In a breach of the usual news blackout on the Indian occupation of Kashmir, the July 26th issue of Time magazine published an article titled “Another Season of Unrest Brings Darkness for Ordinary Kashmiris.” It’s shabby-assed reporting, including using the term “unrest” to suggest rebellion against the brutalities of occupation are a feverish phenomenon among Kashmiris that occasionally erupts without explanation. But it does talk about the monstrous use of pellet munitions blinding so many Kashmiris, including small children.

Hospital wards are filled with partially or fully blinded victims of pellet injuries. According to the doctors’ association at SMHS Hospital in Srinagar, that facility alone has received 289 patients with eye injuries since July 9th.

This siege will become criminally notorious for the use of pellet munitions. The sole purpose of these so-called non-lethal weapons is to demoralize, disable, & blind activists in order to demobilize unarmed political opposition to the occupation. But of course they are not non-lethal just because the fatalities are suffered later from infections & organ damage. Already some have died from their use.

The first stage of international solidarity is education about what India is doing in Kashmir. It doesn’t matter if you think Kashmir belongs to India & has no right to self-determination & independence. If you refuse to denounce the use of pellet guns & other human rights atrocities by the Indian army, you should hang your damn head in shame. That would not distinguish you from the most rabid nationalist.

This protest is from July 23rd in Srinagar. Many of these young people are now laying in hospital or at home recovering, their lives forever changed.

Stand with Kashmir. Demand the end of the occupation even if you can’t bring yourself to demand self-determination for a people willing to risk all to achieve it.

(Photo by Yawar Nazir/Getty Images from Time)

“There is no unrest in ‪#‎Kashmir‬ but it is revolt against Indian occupation.”

–From Kashmir Freedom

These are militias in Libya allied with what media calls the “UN-backed regime” (as opposed to the competing regime) reportedly firing a rocket at ISIS fighters. There are no reliable analyses about what is going on in Libya but for a while there has been a military build up including warplanes on standby from Britain, France, & the US & deployment of US special forces & military advisers–& of course the flow of weapons. According to a Pentagon general, “There will be a long-term mission in Libya.”

So much for the malarkey about US-NATO liberating Libya from Qaddafi. One doesn’t have to have supported Qaddafi to assert that turning Libya into a killing field is not the preferable option to dictatorship. Because in the process of “liberating” Libya, US-NATO warplanes crushed the developing popular revolution against Qaddafi.

Unable to draw the lessons of US-NATO barbarism in Libya, some prominent anti-Assadist activists are now using Libya as a model for what should be done in Syria to end Assad’s rule. They want the US to intervene militarily against Assad–as if it would enter to support the popular revolution against him.

As is the way with militarism, bombs talk louder than delusions. The US has joined Syrian & Russian warplanes in bombing the hell out of Aleppo. Still, with delusions undaunted, these so-called Syrian revolutionaries call aggressively for Hillary Clinton to be elected president since she promises a more aggressive military campaign against Assad than they think Obama has conducted.

Is this image from Libya the vision they have of Syrian emancipation from Assad? Can they point to a single instance in the past 150 years when US military troops & warplanes played a humanitarian role? Can they point to a single instance of where Clinton played the role the role of a peacemaker rather than a war-mongering agent of the Pentagon? They can’t because their delusions & pipe dreams blind them to reality.

There is no militarist solution to the problem of dictatorship. The only alternative is popular revolution which US policy thwarts in every way, including with CIA operatives, bombers, & fostering illusions in the credulous who look for salvation in bombers.

The only solution is to rebuild the international antiwar movement demanding the withdrawal of all foreign militaries from Libya, Syria, Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan, Somalia, Kashmir. Peace is not brokered with bombers & those who claim they do have their heads stuck up their asses no matter how ardently they promote war through extermination.

(Photo by Goran Tomasevic/Reuters)

These counterterrorism officers are the new London bobby, historically heralded for not carrying weapons other than truncheons. According to news reports, for now only 10 percent will be attired like combat troops. But that “for now” may only mean until they can suit up the other 90 percent.

Traveling in England in the 1970s, I came home late evening from an engagement & was blockaded from my quarters by police barricades set up for the annual West Indian parade near Ladbrooke Grove. Most of the revelers had gone home but the bobbies were out in force waiting for trouble from groups of youth. I had to travel by foot quite a distance through manned barricades at every corner, explaining to the bobbies where I was going in order to pass. I was plaintive, desperate, ingratiating.

The unarmed bobbies treated me in an extremely aggressive way, interrogating & taunting me as though I were looking for trouble. The fact that they couldn’t pull out a gun & shoot me was not assuring & I was very scared. Just as I arrived to where I was staying, I saw a small group of black kids walking & knew they were in for trouble. Next morning’s newspaper confirmed there was a confrontation, beatings, & arrests.

Knowing how aggressive the bobby could be unarmed, it is not assuring of public safety that they will now work it in battle gear. This is the security of life under neoliberalism, the barbaric phase of capitalism.

(Photo by Kirsty Wigglesworth/AP)

The Olympic games 2016 have begun with quite a splashy opening ceremony & thousands protesting in the streets against the extravagance for the super-wealthy of the world while a handful of Brazilians will only see the games while selling peanuts in the galleries.

According to Olympic mythology, the purpose of the games is to “promote peace & unity within the international community through the medium of sports & “as a way to bring political enemies together.” Well it certainly brings enemies together which explains why Rio is militarized & armed to the teeth for the purpose of oligarchic unity against its own people.

The first photo is soldiers patroling the airport in Rio as athletes arrive & the second photo is mounted troops at one of the protests against the excesses of the games while Brazilians suffer increasing impoverishment to bankroll them for the world’s elite. A case of bread & circuses for elites?

(Top photo by Sean Kilpatrick/The Canadian Press via AP; bottom phot from Twitter)

Trying to remember if the alarmism about Drumpf & the rise of fascism is rivaled in past presidential elections. It’s tempting to consider it political hysteria but it’s really a profound conservatism, naivety, & inability to see how the US government is really run–by whom & in whose interest. Perhaps there’s also a large measure of manipulation involved.

The president is not a free agent. The oligarchs do not put the fate of their system & their class fortunes in the hands of inferior agents like the Bushes, Obama, Drumpf, the Clintons. They surround them with think tanks, special advisers (like Kissinger), Pentagon generals, national security operatives, CIA functionaries, bankers, corporations. Policies & differences over how to implement them are hammered out behind closed doors & not in the Oval Office.

People who believe the president or prime minister of any country runs the show according to his/her own ideas hold the credulous view of history taught in US schools that goes: there was a very good king & happiness reigned in the kingdom. Then his wicked son inherited the throne & blood rolled in the streets–& the cycle proceeds ad infinitum.

The only losers in all this charade are democracy & the American people–which is why for decades a majority opt out of the the process & don’t bother to register to vote. We need to start discussing options because to move forward humanity needs democracy.

A big deal is being made about Drumpf having his finger on the nuclear button. Whose finger would you prefer? Would you rather have Clinton blow up the world?

Let’s get real: the political imperative is to eliminate nuclear weapons.

The political art of Rollie Mukherjee is not meant to console nationalism but to confront the reality of India’s occupation of Kashmir:

“You may embrace our poems. Sing our songs. But do not asphyxiate them like bodies in the gas chambers of Auschwitz & Majdanek. Like tear gas smoke choking our uteri. Do not disfigure our elegies like the pellet-ridden faces & backs of our boys. Like barrels shoved into our wombs. Do not electrocute our beats like our bodies in Papa II, Hari Niwas. Do not torture them by strappado. Do not crush them under roller, waterboard them, sear them in secret torture chambers. Do not violate our rhythms like vanguards of your peace violate our landscapes. Do not lay siege on them like our cities. Do not desecrate our poems like you desecrate our dead.”

Long live Kashmiri Intifada. End the occupation. Self-determination for Kashmir.

It appears Indian authorities have finally caught up with Kashmiri human rights leader Khurram Parvez & closed down his internet access which some had through broadband. He left this post yesterday & hasn’t posted on FB or Twitter since:

“My home landline phone & internet has been shut. We have been informed by a senior BSNL officer that 20 phones including my home phone has been shut under government order. One doesn’t have to explain when does the government stop internet & phone of a human rights defender.”

Every once in a while I have to repeat this caveat: I value the education of discussion, including of differences, but I don’t run a debating society. There is little value in going back & forth at length with those who support war & militarism, Israeli colonialism, Hillary Clinton’s treacheries, the Kashmiri occupation.

I know the futility since I come from a reactionary family who hasn’t moved an iota to the left despite what seemed an eternity of my best arguments. My older sister has never moved from Sanders socialism & a boyfriend of 22 years could not be dissuaded from voting Democrat. People are heartfelt about their politics, even their deeply misguided ones, & I long ago gave up trying to wrangle or browbeat them to see things my way. It doesn’t work & it poisons friendships.

That doesn’t mean I hold back my views but I don’t get in people’s faces to promote them. And I don’t go to their FB walls to ‘straighten them out.’ My mantra is that one of the arts of politics is knowing when to save your breath.

So the upshot of all this is, don’t come to my wall to set me straight about India’s claims to Kashmir or on anything else. You can think me as intolerant as I think your arguments are banal. We’ll just leave it at that & proceed on what we do agree on.