“The brutal treatment of its minorities by India will end up with one of the world’s largest revolution! Right now only 20% Indians are considered truly Indian and these 20% fascist Brahmans are actually themselves a minority among Minorities. Mark my words, India will disintegrate and look like a human body with all its 206 bones separated apart.”

–Aahil Asif

Photo credit Rollie Mukherjee

The Syrian Network for Human Rights reports that in the past eight years Syrian & Russian bombers have attacked at least 79 displaced persons camps within Syria. Those are people already bombed out of their homes & villages & forced to live in squalid camps. Twelve of the bombing attacks involved cluster bombs which indiscriminately release shrapnel. Will Assadist & Stalinist propagandists claim those were terrorist, not displaced civilian camps? That’s why they call for self-determination for the Assad dictatorship because in their deranged pea brains, there are no civilians in Syria.

(On a good note, most of the political organizations in the US that turned the antiwar movement into a pro-war Assadist & Stalinist cult are collapsing. Code Pink continues only because it has Medea Benjamin’s fortune to sustain its pointless grandstanding in place of movement building.)

There’s something entirely wrong with a legal system where disputations over the legal definition of genocide take precedence over the testimony of nearly two million Rohingya refugees about the genocide they endured. If what happened to the Rohingya is not genocide, then that term has no meaning in this barbaric phase of capitalism.

Indian occupation armed forces have martyred 95,471 Kashmiris since January 1989. That’s only one of numerable horrors Kashmiris have suffered in 72 years of occupation.

#StandWithKashmir

132 days of Kashmir caged.

The text with this image is very important so please take time to read. It links the struggle in Kashmir with the struggle in India.

“It’s like the psychology of a battered woman being faced with her husband again and being asked to trust him again. That’s what is happening. We are being asked by the countries that invented nuclear weapons and chemical weapons and apartheid and modern slavery and racism – countries that have perfected the gentle art of genocide, that colonized other people for centuries – to trust them when they say that they believe in a level playing field and the equitable distribution of resources and in a better world. It seems comical that we should even consider that they really mean what they say.”

– Arundhati Roy

Thamina Eff asked me for a photo from my convent days. I was 18-years-old here. The nunnery & I were a bad fit in every way from the start. I joined after high school since as a working class girl in the early 60s I felt few options, no possibility for college, & the order worked with learning disabled children who I loved working with. I battled my way through the place, becoming known as the rebel nun, & left after 2-1/2 years, a feminist, a lapsed Catholic, & opposed to the Vietnam War where my brother was deployed.

I thought the order was inhumane in every way, especially in using physical violence against the kids. When I absolutely refused to hit the kids, they took me away from their care & put me in the kitchen to be trained as an institutional cook. We never had meat growing up so the sight of raw meat made me sick as well as the noxious smell of powdered eggs. The Vietnam War had started & when my brother was deployed there I wanted to follow it but they forbad me to read newspapers while I peeled potatoes. They would not allow me to go to college because the chaplain (an elitist sycophant) said I wasn’t smart enough & when I smarted out about that to him, they sent me every morning to his house to clean his toilet. It is a point of honor with me that he went months without more than a daily flush from me. I never touched his stinking pot but would sit down on his toilet top & read his magazines about the war. As a longtime history lover, that all was intolerable to me. Here I had always loved history & was not allowed to be part of my own times. So I asked to leave. They gave me no argument but were glad to see me go. They bought me a cheap, oversized dress & stuck me on a train to St. Paul without a dime.

I met some lovely women at the nunnery & some whack jobs too; can’t say I learned a lot except embroidery. But the experience really did make me a feminist, antiwar, & turn me away from the Catholic church.

In case you wonder where the US Pentagon stands on the occupation of Kashmir: the Indian Army has started using US manufactured assault rifles in Kashmir. Russia & India have a joint venture to manufacture 700,000 AK-203 assault rifles in India. They’ll need a massive arsenal to hold down Kashmir & the thousands of protesters against CAB & NRC & they are militarily preparing. If governments allow the sale of arms to genocidal & fascistic regimes, those governments & the arms dealers are guilty of war crimes. Which raises the question of where ISIS & al-Qaeda get their weapons?

Jeremy Corbyn lost the British elections to Boris Johnson? Seems impossible that such a corrupt lowlife politician could win. It’s a call to action, not a reason for cynicism.

The white attorney for The Gambia made an outstanding refutation of Suu Kyi & her defense team. But what in the hell was he thinking when he said China, Japan, & India are to be commended & applauded for facilitating attempts to repatriate Rohingya refugees to their homes? China provided the military equipment to carry out the genocide. India has long been attempting to forcibly deport the Rohingya, & Japan treated Suu Kyi like a rock star when she went there after the 2017 siege because of its considerable investments in Burma.