Let’s see: Trump, Modi, Duterte, Putin, Assad. We’re moving in the wrong direction.

Vanessa Beeley has published one of her “investigative” things claiming it a propaganda myth that Syria uses barrel bombs against civilians. Her idiosyncratic exposés usually focus on discrediting rescue workers & a small boy who survived a Russian bombing attack but now she’s tackling the heavy subject of illegal munitions.

A barrel bomb is an improvised explosive made from a barrel filled with shrapnel, chlorine gas, high explosives dropped from a helicopter or plane. Because they are unguided & indiscriminate, they are considered weapons of terror & illegal under international law. There have been thousands of reports (with photos & videos) of their use on civilians by Assad.

Assad denies using barrel bombs & since he cuts her checks, Beeley complies with one of her “investigations.” The problem with answering Beeley is that her exposés involve more smearing of those many sources that disagree with her than actual investigative work. Since her field work in Syria is under the aegis of Assad, she is always accompanied by one of his officials & her security provided by the Syrian army. That makes her reports not independent at all but of the “embedded” kind.

Her spurious investigative method is mainly vilifying all the investigations which contradict her, including by Human Rights Watch, a UN special commission, Bellingcat, Syrian human rights monitoring groups, & Syrians reporting from bombing zones. Like the dutiful & likely well-remunerated propagandist she is, Beeley smears them all as funded or linked to Soros, the Saudis, CIA, or “jihadist terrorists”. Mainstream media is just fake news when they report the findings.

Beeley who denies Assad’s use of barrel bombs then cites Craig Murray who said barrel bombs are being used by Assad “though on a pretty small scale”. Well what’s a “pretty small scale” in a counter-revolution that’s gone on for nearly 6 years & when used against hundreds of thousands of unarmed civilians?

Murray wrote a piece last year which is shared & cited over & over again by Assadists which says if he were in a bombing zone he would rather be bombed with barrel bombs than with conventional ones. He has co-thinkers in Assadists Paul Larudee who writes for Counterpunch & Robert Parry who writes for Global Research who claim barrel bombs are far less lethal & destructive than conventional bombs. That’s contrary to everything ever written about barrel bombs but the fact that Assadists even use that argument speaks to their derangement.

One question remains for our inveterate propagandist: if Assad is not using barrel bombs, is he then using conventional ones? Because something has to explain all that massive damage & the claim that militias did it is as persuasive as the claim that evil fairies from outer space did.

Video is from Darayya, a suburb of Damascus, posted in July 2016.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=2&v=1CkmY4xVMHY

This is a slum fire today in the Bicutan district of Taguig city, which is part of metropolitan Manila. Residents are gathering in the still smoldering debris to recover what is salvageable of their belongings. There are no reports on the fire except that officials report 60 shanties were burned down & 150 families made homeless. Is there a problem with the fire investigation or were two or three families actually living in each shanty?
If the elevated Manila Skyway didn’t cross over Bicutan we wouldn’t know much about fires in the district. But the frequent fires cause major traffic delays so motorists tweet reports & photos to alert other motorists to take another route. That’s how we know that fires in Bicutan have happened several times a year going back to at least 2010. Often the motorist doesn’t know what’s on fire; other times they report it as a market, warehouse, factory, or slum fire.
From their reports, we can identify that of the ten fires in Bicutan just in 2016, four were slum fires. Today is the first in 2017. But slum fires in metropolitan Manila go back over three decades with the introduction of neoliberal economic policies in the Philippines. In the past several years they have escalated due to resistance by slum residents to forcible eviction & homelessness. This has now made Manila one of the most fire prone cities in the world.
Real estate & construction magnates have made a killing under neoliberal economics in the Philippines. Eleven have become billionaires off the real estate industry. The Philippine Supreme Court cleared the way in 2008 by mandating public lands be privatized to build business districts, office towers, upscale retail & restaurant space, high end condos, & headquarters for multinational corporations in on the plunder.
The slums built on public lands have to be cleared by every means necessary to acquire the land & remove any eyesores that might offend the upscale clientele now occupying the high end condos. Torching has become the quickest way to do that.
Housing is a human right.
(Photo by Erik de Castro/Reuters)

Don’t you wonder what the oligarchs were thinking when they let Trump take the election? Leading politicians are refusing to attend the inauguration & saying they don’t recognize his presidency as legitimate. He’s self-indulgent, out-of-control, & a whopping pile of horse manure.

They probably thought he could best execute a rightward shift in politics but he’s also likely to create a massive opposition movement. Maybe they’re reconsidering. Maybe they still think it’ll work. Maybe there’s a crisis of leadership they can’t resolve in a system spiraling into barbarism.

Are the bookies taking odds on how long Trump will last?

Police arrested Radhika Vemula, the mother of Rohith, along with his brother &  other activists to prevent them from attending her son’s memorial events on campus. They have now released her but are “deporting” her back to her residence in another state.

Perhaps many will like & share her FB page to stand with her in silent tribute to her son who continues to inspire activists against the monstrous institution of caste.

https://www.facebook.com/Radhika-Vemula-1689631917976133/?pnref=story

Just wondering if socialists or others in the Hands off Syria coalition are disturbed at all by the openly anti-Muslim & anti-Semitic sources circulated by their closest allies in the coalition, including but not only Bartlett & Beeley.

Many of them wept crocodile tears over the recent death of Udo Ulfkotte, a leading figure in the European anti-Muslim, anti-immigration movement & an exemplar of right-wing nationalist hatred.

The tour de force of his writings was the claim that Turkish women farmworkers urinating & defecating in strawberry fields they worked had caused the 2011 E. coli outbreak in Germany. He described it as a “fecal jihad” waged by Muslims against Europeans.

Is that okay with you to associate with Assadists who promote such views? How is it possible that you trust their “embedded” views on Syria? Are there no principles left in your politics?

This is winter in Afghanistan & today media showed delightful photos of children playing in the snow near Kabul. There is no war reporting at all from Afghanistan. But US drone & air strikes continue. The conservative estimate for 2016 is 1071 strikes which have killed civilians, destroyed fields, homes, villages, & forced many to relocate.

Many move to Kabul since seeking asylum in Pakistan is now made difficult because of a crackdown by the Pakistani government to force refugees back to Afghanistan.

One of the consequences of the over 15-year-old US-NATO war is massive homelessness. Another which is seldom reported, at least in US or European media, is the growing problem of drug addiction.
This screen shot is from a video news report on drug addicts living under the Pul-e-Sukhta Bridge in Kabul city. The bridge is a well-known place for homeless addicts who live in tents with their families, including small children. They come from every province & some are refugees forced to return from Pakistan or Iran. Many of them, understandably, have mental health problems.

Addicts who were interviewed told the reporter that on average two to four & sometimes more fellow addicts die every day during the winter. The Afghan Ministry of Public Health probably has no idea how many are dying & has not addressed the issue at all.

The addicts explained quite cogently that many whose health is weak & compromised by drugs cannot sustain the subzero temperatures which go down to 23° F / -5° C at night. Many, they said, do not have blankets or tents for shelter.

A large current of the antiwar movement is so absorbed in defending Russia against hyped-up rhetoric over emails & supporting Assad’s dictatorship that they are unable to focus on the real wars US-NATO & Russian forces are engaged in with massive bombing.

Nothing is more imperative than to rebuild the international antiwar movement around principled demands: No to US-NATO wars. No to Russian bombing in Syria. Out now!

Mosul, Iraq, January 16th, 2017:

How do you tell the difference between emancipation US-style & Armageddon?

(Photo by Muhammad Hamed/Reuters)

It’s been one year today since Rohith Vemula took his own life. The loss of someone to suicide is a grief filled with questions that cannot be answered, confusions over what might have been, guilt and recriminations about who’s at fault and what could have been done to prevent it, if only we’d known. In the end, it was his decision long in the making that he, “a glorious thing made up of star dust,” as he so beautifully described human beings, could not live without the freedom of spirit he needed so burdened was he with the dead weight of inequality.

We may grieve for a very long time but we have to trust he understood something about himself that he would not let others see: “My birth is my fatal accident. I can never recover from my childhood loneliness. The unappreciated child from my past.” That spiritual melancholy he expressed so poignantly is the isolation and humiliation of oppression, of being disrespected and looked down upon for who you are. It is human beings, so strong and yet so vulnerable, who bear the weight of social and political inequality which devour the soul & sometimes exhaust the psychic energies to resist them.

He was a man keenly sensitive to nature, human love, pain, life, death, and the distinctions between the sincere and artificial. The sensitivity and insight are what made him a fighter and yet kept him so vulnerable. Oppression weighs heavier on some, on the thinkers, the ones who care about others the deepest. But for himself, he felt empty and believed in others more than he believed in himself. He gave others respect because he knew its value and its power and probably never understood his own. Those are the confusions that come from inequality.

No one holds education in greater esteem than the oppressed, not as a matter of status but of empowerment, and there are remarkable stories of the lengths the oppressed have gone just to learn. Intellectual aspirations are discouraged, often mocked, and always made difficult to achieve by those in power. That’s why in US history, it was newly freed slaves in the south who first introduced free public education available to all.

Rohith was a naturally intellectual person, curious and eager to understand. University officials probably well understood that about him and detested that in him, which is why they took away his stipend and suspended him. It was the place they knew he was most committed and therefore most vulnerable. That makes them culpable in his death.

He was an embodiment of what Gramsci awkwardly called the “organic intellectual.” His intellectual commitments derived energy from being oppressed and from identifying with his caste. His unique ability to educate and inspire others was because he did not place himself above them nor seek to rise above others but only to rise with the oppressed to end inequality once and for all.

We shall always regret the choice he made in death though we trust he knew best when he had reached the limits of his endurance. We wish we could tell him we would never judge him selfish, stupid, or a coward as he thought but will always honor the choices he made in life to stand resolutely against inequality and thus be part of ending it.

When asked what could Rohith Vemula possibly mean to an American socialist and activist the answer is, the same as he means to Dalits and other oppressed castes. He was one of ours, he stood with us, fought for us and with us, believed in our capacities to change the world. For that we honor him. May he Rest In Peace, at one now with the star he came from.