Re: [Marxism] Separatist video from Antratsyt
== Rule #1: YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. == And, to add more surrealism to the event, this takes place at the central square before a statue of Lenin, if I'm not mistaken. Send list submissions to: Marxism@lists.csbs.utah.edu Set your options at: http://lists.csbs.utah.edu/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
Re: [Marxism] Separatist video from Antratsyt
== Rule #1: YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. == The modern cossack revivalist groups are actually ultra-Orthodox and nationalistic conservative paramilitaries. Think of US militias as an equivalent. 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] How Not To Understand ISIS -- Alireza Doostdar
== Rule #1: YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. == https://divinity.uchicago.edu/sightings/how-not-understand-isis-alireza-doostdar October 2, 2014 The group known as the Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant or simply the Islamic State (ISIL, ISIS, or IS) has attracted much attention in the past few months with its dramatic military gains in Syria and Iraq and with the recent U.S. decision to wage war against it. As analysts are called to explain ISIS’ ambitions, its appeal, and its brutality, they often turn to an examination of what they consider to be its religious worldview—a combination of cosmological doctrines, eschatological beliefs, and civilizational notions—usually thought to be rooted in Salafi Islam. The Salafi tradition is a modern reformist movement critical of what it considers to be misguided accretions to Islam—such as grave visitations, saint veneration, and dreaming practices. It calls for abolishing these and returning to the ways of the original followers of Prophet Muhammad, the “salaf” or predecessors. Critics of Salafism accuse its followers of “literalism,” “puritanism,” or of practicing a “harsh” or “rigid” form of Islam, but none of these terms is particularly accurate, especially given the diverse range of Salafi views and the different ways in which people adhere to them [1]. Salafism entered American consciousness after September 11, 2001, as Al-Qaeda leaders claim to follow this school. Ever since, it has become commonplace to demonize Salafism as the primary cause of Muslim violence, even though most Salafi Muslims show no enthusiasm for jihad and often eschew political involvement [2], and even though many Muslims who do engage in armed struggles are not Salafi. ISIS is only the most recent group whose behavior is explained in terms of Salafism. What makes it unique is its aspiration to form immediately a caliphate or pan-Islamic state. Even so, analysts’ emphasis on Salafi thought and on the formation of a caliphate makes it easy to ignore some important aspects of the ISIS phenomenon. I would like to draw attention to some of these neglected issues and to offer a few cautions about attempts to understand ISIS purely in terms of doctrines. My argument is not that studying doctrines is useless; only that such study is limited in what it can explain. I should begin by emphasizing that our knowledge of ISIS is extremely scant. We know close to nothing about ISIS’ social base. We know little about how it made its military gains, and even less about the nature of the coalitions into which it has entered with various groups—from other Islamist rebels in Syria to secular Ba‘athists in Iraq. Sensationalist accounts of “shari‘a justice” notwithstanding, we do not have much information about how ISIS administers the lives of millions of people who reside in the territories it now controls. Information about the militants who fight for ISIS is likewise scarce. Most of what we know is gleaned from recruitment videos and propaganda, not the most reliable sources. There is little on the backgrounds and motives of those who choose to join the group, least of all the non-Western recruits who form the bulk of ISIS’ fighting force. In the absence of this information, it is difficult to even say what ISIS is if we are to rely on anything beyond the group’s self-representations. Let me emphasize this last point. What we call ISIS is more than just a militant cult. At present, ISIS controls a network of large population centers with millions of residents, in addition to oil resources, military bases, and roads [3]. It has to administer the affairs of the populations over whom it rules, and this has required compromise and coalition-building, not just brute force. In Iraq, the group has had to work with secular Ba‘athists, former army officers, tribal councils, and various Sunni opposition groups, many of whose members are in administrative positions [4]. In Syria, it has likewise had to negotiate with other rebel factions as well as tribes, and relies on local (non-ISIS) technical expertise to manage services such as water, electricity, public health, and bakeries [5]. The vast majority of ISIS’ estimated 20,000-31,500 fighters are recent recruits and it is not clear whether and how its leadership maintains ideological consistency among them. All told, our sense of ISIS’ coherence as a caliphate with a clear chain of command, a solid organizational structure, and an all-encompassing ideology is a direct product of ISIS’ propaganda apparatus. We see ISIS as a unitary entity because ISIS propagandists want us to see it that way. This is why it is problematic to rely on doctrines espoused in propaganda to explain ISIS’ behavior. Absent more evidence, we simply cannot know if the behaviors of the different parts of ISIS
[Marxism] U.S. nurses say they are unprepared to handle Ebola patients
== Rule #1: YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. == http://www.reuters.com/article/2014/10/03/us-health-ebola-nurses-idUSKCN0HS18C20141003 If an Ebola patient becomes sick while being transported, How do you clean the elevator? Nurses at hospitals across the country are asking similar questions. A survey by National Nurses United of some 400 nurses in more than 200 hospitals in 25 states found that more than half (60 percent) said their hospital is not prepared to handle patients with Ebola, and more than 80 percent said their hospital has not communicated to them any policy regarding potential admission of patients infected by Ebola. Another 30 percent said their hospital has insufficient supplies of eye protection and fluid-resistant gowns. If there are protocols in place, the nurses are not hearing them and the nurses are the ones who are exposed, said RoseAnn DeMoro, executive director of National Nurses United, which serves as both a union and a professional association for U.S. nurses. Unlike influenza or the common cold, which can be spread by coughing and sneezing, Ebola is only spread by contact with bodily fluids from someone who is actively sick. That means the risk to the average person is low, but for healthcare workers, the risk is much higher. As of Aug. 25, more than 240 healthcare workers have developed the disease in Guinea, Liberia, Nigeria, and Sierra Leone, and more than 120 have died, according to the World Health Organization. Many of these infections occurred when healthcare workers were removing the personal protective gear - masks, gowns, gloves or full hazmat suits used to care for the patients, said biosafety experts. Sean Kaufman, president of Behavioral-Based Improvement Solutions, an Atlanta-based biosafety firm, helped coach nurses at Emory University through the process of putting on and taking off personal protective equipment (PPE) while they were caring for two U.S. aid workers flown to Atlanta after becoming infected with Ebola in West Africa. Kaufman became known as Papa Smurf to the Emory nurses because of the blue hazmat suits he and others wore that resembled the cartoon character. Our healthcare workforce goes through so many pairs of gloves that they really don't focus on how they remove gloves. The putting on and the taking off doesn't occur with enough attention to protect themselves, he said. Nurses say hospitals have not thought through the logistics of caring for Ebola patients. -clip- 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] India: Eyewitness account, images of Kolkata’s huge movement for gender justice | Links International Journal of Socialist Renewal
== Rule #1: YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. == Story by *Kasturi*, photos by *Ronny Sen** * September 24, 2014 -- One of the slogans churned out of the womb of turbulent Paris in the May days of 1968 was Don’t trust anyone over 30. The student uprising of May ‘68 with its audacity and exaggeration might have failed. But the /mahamichhil/ (grand rally) called by students which took command over the heart and pulse of Kolkata on September 20 was a literal, vivid, living embodiment of this slogan. As I stood with a video camera on a spot on the Jawaharlal Nehru Road, with hope to capture the moments and more than 50,000 faces that made history with each footstep, all I could see was an ocean of people most of who had perhaps not even reached their 25th year, and many of who were walking their very first rally. Those slightly older, those weathered yet young at heart paced alongside them in solidarity. Such a student gathering – so huge, determined and disciplined – I have not seen in my life, wrote poet Sankha Ghosh, This really moved me. It’s very early to say if this will mark the beginning of a new era but I will reiterate this is one of the biggest student rallies I have seen in my life. Full articles and orginal photos at http://links.org.au/node/4086 Send list submissions to: Marxism@lists.csbs.utah.edu Set your options at: http://lists.csbs.utah.edu/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
Re: [Marxism] Request
== Rule #1: YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. == On 10/4/14 3:12 AM, RKOB via Marxism wrote: Hi, does someone have this article and could send it to me? Paul /Kellogg/: /Substitutionism versus Self-emancipation/: The Theory of the Offensive, the Russo-Polish War of 1920 and the German March Action of 1921 Thanks in advance! It can be downloaded from https://www.academia.edu/3449186/Substitutionism_versus_Self-emancipation_The_Theory_of_the_Offensive_the_Russo-Polish_War_of_1920_and_the_German_March_Action_of_1921 The link wasn't working the other day but it is okay now. 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: British hostage Alan Henning aimed to help Syrians
== Rule #1: YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. == The fucking ISIS is 10 times worse than the Khmer Rouge. They just beheaded a British cab driver named Alan Henning who had joined a caravan delivering medicine and other badly needed supplies to Syrians organized by a Muslim charity. http://bigstory.ap.org/article/c5e4b7cd3b6f402fbf0e96afdf54d8a1/british-hostage-alan-henning-aimed-help-syrians 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: 'I am not a spy. I am a philosopher.' - The Chronicle Review - The Chronicle of Higher Education
== Rule #1: YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. == Why do you have so many Jewish friends, Mr. Jahanbegloo? my interrogator asked. What do you mean? I’ve had many colleagues and acquaintances throughout my years in academe and outside it, and some of them happen to be Jewish. Yes, but too many of them are Jewish, he said. I have no idea what you mean. I don’t see what their religion or ethnicity has to do with it. As I’ve tried to tell you, we are all scholars. Our job is to educate. I knew what he was going to say next. Merely to educate? No, I don’t believe that’s it at all. You claim that you want to educate, but educate whom and for what? Look at this list of your past associates—Isaiah Berlin, George Steiner, Noam Chomsky, and all these others. You think we don’t know who these people are and what they do? They are all dangerous thinkers, and they all have an agenda. If you actually read the writings of those men, you’d know how wrong you are, I said, immediately regretting it. Oh, so you think you have all the knowledge here? You have all the right interpretations and we know nothing? Watch how you speak to me. If you start to get aggressive with us, believe me, it won’t turn out well for you. We have many other methods to employ. A dead silence. They hadn’t tortured me physically, but there was nothing to stop them. All I was trying to say is that there are different ways of understanding the writings of certain thinkers, and you have chosen to see them in one particular way. If you look at them another way, they may not seem as harmful as you think. Who are you to decide what is harmful or not? Have you not written papers in support of the Zionists? Of course not, I replied. What do you mean? Look at this article here, for example, about your visit to Auschwitz. Do you not realize that in writing this article you have criticized the president’s views and given the Zionists credibility? Ahmadinejad was and is a Holocaust denier. The paper I had written spelled out the fact that millions of Jews had been killed by the Nazis, and that the death camp at Auschwitz was a center of inhumanity and cruelty. But I never refer in any place to the president and his views. I wrote about a place that I visited and saw with my own eyes, and I wrote about my reaction to it. Yes, and in so doing you give ammunition to the Zionists to legitimize their claims and strengthen their grip over those they oppress. Have you ever been to Israel, Mr. Jahanbegloo? he asked, his tone implying that he already knew the answer. I ... when I was a child, yes. I couldn’t have been more than five or six years old. I remember only the huge grapefruits on the trees. Well, you’re not a child anymore, so don’t play games with me. Even if you haven’t been back since, you’ve been in contact with Israelis. You’ve supported their regime all your life. That’s not true at all. I also had many Palestinian friends when I was in France. I knew Edward Said. I even organized a conference at the University of Tehran in his honor after his death. Not all Palestinians are true revolutionaries! The ones with whom you’ve been in contact are complicit in the Zionists’ wrongdoing because they don’t confront it with full force. They may as well be on their side. They are different kinds of revolutionaries— I started to say. Enough! No more of these quick answers. You still have not explained why you’ve written these articles about the Holocaust, why you side with the Zionists in all matters, why you insist on seeing them as the victims. He was right. I hadn’t given him an adequate account, for I knew he would not understand. How could I explain that my main concern was with inhumanity, how pervasive it is and how preventable, when he was already caught in its vise? full: http://chronicle.com/article/I-am-not-a-spy-I-am-a/149089/ 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: SYRIZA rising: what’s next for the movements in Greece? | ROAR Magazine
== Rule #1: YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. == Autonomist blather about the danger posed by SYRIZA and the need for true liberated communistic transformation of the wage labor commodity relationship through Reconceptualizing community, breaking out of social isolation, creating horizontal and participatory structures based on equality, solidarity and mutual recognition, and building networks among these structures are social acts that today constitute revolutionary praxis. In their own way, these idiots are the counterparts of all the diatribes against SYRIZA in the British SWP press. full: http://roarmag.org/2014/09/syriza-government-autonomous-movements/ 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] Hong Kong protests inconvenient to Obama
== Rule #1: YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. == If you read the Global Research/Moon of Alabama/Voltairenet far reaches of the conspiracist left, you'd walk away convinced that there was a plot cooked up by the NED to take over Hong Kong as the first step in gobbling down China as a whole. Basically the same formula applied to Syria and Ukraine--utterly devoid of a class analysis. This NY Times article should make clear that the White House has zero interest in democracy in Hong Kong or anywhere else for that matter. It has perfectly good relations with Beijing and would have been more than happy with Assad, who Hillary Clinton dubbed a reformer, until it became obvious that the Syrians saw it otherwise. NY Times, Oct. 4 2014 An Inconvenient Protest for Both China and the U.S. By MARK LANDLER WASHINGTON — President Obama is scheduled to visit China next month, and with tens of thousands of pro-democracy protesters on the streets of Hong Kong, human rights could force itself onto the agenda between the United States and the Chinese in a way not seen in many years. A major caveat, of course, is that the fervent crowds in Hong Kong could be long gone by Nov. 10, when Mr. Obama and 20 Pacific Rim leaders gather in Beijing for the annual Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation meeting. That would certainly be a relief to the Chinese host, President Xi Jinping, and perhaps to Mr. Obama, too. Human rights have not been a major topic of discussion between the two countries since the aftermath of China’s bloody crackdown in Tiananmen Square 25 years ago. With Washington eager to work with Beijing on a list of priorities — from climate change to curbing Iran’s nuclear program — officials in both countries are eager to keep it that way. “We have principles and values that we want to promote, but we’re not looking to inject the United States into the middle of this,” said a senior administration official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss internal deliberations. The White House is not reconsidering Mr. Obama’s visit, the official said, though it has been calibrating how best to signal its concern for the umbrella-wielding protesters in Hong Kong, especially after the police began roughing up the crowd on Sunday. The United States knows that it has little leverage over China in the dispute over a proposed voting law in Hong Kong, which the Chinese government regards as a strictly internal matter. Chinese officials, including the foreign minister who visited Washington this week, have told their American counterparts, politely, to mind their own business. The tensions in the American position are evident in how it responded to the clashes on Sunday, when the police used tear gas and pepper spray on the protesters. The American consulate in Hong Kong issued a statement urging both sides to show restraint and making no reference to the desire of the crowds for more democracy. “We do not take sides in the discussion of Hong Kong’s political development,” the statement said, “nor do we support any particular individuals or groups involved in it.” Worried that the United States looked as if it were bending over backward to avoid offense, the White House sent out the press secretary, Josh Earnest, to urge the Hong Kong authorities to show restraint and declare that the United States supported “a genuine choice of candidates that are representative of the people’s and the voters’ will.” Asked whether the White House would like to see Hong Kong’s democratic aspirations transplanted to the Chinese mainland, Mr. Earnest said, “the short answer to that is yes.” That response is sure to enrage Chinese officials, who view the Hong Kong protests as deeply threatening because they fear they could spread to other parts of the country. Some Chinese officials blame the United States for the unrest, saying it is whipping up the students. That may have influenced the consulate’s initial fence-sitting. “The consulate statement was maladroit and unbalanced,” said Jeffrey A. Bader, Mr. Obama’s senior director on China until 2011. “They had an understandable impulse, however, to say something that dismissed Chinese concerns that they are the black hand behind the protests.” Human-rights activists expressed general satisfaction with the White House’s response, particularly, said Sophie Richardson, the China director of Human Rights Watch, because it linked the lack of democracy in Hong Kong with the lack of democracy in China. But other experts said the White House should have spoken out sooner, after China’s Parliament proposed the new voting law, which would require candidates for Hong Kong chief executive to be cleared by a nominating committee — effectively ruling out anyone the
Re: [Marxism] Fwd: British hostage Alan Henning aimed to help Syrians
== Rule #1: YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. == At 08:28 04-10-14 -0400, Louis Proyect via Marxism wrote: The fucking ISIS is 10 times worse than the Khmer Rouge. They just beheaded a British cab driver named Alan Henning who had joined a caravan delivering medicine No shit! Not just him, but I believe every high-profile beheading video released by ISIS or their forerunners (which mainstream al-Q'aida, to their credit, never endorsed) has been of a totally innocent civilian involved in reporting from or providing aid in areas of suffering. Absolutely no attempt to punish the guilty (even if beheading were an acceptable punishment for war criminals), but designed to shock and polarize -- successfully! -- amounting to nothing less than terrorism, a term I very much avoid using. Now, I understand all the reasons to oppose or question the motivations of the U.S. bombing campaign. But when I hear something like Obama never even tried to negotiate with ISIS and see what their legitimate grievances are, I just shake my head in dismay. Seldom would I defend Obama et. al. against unfair criticism but that would have to be one. If anyone were to have given Obama a credible excuse to exercise military power, ISIS has succeeded. In the case of the second American recently beheaded, Steven Sotloff, even I had thought that ISIS would show some moderation after the conciliatory, almost grovelling message by his mother, pointing out her son's pursuit in reporting on the suffering of Muslims: her pleas were totally ignored. I'm sure that one could find similar documentation for each of these beheading victims, but here is the last recorded interview of James Foley, beheaded by ISIS in August after having been captured (by whom isn't clear) in 2012. A previous post on this list indirectly pointed to this 4 minute video which is especially worth watching by anyone who might be imagining that there could have been a reasonable justification for his capture, let alone beheading. https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embeddedv=KOckTZHiK20 And if all that isn't enough, you might have noticed a few links (depending on YouTube's random choices) to related videos denouncing the beheading video as a fake! For the conspiratorial left/right, being anti-war means defying reason to whatever extent necessary. Note that they don't try to defend ISIS which they also claim was created by the US (etc. etc.) but rather assert that the whole scenario has been staged-managed (just like the collapse of the World Trade Center!). If you search you can find dozens (actually it says about 11,400 results) conspiracist claims which conveniently deny ISIS's crime: https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=James+Foley+fake - Jeff http://bigstory.ap.org/article/c5e4b7cd3b6f402fbf0e96afdf54d8a1/british-hostage-alan-henning-aimed-help-syrians 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: The Most Ambitious Environmental Lawsuit Ever - NYTimes.com
== Rule #1: YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. == In Louisiana, the most common way to visualize the state’s existential crisis is through the metaphor of football fields. The formulation, repeated in nearly every local newspaper article about the subject, goes like this: Each hour, Louisiana loses about a football field’s worth of land. Each day, the state loses nearly the accumulated acreage of every football stadium in the N.F.L. Were this rate of land loss applied to New York, Central Park would disappear in a month. Manhattan would vanish within a year and a half. The last of Brooklyn would dissolve four years later. New Yorkers would notice this kind of land loss. The world would notice this kind of land loss. But the hemorrhaging of Louisiana’s coastal wetlands has gone largely unremarked upon beyond state borders. This is surprising, because the wetlands, apart from their unique ecological significance and astounding beauty, buffer the impact of hurricanes that threaten not just New Orleans but also the port of South Louisiana, the nation’s largest; just under 10 percent of the country’s oil reserves; a quarter of its natural-gas supply; a fifth of its oil-refining capacity; and the gateway to its internal waterway system. The attenuation of Louisiana, like any environmental disaster carried beyond a certain point, is a national-security threat. Where does it go, this vanishing land? It sinks into the sea. The Gulf of Mexico is encroaching northward, while the marshes are deteriorating from within, starved by a lack of river sediment and poisoned by seawater. Since 2011, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration has delisted more than 30 place names from Plaquemines Parish alone. English Bay, Bay Jacquin, Cyprien Bay, Skipjack Bay and Bay Crapaud have merged like soap bubbles into a single amorphous body of water. The lowest section of the Mississippi River Delta looks like a maple leaf that has been devoured down to its veins by insects. The sea is rising along the southeast coast of Louisiana faster than it is anywhere else in the world. The land loss is swiftly reversing the process by which the state was built. As the Mississippi shifted its course over the millenniums, spraying like a loose garden hose, it deposited sand and silt in a wide arc. This sediment first settled into marsh and later thickened into solid land. But what took 7,000 years to create has been nearly destroyed in the last 85. Dams built on the tributaries of the Mississippi, as far north as Montana, have reduced the sediment load by half. Levees penned the river in place, preventing the floods that are necessary to disperse sediment across the delta. The dredging of two major shipping routes, the Mississippi River Gulf Outlet and the Gulf Intracoastal Waterway, invited saltwater into the wetlands’ atrophied heart. full: http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2014/10/02/magazine/mag-oil-lawsuit.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
Re: [Marxism] Fwd: British hostage Alan Henning aimed to help Syrians
== Rule #1: YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. == The fucking ISIS is 10 times worse than the Khmer Rouge. That's rather an absurd statement. The Khmer Rouge were much more thorough, systematic and killed far more people during their reign. They just beheaded a British cab driver named Alan Henning who had joined a caravan delivering medicine and other badly needed supplies to Syrians organized by a Muslim charity. There's no excuse for murdering such a person. But put in context, the few westerners beheaded by ISIS pales in comparison to the number of people beheaded by the US-backed Saudi Arabian dictatorship in the past month, or the number of innocent people blown to pieces by US airstrikes and drone strikes. Sadly, western missionaries -- and the NGO types of today are direct equivalents to the religious missionaries of the 18th or 19th centuries -- have always been easy targets for those seeking to strike out at imperial powers. -- There is a story, which is fairly well known, about when the missionaries came to Africa. They had the Bible and we, the natives, had the land. They said 'Let us pray,' and we dutifully shut our eyes. When we opened them, why, they now had the land and we had the Bible. -- Bishop Desmond Tutu. 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: The Most Ambitious Environmental Lawsuit Ever - NYTimes.com
== Rule #1: YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. == This article about the environmental disaster occurring in Louisiana says that if this were happening in NYC, people would notice it. But this catastrophe has gone unremarked outside of the state. I have found that New Yorkers, including leftists, don't for the most part give a shit about the rest of the country. It is as if we don't exist. One joker asked if I realized that there were more people in Brooklyn than in many states, implying that Brooklyn was the real America, as opposed to the places in the sparsely populated regions of the country where we were living. As if the demise of deserts and canyons and wetlands don't matter in the real America. Well, if Brooklyn, at least as far as its creative classis concerned, is the real America, we are all fucked. 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] The Dardennes
== Rule #1: YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. == A very good article on the filmmaking brothers whose new film I reviewed for CounterPunch last week: http://www.counterpunch.org/2014/09/26/the-existential-crisis-of-work/ NY Times, Oct. 4 2014 Specializing in Ordinary Ordeals The Dardennes Explore Their Theme in ‘Two Days, One Night’ By A. O. SCOTT Telluride, Colo. — Wage stagnation, income inequality, the living wage, the decline of the middle class: These issues may be pushed out of the headlines by more dramatic crises, but they continue to preoccupy political discourse, especially in the United States and Europe. At the movies, economic injustice is occasionally grist for allegory — as in Bong Joon-Ho’s “Snowpiercer,” the action-movie sleeper of the summer — and more frequently an axiom of realism. And for the past 15 years or so, cinematic realism has been virtually synonymous with the name Dardenne, as in Jean-Pierre and Luc, Belgian brothers, now 63 and 60, who have twice won the Palme d’Or in Cannes. “Two Days, One Night,” their latest film, finds global significance in a slender, almost anecdotal story about a worker’s ordeal. The same might be said of any of the brothers’ other major fictional features, which cast a naturalistic eye on the daily lives of poor and somewhat less poor residents of Belgium’s French-speaking industrial heartland. The Dardennes are faithful chroniclers of a European working class in crisis, and their austere methods have influenced filmmakers from Argentina to Kazakhstan — wherever problems of labor, subsistence and economic survival seem especially acute. Which is just about everywhere, nowadays. Since the appearance of “La Promesse” in 1996, the brothers have been the pre-eminent heirs of a battered and durable neorealist tradition, and they have become known — and in the world of international film festivals, celebrated — for consistency of style and theme. They shoot their films in and around Seraing, where they grew up, and cast local actors, professional and otherwise, along with an occasional French or Belgian movie star. (Marion Cotillard, with worried eyes and weary posture and without a trace of actorly vanity, has the lead in “Two Days.”) There is a typical, often-imitated Dardennes shot: a hand-held camera following behind a character, whose point of view is both emphasized and obscured by the framing. And also a typical Dardennes protagonist: a person in difficult circumstances who is forced to make a costly, morally wrenching choice. In a recent interview here — a stop on the festival itinerary that has taken “Two Days” from Cannes to Toronto to New York, where it screens Sunday in advance of a Christmas commercial release in the United States — Luc Dardenne, on this occasion the more talkative brother, summed up the existential theme of their work. “It may be too simple to put it this way,” he said, “but all of our films recount how a person emerges from his or her solitude, and unites with another, or several others. ‘The Son,’ ‘Rosetta,’ ‘La Promesse’: One way or another, we show how someone encounters somebody else, and how this encounter is transformative, how it resolves the isolation that had kept the main character outside of society, outside the community.” The accuracy of this assessment is plain enough. Even when the plots take a grim turn, toward unemployment, prison or violence, they never let go of the possibility of human connection, of the recognition that affirms an individual’s membership in some larger collective identity: a couple, a family, a team, a class, the human species. Though Luc described this idea in abstract, almost philosophical terms, it has a clear ethical and even political dimension. In “La Promesse,” a boy is torn between loyalty to his father, who runs a construction company that employs mainly undocumented immigrants, and the knowledge that their working conditions are dangerous and illegal. The sense of responsibility that weighs so heavily on him, and that forces him to choose between two forms of betrayal, arises from a larger injustice. In “The Son” (2003), perhaps the most intimate of the Dardennes’ movies, a carpentry teacher finds himself serving as mentor to the young man responsible for the death of his son, and confounded by warring impulses of revenge and forgiveness. But matters of class and labor hover over that tale as well. The grieving father (played by Olivier Gourmet, a polestar of the Dardenne universe) is grounded in the dignity of work and the discipline of craft. The nihilism he sees in the sullen teenage killer is a symptom of the loss of such values, a loss that haunts nearly every frame the Dardennes have shot. It afflicts the reckless protagonist of
[Marxism] The Specter Facing Ukraine
== Rule #1: YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. == NY Review, OCTOBER 23, 2014 ISSUE The Specter Facing Ukraine Tim Judah When I returned to Ukraine at the end of August I went to see a senior diplomat in Kiev. He told me that things had changed so fast since I had been there in the spring that Ukraine was already “a different country” from the one it had been then. The main thing was that Ukrainian forces were on the offensive and winning back territory. They had had “considerable success” in retaking the rebel stronghold of Sloviansk on July 5; but now, stuck at the gates of rebel-held Donetsk and not wanting to turn it into “a Stalingrad,” the government, he said, “was realizing the limits of its current strategy.” Neither of us knew just how right he was. When I left his office I called a Ukrainian army contact who wanted a journalist reporting for an American publication to come and see what his men were doing in the east. The next day he sent me a terse text message. It said: “Security situation is critical now. I cannot host you this week. Sorry.” It was August 27 and the time was exactly 1:00 PM. I rang him up to try to persuade him to change his mind. Sounding stressed, he said he could not talk just then. A few weeks later everything became clear. He was in Ilovaysk in eastern Ukraine. On August 26 things had looked fine. The next day Ukrainian forces were surrounded and routed. He just managed to escape with his life but many did not. This defeat, here and elsewhere, meant that Ukraine had again turned into a different country. On September 5, President Petro Poroshenko authorized the signing of a cease-fire agreement in Minsk with rebel forces, which in reality meant with Vladimir Putin, Russia’s president. Yuriy Lutsenko, Poroshenko’s adviser, explained how it had come to this: “I saw refrigerated lorries with fragments of bodies.” They were the remains of Ukrainian government soldiers coming from the east. Since then the cease-fire has proved perplexing. In most parts of the east the guns fell silent, but in Donetsk, fighting continued for the airport. The Ukrainians were inside it firing out, and rebel forces were outside firing in. Every few days the Russian media reported that the airport had fallen, but at least by mid-September it had not. Civilians who lived in the district nearby continued to die, but much of the rest of Donetsk, from which perhaps half the population of almost a million had fled, was not just quiet but returning to life. People were coming home to the city, which is the “capital” of the self-proclaimed Donetsk People’s Republic, or DNR to use its Russian acronym, which in turn has declared itself part of the breakaway state of Novorossiya. After a couple of weeks in the east I left Donetsk and drove to the town of Konstantinovka, which had been taken by the rebels in the spring but is now back in Ukrainian hands. At the last rebel checkpoint on the way out of Donetsk there was a traffic jam of almost two miles of cars and trucks lining up to get into the city. Earlier, I talked with some of the people who were returning. Some of them had run out of money, and now that shells and rockets were not falling in most of the city they had decided to take their chances and come home. The reason I was going to Konstantinovka, which in normal times is one hour’s drive north of Donestk, was that you can get a train from there to Kiev. Because of war damage, it can no longer get to Donetsk. Ukrainian flags have replaced DNR flags in the town and billboards proclaim: “Konstantinovka Is Ukraine.” The small station entrance was packed—not, I realized, with people trying to buy tickets. They were trying to get money from an ATM that they had heard was working. With so many armed men on the roads, anyone or any bank would think twice about driving around with truckfuls of cash. Taking the train was one those jarring experiences that you sometimes have in war-torn countries. The train was sleek and totally modern and inside it had screens showing films advertising holidays in Croatia and Italy. Twenty-three minutes after leaving, it pulled into Sloviansk. From the window I saw the golden-roofed bell tower of the church where I had attended the funeral service for Aleksandr Lubenets, a twenty-one-year-old rebel who had died on April 24. The day after his death I had met his father, who was still in a state of utter shock. Then I saw him again at the funeral. He squatted down, like a man crushed, as the priests chanted over the open coffin of his son, while journalists jostled to get a better view of it. As Aleksandr was buried there was much shouting of slogans about death and liberty. Now, as the train began to accelerate up to 163 kilometers an
[Marxism] The Tupac Amaru Rebellion
== Rule #1: YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. == NY Review, OCTOBER 23, 2014 ISSUE The Huge, Ignored Uprising in the Andes J.H. Elliott The Tupac Amaru Rebellion by Charles F. Walker Belknap Press/ Harvard University Press, 347 pp., $29.95 Between 1780 and 1782, when the rebellion of the British colonists in North America was reaching its climax, a still more savage drama was being played out in South America. The Andes were in revolt, and Spain, like Britain, was faced with the prospect of losing one of its most prized overseas possessions. Since the overthrow of the Inca empire in the 1530s and the discovery of the silver mountain of Potosí in the high Andes in 1545, the viceroyalty of Peru had generated a substantial part of the wealth that enabled Spain to create and maintain its “empire of the Indies” and its position as a leading European power. Now suddenly in 1780 Spain saw its control of Peru placed in jeopardy by a minor Indian nobleman, José Gabriel Condorcanqui, who laid claim to the royal blood of the Incas as a direct descendant of the last Inca ruler, Tupac Amaru, captured and executed by the Spaniards in 1572. The rebellion of Tupac Amaru II, as Condorcanqui came to style himself, was the largest and most dangerous rebellion faced by the Spanish crown in its American empire before the great upheavals of the early nineteenth century that culminated in its loss. Although there had been innumerable disturbances and uprisings over the course of some two and a half centuries of Spanish imperial rule, these had for the most part been fairly small-scale and localized, and were suppressed with relative ease. This was partly because of the coercive power at the disposal of the imperial authorities once they chose to deploy it, but much of the relative tranquility of the new multi-ethnic societies that emerged in the wake of conquest can be attributed to the system of government that evolved as Spain’s Habsburg rulers imposed elaborate judicial and administrative structures on the conquered territories. Under this system, Spaniards and creoles (their American-born descendants), the indigenous peoples (all subsumed under the name of “Indians”), and a growing population of mestizos, of mixed Indian and European ancestry, with the further addition of African blood as increasing numbers of slaves were imported, were all nominally welded into one organic whole, whether in the viceroyalty of New Spain (Mexico) or in that of Peru. Each was conceived as a Christian commonwealth ruled by a distant but allegedly beneficent monarch and watched over by a ubiquitous church. Within this hierarchically organized society each section of the community theoretically possessed its own allotted space. A native elite of caciques, or kurakas as they were known in Peru, served as intermediaries between the royal authorities and the indigenous population; and every individual or community had the right of appeal up the bureaucratic chain to the king himself. This system left room for maneuver both to the rulers and the ruled. How, then, did it come about that the system failed at the end of the 1770s, and that Spain, ruled by the Bourbons since the turn of the century, found itself confronted by a mass uprising that threatened the loss of vast areas of Peru? This is a question that has exercised generations of historians, and the literature on the rebellion of Tupac Amaru II is enormous. Some of these historians have focused on the charismatic figure of José Gabriel himself, and on the grievances that led him to raise the standard of rebellion. Others, particularly in recent years, have sought to relate him and his cause to the unique characteristics of Andean society and to the changes it was undergoing in the eighteenth century, in part resulting from the administrative and economic reforms introduced by the new Bourbon dynasty. There is certainly no lack of documents on which historians can draw. The judicial inquiries and court cases that followed the capture of the leaders and the collapse of the revolt generated a vast amount of documentation, much of it preserved in the Archive of the Indies in Seville; and between 1980 and 1982 seven volumes of documents on the rebellion were published in Peru to celebrate the second centenary of the uprising. Yet in spite of this mass of material, many puzzles remain, and it is with these puzzles that Charles F. Walker has grappled in the first extended survey of the causes and the course of the Tupac Amaru rebellion to appear in English since 1966.1 Walker, a professor of history at the University of California, Davis, is the author of two previous books on late colonial Peru: one, the more recent, was devoted to the middle years of the
[Marxism] The Burglars Who Exposed the FBI
== Rule #1: YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. == (Some good stuff in the latest NY Review, a magazine that has grown stodgy and centrist over the years. Maybe it's a sign that the times they are a changin'.) NY Review, OCTOBER 23, 2014 ISSUE The Burglars Who Exposed the FBI Aryeh Neier The Burglary: The Discovery of J. Edgar Hoover’s Secret FBI by Betty Medsger Vintage, 596 pp., $16.95 (paper) On the night of March 8, 1971, eight activists in the movement to end American involvement in the war in Vietnam broke into the small office of the Federal Bureau of Investigation in Media, Pennsylvania, a town near Philadelphia, and stole all its files. One of the burglars, William Davidon, who died recently, was a professor of physics at Haverford College and a veteran of many protests against the war. He enlisted the others by persuading them that it was an opportunity to obtain files that he thought would show that the FBI was trying to suppress the anti-war struggle by surveillance and harassment of its participants. This was not a wild guess. It was a period in which there were many hundreds of federal prosecutions of opponents of the war. Some of those charged with crimes and, in many cases, sentenced to prison were young men who declined military service after their draft boards rejected their claims of conscientious objection. Others had publicly burned their draft cards; and some were prominent critics of the war, such as the pediatrician Dr. Benjamin Spock and the Yale University chaplain Reverend William Sloane Coffin Jr., who were among the defendants prosecuted on charges of obstructing the draft in a show trial in Boston in 1968. Others had taken part in more aggressive protests, such as the Berrigan brothers, Catholic priests who conducted raids on draft boards. In one of those raids, they seized files on draft registrants and burned them in a parking lot with homemade napalm. Testimony in those cases by FBI agents made it clear that the bureau was closely monitoring opponents of the war. Also, the FBI was a visible presence at many demonstrations against the war. In a few episodes, FBI surveillance practices that did not involve prosecutions had come to light. In November 1969, for example, a New York City–based organization, the Fifth Avenue Peace Parade Committee, chartered hundreds of buses to take opponents of the war to a large demonstration in Washington, D.C. A clerk in the bank where the committee kept its account revealed that the FBI came to the bank to photograph the checks of those who reserved places on the buses so as to identify participants in the demonstration. One way that protesters were punished in that era was that young men who took part in antiwar demonstrations were reclassified by their draft boards to accelerate their call-up to perform military service. It was also a period in which Americans found out that other agencies of the federal government were engaged in political surveillance. More than a year before the burglary in Media, Pennsylvania, Captain Christopher Pyle revealed that the United States Army had deployed more than a thousand soldiers full-time to conduct domestic political surveillance, focusing on opponents of the war. That disclosure led to hearings by the US Senate Subcommittee on Constitutional Rights, chaired by North Carolina Senator Sam Ervin Jr., and to a lawsuit against the Army sponsored by the American Civil Liberties Union. It was apparent to at least a few Americans like Professor Davidon in 1971 that there was much more to be discovered about their government’s efforts to gather data on dissenters. Betty Medsger, the author of The Burglary: The Discovery of J. Edgar Hoover’s Secret FBI, is a former reporter for The Washington Post who covered the break-in at the FBI office in Media, Pennsylvania, when it took place in 1971. Many years later, she discovered the identity of the burglars. Though the FBI had devoted extensive resources to its investigation of the break-in and made it a matter of high priority over five years, it never succeeded in solving the case. Having previously worked for The Philadelphia Evening Bulletin, and as a specialist in reporting on religion, Medsger had known two of the burglars enlisted by Davidon: John Raines, a freedom rider a decade or so before the burglary, and a professor of comparative religion at Temple University when the burglary took place; and his wife Bonnie Raines, a children’s education specialist. At a casual dinner many years after the burglary, John and Bonnie Raines disclosed their involvement to Medsger, leading her to seek out the other participants and to write The Burglary.1 A factor in making William Davidon think that the burglary would pay off, and
[Marxism] Fwd: Palestinian writers, activists disavow racism, anti-Semitism of Gilad Atzmon | The Electronic Intifada
== Rule #1: YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. == http://electronicintifada.net/blogs/ali-abunimah/palestinian-writers-activists-disavow-racism-anti-semitism-gilad-atzmon 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] racially engineering the pseudo-white Barbie
== Rule #1: YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. == http://www.hamptoninstitution.org/pseudowhitebarbie.html#.VDCzWPldXk1 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] The French Revolution's pre-Marx blogger
== Rule #1: YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. == http://www.hamptoninstitution.org/marat.html#.VDCwD_ldXk0 Send list submissions to: Marxism@lists.csbs.utah.edu Set your options at: http://lists.csbs.utah.edu/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
