Everyone uses social media in their own way. A lot of people don’t comment on walls & just follow the news. But right now, in my choice of new friends or pruning of my friends list, I’m giving priority to those who express concern about the Kashmiri, Palestinian, Rohingya, Uyghur & other freedom struggles or the wars, especially in Syria, Yemen, & Afghanistan. If you’re more concerned about elections in your country, that’s swell. But send me a friend request when the elections are over so we can get back to business. That election stuff bores the hell out of me. The day I reduce politics to parsing distinctions between Biden, Warren, & Sanders is the day I call it quits. My thing is standing with the oppressed & movement building, not playing the odds on politicians. Don’t be offended if I unfriend you. Sometimes I make bad calls. So just let me know if I did.

Times Square, NYC.

So while a US District Court in Houston has summoned Modi for human rights crimes in Kashmir, he is is being feted at the UN, toasted by politicians & corporations in NYC, & awarded by the Gates Foundation for building public toilets. Surrealism is the reality of life in the barbaric phase of capitalism.

There are no reports about New Zealand prime minister Jacinda Ardern’s participation at the Gates Foundation award ceremony for Modi & no reports that she withdrew. But Indian media did post this video of Ardern speaking yesterday at a UN tribute to Gandhi where she begins her speech by acknowledging Modi as the host of the event & thanking him for his invitation to her to speak. All this blither, as if the disenfranchisement of two-million Muslims in Assam & the genocidal occupation of Kashmir were not going on.

Mirza Saaib Bég & Amina Mir will be leading a discussion about Kashmir at the University of Westminster in London on Friday, September 27th, 2019.

#StandWithKashmir forum at University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, MN, September 23rd, 2019.

This is a politically brilliant & dignified response from Kashmiri students studying in India at Aligarh Muslim University to the deranged Islamophobe Yogi Adityanath, chief minister of the state of Uttar Pradesh, who invited them to meet with him about India’s siege & blockade of Kashmir. Adityanath was at the rally a few years ago where one of his minions called for dragging Muslim women out of their graves & raping them.

Except for his coherence on support for Kashmir, it’s never really certain to many of us what Indian author Pankaj Mishra is trying to say. He’s a wordy man so plowing through his writings can make comprehension something of an ordeal. His latest piece for the Guardian is titled “The west’s self-proclaimed custodians of democracy failed to notice it rotting away” with the subtitle “British & American elites failed to anticipate the triumph of homegrown demagogues because they imagined the only threats to democracy lurked abroad.” Where to begin to understand what the hell he is trying to say!?

A lot of the brain fog you experience in reading this piece (& much of his other work) is because he never makes clear who he’s talking about. Who are these elites in the US & UK? Using Mishra’s time scale “from the cold war through to the war on terror” & leaving out US-NATO & UK military interventions in Latin American & the Caribbean, are they same elites who engineered the Vietnam, Iraqi, Afghan, Syrian, Somalian, Libyan, Yemeni Wars & bankroll & arm Israeli colonialism & genocide? Is Mishra claiming US-NATO & UK forces were fighting to defend democracy rather than waging wars of colonial destruction & genocide?

Maybe Mishra should stop talking rubbish about undefined elites & investigate what the people of Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, Somalia, Libya, & Yemen have to say about those wars. Maybe he should come down from his lofty heights & talk to activists from the former British & European colonies or even to principled antiwar & human rights activists to understand that considerations of democracy played no part at all ever in US-NATO & UK wars going back a lot farther than the Cold War & would necessarily include discussion of British, European, & American colonialism. That isn’t a matter of opinion. The truth is in the devastation, the utter destruction, & the millions of civilians bombed to death that is the legacy of those US-NATO wars & of colonialism. They are directly responsible for the rise of fascism today, not to mention for the repression of the Arab Spring uprisings. Putin, Modi, Assad, Suu Kyi, Xi are the continuation of US-NATO colonial & military policies, not a failure of those undefined elites to anticipate unintended results.

Maybe that’s what Mishra was trying to say. Maybe what he needs is just a good editor to cut out some of the poundage of excess words. But probably what he really needs is to stop inventing excuses for US-NATO white supremacist & colonial wars & try to be as coherent as he is on the occupation of Kashmir.

This photo is Syrian children displaced by Syrian & Russian bombing of Idlib. Would Mishra claim Russia, Syria, & the US-coalition were fighting in a misguided way for democracy by bombing their homes, schools, mosques to smithereens?

(Photo from White Helmets)

The ongoing vilification of Greta Thunberg, especially by Assadists & climate change deniers, has gone completely bonkers & stands in contrast to their deification of Julian Assange who has a screw loose. Some are so deranged by their hatred that they are actually posting photos of Greta titled “eco-fascist propaganda poster girl” along with a look-a-like photo of a girl titled “Nazi-fascist propaganda girl.”

It’s not my political style to glorify anyone with the kind of avidity Assadists & Stalinists express for Assad, Stalin, Putin, Assange & I don’t exalt Greta over the Indigenous tribes who have been fighting & dying over climate change policies for decades without accolades. But this rabid vilification of a young girl is demented, misogynist, & constitutes child abuse.

Ahmed Mahmoud Eid is one of 1,700 Palestinian refugees in Syria arrested, tortured, & killed in Assad’s gulag. He was arrested in February 2013 & where he is held, his condition, or even if he is alive is not known.

Support for the Palestinian struggle is incompatible with support for the Assad dictatorship. Those who use anti-Semitic ideology to justify support for Assad endanger Palestinians in Syria & the Palestinian struggle as a whole by associating their struggles with hatred for Jews. They would also be endangering Jews in Syria but the Assad dynasty long ago persecuted or hounded all Jews out the country.

(Photo from Action Group For Palestinians of Syria)