The prayer rituals of Kashmiri women fascinate photojournalists. The brutal Indian occupation of Kashmir not so much.
Monthly Archives: June 2016
If analyses of the EU vote are to be useful at all, they should avoid imputations of low moral character to everyone who disagrees with you. That increases rancor & is a way of shouting down debate rather than clarifying things.
Not everyone who supports leaving the EU did so for racist & xenophobic reasons but rather for internationalism & social solidarity. Some think the EU can be transformed from the monstrosity it is to an agency of social justice & some don’t think so. That’s an essential discussion that should not be drowned in vituperations.
The disagreements among progressives about Syria & on the EU vote are so fundamental & so rancorous that it appears a political & historical process may be unfolding–making an analysis of that process essential before the differences divide us beyond the possibility for unity in action on those things which we agree.
This certainly isn’t the first time progressives of all hue have been divided on consequential questions. It isn’t the first time we are informed by conflictingsources of information–for example, about who is bombing Syria & what will happen after the UK leaves the EU.
Whether you feel funereal or not does not determine the correctness of your views. These are scary times in the UK but for heaven’s sakes it must be said quite frankly that it is as naught compared to what is going on in the Middle East, Africa, & Central America that is driving millions of people to flee as refugees. Why are things always more catastrophic when they happen in Europe & the US?
Brexit & the British Raj in India
This is a marvelous post by my Facebook friend Roy Daniels on Brexit:
Congratulations on Brexit, Britain.
In 1973, you joined the European Community. In 1975, under Labour Prime Minister Harold Wilson you had a referendum on Britain’s membership, and 66% voted ‘yes’, to stay in the European Community. In 1993, the European Union was formed. And now, within 43 years you are out of Europe. How I wish your stay in Asia had also been that brief. For all your national pride and your chauvinism, you were so thick skinned and shameless while you were here, we kept asking you to leave, to Quit India, Quit India, Quit India, but you hung around for 200 years…
There’s a lot of gloating over media headlines that just hours after the vote, the British were “frantically googling” what the EU is. How they know that the googlers were frantic or were the same people who voted to leave the EU is unexplained.
Among the top questions reported by Google are “What does it mean to leave the EU?” & “What will happen now that we’ve left the EU?”
Truth is, most of us don’t know a lot about the economics of the EU because its racist, xenophobic treatment of refugees has so dominated the news in the past several years.
I don’t know more about the economics of the EU than most people so we should all be googling up those questions without facing taunting. It is relevant to note that in the 1990s while traveling in Dingle, Ireland, I met several fishermen who complained bitterly that as a result of EU policies, their livelihoods were being destroyed by Spanish trawlers in Irish territorial waters who used dragnets to haul in everything that swam.
Actually, I have done some research on EU economic policies in Eastern Europe particularly. It is straightforward imposition of neoliberal austerity on working people & gentrification programs that displace hundreds of thousands of urban poor for infrastructure projects like highways to facilitate intercontinental commercial travel.
Josie, one of world’s ugliest dogs: separated at birth from Drumpf?
This is Josie, a Chinese Crested contestant in the World’s Ugliest Dog Competition in Petaluma, California. As if it weren’t ignominious enough to be an entrant for ugly, she also bears a remarkable resemblance to Donald Drumpf. Has God no mercy on a wee pup?
(Photo by Josh Edelson/AFP/Getty)
Riot police attack LGBT rights march in Istanbul, Turkey
These riot police in Istanbul, Turkey are using rubber pellet guns & water cannons mounted on armored vehicles to disperse unarmed LGBT rights activists after the march was banned by the government.
The very same kind of assault took place on last year’s LGBT march & both times major media have questioned why & have answered tentatively it is because the protests coincided with Ramadan–which the Guardian-UK says “could have caused conservative Muslims to bristle.” The Guardian article also noted that while homosexuality is not a crime in Turkey, homophobia remains widespread “as it is in most other Muslim countries.” The Guardian didn’t note that it isn’t a crime because of the heritage of the Muslim Ottoman Empire which legalized it in the 19th century. They perhaps thought they needn’t mention that homophobia is widespread everywhere & homosexuality isn’t fully legal in most countries, including the US.
Media must think there’s some merit in playing stupid. The Erdogan regime has been using extreme violence against democracy protesters & against media since 2013. That’s the political character of the regime & that is likely the reason the LGBT marchers were attacked.
As a postscript, it is particularly grotesque that some actually look to Turkish bombers to free Syria from Assad’s dictatorship & Russian bombers. Of course it should also be noted that under Putin, for the past several years, there has been a crackdown & violent attacks on LGBT activists after Christian Evangelists helped implement new anti-LGBT legislation.
LGBT rights are human rights. Our solidarity with those around the world who stand up against violence to demand them.
(Photo by Murad Sezer/Reuters)
A lesson from US history worth remembering:
When the OJ Simpson verdict came down in October 1995, it emboldened media to start ranting & harping about the incompatibilities of Blacks & whites & encouraged white racists to openly express views that were silenced by the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s. It was a scary time.
But serendipitously, a few weeks after the verdict, the first Million Man March was held in Washington, DC, where at least that number of people came toprotest around a somewhat conservative political agenda.
Political power is a daunting thing. The sight of a million Black men & women marching together scared the bejeezus out of racists & silenced the media on a dime. All that racism didn’t go away but it was cowed into silence & never got the energy to mobilize.
That’s what we need to remember as we see bands of nationalists cruising for trouble. We have to exceed their aggression with power.
It doesn’t appear there can be rapprochement of the competing narratives among progressives about the character of the EU vote in the UK. But what is is & what ain’t ain’t. Dealing with the new realities is priority now, not postmortems & excoriations of the opposition. The political, economic, & social consequences of this vote have not yet fully revealed themselves so there’ll be plenty of opportunity for polemics.
It was Marx who said human beings “make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given & transmitted from the past.”
The vote may have emboldened racists & nationalists but that only means political organizing in defense of refugees, immigrants, & citizens who are brown & black has to be more boldly advanced with no time to waste. That is a political task everywhere, not just in the UK, as rightwing extremists gain prominence.
It must be said the tone of the debate has been regrettable but that is inevitable when so much is at stake & the issues so heartfelt. However, one thing is clear: unity among progressives must be forged to respond to nationalist aggressions with massive & maximum political power.
Addressing the Orlando massacre, Obama’s Attorney General Loretta Lynch told reporters that the most effective weapon at America’s disposal against Islamic terrorism is love–even though they still haven’t determined that the motive was Islamic terrorism & overwhelming evidence suggests Islam didn’t have a damn thing to do with it.
But this raises the question of how the US government defines love. Does it include drone bombing, Guantanamo & torture prisons, & decades of military occupation? Because Muslims could probably do with a whole lot less Obama love.