Deforestation, which is destroying the Amazon & many other regions, is a key feature of India’s ‘development’ plans for Kashmir. The occupation of Kashmir is an environmental issue.
https://www.thethirdpole.net/en/2019/12/12/kashmirs-forests-face-the-axe/?
Given the time I spend keeping up with several freedom struggles, I shortchange many important struggles that require attention. I also don’t keep up my work & Facebook wall as a 2020 US presidential candidate. In the scale of things, I think I’m making the right choices with my time & truly appreciate that without my promoting it, many of you continue to ‘like’ that wall.
This is a useful article (with limited political perspectives) about the toll the Indian siege against Kashmir is taking on India & Pakistan’s economies. One would think the devastation caused on the Kashmiri economy would at least merit mention. What’s useful about it is that India’s economy was already in a severe crisis before the siege. Part of the purpose of the siege was to strengthen India’s tanking economy by unbridled exploitation of Kashmiri natural resources. But militarism is an immense drain on the system. That doesn’t mean Indian capitalism will just collapse but that is why it is resorting to fascism. This reality is what makes the protests in India & the international protests in solidarity with Kashmir & against CAB & NRC of such monumental importance.
The protests in India against legalizing persecution of Muslims are extremely important internationally & in the struggle against the Islamophobic ‘war on terror’. They are linked inextricably & holistically to the struggle of Kashmiris who are in their majority Muslims. We cannot allow our attention to be withdrawn from the occupation but in our campaigning against CAB & NRC must integrate demands for the immediate withdrawal of troops from Kashmir & from everywhere else they are being deployed in India, including on campuses firing tear gas at student protesters.
News reporting from Kashmir is down to a trickle; most of us have no way of knowing what is going on. But in over four months of lockdown, we know the situation is extremely dire & we cannot relax our vigilance & attention. We should remember that one way antiwar opposition is thwarted is by news blackouts on the wars in Afghanistan, Yemen, Somalia, Iraq, Libya, East Timor, Sri Lanka, even Syria. We cannot be daunted by the overwhelming violence in so many countries but need to take a holistic approach, knowing all these struggles are interconnected militarily & ideologically. Our solidarity should unite in action all these struggles against war, occupation, genocide. That is why the most imperative political mission of our times is to rebuild the international antiwar movement. The forces to do that will be drawn from these struggles.
“When injustice becomes law, resistance becomes duty.”—Thomas Jefferson
(“Going on his statement his slaves would have been within their rights to rebel. It doesn’t seem he thought it through.” –Tony Dewberry)
“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.