Two weeks of Trump now. Anybody sorry you didn’t vote for me?

The misanthrope’s mantra has become: “There’s something wrong with people who protest Trump’s ban on Muslims but didn’t object to Obama’s wars.”

That’s the problem with cynicism & misanthropy. It doesn’t require information. It can construct a straw man & burn it in effigy & work itself into a white heat of condemnations without a shred of evidence for hating on other human beings.

If the accusers had been involved in the antiwar movement during Obama’s term, they would know that polls repeatedly showed opposition to US wars was at an all time high; that Obama’s approval rates were at an all-time low over his continuation of wars & starting of new ones; that the Pentagon adopted a tactic of pretending to withdraw or draw down both in Iraq & Afghanistan precisely to diminish opposition to the wars, that it keeps most US troop deployments secret; & this all likely explains why there is almost no media coverage of any US wars.

Of course, one would have to read mainstream media to find all that out. Or one could have learned it at an antiwar organizing meeting. Get the drift? Those so ardent in hating should have been more ardent in organizing all that positive antiwar energy.

Been seeing a video of John Pilger circulating giving a lecture called “The Hijacking of Feminism.” Call me old-fashioned, but why was a man asked to give that lecture? If I had been sitting in that lecture hall, I’d have been bristling with indignation. We can damn well talk for ourselves. And how does he come off making such sweeping & damning generalizations about modern feminism?

There are major disputes within feminism & always have been. Feminism is a cacophony of voices. It’s internationally diverse & not just a western-based movement. But he made pronouncements about its political character as though it were monolithically pro-war, conservative, & dominated by US feminists like Hillary Clinton who never had any actual association with the movement.

He wasn’t entirely wrong in his judgment; the conservative current dominates media representations of feminism. But that ain’t all she wrote. There is no actual social movement. For a very long while, up until the Women’s Marches on January 21st, feminism was more a political current than a movement. That appears to be changing because women’s rights are being assailed. A movement has to be organized with broad forces involved, not just those connected to the Democratic Party who want to contain its momentum. That won’t be easy but meanwhile we sure as hell don’t want to listen to the women-hating gorillas aroused from their primal stupor by women on the march.

This momentous change is bringing misogynists out from under their rocks to denounce the Women’s Marches as a “cutie-pie pink-cap uprising,” or “Big Mommy Parade of White Woman Privilege,” or “hands off my pussy protests.” There are those trying to divide it claiming white women are its proprietors & it is either of no interest to Black & brown women or is a movement hostile to their participation & leadership.

There’s going to be some political scuffles in rebuilding the women’s movement & collaborating with women around the world. That’s the nature of social movements. Women will work those differences out. Or they won’t. Men are certainly allowed opinions & can express them. In the appropriate venue. But don’t try to speak for feminism & don’t lay down ex cathedra assertions based on misrepresentations or on power politics in the US.

PS: Pilger needs to take time out from lecturing on feminism to studying Syria, where his politics have tanked.

We joke about listening to Frederick Douglass, MLK, & Malcolm X at the vigil memorializing the Bowling Green massacre but seriously we do rue that they are not still here to lead us. In fact, they are still alive & do continue to teach us through their ideals, writings, & lives well spent.

Our historic era is producing its own great leaders–if not in a singular figure with a resounding voice, then in the unbroken collective defiance of Palestinian & Kashmiri resistance, of Syrian revolutionists & of the monumental Arab uprisings that showed the human race the best we’re made of. Maybe the Arab uprisings have been set back; they never said they were defeated.

Then there are the tens of thousands of anti-Trump youth, the over three million in the Women’s Marches on every continent, the thousands around the world still actively opposing the anti-Muslim ban.

Reactionary cynics & misanthropes sneer at all that; they always have because hating is the breadth & depth of their vision. As they stumble over each other moving backwards from the front lines, they dismiss civil rights, women’s rights, immigrant rights protests as trivial “flare ups,” identity politics gone amuck, just a liberal thing unsuited to the avant-garde smart-ass & sophisticado. There’s no Frederick Douglass, Malcolm X, MLK alive to silence their discordant harping so we must tell them in a collective voice & in the nicest possible way to STFU. We’ll make history without you.

Just one more thing; the resounding voices of our era may very well be soprano or more likely a chorus expressing the entire range of human aspiration.

Apparently it’s snowing in Kashmir since there are so many complaints about it.

Kashmir uprising 2016

A wounded Kashmiri boy, with an injured eye, lies on a hospital bed after being hit by pellets fired by paramilitary forces during a protest in Srinagar.

“Hearken to us oh rulers, return to me my eyesight”.

And they just keep coming:

“Bowling Green! False Flag Operation By Bilderberg Group!”

–John Scott

The Russian Defense Ministry reported that it deployed troops to clear explosive devices in east Aleppo. They’re actually present in Aleppo as an occupying army but they do have to demine thousands of buildings & public roads to make it habitable because of their use of cluster munitions in over one year of bombing the city.

Cluster munitions, which are dropped from warplanes or fired in rockets, contain hundreds of small explosive devices the size of an apple that spread over large areas indiscriminately & are designed to explode upon impact. But unexploded ordnance, including cluster bombs, bullets, shells, grenades, & land mines, often do not detonate, are buried in rubble or the ground, & continue to maim & kill long after, even decades after their deployment. There are millions of unexploded ordnance in every country subjected to military attack by US-NATO & Russian warplanes.

Russia & Syria deny the use of cluster munitions in east Aleppo because they are banned in international law but there is photographic & video documentation along with testimony from Syrians being bombed with them.

The photo is Russian soldiers on foot patrol in east Aleppo. Presumably assault rifles are not used for demining but to enforce occupation.

End Syrian, Russian, & US bombing of civilians in Syria. No foreign military intervention. Out now.

(Photo by Ali Hashisho/Reuters)

Media continues, for xenophobic & racist political purpose, to call all refugees “migrants,” even Rohingya fleeing genocide & those from African & Middle Eastern countries fleeing war.

Immigration policies, which are coordinated internationally by governments, used to distinguish between economic & war migrants to deport economic migrants back to their home countries. That distinction is no longer operative; all are considered deportable

We should dispense with the term immigrant & call them all refugees since most of them come from countries economically gutted by neoliberal sweatshop economics & often with US or other foreign troops deployed.

They are all refugees. They are all human. They are all our brothers & sisters. Open the damn borders.

As if being called obtuse wasn’t insolent enough, I was asked to write an article about the left & Syria which the editor accepted & rewrote in language completely foreign to me. I objected & edited the editor’s rewrite.

I got an email just now saying the edited rewritten “piece was not articulated as cogently as it needed to be in order to meet the magazine’s publication standards” but that I was welcome to submit other articles. Excuse me? What are the odds I’ll put myself through that again?