When we view some of the footage of Indian troops in Kashmir, it appears India has unleashed vigilante thugs & the criminally insane on Kashmir. But then we know from decades of US military crimes in Vietnam, Iraq, Libya, Afghanistan, & so many other countries, that barbarism is the very nature of war & occupation.
The historic imperative remains: rebuild the international antiwar movement. That is the historic mission of our era.
The mass funeral cortège/protest is a tragic feature of Israel’s occupation of the West Bank & of India’s occupation of Kashmir. What kind of world do we live in where our young are murdered for resisting oppression? Where our funerals become protests? Where we bury our beloved to requiems of freedom songs? Where military occupation has become the norm?
Long live Palestinian Intifada. Long live Kashmiri Intifada. No US military aid to Israel or India.
Build BDS. (It is not irrelevant that Israel sells armaments to India for use in Kashmir & trains the Indian paramilitary death squads deployed there.)
(Photo on top is recent funeral in West Bank of Naim Shawamrah who was held in Israel’s gulag for 19 years; photo on bottom is recent funeral in Kashmir of two young men killed by Indian troops.)
The Olympic athletes are so remarkable that their performances make me regret growing up in an era without sports programs for girls & thus a life wasted on disco & politics. Then I consider the hours of training to develop such prowess, weigh that off against my lack of competitive drive, & realize fate did me no disfavor.
What a mess the competing analyses of Syria are & they have been since a popular revolution against Assad was turned into a civil war after 2011. The extremes of those who claim to be left thinkers are from enthusiastic, actually rightwing support for Assad & denial of Syrian & Russian carpet bombing to those of confused political allegiance who hate Assad & want the US or Saudi Arabia to intervene against Syrian & Russian bombing. The latter call for humanitarian US military intervention & are campaigning for Clinton since they see her as most reliable war-monger.
There’s no possible reconciliation between these points of view & no possible agreement with either. They’re both nuts. Adherents of Assad dismiss the popular revolution against his autocracy but are wary of US intervention & opponents of Assad’s tyranny campaign for US intervention. They’re both playing with fire. You can’t make those kind of mistakes before you find yourself politically irrelevant or at least in a downward spiral.
When you try to unravel what the problem is, why the analyses are so unhinged, it appears many can’t theoretically deal with complexity & apparent contradictions in reality, so they improvise & then become wedded to their massive blunders & to militarism.
The only way to cut through all that is to demand no military intervention in Syria by any government & to build support for the popular movement against Assad which still struggles on.