against protestors & striking workers then protestors can use paint bombs in their own defense--& union protestors in Greece & student protestors in several Latin American countries have distinguished themselves in this regard. When used against protestors however it evokes outrage but when used against riot cops it evokes hilarity.

Students in Bogota, Colombia gave riot cops a snoot full of technicolor indignation at a march yesterday to support striking farmers & truckers who are blockading highways to reduce fuel prices, increase government farm subsidies, & cancel free trade agreements giving foreign food conglomerates advantage over local farmers. Are we wrong to laugh!?

(Photo by Fernando Vergara/AP)

Opposition to US-NATO intervention not an endorsement of Assad’s regime

Many regard Bashar al-Assad as a benign ruler now besieged by US-NATO military aggression. They believe opposition to his rule is solely fostered by covert operatives trained, funded, & armed by US-NATO governments assisted by Israel. But for many months before the civil war emerged there was un-refutable documentation of a popular uprising against Assad. There was probably no Arab uprising more documented by thousands of videos than the Syrian uprising. Aborting that uprising was exactly the strategy of the civil war.

Opposition to US-NATO intervention is not an endorsement of Assad’s regime. It is an endorsement of Syrian democracy, of opposition to foreign meddling aimed to protect tyranny in Syria under another guise & it is to allow Syrians to finish the job of social transformation they began in 2011.

This is a video of Ibrahim Qashoush, a 34-year-old fireman, poet & songwriter who led protest anthems during the uprising. In July 2011, he was kidnapped & thrown into a river with his throat cut & his vocal cords ripped out. After his murder, he was hailed as the "nightingale of the revolution,” the troubadour of social transformation in Syria.

May our brother Ibrahim Rest in Peace & may we honor him by demanding “Hands off Syria!” so that the cause he & thousands of others have given their lives for can be completed.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HNauJ8P1fDY&list=TLvVh_muZnDpo

No US-NATO war in Syria! There is no such thing as a humanitarian intervention!

In human history, there has been no greater obstacle to social transformation than war & as a result nothing separates wheat from chaff faster than war. Fault lines get exposed, political ruptures that could previously lie low emerge as pro-war patriots line up uttering time-worn banalities endorsing “humanitarian interventions” & take their distance from antiwar activists, accusing them of rigidity & ossified politics stuck in the bygone era of Vietnam.

Those reactionary forces write the history books & make the films promoting WWI & WWII as the good wars fought for democracy & against genocide when in fact they were at heart inter-imperial conflicts over the division of colonial plunder. There wasn’t a damn good thing about either war--& WWII had nothing to do with stopping genocide in Europe.

So here we are on the threshold of another US-NATO military conflagration in Syria. If there’s one thing those governments know how to do it’s propaganda & milking tears out of the tender-hearted champions of war. “We can’t stand by & do nothing,” they cry out. (The use of the royal we, identifying with their own governments, is the first clue to where their loyalties lie.) And of course their governments haven’t stood by & done nothing. For the past few years through covert operations, they thwarted a popular revolution against the tyranny of Assad & turned it into a barbaric civil war.

To suggest that US-NATO forces have humanitarian intentions or could possibly achieve some peace for the millions of Syrians bombed out of their homes & sent to flight in other countries is to be either unforgivably stupid or irredeemably pro-war. One only has to look at Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia, DR Congo, Uganda, Libya.

Human rights organizations take the cake in this regard, in particular Human Rights Watch (HRW) & Amnesty International. Amnesty has already won its Nobel Peace Prize; HRW is probably angling for one right now. Neither corporate-funded group can bring itself to denounce this pending war in no uncertain terms; that would upset their benefactors & curtail philanthropic largesse (otherwise known as hush money).

Amnesty issued a six-point manifesto on the Syrian intervention chiding the bellicose nations to take it easy on civilians. The statement will have you in tears as they beat the war drums against Assad--& you wonder why they haven’t long-since done the same for Iraq, Afghanistan, & elsewhere. HRW issued a statement saying they don’t take a position for or against intervention but you wouldn’t know that from their statement which also blisters Assad without mentioning US-NATO occupations. HRW cautions bellicose nations to “adhere to the laws of war” & discriminate between civilians & combatants. Does HRW have its head stuck up its ass? Can it think of a single war in human history where civilians weren’t the primary targets & victims!? Or is it covering for US-NATO aggression?

The only possible principled position is “No US-NATO intervention in Syria!” War against Syria would only replace the tyranny of Assad with the barbarism of US-NATO occupation. There are no humanitarian interventions, at least by US-NATO armies.

Hands off Syria! No covert intervention & no military invasion! It needn't be said that opposition to war does no good sitting in people's heads but can be actively expressed in antiwar protests & rallies.

(Photo of Syrian refugees & littlest civilians near border between Syria & Turkey taken in March by Bulent Kilic/AFP/Getty Images)

Israeli apartheid flouts international law--because it can!

Somebody needs to explain why nations formulate international law in impressive manifestos like the Geneva Conventions & then flout every damn one of their terms. What’s the point in all that judicial hot air if there are no provisions for enforcement? US-NATO marines run roughshod over a dozen countries, the Obama regime terrorizes millions of civilians with drone attacks, Israel is an ethnic cleansing catastrophe & in response there are no protests, let alone sanctions from the forces that formulate these laws.

That’s why political movements for social justice have devised their own methods for sanction. One of them is the Boycott, Divestment, & Sanctions (BDS) movement against Israel to apply economic & political pressure against Israeli occupation & colonization of Palestinian land, for full equality for Palestinian citizens of Israel, & the right of return for Palestinian refugees. BDS was effective against South African apartheid & is proving a powerful political weapon to support Palestinian self-determination.

The BDS movement is growing internationally but so has Israel accelerated its colonization of Palestinian property & land along with its global search for Zionist settlers to move in & take over Palestine. One of the sarcasms of Israeli immigration policy mocking its infamous law of return (which allows Jews from anywhere to become citizens of Israel) is that hundreds of Zionist settlers fail the DNA tests looking for that oh-so-special Jewish chromosome. Parties of settlers from Ethiopia, India, Peru, & elsewhere were persuaded by fundamentalist Christian missionaries that they were members of a lost tribe of Israel & have been granted immigration rights on that claim. Does construction of a master race get wackier than that!?

The entire project of Israel since 1948 is a colonial enterprise. But in the past several months Israel uprooted several Bedouin communities by designating their areas as military zones; for the past many years they have militarily occupied & aggressively confiscated acres of Palestinian farm land in the West Bank, tearing up olive trees & fields, bulldozing homes & animal pens, & poisoning water wells; in East Jerusalem, they’ve simply gone hog-wild since its occupation in 1967 in an attempt to force Palestinians to migrate out of Israel. The fact that all this violates the Fourth Geneva Convention prohibiting forcible transfers of civilians within occupied territory hasn’t deterred Israeli ethnic cleansing in the least.

According to reports by the European Union & several Israeli & international human rights groups, Israel has constructed housing for nearly 200,000 Zionist settlers from all over kingdom come to move into East Jerusalem while hundreds of Palestinian homes are being zoned out of legality & bulldozed & thousands of Palestinian residents made homeless or forced to live in tents, makeshift huts, & temporary shelters. Adding barbarism to barbarism, Israeli bulldozers then mow these emergency structures down & the Israeli government sends residents a bill for the cost of demolition.

This photo is of Khaled Zir & his family whose home was demolished several years ago by Israeli officials. Zir built a makeshift tin shack for the family but when Israeli goons recently bulldozed that, they were forced to move into a cave that formerly served as their animal stable. They had no place else to go.

Oppose Israeli apartheid & support justice for Palestinians by boycotting all Israeli products (barcode beginning 729), support the cultural boycott of Israel, & demand “No US aid to Israel!”

(Photo by Sebastian Scheiner/AP)

Homeless in Greece

Homeless in Thessaloniki, Greece: holy McGillicutty, that IMF-European Union bailout has done wonders for working people in Greece! They get to sleep al fresco. They’re free to beg for food.

This is not an old man but after a few months living on the street you won’t know the difference. Neoliberal plunder has taken his life from him & reduced him to street litter. Greek working people have fiercely resisted these predations & shown human solidarity in the midst of it all--with farmers distributing cheap & even free food to the hungry.

Their inability to reverse the plunder is not a sign of impotence or the impossibility of social transformation but points to the need for international collaboration & solidarity. Ridding this planet of its thuggish oligarchs is a monumental historic task; this is where that “workers of the world unite” thing kicks in to become not just a mantra but a battle cry.

(Photo by Nikolas Giakoumidis/AP)

On shaming feminism

When the hell did slut-shaming become a theoretical concept in feminism? Why is it that male radicals discuss feminism only in terms of porno & prostitution & slut-shaming? Why are they preoccupied with sex workers & not much with sweatshop or office workers or underpaid & unemployed women or the serious challenges to reproductive rights? Quite frankly, it’s not only a disturbing development; it’s outright creepy.

When did the broad concerns & achievements of feminism start going down the tubes to a banal focus only on sexual exhibitionism & the prurient? And how the hell did raunch get all confused with female sexuality? Are male radicals watching too much MTV or reading too much porn? And then trying to justify it by long quotations from Marx & Engels?

Feminists who object are told with insular stupidity that we are sex-negative & politically passé. But bucko, there’s another explanation for our protests. We don’t like when men, who quite frankly don’t know a damn thing about feminist history or theoretics, try to control the renewal of feminism that is erupting like wildfire by taking hold of the debate & channeling it into their pornographic notions of our sexuality & human potentials. Imagine people who call themselves socialists who can’t imagine a world without prostitution, where women’s bodies are commodities!

They chide the women’s movement for lack of intersectionality & then consider the racist slut walks of half-naked women promoting prostitution as the epitome of feminist activism. They laud FEMEN for showing up bare-breasted even though they’re chanting racist crap against Arabs & Muslims. They ignore the veiled women leading revolutions in the Arab countries, the Egyptian women fighting for their place in Tahrir Square, the Mayan women taking on a corrupt regime for genocide & rape, the Dalit & other oppressed castes in India standing up against rape & sexual violence, & against land grabs, the mothers of Bhopal continuing to fight for over 30 years for justice for their children. What about them, bucko? Do they have to show up naked to get your attention or your approval?

Boycott Israeli apartheid!

When you wonder how Israel can perpetrate such vile outrages & human rights crime against Palestinians look no further than media coverage like in the NY Times whose choice of language alibis the crimes--as it did for apartheid in the US South & in South Africa. What delicacy they employ describing Israeli atrocities; what inflammatory adjectives they use describing Palestinian resistance! What big lies they tell!

Despite the linguistic delicacies to cover for ethnic cleansing, an atrocious crime was committed Monday when a unit of Israeli border cops in armored vehicles entered Qalandiya refugee camp near Jerusalem at 3:00 am to arrest Yousef al-Khatib, a Palestinian prisoner released two years ago after spending 10 years in an Israeli prison for rock throwing & who Israeli cops now label “a hostile terrorist activist.” For throwing stones again!? For speaking out against ethnic cleansing!? For protesting occupation!? According to an Israeli spokesperson, “After his arrest a mob of about 1,500 residents began a disturbance, throwing petrol bombs & stones, endangering the lives of force members, who responded with riot dispersal means." Another Israeli spokesperson said, The mob had become "so large & violent that it was vital for forces to assist in containing it."

The Palestinian version of events--which is actually credible--is that al-Khatib escaped to a neighbor’s house but was caught up with by the Israeli border cops & beaten. In his defense residents surrounded the Israeli cops who then called in military patrols waiting outside the camp for reinforcement. Three Palestinian men were killed when Israeli forces opened fire on the crowd with live ammunition. At least 19 were wounded, with six now in critical condition. Most of the injured were shot in the head, chest, & upper body, according to medics. That is called a shoot to kill mission. More broadly, it is called ethnic cleansing.

The funerals of Robeen Zayed, 32, Younis Jahjouh, 22, & Jihad Aslan, 20, were held yesterday after the military rampage. After the funeral, Palestinian youth threw stones at Israeli soldiers at the Qalandiya checkpoint, the main crossing between the West Bank & Jerusalem where Palestinians routinely face abuse. Israeli border patrol responded with volleys of tear gas & rubber bullets. Here a Palestinian protester is lobbing a Molotov cocktail at Israeli troops. Some may call stone-throwing a provocation. Others call it intifada--or as the rebelling prisoners of Attica once called it, “the sound before the fury of those who are oppressed.”

It’s regrettable to report that after a brief recess the phony-assed US-brokered Israeli-Palestinian negotiations will resume to establish a Palestinian bantustate in the areas occupied by Israel--after Israel just announced plans for more settlement construction on the West Bank, despite continuing arrests of Palestinians ‘suspected of planning terrorist acts,’ & after gunning down three young, unarmed Palestinians.

Support Palestinian human rights by boycotting all Israeli products (barcode beginning 729), by supporting the cultural boycott of Israel, & by demanding "No US aid to Israel!"

(Photo by Darren Whiteside/Reuters)

Farmer protests in Colombia

In February, peasant farmers in Colombia began striking over government refusal to negotiate development projects that would ameliorate growing poverty in the agricultural sector. The government attempted to discredit the protests by claiming they were infiltrated by guerillas (particularly the FARC) & army & riot cops used what even UN observers called “excessive force” to stop farmers from blockading highways. Four protestors were killed & dozens arrested--but the protests were temporarily halted a few times after the government agreed to negotiate. So much for the promises of hoodlums!

On Monday, after government negotiations for economic reforms again proved unproductive, protests & highway blockades resumed in a national strike of truckers demanding cheaper gasoline, coffee growers demanding extension of government subsidies, potato & onion growers demanding lower prices for fertilizer, & farmers opposing free trade agreements with the US & European Union which threaten their entire livelihoods--but which would enormously enrich a handful of Colombian oligarchs.

Government officials say the strike is a ploy to extort more benefits from the government. Well you certainly can’t say the government is stupid. But in fact, most peasant farmers haven’t received a single cent of government subsidies or any type of assistance since the subsidy program was initiated last October & when they agreed to implement a direct payment system after a previous farmer strike in February.

In Bogota, thousands of students, health workers, agriculture & mining workers joined support rallies for the national strike; in Medellin, protesting farmers littered the streets in front of the Coffee Growers Federation with coffee beans. Media reports some protestors are pelting riot cops with rocks & homemade explosives. Meanwhile riot cops are charging protestors with tear gas & “excessive force.”

No explanation is given for why seven riot cops are ganging up on & kicking this unarmed guy at a protest in Ubate (north of Bogota). The media caption says the kneeling cop is attempting to protect the man. Well bully for him.

(Photo by Fernando Vergara/AP)