[Marxism] Were McCain and Romney the lesser evils?
== Rule #1: YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. == (I remember when a couple of people on Marxmail were posting encomiums to Obama in 2008. I would like to tell them I told you so but they are long gone.) NY Times, June 29 2014 Obama to Seek Funds to Stem Border Crossings and Speed Deportations By JULIA PRESTON President Obama will ask Congress to provide more than $2 billion in new funds to control the surge of illegal Central American migrants at the South Texas border, and to grant broader powers for immigration officials to speed deportations of children caught crossing without their parents, White House officials said on Saturday. Mr. Obama will send a letter on Monday to alert Congress that he will seek an emergency appropriation for rapidly expanding border enforcement actions and humanitarian assistance programs to cope with the influx, which includes record numbers of unaccompanied minors and adults bringing children. The officials gave only a general estimate of the amount, saying the White House would send a detailed request for the funds when Congress returned after the Fourth of July recess that began Friday and ends July 7. Wave of Minors on Their Own Rush to Cross Southwest BorderJUNE 4, 2014 The president will also ask Congress to revise existing statutes to give the Homeland Security secretary, Jeh Johnson, new authorities to accelerate the screening and deportation of young unaccompanied migrants who are not from Mexico. Fast-track procedures are already in place to deport young migrants from Mexico because it shares a border with the United States. Mr. Obama will also ask for tougher penalties for smugglers who bring children and other vulnerable migrants across the border illegally, the officials said. “This is an urgent humanitarian situation,” Cecilia Muñoz, the director of the White House Domestic Policy Council, said in a telephone interview on Saturday. “We are being as aggressive as we can be, on both sides of the border,” she said. “We are dealing with smuggling networks that are exploiting people, and with the humanitarian treatment of migrants while also applying the law as appropriate.” After the president declared a humanitarian crisis in early June, federal emergency management officials have been coordinating with the many federal agencies involved in finding detention shelters for the unaccompanied youths and in stepping up enforcement measures to deter more migrants from coming. “The uptick in activity at the border and the steps the administration has put in place are extraordinary,” a White House official said. “We are maxing out our capacities within the existing appropriated monies.” Federal officials have opened shelters to detain unaccompanied children at three military bases and are seeking facilities for other shelters. Border authorities are required to turn over unaccompanied minors within 72 hours to the Department of Health and Human Services, which oversees the shelters and seeks to locate family members in this country who can receive the youths. While many unaccompanied children may qualify for some legal status here, many others would not. Authorities want to eliminate delays in deporting children determined to have no legal option to stay, the White House officials said. On Thursday, Mr. Obama directed tough comments to Central American parents in an interview on ABC News. “Do not send your children to the borders,” the president said. “If they do make it, they’ll get sent back. More importantly, they may not make it.” White House officials said they were not asking Congress to change other existing legal protections for children apprehended without their parents. The administration is working with the governments of the three countries that are home to most of the migrants — El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras — to ensure the children are safe once they are returned, the officials said. Representative Henry Cuellar, a Democrat whose district includes a long stretch of the South Texas border, on Saturday visited about 1,000 migrants detained at the Border Patrol station in McAllen. He urged Congress to approve quick changes to laws on the handling of unaccompanied minors. “When it’s Central American countries, there is a different process,” Mr. Cuellar said. “One of the things we need to do is tweak the law, to give Border Patrol the power to treat anybody the same as we treat Mexicans.” The influx in the Rio Grande Valley has also included many families, especially women with children. To discourage more families from embarking on the dangerous journey across Mexico, the administration is detaining more of them after they are caught. House Republican leaders chastised the president last week, saying his
[Marxism] Fwd: LENIN'S TOMB: Twitter warning
== Rule #1: YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. == Richard Seymour gets it right: First, clearly, 140 characters makes a difference. It's supposed to. The concision demanded by this form lends itself to, among other better things, the formulation of statements in the form of sentiments and platitudes. It is not a format best suited to rigorous argument, but to the emphatic reiteration of dogma and sentimentality. Second, Twitter is a marketing platform, which is designed to foster short-term buzz and hype. It would be absurd for me to be pious about this aspect of Twitter, since I depend upon it to circulate my writing, and advertise upcoming events. Still, this has effects. The whole point of Twitter is that to fully participate in it, one has to get carried away with passing frenzies. http://www.leninology.co.uk/2014/06/twitter-warning.html Send list submissions to: Marxism@lists.csbs.utah.edu Set your options at: http://lists.csbs.utah.edu/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
[Marxism] China’s Threat to Wild Tigers
== Rule #1: YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. == NY Times Op-Ed, June 29 2014 China’s Threat to Wild Tigers By SHARON GUYNUP EARLIER this year, a police raid on a house party in Leizhou, Guangdong Province, in southern China, revealed a decadent diversion apparently popular among some of China’s elite: watching a tiger being slaughtered and butchered, then gorging on meat that’s considered an exotic delicacy. Fifteen people were arrested and charged with killing more than 10 tigers in the past few years. One of them, a real estate developer identified as Mr. Xu, pleaded guilty to consuming three tigers in 2013. A prosecutor said he had “a quirky appetite for eating tiger penis and drinking tiger blood.” The Nanfang Daily reported that these “visual feasts” had become fashionable among wealthy businessmen and government officials. One official told China Daily that the privileged staged these dinners “as a form of entertainment and to show off their wealth.” The demise of the tiger, the world’s most endangered big cat, was hastened by demand for traditional Chinese medicine, which ascribed healing properties to nearly every part of the cat, from whiskers to tail. But that has changed, says a new report commissioned by the secretariat of the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species, which regulates that trade under a treaty signed by 180 nations. “ ‘Wealth’ [is] replacing ‘health’ as a primary form of consumer motivation,” the report says. Tiger parts “are now consumed less as medicine and more as exotic luxury products.” This demand is about prestige and money. The cats’ magnificent pelts are among the most sought-after items (displayed as luxury home décor), along with “bone-strengthening wine” (an exorbitantly costly elixir made by steeping a tiger skeleton in rice wine). It’s a deadly commerce fueled by China’s commercial captive breeding farms, which hold more than 5,000 tigers and maintain stockpiles of frozen carcasses and body parts. These farms spur poaching of wild tigers by perpetuating the market in tiger parts. China figures prominently in this illegal commerce and will be a focus as convention representatives meet in Geneva next month to discuss ways to stop the trade in tigers and other big Asian cats. When Rudyard Kipling wrote “The Jungle Book” at the turn of the 20th century, about 100,000 wild tigers roamed the Asian continent. Today, perhaps 3,200 remain scattered across 13 countries, wiped out by trophy hunts in India, the 1960s fashion craze for fur in the United States and Europe, disappearing habitat, conflict with people and poaching. Tigers command a small fortune on the black market, and demand is rising. A loophole in the country’s wildlife protection law allows the breeding and “utilization” of certain products derived from captive-bred endangered species. This has made industrial-scale “tiger farming” big business. The number of captive tigers skyrocketed from about 85 in 1993 to 5,000-plus today. (Vietnam, Laos and Thailand also breed tigers, but on a much smaller scale.) Farming continues despite a 2007 decision by the convention that “tigers should not be bred for trade in their parts and derivatives.” In 2010, the Chinese Year of the Tiger, the bleak conditions in China’s commercial breeding facilities came under scrutiny from conservation groups and the media. Gruesome images documented tigers crammed into cramped, decrepit, concrete enclosures. Many were emaciated, reduced to striped bags of bones. Some were deformed by inbreeding. Little seems to have changed since then. Some farms are run as animal parks, where the few healthy animals perform before cheering tourists. The rest are hidden from public view. Though these parks are thinly disguised as educational or conservation initiatives, they in no way help the species. A captive tiger has never been successfully released into the wild. The two largest breeding outfits (which more than 1,000 tigers each) were begun with start-up financing from the State Forestry Administration, an agency with contradictory roles: protecting wildlife while also overseeing and promoting intensive tiger farming. While breeding is legal in China, the sale of tiger parts is not. Skins from captive animals are exempt if they have forestry administration permits, supposedly issued for educational or scientific purposes. But undercover operatives working for the Environmental Investigation Agency, a London-based group focused on exposing environmental crime, found the licensing process rife with improprieties. In 2012, they encountered taxidermists preparing skins for private customers using forestry administration permits. Those documents seemed to be regularly reused — making it
[Marxism] The NY Times Ombudsperson on Iraq coverage
== Rule #1: YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. == Covering New War, in Shadow of Old One JUNE 28, 2014 Margaret Sullivan THE PUBLIC EDITOR THE lead-up to the war in Iraq in 2003 was not The Times’s finest hour. Some of the news reporting was flawed, driven by outside agendas and lacking in needed skepticism. Many Op-Ed columns promoted the idea of a war that turned out to be both unfounded and disastrous. Readers have not forgotten. Even now, more than a decade later, it’s one of the topics I hear most about. In recent weeks, with Iraq in chaos, military intervention there again has been under consideration, and readers are on high alert. Clearly, the two situations are very different, and made even more so by President Obama’s statement that no ground troops would be involved. Beyond that, where President George W. Bush seemed intent on invading Iraq, President Obama has made his distaste for the war clear. And it’s still early in this crisis. Nevertheless, given The Times’s troubled history when it comes to this subject, readers have good reason to be wary about what appears in the paper about military intervention in Iraq. And based on what I am already hearing from them, they are. Many readers have complained to me that The Times is amplifying the voices of hawkish neoconservatives and serving as a megaphone for anonymously sourced administration leaks, while failing to give voice to those who oppose intervention. I went back with the help of my assistant, Jonah Bromwich, and reread the Iraq coverage and commentary from the past few weeks to see if these complaints were valid. The readers have a point worth considering. On the Op-Ed pages and in the news columns, there have been very few outside voices of those who opposed the war last time, or those who reject the use of force now. But the neoconservatives and interventionists are certainly being heard. A recent profile of the historian Robert Kagan, a leading proponent of the invasion of Iraq in 2003 who is once more in the news, was one focus of sharp reader criticism. And an Op-Ed article by Anne-Marie Slaughter, another proponent of the Iraq war who says Mr. Obama should use force in Syria, also dismayed some readers. Phyllis Bennis, who writes frequently on the Middle East, protested in an email to me: “The appearance is that The Times takes seriously only those who were responsible for the disaster that Iraq has become.” Where, she asked, is the equivalent treatment — “serious, comprehensive, virtually uncritical” — of those who opposed the war and warned of what is coming to pass now? And the documentary filmmaker Robert Greenwald put it this way on Twitter: “Another day, another NYT article about a neocon and Iraq! Where are the articles about hundreds of thousands against escalation?” I also observed that much of the news reporting continues to reflect The Times’s extraordinary access to administration sources. That is both a competitive advantage and a potential hazard. A reader, Dave Metzger, pointed out one recent front-page article that relied heavily on such unnamed sources. His comment on Twitter dripped with sarcasm: “Iraq lessons learned.” I’ve been critical, repeatedly, of the overuse of unnamed sources, while acknowledging that they are sometimes necessary. Certainly, they have dominated the paper’s recent coverage from Washington. The Times’s access to administration sources has produced important news stories, but my reading suggests that there has not been enough effort to challenge and vet the views of these government sources. Here’s one small example. In a military analysis, “U.S. Airstrikes Could Help in Reversing Insurgent Offensive, Experts Say,” the only acknowledgment of opposition came in a partial sentence: “Despite skeptics, particularly Democrats, who say that American airstrikes are unlikely to change the course of events in Iraq, President Obama is considering them among a range of options to help the government of Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Malaki.” The skeptics, after this brief nod, are not heard from again. (Maybe a military analysis was not the right place for such skepticism, but it has not surfaced much elsewhere either.) Other news articles have also included limited response from those who oppose American intervention. The coverage has not featured the kind of in-depth attention that readers want as a counterbalance to pieces like the one on Mr. Kagan. It is worth noting that The Times’s foreign on-the-ground reporting has been aggressive and solid. On the editorial page and Op-Ed pages, the anti-intervention arguments have come not from the outside but largely from The Times’s own columnists and its editorials. The opinion pieces by outside writers have
Re: [Marxism] Were McCain and Romney the lesser evils?
== Rule #1: YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. == http://america.aljazeera.com/opinions/2014/6/violence-in-hondurasunaccompaniedminorsimmigrationtous.html The legacy children of the Honduran coup Many of the youths crossing the US border are fleeing a country torn apart by coup supported by US government June 28, 2014 12:00AM ET by Dan Beeton http://america.aljazeera.com/profiles/b/dan-beeton.html @Dan_Beeton http://www.twitter.com/Dan_Beeton Prior to its 2009 coup d’état, five years ago on June 28, Honduras rarely made headlines in the U.S. Since the ouster of President Manuel Zelaya, however, the Central American nation has received a lot of bad press. It is in the spotlight again for the recent surge of unaccompanied Honduran minors crossing U.S. borders. Of the 47,000 children apprehended by U.S. Border Patrol since October, 28 percent, or more than 13,000 http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2014/06/10/number-of-latino-children-caught-trying-to-enter-u-s-nearly-doubles-in-less-than-a-year/, came from Honduras. This is a whopping 1,272 percent increase over the number apprehended on the border in 2009. Send list submissions to: Marxism@lists.csbs.utah.edu Set your options at: http://lists.csbs.utah.edu/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
[Marxism] Fwd: 2014 New York Asian Film Festival | Louis Proyect: The Unrepentant Marxist
== Rule #1: YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. == Last Friday night the NY Asian Film Festival (NYAFF) opened in New York. This is the thirteenth year for the annual event, one that I have been covering from its inception. After some general comments on Asian film, I will conclude with a review of “The White Storm”, a festival film showing at Walter Reader Theater tonight. Unlike the Indian Film Festival that I covered a month ago, this one features movies that are geared to local audiences rather than Western film festivals and theaters specializing in indie and foreign films. So the typical NYAFF film will be about samurais or gangsters while one from the Indian film festival will be about the plight of Dalits. I would have preferred that the NYAFF curators include more political films but I confess that I am not even aware that they are being made. From what I have gleaned from the Japanese film industry over the past five years or so, there are very few—if any—directors or screenwriters in the Akira Kurosawa or Yoji Yamada tradition nowadays. Perhaps if there were a stronger left in Japan or Hong Kong for that matter, we’d see films being made with a social and political message. That being said, I am totally devoted to Hong Kong and Japanese gangster and samurai films. In an age when Hollywood “entertainment” means the latest Michael Bay movie, we are better off with a lobotomy. I thought that Atlantic Magazine’s Christopher Orr got the latest installment of “Transformers” just right: “If it truly takes this long to save the world from the depredations of robots that turn into muscle cars, it may be that the world is no longer worth saving.” full: http://louisproyect.org/2014/06/29/2014-new-york-asian-film-festival/ Send list submissions to: Marxism@lists.csbs.utah.edu Set your options at: http://lists.csbs.utah.edu/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
[Marxism] Fwd: Understanding Ukraine’s upheaval | REDFLAG
== Rule #1: YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. == The trajectory of the movement and the fate of Ukraine have been profoundly changed by imperialism. Not just the imperialism of the West as some commentators think. The main problem is Russia. Russian domination over Ukraine has a long history. The foggy hopes for European stability and prosperity in the minds of many protesters are a direct result of Russian domination. They rightly associate Russia with corruption, poverty and repression. It is the main regional power that has consistently bullied and harassed Ukraine – for example by turning off natural gas supplies in the middle of winter in order to wring a more favourable treaty out of the Ukrainian government. Ukraine relies on Russia for 60-70 percent of its energy needs, and so Russia has used blatant economic blackmail time and again. full: http://redflag.org.au/article/understanding-ukraine%E2%80%99s-upheaval Send list submissions to: Marxism@lists.csbs.utah.edu Set your options at: http://lists.csbs.utah.edu/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
[Marxism] Letter from the US: We must oppose new war in Iraq
== Rule #1: YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. == ...The danger is that Washington will either have to accept that its whole intervention into Iraq has been an abject failure, or attack the Sunni-controlled area with huge air strikes with the Baghdad army and Shia militias on the ground. The Iraqi army has not exactly distinguished itself in the face of the Sunni advance, largely fleeing without a fight. The Shia militias are divided. Accepting the Iraq intervention decisively failed would be the most rational action, but would also be a major blow to US credibility. It may be too high a price to pay. Large-scale air strikes, on the other hand, would be the start of the third US war against Iraq, and suck it deeper into the quagmire of civil war, with untold consequences for the whole region... https://www.greenleft.org.au/node/56764 -- “Disobedience, in the eyes of anyone who has read history, is humanity’s original virtue. It is through disobedience that progress has been made, through disobedience and through rebellion.” — Oscar Wilde, Soul of Man Under Socialism “The free market is perfectly natural... do you think I am some kind of dummy?” — Jarvis Cocker Send list submissions to: Marxism@lists.csbs.utah.edu Set your options at: http://lists.csbs.utah.edu/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
[Marxism] Al-Sadr: No to Maliki, No to US/UK, No to Syria/Iran, yes to working with Sunni!
== Rule #1: YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. == Daily Mail interviews Moqtada's commander in Baghdad Sunday, 29 June 2014 06:58 Henry Adams On Saturday Barbara Jones published in the London Daily Mail an account of her interview with Ibrahim al-Jaberi, the Mahdi Army's militia commander in Baghdad.[1] -- COMMENT: Moqtada al-Sadr, the leader of the Mahdi Army, is a hero to millions of Iraqi Shiites and the only leader who has a chance of uniting Iraqis to fight off the fanatical ISIS. -- He represents genuine Iraqi nationalism and is the only major Shiite leader has fought to defend Sunnis and thus has a claim to their allegiance. -- But the forces he fought to defend them were American and British, and he represents the poorer strata of Iraqi society, to which U.S. policy is indifferent when it is not hostile. -- As a result, Moqtada and his Mahdi Army get only negative press in the West when they get any press at all. -- The failure of the U.S. to come to terms with Moqtada is a clear sign that maintaining the unity and territorial integrity of Iraq is not the highest American priority 1. MY PERILOUS VOYAGE INTO BAGHDAD'S DRAGON DEN By Barbara Jones ** A dramatic dispatch on a saber-rattling encounter with rebel chief ** Daily Mail (London) June 28, 2014 http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2673472/My-perilous-voyage-Baghdad-dragons-den-BARBARA-JONESS-dramatic-dispatch-sabre-rattling-encounter-rebel-chief.html Shots echo in the street below as my phone rings. It’s just after dawn in a Baghdad under curfew. The head of the Mahdi Army -- the fanatical Shia force and avowed enemies of the West -- has agreed to see me: but on his terms. I must venture into Sadr City, the slum district of the Iraqi capital that defied British and American occupation for a decade. Now the militants have a new enemy -- the Sunni terror group ISIS, who have left a trail of blood across Iraq and are fast closing in on Baghdad itself. That has not dimmed the army’s hatred of the West -- and I will be told in no uncertain terms that foreign intervention will be ‘unacceptable.’ But first I must get to Sadr City, a volatile place with a ‘fight-to-the-death’ spirit, whose streets have seen terrible sectarian bloodshed. It was named after the father of Moqtada al-Sadr, the army’s founder. He was a Grand Ayatollah who stood up to Saddam Hussein and was shot dead by the dictator’s Sunni supporters. I had encountered the Mahdi Army before. In 2005, when I was with a British Army patrol in Basra, we were attacked by their fighters aiming rocket-propelled grenades at us. Yet now I am speaking to them; agreeing to the instructions for this meeting: I am to drive to the Habibi Hospital, call a number, and wait for Al-Sadr’s men. The militant leader knows no compromise, and only last week warned America and her allies to ‘take their hands off Iraq.’ He claims to have re-invented his fighting force as a ‘peace brigade’ to defend Baghdad. Driving through empty early-morning streets, the dashboard shows a temperature of 41 C. (106 F.), another day of suffocating heat. Inside our car, flak jackets are flattened against the doors, protection against roadside bombs that kill four people a day here. This is a city in a state of siege, nervously awaiting, fearing, an attack by the Sunni forces or a return of the Americans. Checkpoints, car searches and blast walls are all a way of life. We arrive at the hospital, a sad run-down structure surrounded by rolls of barbed wire. Seven Mahdi Army men soon pull up, all in black police uniforms and bristling with weapons. They check our papers and signal for us to follow them through the rubbish-strewn streets. Low-key is not their style. Their Ford pick-up careers through busy markets with much hooting of horns and screeching of brakes. Any vehicles getting in the way end up at the dangerous end of a rifle barrel. Residents live their lives, opening pavement kiosks, servicing rundown cars, and recycling tires. Two sheep are led into a butcher’s shop to meet their fate. Cans of petrol are lined up at the roadside, a symbol of poverty in an oil-rich country. But no one looks up as we speed past. People here are trained to see only what they need to see. Eventually we skid around a corner between broken buildings. White gates swing open on to a courtyard. A striking figure in a turban comes out to greet us -- the man we have come to meet, cleric-cum-warlord Ibrahim al-Jaberi, Al-Sadr’s commander in Baghdad. Our escort excitedly surround him, scrambling for photos. Once in his reception room, with its garish red velvet furniture and an excerpt from the Koran engraved on a goat-skin, it is clear Al-Jaberi is playing games
Re: [Marxism] Al-Sadr: No to Maliki, No to US/UK, No to Syria/Iran, yes to working with Sunni!
== Rule #1: YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. == A correction which may have substantive implications: I received earlier today the email which Michael forwarded here on a UFPJ list, sent by Mark Jensen, and with the Comment signed by Mark. If you click on the link at the end of Michael's forward it takes you to the list of Mark's group and shows the email to have been written by Henry Adams. Either way, the point is that Michael did not write the Comment, which is a glowing tribute to Moqtada al-Sadr. Which wouldn't surprise me coming from Mark, a dyed in the wool fanatical supporter of Assad. It's good to know that Michael didn't write it, because my impression is that al-Sadr has always been more talk than action, and, while I very, very much hope that al-Sadr is as interested in nonsectarian unity as the Commenter believes, I'm not counting on it given al-Sadr's social and ideological position. On Sun, Jun 29, 2014 at 7:59 PM, Michael Karadjis via Marxism marxism@lists.csbs.utah.edu wrote: == Rule #1: YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. == Daily Mail interviews Moqtada's commander in Baghdad Sunday, 29 June 2014 06:58 Henry Adams On Saturday Barbara Jones published in the London Daily Mail an account of her interview with Ibrahim al-Jaberi, the Mahdi Army's militia commander in Baghdad.[1] -- COMMENT: Moqtada al-Sadr, the leader of the Mahdi Army, is a hero to millions of Iraqi Shiites and the only leader who has a chance of uniting Iraqis to fight off the fanatical ISIS. -- He represents genuine Iraqi nationalism and is the only major Shiite leader has fought to defend Sunnis and thus has a claim to their allegiance. -- But the forces he fought to defend them were American and British, and he represents the poorer strata of Iraqi society, to which U.S. policy is indifferent when it is not hostile. -- As a result, Moqtada and his Mahdi Army get only negative press in the West when they get any press at all. -- The failure of the U.S. to come to terms with Moqtada is a clear sign that maintaining the unity and territorial integrity of Iraq is not the highest American priority 1. MY PERILOUS VOYAGE INTO BAGHDAD'S DRAGON DEN By Barbara Jones ** A dramatic dispatch on a saber-rattling encounter with rebel chief ** Daily Mail (London) June 28, 2014 http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2673472/My- perilous-voyage-Baghdad-dragons-den-BARBARA-JONESS- dramatic-dispatch-sabre-rattling-encounter-rebel-chief.html Shots echo in the street below as my phone rings. It’s just after dawn in a Baghdad under curfew. The head of the Mahdi Army -- the fanatical Shia force and avowed enemies of the West -- has agreed to see me: but on his terms. I must venture into Sadr City, the slum district of the Iraqi capital that defied British and American occupation for a decade. Now the militants have a new enemy -- the Sunni terror group ISIS, who have left a trail of blood across Iraq and are fast closing in on Baghdad itself. That has not dimmed the army’s hatred of the West -- and I will be told in no uncertain terms that foreign intervention will be ‘unacceptable.’ But first I must get to Sadr City, a volatile place with a ‘fight-to-the-death’ spirit, whose streets have seen terrible sectarian bloodshed. It was named after the father of Moqtada al-Sadr, the army’s founder. He was a Grand Ayatollah who stood up to Saddam Hussein and was shot dead by the dictator’s Sunni supporters. I had encountered the Mahdi Army before. In 2005, when I was with a British Army patrol in Basra, we were attacked by their fighters aiming rocket-propelled grenades at us. Yet now I am speaking to them; agreeing to the instructions for this meeting: I am to drive to the Habibi Hospital, call a number, and wait for Al-Sadr’s men. The militant leader knows no compromise, and only last week warned America and her allies to ‘take their hands off Iraq.’ He claims to have re-invented his fighting force as a ‘peace brigade’ to defend Baghdad. Driving through empty early-morning streets, the dashboard shows a temperature of 41 C. (106 F.), another day of suffocating heat. Inside our car, flak jackets are flattened against the doors, protection against roadside bombs that kill four people a day here. This is a city in a state of siege, nervously awaiting, fearing, an attack by the Sunni forces or a return of the Americans. Checkpoints, car searches and blast walls are all a way of life. We arrive at the hospital, a sad run-down structure surrounded by rolls of barbed wire. Seven Mahdi Army men soon pull up, all in black
Re: [Marxism] Al-Sadr: No to Maliki, No to US/UK, No to Syria/Iran, yes to working with Sunni!
== Rule #1: YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. == You wouldn't want to count on it, and as I wrote in my ISIS article, while al-Sadr began with anti-sectarian solidarity with the Sunni back in 2004, his army later got into the sectarian action. This time round he has been fiercely critical of Maliki on precisely the Sunni issue over the last year or so, but with the threat of ISIS appeared to go back to Shiite mode. His social an ideological position, as Andy puts it, means we expect this kind of wavering. What his better moments probably do represent, however, is that his working class base in Sadr City are not entirely happy with a corrupt and repressive Shiite regime of their own bourgeoisie plunging them into a crisis for them to die for. MK -Original Message- From: Andrew Pollack via Marxism Sent: Monday, June 30, 2014 10:13 AM To: Michael Karadjis Subject: Re: [Marxism] Al-Sadr: No to Maliki, No to US/UK, No to Syria/Iran, yes to working with Sunni! == Rule #1: YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. == A correction which may have substantive implications: I received earlier today the email which Michael forwarded here on a UFPJ list, sent by Mark Jensen, and with the Comment signed by Mark. If you click on the link at the end of Michael's forward it takes you to the list of Mark's group and shows the email to have been written by Henry Adams. Either way, the point is that Michael did not write the Comment, which is a glowing tribute to Moqtada al-Sadr. Which wouldn't surprise me coming from Mark, a dyed in the wool fanatical supporter of Assad. It's good to know that Michael didn't write it, because my impression is that al-Sadr has always been more talk than action, and, while I very, very much hope that al-Sadr is as interested in nonsectarian unity as the Commenter believes, I'm not counting on it given al-Sadr's social and ideological position. On Sun, Jun 29, 2014 at 7:59 PM, Michael Karadjis via Marxism marxism@lists.csbs.utah.edu wrote: == Rule #1: YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. == Daily Mail interviews Moqtada's commander in Baghdad Sunday, 29 June 2014 06:58 Henry Adams On Saturday Barbara Jones published in the London Daily Mail an account of her interview with Ibrahim al-Jaberi, the Mahdi Army's militia commander in Baghdad.[1] -- COMMENT: Moqtada al-Sadr, the leader of the Mahdi Army, is a hero to millions of Iraqi Shiites and the only leader who has a chance of uniting Iraqis to fight off the fanatical ISIS. -- He represents genuine Iraqi nationalism and is the only major Shiite leader has fought to defend Sunnis and thus has a claim to their allegiance. -- But the forces he fought to defend them were American and British, and he represents the poorer strata of Iraqi society, to which U.S. policy is indifferent when it is not hostile. -- As a result, Moqtada and his Mahdi Army get only negative press in the West when they get any press at all. -- The failure of the U.S. to come to terms with Moqtada is a clear sign that maintaining the unity and territorial integrity of Iraq is not the highest American priority 1. MY PERILOUS VOYAGE INTO BAGHDAD'S DRAGON DEN By Barbara Jones ** A dramatic dispatch on a saber-rattling encounter with rebel chief ** Daily Mail (London) June 28, 2014 http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2673472/My- perilous-voyage-Baghdad-dragons-den-BARBARA-JONESS- dramatic-dispatch-sabre-rattling-encounter-rebel-chief.html Shots echo in the street below as my phone rings. It’s just after dawn in a Baghdad under curfew. The head of the Mahdi Army -- the fanatical Shia force and avowed enemies of the West -- has agreed to see me: but on his terms. I must venture into Sadr City, the slum district of the Iraqi capital that defied British and American occupation for a decade. Now the militants have a new enemy -- the Sunni terror group ISIS, who have left a trail of blood across Iraq and are fast closing in on Baghdad itself. That has not dimmed the army’s hatred of the West -- and I will be told in no uncertain terms that foreign intervention will be ‘unacceptable.’ But first I must get to Sadr City, a volatile place with a ‘fight-to-the-death’ spirit, whose streets have seen terrible sectarian bloodshed. It was named after the father of Moqtada al-Sadr, the army’s founder. He was a Grand Ayatollah who stood up to Saddam Hussein and was shot dead by the dictator’s Sunni supporters. I had
[Marxism] Burma: 'Democracy means more than elections every five years' say 88 Generation leaders
== Rule #1: YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. == One cannot but feel privileged and awed to meet three of Burma's “88 Generation” student uprising leaders: Min Ko Naing who has spent most of the years since 1988 uprising jailed by the Burmese military dictatorship for his opposition activities; Ko Jimmy, who spent 20 years as a political prisoner and who was recently thrown back into what he wryly describes as “our second home” for protesting against fuel price hikes; and Ko Ko Gyi who spent 17 years in prison for opposing the military regime. https://www.greenleft.org.au/node/56766 -- “Disobedience, in the eyes of anyone who has read history, is humanity’s original virtue. It is through disobedience that progress has been made, through disobedience and through rebellion.” — Oscar Wilde, Soul of Man Under Socialism “The free market is perfectly natural... do you think I am some kind of dummy?” — Jarvis Cocker Send list submissions to: Marxism@lists.csbs.utah.edu Set your options at: http://lists.csbs.utah.edu/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
