“Four and a half months later, 7 Million People remain cut off from web and by extension, the world.

Kashmiris still have little/no contact with their loved ones in Kashmir.”

#FreeKashmir #StandwithKashmir

–Kashmiri شاهد جيلانى

Human trafficking for sex slavery is a burgeoning, multi-billion dollar international industry that preys on the poorest & most marginalized women & children & is now engaged in a global effort to completely decriminalize prostitution. It has received political support from the UN whose officials & so-called ‘peace-keeping’ troops are implicated in thousands of sex crimes & also by Amnesty International, whose campaign for decriminalization was bankrolled by one of the richest pimps in the UK.

Now they are on a campaign to decriminalize prostitution in the US & are using the 2020 presidential campaign to advance it. They have made it an issue in the campaign & have lined up Sanders, Warren, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Ayanna Pressley, Kamala Harris (now dropped out of the campaign), Corey Booker, & others to endorse complete decriminalization. Traffickers & pimps don’t have to directly approach these politicians but do so through front organizations of prostitutes & transgenders & by upper class women who think it progressive to push hooking for declassed, immigrant, & Black women as a way to make a living. They expect their own daughters, of course, to go to Stanford, Harvard, & Yale. They cynically added transgender rights as a way to legitimize prostitution, as if transgenders were obligated to hook to afford surgical transition or as if transgender oppression rendered prostitution legitimate. The contempt for poor & marginalized women is breathtaking in its ignorance & class arrogance. For their promotional campaign the traffickers hire sexed-up women to talk about their right to do what they want with their bodies. These women are not leading the decriminalization campaign & they are certainly not bankrolling it if they don’t have enough money to stop selling sex.

Prostitution is a scourge that can never be consensual sex since it is rooted in patriarchal power relations & economic poverty. It is not a form of labor but the commodification & exploitation of poor women & children’s bodies. The distinction between prostitution & trafficking can no longer be made, not just because there is so little to distinguish the pimp from the trafficker, but because brothels & the streets are filled with trafficked women & children. Forcible trafficking of thousands of women & children is the imperative issue, not legitimizing street walking.

The alternative to decriminalization is the Nordic Model which decriminalizes prostitutes but prosecutes traffickers, pimps, & johns. There are some problems with this model, primarily that once made law, it is not enforced by police or the courts which remain patriarchal institutions. It’s a weakness in the model that must be addressed. But the complete decriminalization of prostitution will exponentially increase trafficking & violence against women & children.

Those who think they’re avant-garde for supporting prostitution as consensual sex or who support decriminalization accept the power relations involved which make prostitutes a major target for rape, assault, & murder. They are profoundly ignorant, insular to reality, or share the traffickers’ contempt for women or may have watched one too many reruns of “Pretty Woman”, which like most Hollywood movies, glorifies this squalid exploitation. There is considerable feminist scholarship on the character of prostitution around the world, including in its relationship to militarism. Those who consider it a legitimate form of labor rather than commodification of women & children need to do some study before they shoot off their mouthes & put women & children in more danger than we already are.

(Photo is from Tennessee campaign against trafficking)

Many are posting articles about a study done at the International Institute of Information Technology in Hyderabad showing that ‘the Indian brain on average is smaller in height, width & volume when compared to western & other eastern populations.” They don’t appear to draw any conclusions about intelligence from the study but the implication is there that brain size has a relationship to intelligence. This is crap science. Measuring the size of anyone’s brain is about as useless as measuring IQ. It is ideologically, not scientifically, based. There appears to be a resurgence of this kind of so-called scholarship & an attempt to revive the stinking notion that brain size or IQ matter when such studies are just a continuum of evo psycho studies proving racism, misogyny, rape, homophobia, & white supremacist beauty standards are genetic.

The now deceased Harvard scientist & science writer Stephen J. Gould has written lacerating polemics against this kind of science which comes right out of social Darwinism & its attempts to impugn Black, Native American, & women’s intelligence. His book “The Mismeasure of Man” is a classic refutation of this social Darwinist rubbish. Reputable & deeply racist & misogynist scientists like Louis Agassiz at Harvard & others spent years measuring the brain sizes & cranial capacities of Blacks & Native Americans to prove they were inferior to whites. Gould discussed how their conclusions of inferiority were contradicted by their work but they promoted social Darwinist views anyway. Such is the power of hate. Such is the necessity to interrogate these studies. Women may be in a stronger position to see through them since we are so often the subject of academic rancidities.

(Photo is cover of Stephen J. Gould’s brilliant book on brain & cranium measurement studies & social Darwinism)

“India’s ruling duo live on a different planet from the mass of Indians, so completely divorced are they from the lives of the vast majority who struggle to make ends meet. They love the company of Mukeshbhai and Mehulbhai, love to dress expensively and to strut around like peacocks, waving to cameras. One loves to travel and is obsessed with embracing powerful male heads of state (as long as the cameras are watching). The other obviously eats very well, unlike 85% of Indians, and tells us human rights are irrelevant. This sets the clock of modern society back several centuries, to before the days when the rights of the individual began to matter. They both seriously think they can arrogate the power of life and death over many millions of their fellow citizens by having the right to decide who is and isn’t a citizen, who will and will not be stateless. Basically this is because they see their citizens (*all* citizens) as subjects, not citizens. The detention centres will become embodiments of a religious hierarchy strongly reminiscent of the racial hierarchies of the Nazi state.

Shah’s own family migrated to Bombay from a princely state, the town of Mansa, which lay outside the jurisdiction of British India and thus of *India* as it was politically constituted at the time. His family were pure immigrants. Had India’s colonial rulers been half as reactionary as today’s home minister, they may well have seen him as an “illegal” immigrant, except that his great grandfather was a wealthy capitalist and of course the British placed no restrictions on the mobility of either capital or labor.”

–Jairus Banaji

“‘Indian Democracy’: Freedom for Fascists Only
Kashmir will never be India. But India is becoming Kashmir. As people begin to resist tyranny like Kashmiris, ‘Indian democracy’ responds in the only way it knows: by showing its true fascist colours, like it has been showing in Kashmir and the Northeast since 1947.”

–Satyadeep Satya

The NY Times reporting & editorials about the Indian protests can only be called wimpy-assed when the struggle against Indian fascism is so monumental & so integral to the struggle against Indian fascism & occupation in Kashmir. The NYT did some good reporting from Kashmir–past tense. They know exactly what’s at stake in India & Kashmir & it isn’t ‘bigotry’; it’s fascism. This weak-minded kind of reporting is a way of protecting US military & trade relations with India, of not alarming investors or jeopardizing the alliance Obama forged with India against China in the region.

This is 10-year-old Mohd Aariz Khan who is protesting with his mother at Shaheen Bagh against India’s version of the German Nuremberg laws.

(Photo via Astha Saxena on Twitter)

Is it true that protesters at Jama Masjid in Delhi are chanting ‘azaadi’? This is apparently befuddling Indian newscasters covering the protest.

A brilliant anti-fascist speech by Mahua Moitra to the Indian Parliament.

(Perhaps someone could explain what she meant by her brief mention of Kashmir.)