“No escape”, another brilliant work by Rollie Mukherjee published in an upcoming book by the People’s Study Group:
Monthly Archives: November 2018
That guy who took over as US Attorney General looks like a Russian mafia guy from central casting. Russian meddling may go deeper than we think. Libertarians like Glenn Greenwood will be confused: will they applaud him for halting Russiagate? Or will they denounce him as a member of the deep state? Whither conspiracy thinkers?
These days, people are always accused of having secrets. I remember a time, before gossip took over journalism, when what are now impugned as secrets were considered private & privacy was respected.
An important article showing the insidious justification for censorship on social media but also which belies any idea that corporations are not subject to laws or public pressure:
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/14/technology/facebook-data-russia-election-racism.html?
Since Trump was handed the presidency after Clinton won the popular vote, Russian meddling in the elections may not be as compelling a problem as US meddling via the Electoral College, gerrymandering, the Supreme Court decision to disenfranchise Native American reservation residents, the constant & ongoing disenfranchisement of Blacks, Latinos, & former prisoners, voter suppression, & just outright election fraud. Not to mention the election laws which prevent any real challenges to the two party monopoly of US politics. In that regard, leftists jubilant over the so-called regeneration of the Democratic Party must not know much about the last 100 years of social struggle in this country or are looking to the wrong class of people to make history.
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It was sometime after 2012 that Kashmiri activists on Facebook began asking me to study their freedom struggle & write about it. To be honest, before that I had never heard about it. For a while I put them off but they would not take no for an answer. So I committed myself to studying their history by going to the library at the local branch of the University of Texas. All of the books in that collection were written in that distinct US State Department way & were only useful in seeing how the US government portrays things. In that regard, the voices of the freedom movement are ignored or treated as ‘Islamist jihadism’.
It turned out to be much more fruitful to search the article data base & news reports, including in Indian media. Since the issue of Pandits (Kashmiri Hindus) is so often thrown in Kashmiri’s faces, I investigated that issue—& got it all wrong because my sources were tendentious & nationalist. My Kashmiri friends wasted no time in correcting me & I had to go back to the extensive library data bases.
Now I understand the basic disputes around Pandits but still need a deeper grasp & in pursuing that am coming up against the same scholarship problem. There is certainly excellent scholarship available to Kashmiris but not so accessible to others. For those of us who would like the best scholarship on the Kashmiri struggle without plowing through volumes of rubbish, can Kashmiri friends suggest those books, articles, journals, writers you think most important?
But of course not a single Rohingya volunteered to return to Burma without ironclad protections against the genocidaires. What is monstrous is that Burmese & Bangladeshi officials threatened people still recovering from unspeakable criminality through such an ordeal until the last minute before scrapping the plan. Psycho Suu Kyi & the generals are probably having a good laugh at the Rohingya’s expense. Monsters!
Thousands of Rohingya protested in the camps & at the border with Burma, chanting they will not go back. No plans of any kind can be made about Rohingya lives without their direct participation. They alone have the right to formulate demands, conditions, & who they will negotiate with.
It is a giant relief today that they will not be forcibly deported but their ordeal won’t be over till Sheikh Hasina also dumps plans to deport them to barracks on a deserted island. They are human beings, not cattle, & have no intention of being treated as such.
Bangladesh is playing fast & loose with Rohingya lives & refugee rights by marching in troops, police, & paramilitary forces one day & scrapping the deportation plan the next. Sheikh Hasina, the prime minister, must have realized that deporting genocide victims at gunpoint would have consequences for her public image since clearly there are so few political consequences for genocide. Her regime still plans to deport 25,000 Rohingya to barracks on an uninhabitable island in the middle of nowhere so she may have pulled off the dogs so a few thousand deported back to Burma will not interfere with this larger deportation.
https://abcnews.go.com/International/wireStory/bangladesh-rohingya-volunteer-myanmar-59208948?
So much for that ‘voluntary repatriation’ crap! The Bangladeshi army, police, & paramilitary troops have moved into Rohingya refugee camps to forcibly deport them back to the killing fields of Burma.
The suffering children of Kashmir: as in Palestine & in every war, occupation, genocide, children are not accidental victims but the intended targets. There is nothing the oppressors fear more than children who represent a new generation of resistance. Stand with the little ones of Kashmir by telling the world about the barbaric occupation they endure.
Go back, India, go back.