tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-91811289321438754412024-03-13T19:08:49.485-07:00UDAY PRAKASHA POET, FICTION WRITER, FILMMAKER AND FREELANCE JOURNALIST.
Most un-beloved by the power centers but most popular amongst people living in margins and edges of 'shining India'.Uday Prakashhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07587503029581457151noreply@blogger.comBlogger68125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9181128932143875441.post-82429148839410718252013-04-27T18:44:00.003-07:002013-04-27T18:45:01.069-07:00<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
<br />
<h1 class="title" id="view_title" style="font-family: 'Lucida Grande', 'Trebuchet MS', Verdana, sans-serif; margin: 20px 0px 0px;">
We Don’t Need Genetically Engineered Bananas For Iron Deficiency</h1>
<hr style="font-family: 'Lucida Grande', 'Trebuchet MS', Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 13px;" />
<div class="content_authors" style="font-family: 'Lucida Grande', 'Trebuchet MS', Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 13px;">
By <a href="http://www.zcommunications.org/zspace/vandanashiva" style="color: #49932c; text-decoration: none;">Vandana Shiva</a></div>
<br style="font-family: 'Lucida Grande', 'Trebuchet MS', Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 13px;" />
<div class="content_date" style="float: right; font-family: 'Lucida Grande', 'Trebuchet MS', Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 13px;">
Saturday, April 27, 2013</div>
<br style="font-family: 'Lucida Grande', 'Trebuchet MS', Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 13px;" />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj-bj_sCQKTQdke0SlwrEuFhnK6nwku51YI59_xUNAR5BBCjFKcC1YD8mEsG-sy8KL8HqJPha_Vjo2YbB2w4G0VBo93UifTfvlz1K6vkqAcyUfWqjXvprpmrQ1-JjMeSsbNijoHlfBKqAqo/s1600/vandana+shiva.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="205" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj-bj_sCQKTQdke0SlwrEuFhnK6nwku51YI59_xUNAR5BBCjFKcC1YD8mEsG-sy8KL8HqJPha_Vjo2YbB2w4G0VBo93UifTfvlz1K6vkqAcyUfWqjXvprpmrQ1-JjMeSsbNijoHlfBKqAqo/s320/vandana+shiva.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>
<div class="content_zspace_links" style="font-family: 'Lucida Grande', 'Trebuchet MS', Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; margin-top: 20px;">
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 10pt; line-height: 19px;">The latest insanity from the genetic engineers is to push GMO bananas on India for reducing iron deficiency in Indian women.</span></div>
<div class="body" id="view_body" style="font-family: 'Lucida Grande', 'Trebuchet MS', Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 12px;">
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 18px;">
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 10pt; line-height: 19px;">Nature has given us a cornucopia of biodiversity, rich in nutrients. Malnutrition and nutrient deficiency results from destroying biodiversity, and with it rich sources of nutrition.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 18px;">
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 10pt; line-height: 19px;">The Green Revolution has spread monocultures of chemical rice and wheat, driving out biodiversity from our farms and diets.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 18px;">
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 10pt; line-height: 19px;">And what survived as spontaneous crops like the amaranth greens and chenopodium (bathua) which are rich in iron were sprayed with poisons and herbicides. Instead of being seen as iron rich and vitamin rich gifts, they were treated as “weeds”. A Monsanto representative once said that Genetically Engineered crops resistant to their propriety herbicide Roundup killed the weeds that “steal the Sunshine”. And their RoundUp Ads in India tell women “Liberate yourself, use Roundup”. This is not a recipe for liberation, but being trapped in malnutrition.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 18px;">
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 10pt; line-height: 19px;">As the “Monoculture of the Mind” took over, biodiversity disappeared from our farms and our food. The destruction of biodiverse rich cultivation and diets has given us the malnutrition crisis, with 75% women now suffering from iron deficiency.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 18px;">
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 10pt; line-height: 19px;">Our indigenous biodiversity offers rich sources of iron. Amaranth has 11.0 mg per 100gm of food, buckwheat has 15.5,neem has 25.3,bajra has 8.0,rice bran 35.0,rice flakes 20.0bengal gram roasted 9.5,Bengal gram leaves 23.8 ,cowpea 8.6,horse gram6.77, amaranth greens have upto 38.5,karonda 39.1,lotus stem 60.6, coconut meal 69.4,niger seeds 56.7,cloves 11.7,cumin seeds 11.7.mace 12.3,mango powder (amchur) 45.2,pippali 62.1,poppy seeds 15.9,tamarind pulp 17.0,turmeric 67.8, raisins 7.7……..<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 18px;">
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 10pt; line-height: 19px;">The knowledge of growing this diversity and transforming it to food is women’s knowledge. That is why in Navdanya we have created the network for food sovereignty in women’s hands - Mahila Anna Swaraj.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 18px;">
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 10pt; line-height: 19px;">The solution to malnutrition lies in <b>growing</b> nutrition, and growing nutrition means growing biodiversity, it means recognizing the knowledge of biodiversity and nutrition among millions of Indian women who have received it over generations as “Grandmothers Knowledge”. For removing iron deficiency, iron rich plants should be grown everywhere, on farms, in kitchen gardens, in community gardens, in school gardens, on roof tops, in balconies….Iron deficiency was not created by Nature. And we can get rid of it by becoming co-creators and co-producers with Nature.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 18px;">
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 10pt; line-height: 19px;">But there is a “creation myth” that is blind to nature’s creativity and biodiversity, and to the creativity, intelligence and knowledge of women. According to this “creation myth” of capitalist patriarchy, rich and powerful men are the “creators”. They can own life through patents and intellectual property. They can tinker with nature’s complex evolution over millennia, and claim their trivial yet destructive acts of gene manipulation “create” life, “create” food, “create” nutrition. In the case of GM bananas it is <b>one</b> rich man, Bill Gates, financing <b>one</b> Australian scientist, Dale, who knows <b>one</b> crop, the banana, to impose inefficient and hazardous GM bananas on millions of people in India and Uganda who have grown hundreds of banana varieties over thousands of years in addition to thousands of other crops.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 18px;">
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 10pt; line-height: 19px;">The project is a waste of money, and a waste of time. It will take 10 years and millions of dollars to complete the research. But meantime, governments, research agencies, scientists will become blind to biodiversity based, low cost, safe, time tested, democratic alternatives in the hands of women.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 18px;">
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 10pt; line-height: 19px;">Bananas only have 0.44mg of iron per 100 grams of edible portion. All the effort to increase iron content of bananas will fall short of the iron content of our indigenous biodiversity.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 18px;">
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 10pt; line-height: 19px;">Not only is the GM banana not the best choice for providing iron in our diet, it will further threaten biodiversity of bananas and iron rich crops, and introduce new ecological risks.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 18px;">
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 10pt; line-height: 19px;">First, the GM banana, if adopted, will be grown as large monocultures, like GM Bt cotton, and the banana plantations in the banana republics of Central America. </span><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 10pt; line-height: 19px;">Since government and Aid agencies will push this false solution, as has happened with every “miracle” in agriculture, our biodiversity of iron rich foods will disappear.</span><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 10pt; line-height: 19px;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 18px;">
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 10pt; line-height: 19px;">The idea of “nutrient farming” of a few nutrients in monocultures of a few crops has already started to be pushed at the policy level. The finance Minister announced an Rs 200 crore project for “nutri farms” in his 2013 budget speech.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 18px;">
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 10pt; line-height: 19px;">Humans need a biodiversity of nutrients including a full range of micronutrients and trace elements. These come from healthy soils and biodiversity.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 18px; margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;">
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 10pt; line-height: 19px;">Second, our native banana varieties will be displaced, and contaminated.</span><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 10pt; line-height: 19px;"> These include Nedunendran, Zanzibar, Chengalikodan, Manjeri Nendran II<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 18px; margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 18px; margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;">
<b><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 10pt; line-height: 19px;">Table varieties</span></b><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 10pt; line-height: 19px; text-align: justify; text-indent: 30pt;">Monsmarie, Robusta, Grand Naine, Dwarf Cavendish, Chenkadali, Poovan, Palayankodan,Njalipoovan, Amritsagar, Grosmichel, Karpooravalli, Poomkalli, Koompillakannan, Chinali, Dudhsagar, Poovan, Red banana</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 18px; margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; text-align: justify; text-indent: 30pt;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 18px; margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;">
<b><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 10pt; line-height: 19px;">Culinary varieties</span></b><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 10pt; line-height: 19px;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 18px; margin: 0in 197pt 0.0001pt 0in;">
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 10pt; line-height: 19px;">Monthan, Batheea Kanchikela Nendrapadathy</span><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 10pt; line-height: 19px;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 18px;">
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 10pt; line-height: 19px;">Njalipoovan, Palayankodan, Robusta.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 18px; margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;">
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 10pt; line-height: 19px;">(KERALA AGRICULTURAL UNIVERSITY </span><b><span style="color: #0f7003; font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 10pt; line-height: 19px;">ORGANIC PRODUCTION OF BANANA <i>(Musa </i>spp.)</span></b><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 10pt; line-height: 19px;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 18px;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 18px;">
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 10pt; line-height: 19px;">There is a perverse urge among the biotechnology brigade to declare war against biodiversity in its centre of origin. An attempt was made to introduce Bt brinjal into India which is the centre of diversity for Brinjal. GM corn is being introduced in Mexico, the centre of diversity of corn. The GM banana is being introduced to the two countries where banana is a significant crop and has large diversity. One is India, the other is Uganda, the only country where banana is a staple.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div style="line-height: 18px; margin: 0.1pt 0in;">
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Fourth, as recognized by Harvest Plus, the corporate alliance pushing Biofortification,</span><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"> there could be insurmountable problems with the biofortification of nutrients in foods as they: “... may deliver toxic amounts of nutrients to an individual and also cause its associated side effects (and) the potential that the fortified products will still not be a solution to nutrient deficiencies amongst low income populations who may not be able to afford the new product and children who may not be able to consume adequate amounts."<span style="color: blue;"> (</span><b>Food Biofortification: no answer to ill-health, starvation or malnutrition </b>By Bob Phelps <span style="color: blue;"><a href="http://www.freshfruitportal.com/opinion-biofortification-is-an-obstacle-to-food-justice" style="color: #49932c; text-decoration: none;">http://www.freshfruitportal.com/opinion-biofortification-is-an-obstacle-to-food-justice</a>)<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div style="line-height: 18px; margin: 0.1pt 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div style="line-height: 18px; margin: 0.1pt 0in;">
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Fifth, Australian scientists are using a virus that infects the banana as a promoter. This could spread through horizontal gene transfer. All genetic engineering uses genes from bacteria and viruses. Independent studies have shown that there are health risks associated with GM foods.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div style="line-height: 18px; margin: 0.1pt 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div style="line-height: 18px; margin: 0.1pt 0in;">
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">There is no need for introducing a hazardous technology in a low iron food like bananas (which brings us many other health benefits )when we have so many affordable, accessible, safe and diverse options for meeting our nutritional needs of iron.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div style="line-height: 18px; margin: 0.1pt 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div style="line-height: 18px; margin: 0.1pt 0in;">
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">We have to <b>grow</b> nutrition by growing biodiversity, not industrially “fortify” nutritionally empty food at high cost, or put one or two nutrients into genetically engineered crops.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div style="line-height: 18px; margin: 0.1pt 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div style="line-height: 18px; margin: 0.1pt 0in;">
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">We don’t need these irresponsible experiments, that create new threats to biodiversity and our health, imposed by powerful men in distant places, who are totally ignorant of the biodiversity in our fields and thalis, and who never bear the consequences of their destructive power. We need to put food security in women’s hands so that the last woman and the last child can share in nature’s gifts of biodiversity.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div style="line-height: 18px; margin: 0.1pt 0in;">
<br /></div>
</div>
</div>
Uday Prakashhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07587503029581457151noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9181128932143875441.post-74431308414076312132013-04-04T21:04:00.001-07:002013-04-04T21:04:16.186-07:00<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjVaV2h0jB720RnlRCGryC4QN-D6tHZblNkJ_rzM5vJ0P7_PDn-2dv1_8QEqzI3pQp5j4PbFdJcLxp97cvAWZmm431JrmSS3F4mLXVK-VVbdZnWgv4DTV8mJUhgX7991I9PRW3lu6Rrw0j7/s1600/images.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" height="239" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjVaV2h0jB720RnlRCGryC4QN-D6tHZblNkJ_rzM5vJ0P7_PDn-2dv1_8QEqzI3pQp5j4PbFdJcLxp97cvAWZmm431JrmSS3F4mLXVK-VVbdZnWgv4DTV8mJUhgX7991I9PRW3lu6Rrw0j7/s320/images.jpg" width="320" /></a><br />
<h1 class="txttitle" style="background-color: white; font-family: 'Times New Roman', Times, serif; font-size: 22px; margin: 30px 0px 0px 2px; padding: 0px 0px 8px; width: 475.9624938964844px;">
How the Government Killed Martin Luther King, Jr.</h1>
<div class="txtauthor" style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: 'Times New Roman', Times, serif; font-size: 12px; line-height: 17px; margin-left: 2px; padding: 0px;">
By Carl Gibson, Reader Supported News</div>
<div class="date" style="background-color: white; color: #dc3b41; font-family: 'Times New Roman', Times, serif; font-size: 15.199999809265137px; line-height: 17px; margin-left: 2px; padding: 0px;">
03 April 13</div>
<div style="background-color: white; font-family: 'Times New Roman', Times, serif; font-size: 15.199999809265137px; line-height: 17px; margin-bottom: 20px; margin-top: 10px; padding: 0px;">
<br /></div>
<div style="background-color: white; font-family: 'Times New Roman', Times, serif; font-size: 15.199999809265137px; line-height: 17px; margin-bottom: 20px; margin-top: 10px; padding: 0px;">
<img border="0" src="http://readersupportednews.org/images/stories/alphabet/rsn-B.jpg" style="margin: 0px; padding: 0px;" />efore scoffing at this headline, you should know that in 1999, in Memphis, Tennessee, more than three decades after MLK's death, <a href="http://www.examiner.com/article/dr-martin-luther-king-assassinated-by-us-govt-king-family-civil-trial-verdict" style="color: black; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;" target="_hplink">a jury found local, state, and federal government agencies guilty</a> of conspiring to assassinate the Nobel Peace Prize winner and civil rights leader. The same media you would expect to cover such a monumental decision was absent at the trial, because those news organizations were part of that conspiracy. William F. Pepper, who was James Earl Ray's first attorney, called over 70 witnesses to the stand to testify on every aspect of the assassination. The panel, which consisted of an even mix of both black and white jurors, took only an hour of deliberation to find Loyd Jowers and other defendants guilty. If you're skeptical of any factual claims made here, <a href="http://members.tranquility.net/~rwinkel/911/Wakeup2/MLKTrial.html" style="color: black; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;" target="_hplink">click here for a full transcript</a>, broken into individual sections. Read the testimonies yourself if you don't want to take my word for it.</div>
<div class="indent" style="background-color: white; font-family: 'Times New Roman', Times, serif; font-size: 15.199999809265137px; line-height: 17px; margin-bottom: 20px; margin-top: 10px; padding: 0px; text-indent: 30pt;">
It really isn't that radical a thing to expect this government to kill someone who threatened their authority and had the power to organize millions to protest it. When MLK was killed on April 4, 1968, he was speaking to <a href="http://www.archives.gov/education/lessons/memphis-v-mlk/" style="color: black; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;" target="_hplink">sanitation workers in Memphis</a>, who were organizing to fight poverty wages and ruthless working conditions. He was an <a href="http://www.americanrhetoric.com/speeches/mlkatimetobreaksilence.htm" style="color: black; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;" target="_hplink">outspoken critic</a> of the government's war in Vietnam, and his power to organize threatened the moneyed corporate interests who were profiting from the war. At the time of his death, he was gearing up for the <a href="http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=91626373" style="color: black; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;" target="_hplink">Poor People's Campaign</a>, an effort to get people to camp out on the National Mall to demand anti-poverty legislation – essentially the first inception of the Occupy Wall Street movement. The government perceived him as a threat, and had him killed. James Earl Ray was the designated fall guy, and a complicit media, taking its cues from a government in fear of MLK, helped sell the "official" story of the assassination. Here's how they did it.</div>
<div class="indent" style="background-color: white; font-family: 'Times New Roman', Times, serif; font-size: 15.199999809265137px; line-height: 17px; margin-bottom: 20px; margin-top: 10px; padding: 0px; text-indent: 30pt;">
<strong style="margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">The Setup</strong></div>
<div class="indent" style="background-color: white; font-family: 'Times New Roman', Times, serif; font-size: 15.199999809265137px; line-height: 17px; margin-bottom: 20px; margin-top: 10px; padding: 0px; text-indent: 30pt;">
The defendant in the 1999 civil trial, Loyd Jowers, had been a <a href="http://www.justice.gov/crt/about/crm/mlk/part3.php" style="color: black; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;" target="_hplink">Memphis PD officer in the 1940s</a>. He owned a restaurant called Jim's Grill, a staging ground to orchestrate MLK's assassination underneath the rooming house where the corporate media alleges James Earl Ray shot Dr. King. During the trial, William Pepper, the plaintiff's attorney, played a tape of an incriminating 1998 conversation between Jowers, UN Ambassador Andrew Young, and Dexter King, MLK's son. Young testified that Jowers told them he "wanted to get right with God before he died, wanted to confess it and be free of it."</div>
<div class="indent" style="background-color: white; font-family: 'Times New Roman', Times, serif; font-size: 15.199999809265137px; line-height: 17px; margin-bottom: 20px; margin-top: 10px; padding: 0px; text-indent: 30pt;">
On the tape, Jowers mentions that those present at the meetings <a href="http://ctka.net/pr500-king.html" style="color: black; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;" target="_hplink">included</a> MPD officer Marrell McCollough, Earl Clark, an MPD lieutenant and known as the department's best marksman, another MPD officer, and two men who were unknown to Jowers but whom he assumed to be representatives of federal agencies. While Dr. King was in Memphis, he was under open or eye-to-eye federal surveillance by the 111th Military Intelligence Group based at Fort McPherson in Atlanta, Georgia. Memphis PD intelligence officer Eli Arkin even admitted to having the group in his own office. During his last visit to Memphis in late March of 1968, MLK was under covert surveillance, meaning his room at the Rivermont was bugged and wired. Even if he went out to the balcony to speak, his words were recorded via relay. William Pepper alleges in his closing argument during King v. Jowers that such covert surveillance was usually done by the Army Security Agency, implying the involvement of at least two federal agencies.</div>
<div class="indent" style="background-color: white; font-family: 'Times New Roman', Times, serif; font-size: 15.199999809265137px; line-height: 17px; margin-bottom: 20px; margin-top: 10px; padding: 0px; text-indent: 30pt;">
Jowers also gave an interview to Sam Donaldson on "Prime Time Live" in 1993. The transcript of the interview was read during the trial, and it was revealed that Jowers openly talked about being asked by produce warehouse owner Frank Liberto to help with MLK's murder. Liberto had mafia connections, and sent a courier with $100,000 to Jowers, who owned a local restaurant, with instructions to hold the money at his restaurant.</div>
<div class="indent" style="background-color: white; font-family: 'Times New Roman', Times, serif; font-size: 15.199999809265137px; line-height: 17px; margin-bottom: 20px; margin-top: 10px; padding: 0px; text-indent: 30pt;">
John McFerren owned a store in Memphis and was making a pickup at Liberto's warehouse at 5:15 p.m. on April 4th, roughly 45 minutes before the assassination. McFerren testified that he overheard Liberto tell someone over the phone, "Shoot the son of a bitch on the balcony." Other witnesses who testified included café owner Lavada Addison, who was friends with Liberto in the 1970s. She recalled him confiding to her that he "had Martin Luther King killed." Addison's son, Nathan Whitlock, also testified. He asked Liberto if he killed MLK, and he responded, "I didn't kill the nigger but I had it done." When Whitlock pressed him about James Earl Ray, Liberto replied, "He wasn't nothing but a troublemaker from Missouri. He was a front man ... a setup man."</div>
<div class="indent" style="background-color: white; font-family: 'Times New Roman', Times, serif; font-size: 15.199999809265137px; line-height: 17px; margin-bottom: 20px; margin-top: 10px; padding: 0px; text-indent: 30pt;">
The back door of Loyd Jowers' establishment led to a thick crop of bushes across the street from the Lorraine Motel balcony where Dr. King was shot. On the taped confession to Andrew Young and Dexter King, Jowers says after he heard the shot, Lt. Earl Clark, who is now deceased, laid a smoking rifle at the rear of his restaurant. Jowers then disassembled the rifle, wrapped it in a tablecloth and prepared it for disposal.</div>
<div class="indent" style="background-color: white; font-family: 'Times New Roman', Times, serif; font-size: 15.199999809265137px; line-height: 17px; margin-bottom: 20px; margin-top: 10px; padding: 0px; text-indent: 30pt;">
<a href="http://www.cnn.com/2011/US/studentnews/03/29/bia.mlk.assassination.guide/index.html" style="color: black; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;" target="_hplink">The corporate media</a> says it was James Earl Ray who shot MLK, and he did it from the 2nd floor bathroom window of the rooming house across the street from the Lorraine Motel. The official account alleges the murder weapon was dropped in a bundle and abandoned at Dan Canipe's storefront just before he made his getaway. But even those authorities and media admit that the bullet that tore through MLK's throat didn't have the same metallurgical composition as the bullets in the rifle left behind by James Earl Ray. And Judge Joe Brown, a weapons expert called to testify by Pepper in the 1999 trial, said the rifle allegedly used by James Earl Ray had a scope that was never sighted in, meaning that the weapon in question would have fired far to the left and far below the target.</div>
<div class="indent" style="background-color: white; font-family: 'Times New Roman', Times, serif; font-size: 15.199999809265137px; line-height: 17px; margin-bottom: 20px; margin-top: 10px; padding: 0px; text-indent: 30pt;">
The actual murder weapon was disposed of by taxi driver James McCraw, a friend of Jowers. William Hamblin testified in King v. Jowers that McCraw told him this story over a 15-year period whenever he got drunk. McCraw repeatedly told Hamblin that he threw the rifle over the Memphis-Arkansas bridge, meaning that the rifle is at the bottom of the Mississippi river to this day. And according to Hamblin's testimony, Canipe said he saw the bundle dropped in front of his store before the actual shooting occurred.</div>
<div class="indent" style="background-color: white; font-family: 'Times New Roman', Times, serif; font-size: 15.199999809265137px; line-height: 17px; margin-bottom: 20px; margin-top: 10px; padding: 0px; text-indent: 30pt;">
<strong style="margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">The Conspiracy</strong></div>
<div class="indent" style="background-color: white; font-family: 'Times New Roman', Times, serif; font-size: 15.199999809265137px; line-height: 17px; margin-bottom: 20px; margin-top: 10px; padding: 0px; text-indent: 30pt;">
To make Dr. King vulnerable, plans had to be made to remove him from his security detail and anyone sympathetic who could be a witness or interfere with the killing. Two black firefighters, Floyd Newsum and Norvell Wallace, who were working at Fire Station #2 across the street from the Lorraine Motel, were each transferred to different fire stations. Newsum was a civil rights activist and witnessed MLK's last speech to the striking Memphis sanitation workers, "I Have Seen the Mountaintop," before getting the call about his transfer. Newsum testified that he wasn't needed at his new assignment, and that his transfer meant that Fire Station #2 would be out of commission unless someone else was sent there in his stead. Newsum talked about having to make a series of inquiries before finally learning that his reassignment had been ordered by the Memphis Police Department. Wallace testified that to that very day, while the official explanation was a vague death threat, he hadn't once received a satisfactory answer as to why he was suddenly reassigned.</div>
<div class="indent" style="background-color: white; font-family: 'Times New Roman', Times, serif; font-size: 15.199999809265137px; line-height: 17px; margin-bottom: 20px; margin-top: 10px; padding: 0px; text-indent: 30pt;">
<a href="http://www.commercialappeal.com/news/2012/nov/27/former-memphis-detective-coach-was-part-of-king/?print=1" style="color: black; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;" target="_hplink">Ed Redditt</a>, a black MPD detective who was assigned to MLK's security detail, was also removed from the scene an hour before the shooting and sent home, and the only reason given was a vague death threat. <a href="http://www.democracynow.org/2007/1/15/retired_memphis_policeman_no_black_officers" style="color: black; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;" target="_hplink">Jerry Williams</a>, another black MPD detective, was usually tasked with assembling a security team of black police officers for Dr. King. But he testified that on the night of the assassination, he wasn't assigned to form that team.</div>
<div class="indent" style="background-color: white; font-family: 'Times New Roman', Times, serif; font-size: 15.199999809265137px; line-height: 17px; margin-bottom: 20px; margin-top: 10px; padding: 0px; text-indent: 30pt;">
There was a Black Panther-inspired group called <a href="http://www.smartcitymemphis.com/2010/09/reputation-withers-under-revelations/" style="color: black; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;" target="_hplink">The Invaders</a>, who were staying at the Lorraine Motel to help MLK organize a planned march with the striking garbage workers. The Invaders were ordered to leave the motel after getting into an argument with members of MLK's entourage. The origins of the argument are unclear, though several sources affirm that The Invaders had been infiltrated by Marrell McCollough of the MPD, who later went on to work for the CIA. And finally, the Tact 10 police escort of several MPD cars that accompanied Dr. King's security detail were pulled back the day before the shooting by Inspector Evans. With all possible obstacles out of the way, MLK was all alone just before the assassination.</div>
<div class="indent" style="background-color: white; font-family: 'Times New Roman', Times, serif; font-size: 15.199999809265137px; line-height: 17px; margin-bottom: 20px; margin-top: 10px; padding: 0px; text-indent: 30pt;">
<strong style="margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">The Cover-Up</strong></div>
<div class="indent" style="background-color: white; font-family: 'Times New Roman', Times, serif; font-size: 15.199999809265137px; line-height: 17px; margin-bottom: 20px; margin-top: 10px; padding: 0px; text-indent: 30pt;">
Around 7 a.m. on April 5, the morning after the shooting, MPD Inspector Sam Evans called Public Works Administrator Maynard Stiles and told him to <a href="http://www.ratical.org/ratville/JFK/Unspeakable/MLKconExp.html#c" style="color: black; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;" target="_hplink">have a crew destroy the crop of bushes</a> adjacent to the rooming house above Loyd Jowers' restaurant. This is particularly odd coming from a policeman, since the bushes were in a crime scene area, and crime scene areas are normally roped off, not to be disturbed. The official narrative of a sniper in the bathroom at the rooming house was then reinforced, since a sniper firing from an empty clearing would be far more visible than one hidden behind a thick crop of bushes.</div>
<div class="indent" style="background-color: white; font-family: 'Times New Roman', Times, serif; font-size: 15.199999809265137px; line-height: 17px; margin-bottom: 20px; margin-top: 10px; padding: 0px; text-indent: 30pt;">
Normally, when a major political figure is murdered, all possible witnesses are questioned and asked to make statements. But Memphis PD neglected to conduct even a basic house-to-house investigation. Olivia Catling, a resident of nearby Mulberry Street just a block away from the shooting, testified that she saw a man leave an alley next to the rooming house across from the Lorraine, climb into a Green 1965 Chevrolet, and speed away, burning rubber right in front of several police cars without any interference. There was also no questioning of Captain Weiden, a Memphis firefighter at the fire station closest to the Lorraine, the same one from which Floyd Newsum had been transferred just a day before.</div>
<div class="indent" style="background-color: white; font-family: 'Times New Roman', Times, serif; font-size: 15.199999809265137px; line-height: 17px; margin-bottom: 20px; margin-top: 10px; padding: 0px; text-indent: 30pt;">
Memphis PD and the FBI also suppressed the statements of Ray Hendricks and William Reed, who said they saw James Earl Ray's white mustang parked in front of Jowers' restaurant, before seeing it again driving away as they crossed another street. Ray's alibi was that he had driven away from the scene to fix a tire, and these two statements that affirmed his alibi were withheld from Ray's guilty plea jury.</div>
<div class="indent" style="background-color: white; font-family: 'Times New Roman', Times, serif; font-size: 15.199999809265137px; line-height: 17px; margin-bottom: 20px; margin-top: 10px; padding: 0px; text-indent: 30pt;">
The jury present at Ray's guilty plea hearing also wasn't informed about the bullet that killed MLK having different striations and markings than the other bullets kept as evidence, nor that the bullet couldn't be positively matched as coming from the alleged murder weapon. Three days after entering the guilty plea, James Earl Ray unsuccessfully attempted to retract it and demand a trial. Incredibly, James Earl Ray turned down two separate bribes, one of which was recorded by his brother Jerry Ray, where he was offered $220,000 by writer William Bradford Huey and the guarantee of a full pardon if he would just agree to have the story "Why I Killed Martin Luther King" written on his behalf.</div>
<div class="indent" style="background-color: white; font-family: 'Times New Roman', Times, serif; font-size: 15.199999809265137px; line-height: 17px; margin-bottom: 20px; margin-top: 10px; padding: 0px; text-indent: 30pt;">
<strong style="margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">The Deception</strong></div>
<div class="indent" style="background-color: white; font-family: 'Times New Roman', Times, serif; font-size: 15.199999809265137px; line-height: 17px; margin-bottom: 20px; margin-top: 10px; padding: 0px; text-indent: 30pt;">
One of the 70 witnesses that William F. Pepper called to testify in King v. Jowers was Bill Schaap, a practicing attorney with particular experience in military law, with bar credentials in New York, Chicago, and DC. Schaap testified at great length about how the government, through the FBI and the CIA, puts people in key positions on editorial boards at influential papers like the New York Times and Washington Post. He describes that although these editorial board members and news directors at cable news outlets may be liberal in their politics, they always take the government's side in national security-related stories. Before you write that off as conspiracy theory, remember how people like <a href="http://reason.com/blog/2011/09/06/bill-keller-testosterone-and-a" style="color: black; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;" target="_hplink">Bill Keller</a> at the New York Times, as well as the <a href="http://www.commondreams.org/views03/0304-07.htm" style="color: black; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;" target="_hplink">Washington Post editorial board</a>, all cheerfully <a href="http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2010/09/15/michael-moore-on-the-iraq-war-the-liberals-backed-it.html" style="color: black; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;" target="_hplink">led the march</a> to war in Iraq ten years ago.</div>
<div class="indent" style="background-color: white; font-family: 'Times New Roman', Times, serif; font-size: 15.199999809265137px; line-height: 17px; margin-bottom: 20px; margin-top: 10px; padding: 0px; text-indent: 30pt;">
Another King v. Jowers witness was Earl Caldwell, a New York Times reporter who was sent to Memphis by an editor named Claude Sitton. Caldwell testified that the orders from his editor were to "nail Dr. King." In the publication's effort to sell the story of James Earl Ray as the murderer, the Times cited an investigation into how Ray got the money for his Mustang, rifle, and the long road trip to Tennessee from California. The Times said that according to their own findings as well as the findings of federal agencies, Ray got the money by robbing a bank in his hometown of Alton, Illinois. In Pepper's closing argument, he says that when he or Jerry Ray talked to the chief of police in Alton, along with the bank president of the branch that was allegedly robbed, neither said they had been approached by the New York Times, or by the FBI. Essentially, the Times fabricated the entire story in order to sell a false narrative that there was no government intervention and that James Earl Ray was a lone wolf.</div>
<div class="indent" style="background-color: white; font-family: 'Times New Roman', Times, serif; font-size: 15.199999809265137px; line-height: 17px; margin-bottom: 20px; margin-top: 10px; padding: 0px; text-indent: 30pt;">
So for the following 31 years after King's death, nobody dared to question the constant reiteration of James Earl Ray as the murderer of Martin Luther King. Even 13 years after a jury found the government complicit in a conspiracy to murder the civil rights leader, the complicit media continues to propagate the false narrative they sold us three decades ago and vociferously shout down any alternative theories as to what happened as "conspiracy theory," framing those putting forth such theories as wackjobs undeserving of any credibility. It's strikingly similar to how the Washington Post <a href="http://articles.washingtonpost.com/2013-03-22/opinions/37934914_1_sunni-finance-minister-sunni-vice-president-maliki" style="color: black; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;" target="_hplink">defended their warmongering</a> in a recent editorial commenting on the invasion of Iraq, and had one of their reporters <a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/on-iraq-journalists-didnt-fail-they-just-didnt-succeed/2013/03/22/0ca6cee6-9186-11e2-9abd-e4c5c9dc5e90_story.html" style="color: black; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;" target="_hplink">defend</a> the media's leading of the charge into Iraq.</div>
<div class="indent" style="background-color: white; font-family: 'Times New Roman', Times, serif; font-size: 15.199999809265137px; line-height: 17px; margin-bottom: 20px; margin-top: 10px; padding: 0px; text-indent: 30pt;">
As we remember Dr. King and the important work he did, we should also reject the official account of his death as loudly as the government and media shout down anyone who tries to contradict their lies. As<a href="http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/quotes/e/edwardrmu159003.html" style="color: black; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;" target="_hplink">Edward R. Murrow said</a>, "Most truths are so naked that people feel sorry for them and cover them up, at least a little bit."</div>
<br style="background-color: white; font-family: 'Times New Roman', Times, serif; font-size: 15.199999809265137px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;" /><hr size="3" style="background-color: white; font-family: 'Times New Roman', Times, serif; font-size: 15.199999809265137px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; width: 160.8000030517578px;" />
<div class="indent" style="background-color: white; font-family: 'Times New Roman', Times, serif; font-size: 15.199999809265137px; line-height: 17px; margin-bottom: 20px; margin-top: 10px; padding: 0px; text-indent: 30pt;">
<em style="margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">Carl Gibson, 25, is co-founder of US Uncut, a nationwide creative direct-action movement that mobilized tens of thousands of activists against corporate tax avoidance and budget cuts in the months leading up to the Occupy Wall Street movement. Carl and other US Uncut activists are featured in the documentary "We're Not Broke," which premiered at the 2012 Sundance Film Festival. He currently lives in Madison, Wisconsin. You can contact him at <a href="mailto:carl@rsnorg.org" style="color: black; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">carl@rsnorg.org</a>, and follow him on twitter at @uncutCG.</em></div>
<div class="indent" style="background-color: white; font-family: 'Times New Roman', Times, serif; font-size: 15.199999809265137px; line-height: 17px; margin-bottom: 20px; margin-top: 10px; padding: 0px; text-indent: 30pt;">
Reader Supported News is the Publication of Origin for this work. Permission to republish is freely granted with credit and a link back to Reader Supported News.</div>
</div>
Uday Prakashhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07587503029581457151noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9181128932143875441.post-15010211929968201492013-03-16T08:55:00.001-07:002013-03-16T08:55:41.872-07:00The feeding frenzy of kleptocracy - The Hindu<a href="http://www.thehindu.com/opinion/columns/sainath/the-feeding-frenzy-of-kleptocracy/article4513159.ece#.UUSU8K-kjVM.blogger">The feeding frenzy of kleptocracy - The Hindu</a>Uday Prakashhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07587503029581457151noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9181128932143875441.post-82076323162492963402012-06-29T16:01:00.000-07:002012-06-29T16:01:28.979-07:00Review: The Walls of Delhi<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
<br />
<div class="itemHeader" style="border: 0px; color: #333333; font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12px; line-height: 18px; margin: 0px; min-height: 60px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px 0px 0px 70px; text-align: -webkit-auto;">
<h2 class="itemTitle" style="background-color: transparent; background-position: initial initial; background-repeat: initial initial; border: 0px; font-family: Georgia, Cambria, 'Times New Roman', Times, serif; font-size: 24px; line-height: 1.2; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px;">
<br /></h2>
</div>
<h3 style="text-align: left;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12px; line-height: 18px; text-align: -webkit-auto;"><b><span style="color: purple;"><a href="http://www.sa.org.au/index.php?option=com_k2&view=item&id=7373%3Areview-the-walls-of-delhi&Itemid=545" target="_blank">Roz Ward</a></span></b></span></h3>
<span style="color: #333333; font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12px; line-height: 18px; text-align: -webkit-auto;"></span><div class="itemToolbar clearfix" style="background-color: #fcfcfc; border-bottom-color: rgb(204, 204, 204); border-bottom-style: dotted; border-top-color: rgb(204, 204, 204); border-top-style: dotted; border-width: 1px 0px; color: #333333; font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12px; line-height: 18px; margin: 10px 0px 20px; outline: 0px; padding: 4px 0px; text-align: -webkit-auto;">
<ul style="background-color: transparent; border: 0px; list-style: none; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; text-align: right;"><div class="itp-share" style="background-color: transparent; border: 0px; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px;">
<div class="itp-share-fbl" style="background-color: transparent; border: 0px; float: left; margin: 5px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px;">
<iframe allowtransparency="true" frameborder="0" scrolling="no" src="http://www.facebook.com/plugins/like.php?%20%20%20%20%20%20%20%20%20%20%20%20%20%20%20%20href=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.sa.org.au%2Findex.php%3Foption%3Dcom_k2%26view%3Ditem%26id%3D7373%3Areview-the-walls-of-delhi%26Itemid%3D545&%20%20%20%20%20%20%20%20%20%20%20%20%20%20%20%20send=0&%20%20%20%20%20%20%20%20%20%20%20%20%20%20%20%20locale=en_GB&%20%20%20%20%20%20%20%20%20%20%20%20%20%20%20%20layout=button_count&%20%20%20%20%20%20%20%20%20%20%20%20%20%20%20%20show_faces=false&%20%20%20%20%20%20%20%20%20%20%20%20%20%20%20%20width=90&%20%20%20%20%20%20%20%20%20%20%20%20%20%20%20%20action=recommend&%20%20%20%20%20%20%20%20%20%20%20%20%20%20%20%20colorscheme=light&%20%20%20%20%20%20%20%20%20%20%20%20%20%20%20%20height=25" style="background-color: transparent; border-style: none; height: 25px; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; overflow: hidden; padding: 0px; width: 90px;"></iframe></div>
<div class="itp-share-tw" style="background-color: transparent; border: 0px; float: left; margin: 5px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px;">
<iframe allowtransparency="true" class="twitter-share-button twitter-count-none" frameborder="0" scrolling="no" src="http://platform.twitter.com/widgets/tweet_button.1340179658.html#_=1341030366223&count=none&id=twitter-widget-0&lang=en&original_referer=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.sa.org.au%2Findex.php%3Foption%3Dcom_k2%26view%3Ditem%26id%3D7373%253Areview-the-walls-of-delhi%26Itemid%3D545&size=m&text=Socialist%20Alternative%20-%20Review%3A%20The%20Walls%20of%20Delhi&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.sa.org.au%2Findex.php%3Foption%3Dcom_k2%26view%3Ditem%26id%3D7373%3Areview-the-walls-of-delhi%26Itemid%3D545" style="background-color: transparent; border-width: 0px; height: 20px; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; width: 59px;" title="Twitter Tweet Button"></iframe></div>
<div class="itp-share-gone" style="background-color: transparent; border: 0px; float: left; margin: 5px 10px 0px 5px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px;">
<div id="___plusone_0" style="background-color: transparent; border: 0px none; display: inline-block; float: none; font-size: 1px; height: 20px; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline; width: 90px;">
<iframe allowtransparency="true" frameborder="0" hspace="0" id="I0_1341030365338" marginheight="0" marginwidth="0" name="I0_1341030365338" scrolling="no" src="https://plusone.google.com/_/+1/fastbutton?bsv=pr&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.sa.org.au%2Findex.php%3Foption%3Dcom_k2%26view%3Ditem%26id%3D7373%3Areview-the-walls-of-delhi%26Itemid%3D545&size=medium&count=true&origin=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.sa.org.au&hl=en&jsh=m%3B%2F_%2Fapps-static%2F_%2Fjs%2Fgapi%2F__features__%2Frt%3Dj%2Fver%3DHwp45vDlqy0.en_GB.%2Fsv%3D1%2Fam%3D!0Tt3uNrLr0Coc6egjA%2Fd%3D1%2Frs%3DAItRSTPPmWPJ07cyg8-dwnRRgdhd5VvL4g#_methods=onPlusOne%2C_ready%2C_close%2C_open%2C_resizeMe%2C_renderstart&id=I0_1341030365338&parent=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.sa.org.au" style="background-color: transparent; border-style: none; border-width: 0px; height: 20px; left: 0px; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; position: static; top: 0px; visibility: visible; width: 90px;" tabindex="0" title="+1" vspace="0" width="100%"></iframe></div>
</div>
</div>
<li style="background-image: none; border-left-color: rgb(204, 204, 204); border-left-style: solid; border-width: 0px 0px 0px 1px; display: inline; line-height: 1.4; list-style: none; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; overflow: hidden; padding: 0px 4px 0px 8px; text-align: center;"><a class="modal itemPrintLink" href="http://www.sa.org.au/index.php?option=com_k2&view=item&id=7373:review-the-walls-of-delhi&Itemid=545&tmpl=component&print=1" rel="{handler:'iframe',size:{x:900,y:500}}" style="background-image: url(http://www.sa.org.au/templates/ja_teline_iv/images/printButton.png); background-position: 0% 0%; background-repeat: no-repeat no-repeat; border: 0px; color: #006699; display: inline-block; height: 16px; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; overflow: hidden; padding: 0px; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: middle; width: 16px;"></a> </li>
<li style="background-image: none; border-left-color: rgb(204, 204, 204); border-left-style: solid; border-width: 0px 0px 0px 1px; display: inline; line-height: 1.4; list-style: none; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; overflow: hidden; padding: 0px 4px 0px 8px; text-align: center;"><a class="itemEmailLink" href="http://www.sa.org.au/index.php?option=com_mailto&tmpl=component&link=aHR0cDovL3d3dy5zYS5vcmcuYXUvaW5kZXgucGhwP29wdGlvbj1jb21fazImdmlldz1pdGVtJmlkPTczNzM6cmV2aWV3LXRoZS13YWxscy1vZi1kZWxoaSZJdGVtaWQ9NTQ1" style="background-image: url(http://www.sa.org.au/templates/ja_teline_iv/images/emailButton.png); background-position: 0% 0%; background-repeat: no-repeat no-repeat; border: 0px; color: #006699; display: inline-block; height: 16px; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; overflow: hidden; padding: 0px; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: middle; width: 16px;"></a></li>
</ul>
<div class="clr" style="background-color: transparent; border: 0px; clear: both; float: none; height: 0px; line-height: 0; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px;">
</div>
</div>
<div class="itemBody" style="border: 0px; clear: both; color: #333333; font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12px; line-height: 18px; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; text-align: -webkit-auto;">
<div class="itemImageBlock" style="background-color: transparent; border: 0px; float: right; margin: 0px 0px 6px 6px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px;">
<span class="itemImage" style="background-color: transparent; border: 0px; display: block; margin: 0px 0px 0px 6px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px;"><a class="modal" href="http://www.sa.org.au/media/k2/items/cache/e3948d1dd2114f1a5c69bdfcccde552c_XL.jpg" style="background-color: transparent; border: 0px; color: #006699; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration: none;" title="Click to preview image"><img alt="Review: The Walls of Delhi" src="http://www.sa.org.au/media/k2/items/cache/e3948d1dd2114f1a5c69bdfcccde552c_M.jpg" style="background-color: transparent; border: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); height: auto; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; width: 300px;" /></a></span><div class="clr" style="background-color: transparent; border: 0px; clear: both; float: none; height: 0px; line-height: 0; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px;">
</div>
</div>
<div class="itemFullText" style="background-color: transparent; border: 0px; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px;">
<div style="background-color: transparent; border: 0px; margin-bottom: 15px; margin-top: 15px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px;">
<strong style="background-color: transparent; border: 0px; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px;">Review: <em style="background-color: transparent; border: 0px; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px;">The Walls of Delhi</em>. Uday Prakash (Author), Jason Grunebaum (Translator). </strong><strong style="background-color: transparent; border: 0px; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px;"><a href="http://www.uwap.uwa.edu.au/" style="background-color: transparent; border: 0px; color: #006699; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration: none;" target="_blank">UWA Publishing</a>March, 2012</strong></div>
<div style="background-color: transparent; border: 0px; margin-bottom: 15px; margin-top: 15px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px;">
Uday Prakash’s three short stories pull back the curtain on life in 21st century India, a place where poverty and exploitation are the daily reality for millions of people. These are by no means just stories that lament the tragedy of poverty; they are compelling, comic and full of life.</div>
<div style="background-color: transparent; border: 0px; margin-bottom: 15px; margin-top: 15px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px;">
Prakash’s storytelling, in the Hindi tradition, will take you on a journey into the lives of three characters whose experiences come to represent a greater reality. The rich descriptions of the hardships endured by the men, women and children paint a vivid picture of the depravity of modern capitalism and the hopefulness of the human spirit that survives in even the most desperate situations.</div>
<div style="background-color: transparent; border: 0px; margin-bottom: 15px; margin-top: 15px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px;">
The first of three novellas, “The Walls of Delhi”, centres on Ramivas, a down and out cleaner who one day discovers a fortune that transforms his life. The description of his time among the street vendors, beggars, cleaners, and lowly paid workers of Delhi gives a truly sensual experience of what life is like for those who were hidden away when the Commonwealth games visited.</div>
<div style="background-color: transparent; border: 0px; margin-bottom: 15px; margin-top: 15px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px;">
It brings to mind the wilful blindness of Western presenters on tourist shows who gush about how breathtaking the “local” markets are in these far flung lands. Yet, the story is not just about individual characters and the trials they face just trying to stay alive, it pulls together pieces to show you something of the whole. In one passage, the narrator ponders:</div>
<div style="background-color: transparent; border: 0px; margin-bottom: 15px; margin-top: 15px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px;">
<em style="background-color: transparent; border: 0px; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px;">every time I do a bit of soul searching to try to figure out what’s wrong with me and why I have such bad luck, I come face-to-face with every single rotten thing about this whole system we live in – a system surely created by some underworld gang.</em></div>
<div style="background-color: transparent; border: 0px; margin-bottom: 15px; margin-top: 15px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px;">
The characters are aware that some small minority is dominating the majority and making their lives a misery. It doesn’t come as a surprise then, to discover that Prakash was once a member of the Communist Party of India. Although he now describes himself as “apolitical” his work, for anyone with progressive or left wing politics, is woven through with the underlying themes of social injustice, corruption, class, and inequality.</div>
<div style="background-color: transparent; border: 0px; margin-bottom: 15px; margin-top: 15px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px;">
In the second story, “Mohandas”, a man who starts out with a belief in fairness and justice gets brutally disavowed at every turn. Just when you think things can’t get worse, they do. Top of his grade at college, Mohandas secured a degree that he thought would lead him and his family out of poverty, to security, and even to freedom. Although centred on one person’s individual ambition and disillusionment, the story again weaves in so many interconnections that you can’t help but see the bigger picture.</div>
<div style="background-color: transparent; border: 0px; margin-bottom: 15px; margin-top: 15px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px;">
Sometimes the politics is not even underlying, it is right out in the open. At one point, in a step back from the story at hand, the narrator comments:</div>
<div style="background-color: transparent; border: 0px; margin-bottom: 15px; margin-top: 15px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px;">
<em style="background-color: transparent; border: 0px; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px;">You may think this is some 125 year old tale, in the tradition of Hindi fiction, it is not. It is a tale of a time right after 9/11…a time when two sovereign Asian nations were reduced to ash and rubble. It’s a tale of time when anybody worshipping gods other than the god of the US and Europe were called fascists, terrorists, religious fanatics. Gas and oil, water, markets, profit, plunder: to get all of this, companies, governments, and armies were killing innocent people every day all over the world.</em></div>
<div style="background-color: transparent; border: 0px; margin-bottom: 15px; margin-top: 15px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px;">
The final story “Mangosil” is perhaps the most tragic of all. Chandrakant, the servant of a disgusting police inspector, runs away with Shobha, a woman suffering brutal abuse, to start a new life. They make their home in a “half flat” under the stairs of an apartment building with planks of wood for a door, one tap to serve all their needs, and an open sewer stinking two feet below the window. When they are finally able to have a child to create the family they long for, he is born with a condition that poverty has caused, and that only the rich could hope to cure. The boy, Suri, comes to represent a pained wisdom and calm amongst the ravages of everyday life. The narrator describes how one day Suri said to him:</div>
<div style="background-color: transparent; border: 0px; margin-bottom: 15px; margin-top: 15px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px;">
<em style="background-color: transparent; border: 0px; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px;">Uncle, there’s no such thing as the Third World. There are only two worlds, and both of them exist everywhere. In one live those who create injustice, and all the rest, the ones who have to put up with injustice, live in the other.</em></div>
<div style="background-color: transparent; border: 0px; margin-bottom: 15px; margin-top: 15px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px;">
Prakash is a controversial figure in the world of Hindi literature. His work has raised many political debates about the contradictions and catastrophes of contemporary India. This book gives you a real insight into these questions in a way that is both painful and hopeful. For those of us who fight to see an end to injustice, this book is well worth a read.</div>
</div>
</div>
</div>Uday Prakashhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07587503029581457151noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9181128932143875441.post-36677195256480532502012-01-03T22:32:00.000-08:002012-01-03T22:32:15.263-08:00Joseph: the Victim of Ancient Human Trafficking<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on"><br />
<div align="center" style="background-color: white; margin-bottom: 0.1pt; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 0.1pt; text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: Times;"><span style="font-size: 19px;"><b><br />
</b></span></span></div><div align="center" style="background-color: white; font-family: Tahoma; margin-bottom: 0.1pt; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 0.1pt; text-align: center;"><span lang="EN-US"><span style="font-family: Times;"><b><span style="font-size: large;">Man Who Brought a Food Security Bill and Made Egypt a Super Economic Power</span></b><span style="font-size: x-small;"><u></u><u></u></span></span></span></div><div align="center" style="background-color: white; font-family: Tahoma; font-size: 13px; margin-bottom: 0.1pt; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 0.1pt; text-align: center;"><b style="font-family: Times; text-align: right;">By Madhu Chandra</b></div><div style="background-color: white; font-family: Tahoma; font-size: 13px; margin-bottom: 0.1pt; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 0.1pt; text-align: justify;"><br />
</div><div style="background-color: white; font-family: Tahoma; font-size: 13px; margin-bottom: 0.1pt; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 0.1pt; text-align: justify;"></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"></div><br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-j-ztSLLibNc/TwPvB89q3wI/AAAAAAAABDU/Ry6lodSnbn4/s1600/joseph+4.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-j-ztSLLibNc/TwPvB89q3wI/AAAAAAAABDU/Ry6lodSnbn4/s1600/joseph+4.jpg" /></a></div><br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">------------------------------------------------------------------------------</div><br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">----</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0.1pt; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 0.1pt;"><span lang="EN-US"><span style="color: blue; font-family: Times;"><i>Joseph’s story is not just a Biblical narrative. It gives us insight into the human condition. In this narrative it is the issue of selling human beings for money and subsequent slavery. The world has declared that human trafficking is the largest crime next to armed drug trafficking. The story of Joseph will help people to understand the grave concerns involved with the victims of human trafficking. It can also serve to encourage the anti-trafficking initiatives.<u></u><u></u></i></span></span></div><div style="margin-bottom: 0.1pt; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 0.1pt;"><br />
</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0.1pt; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 0.1pt;"><span lang="EN-US"><span style="color: blue; font-family: Times;"><i>For Joseph, it was God who helped him throughout, from the cistern, to being sold to the Midianite merchants, to slavery in Potiphar’s house, to enduring sexual abuse by family members, to being falsely accused and imprisoned. For Joseph, it was God’s intension that he testifies to his brothers when they asked for his forgiveness.</i></span></span></div><br />
<div style="background-color: white; font-family: Tahoma; font-size: 13px; margin-bottom: 0.1pt; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 0.1pt; text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-US"><span style="font-family: Times;"><b><br />
</b></span></span></div><div style="background-color: white; font-family: Tahoma; font-size: 13px; margin-bottom: 0.1pt; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 0.1pt; text-align: justify;"><a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-Atx52BEKfxY/TwPxs1WGvDI/AAAAAAAABFQ/ubLOd8qZEhY/s1600/joseph+6.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" height="200" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-Atx52BEKfxY/TwPxs1WGvDI/AAAAAAAABFQ/ubLOd8qZEhY/s200/joseph+6.jpg" width="154" /></a><span lang="EN-US"><span style="font-family: Times;"><b>Joseph</b>, the 11<sup>th</sup> son of <b>Jacob</b> and first son of his mother <b>Rachael</b>, was a victim of ancient human trafficking. He also became head of the 11<sup>th</sup> tribe of Israel and a unique part of Israel’s history. Joseph was abducted, trafficked for domestic work, brutalized, sold and resold to bounded labor, a victim of attempted rape repeatedly by a woman, abused, imprisoned, and ignored, yet became a man who brought a food security bill for the whole Egyptian nation and made the nation a super economic power during years of severe famine.<u></u><u></u></span></span></div><div style="background-color: white; font-family: Tahoma; font-size: 13px; margin-bottom: 0.1pt; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 0.1pt; text-align: justify;"><br />
</div><div style="background-color: white; font-family: Tahoma; font-size: 13px; margin-bottom: 0.1pt; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 0.1pt; text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-US"><span style="font-family: Times;">The narration of Joseph found in the Bible is often thought of as a Biblical story and not connected with the contemporary issues facing us around the world today. Reviewing Joseph’s narrative, not from a theological and evangelical perspective, will throw light on the challenges of modern slavery systems and human trafficking. Perhaps, it will be helpful for those who are struggling to accept the challenges of human trafficking from Christian or Biblical perspectives.<u></u></span></span></div><div style="background-color: white; font-family: Tahoma; font-size: 13px; margin-bottom: 0.1pt; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 0.1pt; text-align: justify;"><br />
</div><div style="background-color: white; font-family: Tahoma; font-size: 13px; margin-bottom: 0.1pt; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 0.1pt; text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-US"><span style="font-family: Times;">His stepbrothers misled Joseph, which is similar to many cases in current human trafficking. People familiar with the victims mislead them with false promises of giving jobs and free education etc. Joseph, being thrown into a cistern by his stepbrothers, indicates the confinement that victims experience in most human trafficking cases.<u></u><u></u></span></span></div><div style="background-color: white; font-family: Tahoma; font-size: 13px; margin-bottom: 0.1pt; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 0.1pt; text-align: justify;"><br />
</div><div style="background-color: white; font-family: Tahoma; font-size: 13px; margin-bottom: 0.1pt; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 0.1pt; text-align: justify;"><a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-ZbxbPeQhR8c/TwPvk-eTa6I/AAAAAAAABD8/o79pUIczMM4/s1600/joseph+3.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-ZbxbPeQhR8c/TwPvk-eTa6I/AAAAAAAABD8/o79pUIczMM4/s1600/joseph+3.jpg" /></a><span lang="EN-US"><span style="font-family: Times;">His stepbrothers sold him to Midianite merchants for twenty shekels of silver. </span></span><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif;">Twenty shekels of silver is equivalent to eight ounces of silver. Today, twenty shekels is approximately equal to $143.</span><span style="font-family: Times;"> <span lang="EN-US">Perhaps, this was the first recorded instance of selling human beings for money. The Midianite merchants resold Joseph to Potiphar, an official of Pharoh. He became the captain of the guard as a slave. His sole purpose was domestic work as a bounded laborer. He was faithful to the service of his master, found favor in the eyes of Potiphar, and was thus given charge of his household.<u></u><u></u></span></span></div><div style="background-color: white; font-family: Tahoma; font-size: 13px; margin-bottom: 0.1pt; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 0.1pt; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: Times;"><span lang="EN-US"><br />
</span></span></div><div style="background-color: white; font-family: Tahoma; font-size: 13px; margin-bottom: 0.1pt; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 0.1pt; text-align: justify;"><br />
</div><div style="background-color: white; font-family: Tahoma; font-size: 13px; margin-bottom: 0.1pt; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 0.1pt; text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-US"><span style="font-family: Times;">Like many domestic female servants, Joseph was sexually abused. His master’s wife attempted to rape him repeatedly day after day. Because of his commitment to his master and fear of God, he overcame these rape attempts. When Potipar’s wife saw that she could not succeed, he was charged with an allegation of sexual abuse, which landed him in prison for years.<u></u><u></u></span></span></div><div style="background-color: white; font-family: Tahoma; font-size: 13px; margin-bottom: 0.1pt; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 0.1pt; text-align: justify;"><br />
</div><div style="background-color: white; font-family: Tahoma; font-size: 13px; margin-bottom: 0.1pt; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 0.1pt; text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-US"><span style="font-family: Times;">In prison he met two government officials of Pharaoh, a cupbearer and a baker, who were facing serious allegations against them. They were depressed due to these allegations, lost jobs, and justice denied. Joseph the interpreter of dreams at his father’s house, in the prison, and Pharaoh’s court, consoled the cupbearer and convinced the baker by interpreting the dreams that they each had. The baker was executed for the crimes he committed as Joseph foretold, and the cupbearer was reinstated into Pharoh’s court. Interestingly, the cupbearer forgot the consolation received from Joseph for two years until someone was needed to interpret Pharaoh’s dreams, and Joseph was summoned.<u></u><u></u></span></span></div><div style="background-color: white; font-family: Tahoma; font-size: 13px; margin-bottom: 0.1pt; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 0.1pt; text-align: justify;"><br />
</div><div style="background-color: white; font-family: Tahoma; font-size: 13px; margin-bottom: 0.1pt; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 0.1pt; text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-US"><span style="font-family: Times;">Finally, Joseph was rescued from bounded labor when he was able to interpret Pharaoh’s dreams of seven years great abundance and seven years severe famine. Joseph found favor in the eyes of Pharaoh and was appointed as governor of Egypt.<u></u><u></u></span></span></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-oG40pvPuVqI/TwPvCXNzQBI/AAAAAAAABDY/9Yw2H-sm0_g/s1600/joseph+2.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" height="400" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-oG40pvPuVqI/TwPvCXNzQBI/AAAAAAAABDY/9Yw2H-sm0_g/s400/joseph+2.jpg" width="336" /></a></div><div style="background-color: white; font-family: Tahoma; font-size: 13px; margin-bottom: 0.1pt; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 0.1pt; text-align: justify;"><br />
</div><div style="background-color: white; font-family: Tahoma; font-size: 13px; margin-bottom: 0.1pt; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 0.1pt; text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-US"><span style="font-family: Times;">Joseph, the dreamer, made a food security bill for Egypt and the surrounding tribal nations after he was rescued from human trafficking. A bill of agriculture was issued for a tax in order to prepare and store food grain from all over the land of Egypt during the abundant seven years so that the nation would not fall to ruin during the seven years famine. Joseph stored up quantities of grain, like the sand of the sea. It was so much, that he stopped keeping records.<u></u><u></u></span></span></div><div style="background-color: white; font-family: Tahoma; font-size: 13px; margin-bottom: 0.1pt; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 0.1pt; text-align: justify;"><br />
</div><div style="background-color: white; font-family: Tahoma; font-size: 13px; margin-bottom: 0.1pt; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 0.1pt; text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-US"><span style="font-family: Times;">Indian government managed to introduce a must awaited Food Security Bill 2011 on December 22 and it needs to go through both upper and lower houses before it becomes a law for the nation to secure food for over one billion people in India. Joseph knew the importance of the bill in order to save lives of many under his care.<u></u><u></u></span></span></div><div style="background-color: white; font-family: Tahoma; font-size: 13px; margin-bottom: 0.1pt; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 0.1pt; text-align: justify;"><br />
</div><div style="background-color: white; font-family: Tahoma; font-size: 13px; margin-bottom: 0.1pt; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 0.1pt; text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-US"><span style="font-family: Times;">Then the seven years famine began and spread all over the land of Egypt and surrounding nations. No food stores were left in the region accept in Egypt, and people from all over the region came to Egypt to buy food including his stepbrothers and his father Jacob. Egypt became a super economic power due to these great reserves of grain.<u></u><u></u></span></span></div><div style="background-color: white; font-family: Tahoma; font-size: 13px; margin-bottom: 0.1pt; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 0.1pt; text-align: justify;"><br />
</div><div style="background-color: white; font-family: Tahoma; font-size: 13px; margin-bottom: 0.1pt; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 0.1pt; text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-US"><span style="font-family: Times;">Joseph’s story is not just a Biblical narrative. It gives us insight into the human condition. In this narrative it is the issue of selling human beings for money and subsequent slavery. The world has declared that human trafficking is the largest crime next to armed drug trafficking. The story of Joseph will help people to understand the grave concerns involved with the victims of human trafficking. It can also serve to encourage the anti-trafficking initiatives.<u></u><u></u></span></span></div><div style="background-color: white; font-family: Tahoma; font-size: 13px; margin-bottom: 0.1pt; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 0.1pt; text-align: justify;"><br />
</div><div style="background-color: white; font-family: Tahoma; font-size: 13px; margin-bottom: 0.1pt; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 0.1pt; text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-US"><span style="font-family: Times;">For Joseph, it was God who helped him throughout, from the cistern, to being sold to the Midianite merchants, to slavery in Potiphar’s house, to enduring sexual abuse by family members, to being falsely accused and imprisoned. For Joseph, it was God’s intension that he testifies to his brothers when they asked for his forgiveness.<u></u><u></u></span></span></div><div style="background-color: white; font-family: Tahoma; font-size: 13px; margin-bottom: 0.1pt; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 0.1pt; text-align: justify;"><br />
</div><div style="background-color: white; font-family: Tahoma; font-size: 13px; margin-bottom: 0.1pt; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 0.1pt; text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-US"><span style="font-family: Times;">But for modern man, hundreds of thousand who are trafficked into forced sexual bondage, bounded labor, domestic work, and mafia thugs, who will be their voices and who care to redeem them? Who is there to restore hope to their lives?<u></u><u></u></span></span></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-dmuXZO1QpM8/TwPxJRbr9jI/AAAAAAAABE4/gKSkmJ8iv78/s1600/joseph+5.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="400" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-dmuXZO1QpM8/TwPxJRbr9jI/AAAAAAAABE4/gKSkmJ8iv78/s400/joseph+5.jpg" width="336" /></a></div><div style="background-color: white; font-family: Tahoma; font-size: 13px; margin-bottom: 0.1pt; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 0.1pt; text-align: justify;"><br />
</div><div style="background-color: white; font-family: Tahoma; font-size: 13px; margin-bottom: 0.1pt; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 0.1pt; text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-US"><span style="font-family: Times;">Seema (name changed) a 13 years old girl, now 15, is a victim of Orissa’s Kandhmal communal violence, which took place in 2008-09. Hundreds of home, churches, and lives were destroyed. Thousands were rendered homeless and displaced. Seema’s parents were displaced, and her village and home destroyed. A known villager with false promises of work deceived her and her 19-year-old sister, along with two other girls. They were sold and brought to a placement agency in Delhi in early 2010.<u></u><u></u></span></span></div><div style="background-color: white; font-family: Tahoma; font-size: 13px; margin-bottom: 0.1pt; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 0.1pt; text-align: justify;"><br />
</div><div style="background-color: white; font-family: Tahoma; font-size: 13px; margin-bottom: 0.1pt; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 0.1pt; text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-US"><span style="font-family: Times;">They were sexually abused and raped repeatedly for five days by different people in the placement agency before they were sent to work as domestic workers in different homes. They worked without pay or proper food, and were abused by family members.<u></u><u></u></span></span></div><div style="background-color: white; font-family: Tahoma; font-size: 13px; margin-bottom: 0.1pt; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 0.1pt; text-align: justify;"><br />
</div><div style="background-color: white; font-family: Tahoma; font-size: 13px; margin-bottom: 0.1pt; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 0.1pt; text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-US"><span style="font-family: Times;">An anti human trafficking team rescued them after 9 months when the matter was reported to the All India Christian Council. Three of them were rescued from Delhi and a neighboring state. Seema’s sister is still untraceable even after the Delhi High Court ordered the Delhi police to find her. Two of Seema’s friends have been restored to their families in Orissa after they were rescued. Seema continues rebuilding her life under the care of the All India Christian Council’s shelter home in Delhi.<u></u><u></u></span></span></div><div style="background-color: white; font-family: Tahoma; font-size: 13px; margin-bottom: 0.1pt; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 0.1pt; text-align: justify;"><br />
</div><div style="background-color: white; font-family: Tahoma; font-size: 13px; margin-bottom: 0.1pt; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 0.1pt; text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-US"><span style="font-family: Times;">Seema’s future is finally being restored after she has been given coaching class to read and write in English and half way through a beautician vocational training. Once she completes her course, will able to get a livelihood for herself and her poor parents living in an isolated village in a think forest in Orissa.<u></u><u></u></span></span></div><div style="background-color: white; font-family: Tahoma; font-size: 13px; margin-bottom: 0.1pt; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 0.1pt; text-align: justify;"><br />
</div><div style="background-color: white; font-family: Tahoma; font-size: 13px; margin-bottom: 0.1pt; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 0.1pt; text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-US"><span style="font-family: Times;">Indian Dalit and tribal women and children are vulnerable to human trafficking. North Eastern communities are in great danger at the hands of human traffickers. The issue remained unchallenged with the current socio-economic, educational, and employment crisis in the North East India region. More challenge will face in the region, when the International Highways are soon opened as per as Indian government’s “LOOK EAST” policy with ASEAN countries, where the region could become a hub for entry and exit of human trafficking.<u></u><u></u></span></span></div><div style="background-color: white; font-family: Tahoma; font-size: 13px; margin-bottom: 0.1pt; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 0.1pt; text-align: justify;"><br />
</div><div style="background-color: white; font-family: Tahoma; font-size: 13px; margin-bottom: 0.1pt; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 0.1pt; text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-US"><span style="font-family: Times;">With care and concern, many victims of human trafficking, like Seema, can find hope and a future like Joseph, who became a man rescued, made a food security bill for the nation and helped to make Egypt a super economic power.<u></u><u></u></span></span></div><div style="background-color: white; font-family: Tahoma; font-size: 13px; margin-bottom: 0.1pt; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 0.1pt; text-align: justify;"><br />
</div><div style="background-color: white; font-family: Tahoma; font-size: 13px; margin-bottom: 0.1pt; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 0.1pt; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: small;"><strong><i><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; font-size: 9pt;">Madhu Chandra</span></i></strong><i><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; font-size: 9pt;"> is a social activist and research scholar based in New Delhi. </span></i></span></div></div>Uday Prakashhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07587503029581457151noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9181128932143875441.post-64163950527313296722012-01-02T00:46:00.000-08:002012-01-02T00:46:33.830-08:00Wishes for 2012 : The New Year<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on"><br />
<div style="background-attachment: initial; background-clip: initial; background-color: white; background-image: initial; background-origin: initial; font-family: Verdana; line-height: 18px; margin-bottom: 1.35em; text-align: -webkit-auto;"><em style="line-height: 15px;"><span style="font-family: verdana, sans-serif; line-height: 19px;"><b><span style="color: blue;">Helena Hagglund</span></b></span></em> </div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-w7d5eYfXhgA/TwFuyqr3YsI/AAAAAAAABDA/WzJDzGnweEo/s1600/Egypt.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="433" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-w7d5eYfXhgA/TwFuyqr3YsI/AAAAAAAABDA/WzJDzGnweEo/s640/Egypt.jpg" width="640" /></a></div><div style="background-attachment: initial; background-clip: initial; background-color: white; background-image: initial; background-origin: initial; font-family: Verdana; line-height: 18px; margin-bottom: 1.35em; text-align: -webkit-auto;"><em style="line-height: 15px;"><span style="font-family: verdana, sans-serif; line-height: 19px;"><b><span style="color: blue;"><br />
</span></b></span></em></div><div style="background-attachment: initial; background-clip: initial; background-color: white; background-image: initial; background-origin: initial; color: #2a2a2a; font-family: Verdana; font-size: 12px; line-height: 18px; margin-bottom: 1.35em; text-align: -webkit-auto;"><span style="color: black; font-family: verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 10pt; line-height: 19px;">There is no Christmas calm in Egypt. The protests and marches continue, as do the attacks and killings by the army. The second wave of revolution continues.</span></div><div style="background-attachment: initial; background-clip: initial; background-color: white; background-image: initial; background-origin: initial; color: #2a2a2a; font-family: Verdana; font-size: 12px; line-height: 18px; margin-bottom: 1.35em; text-align: -webkit-auto;"><span style="color: black; font-family: verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 10pt; line-height: 19px;">In less than a month, Egypt will celebrate the anniversary of the January 25th uprising. The Supreme Army Council is said to be planning its own festivities that day, something that the revolutionaries cannot accept. Many fear new controversies.</span></div><div style="background-attachment: initial; background-clip: initial; background-color: white; background-image: initial; background-origin: initial; color: #2a2a2a; font-family: Verdana; font-size: 12px; line-height: 18px; margin-bottom: 1.35em; text-align: -webkit-auto;"><span style="color: black; font-family: verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 10pt; line-height: 19px;">The scenes in Tahrir Square and its neighbouring streets are scary: people getting abused and killed, choking on tear gas, dying from gunshot wounds. The list of martyrs grows longer. It is easy to see pictures of this and wish for an end to the unrest.</span></div><div style="background-attachment: initial; background-clip: initial; background-color: white; background-image: initial; background-origin: initial; color: #2a2a2a; font-family: Verdana; font-size: 12px; line-height: 18px; margin-bottom: 1.35em; text-align: -webkit-auto;"><span style="color: black; font-family: verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 10pt; line-height: 19px;">And an end to the unrest is precisely what the Muslim Brotherhood and its allies are looking for. They exhort to calm and claim to be looking for a peaceful democratic electoral process. Calm is also what the ruling military council says it wants. In a time of crisis it is easy to play the stability card if you already have institutionalised power and influence.</span></div><div style="background-attachment: initial; background-clip: initial; background-color: white; background-image: initial; background-origin: initial; color: #2a2a2a; font-family: Verdana; font-size: 12px; line-height: 18px; margin-bottom: 1.35em; text-align: -webkit-auto;"><span style="color: black; font-family: verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 10pt; line-height: 19px;">But for those who dedicated their lives for the revolution, for those who quit their jobs, for those whose friends or sons or daughters have been killed, for those imprisoned - for all of them calm would be devastating. If they surrender their demands for the downfall of the military council in order to gain calm and stability, the struggle will be lost. Even Mubarak offered calm and stability.</span></div><div style="background-attachment: initial; background-clip: initial; background-color: white; background-image: initial; background-origin: initial; color: #2a2a2a; font-family: Verdana; font-size: 12px; line-height: 18px; margin-bottom: 1.35em; text-align: -webkit-auto;"><span style="color: black; font-family: verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 10pt; line-height: 19px;">"Stability" is something the powerful incessantly call for. Stability means an end to visible violence but nothing when it comes to ending the silent violations of human rights: the starvation of the poor, the murder of the unwanted in police cells, the daily abuse and exploitation. A calm and quiet people who do not collectively organize themselves in protests are a people easy to control. Hence every dictator this year has pointed out the stability and the calm that he can provide as an opposite to the rowdiness of the revolutionaries. Calm and stability is good for business and rich and powerful nations needs calm to plan and guarantee business deals.</span></div><div style="background-attachment: initial; background-clip: initial; background-color: white; background-image: initial; background-origin: initial; color: #2a2a2a; font-family: Verdana; font-size: 12px; line-height: 18px; margin-bottom: 1.35em; text-align: -webkit-auto;"><span style="color: black; font-family: verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 10pt; line-height: 19px;">But stability is devastating. If this was the goal, no revolutions would have ever occurred, there would be no real political change. Chaos, unrest and instability is necessary in creating a new future. A subdued people know to expect the onward grind of oppression. But a people ruling themselves do not have a clue what the future will bring, the only thing they know is that they are taking power from the powerful.</span></div><div style="background-attachment: initial; background-clip: initial; background-color: white; background-image: initial; background-origin: initial; color: #2a2a2a; font-family: Verdana; font-size: 12px; line-height: 18px; margin-bottom: 1.35em; text-align: -webkit-auto;"><span style="color: black; font-family: verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 10pt; line-height: 19px;">That is why the revolutionaries of Egypt are continuing to fight. They know that a revolution is more than overthrowing a dictator. They know that it will probably take years of uncertainty and unrest to ensure that their demands of freedom, justice, social equality and bread are met. The Left in Europe needs to follow their lead and listen to their demands, and not fall for media narratives of "successful elections" or "a gradual transition to a new Egypt".</span></div><div style="background-attachment: initial; background-clip: initial; background-color: white; background-image: initial; background-origin: initial; color: #2a2a2a; font-family: Verdana; font-size: 12px; line-height: 18px; margin-bottom: 1.35em; text-align: -webkit-auto;"><span style="color: black; font-family: verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 10pt; line-height: 19px;">So this is why I hope for a 2012 that follows on from what the Arab Spring started. I hope for a boiling, unstable 2012 that continues to change the world.</span></div><div style="background-attachment: initial; background-clip: initial; background-color: white; background-image: initial; background-origin: initial; color: #2a2a2a; font-family: Verdana; font-size: 12px; line-height: 18px; margin-bottom: 1.35em; text-align: -webkit-auto;"><em style="line-height: 15px;"><span style="color: black; font-family: verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 10pt; line-height: 19px;">Helena Hagglund is a freelance journalist based in Cairo and Stockholm. The piece was first published in Swedish on</span></em><span class="ecxapple-converted-space" style="line-height: 15px;"><i><span style="color: black; font-family: verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 10pt; line-height: 19px;"> </span></i></span><em style="line-height: 15px;"><span style="color: black; font-family: verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 10pt; line-height: 19px;"><a href="http://www.seglorasmedja.se/" style="color: #0068cf; cursor: pointer; line-height: 17px;" target="_blank"><span style="color: #0000cc;">www.seglorasmedja.se</span></a></span></em><span style="font-family: verdana, sans-serif; line-height: 15px;"><span style="color: black; font-size: small; line-height: normal;"> </span></span></div></div>Uday Prakashhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07587503029581457151noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9181128932143875441.post-90398529527494372872011-03-21T20:01:00.000-07:002011-03-21T20:01:33.602-07:00Beyond Fukishima<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj-Et257m5tSXwwq3kpo4pT3rHW15KRAYIvNQRGNs_w4gZpnpPPrp4z8QhqjyUTMkvD2mK927JqWNtTctEX-uTizBCllDG3GHEZ2Z-XpA0tjbg1PKrASBzhCMtrPIxhLKJ5w4FuUVkWcCX1/s1600/Fukushima.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" height="268" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj-Et257m5tSXwwq3kpo4pT3rHW15KRAYIvNQRGNs_w4gZpnpPPrp4z8QhqjyUTMkvD2mK927JqWNtTctEX-uTizBCllDG3GHEZ2Z-XpA0tjbg1PKrASBzhCMtrPIxhLKJ5w4FuUVkWcCX1/s400/Fukushima.jpg" width="400" /></a><br />
<h1 style="color: black; font-weight: normal; margin-bottom: 5px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #2a2a2a; font-family: Tahoma, Verdana, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: small; line-height: 17px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: x-small;"> </span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">By <b style="font-weight: bold; line-height: 17px;">Danny Schechter</b></span></span></h1><h1 style="color: black; font-weight: normal; margin-bottom: 5px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #2a2a2a; font-family: Tahoma, Verdana, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: small; line-height: 17px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;"><b style="font-weight: bold; line-height: 17px;"></b> </span></span></h1><div><div class="ecxMsoNoSpacing" style="color: #2a2a2a; font-family: Verdana; line-height: 15px; margin-bottom: 1.35em; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;"><span style="font-family: verdana, sans-serif; line-height: 17px;"><span style="color: black; line-height: normal;">What will it take for our world to recognize the dangers that nuclear scientists and even Albert Einstein were warning about at the “dawn” of the nuclear age?</span></span></div><div class="ecxMsoNoSpacing" style="color: #2a2a2a; font-family: Verdana; line-height: 15px; margin-bottom: 1.35em; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;"><span style="font-family: verdana, sans-serif; line-height: 17px;"><span style="color: black; line-height: normal;"> </span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: black; font-family: verdana, sans-serif; line-height: normal;">Amy Goodman reminds us of the prophetic statement by Australian journalist Wilfred Burchett who tried to find words to describe the horror he was seeing in Hiroshima in 1945 after the bomb fell.</span></div><div class="ecxMsoNoSpacing" style="color: #2a2a2a; font-family: Verdana; line-height: 15px; margin-bottom: 1.35em; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;"><span style="font-family: verdana, sans-serif; line-height: 17px;"><span style="color: black; line-height: normal;"> </span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: black; font-family: verdana, sans-serif; line-height: normal;"><span style="line-height: 17px;"> </span>“It looks as if a monster steamroller had passed over it and squashed it out of existence. I write these facts ... as a warning to the world.”</span></div><div class="ecxMsoNoSpacing" style="color: #2a2a2a; font-family: Verdana; line-height: 15px; margin-bottom: 1.35em; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;"><span style="font-family: verdana, sans-serif; line-height: 17px;"><span style="color: black; line-height: normal;"> </span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: black; font-family: verdana, sans-serif; line-height: normal;">The world heard his warning, but seems to have ignored it. In fact, what followed has been decades of nuclear proliferation, the spread of nuclear power plants and the escalation of the arms race with new higher tech weaponry.</span></div><div class="ecxMsoNoSpacing" style="color: #2a2a2a; font-family: Verdana; line-height: 15px; margin-bottom: 1.35em; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;"><span style="font-family: verdana, sans-serif; line-height: 17px;"><span style="color: black; line-height: normal;"> </span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: black; font-family: verdana, sans-serif; line-height: normal;">As Hiroshima becomes yesterday’s distant memory and Fukishima the current threat, the full extent of the casualties and body count are not yet in, partly because the Japanese government and the power companies don’t want to alarm the public.</span></div><div class="ecxMsoNoSpacing" style="color: #2a2a2a; font-family: Verdana; line-height: 15px; margin-bottom: 1.35em; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhpjsHqa9C77U8ZJvmvt6A6nWwtW5MH5A5OxSuw-XFvKIZeFzU5zrtLZPCZPPDnOvXKhwPixg0iXtZM0YkNNpL1eTaH89UfPeJNVXPEGO8gDNQ4dfrCv-Arx0c4HTLB6HDkxeLiiKd0hR1_/s1600/Hiroshima+2.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="306" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhpjsHqa9C77U8ZJvmvt6A6nWwtW5MH5A5OxSuw-XFvKIZeFzU5zrtLZPCZPPDnOvXKhwPixg0iXtZM0YkNNpL1eTaH89UfPeJNVXPEGO8gDNQ4dfrCv-Arx0c4HTLB6HDkxeLiiKd0hR1_/s400/Hiroshima+2.jpg" width="400" /></a><span style="font-family: verdana, sans-serif; line-height: 17px;"><span style="color: black; line-height: normal;"> </span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: black; font-family: verdana, sans-serif; line-height: normal;">Years earlier, a similar cover-up was in effect at Thee Mile Island complex in Pennsylvania where reports of the damage people suffered from a serious accident was minimized, never examined in depth by some of the very same media outlets who are today criticizing Japan for a lack of transparency.</span></div><div class="ecxMsoNoSpacing" style="margin-bottom: 1.35em; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: verdana, sans-serif;">On August, 6, 2008, the anniversary of the dropping of the first nuclear bomb, Alternet.org reported that the government and media were complicit in minimizing public awareness of the extensive suffering that did take place:</span></div><div class="ecxMsoNoSpacing" style="color: #2a2a2a; font-family: Verdana; line-height: 15px; margin-bottom: 1.35em; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;"><span style="font-family: verdana, sans-serif; line-height: 17px;"><span style="color: black; line-height: normal;"> </span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: black; font-family: verdana, sans-serif; line-height: normal;">“But the word never crossed the conceptual chasm between the "mainstream" media and the "alternative." Despite a federal class action lawsuit filed by 2400 Pennsylvania families claiming damages from the accident, despite at least $15 million quietly paid to parents children with birth defects, despite three decades of official admissions that nobody knows how much radiation escaped from TMI, where it went or who it affected, not a mention of the fact that people might have been killed there made its way into a corporate report”</span></div><div class="ecxMsoNoSpacing" style="color: #2a2a2a; font-family: Verdana; line-height: 15px; margin-bottom: 1.35em; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;"><span style="font-family: verdana, sans-serif; line-height: 17px;"><span style="color: black; line-height: normal;"> </span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: black; font-family: verdana, sans-serif; line-height: normal;">Was this just accidental or is there a deeper pattern of denial? The great expert on psycho history, Robert J. Lifton, wrote a book, Hiroshima In America, with journalist Greg Mitchell about the aftermath of Hiroshima in America exploring what they call<span style="line-height: 17px;"> </span>“50 years of denial.”</span></div><div class="ecxMsoNoSpacing" style="color: #2a2a2a; font-family: Verdana; line-height: 15px; margin-bottom: 1.35em; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;"><span style="font-family: verdana, sans-serif; line-height: 17px;"><span style="color: black; line-height: normal;"> </span></span><span style="font-family: verdana, sans-serif; line-height: 17px;"><span style="color: black; line-height: normal;">One reviewer explained, “</span></span><span style="font-family: verdana, sans-serif; line-height: 17px;"><span style="color: black; line-height: normal;">The authors examine what they perceive to be a conspiracy by the government to mislead and suppress information about the actual bombing, Truman's decision to drop the bomb, and the birth and mismanagement of the beginning of the nuclear age. The authors claim that Americans then, and now, are haunted by the devastating psychological effects of the bomb.”</span></span></div><div class="ecxMsoNoSpacing" style="margin-bottom: 1.35em; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: verdana, sans-serif;">Lifton and Mitchell are evidence-based writers, not conspiratologists, but they could find no other explanation for how such a seminal event could have been distorted and misrepresented for a half century.</span></div><div class="ecxMsoNoSpacing" style="color: #2a2a2a; font-family: Verdana; line-height: 15px; margin-bottom: 1.35em; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;"><span style="font-family: verdana, sans-serif; line-height: 17px;"><span style="color: black; line-height: normal;"> </span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: black; line-height: normal;"><span style="font-family: verdana, sans-serif; line-height: 17px;">Nuclear power and nuclear weapons have been sold to the public relentlessly, in the first instance as necessary, and the second, as safe. </span><span style="font-family: verdana, sans-serif; line-height: 17px;">Rory O’ Connor and Richard Bell coined the term “Nuke Speak” to describe the Orwellian methods deployed by the nuclear industry’s PR offensive in a book length analysis of a well funded campaign that continues to this day using euphemistic language to mask its real agenda.</span></span></div><div class="ecxMsoNoSpacing" style="margin-bottom: 1.35em; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: verdana, sans-serif;">And today, as the world watches the dreadful and even Darwinian struggle for survival by the earthquake and tsunami victims in Japan, as information about the extent of the nuclear danger trickles out, President Obama has reaffirmed his commitment to build new nuclear plants.</span></div><div class="ecxMsoNoSpacing" style="margin-bottom: 1.35em; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: verdana, sans-serif;">Others stress more parochial concerns.<span style="line-height: 17px;"> </span>The TV Production community fears a shortage in Japanese made magnetic and recording tape. Consumers are being told that they may face a delay in ordering new iPads so get your orders in now. And, the Israeli new service YNET says people there worry about a sushi shortage.</span></div><div class="ecxMsoNoSpacing" style="color: #2a2a2a; font-family: Verdana; line-height: 15px; margin-bottom: 1.35em; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjDDepMJQTYG0tV09zKQ6GkKFrcYa46cNJWoC9Q3z46vGt-nIBQ90eeunGqjU2pLJdImBNylwMap8DcCduVmg2uiiTgsWsuOwIDpAH0ovQbYHAajriLV7ZwyZe5NjDis9Jb3MBa9A6tfPNP/s1600/Hiroshima.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" height="278" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjDDepMJQTYG0tV09zKQ6GkKFrcYa46cNJWoC9Q3z46vGt-nIBQ90eeunGqjU2pLJdImBNylwMap8DcCduVmg2uiiTgsWsuOwIDpAH0ovQbYHAajriLV7ZwyZe5NjDis9Jb3MBa9A6tfPNP/s400/Hiroshima.jpg" width="400" /></a><span style="font-family: verdana, sans-serif; line-height: 17px;"><span style="color: black; line-height: normal;"> </span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: black; font-family: verdana, sans-serif; line-height: normal;">Meanwhile, in Germany, more than 50,000 activists took to the streets in protest, but, so far, there has been no organized outcry here in the U.S. At the Left Forum in New York, the issue was barely addressed in the opening plenary.</span></div><div class="ecxMsoNoSpacing" style="color: #2a2a2a; font-family: Verdana; line-height: 15px; margin-bottom: 1.35em; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;"><span style="font-family: verdana, sans-serif; line-height: 17px;"><span style="color: black; line-height: normal;"> </span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: black; font-family: verdana, sans-serif; line-height: normal;">On the right, flamboyant talking head/provocateur Ann Coulter defended the imagined health benefits of a release of radiation to counter what she calls the alarmism of the environmentalists. She calls it a “cancer vaccine.”</span></div><div class="ecxMsoNoSpacing" style="color: #2a2a2a; font-family: Verdana; line-height: 15px; margin-bottom: 1.35em; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;"><span style="font-family: verdana, sans-serif; line-height: 17px;"><span style="color: black; line-height: normal;"> </span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: black; font-family: verdana, sans-serif; line-height: normal;">In a talk during a recent visit to Iran, which insists it is not making nuclear weapons, I raised questions about what their government said they want to do: expand their nuclear power plants. When I questioned the wisdom of<span style="line-height: 17px;"> </span>that approach, I was jeered because they felt I was challenging their “right” to have what other countries have, their right to “progress.” The thought that the plants could be dangerous was dismissed,</span></div><div class="ecxMsoNoSpacing" style="color: #2a2a2a; font-family: Verdana; line-height: 15px; margin-bottom: 1.35em; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;"><span style="font-family: verdana, sans-serif; line-height: 17px;"><span style="color: black; line-height: normal;"> </span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: black; font-family: verdana, sans-serif; line-height: normal;">What they don’t seem to know and what millions in Japan are finding out is this technology—with spent rods that are never “spent” and the nuclear waste that will outlive us all-- is inherently unsafe.<span style="line-height: 17px;"> </span>Jonathan Schell makes this point well in a recent essay in the Nation:</span></div><div class="ecxMsoNoSpacing" style="color: #2a2a2a; font-family: Verdana; line-height: 15px; margin-bottom: 1.35em; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;"><span style="font-family: verdana, sans-serif; line-height: 17px;"><span style="color: black; line-height: normal;"> </span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: black; font-family: verdana, sans-serif; line-height: normal;">“The chain of events at the reactors now running out of control provides a case history of the underlying mismatch between human nature and the force we imagine we can control. Nuclear power is a complex, high technology. But the things that endemically malfunction are of a humble kind.</span></div><div class="ecxMsoNoSpacing" style="color: #2a2a2a; font-family: Verdana; line-height: 15px; margin-bottom: 1.35em; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;"><span style="font-family: verdana, sans-serif; line-height: 17px;"><span style="color: black; line-height: normal;"> </span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: black; font-family: verdana, sans-serif; line-height: normal;">The art of nuclear power is to boil water with the incredible heat generated by a nuclear chain reaction. But such temperatures necessitate continuous cooling. Cooling requires pumps. Pumps require conventional power. These are the things that habitually go wrong—and have gone wrong in Japan. A backup generator shuts down. A battery runs out. The pump grinds to a halt. You might suppose that it is easy to pump water into a big container, and that is usually true, but the best-laid plans go awry from time to time. Sometimes the problem is a tsunami, and sometimes it is an operator asleep at the switch.”</span></div><div class="ecxMsoNoSpacing" style="color: #2a2a2a; font-family: Verdana; line-height: 15px; margin-bottom: 1.35em; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;"><span style="font-family: verdana, sans-serif; line-height: 17px;"><span style="color: black; line-height: normal;">As the “incident” records of our own Nuclear Regulatory Agency make clear, these are not just Japanese problems.<span style="line-height: 17px;"> </span>The Christian Science Minitor reports, “<span style="line-height: 17px;">The Nuclear Regulatory Commission failed to resolve known safety problems, leading to 14 'near-misses' in US nuclear power plants in 2009 and 2010, according to a new report from a nuclear watchdog group.”</span></span></span></div><div class="ecxMsoNoSpacing" style="color: #2a2a2a; font-family: Verdana; line-height: 15px; margin-bottom: 1.35em; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;"><span style="font-family: verdana, sans-serif; line-height: 17px;"><span style="color: black; line-height: normal;"> </span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: black; font-family: verdana, sans-serif; line-height: normal;">We don’t even know the full of the extent of the accidents, unintentional releases of radiation and other problems in this country much less in others with fewer rules and less oversight. No one expected Chenobyl to explode, claiming so many lives; no one knows where the next disaster will occur.</span></div><div class="ecxMsoNoSpacing" style="color: #2a2a2a; font-family: Verdana; line-height: 15px; margin-bottom: 1.35em; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;"><span style="font-family: verdana, sans-serif; line-height: 17px;"><span style="color: black; line-height: normal;"> </span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: black; line-height: normal;"><span style="font-family: verdana, sans-serif; line-height: 17px;">Bernie Sanders is calling for a full investigation of nuclear safety here. Ralph Nader writes, “</span><span style="font-family: verdana, sans-serif; line-height: 17px;">"The unfolding multiple nuclear reactor catastrophe in Japan is prompting overdue attention to the 104 nuclear plants in the United States - many of them aging, many of them near earthquake faults, some on the west coast exposed to potential tsunamis."</span></span></div><div class="ecxMsoNoSpacing" style="color: #2a2a2a; font-family: Verdana; line-height: 15px; margin-bottom: 1.35em; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;"><span style="font-family: verdana, sans-serif; line-height: 17px;"><span style="color: black; line-height: normal;"> </span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: black; font-family: verdana, sans-serif; line-height: normal;">The global nuclear roulette game goes on. Even moderate and restrained criticisms are dismissed until there is an “event” that cannot be denied. Nuclear energy supporters promise that<span style="line-height: 17px;"> </span>“Gen 4,” the next generation of reactors, will be much safer.<span style="line-height: 17px;"> </span></span></div><div class="ecxMsoNoSpacing" style="color: #2a2a2a; font-family: Verdana; line-height: 15px; margin-bottom: 1.35em; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;"><span style="font-family: verdana, sans-serif; line-height: 17px;"><span style="color: black; line-height: normal;"> </span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: black; line-height: normal;"><span style="font-family: verdana, sans-serif; line-height: 17px;">Problem solved?<span style="line-height: 17px;"> </span>Not everyone thinks so. The Bulletin of Atomic Scientists carries an assessment by </span><span style="font-family: verdana, sans-serif; line-height: 17px;">Hugh Gusterson on “The Lessons of Fukishima.”</span></span></div><div class="ecxMsoNoSpacing" style="color: #2a2a2a; font-family: Verdana; line-height: 15px; margin-bottom: 1.35em; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;"><span style="font-family: verdana, sans-serif; line-height: 17px;"><span style="color: black; line-height: normal;"> </span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: black; font-family: verdana, sans-serif; line-height: normal;">“To this anthropologist, then, the lesson of Fukushima is not that we now know what we need to know to design the perfectly safe reactor, but that the perfectly safe reactor is always just around the corner. It is technoscientific hubris to think otherwise.</span></div><div class="ecxMsoNoSpacing" style="color: #2a2a2a; font-family: Verdana; line-height: 15px; margin-bottom: 1.35em; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;"><span style="font-family: verdana, sans-serif; line-height: 17px;"><span style="color: black; line-height: normal;"> </span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: black; font-family: verdana, sans-serif; line-height: normal;">This leaves us with a choice between walking back from a technology that we decide is too dangerous or normalizing the risks of nuclear energy and accepting that an occasional Fukushima is the price we have to pay for a world with less carbon dioxide. It is wishful thinking to believe there is a third choice of nuclear energy without nuclear accidents.”</span></div><div class="ecxMsoNoSpacing" style="color: #2a2a2a; font-family: Verdana; line-height: 15px; margin-bottom: 1.35em; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;"><span style="font-family: verdana, sans-serif; line-height: 17px;"><span style="color: black; line-height: normal;"> </span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: black; font-family: verdana, sans-serif; line-height: normal;">We are still debating if nuclear power is worth the risk as irradiated clouds float over Los Angeles and there is a panicked run in the public to buy iodine pills.<span style="line-height: 17px;"> </span>The industry’s marketing machine is in crisis response mode and hasn’t missed a beat, while many of us look on with a sense of impotence as we are told, once again, what’s in our best interest.</span></div><div class="ecxMsoNoSpacing" style="color: #2a2a2a; font-family: Verdana; line-height: 15px; margin-bottom: 1.35em; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;"><span style="font-family: verdana, sans-serif; line-height: 17px;"><span style="color: black; line-height: normal;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: x-small;"> </span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: x-small;">(</span></i></span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: black; font-family: verdana, sans-serif; line-height: normal;"><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: x-small;">News Dissector Danny Schechter began covering nuclear power plant controversies in the early 1970’s. He blogs for Mediachannel.org. Comments to <a href="mailto:dissector@mediachannel.org" style="color: #0068cf; cursor: pointer; font-weight: inherit; line-height: 17px; text-decoration: underline;">dissector@mediachannel.org</a>)</span></i></span></div></div></div>Uday Prakashhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07587503029581457151noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9181128932143875441.post-67536761674771626122010-11-18T07:48:00.000-08:002010-11-18T07:48:33.064-08:00Why People of India are skeptical becoming a Nation<b>The problem</b><br />
<br />
<b>ANANYA VAJPEYI</b><br />
<b><i>(Seminar, Nov.2010)</i></b><br />
Sixty years of constitutional democracy and the rule of law in India would seem, on the face of it, like an occasion for taking stock and for celebrating the great Indian political experiment. The founding fathers and mothers put a structure in place, enshrined a nation’s dreams in an impressively liberal text, and six decades later, it appears we still abide by that vision. All around us, there are polities in various kinds of malfunction – Pakistan, Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Nepal, Sri Lanka, Myanmar – and to our north, a prosperous but authoritarian China. India’s Constitution makes the country an oasis of rights, representation and justice in a desert of flailing, failing or otherwise flawed states.<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjdh3MRlGeBF9oElGx_o4JKXUD89fyqxKOTLv37WjtWTGvsc1JO9HjtBwehPC-0zAbwkGG0RA0J7Tksyzxi-ACYBNeEx6rWzXAreDdUcWTbM6FwfJUV3Qqrlm8rDxGEabu-YlsvPMXY0iUy/s1600/Gandhi.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjdh3MRlGeBF9oElGx_o4JKXUD89fyqxKOTLv37WjtWTGvsc1JO9HjtBwehPC-0zAbwkGG0RA0J7Tksyzxi-ACYBNeEx6rWzXAreDdUcWTbM6FwfJUV3Qqrlm8rDxGEabu-YlsvPMXY0iUy/s1600/Gandhi.jpg" /></a></div><br />
<br />
If only. ‘Between the idea/And the reality…/Falls the shadow,’ wrote T.S. Eliot in his great poem, ‘The Hollow Men’. So much of India is in such deep crisis that the promise of the Constitution, our proudest possession, our charter and our pillar, is beginning to seem utterly hollow. For millions of Indian citizens, the mere existence of the Constitution does not alleviate poverty, dispense justice, provide security, guarantee rights or compensate for long-standing inequity. Tribals, religious minorities, Dalits, women, and the poorest of the poor, oftentimes overlapping categories, suffer so acutely that they may as well be living in a rudderless state, where no organ – electoral, legal, legislative, administrative or military – looks out for their welfare. In the border states of the Northeast and Jammu and Kashmir, a state of exception to the rule of law, designated by the extraordinary dispensation, the Armed Forces Special Powers Act (AFSPA), suspends the constitutional regime in any case, so that citizens may not even have the expectation, if only to be disappointed, that their rights will be protected.<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg09K__aQhvj3o_z8wTPUj_OfQBk7MrcH4easY_mHSnRVQDsIs2gRyU9iNpeHOie1Pz0Mm-Dhx5zKKXkCcSgGD5Ri6czW159PbwSuCey_811mKZtIinCzEW40oUvOfLqWQ64c2DQJLdhQHz/s1600/Phot+of+Mahatma+Gandhi.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg09K__aQhvj3o_z8wTPUj_OfQBk7MrcH4easY_mHSnRVQDsIs2gRyU9iNpeHOie1Pz0Mm-Dhx5zKKXkCcSgGD5Ri6czW159PbwSuCey_811mKZtIinCzEW40oUvOfLqWQ64c2DQJLdhQHz/s1600/Phot+of+Mahatma+Gandhi.jpg" /></a></div><br />
It could be argued that the Constitution, as the textual blueprint of the republic, is not responsible for its own marginalization, violation, or suspension. That it was conceived in a certain era, written in a certain spirit, and promulgated in good faith by the best political and legal minds active in India around the time of independence. That a document first articulated and steered by the likes of B.R. Ambedkar, Sardar Patel, Jawaharlal Nehru, Maulana Azad, Rajendra Prasad, K.M. Munshi and Constitutional Advisor B.K. Rau, continuously guarded and carefully interpreted by three generations of lawmakers since, is as good as it gets for an overly large, unremittingly poor, vexingly diverse and precariously free post-colony like India. That we may criticize the Constitution; we may lament its disrespect or point out its inefficacy in many parts of India, but without it, we would still be colonized, if not by the British then by undemocratic, militarist, communal or other sorts of nonprogressive strains within the Indian political spectrum.<br />
<br />
Better to have an excellent constitution in the letter if not in practice, than no constitution at all, the objector says, and we should be grateful for the moral commitment and practical foresight of our founders. They took three years to draft the text and tried to correct for every problem that they could think of. They overcame tremendous disagreements to achieve consensus. Without that inaugural effort and investment we would be nowhere today, as a nation or even as an idea.<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjgmEr0OxiCu9m-Rn6mtWifx-3DTO6mYHixlOlyuit3N3Qsrq-41A7mnH_cXG8CJMnmSAnkl0cEH_wE31o8fq9pOSN-fgMy0cKM7Dxchfiw6ZEJsuLwxHpB3Iz7htIfp-3funlFISnuYWtt/s1600/Ambedkar.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjgmEr0OxiCu9m-Rn6mtWifx-3DTO6mYHixlOlyuit3N3Qsrq-41A7mnH_cXG8CJMnmSAnkl0cEH_wE31o8fq9pOSN-fgMy0cKM7Dxchfiw6ZEJsuLwxHpB3Iz7htIfp-3funlFISnuYWtt/s1600/Ambedkar.jpg" /></a></div>There is some merit to these objections. The Constitution provides a stable point of reference, so that we are able to describe egregious attempts to hijack state power, undermine democracy, disturb the peace and deprive citizens of their rights as ‘unconstitutional’. We may also amend the constitution to make it more responsive to present-day needs and to unanticipated developments in the polity, economy or society. The Indian Constitution has been amended a hundred times, a factor that arguably contributes to its survival. If there were no constitution, or if it did not look anything like it does, we would not be in a position to criticize, condemn or resist some of the gravest challenges the republic has faced thus far: the Emergency, Ayodhya, the over-extension of the AFSPA in Kashmir, to name just a few of many.<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgr6JgPZbbPv7m5bEEqf-ji6SxL1LaTWXDRRU6k1r9pH3Z63xd0zTRLWlgjiUOTF9avwhqymN3N9NE30VxY1acyrctvik4ZEutbXINwVVLErr0oGGlq9qZA8x1EXJltk11QmBSpWEByfY0P/s1600/Ambedkar+1.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgr6JgPZbbPv7m5bEEqf-ji6SxL1LaTWXDRRU6k1r9pH3Z63xd0zTRLWlgjiUOTF9avwhqymN3N9NE30VxY1acyrctvik4ZEutbXINwVVLErr0oGGlq9qZA8x1EXJltk11QmBSpWEByfY0P/s1600/Ambedkar+1.jpg" /></a></div>The Constitution is an orienting mechanism, a talisman, a symbol, an everunrealizable ideal and a permanent mirror held up to our nation. Governments may come and go, wars and insurrections may disrupt normal life, ideologies may wax and wane, the economy may ebb and flow. But in principle it’s always possible for India, as a nation with a democratic, pluralistic, flexible and durable Constitution, to perform a reality-check and pull itself up by the bootstraps. Survivors of the Holocaust like Hannah Arendt and Primo Levi used to say the worst thing about the Nazi regime was that anything was possible in that world without the law. The Constitution preserves the aspiration that in India at least, it is not the case that anything might be possible; that beyond a point, you cannot desecrate the rule of law and keep on getting away with it. The buck stops somewhere, even if only at a vanishing point, infinitely far from the here-and-now.<br />
<br />
The Constitution of India, as an intellectual artefact, owed its inspiration and its form, in the first place, to its American, French, Canadian and Irish predecessors, to the legacy of English parliamentary democracy, to Anglo-Indian law, and to British jurisprudence. Indian liberals and modernists are quick to emphasize this genealogy of the Constitution. But this document did not come into being in an epistemological vacuum, as it were – and it hardly arrived in the mail, from overseas.<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi_O4SdkPNQldH3kyOg6xLuDa3ONgHnR5-ZEO96nVhylIIEjtLnq3U6L-aTO6YmeSHUL5_QrSbQ9cuHy_pPD9LIGTxKNQIynnBrwnknmcUQe79BBJJh8gGno1jPLzWJNvRnwcSub0i-Vue3/s1600/Dr.+Bhimrao+Ramji+Ambedkar+-+1946.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi_O4SdkPNQldH3kyOg6xLuDa3ONgHnR5-ZEO96nVhylIIEjtLnq3U6L-aTO6YmeSHUL5_QrSbQ9cuHy_pPD9LIGTxKNQIynnBrwnknmcUQe79BBJJh8gGno1jPLzWJNvRnwcSub0i-Vue3/s320/Dr.+Bhimrao+Ramji+Ambedkar+-+1946.jpg" width="250" /></a></div><br />
Rather, it was born into a culture with a long and complex history of legal and legislative discourse, one or more textual traditions dealing with the law, and protocols of argumentation, exegesis and interpretation that are among the most ancient, the most rigorous, the most exacting and the most continuous in any part of the literate world. Many of the members of the nationalist movement, of the Constituent Assembly and of the first legislature were formally trained as lawyers in England, but also conversant with Indic legal and political traditions, and with ideas of ethical sovereignty, righteous rule, and normative justice derived from Brahmin and Islamic codes of pre-colonial provenance.<br />
<br />
To this mixed inheritance of the founders of the republic – modern and traditional, Western and Indic, Christian, Hindu and Muslim, imported and indigenous – should be added the lessons of the preceding thirty years of Gandhian politics. Gandhi’s harnessing and shepherding of disparate anti-colonial, radical and nationalist energies was successful in ousting the British Raj and establishing Indian sovereignty, but the Mahatma himself never thought in terms of translating swaraj into a Constitution. His assassination in early 1948 forever ended the possibility of any eventual compromise he might have made with the idea of a constitution. Others tried to theorize a so-called ‘Gandhian Constitution’, incorporating some ideas about village-level democracy and panchayati raj, without much uptake from the Constituent Assembly as a whole.<br />
<br />
Ambedkar’s closing address to the Constituent Assembly at its penultimate session in November 1949 explicitly asks that ‘the bloody methods of revolution’ – in which he includes, somewhat incoherently, ‘civil disobedience, non-cooperation and satyagraha’ – be left behind in favour of ‘constitutional methods of achieving our social and economic objectives.’ The Chairman of the Drafting Committee went on to say: ‘These methods are nothing but the Grammar of Anarchy and the sooner they are abandoned, the better for us.’1 In other words, he was closing the chapter on Gandhian struggle. In the same speech he chastises Socialist and Communist critics of the Indian Constitution, invokes the American Thomas Jefferson and the British John Stuart Mill, and reminds his colleagues of democratic tendencies in the long-ago Buddhist republics of the subcontinent.<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjWgfCbFEVHYdxw9-NDhSjYGxnWZze5uEovI642Me5srLx3c3mHjXFYmCtE7QKgEpL9rt6yYvKCI8BCN5bgJTKvO890uUNn6oyHAcUaxQUlPrQfeV5GcvxNl8TLafTbWc-Zigngdyvi4zCm/s1600/seperatist.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" height="267" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjWgfCbFEVHYdxw9-NDhSjYGxnWZze5uEovI642Me5srLx3c3mHjXFYmCtE7QKgEpL9rt6yYvKCI8BCN5bgJTKvO890uUNn6oyHAcUaxQUlPrQfeV5GcvxNl8TLafTbWc-Zigngdyvi4zCm/s400/seperatist.jpg" width="400" /></a></div><br />
The struggle over the genealogy of political thought in India is apparent even at the very moment that the Constitution is completed and presented to the nation. Hardly two years after independence and soon after Gandhi’s death, Ambedkar is making it clear how he wants to locate the Constitution in a longer history of state-building in India: a position that by no means goes uncontested by his colleagues both within and outside the Constituent Assembly. Tellingly, within another few months, Ambedkar had already resigned his position as Law Minister in Nehru’s cabinet.<br />
<br />
Historians of decolonizing and post-colonial India, and of the republic’s foundation and subsequent fortunes, from Granville Austin to Ramachandra Guha, have pointed out the different strands in the Constitution’s DNA: the Government of India Act of 1935, which provides an element of ‘colonial continuity’; the examples and models of other constitutions belonging to modern democratic republics older than India; Gandhian swaraj, a dormant gene or a road not taken; a ‘national revolution’, whence the imperative of democracy, and a ‘social revolution’, whence the impetus for equality.<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"></div><br />
Yet Ambedkar is right to caution his fellow-founders that while liberty, recently achieved, is to be celebrated, neither equality nor fraternity have deep roots in Indian society. He even goes on to make a fine distinction between the idea of India being based on a ‘people’ versus a ‘nation’, and points out that mere political independence for India does not entail or guarantee Indians becoming a ‘nation’ in the true sense of that term. These notes of scepticism and criticism at the very dawn of the republic are jarring, but also indicative of how genuine Ambedkar’s engagement was with the problem of constructing a new political paradigm for India. He wasn’t going to pretend that simply writing a constitution was an answer to India’s long history of entrenched inequality and persistent injustice: and in this respect, we can do no better than follow in his footsteps today, on a significant anniversary of the Constitution.<br />
<br />
Of course, it should also be immediately apparent that to an extent Ambedkar’s rejection of what he calls ‘the Grammar of Anarchy’ is premised on a misreading or misrepresentation of the Gandhian revolution, because it completely elides and ignores its core value: non-violence. But then again, perhaps this is understandable, given the fundamental differences between Gandhi and Ambedkar on a number of issues, including caste, religion and passive resistance – differences that were never reconciled to the very end of either man’s life, and have not been reconciled by their respective followers to date.<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgfKZYGcpQ0cetcbqriRCTJgLWS5ebrHjmJkuKJ0s27aglSzC8S9X1BXzGdWlODqwvfctbkek7c8ttGTdkIyy0U2NyAXKy7MmqK8nEvO7avIJvZawSJXjrrmXTOiFaq2s347v3_g7klBWML/s1600/seperatists.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="402" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgfKZYGcpQ0cetcbqriRCTJgLWS5ebrHjmJkuKJ0s27aglSzC8S9X1BXzGdWlODqwvfctbkek7c8ttGTdkIyy0U2NyAXKy7MmqK8nEvO7avIJvZawSJXjrrmXTOiFaq2s347v3_g7klBWML/s640/seperatists.jpg" width="640" /></a></div><br />
The late D.R. Nagaraj showed us in his brief but important career as a social theorist interested most of all in inequality and emancipation, that the disagreement between Gandhi and Ambedkar on caste was no minor quibble. Caste goes to the very heart of the people, the nation, the state and the Constitution of India. We could say that the Constitution was the most comprehensive attempt ever made to undo caste society and rebuild India on the basis of equal citizenship, fundamental rights, and compensatory social justice.<br />
<br />
Six decades later, the goal of an egalitarian and just society still being elusive, this continues to be one of the Constitution’s main raisons d’être. While the Constitution seeks to create a flat community of citizens in place of an intricate hierarchy of caste-based groups, the historical complexity, the political potential, the religious meanings and the social practices associated with caste identities have in large measure remained intractable to the legal and administrative measures envisaged by the founders, principally Ambedkar. The alignment between the social teleology of the Constitution and Indian social reality has gone progressively awry.<br />
<br />
Caste, after an initial recession in the Nehru years, has enjoyed a new lease of life in post-Mandal, globalizing India. Questions around caste-based political activity, electoral democracy, reservations in education and employment, and most recently around the idea of a caste census, continue to be central to Indian politics and legislation. If the Constitution, and especially Ambedkar among those responsible for its drafting, anticipated a withering away of caste identities as the republic evolved, this has not occurred – quite the opposite.<br />
<br />
Besides caste, another area of public life in which the Constitution is at the very centre of attention, is at the margins of the Indian Union, i.e., in the eight states where the AFSPA is in effect, either because it was imposed sometime in the past and never removed, or because it is seen to be actively needed in an ongoing way. Arguably, if the government is inclined to suspend the rule of law and enforce what is effectively martial law, then it can hardly worry that the Constitution is not sufficiently respected in these parts of the country. Rationally, the state cannot both suspend constitutional rights and at the same time demand the citizens’ allegiance to the Constitution of India.<br />
<br />
But this is precisely the situation in the Northeast and in Jammu and Kashmir these days, particularly in the latter. Except for the provision of periodic elections, the Constitution is not available to the people of these regions as their bulwark and their appeal against state excesses, especially military brutality. When these very people, beleaguered and cast into a state of exception, disavow their faith in the Constitution, they are characterized as antinational and secessionist. When they then go on to really demand separation from the Union, we wonder why they do not feel love and loyalty towards our splendidly liberal and democratic Constitution.<br />
<br />
This cycle of exception and alienation has gone on for over 50 years in the Northeast and over 20 years in Kashmir. The breaking point may well be upon us, as far as Kashmir goes. The message is clear: a constitution in suspension is a recipe for rebellion, secession and the implosion of the Union so painstakingly and so tenuously constructed in the early years of the republic, by use of a combination of methods, fair and not-so-fair. The Indian state must rethink the purpose, the efficacy and the implementation of the AFSPA, as well as a host of other extraordinary laws that undermine, weaken and can ultimately destroy the writ of the Constitution or worse, engender in the public opinion a terminal aversion against it.<br />
<br />
A priori, every single part of this country deserves to be governed by the representatives of the people, duly elected and installed in office, and authorized to administer the full panoply of institutions of the executive, the judiciary, the legislature and the armed forces. The sun of the Constitution ought to shine in every dark corner of India. Simply put, those who are left out for long, want out for good – rightly, if regrettably, so.<br />
<br />
Tracts of India directly affected by Maoist insurgencies, inhabited by autochthonous populations, rich in mineral resources and potentially the most attractive to capitalist corporations, are also, increasingly, zones of constitutional crisis. Again, logic very similar to the inflamed borderlands can be seen unfolding before our very eyes in the tribal heartlands: people don’t want a constitution that fails to protect their interests or guarantee their basic rights, livelihood and security – not because it is hostile to them in and of itself, but because it is unavailable to them on account of some or other type of emergency.2<br />
<br />
The mere holding of elections from time to time has not contained unrest nor reconciled disaffected populations to state power, in many parts of the Northeast, in J&K, and in Naxalite areas. State and non-state actors complain that separatist and insurgent leaders, whether Kashmiris or Nagas or Maoists, don’t want to come to the table for talks; refuse to contest elections and form elected governments; insist on using armed methods to spread their ideology and make their demands; counter policy with violence; invite deadly counter-insurgency operations upon themselves and hapless civilians and, in general, do not uphold constitutional norms of negotiation. Indeed.<br />
<br />
Rebels against the idea of India have picked up the gun at every point since the very inception of the republic. But it has been the state’s prerogative to either follow suit and abandon the constitutional path, or hew close to the Constitution’s liberal vision and attempt to bring in estranged sections through a combination of persuasion and incentives. By enforcing extraordinary laws, by sending in armed forces, by granting impunity to soldiers and paramilitaries for their actions against armed or unarmed civilians, by denying citizens redress, justice or compensation, by creating a war-like situation for a population that has political, social, cultural and economic grievances possible to address without force, it is the state that sets aside the Constitution. The Indian state has done this too many times, in too many places, and for too long.<br />
<br />
It is time for citizens in the so-called ‘normal’ parts of the country to consider how they want to defend their Constitution against such misuse and ill-treatment by the state, a procedure that leaves millions of people exposed to both everyday as well as excessive violence, and ultimately turns them against India. If the Indian Union sees any attrition to its territory in the coming years on account of separatism and civil strife (not such an unlikely scenario as hawkish policy-makers like to believe), this will have come to pass at least partly because the state allowed the cancer of exception to eat away at the body politic, and did not administer the medicine of constitutional reinstatement and restitution in time. It bears repeating that periodic exercises in the electoral process do not always prove to be a sufficient counterweight to the toxic effects of the AFSPA, even if elections are relatively free and fair (a tough challenge), and even if significant percentages of the relevant populations do turn out to vote.<br />
<br />
The state’s reasoning for why military, paramilitary and police must replace civil agencies in the work of everyday governance, a step which can and does go horribly wrong, is that disruptive violence (from secessionist and insurgent groups) has to be met with restorative counter-violence (from the state) in order to ensure overall security for the population, and preserve the integrity of the Union of India. Defenders of the AFSPA insist that this is a sound rationale. But inevitably, questions arise: What are the limits of the immunity that such an extraordinary law grants to the armed forces, when does the justifiable control of terror become overkill, and when should a quantitative assessment about the necessary degree of force give way to a qualitative judgment about whether force is necessary at all, over and above alternative – peaceful – means of addressing the situation?<br />
<br />
There appears to be a dire need for a system of checks-and-balances, perhaps also originating from the Constitution, to be instituted, so that the explicitly democratic mandate of the Indian republic may be strengthened against an always lurking authoritarian tendency (a legacy of the post-colonial state’s colonialist and imperialist predecessor).<br />
<br />
It may be true that extremist and terrorist organizations have as little regard for civilian life and safety as do trigger-happy paramilitaries, and that both sides violate human rights and abuse their armed power. But because the state is by definition the stronger party, and the one authorized to govern, the responsibility of exercising restraint, minimizing collateral damage, and setting an example of honourable conduct lies first and foremost with the state. This is a responsibility that it cannot ever relinquish, no matter what the provocation, and no matter how difficult the conditions for negotiation and dialogue with enemies of the state. The Constitution is what can make the difference between India and centrifugal anarchy (Pakistan), India and soulless growth (China), India and exclusivist notions of citizenship (Israel), India and unchecked consumerism (the US), India and any form of power that might be unethical and inimical to human flourishing.<br />
<br />
The Constitution of the Republic of India, in a country that has produced more texts in more languages for more centuries than any other nation in the world, is a singular text. It is comparable to no other text: not the Bhagavad Gita or the Qur’an, not the Holy Bible or the Guru Granth Sahib, not the Ramayana or the Mahabharata, not Manu’s Dharmashastra or Kautilya’s Arthashastra, not the edicts of Ashoka or the diaries of Babur, not the inscriptions of Samudragupta or the poems of Bahadur Shah Zafar, not Gandhi’s Hind Swaraj or Nehru’s Discovery of India, not Tagore’s national anthem or Ambedkar’s The Buddha and His Dhamma. It is completely unique and unprecedented in the history of India, crowded as that history is with innumerable texts.<br />
<br />
For those who ask, ‘What can a mere text do?’ we need only turn to places where this text has been suspended, neglected, ignored or transgressed, and we find injustices and atrocities of every kind rampant. A text like the Constitution can do exactly what such a text is supposed to do: nothing more, and nothing less, than upholding the world. After 250 years of colonial rule, nearly a century of imperialism, incessant soul-searching, and the most profound political and intellectual effort undertaken by hundreds of thousands of individuals across the length and breadth of the subcontinent, India finally became an independent nation-state on 15 August 1947. After three years of Constituent Assembly debates, on 26 January 1950 India gifted itself the chance to unlock its society and set itself free.<br />
<br />
Given a very old and civilized culture, the Indian nation, protected by its founding ideals, served by resilient institutions, and fired by new economic opportunities, ought to be able to find a way to allow its people to live with dignity, in peace, and with the means and the prospects to better their lot. If 60 years after the founding of the republic millions of citizens still remain deprived of their liberty, then somewhere along the way India has forgotten that the key to its emancipation lies in its own priceless, peerless Constitution.<br />
<br />
* Thanks to Ramachandra Guha, Dilip Simeon and Sanjib Baruah for detailed comments on earlier drafts of this essay. D.R. Nagaraj’s classic The Flaming Feet has just been reissued from Permanent Black (2010), together with his previously unpublished writings and a critical introduction by Ashis Nandy, edited by Prithvi Datta Chandra Shobhi. The complete text of the Indian Constitution is accessible at: http://indiacode.nic.in/coiweb/welcome.html<br />
<br />
Footnotes:<br />
<br />
1. Constituent Assembly, Friday, 25 November 1949.<br />
<br />
2. If anything, the 5th Schedule of the Constitution specifically addresses Scheduled Tribes and Scheduled Areas, but are ruling parties implementing it in the states affected by Maoism?Uday Prakashhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07587503029581457151noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9181128932143875441.post-70010132748321643982010-10-21T05:08:00.000-07:002010-10-21T05:08:05.544-07:00Hindutva versus Hinduism<div align="center" style="border-collapse: collapse; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; font: normal normal normal 10pt/normal Tahoma;">by</div><div align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="border-collapse: collapse; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-left: 0in; margin-right: 0in; margin-top: 0in; text-align: center;"><span lang="EN-US"><a href="http://www.indianexpress.com/about/feedback.html?url=http://www.indianexpress.com/full_story.php?content_id=34375&title=Hindutva%20versus%20Hinduism" style="color: #336633;" target="_blank"><span style="font-size: 10pt; text-decoration: none;"><span style="color: blue;" title="http://www.indianexpress.com/about/feedback.html?url=http://www.indianexpress.com/full_story.php?content_id=34375&title=Hindutva%20versus%20Hinduism
CTRL + Click to follow link">SARAL JHINGRAN</span></span></a></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="border-collapse: collapse; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-left: 0in; margin-right: 0in; margin-top: 0in; text-align: justify;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="border-collapse: collapse; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-left: 0in; margin-right: 0in; margin-top: 0in; text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-size: 10pt;">Hinduism is the most difficult religion to define as it does not have a Book, a prophet or a common creed. Consequently, both its supporters and critics can take up any one of its various aspects and present a conception of it that is nowhere near the reality. This is exactly what is being done by the protagonists of Hindutva.</span></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh8Js1uOphXe7xqml3NcodgriPJLZ35RLowYBFztDB4klLMhqa9KViITpSMnofQz_6Xj1DVffosCCXyE_6ZxHwm0ZqLE7A4M3-d5Dsn14RuD696YHR9HUVwDXLX-iIpx-INE7jn2SQdTTyQ/s1600/ramayana.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh8Js1uOphXe7xqml3NcodgriPJLZ35RLowYBFztDB4klLMhqa9KViITpSMnofQz_6Xj1DVffosCCXyE_6ZxHwm0ZqLE7A4M3-d5Dsn14RuD696YHR9HUVwDXLX-iIpx-INE7jn2SQdTTyQ/s320/ramayana.jpg" width="255" /></a></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="border-collapse: collapse; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-left: 0in; margin-right: 0in; margin-top: 0in; text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-size: 10pt;"><br />
</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="border-collapse: collapse; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-left: 0in; margin-right: 0in; margin-top: 0in; text-align: justify;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="border-collapse: collapse; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-left: 0in; margin-right: 0in; margin-top: 0in; text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-size: 10pt;">First, let us take up the conception of Rama. They project Rama as the sole Deity of Hinduism, a symbol not only of Hinduism, but of nationalism. This is a fantastic assertion. Rama cannot be a symbol of nationalism, because religious faith and nationalism belong to two entirely different conceptual frameworks. Nationalism is a modern conception and is territorial and political in its connotation. Religious faith is a matter of heart, or soul if you wish, and is not related to territory or political sovereignty. More importantly, Rama could not be a symbol of Hinduism even, as the latter has so many gods, and Rama is but one of them, and that too a later entrant in the Hindu pantheon. If at all the votaries of Hindutva want to establish the historicity of Rama, they must depend on Valmiki’s Ramayana; and there is no suggestion of Rama’s divinity therein. It is in Tulsidas’s Ramacharita Manas that Rama is declared divine. But this was written approximately one and a half millennia after Valmiki’s Ramayana and cannot be cited to prove Rama’s historicity.</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="border-collapse: collapse; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-left: 0in; margin-right: 0in; margin-top: 0in; text-align: justify;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="border-collapse: collapse; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-left: 0in; margin-right: 0in; margin-top: 0in; text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-size: 10pt;">Second, granting that Rama is probably a historical figure in view of the depth of feelings for his story; also granting that Rama was born in Ayodhya, it is hard to believe that the exact spot of Rama’s birth can be pinpointed with accuracy. The declaration that the spot at which Rama was born is determined by faith is stretching the meaning of faith. Here it should be remembered that the greatest difference between Hinduism and the Semitic religions is that, unlike the latter, Hinduism has no historical beginning. If tomorrow, it could be proved that there was no historical Jesus Christ, Christianity would be destroyed. But if it were to proved that Krishna was not a historical person, it would not diminish the Gita’s authenticity. The same holds true for Rama. Hinduism is Sanatan dharma, marked by its content, attitudes and values, and not by its historicity.</span></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEizigEPlUnH7GOaOuezzvkfhYD5M3iVGl2PHC9ZsdUN24UzhJjHiTfMhxSL45pikLxT4hDqARs88K7lF4D3KNGdm0fTPgm39cvKlOBN_k1WkbKuTX7hb2rovXQZtM8J41Y5kTupWqpP9qyL/s1600/Ramayana+2.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="225" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEizigEPlUnH7GOaOuezzvkfhYD5M3iVGl2PHC9ZsdUN24UzhJjHiTfMhxSL45pikLxT4hDqARs88K7lF4D3KNGdm0fTPgm39cvKlOBN_k1WkbKuTX7hb2rovXQZtM8J41Y5kTupWqpP9qyL/s320/Ramayana+2.jpg" width="320" /></a></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="border-collapse: collapse; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-left: 0in; margin-right: 0in; margin-top: 0in; text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-size: 10pt;"><br />
</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="border-collapse: collapse; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-left: 0in; margin-right: 0in; margin-top: 0in; text-align: justify;">Thirdly, the Hindutva people have destroyed the conception of Rama which the Hindus have worshipped through the ages. Rama is maryada purushottam, the embodiment of all Aryan virtues. An extreme dedication to duty, respect for elders, affection for juniors, compassion for all and peace (shanti) characterise him. He hardly ever gets angry and is unwilling to attack anybody unless absolutely necessary. His idols have traditionally portrayed Rama in shanta or abhaya mudra — with the right hand raised in a gesture of blessing and a beatific smile on his face. Also, traditionally, Rama, like Krishna, is never worshipped alone but always with his consort. The Rama of Hindutva stands alone, with bow held aloft, ready for aggression. Both innovations go against the traditional conception of Rama.</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="border-collapse: collapse; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-left: 0in; margin-right: 0in; margin-top: 0in; text-align: justify;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="border-collapse: collapse; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-left: 0in; margin-right: 0in; margin-top: 0in; text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-size: 10pt;">Fourthly, there is hardly anything common between traditional Hinduism and Hindutva. Traditional Hinduism worships many gods, and declares that all Gods are but different names of one Supreme Divine Reality. But the ideology of Hindutva seems to declare that there is but one God called Rama, who is the symbol of both Hindusim and Indian nationalism. The core of traditional Hinduism is religious toleration and even ahimsa which, though borrowed from heterodox sects, has been so internalised by Hinduism that it can be safely assumed as belonging to the core of Hinduism. In contrast, Hindutva’s central message is aggression and destruction of enemies, real or imagined.</span></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhtMCOSk5rCxAmJB-cdLlDWGuBet6x6-JM-R24mm6xRI36FhbWMcKgeRwGKz0kSpUANmP95x0wZNXiQcYp9puDTTguKoPnA4Y1mYPutqNwhSclSSGYuEUJPiaZU2mBYvJ8qkFtI7T4E8hKf/s1600/Ramayana+1.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhtMCOSk5rCxAmJB-cdLlDWGuBet6x6-JM-R24mm6xRI36FhbWMcKgeRwGKz0kSpUANmP95x0wZNXiQcYp9puDTTguKoPnA4Y1mYPutqNwhSclSSGYuEUJPiaZU2mBYvJ8qkFtI7T4E8hKf/s1600/Ramayana+1.jpg" /></a></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="border-collapse: collapse; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-left: 0in; margin-right: 0in; margin-top: 0in; text-align: justify;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="border-collapse: collapse; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-left: 0in; margin-right: 0in; margin-top: 0in; text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-size: 10pt;">Fifthly, Hindutva has distorted the meaning of religious symbols. The project of distributing trishuls is an example. That Shiva has been portrayed holding a trishul does not mean that every Hindu should carry one. Vishnu is portrayed as carrying four things in his hands—shanka, chakra, gada, padma, Rama carries a bow and arrow, and Kali is supposed wear a garland of skulls. Does it mean that a Hindu should carry these things?</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="border-collapse: collapse; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-left: 0in; margin-right: 0in; margin-top: 0in; text-align: justify;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="border-collapse: collapse; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-left: 0in; margin-right: 0in; margin-top: 0in; text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-size: 10pt;">The Hindutva people have randomly picked varied elements from all these traditions to project Hinduism as an aggressive religion, without learning about the intrinsic characters of their Gods. Rama is God of righteousness, compassion; Krishna of Vrindavan is a God of love; Krishna teaches one to do one’s duty selflessly; and Shiva is declared Hole nath, a simple-hearted God who is easily appeased. None of this holds value for the Hindutva lot.</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="border-collapse: collapse; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-left: 0in; margin-right: 0in; margin-top: 0in; text-align: justify;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="border-collapse: collapse; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-left: 0in; margin-right: 0in; margin-top: 0in; text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-size: 10pt;">Hindutva is an attempt at semitising Hindusim. The uniqueness of Hinduism lay in its extreme liberalness, toleration and vision of one Divine Reality residing in all. By trying to project Hinduism as a self-assertive, aggressive, and strictly monotheistic religion, Hindutva could destroy it.</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="border-collapse: collapse; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-left: 0in; margin-right: 0in; margin-top: 0in; text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-size: 10pt;"><br />
</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="border-collapse: collapse; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-left: 0in; margin-right: 0in; margin-top: 0in; text-align: justify;"><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #674ea7;">(Indian Express, 31 October 2003, Chandigarh)</span></i></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="border-collapse: collapse; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-left: 0in; margin-right: 0in; margin-top: 0in;"><br />
</div>Uday Prakashhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07587503029581457151noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9181128932143875441.post-80072964646347878032010-09-24T23:38:00.000-07:002010-09-24T23:38:54.805-07:00It's a Danger Signal<h3 style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: 1.8em; font-weight: normal; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;">This Year, Contractor Deaths Exceed Military Ones in Iraq and Afghanistan</h3><div class="article_date" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: 12px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;">Thursday 23 September 2010</div><div class="jgasm" style="color: #cc0000; font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: 12px; font-style: italic; letter-spacing: 0px; margin-bottom: 20px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;">by: T. Christian Miller </div><div class="alignright" style="display: inline; float: right; font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: 12px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px; padding-bottom: 1em; text-align: right;"><img alt="photo" height="320" src="http://www.truth-out.org/files/images/092410-5.jpg" style="border-bottom-color: rgb(204, 204, 204); border-bottom-style: solid; border-bottom-width: 1px; border-color: initial; border-left-color: rgb(204, 204, 204); border-left-style: solid; border-left-width: 1px; border-right-color: rgb(204, 204, 204); border-right-style: solid; border-right-width: 1px; border-style: initial; border-top-color: rgb(204, 204, 204); border-top-style: solid; border-top-width: 1px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 1.5em; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;" width="276" /><br />
<span class="photo_source" style="color: black; display: block; font-size: 0.875em; margin-left: 19px; text-align: left; width: 238px;">Eyrnis security personnel, contracted to provide security for the US Army Corps of Engineers in Iraq, pose at the Baghdad parade field. (Photo: <a href="http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:The_Swords_of_Q%C4%81dis%C4%AByah,_Baghdad.jpg" style="color: black; text-decoration: none;" target="_blank">jamesdale10 / WikiMedia</a>)</span></div><div class="article_content" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: 1.1em; line-height: 1.6em;"><div class="rteleft" style="margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px; padding-left: 0px; text-align: left; width: 490px;"><a href="http://www.dol.gov/owcp/dlhwc/lsdbareports.htm" style="text-decoration: none;" target="_blank"><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #e06666;">Labor Department figures</span></span></i></a><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #e06666;"> show that more than 44,000 contractors have reported injuries since 2001, compared to about 40,000 U.S. troops. The figures are not entirely comparable, since contractor injuries include minor workplace injuries.</span></span></i></div><div class="rteleft" style="margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px; padding-left: 0px; text-align: left; width: 490px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;">More private contractors than soldiers were killed in Iraq and Afghanistan in recent months, the first time in history that corporate casualties have outweighed military losses on America’s battlefields.</span></div><div class="rteleft" style="margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px; padding-left: 0px; text-align: left; width: 490px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;">More than 250 civilians working under U.S. contracts died in the war zones between January and June 2010, according to a ProPublica analysis of the most recent data available from the U.S. Department of Labor, which tracks contractor deaths. In the same period, 235 soldiers died, according to Pentagon figures.</span></div><div class="rteleft" style="margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px; padding-left: 0px; text-align: left; width: 490px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;">This milestone in the privatization of modern U.S. warfare reflects both the drawdown in military forces in Iraq and the central role of contractors in providing logistics support to local armies and police forces, contracting and military experts said.</span></div><div class="rteleft" style="margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px; padding-left: 0px; text-align: left; width: 490px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;">Steven Schooner, a professor of government contracting at George Washington University Law School, said that the contractor deaths show how the risks of war have increasingly been absorbed by the private sector. Private contractors in Iraq and Afghanistan provide fuel, food and protective services to U.S. outposts — jobs once performed by soldiers.</span></div><div class="rteleft" style="margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px; padding-left: 0px; text-align: left; width: 490px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;">“It’s extremely likely that a generation ago, each one of these contractors deaths would have been a military death,” Schooner said. “As troop deaths have fallen, contractor deaths have risen. It's not a pretty picture.”</span></div><div class="rteleft" style="margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px; padding-left: 0px; text-align: left; width: 490px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;">Schooner, who conducted a recent study of contractor fatalities published in </span><a href="http://www.pscouncil.org/Content/NavigationMenu/Publications/ServiceContractorMagazine/SC_SEPT2010_Web.pdf#page=16" style="color: #bb0d10; text-decoration: none;" target="_blank"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;">Service Contractor (PDF)</span></a><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;">, an industry newsletter, said contractors now make up more than 25 percent of total deaths in Iraq and Afghanistan — a proportion that has grown steadily throughout the conflicts. Official figures show that 5,531 troops and 2,008 civilian contract workers have died in Iraq and Afghanistan between the beginning of hostilities in 2001 and June 2010.</span></div><div class="rteleft" style="margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px; padding-left: 0px; text-align: left; width: 490px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;">Many working under U.S. contracts are local civilians, often working as translators for troops, or are hired from third world countries to do basic labor, such as cleaning kitchens and toilets.</span></div><div class="rteleft" style="margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px; padding-left: 0px; text-align: left; width: 490px;"><a href="http://www.propublica.org/series/disposable-army" style="color: #bb0d10; text-decoration: none;" target="_blank"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;">Previous ProPublica stories</span></a><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"> have noted that companies employing such workers often fail to report their deaths and injuries to the Labor Department, as required by law. Government figures likely understate the total number civilian contractor deaths.</span></div><div class="rteleft" style="margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px; padding-left: 0px; text-align: left; width: 490px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;">The rising fatalities have received little public attention, concealing the full human cost of the war, Schooner said. When President Obama spoke of troop deaths in Afghanistan earlier this month, he made no mention of fatalities among the private workforce that feeds and fuels U.S. forces.</span></div><div class="rteleft" style="margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px; padding-left: 0px; text-align: left; width: 490px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;">“I'm not accusing either the Bush or the Obama administration of intentionally deceiving the public,” Schooner said. “But when a president applauds a reduction in military deaths but fails to acknowledge the contractor personnel now dying in their place, someone isn't telling the whole story.”</span></div><div class="rteleft" style="margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px; padding-left: 0px; text-align: left; width: 490px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;">The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan are the most privatized in American military history. Today, there are 150,000 troops in Afghanistan and Iraq. As of March 2010, there were more than 200,000 private contractors, though that number is believed to have declined with the drawdown of U.S. forces.</span></div><div class="rteleft" style="margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px; padding-left: 0px; text-align: left; width: 490px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;">Defense Secretary Robert Gates </span><a href="http://www.defense.gov/transcripts/transcript.aspx?transcriptid=4669" style="color: #bb0d10; text-decoration: none;" target="_blank"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;">announced</span></a><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"> a plan last month to sharply reduce the number of contractors, saying the Pentagon has become overly dependent on private workers to carry out jobs once done by soldiers.</span></div><div class="rteleft" style="margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px; padding-left: 0px; text-align: left; width: 490px;"><a href="http://www.fas.org/sgp/crs/natsec/R40764.pdf" style="color: #bb0d10; text-decoration: none;" target="_blank"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;">A recent Congressional Research Service report </span></a><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;">(PDF) found that the heavy use of contractors had exposed troops to supply shortfalls, wasted taxpayer money, and stirred anger among locals. In several high-profile incidents, heavily armed private security contractors have killed unarmed Iraqi and Afghan civilians.</span></div><div class="rteleft" style="margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px; padding-left: 0px; text-align: left; width: 490px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;">“Some analysts believe that poor contract management has also played a role in abuses and crimes committed by certain contractors against local nationals, which may have undermined U.S. counterinsurgency efforts in Iraq and Afghanistan,” the report found.</span></div><div class="rteleft" style="margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px; padding-left: 0px; text-align: left; width: 490px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;">Marcie Hascall Clark, an advocate for contract workers, said that contractor deaths and injuries reflected contractors’ importance in fighting the wars.</span></div><div class="rteleft" style="margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px; padding-left: 0px; text-align: left; width: 490px;"><a href="http://www.dol.gov/owcp/dlhwc/lsdbareports.htm" style="color: #bb0d10; text-decoration: none;" target="_blank"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;">Labor Department figures</span></a><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"> show that more than 44,000 contractors have reported injuries since 2001, compared to about 40,000 U.S. troops. The figures are not entirely comparable, since contractor injuries include minor workplace injuries.</span></div><div class="rteleft" style="margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px; padding-left: 0px; text-align: left; width: 490px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;">“I don’t think most contractors expect to be treated as nobly as our soldiers, but they don’t expect to be forgotten, either,” said Hascall Clark, who runs a group called </span><a href="http://www.americancontractorsiniraq.com/" style="color: #bb0d10; text-decoration: none;" target="_blank"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;">American Contractors in Iraq and Afghanistan</span></a><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;">. “I think there should definitely be some recognition of what they do.”</span></div></div>Uday Prakashhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07587503029581457151noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9181128932143875441.post-61714984918265397062010-09-16T22:32:00.000-07:002010-09-17T00:25:50.174-07:00We are Dirt Poor of India<h1 class="title" id="view_title" style="font-family: 'Lucida Grande', 'Trebuchet MS', Verdana, sans-serif; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 20px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: x-large;">C'mon, Time To Re-Brand Your Life!</span></h1><hr style="font-family: 'Lucida Grande', 'Trebuchet MS', Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 13px;" /><div class="content_authors" style="font-family: 'Lucida Grande', 'Trebuchet MS', Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 13px;">By <a href="http://www.zcommunications.org/zspace/johnpilger" style="color: #49932c; text-decoration: none;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;">John Pilger</span></a></div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Lucida Grande', 'Trebuchet MS', Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 13px;"><br />
</span><br />
<div class="content_date" style="float: right; font-family: 'Lucida Grande', 'Trebuchet MS', Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 13px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #bf9000;">Friday, September 17, 2010</span></div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Lucida Grande', 'Trebuchet MS', Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 13px;"><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: verdana, sans-serif;"><b><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #0b5394;">In India, a similar re-branding is under way for next month’s </span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #cc0000;">Commonwealth Games</span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #0b5394;">. In the country that has most of the world’s malnourished children, the capital Delhi has been re-branded a “world class city” at a cost of $2.5 billion. A school for 180 slum children has been bulldozed so that a vast estate of luxury apartments can be built for visiting athletes. “They told us we were a security threat so we had to go,” said the headteacher.</span></i></span></b></span></span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Lucida Grande', 'Trebuchet MS', Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 13px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: verdana, sans-serif;"><br />
</span></span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Lucida Grande', 'Trebuchet MS', Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 13px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: verdana, sans-serif;"><br />
</span></span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Lucida Grande', 'Trebuchet MS', Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 13px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: verdana, sans-serif;">The year before England won the 1966 World Cup, I interviewed its captain, Bobby Moore. Having not long arrived from the antipodes, where “soccer” was a minority sport beloved by Italians and Croats, I did not have a clue about the game. Nevertheless I had been assigned to write a “human interest” piece on the West Ham star by the same convivial assistant editor who had hired me believing I could play cricket, because I was Australian, and so assist the Daily Mirror team in its grudge match against the Express. I could swim and row and had done time in a rugby scrum, but cricket, no. (He forgave me). I met Bobby Moore outside West Ham tube station, and we walked round the corner to a greasy spoon that was filled with Woodbine fug. People beamed and shook his hand, reinforcing my impression of a gracious, modest man. Here was a star in every sense – talent, looks, fame – and yet he seemed genuinely surprised by the fuss. In the queue for tea and coffee he patiently engaged an elderly fan who was hard of hearing. When I unwisely feigned knowledge of the game, he let me down gently. As we parted, he said, “Look, this is a bit embarrassing, but I’ve got this agent and he’s asked me to ask for 50 quid for the interview.” I said I would pass it on to my editor; I don’t know if he was paid, and I doubt if he cared.</span></span><br />
<div class="body" id="view_body" style="font-family: 'Lucida Grande', 'Trebuchet MS', Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 12px;"><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-left: 0in; margin-right: 0in; margin-top: 0in; text-align: left;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-left: 0in; margin-right: 0in; margin-top: 0in; text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 10pt;"><span style="color: black;">I remembered Bobby Moore when I read about another sporting star, Lleyton Hewitt, the Australian tennis seed and famous air-puncher. For all his classy, often tireless play, Hewitt’s behaviour on court has always been difficult to watch, because he gives the impression only he matters. His aggressive “C’mon!” and fist pumping are his trademark, literally. He is not merely a tennis player; he is Brand Hewitt, which is owned by Lleyton Hewitt Marketing Pty Ltd which owns the rights to two “C’mon” logos.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-left: 0in; margin-right: 0in; margin-top: 0in; text-align: left;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-left: 0in; margin-right: 0in; margin-top: 0in; text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 10pt;"><span style="color: black;">Lleyton Hewitt Marketing, or LHM, recently suffered a defeat against a sports fan in Australia, Josh Shiels, who since 2004 has used “Come-on” to promote his struggling sportswear business. In a statement, LHM says that it has no problem with other parties owning trademarks incorporating “C’mon” and “Come on”; however, having been “threatened” by Shiels and asked to “surrender” its own trademarks, it requested that the Trade Marks Office cancel one registered to Shiels on the basis that he failed to use it.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-left: 0in; margin-right: 0in; margin-top: 0in; text-align: left;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-left: 0in; margin-right: 0in; margin-top: 0in; text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 10pt;"><span style="color: black;">At an intellectual property hearing in Canberra, Shiels said that his wife and daughters had designed the logo and his business had sold “about 10 shirts”. He pointed out that “come-on” had been a popular catch cry in Australia since world series cricket began in the 1970s; there was even a song. The hearing officer decided that, however meagre Shiels’s business, he had the right to make use of the words. Shiels is left fearing he will face a re-match.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-left: 0in; margin-right: 0in; margin-top: 0in; text-align: left;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-left: 0in; margin-right: 0in; margin-top: 0in; text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 10pt;"><span style="color: black;">The stark contrast between Bobby Moore and Brand Hewitt is telling because it represents what has been lost and is a reminder of the ubiquitous nature of extreme corporatism. It seems that no idea, no event, no talent, no personality, no resource of nature has value unless it is owned and branded. When the public water supply of Bolivia’s second city, Cochabamba, was sold off to a foreign consortium, rainwater was included. The clouds became the property of multinationals – until the people fought back, and won. <o:p></o:p></span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-left: 0in; margin-right: 0in; margin-top: 0in; text-align: left;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-left: 0in; margin-right: 0in; margin-top: 0in; text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 10pt;"><span style="color: black;">The pursuit of profit in sport seems unrelenting. Having said goodbye to foreign sports writers and their platitudinous eulogies for the “rainbow nation”, the South African treasury reckons it put $5 billion into the World Cup while corporate sponsors took home more than $4 billion in tax-free profits. All those corporate parties, free tickets, kickbacks and other “gifts” merely indulged a post-apartheid elite which presides over the most inequitable society on earth. Since 2008, during the feverish building of stadiums, several of them unnecessary, more than a million people lost their jobs. In the wake of the World Cup, 1.3 million public sector workers have struck for a living wage. The South African police now have paramilitary powers comparable with the apartheid era. A new Protection of Information Bill before parliament will conceal the corruption of the ruling African National Congress “wabenzi” (identifiable by their large silver Mercedes). “If journalists have to be fired [or go to prison], because they don’t contribute to the South Africa we want,” said the ANC spokesman, “let it be.”<o:p></o:p></span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-left: 0in; margin-right: 0in; margin-top: 0in; text-align: left;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-left: 0in; margin-right: 0in; margin-top: 0in; text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 10pt;"><span style="color: black;">In India, a similar re-branding is under way for next month’s Commonwealth Games. In the country that has most of the world’s malnourished children, the capital Delhi has been re-branded a “world class city” at a cost of $2.5 billion. A school for 180 slum children has been bulldozed so that a vast estate of luxury apartments can be built for visiting athletes. “They told us we were a security threat so we had to go,” said the headteacher. “All my children were crying.” It is one of many demolitions; over 100,000 families have been evicted to make way for “security zones” around the Games and facilities that will mostly benefit India’s small but powerful managerial and technocratic class who, besotted with all things corporate, prefer not to be reminded that 77 per cent of their compatriots are dirt poor. <o:p></o:p></span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-left: 0in; margin-right: 0in; margin-top: 0in; text-align: left;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-left: 0in; margin-right: 0in; margin-top: 0in; text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 10pt;"><span style="color: black;">Corporate sport has enriched Rupert Murdoch, corrupted cricket and much of football, subverted numerous other play and appropriated the Olympics and similar spectacles. Its language is that of business schools, PR companies, consultancies and banks. Its “philosophy” is that everything is for sale and monopoly rules. Just wear the logo, pump your fist and bellow, “C’mon!”</span></span></div></div>Uday Prakashhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07587503029581457151noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9181128932143875441.post-67398007213426231892010-07-18T18:11:00.000-07:002010-07-18T18:42:31.095-07:00Beyond Violence And Non-Violence<span style="font-size: large;"><b>Resistance As A Culture</b></span> <br />
<div class="style1"><b>By Ramzy Baroud</b></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhh5O4Bmr5JZ-_gynRptqpEn1Fkc_aBcPLfmJg3bjAqN1CuXZSLRgwvZFN9j8KJTir-NpG5cELfsAzoEjCKHyU1vpISCdFSSqPijDPSE8Kxu3_qS9le9-i-7GslO4yJ0KopqT3KvlzYYv2J/s1600/india-independence-day.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhh5O4Bmr5JZ-_gynRptqpEn1Fkc_aBcPLfmJg3bjAqN1CuXZSLRgwvZFN9j8KJTir-NpG5cELfsAzoEjCKHyU1vpISCdFSSqPijDPSE8Kxu3_qS9le9-i-7GslO4yJ0KopqT3KvlzYYv2J/s320/india-independence-day.jpg" /></a></div><div class="style1"><br />
</div><div class="style1"><b></b></div><div class="style1"><span class="style2">R</span>esistance is not a band of armed men hell-bent on wreaking havoc. It is not a cell of terrorists scheming ways to detonate buildings. </div><div class="style1">True resistance is a culture. </div><div class="style1">It is a collective retort to oppression. </div><div class="style1">Understanding the real nature of resistance, however, is not easy. No newsbyte could be thorough enough to explain why people, as a people, resist. Even if such an arduous task was possible, the news might not want to convey it, as it would directly clash with mainstream interpretations of violence and non-violent resistance. The Afghanistan story must remain committed to the same language: al-Qaeda and the Taliban. Lebanon must be represented in terms of a menacing Iran-backed Hizbullah. Palestine's Hamas must be forever shown as a militant group sworn to the destruction of the Jewish state. Any attempt at offering an alternative reading is tantamount to sympathizing with terrorists and justifying violence. </div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg8T2dif1PkLAG_xA2Ywb23m9L9P9ivocuQ0kNWypUPzlQUSzG9czhFBCA0ugMhuCf7P0IiRwYxw7tAfKylm7Q4dJrqb18wLZZqef_f2Tkz-PJQFxC1JYYNxxBLUim-WBM40oP1qTKqkRel/s1600/gandhi-and-crowd.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg8T2dif1PkLAG_xA2Ywb23m9L9P9ivocuQ0kNWypUPzlQUSzG9czhFBCA0ugMhuCf7P0IiRwYxw7tAfKylm7Q4dJrqb18wLZZqef_f2Tkz-PJQFxC1JYYNxxBLUim-WBM40oP1qTKqkRel/s320/gandhi-and-crowd.jpg" /></a></div><div class="style1"><br />
</div><div class="style1">The deliberate conflation and misuse of terminology has made it almost impossible to understand, and thus to actually resolve bloody conflicts. </div><div class="style1">Even those who purport to sympathize with resisting nations often contribute to the confusion. Activists from Western countries tend to follow an academic comprehension of what is happening in Palestine, Iraq, Lebanon, and Afghanistan. Thus certain ideas are perpetuated: suicide bombings bad, non-violent resistance good; Hamas rockets bad, slingshots good; armed resistance bad, vigils in front of Red Cross offices good. Many activists will quote Martin Luther King Jr., but not Malcolm X. They will infuse a selective understanding of Gandhi, but never of Guevara. This supposedly ‘strategic' discourse has robbed many of what could be a precious understanding of resistance - as both concept and culture. </div><div class="style1">Between the reductionst mainstream understanding of resistance as violent and terrorist and the ‘alternative' defacing of an inspiring and compelling cultural experience, resistance as a culture is lost. The two overriding definitions offer no more than narrow depictions. Both render those attempting to relay the viewpoint of the resisting culture as almost always on the defensive. Thus we repeatedly hear the same statements: no, we are not terrorists; no, we are not violent, we actually have a rich culture of non-violent resistance; no, Hamas is not affiliated with al-Qaeda; no, Hizbullah is not an Iranian agent. Ironically, Israeli writers, intellectuals and academicians own up to much less than their Palestinian counterparts, although the former tend to defend aggression and the latter defend, or at least try to explain their resistance to aggression. Also ironic is the fact that instead of seeking to understand why people resist, many wish to debate about how to suppress their resistance.</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhoDzK4Rwc1KbO4mwDUx-BehTHTNhegpLxqWjV3G1sIPjTkZUr7BB9dUfjtSuheWwryAqRH52oYqGn25T59FNYhBT8tEBxbgHvm9BUBsuBTZ4uodW7widlkNlGdb4csAcUc1C9t7zVuBe9b/s1600/%E0%A5%A7%E0%A5%AE%E0%A5%AB%E0%A5%AD.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhoDzK4Rwc1KbO4mwDUx-BehTHTNhegpLxqWjV3G1sIPjTkZUr7BB9dUfjtSuheWwryAqRH52oYqGn25T59FNYhBT8tEBxbgHvm9BUBsuBTZ4uodW7widlkNlGdb4csAcUc1C9t7zVuBe9b/s320/%E0%A5%A7%E0%A5%AE%E0%A5%AB%E0%A5%AD.jpg" /></a></div><div class="style1"><br />
</div><div class="style1">By resistance as a culture, I am referencing Edward Said's elucidation of "culture (as) a way of fighting against extinction and obliteration." When cultures resist, they don't scheme and play politics. Nor do they sadistically brutalize. Their decisions as to whether to engage in armed struggle or to employ non-violent methods, whether to target civilians or not, whether to conspire with foreign elements or not are all purely strategic. They are hardly of direct relevance to the concept or resistance itself. Mixing between the two suggests is manipulative or plain ignorant. </div><div class="style1">If resistance is "the action of opposing something that you disapprove or disagree with", then a culture of resistance is what occurs when an entire culture reaches this collective decision to oppose that disagreeable element - often a foreign occupation. The decision is not a calculated one. It is engendered through a long process in which self-awareness, self-assertion, tradition, collective experiences, symbols and many more factors interact in specific ways. This might be new to the wealth of that culture's past experiences, but it is very much an internal process. </div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg4_uNzn0Xt1UYDoLJDB1Zl7uxtF2bah-dyUlzqRtuKNph-2yl6IID01wDhaaT5j3drrMLkczjclmIIfmjVdogUpQY13fpyqikl3cd7GMoMjMlBJC0Jb3pEcbtwrgUS4gMP4wRNIhEds6G3/s1600/independence+day+girl.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg4_uNzn0Xt1UYDoLJDB1Zl7uxtF2bah-dyUlzqRtuKNph-2yl6IID01wDhaaT5j3drrMLkczjclmIIfmjVdogUpQY13fpyqikl3cd7GMoMjMlBJC0Jb3pEcbtwrgUS4gMP4wRNIhEds6G3/s320/independence+day+girl.jpg" /></a></div><div class="style1"><br />
</div><div class="style1">It's almost like a chemical reaction, but even more complex since it isn't always easy to separate its elements. Thus it is also not easy to fully comprehend, and, in the case of an invading army, it is not easily suppressed. This is how I tried to explain the first Palestinian uprising of 1987, which I lived in its entirely in Gaza: </div><div class="style1">"It's not easy to isolate specific dates and events that spark popular revolutions. Genuine collective rebellion cannot be rationalized though a coherent line of logic that elapses time and space; its rather a culmination of experiences that unite the individual to the collective, their conscious and subconscious, their relationships with their immediate surroundings and with that which is not so immediate, all colliding and exploding into a fury that cannot be suppressed." (My Father Was A Freedom Fighter: Gaza's Untold Story)<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjyzYo2FRaOnYm5mlg8mTJ49wBShyphenhyphenmP3g_vVy609_lHxxC1Rr6OluWBaVMXLP5ZZRlJjUfbpYYMkPyefaBxE-NE9x34hswFqVkzZiofVM-gyhCIRmN-Sk7wxgPK1LARGcq2fiq3Di1B1ETO/s1600/Subhaash.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjyzYo2FRaOnYm5mlg8mTJ49wBShyphenhyphenmP3g_vVy609_lHxxC1Rr6OluWBaVMXLP5ZZRlJjUfbpYYMkPyefaBxE-NE9x34hswFqVkzZiofVM-gyhCIRmN-Sk7wxgPK1LARGcq2fiq3Di1B1ETO/s320/Subhaash.jpg" /></a></div><br />
</div><div class="style1">Foreign occupiers tend to fight popular resistance through several means. One includes a varied amount of violence aiming to disorient, destroy and rebuild a nation to any desired image (read Naomi Klein's The Shock Doctrine). Another strategy is to weaken the very components that give a culture its unique identity and inner strengths - and thus defuse the culture's ability to resist. The former requires firepower, while the latter can be achieved through soft means of control. Many ‘third world' nations that boast of their sovereignty and independence might in fact be very much occupied, but due to their fragmented and overpowered cultures - through globalization, for example - they are unable to comprehend the extent of their tragedy and dependency. Others, who might effectively be occupied, often possess a culture of resistance that makes it impossible for their occupiers to achieve any of their desired objectives.<br />
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhiFdjCjCLlYa91VK2-it5lt9srkweCRMo3WNcqyN-Ubyq1YoSZxko8BKLIp94aCIl03xpXG4v9RgzC0e9MssKu1bs74_OG64JX8TU1WvqDOJAHqi0Ngdu_2QsuH9ps6jmnWQJCuFte9vZg/s1600/Gandhi.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhiFdjCjCLlYa91VK2-it5lt9srkweCRMo3WNcqyN-Ubyq1YoSZxko8BKLIp94aCIl03xpXG4v9RgzC0e9MssKu1bs74_OG64JX8TU1WvqDOJAHqi0Ngdu_2QsuH9ps6jmnWQJCuFte9vZg/s320/Gandhi.jpg" /></a> </div><div class="style1"><br />
</div><div class="style1">In Gaza, Palestine, while the media speaks endlessly of rockets and Israeli security, and debates who is really responsible for holding Palestinians in the strip hostage, no heed is paid to the little children living in tents by the ruins of homes they lost in the latest Israeli onslaught. These kids participate in the same culture of resistance that Gaza has witnessed over the course of six decades. In their notebooks they draw fighters with guns, kids with slingshots, women with flags, as well as menacing Israeli tanks and warplanes, graves dotted with the word ‘martyr', and destroyed homes. Throughout, the word ‘victory' is persistently used. </div><div class="style1">When I was in Iraq, I witnessed a local version of these kids' drawings. And while I have yet to see Afghani children's scrapbooks, I can easily imagine their content too.</div><div class="style1"><br />
</div><div class="style1"><b>Ramzy Baroud</b> (<a href="http://www.ramzybaroud.net/"><b>www.ramzybaroud.net</b></a>) is an author and editor of <a href="http://www.palestinechronicle.com/"><b>PalestineChronicle.com</b></a>. </div><div class="style1">From : <b>Countercurrents.org</b> </div>Uday Prakashhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07587503029581457151noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9181128932143875441.post-32267961155418364972010-07-11T05:56:00.000-07:002010-07-11T05:56:46.656-07:00Losing in Afghanistan<span class="Apple-style-span" style="border-collapse: separate; color: black; font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: medium; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; line-height: normal; orphans: 2; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; widows: 2; word-spacing: 0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #444444; font-family: Tahoma,Verdana,Arial,sans-serif; font-size: 13px;"></span></span><br />
<h1 style="color: black; font-size: 22px; font-weight: normal; line-height: 24px; margin: 0px 0px 5px;"></h1><div style="margin: 0px 0px 1.35em;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="border-collapse: separate; color: black; font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: medium; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; line-height: normal; orphans: 2; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; widows: 2; word-spacing: 0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #444444; font-family: Tahoma,Verdana,Arial,sans-serif; font-size: 13px;"><span class="ecxdate_text"></span>By<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span><b style="font-weight: bold;">Marjorie Cohn</b> </span></span></div><div style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 12px;"><div class="ecxMsoNoSpacing" style="margin: 0px 0px 1.35em;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="border-collapse: separate; color: black; font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: medium; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; line-height: normal; orphans: 2; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; widows: 2; word-spacing: 0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #444444; font-family: Tahoma,Verdana,Arial,sans-serif; font-size: 13px;">Last week, the House of Representatives voted 215-210 for $33 billion to fund Barack Obama’s troop increase in Afghanistan. But there was considerable opposition to giving the President a blank check. One hundred sixty-two House members supported an amendment that would have tied the funding to a withdrawal timetable. One hundred members voted for another amendment that would have rejected the $33 billion for the 30,000 new troops already on their way to Afghanistan; that amendment would have required that the money be spent to redeploy our troops out of Afghanistan. Democrats voting for the second amendment included House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and nine Republicans. Both amendments failed to pass. </span></span></div><div class="ecxMsoNoSpacing" style="margin: 0px 0px 1.35em;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="border-collapse: separate; color: black; font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: medium; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; line-height: normal; orphans: 2; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; widows: 2; word-spacing: 0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #444444; font-family: Tahoma,Verdana,Arial,sans-serif; font-size: 13px;">The new appropriation is in addition to the $130 billion Congress has already approved for Iraq and Afghanistan this year. And the 2010 Pentagon budget is $693 billion, more than all other discretionary spending programs combined. </span></span></div><div class="ecxMsoNoSpacing" style="margin: 0px 0px 1.35em;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="border-collapse: separate; color: black; font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: medium; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; line-height: normal; orphans: 2; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; widows: 2; word-spacing: 0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #444444; font-family: Tahoma,Verdana,Arial,sans-serif; font-size: 13px;">Our economic crisis is directly tied to the cost of the war. We are in desperate need of money for education and health care. The $1 million per year it costs to maintain a single soldier in Afghanistan could pay for 20 green jobs. </span></span></div><div class="ecxMsoNoSpacing" style="margin: 0px 0px 1.35em;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="border-collapse: separate; color: black; font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: medium; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; line-height: normal; orphans: 2; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; widows: 2; word-spacing: 0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #444444; font-family: Tahoma,Verdana,Arial,sans-serif; font-size: 13px;">Not only is the war bankrupting us, it has come at a tragic cost in lives. June was the deadliest month for U.S. troops in Afghanistan. In addition to the 1,149 American soldiers killed in Afghanistan, untold numbers of Afghan civilians have died from the war - untold because the Defense Department refuses to maintain statistics of anyone except U.S. personnel. After all, Donald Rumsfeld quipped in 2005, “death has a tendency to encourage a depressing view of war.” </span></span></div><div class="ecxMsoNoSpacing" style="margin: 0px 0px 1.35em;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="border-collapse: separate; color: black; font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: medium; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; line-height: normal; orphans: 2; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; widows: 2; word-spacing: 0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #444444; font-family: Tahoma,Verdana,Arial,sans-serif; font-size: 13px;">There are other “depressing” aspects of this war as well. As Gen. Stanley McChrystal reported just days before he got the axe, there is a “resilient and growing insurgency” with high levels of violence and corruption within the Karzai government. McChrystal’s remarks were considered “off message” by the White House, which was also irked by the general’s criticisms of Obama officials in a Rolling Stone article. McChrystal believes that you can’t kill your way out of Afghanistan. “The Russians killed 1 million Afghans and that didn’t work.” </span></span></div><div class="ecxMsoNoSpacing" style="margin: 0px 0px 1.35em;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="border-collapse: separate; color: black; font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: medium; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; line-height: normal; orphans: 2; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; widows: 2; word-spacing: 0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #444444; font-family: Tahoma,Verdana,Arial,sans-serif; font-size: 13px;">He and his successor, Gen. David Petraeus, likely disagree on the need to prevent civilian casualties (known as “Civ Cas”). McChrystal instituted some of the most stringent rules of engagement the U.S. military has had in a war zone: “Patrol only in areas that you are reasonably certain that you will not have to defend yourselves with lethal force.” Commanders cannot fire on buildings or other places if they have reason to believe civilians might be present unless their own forces are in imminent danger of being overrun. And they must end engagements and withdraw rather than risk harming noncombatants. McChrystal knows that for every innocent person you kill, you create new enemies; he calls it “insurgent math.” According to the Los Angeles Times, McChrystal “was credited with bringing about a substantial drop in the proportion of civilian casualties suffered at the hands of NATO’s International Security Assistance Force and its Afghan allies.” </span></span></div><div class="ecxMsoNoSpacing" style="margin: 0px 0px 1.35em;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="border-collapse: separate; color: black; font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: medium; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; line-height: normal; orphans: 2; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; widows: 2; word-spacing: 0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #444444; font-family: Tahoma,Verdana,Arial,sans-serif; font-size: 13px;">While testifying in Congress before he was confirmed to take McChrystal’s place, Petraeus told senators that some U.S. soldiers had complained about the former’s rules of engagement aimed at preventing civilian casualties. </span></span></div><div class="ecxMsoNoSpacing" style="margin: 0px 0px 1.35em;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="border-collapse: separate; color: black; font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: medium; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; line-height: normal; orphans: 2; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; widows: 2; word-spacing: 0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #444444; font-family: Tahoma,Verdana,Arial,sans-serif; font-size: 13px;">According to the Rolling Stone article, Obama capitulated to McChrystal’s insistence that more troops were needed in Afghanistan. In his December 1 speech at West Point, the article says, “the president laid out all the reasons why fighting the war in Afghanistan is a bad idea: It’s expensive; we’re in an economic crisis; a decade-long commitment would sap American power; Al Qaeda has shifted its base of operations to Pakistan. Then,” the article continued, “without ever using the words ‘victory’ or ‘win,’ Obama announced that he would send an additional 30,000 troops to Afghanistan, almost as many as McChrystal had requested.” </span></span></div><div class="ecxMsoNoSpacing" style="margin: 0px 0px 1.35em;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="border-collapse: separate; color: black; font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: medium; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; line-height: normal; orphans: 2; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; widows: 2; word-spacing: 0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #444444; font-family: Tahoma,Verdana,Arial,sans-serif; font-size: 13px;">Both Obama and Petraeus no longer speak of “victory” over the Taliban; they both hold open the possibility of settlement with the Taliban. Indeed, Maj. Gen. Bill Mayville, chief of operations for McChrystal, told Rolling Stone, “It’s not going to look like a win, smell like a win or taste like a win.” </span></span></div><div class="ecxMsoNoSpacing" style="margin: 0px 0px 1.35em;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="border-collapse: separate; color: black; font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: medium; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; line-height: normal; orphans: 2; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; widows: 2; word-spacing: 0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #444444; font-family: Tahoma,Verdana,Arial,sans-serif; font-size: 13px;">The majority of Americans now oppose the war in Afghanistan. Fareed Zakaria had some harsh words for the war on his CNN show, saying that “the whole enterprise in Afghanistan feels disproportionate, a very expensive solution to what is turning out to be a small but real problem.” Noting that CIA director Leon Panetta admitted that the number of Al Qaeda left in Afghanistan may be 50 to 100, Zakaria asked, “why are we fighting a major war” there? “Last month alone there were more than 100 NATO troops killed in Afghanistan,” he said. “That’s more than one allied death for each living Al Qaeda member in the country in just one month.” Citing estimates that the war will cost more than $100 billion in 2010 alone, Zakaria observed, “That’s a billion dollars for every member of Al Qaeda thought to be living in Afghanistan in one year.” He queried, “Why are we investing so much time, energy, and effort when Al Qaeda is so weak?” And Zakaria responded to the argument that we should continue fighting the Taliban because they are allied with Al Qaeda by saying, “this would be like fighting Italy in World War II after Hitler’s regime had collapsed and Berlin was in flames just because Italy had been allied with Germany.” </span></span></div><div class="ecxMsoNoSpacing" style="margin: 0px 0px 1.35em;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="border-collapse: separate; color: black; font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: medium; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; line-height: normal; orphans: 2; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; widows: 2; word-spacing: 0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #444444; font-family: Tahoma,Verdana,Arial,sans-serif; font-size: 13px;">There is also division in the Republican ranks over the war. Republican National Committee chairman Michael Steele made some gutsy comments about the war in Afghanistan, saying it is not winnable and calling it a “war of Obama’s choosing.” (Even though George W. Bush first invaded Afghanistan, Obama made the escalation of U.S. involvement a centerpiece of his campaign.) Steele said that if Obama is “such a student of history, has he not understood that, you know, that’s the one thing you don’t do, is engage in a land war in Afghanistan? Everyone who has tried, over 1,000 years of history, has failed.” Interestingly, Republicans Lindsey Graham and John McCain slammed Steele and jumped to Obama’s defense. Rep. Ron Paul, however, agreed with Steele, saying, “Michael Steele has it right, and Republicans should stick by him.” </span></span></div><div class="ecxMsoNoSpacing" style="margin: 0px 0px 1.35em;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="border-collapse: separate; color: black; font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: medium; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; line-height: normal; orphans: 2; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; widows: 2; word-spacing: 0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #444444; font-family: Tahoma,Verdana,Arial,sans-serif; font-size: 13px;">Obama will likely persist with his failed war. He appears to be stumbling along the same path that Lyndon Johnson followed. Johnson lost his vision for a “Great Society” when he became convinced that his legacy depended on winning the Vietnam War. It appears that Obama has similarly lost his way. </span></span></div><div class="ecxMsoNoSpacing" style="margin: 0px 0px 1.35em;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="border-collapse: separate; color: black; font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: medium; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; line-height: normal; orphans: 2; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; widows: 2; word-spacing: 0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #444444; font-family: Tahoma,Verdana,Arial,sans-serif; font-size: 13px;"><span style="font-size: x-small;"><i><b style="font-weight: bold;">Marjorie Cohn, a professor at Thomas Jefferson School of Law, is immediate past president of the National Lawyers Guild and deputy secretary general of the International Association of Democratic Lawyers. She is co-author (with Kathleen Gilberd) of Rules of Disengagement: The Politics and Honor of Military Dissent. See www.marjoriecohn.com.</b></i></span></span></span></div></div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="border-collapse: separate; color: black; font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: medium; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; line-height: normal; orphans: 2; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; widows: 2; word-spacing: 0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #444444; font-family: Tahoma,Verdana,Arial,sans-serif; font-size: 13px;"></span></span>Uday Prakashhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07587503029581457151noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9181128932143875441.post-31644890757330970892010-06-13T03:16:00.000-07:002010-06-13T03:16:23.472-07:00Israel is a Rouge Nation ...US must distance from it<h1 class="title" id="view_title">Reflections On The Flotilla Massacre</h1><hr /> <div class="content_authors">By <a href="http://www.zcommunications.org/zspace/pervezhoodbhoy">Pervez Hoodbhoy</a></div><br />
<div class="content_date">Sunday, June 13, 2010</div><div class="content_zspace_links"> <br />
<a href="http://www.zcommunications.org/zspace/signup">Join ZSpace</a></div><br />
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 0pt; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: Verdana;"><span>Israel’s premeditated murder of the <em><span>Mavi Marmara’s</span></em><strong><span> peace activists could become the turning point for </span></strong>the Palestinian struggle. Or, if the wrong conclusions are deduced, there’s a lot more misery ahead for the people of Gaza. A week after the event, it is time to ask some key questions and suggest answers. </span></span><span><o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 0pt; text-align: justify;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 0pt; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: Verdana;"><b><span>Question: </span></b><span>The decision to attack the 6-ship flotilla and stop it “at all cost” was a deliberate decision by the Israeli government. Given that international condemnation would surely follow, how can one understand Israel’s decision to go ahead?</span></span><span><b><o:p></o:p></b></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 0pt; text-align: justify;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 0pt; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: Verdana;"><span class="apple-style-span"><b><span>Answer</span></b></span><span class="apple-style-span"><span>: The attack had little to do with </span></span><span>“restoring Israel's deterrence” or capping the peashooters in Gaza. To understand Israel’s decision, one must hark back to <strong><span>Moshe Yaalon, then chief of staff of the Israeli Defence Forces, who in 2002 said that “<i>The Palestinians must be made to understand in the deepest recesses of their consciousness that they are a defeated people</i>.” </span></strong></span></span><span><strong><span><o:p></o:p></span></strong></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 0pt; text-align: justify;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 0pt; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: Verdana;"><span class="apple-style-span"><span>The flotilla attack was aimed to send a clear message: </span></span><span>foreign nationals and peace activists will be treated just as violently as the inmates of the Israeli gulag. The Israeli bulldozer that crushed Rachel Corrie, the 23-year old American-Jewish pro-Palestinian activist, stands ever-ready to crush challenges to absolute Israeli supremacy. It scarcely mattered that <span class="apple-style-span">the world was watching or that on board was a Holocaust survivor, white-as-lilies members of parliament from European countries, and even a six-month baby of unknown color and descent. Discounting those from Muslim countries, including three from Pakistan, the constellation of those calling for an end to Gaza’s blockade was impressive. The hope of a violence-free ending was therefore reasonable. But that did not happen. </span><strong><span>Israel wanted Gazans to know that even the international community cannot save them. It reasons that a hopeless people would eventually give up fighting. </span></strong><span class="apple-style-span"><span> </span></span></span></span><span><span class="apple-style-span"><o:p></o:p></span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 0pt; text-align: justify;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 0pt; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: Verdana;"><span>That the peace flotilla was attacked in international waters, and that a Hamas leader was murdered this year by the Mossad in Dubai, is also noteworthy. <strong><span>Israel, in effect, has declared that it knows no boundaries. <span> </span>It is truly a rogue nation.</span></strong></span></span><span><strong><span><o:p></o:p></span></strong></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 0pt; text-align: justify;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 0pt; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: Verdana;"><strong><span>Question: Why did the United States refuse to condemn the Israeli action, even though the cost it shall pay will be large?</span></strong></span><strong><span><o:p></o:p></span></strong></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 0pt; text-align: justify;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 0pt; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: Verdana;"><strong><span>The cost is indeed huge! Imagine that the US had allowed a meeting of the UN Security Council to criticize Israel, and had called for an open investigation by the International Court of Justice. In a jiffy, the key US interest across the world – that of fighting Al-Qaeda and Islamic extremism – would have been immensely strengthened. This one act may have bought more security for the US than increasing its defense budget by 100 billion dollars. The world would have felt so much better about America. The steam would have gone out of rabid jihadist organizations. Conversely, in refusing to condemn the atrocity, the United States lost an opportunity to rescue its tarnished international image of being a slave of Israel.</span></strong></span><strong><span><o:p></o:p></span></strong></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 0pt; text-align: justify;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 0pt; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: Verdana;"><span>It is unprecedented in history for one state to set aside its own security, and that of its allies, in pursuing the interests of another state. So what on earth makes the US behave in this way? This is a fascinating question. Most people think that this is because of shared US-Israeli strategic interests and/or some compelling moral imperative. </span></span><span><o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 0pt; text-align: justify;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 0pt; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: Verdana;"><span>But John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt, two leading American academics whose book caused a storm, argue that neither is true. Unqualified US support for Israel, they say, is unnatural and unnecessary. Far from being a loyal ally, Israel regularly spies on its principal patron. Moreover, Israel is racist while the US is democratic. Unlike the US, where people enjoy equal legal rights irrespective of race, religion or ethnicity, Israel was explicitly founded as a Jewish state where citizenship is based on the principle of blood kinship. Indeed, even Pakistan’s America-hating ulema think this way – they line up to send their children to the US and pray for grant of their Green Cards. </span></span><span><o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 0pt; text-align: justify;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 0pt; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: Verdana;"><span>But, say Mearsheimer and Walt, America’s uncritical support for Israel actually owes to the Israeli lobby in the US. AIPAC (American Israel Public Action Committee) is a hugely influential organization that was ranked second behind the American Association of Retired People, but ahead of the AFL-CIO and the National Rifle Association. Thus, during the bombardment of Lebanon in the summer of 2006, the House of Representatives passed a resolution of total solidarity with Israel by 410 votes to eight. Today the Israeli tail wags the American dog. This is remarkable: Jews belonged to the oppressed people of America until a few decades ago, and only conditionally allowed to set foot on American soil although Hitler was sending them off to be gassed.<br />
</span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 0pt; text-align: justify;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 0pt; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: Verdana;"><span>Noam Chomsky, my guru and friend, who was turned away from entering the West Bank some weeks ago, has long argued that Israel’s time is running out. Decades ago he wrote that “Israel is deliberately turning itself into perhaps the most hated country in the world, and is also losing the allegiance of the population of the West, including younger American Jews, who are unlikely to tolerate its persistent shocking crimes for long.” <br />
</span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 0pt; text-align: justify;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 0pt; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: Verdana;"><span class="apple-style-span"><span>Is Chomsky right? Maybe. America’s formerly unqualified support for Israel is now qualified. Polls show that Democrat voters are unwilling to give Israel a blank check anymore. And, a glance at the Israeli press shows that while President Obama refused to condemn the massacre, his clear disapproval has made him Israel’s enemy number-one. But Obama, like other US presidents, is helpless before a political establishment which has internalized a belief that Israel should never be criticized. The consensus on Israel-can-do-no-wrong is only just beginning to crack.</span></span></span><span><o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 0pt; text-align: justify;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 0pt; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: Verdana;"><span class="apple-style-span"><b><span>Question: why are the Palestinians losing so badly when others have won against larger, more powerful, enemies? </span></b></span></span><span class="apple-style-span"><b><span><o:p></o:p></span></b></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 0pt; text-align: justify;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 0pt; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: Verdana;"><span class="apple-style-span"><span>The fact is that </span></span><span>Vietnam lost a million people but won; Timor finally achieved independence from Indonesia; Cuba has withstood siege for 50 years; and Venezuela under Chavez is resisting America.</span></span><span><o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 0pt; text-align: justify;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 0pt; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: Verdana;"><span>The usual excuses for Palestinian failure can be trotted out: grand conspiracies, disunity, and lack of firepower. <span>But surely it’s time to get to the real reasons. The first is that of poor tactics: the weak cannot behave as the strong do. The leadership made disastrous decisions in Lebanon in 1982, then </span><span class="apple-style-span">Lebanon again in 2006 (Hasan Nasrallah admitted his mistake), and Gaza in 2009. In arguing Palestine’s case before the Western world, Palestinian leaders and diplomats have performed pathetically, and </span>American Zionists<span class="apple-style-span"><span> readily shot holes into them. But they viewed men like </span></span>Edward Said and Eqbal Ahmad with great alarm because, with passion and reason, these stalwarts of secular humanism refuted Israeli propaganda in an idiom that the world could understand. Alas, they are gone.</span></span><span><o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 0pt; text-align: justify;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 0pt; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: Verdana;"><span class="apple-style-span"><span>Human history is a long story of injustice and cruelty. In our times, nothing stands out more vividly than Palestine. But, tragically, this struggle for justice has been turned into a religious cause. When the secular </span></span><span>PLO led the Palestinians, it commanded power and respect. After the 1982 debacle in Beirut, Hamas took over. Sending suicide bombers on to Israeli civilian targets decimated international support, heightened Israeli repression, and led to The Wall. </span></span><span><o:p></o:p></span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: Verdana;"><span>The tragic loss of life notwithstanding, the flotilla episode is a huge moral victory for Palestine and a defeat for Israel. Israel was shown up to be paranoid, dominated by fundamentalist nuclear-armed crazies, and trigger happy. The moral high ground has again turned out to be the Palestinian’s principal weapon. It must not be wasted by firing off a few toy rockets from Gaza. <span class="apple-style-span">Israelis love war and fear peace. This is why struggle for Palestine must be fought with different tactics.</span></span></span><span><span class="apple-style-span"><o:p></o:p></span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 0pt; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: Verdana;"><span class="apple-style-span"><b><span>Question: why are we Pakistanis so hyped-up about what Israel does but blind to what we do to our people and those in neighboring countries? </span></b></span></span><span class="apple-style-span"><b><span><o:p></o:p></span></b></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 0pt; text-align: justify;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 0pt; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: Verdana;"><span>Let’s face the truth: Israeli crimes are extremely serious but they pale in front of those committed almost daily by religious extremists in Pakistan.<span> </span>Israel murdered nine peace activists of the<em><span> Mavi Marmara</span></em>, but just hours earlier jihadists had killed over ninety Ahmadis peacefully praying in a mosque in Lahore.<span> </span>Israel starves Gaza, but the Taliban have imposed an even more brutal blockade of Shias in Parachinar and Kurram. Israel does not amputate the limbs of its enemies or decapitate them, but the Taliban do. Israel has destroyed schools for Palestinians in Gaza, but the Taliban have blown up nearly a thousand schools. </span></span><span><o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 0pt; text-align: justify;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 0pt; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: Verdana;"><span>Of course, it is not just the religious extremists but also our state – the Pakistani state and army – that is guilty of atrocities. Israeli forces have never been accused of mass rape, but the Bengalis have never forgiven the Pakistani army for what it did in 1971. Israel is responsible for many abductions and disappearances, but does anyone have an estimate for the number of “disappeared persons” in Baluchistan? One could go on. So, instead of riding the moral high horse and using different yardsticks here and there, it is time for us Pakistanis to also reflect upon the crimes of those from within us – and stop more wrongs from happening.</span></span><span><o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 0pt; text-align: justify;"><br />
</div><i><span style="font-size: x-small;"><b><span style="color: #38761d; font-family: Verdana;"><span class="apple-style-span"><span>The author teaches at Quaid-e-Azam University, Islamabad</span></span></span></b></span></i>Uday Prakashhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07587503029581457151noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9181128932143875441.post-1203422976165922182010-05-18T20:44:00.000-07:002010-05-18T20:44:01.471-07:00Monsanto :The Principal Enemy of Peasant Sustainable Agriculture and Food Sovereignty for People.By <span style="font-size: large;"><b>Beverly Bell </b></span><br />
A new earthquake" is what peasant farmer leader Chavannes Jean-Baptiste of the Peasant Movement of Papay (MPP) called the news that Monsanto will be donating 60,000 seed sacks (475 tons) of hybrid corn seeds and vegetable seeds, some of them treated with highly toxic pesticides. The MPP has committed to burning Monsanto's seeds, and has called for a march to protest the corporation's presence in Haiti on June 4, for World Environment Day.<br />
<br />
In an open letter sent May 14, Chavannes Jean-Baptiste, the executive director of MPP and the spokesperson for the National Peasant Movement of the Congress of Papay (MPNKP), called the entry of Monsanto seeds into Haiti "a very strong attack on small agriculture, on farmers, on biodiversity, on Creole seeds ... and on what is left our environment in Haiti."<a href="http://www.truthout.org/haitian-farmers-commit-burning-monsanto-hybrid-seeds59616#1.">(1)</a> Haitian social movements have been vocal in their opposition to agribusiness imports of seeds and food, which undermines local production with local seed stocks. They have expressed special concern about the import of genetically modified organisms (GMOs).<br />
<br />
For now, without a law regulating the use of GMOs in Haiti, the Ministry of Agriculture rejected Monsanto's offer of Roundup Ready GMOs seeds. In an email exchange, a Monsanto representative assured the Ministry of Agriculture that the seeds being donated are not GMOs.<br />
<br />
Elizabeth Vancil, Monsanto's director of development initiatives, called the news that the Haitian Ministry of Agriculture approved the donation "a fabulous Easter gift" in an April email.<a href="http://www.truthout.org/haitian-farmers-commit-burning-monsanto-hybrid-seeds59616#2.">(2)</a> Monsanto is known for aggressively pushing seeds, especially GMOs seeds, in both the global North and South, including through highly restrictive technology agreements with farmers who are not always made fully aware of what they are signing. According to interviews by this writer with representatives of Mexican small farmer organizations, they then find themselves forced to buy Monsanto seeds each year, under conditions they find onerous and at costs they sometimes cannot afford.<br />
<br />
The hybrid corn seeds Monsanto has donated to Haiti are treated with the fungicide Maxim XO, and the calypso tomato seeds are treated with thiram.<a href="http://www.truthout.org/haitian-farmers-commit-burning-monsanto-hybrid-seeds59616#3.">(3)</a> Thiram belongs to a highly toxic class of chemicals called ethylene bisdithiocarbamates (EBDCs). Results of tests of EBDCs on mice and rats caused concern to the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), which then ordered a special review. The EPA determined that EBDC-treated plants are so dangerous to agricultural workers that they must wear special protective clothing when handling them. Pesticides containing thiram must contain a special warning label, the EPA ruled. The EPA also barred marketing of the chemicals for many home garden products, because it assumes that most gardeners do not have adequately protective clothing.<a href="http://www.truthout.org/haitian-farmers-commit-burning-monsanto-hybrid-seeds59616#4.">(4)</a> Monsanto's passing mention of thiram to Ministry of Agriculture officials in an email contained no explanation of the dangers, nor any offer of special clothing or training for those who will be farming with the toxic seeds.<br />
<br />
Haitian social movements' concern is not just about the dangers of the chemicals and the possibility of future GMOs imports. They claim that the future of Haiti depends on local production with local food for local consumption, in what is called food sovereignty. Monsanto's arrival in Haiti, they say, is a further threat to this.<br />
<br />
"People in the US need to help us produce, not give us food and seeds. They're ruining our chance to support ourselves," said farmer Jonas Deronzil of a peasant cooperative in the rural region of Verrettes.<a href="http://www.truthout.org/haitian-farmers-commit-burning-monsanto-hybrid-seeds59616#5.">(5)</a><br />
<br />
Monsanto's history has long drawn ire from environmentalists, health advocates and small farmers, going back to its production of Agent Orange during the Vietnam war. Exposure to Agent Orange has caused cancer in an untold number of US veterans, and the Vietnamese government claims that 400,000 Vietnamese people were killed or disabled by Agent Orange, and 500,000 children were born with birth defects as a result of their exposure.<a href="http://www.truthout.org/haitian-farmers-commit-burning-monsanto-hybrid-seeds59616#6.">(6)</a><br />
<br />
Monsanto's former motto, "Without chemicals, life itself would be impossible," has been replaced by "Imagine." Its web site home page claims it "help[s] farmers around the world produce more while conserving more. We help farmers grow yield sustainably so they can be successful, produce healthier foods ... while also reducing agriculture's impact on our environment."<a href="http://www.truthout.org/haitian-farmers-commit-burning-monsanto-hybrid-seeds59616#7.">(7)</a> The corporation's record does not support the claims.<br />
<br />
Together with Syngenta, Dupont and Bayer, Monsanto controls more than half of the world's seeds.<a href="http://www.truthout.org/haitian-farmers-commit-burning-monsanto-hybrid-seeds59616#8.">(8)</a> The company holds almost 650 seed patents, most of them for cotton, corn and soy, and almost 30 percent of the share of all biotech research and development. Monsanto came to own such a vast supply by buying major seed companies to stifle competition, patenting genetic modifications to plant varieties and suing small farmers. Monsanto is also one of the leading manufacturers of GMOs.<br />
<br />
As of 2007, Monsanto had filed 112 lawsuits against US farmers for alleged technology contract violations of GMOs patents, involving 372 farmers and 49 small agricultural businesses in 27 different states. From these, Monsanto has won more than $21.5 million in judgments. The multinational appears to investigate 500 farmers a year, in estimates based on Monsanto's own documents and media reports.<a href="http://www.truthout.org/haitian-farmers-commit-burning-monsanto-hybrid-seeds59616#9.">(9)</a><br />
<br />
"Farmers have been sued after their field was contaminated by pollen or seed from someone else's genetically engineered crop [or] when genetically engineered seed from a previous year's crop has sprouted, or 'volunteered,' in fields planted with non-genetically engineered varieties the following year," said Andrew Kimbrell and Joseph Mendelson of the Center for Food Safety.<a href="http://www.truthout.org/haitian-farmers-commit-burning-monsanto-hybrid-seeds59616#10.">(10)</a><br />
<br />
In Colombia, Monsanto has received upwards of $25 million from the US government for providing Roundup Ultra in the antidrug fumigation efforts of Plan Colombia. Roundup Ultra is a highly concentrated version of Monsanto's glyphosate herbicide, with additional ingredients to increase its lethality. Colombian communities and human rights organizations have charged that the herbicide has destroyed food crops, water sources and protected areas, and has led to increased incidents of birth defects and cancers.<br />
<br />
Vía Campesina, the world's largest confederation of farmers with member organizations in more than 60 countries, has called Monsanto one of the "principal enemies of peasant sustainable agriculture and food sovereignty for all peoples."<a href="http://www.truthout.org/haitian-farmers-commit-burning-monsanto-hybrid-seeds59616#11.">(11)</a> They claim that as Monsanto and other multinationals control an ever larger share of land and agriculture, they force small farmers out of their land and jobs. They also claim that the agribusiness giants contribute to climate change and other environmental disasters, an outgrowth of industrial agriculture.<a href="http://www.truthout.org/haitian-farmers-commit-burning-monsanto-hybrid-seeds59616#12.">(12)</a><br />
<br />
The Vía Campesina coalition launched a global campaign against Monsanto last October 16, on International World Food Day, with protests, land occupations and hunger strikes in more than 20 countries. They carried out a second global day of action against Monsanto on April 17 of this year, in honor of Earth Day.<br />
<br />
Nongovernmental organizations in the US are challenging Monsanto's practices, too. The Organic Consumers Association has spearheaded the campaign "Millions Against Monsanto," calling on the company to stop intimidating small family farmers, stop marketing untested and unlabeled genetically engineered foods to consumers and stop using billions of dollars of US taypayers' money to subsidize GMOs crops.<a href="http://www.truthout.org/haitian-farmers-commit-burning-monsanto-hybrid-seeds59616#13.">(13)</a><br />
<br />
The Center for Food Safety has led a four-year legal challenge to Monsanto that has just made it to the US Supreme Court. After successful litigation against Monsanto and the US Department of Agriculture for illegal promotion of Roundup Ready Alfalfa, the court heard the Center for Food Safety's case on April 27. A decision on this first-ever Supreme Court case about GMOs is now pending.<a href="http://www.truthout.org/haitian-farmers-commit-burning-monsanto-hybrid-seeds59616#14.">(14)</a><br />
<br />
"Fighting hybrid and GMO seeds is critical to save our diversity and our agriculture," Jean-Baptiste said in an interview in February. "We have the potential to make our lands produce enough to feed the whole population and even to export certain products. The policy we need for this to happen is food sovereignty, where the county has a right to define it own agricultural policies, to grow first for the family and then for local market, to grow healthy food in a way which respects the environment and Mother Earth."<br />
<br />
<em>Many thanks to Moira Birss for her assistance with research and writing.</em> <br />
<div class="rteleft"><a href="" name="1.">1.</a> Group email from Chavannes Jean-Baptiste, May 14, 2010.<br />
<a href="" name="2.">2.</a> Email from Elizabeth Vancil to Emmanuel Prophete, director of seeds at the Haitian Ministry of Agriculture, and others; released by the Haitian Ministry of Agriculture, date unavailable.<br />
<a href="" name="3.">3.</a> Ibid.<br />
<a href="" name="4.">4.</a> <a href="http://pmep.cce.cornell.edu/profiles/extoxnet/pyrethrins-ziram/thiram-ext.html" target="_blank">Extension Toxicology Network</a>, Pesticide Information Project of the Cooperative Extension Offices of Cornell University, Michigan State University, Oregon State University and University of California at Davis.<br />
<a href="" name="5.">5.</a> Jonas Deronzil's comments are from an interview in April. He was not specifically discussing Monsanto.<br />
<a href="" name="6.">6.</a> "MSNBC," January 23, 2004. "Study Finds Link Between Agent Orange, Cancer." The Globe and Mail, June 12, 2008. "Last Ghost of the Vietnam War."<br />
<a href="" name="7.">7.</a> www.monsanto.com<br />
<a href="" name="8.">8.</a> <a href="http://viacampesina.org/en/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=797:peasants-worldwide-rise-up-against-monsanto-gmos&catid=49:stop-transnational-corporations&Itemid=76" target="_blank">La Vía Campesina</a>, "La Vía Campesina carries out Global Day of Action against Monsanto," October 16, 2009.<br />
<a href="" name="9.">9.</a> Center for Food Safety, "Monsanto vs. US Farmers," November 2007.<br />
<a href="" name="10.">10.</a> Andrew Kimbrell and Joseph Mendelson, Center for Food Safety, "Monsanto vs. US Farmers," 2005.<br />
<a href="" name="11.">11.</a> La Vía Campesina, October 16, 2009, Op. Cit.<br />
<a href="" name="12.">12.</a> <a href="http://www.mstbrazil.org/?q=node/639" target="_blank">La Vía Campesina</a>, "La Vía Campesina Call to Action 17 April 2010 - Join the International Day of Peasant Struggle," February 23, 2010.<br />
<a href="" name="13.">13.</a> <a href="http://www.organicconsumers.org/" target="_blank">Organic Consumers Association</a>, "Taxpayers Forced to Fund Monsanto's Poisoning of Third World," Finland, Minnesota. <br />
<a href="" name="14.">14.</a> <a href="http://truefoodnow.org/?CFID=23809091&CFTOKEN=67921769" target="_blank">Center for Food Security</a>, "Update: CFS Fighting Monsanto in the Supreme Court," May 11, 2010.</div>Uday Prakashhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07587503029581457151noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9181128932143875441.post-88984988326389812572010-05-11T21:23:00.000-07:002010-05-11T21:24:26.352-07:00Am I A Maoist?<span class="Apple-style-span" style="border-collapse: collapse; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px;"></span><br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgsqqA83oFWs8BbwwYy-oVnteyHNvYmvr-9vSUNP7fYOFqZH_dnhG00sxUatvzp5gEZ3dLeS79vPLUriZEu1rp1g739Bsbg0tYMQR2nzY3QPw3FMSHm8pZh8_rTxebfF9CIgrOVSoB8wTix/s1600/Freedom+of+Expression.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgsqqA83oFWs8BbwwYy-oVnteyHNvYmvr-9vSUNP7fYOFqZH_dnhG00sxUatvzp5gEZ3dLeS79vPLUriZEu1rp1g739Bsbg0tYMQR2nzY3QPw3FMSHm8pZh8_rTxebfF9CIgrOVSoB8wTix/s320/Freedom+of+Expression.jpg" width="320" /></a></div><div>By <b><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;">Gladson Dungdung</span></b></div><div><br />
</div><div></div>I appeared in public life through my human rights works, writings and speeches. However, I reached to a larger audience when I got a chance to appear in CNN-IBN and NDTV-24×7 debates on the issue of Naxalism last year. After these debates, I got immense positive and negative responses from across the country. I was upset for sometime precisely because of the most negative responses I got from youth who are running behind the market forces unknowingly. They ruthlessly questioned me about whether I get money from Pakistan, Nepal or China for speaking against the Indian State. I responded to a few of them with detailed explanations, but many believe P Chidambaram’s theory of this side or that side; therefore they are not ready to accept my rational arguments.<br />
Meanwhile, I continued my work of raising the genuine issues of the marginalized people of India. Amidst, the so-called operation green hunt (OGH) was also launched in the state of Jharkhand in the name of cleansing the Maoists. I passionately attempted to bring out the truth of the OGH, intention of the state behind the OGH and sufferings of the villagers caused by the OGH. As a result, so-called educated people intensified more personal attacks against me. There are also some e-groups where they attempted to coin me as a Maoist sympathizer and supporter. Finally, they have portrayed me as a Maoist Ideologue. I just laugh, laugh and laugh. Precisely, because how can a person suddenly become a Maoist ideologue without having an in-depth study on Maoism? I have never read about Maoism.<br />
I deliberately do not read about any ideology because I know that Maoists teach the Adivasis about Maoism, Gandhians preach them about Gandhism and Marxists ask them to walk on Marxism; but no one bothers about Adivasism, which is the best ‘ism’ among these, which perhaps leads to a just and equitable society. I have been raising questions about how the Indian State has deliberately destroyed the Adivasism. The Adivasi religion was not recognized by the Indian constitution, traditional self-governance was neglected, culture was destroyed, lands were grabbed and our resources were snatched in the name of development. But what do we get out of it? Should we still keep quiet? Are we not the citizens of this country who need to be treated equally? Do they care about our sufferings?<br />
I’m one of those unfortunate persons, who have lost everything for the so-called development of the nation and am struggling for survival even today. When I was just one year old, my family was displaced. Our 20 acres of fertile land was taken away from us in the name of development. Our ancestral land was submerged in a Dam, which came up at Chinda River near Simdega town in 1980. We lost our house, agricultural land and garden but we were paid merely Rs.11 thousand as compensation. When the whole village protested against it they were sent to Hazaribagh Jail. Can a family of 6 members ensure food, clothing, shelter, education and health facilities for whole life with Rs.11 thousand?<br />
After displacement, we had no choice but to proceed towards the dense forest for ensuring our livelihood. We settled down in the forest after buying a small patch of land. We used to collect flowers, fruits and firewood to sustain our family. We also had sufficient livestock, which supported our economy. Needless to say that the state suppression continued with us. When we were living in the forest, my father was booked under many cases filed by the forest department (the biggest landlord of the country) alleging him as an encroacher and woodcutter. There was no school building in our village - therefore we used to study under the trees, and when there was rain our school was closed. But my father taught us to always fight for justice. Though he was struggling to sustain our family, he never stopped his fight for the community.<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiAhO1lWrZWE_U8CYJFJqG0gt3FheVkb1gK7T_9Skzc8HEi6jjvJ6X5lbIHOKEcphSfEIwQs9IdR90pcjo37FWMvemFDUQFtAPcXhn1yvxCuZg_trPwKjJQYB1WCOZ_TO3NqngkGnN6T30Y/s1600/censorship_Ouibq_3868.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiAhO1lWrZWE_U8CYJFJqG0gt3FheVkb1gK7T_9Skzc8HEi6jjvJ6X5lbIHOKEcphSfEIwQs9IdR90pcjo37FWMvemFDUQFtAPcXhn1yvxCuZg_trPwKjJQYB1WCOZ_TO3NqngkGnN6T30Y/s320/censorship_Ouibq_3868.jpg" /></a></div>Unfortunately, on 20 June 1990, my parents were brutally murdered while they were going to Simdega civil court to attend a case and 4 kids were orphaned. Can anyone imagine how we suffered afterwards? The worst thing is the culprits were not brought to justice. Can anyone tell us why the Indian State did not deliver justice to us, who snatched our resource in the name of development? Why there is no electricity in my village even today? Why my people do not get water for their field whose lands were taken for the irrigation projects? Why there is no electricity in those houses, who have given their land for the power project? And why people are still living in small mud houses whose lands were taken for the steel plants? It seems that the Adivasis are only born to suffer and other to enjoy over our graves.<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh_WAJESFhQl9616mzsZca2Qxb_kxaoOMLr16xkf1JZ27r7KCwNm6FB-yDNuUUDg6-GT7BhBbMV-h62P0_oblk8HRq5lTY6dI1nUbwdk0lKifVaEv1_lCgvvY4ifsu-MOwDFcbxbnZzHH7n/s1600/freedom-of-expression-is-western-terrorism.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" height="146" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh_WAJESFhQl9616mzsZca2Qxb_kxaoOMLr16xkf1JZ27r7KCwNm6FB-yDNuUUDg6-GT7BhBbMV-h62P0_oblk8HRq5lTY6dI1nUbwdk0lKifVaEv1_lCgvvY4ifsu-MOwDFcbxbnZzHH7n/s200/freedom-of-expression-is-western-terrorism.jpg" width="200" /></a></div>After a long struggle, we all got back to life but my pain and sufferings did not end here. When I was working as a state programme officer in a project funded by the European Commission, a senior government officer and an editor of a newspaper (both from the upper caste) questioned my credentials saying that being an Adivasi, how could I have gotten into such a prestigious position? Similarly, when my friend had taken me to meet a newly wedded couple of the upper caste in Ranchi, I was not allowed to meet them saying that being an Adivasi if I meet the couple, they might become unauspicious and their whole life would be at stake. Was I a devil for them?<br />
However, when I joined another firm, I was totally undermined and not given the position which I highly deserved. I was racially discriminated against, economically exploited and mentally disturbed. Can anyone tell me why I should not fight for justice? Can those so-called supporters of the unjust development process, who have not given even one inch of land for the so-called national interest, coin me as the Maoist ideologue, sympathizer and supporter respond to me: why should I shut up my mouth and stop writing against injustice, inequality and discrimination?<br />
I have lost everything in the name of development and now I have nothing to lose therefore I’m determined to fight for my own people because I do not want them to be trapped in the name of development. I have taken the democratic path of struggle, which the Indian Constitution guarantees through Article 19. A pen, mouth and mind are my weapons. I’m neither a Maoist nor a Gandhian but I’m an Adivasi who is determined to fight for its own people, whom the Indian State has alienated, displaced and dispossessed from their resources and is continually doing it in the name of development, national security and national interest even today.<br />
<br />
<i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #0b5394;">Gladson Dungdung is a Human Rights Activist and Writer from Jharkhand. He can be reached at </span><a href="mailto:gladsonhractivist@gmail.com" style="color: #336633;" target="_blank">gladsonhractivist@gmail.com</a></i><br />
<span style="color: #888888;"><br />
</span>Uday Prakashhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07587503029581457151noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9181128932143875441.post-63154146303803293512010-05-10T06:28:00.000-07:002010-05-10T06:30:08.148-07:00Their Final Letters<span class="Apple-style-span" style="-webkit-border-horizontal-spacing: 4px; -webkit-border-vertical-spacing: 4px;"></span><br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj3dDmu9tW2s5C5y7ci47KE-j-bIJxJAm4APtaVmQoBG4jeiJCV6ScNpFE2bV0pCtVwD8K_M0486IwyzTw_ohXwbMGFJhf20cy7nx8xCUYGi6bbAPVTnsE0P-KkgxvhyqnOWDNOMjSHAN9s/s1600/DSCN1777.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj3dDmu9tW2s5C5y7ci47KE-j-bIJxJAm4APtaVmQoBG4jeiJCV6ScNpFE2bV0pCtVwD8K_M0486IwyzTw_ohXwbMGFJhf20cy7nx8xCUYGi6bbAPVTnsE0P-KkgxvhyqnOWDNOMjSHAN9s/s320/DSCN1777.JPG" /></a></div><h1 align="left"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #990000; font-family: 'Times New Roman', Times, serif; font-size: x-large;">Farmers' Suicides</span></h1><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', Times, serif;">By <b><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: magenta;">P. SAINATH</span></b></span><br />
<span style="color: #990000; font-family: Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">S</span><span class="style2" style="font-family: Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 13px;">eeking authenticity for his letter to the Prime Minister and the President, Ramachandra Raut composed it with care on Rs.100 non-judicial stamp paper. Then he added a few more addressees, including his village <em>sarpanch</em> and the police, in the hope that it got home someplace. Then he killed himself. A mere digit in the nearly 250 farm suicides that hit Vidarbha in four months; but a villager desperate to be heard on the reasons for his action: “The two successive years of crop failure is the reason.” Yet, “bank employees came twice to my home to recover my loans”. (Despite a government order to go slow on recovery in a region hit by crisis, crop failure and more recently, drought).</span><br />
<span class="style2" style="font-family: Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 13px;">Raut's suicide being the third in a month in Dhotragoan in Washim district, the village wants to see it spreads no further. “We try and meet every evening for an hour, all of us, anyone who will come,” says Nandkishore Shankar Raut from Dhotragaon. “The idea is to keep people's morale up.” So Dhotragaon counsels itself. Ramachandra Raut's letter was also an appeal not to be misunderstood. “Don't trouble anyone in my home,” it tells the police. “I am fully responsible for my action.” The stamp paper suicide note carries the seal of the deputy treasury officer of Mangrulpir tehsil dated March 29, and that of the stamp vendor who issued it to Raut on April 7. Raut filled it in and took his life the same day.</span><br />
<span class="style2" style="font-family: Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 13px;">The family owes the banks Rs.1.5 lakh ($3,285). His village pooled money to observe his 13th day ritual, sparing Raut's indebted family further expense.</span><br />
<span class="style13" style="color: #990000; font-family: Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; font-weight: bold;">Unique</span><br />
<span class="style2" style="font-family: Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 13px;">Vidarbha's farm suicides have been unique in one respect. Some of those taking their lives have addressed suicide notes to the Prime Minister, the Chief Minister or the Finance Minister. In August 2006 Rameshwar Lonkar of Wardha complained, in his note, to Dr. Manmohan Singh, just a month after the Prime Minister went to his region. “After the Prime Minister's visit and reports of a fresh crop loan, I thought I could live again,” Lonkar wrote. But he found himself rebuffed at every stage while seeking that loan. Sahebrao Adhao's last testament in Amravati the same year painted a picture of usury, debt and land grab.</span><br />
<span class="style2" style="font-family: Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 13px;">In November 2006, cotton grower Rameshwar Kuchankar addressed the then Maharashtra Chief Minister Vilasrao Deshmukh in his note. He scribbled it down moments before taking his life in Yavatmal. “We are fed up with the delay in procurement and crashing prices ... Mr. Chief Minister, give us the price.” He also warned State Home Minister R.R. Patil that if the price did not improve at once, suicides would soar. They did.</span><br />
<span class="style2" style="font-family: Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 13px;">“These notes are the last cry of despair of people trying to tell their government the reasons for agrarian distress,” says Kishor Tiwari. Mr. Tiwari heads the Vidarbha Jan Andolan Samiti, a body fighting for farmers' rights. “We set up expert committees to tell us why farmers commit suicide when they are themselves telling us the reasons with such clarity in their suicide notes.” The notes often speak of debt, soaring cultivation costs, high cost of living and volatile prices. Some of them trash regressive policies and a credit crunch that have destroyed thousands of farmers here in the past decade. Crop failure and drought coming atop these, ruin fragile lives.<br />
Two years of crop failure in a single crop district can mean 34 months with no income. Vidarbha gained little from the 2008 Farm Loan Waiver which addressed only bank debt. The waiver excluded those farmers holding more than five acres, and made no distinction between dry and irrigated holdings. In Western Vidarbha, farmers take more loans from moneylenders than from banks. And, the average land holding is around seven acres in this mostly unirrigated region.</span><br />
<span class="style2" style="font-family: Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 13px;">Of the five states that account for two-thirds of all of India's farm suicides, Maharashtra is by far the worst. According to the National Crime Records Bureau (NCRB) the State logged 41,404 farm suicides between 1997 and 2008. That is, more than a fifth of the national total of nearly 200,000 in that same period. Of those 12 years, NCRB data show, the years 2006-08 have been the very worst. Within the State, Vidarbha has been the focal point of the tragedy.</span><br />
<div align="center"><img align="bottom" height="636" src="http://www.counterpunch.org/SUICIDE%20LETTER%20JPEG.jpg" width="454" /></div><span class="style13" style="color: #990000; font-family: Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; font-weight: bold;">Back to square one</span><br />
<span class="style2" style="font-family: Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 13px;">However, the situation here seems like a throwback to that of 2005-06, before Prime Minister Manmohan Singh's visit. Hit by a spate of suicides at the time, the State government spoke in many voices. In mid-2005, it gave out a figure of just 141 distress suicides across the whole State since 2001. Challenged in court, it revised this to 524. When the National Commission of Farmers team led by Dr. M.S. Swaminathan visited later the same year, it conceded there had been over 300 in the single district of Yavatmal. The final figure for the whole State that year, put out by the NCRB, was actually 3,926 suicides.</span><br />
<span class="style2" style="font-family: Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 13px;">“For a while,” says Mr. Tiwari of the VJAS, “the State revealed real numbers on the website of the Vasantrao Naik Farmers' Self-Reliance Mission. That was because of Dr. Singh's visit and a lashing from the courts.” In fact, those figures were far higher than anything even the VJAS had recorded. This year, however, the website's columns for 2010 are so far blank. The Agriculture Ministry's reply to a question in the Rajya Sabha, based on State claims, says just 23 farm suicides occurred between January and April 8.</span><br />
<span class="style2" style="font-family: Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 13px;">This, even as other arms of government (and the Leader of the Opposition) put out figures ten times as high. The Vasantrao Naik Mission has itself given out signed data confirming there were 62 such deaths in January alone. (Though it has not put this up on its website.)</span><br />
<span class="style2" style="font-family: Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 13px;">The numbers are routinely lowered by tagging hundreds of suicides as “non-genuine”. That is, “ineligible for compensation”. Aimed at curbing the amounts the State has to fork out to bereaved families, this move has caused much damage. “We are deluding ourselves,” says a senior official. “No wonder Ramachandra Raut felt the need to address his letter on stamp paper to the Prime Minister and President as well. He knew nothing would be taken seriously here in Maharashtra.”</span><br />
<span class="style2" style="font-family: Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 13px;"><br />
</span><br />
<div class="style2" style="font-family: Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><strong><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: x-small;">(P. Sainath</span></i></strong><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: x-small;"> is the rural affairs editor of The Hindu, where this piece appears, and is the author of </span></i><a href="http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0140259848/counterpunchmaga"><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: x-small;">Everybody Loves a Good Drought: Stories From India's Poorest Districts.</span></i></a><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: x-small;"> He can be reached at: </span></i><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: x-small;"><a href="mailto:psainath@vsnl.com">psainath@vsnl.com</a>)</span></i></div>Uday Prakashhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07587503029581457151noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9181128932143875441.post-30270387449233633842010-04-19T17:50:00.000-07:002010-04-19T17:50:32.360-07:00Voices of Resistance Becoming Clearer<div style="line-height: 1.6em;"> <div class="style5 style6" style="color: #3d85c6;"><b><span style="font-size: large;">Chidambaram's Dominoes Are Beginning To Fall </span></b></div><div class="style5"><strong>By Trevor Selvam</strong></div><div class="style5">17 April, 2010<br />
<strong></strong></div><div class="style5"><span class="style6">T</span>he dominoes are knocking over each other at such a rapid pace that India should not be surprised if Naxalites and Maoists find curious backers in the highest echelons of the State. Not because people up there are particularly endeared to Naxalite strategy and tactics, but some of them are reconsidering their options and have realized that in this insane rush towards ramrodding India into a neo-liberal Valhalla, a large majority of the citizens of India are being ripped apart, torn asunder and shoved into the gutters, sewers, swamps and bogs of this nation. Something is going wrong and if a course correction is not made now, things are going down the tubes to hell in a hand basket. The collateral damage has been so obvious that no less than the Central Government’s own offices have declared the attempts at displacing the “poorest of the poor” (the PM’s own words), and the forced evacuation and hamletization of aboriginal people, as the “biggest land grab since Columbus. ” Whoever drafted that phrase or statement is an extraordinarily thoughtful and historically wary person. Because she or he knew what was around the bend. And it has come about faster than the powers ever imagined. It was supposed to have been done surreptitiously, quietly and with the fanfare and dog and pony show associated with 9% growth drowning out the screams of the displaced. It did not pan out that way.</div><div class="style5"> Indians, be they analysts, economists, bureaucrats, historians, scientists, advocates, IAS officers and even retired senior commanders in the services are not unconscious and ahistorical babblers. After all Indians bore the brunt of the British Empire for two hundred years. The process of colonization is such that it leaves behind a genealogy of awareness, of remembrance, the ability to connect the dots and not be taken for a ride. Indians pass on the lessons of their parents’ generation to their next in line. To put it bluntly, Indians are not fools. They do not take kindly to the incessant repetition of official speak. Just as Iraqis and Afghanis aren’t either. Indians know that occupation, whether it is by goras or by their proxies are never tolerated quietly. </div><div class="style5"> The sons and daughters and the grandchildren of freedom fighters, of Gandhian activists, of Sarvodaya activists, followers of Vinoba Bhave, of the Congress Socialists, of the followers of “Nehruvian socialism”, of the followers of JP Narayan, of those the British chose to call “terrorists” and old-style retired Communists from the Tebhaga and Telengana period, know where “the buck stops.” They may not be supporters of the Maoists, but they know that this time around, something is going terribly wrong and this mad race to “modernize” India has only one group of takers—those who salivate over the glam and glitter of Ratan Tata, Narendra Modi, the Ambanis, the Jindals, the Mallyas and their main backers, Chidambaram, Ahluwalia, Kamal Nath and a handful of others. </div><div class="style5"> The dominoes are beginning to fall. And despite the clear cut statement by the PM’s office that all statements on the Maoist issue will only come from the Home Minister’s office, within twenty four hours, <a href="http://economictimes.indiatimes.com/news/politics/nation/Rethink-counter-Maoist-strategy-Digvijay-Singh-to-P-Chidambaram/articleshow/5800173.cms"><strong>Mr. Digvijay Singh spoke up</strong></a>, and he is no small fish. </div><div class="style5"> “He (Mr Chidambaram) is treating it purely as a law and order problem without taking into consideration the issues that affect the tribals," Digvijay Singh, wrote in the Economic Times. Further on he went on to say, “We can't solve this problem by ignoring the hopes and aspirations of the people living in these areas... In a civilised society and a vibrant democracy, ultimately it is the people who matter," he added. </div><div class="style5"> Mr. Mani Shankar Aiyar, the former Minister of Petroleum and Panchayati Raj had at one time this to say about Chidambaram. “His deposition over four sessions in the witness-box has shown him up to have been a most incompetent minister of state for internal security (1986-89) and most negligent as minister in charge of the investigation into Rajiv Gandhi's assassination from May 24, 1995, till his defection to the TMC on April Fool's Day, 1996. ” And in an add-on to Digvijay Singh’s recent article in the Economic Times, Aiyar said, "Digvijay is not one hundred per cent right, he is not even one thousand per cent right, he is one lakh per cent right." At an MSN India site, the following is stated. “ And at a conference on The Dynamics of Rural Transformation, organised by Planning Commission member Mihir Shah, Aiyar presented a paper which said "the consistent failure of the state governments concerned, and the total lack of conscientiousness on the part of the Centre in urging the states concerned to conscientiously implement, in letter and spirit, the provisions of PESA -- Provisions of the Panchayats (Extension to Scheduled Areas) Act -- have contributed more than any other single factor to the aggravation of the situation in forest areas. This has facilitated the mushrooming of insurgency directed against the state in the heart of India." <br />
In the article in The Economic Times on Wednesday, Digvijay Singh further accused Chidambaram, of "intellectual arrogance". There are many in the Congress, including those who are close to Mrs. Sonia Gandhi and her son, who have maintained a significant distance from the genocidal verbiage of “wiping out, sanitizing and cleansing” that has come from the entourage of Mr. Chidambaram, his Police and Paramilitary as well as the loyal mainstream media. In the final analysis, there is nothing sanctified about “law and order” and they know it. Because lawlessness has been a defining character of governance in the Indian countryside. </div><div class="style5"> The chips are going to fall, one by one. It is only a matter of time, before Indians from all walks of life will speak up. It does not have to be the tireless voices of the Roys, the Navlakhas, Sundars, Bhusans, Himanshu Kumars only. And it will not be the voices of Justice PB Sawant and Suresh, Professor Yash Pal, Drs. Giri, Bhargava and Subramanium who officiated in the Indian Peoples Tribunal either. Soon other journals and magazines will join Tehelka, Outlook, Mainstream, Open magazines and occasionally The Hindu and even 24 Ghanta (the Kolkata TV channel), as well. Because, there is a tradition in India of quietly re-visiting the past and not simply concocting a present. There is a tradition of thoughtfulness and a renaissance mentality that gently warns against the rabid promotion of the “us and them” dichotomy. There is a tradition in India of being alert to upstarts who want to steal the show.</div><div class="style5"> Actors, actresses, scientists, sports personalities will also speak up. News channels, despite the corporate sponsorship they enjoy, will eventually break their bondage and slip in the truth from the hills and rivers of Dandakaranya. There is a limit to how much an entire nation can be duped into this proto-fascist frenzy. Shades of George Bush, post-911! It lasted for a while and Ms. Susan Sonntag, Gore Vidal and a host of others were similarly brutally abused for questioning the rabid war-mongering and xenophobia that followed. So will it happen in India. Even in the Bombay movie tradition, there is a long list of Sahnis, Kapoors, Azmis, Abbas, the heirs in Bengal of Bijon Bhattacharya and Shombhu Mitra and the musical tradition of Salil Choudhury, Sahir Ludhianvi, Majrooh Sultanpuri and others all over the country will come out and have their voices be heard. </div><div class="style5"> This is a fork in the road. And if you take the wrong end of the fork, there is no retreat. Hidden agendas will not work in this India. Whether you are a Maoist supporter or not, the facts are clear that the Maoists are NOT on the wrong side of history. You cannot juggle the reality by endlessly discussing the dichotomy of law and order versus development. This is a falsification of the debate. To thump your chest and bemoan the plight of “ our Jawans” as the CPI(Marxist) and the BJP recently did in Parliament, smacks of the same anti-intellectual tradition that followed 911 in the US. </div><div class="style5"> The Maoists have, as per their own interpretations, clearly figured out what is going disastrously wrong and they have chosen to highlight this. Their fight has been a fight of resistance, albeit violent. And while the Maoists did not choose violence as their first step ( the counter-Maoists can continue to whine away about the Maoists constitutional edict to seize power by armed struggle etc, highlighting the aspect of power seizure as if it is an overnight coup d’état and not a long drawn out struggle for structural change) they have no choice but to defend their gains. For a long time, the fathers and mothers of liberalization sold the story to the media and who in turn parroted it out, day in and out that India needed to “liberalize.” Behind that well chosen misnomer, the Indian state sold a bill of goods to India’s proto-gullible middle class that questioning this “liberalization” would amount to un-patriotic activity. And the bloggers, twitterers, facebookers went all out to spread the same gospel. Well, that balance is now being tipped. Scores of blogs and sites have now hit out hard against this one sided misrepresentation.</div><div class="style5"> If India was the same nation, it was some fifteen years ago, it would not attract much attention, either internally or externally. The times have changed. Today, what happens in Dantewada is written about in Washington DC, in San Francisco, in Moscow, in Amsterdam, London, Singapore, Paris and Johannesburg within hours. Call it what you will, there are representatives of the new media, stationed everywhere, picking up on each other’s pronouncements and belting out stories instantaneously. And some of these stories do not bode well for the folks who quietly promoted the camp of the suave and cocky Mr. P. Chidambaram. Because word has gotten around that within the ruling corridors that there is considerable double taking or to put it somewhat euphemistically some soul searching going on. Mr. Chidambaram had some vague notions that one day he would be an applicant for the position of the PM of this country. Dynasty or not, the Gandhi family knows that Chidambaram is a chip of the old block. For those of you who remember, this is the progeny of the Old Congress Syndicate. The ruling class of India are not a monolithic block and they continue to have their own skirmishes and cock-fights like Morarji Desai and Sanjiva Reddy on one side and the VV Giris, Indira-clan on the other side. Let us not forget that out of the Indian electorate of 714 million, 153,482,356 voted for the Congress party (21% of the electorate) and Manmohan Singh had to run in Assam and Chidambaram required a recount to get their seats. Within the UPA, there are plenty of forces who are not going to put up with the high-handedness of the Chidambaram coterie. </div><div class="style5"> Somewhere amongst the denizens in India’s ruling corridors there are families, groupings, influences that have a long lineage going back to India’s struggle to free itself from Britain. In that lineage, non-alignment did well. Playing one superpower against the other. Despite the hidebound theories of the ruling classes’ propensities, the fact is that after all is said and done, the ruling class is not united. On the one hand there are the outright compradors and on the other side are the compromisers who desperately wish for a new superpower. There has always been an Indian state of mind, which eventually shakes itself out of its torpor and calls a spade a spade. </div><div class="style5"> The people of India and I mean those who do not read blogs and do not know who George Dick Obama could be, vote with their fists, when they are kicked around too much. Mrs. Indira Gandhi found that out. The BJP realized that in no time. Karat and Yechury smarted under the same blows and Buddhadev Bhattacharya is going to find it out pretty soon. Even though voter turn out in India is still hardly anything to be proud of, when Indians do vote they vote with their minds. (<strong>Countercurrents.org)</strong></div><br />
<br />
</div>Uday Prakashhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07587503029581457151noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9181128932143875441.post-66783527008424198462010-04-11T12:19:00.000-07:002010-04-11T12:19:52.260-07:00Tribes and Skies<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiHiomvtBMSbq5e4ED3oRL88kKW-EnN_e3sRfCul8sfjWTQnLx1awacbfV0ytVtHLJvSSWV4w08eoYnZtpJjcv4ESkfjzTeW7RjvNIjvCn7NWMMv7Y8Nj8KMeeoRUAklGfikMPgQDPcXnO1/s1600/TRIBAL15.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" height="229" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiHiomvtBMSbq5e4ED3oRL88kKW-EnN_e3sRfCul8sfjWTQnLx1awacbfV0ytVtHLJvSSWV4w08eoYnZtpJjcv4ESkfjzTeW7RjvNIjvCn7NWMMv7Y8Nj8KMeeoRUAklGfikMPgQDPcXnO1/s320/TRIBAL15.jpg" width="320" /></a></div><div class="rteleft"> <span style="font-size: large;"><b>by Zygmunt Bauman</b></span></div><div class="rteleft"><br />
</div><div class="rteleft">The 'tribe' focused on by Calvino, a tribe of coconut gatherers, is - as the title of the story suggests - addicted to 'watching the sky'. The sky it watches obsessively and intensely happens to be a sight that is genuinely fascinating and truly rewarding to watch: it is full of 'new celestial bodies', like jet planes, flying saucers, rockets, and guided missiles . . . While the tribe watches, the tribal witch doctors feel obliged to explain, authoritatively, to their fellow tribesmen the meaning of what they are seeing. They tell the tribesmen that what is currently happening in the sky is a sure sign that the day is fast approaching when the slavery and poverty which has tormented the tribe for centuries will come to an end. Soon 'the barren savannah will bring forth millet and maize', so the tribe will no longer be doomed to feeding itself and surviving, day in, day out, by picking coconuts. And so - here comes the crunch - 'it is hardly worth us racking our brains over new ways of emerging from our present situation; we should trust in the Great Prophecy, rally around its only rightful interpreters, without asking to know more . . .'</div><div class="rteleft">Meanwhile, on earth, in that valley where the tribe had built their huts of straw and mud, from which they wandered out daily in search of coconuts and to which they returned, day in, day out, things were also changing. Previously, merchants occasionally arrived in the valley to buy coconuts from the gatherers; the merchants cheated on price, but the clever tribesmen managed to outsmart and fool them time and again, avenging their cheating for good measure. Now, however, the merchants had stopped coming. Instead, an outpost had been opened in the valley by a brand new establishment called Nicer Nut Corporation, whose agents purchased, wholesale, the totality of the coconut crop. The corporation, unlike the old-style travelling traders, allowed no haggling and no opportunities for trickery: prices were fixed in advance, take it or leave it. But, of course, if you 'leave it', you might as well forget your chances of survival until the next batch of coconuts is brought into the valley from picking escapades. On one point, however, the agents of the Nicer Nut Corporation wholeheartedly agree with the tribal witch doctors (and vice versa). They all talk about missiles in the sky and about the news they augur. And the agents, just like the witch doctors, insist that beyond all reasonable doubt 'it is in the power of these shooting stars that our entire destiny lies'.</div><div class="rteleft">The teller of the story shares in the destinies and habits of his tribe. Like the rest of the tribe, he spends his evenings at the entrance of his straw and mud hut, closely watching the sky. Like the other tribesmen, he attentively listens to the witch doctors and takes to heart and memorizes what they, and the agents of the Nicer Nut Corporation, keep saying. But he also thinks for himself (or, more precisely, his thoughts think themselves in his mind, without having asked his permission: an idea occurs to him which, he confesses, 'I can't get out of my head'). He thinks that 'a tribe that relies entirely on the will of shooting stars, whatever fortune they may bring, will always sell off its coconuts cheap'.</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEip3OJpg2VvLhzb5m9P4wE_rxqcGqtYMQeXVF-ZMhfGCqf7WZ7FFn8O16tznbn0hlw2vnqSnUKcs4PozJawyxmjBYNsjlI-5hl4ITuJBMW5PSC9GqyqMSXC8Xn_zyX8EnDBguyH5Wkhk19i/s1600/6786.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEip3OJpg2VvLhzb5m9P4wE_rxqcGqtYMQeXVF-ZMhfGCqf7WZ7FFn8O16tznbn0hlw2vnqSnUKcs4PozJawyxmjBYNsjlI-5hl4ITuJBMW5PSC9GqyqMSXC8Xn_zyX8EnDBguyH5Wkhk19i/s320/6786.jpg" /></a></div><div class="rteleft"><br />
</div><div class="rteleft">In another short story, <em>Beheading the Heads</em>, Italo Calvino points out that television (here he goes straight to the point, skipping the allegory of a sky filled with shooting stars, 'television' itself being a potent metaphor for so many aspects of our liquid modern life) 'changed a lot of things' - though not necessarily the things which our own, new and improved, technologically sophisticated witch doctors (now renamed 'spin doctors') privately like to pride themselves on having craftily and stealthily changed, while praising television for those changes.</div><div class="rteleft">Among things that TV did indeed change, Calvino suggests, is the way we view our leaders (here, 'our leaders' stands for much a larger collection of people who were previously distant and whom we used to hear without seeing, let alone watching: idols, stars, celebrities, all those people we now watch daily, and closely, expecting entertainment, fun and all the illumination and guidance worth getting, and to whom television accords the same treatment as it does to 'our leaders'). Once they were remote figures somewhere high up on the platform, or shown in portraits 'assuming expressions of conventional pride'. Now however, thanks to TV 'everybody can pore over the slightest movements of the features, the irritated twitch of the eyelids under spotlights, the nervous moistening of the lips between one word and another'. In a nutshell, once they arrived so close to us, indeed inside our sitting rooms and bedrooms, our leaders came to appear terribly banal, like the rest of us. And mortal, like the rest of us - that is, arriving only to go away again. Appearing in order to disappear. Clinging to power only to lose it. The sole advantage they seem to have over us, ordinary mortals, is that they are destined for a <em>public</em>, not a <em>private</em> death - 'the death we are sure to be there for, all together' ...</div><div class="rteleft">Tongue in cheek, though not entirely, Calvino goes as far as suggesting that it is our new awareness of this which explains why, so long as a politician lives, she or he 'will enjoy our interested, anticipatory concern'.</div><div class="rteleft">And finally come words so poignant that they deserve to be quoted verbatim and in full:</div><blockquote> <div class="rteleft">For us democracy can only begin once we are sure that on the appointed day the television cameras will frame the death throes of our ruling classes to the last man, and then, as an epilogue to the same programme (though many will switch off their sets at this point), the investiture of the new faces who are to rule (and to live) for a similar period.</div></blockquote><div class="rteleft">All that, Calvino concludes, is 'watched by millions of viewers with the serene absorption of one observing the movement of the heavenly bodies in their recurrent circles, a spectacle all the more reassuring the more alien we find it'.</div><div class="rteleft">It is, it seems, a custom of more than one tribe, and not necessarily tribes who are remote in space or time, to keep their eyes fixed 'on stars shooting in the sky'. And the reasons why eyes are fixed on stars do not change much from one tribe to another. The consequences of eyes being fixed there do not change much: it is only the equipment serving that activity/passivity that changes. As well as the names of the tribes and of the stars they watch, and the stories told by tribal witch doctors about the meaning of all those shooting stars on which those eyes happen to be fixed. Though not the message of those stories, nor the intentions and purposes of their tellers.</div><div class="rteleft">Truthout, Sunday, 11th April, 2010 </div>Uday Prakashhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07587503029581457151noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9181128932143875441.post-57205600162430871652010-01-18T23:10:00.000-08:002010-01-21T00:42:10.480-08:00Beyond Multiculturalism<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjCkrNmyNmzSklKVLChOdNivigkyxeOuqhYPwIqRWGVpGcvP_3SasoylFBVuV1SCzkDIJgI_VDG7tzNHFMUygMDjh_Wbn-e2L_vTQYIcDpjq1MEhfWplewgqQEUpNa0XufVrQY-UlKW9Azb/s1600-h/erasehate.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjCkrNmyNmzSklKVLChOdNivigkyxeOuqhYPwIqRWGVpGcvP_3SasoylFBVuV1SCzkDIJgI_VDG7tzNHFMUygMDjh_Wbn-e2L_vTQYIcDpjq1MEhfWplewgqQEUpNa0XufVrQY-UlKW9Azb/s320/erasehate.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /></div><span style="font-size:large;"><b>Robert Jensen</b> talks about Love in Action and Love in Dreams, Identities of Race, Gender and Class, Injuries coming out of Hierarchical Systems in today's world...Politics to grab Power vs Politics to Distribute Power.....And on many more topics...</span><br /><a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ErAj2Ik9e9M"><b><span style="color: rgb(204, 0, 0);font-family:Verdana,sans-serif;" >Click here : Thinking a New world</span></b></a>Uday Prakashhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07587503029581457151noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9181128932143875441.post-77567087948611295992009-12-25T18:38:00.000-08:002009-12-25T19:04:02.932-08:00Wishing you a meaningful Christmas and a happy, and violence-free YEAR 2010<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhyDzohnOYsjsggHTlGSy-PUyplV7xKYOJOohpR9Yl59Kh8Bv2Wxoj8sO9vkTjSCOVzx9Dtgtn4o8m028ISIDl5ha5jEjL_Rfjg9MEqapwJVqqD-shX2pJ5tx0DI-ckd1XtwUhGhmEvqav_/s1600-h/spacer.gif"><img style="margin: 0pt 0pt 10px 10px; float: right; cursor: pointer; width: 1px; height: 1px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhyDzohnOYsjsggHTlGSy-PUyplV7xKYOJOohpR9Yl59Kh8Bv2Wxoj8sO9vkTjSCOVzx9Dtgtn4o8m028ISIDl5ha5jEjL_Rfjg9MEqapwJVqqD-shX2pJ5tx0DI-ckd1XtwUhGhmEvqav_/s320/spacer.gif" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5419375094651454914" border="0" /></a><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg4ABLFWx7coAGmo1SKnCLxIBckOFMDAynHb55o615mrRvVwDT4TN-UdcGUBbnOOBdeXFa-Z2lVIrpRP-otALfiJZA2tTxuf0Iw4ZKnmuRFbw_7u1eUVQ9ujFMgXYSOa3bnNIs-z1RM2_FX/s1600-h/spacer.gif"><img style="margin: 0pt 0pt 10px 10px; float: right; cursor: pointer; width: 1px; height: 1px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg4ABLFWx7coAGmo1SKnCLxIBckOFMDAynHb55o615mrRvVwDT4TN-UdcGUBbnOOBdeXFa-Z2lVIrpRP-otALfiJZA2tTxuf0Iw4ZKnmuRFbw_7u1eUVQ9ujFMgXYSOa3bnNIs-z1RM2_FX/s320/spacer.gif" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5419374283950132818" border="0" /></a><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgqsDcbEiH4BfyeaDxZ3HAhf5XO1gbBRNqxABcUzGukH_bpKe3U07WPXIUacHspycdbx5LNfa5POqLVMPf2wqQp23YxnbQmlHQMa3KNnLh_tlCz5nch8aApU_pKRNB1HVkPmBtyueg80-7C/s1600-h/Jesus_Christ.jpg"><img style="cursor: pointer; width: 238px; height: 320px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgqsDcbEiH4BfyeaDxZ3HAhf5XO1gbBRNqxABcUzGukH_bpKe3U07WPXIUacHspycdbx5LNfa5POqLVMPf2wqQp23YxnbQmlHQMa3KNnLh_tlCz5nch8aApU_pKRNB1HVkPmBtyueg80-7C/s320/Jesus_Christ.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5419373745749985314" border="0" /></a><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiHdUQ3CaIHzF2wVpBmwXxs9RPy6FRpk4NQZfYdMX_7xQzoSD519_dWXmOzZUfr-LfxLagKm8w3QQMP0rShiwg804sVQa4yVrd-VTLndQxY6qNBjXBenOuuvqyjY_KJdOArwCP7LxnYILP6/s1600-h/spacer.gif"><img style="cursor: pointer; width: 1px; height: 1px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiHdUQ3CaIHzF2wVpBmwXxs9RPy6FRpk4NQZfYdMX_7xQzoSD519_dWXmOzZUfr-LfxLagKm8w3QQMP0rShiwg804sVQa4yVrd-VTLndQxY6qNBjXBenOuuvqyjY_KJdOArwCP7LxnYILP6/s320/spacer.gif" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5419373740684366130" border="0" /></a><br /><div id=":1io" class="ii gt"><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; line-height: normal; font-style: italic; color: rgb(51, 51, 153);"><b><span style=";font-family:";font-size:9pt;" ><span style="font-family:verdana;"><br /></span></span></b></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; line-height: normal; font-style: italic; color: rgb(51, 51, 153);"><b><span style=";font-family:";font-size:9pt;" ><span style="font-family:verdana;">This is an email greeting i received from George Goldy yesterday with a very inspiring poem. i post it hear for friends who visit this blog. </span><br /></span></b></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; line-height: normal;"><b><span style=";font-family:";font-size:8pt;" >Dear friends:</span></b><span style=";font-size:8pt;color:black;" ></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; line-height: normal;"><b><span style=";font-family:";font-size:8pt;" > </span></b></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; line-height: normal;"><b><span style=";font-family:";font-size:8pt;" >An irrelevant birth in the manger,</span></b></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; line-height: normal;"><b><span style=";font-family:";font-size:8pt;" >Of an ordinary, unimportant, child,</span></b></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; line-height: normal;"><b><span style=";font-family:";font-size:8pt;" >The spaceless birth, </span></b></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; line-height: normal;"><b><span style=";font-family:";font-size:8pt;" >The pains and agonies of a virgin mother,</span></b></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; line-height: normal;"><b><span style=";font-family:";font-size:8pt;" >To bear the identity of slumhood,</span></b></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; line-height: normal;"><b><span style=";font-family:";font-size:8pt;" >To live amidst betrayed, battered and undignified.</span></b></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; line-height: normal;"><b><span style=";font-family:";font-size:8pt;" > </span></b></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; line-height: normal;"><b><span style=";font-family:";font-size:8pt;" >But today,</span></b></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; line-height: normal;"><b><span style=";font-family:";font-size:8pt;" >Traditions changed, trends changed</span></b><span style=";font-size:8pt;color:black;" ></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; line-height: normal;"><b><span style=";font-family:";font-size:8pt;" >Years changed, volume changed</span></b><span style=";font-size:8pt;color:black;" ></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; line-height: normal;"><b><span style=";font-family:";font-size:8pt;" >Language changed, literature changed,</span></b><span style=";font-size:8pt;color:black;" ></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; line-height: normal;"><b><span style=";font-family:";font-size:8pt;" >Yet there is something unchanged,</span></b><span style=";font-size:8pt;color:black;" ></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; line-height: normal;"><b><span style=";font-family:";font-size:8pt;" > </span></b><span style=";font-size:8pt;color:black;" ></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; line-height: normal;"><b><span style=";font-family:";font-size:8pt;" >Rather unwilling to change,</span></b><span style=";font-size:8pt;color:black;" ></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; line-height: normal;"><b><span style=";font-family:";font-size:8pt;" >The labour of this new birth</span></b><span style=";font-size:8pt;color:black;" ></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; line-height: normal;"><b><span style=";font-family:";font-size:8pt;" >Still striving to break the womb</span></b><span style=";font-size:8pt;color:black;" ></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; line-height: normal;"><b><span style=";font-family:";font-size:8pt;" >And see this world</span></b><span style=";font-size:8pt;color:black;" ></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; line-height: normal;"><b><span style=";font-family:";font-size:8pt;" > </span></b><span style=";font-size:8pt;color:black;" ></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; line-height: normal;"><b><span style=";font-family:";font-size:8pt;" >The voice of freedom,</span></b><span style=";font-size:8pt;color:black;" ></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; line-height: normal;"><b><span style=";font-family:";font-size:8pt;" >The voice of humanhood,</span></b><span style=";font-size:8pt;color:black;" ></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; line-height: normal;"><b><span style=";font-family:";font-size:8pt;" >The voice of liberation,</span></b><span style=";font-size:8pt;color:black;" ></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; line-height: normal;"><b><span style=";font-family:";font-size:8pt;" >The voice of brotherhood</span></b><span style=";font-size:8pt;color:black;" ></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; line-height: normal;"><b><span style=";font-family:";font-size:8pt;" > </span></b><span style=";font-size:8pt;color:black;" ></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; line-height: normal;"><b><span style=";font-family:";font-size:8pt;" >Had been battered ever than before</span></b><span style=";font-size:8pt;color:black;" ></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; line-height: normal;"><b><span style=";font-family:";font-size:8pt;" >Suffered more than in the history</span></b><span style=";font-size:8pt;color:black;" ></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; line-height: normal;"><b><span style=";font-family:";font-size:8pt;" >The days ahead are more brutal and violent</span></b><span style=";font-size:8pt;color:black;" ></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; line-height: normal;"><b><span style=";font-family:";font-size:8pt;" >Anyone dare to oppose it will be anti-national,</span></b></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; line-height: normal;"><b><span style=";font-family:";font-size:8pt;" >Or a terrorist,</span></b></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; line-height: normal;"><b><span style=";font-family:";font-size:8pt;" > </span></b></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; line-height: normal;"><b><span style=";font-family:";font-size:8pt;" >So,</span></b></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; line-height: normal;"><b><span style=";font-family:";font-size:8pt;" >Don’t dare, YOU</span></b></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; line-height: normal;"><b><span style=";font-family:";font-size:8pt;" >Dalits, Adivasis, Women, Working Class</span></b><span style=";font-size:8pt;color:black;" ></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; line-height: normal;"><b><span style=";font-family:";font-size:8pt;" >Blacks, Ethnics, Indigenous, Subalterns</span></b><span style=";font-size:8pt;color:black;" ></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; line-height: normal;"><b><span style=";font-family:";font-size:8pt;" >Minorities, Majority, etc. etc.</span></b><span style=";font-size:8pt;color:black;" ></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; line-height: normal;"><b><span style=";font-family:";font-size:8pt;" > </span></b><span style=";font-size:8pt;color:black;" ></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; line-height: normal;"><b><span style=";font-family:";font-size:8pt;" >Yet! There’s hope that one day</span></b><span style=";font-size:8pt;color:black;" ></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; line-height: normal;"><b><span style=";font-family:";font-size:8pt;" >The bells of freedom and liberty will ring…</span></b><span style=";font-size:8pt;color:black;" ></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; line-height: normal;"><b><span style=";font-family:";font-size:8pt;" >The flag of peace and love will fly up high in the sky...</span></b><span style=";font-size:8pt;color:black;" ></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; line-height: normal;"><b><span style=";font-family:";font-size:8pt;" >Over the earth, in the world,</span></b><span style=";font-size:8pt;color:black;" ></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; line-height: normal;"><b><span style=";font-family:";font-size:8pt;" >In every country, every province</span></b><span style=";font-size:8pt;color:black;" ></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; line-height: normal;"><b><span style=";font-family:";font-size:8pt;" >In every town, every village.</span></b></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; line-height: normal;"><b><span style=";font-family:";font-size:8pt;" > </span></b></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; line-height: normal;"><b><span style=";font-family:";font-size:8pt;" >May this Christmas and the New Year 2010 bring back the hopes of freedom, liberty and peace for all. Let the year 2010 be a step forward in gaining strength and courage.</span></b><span style=";font-size:8pt;color:black;" > </span><b><span style=";font-family:";font-size:8pt;" >Let's greet each other with the hope that this year would be a better one is the struggle for justice, freedom and fuller humanity</span></b><span style=";font-size:8pt;color:black;" ></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; line-height: normal;"><b><span style=";font-family:";font-size:8pt;" > </span></b><span style=";font-size:8pt;color:black;" ></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; line-height: normal;"><b><span style=";font-family:";font-size:8pt;" >Wishing you a meaningful Christmas and a happy, and violence-free YEAR 2010</span></b><span style=";font-size:8pt;color:black;" ></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; line-height: normal;"><b><span style=";font-family:";font-size:8pt;" > </span></b><span style=";font-size:8pt;color:black;" ></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; line-height: normal;"><b><span style=";font-family:";font-size:8pt;" >Warm regards</span></b><span style=";font-size:8pt;color:black;" ></span></p> <b><span style="line-height: 115%;font-family:";font-size:8pt;" >Goldy</span></b> </div>Uday Prakashhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07587503029581457151noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9181128932143875441.post-21253357936223858622009-12-11T19:48:00.000-08:002009-12-11T19:53:59.180-08:00Democracy Now!<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhZGOAQvulNV0QYxtJkNbu3pfXPjyEAPKxU6jzHZb1ql0jSR6AKqX8Oq2NZMX-cVjmp37JWjCHXq5dJDa1lxhoptxxUvOr-8hS2dwTyd6jrAXAn8T7mKxs5W2sBj7zBuqbW3vdPqTwL7Q30/s1600-h/tariq_ali_140x140.jpg"><img style="margin: 0pt 10px 10px 0pt; float: left; cursor: pointer; width: 140px; height: 140px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhZGOAQvulNV0QYxtJkNbu3pfXPjyEAPKxU6jzHZb1ql0jSR6AKqX8Oq2NZMX-cVjmp37JWjCHXq5dJDa1lxhoptxxUvOr-8hS2dwTyd6jrAXAn8T7mKxs5W2sBj7zBuqbW3vdPqTwL7Q30/s320/tariq_ali_140x140.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5414192940870144290" border="0" /></a><br /><a href="http://www.democracynow.org/email/post/518">Democracy Now!</a><br /><br />Speaking before a packed audience at Hampshire College, Tariq Ali argues that an immediate exit strategy from Afghanistan and Pakistan is vital both for the region and for the United States।Uday Prakashhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07587503029581457151noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9181128932143875441.post-39003218606917134232009-12-03T20:54:00.000-08:002009-12-03T21:04:42.052-08:00Resist and Speak out Loudly<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhYWRvxt9OEtpZr-D_yZGJAOzDo8JeNxCQqT10_wSTb3Th_d3OUsYFAZzSR7p6a3T9ykVwA6kKI_qI9aHGnGk1KeNEdk1r75yQLkg9iWmNMqVlY-xcxrA5h3G6cbH_zbLB8btn1jNzGjkCH/s1600-h/a-senior-naxalite-commander-known-as-comrade-kosa-addresses-about-5000-tribal-militiamen-and-supporters-at-an-april-rally-near-bastar-india.jpg"><img style="margin: 0pt 10px 10px 0pt; float: left; cursor: pointer; width: 320px; height: 238px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhYWRvxt9OEtpZr-D_yZGJAOzDo8JeNxCQqT10_wSTb3Th_d3OUsYFAZzSR7p6a3T9ykVwA6kKI_qI9aHGnGk1KeNEdk1r75yQLkg9iWmNMqVlY-xcxrA5h3G6cbH_zbLB8btn1jNzGjkCH/s320/a-senior-naxalite-commander-known-as-comrade-kosa-addresses-about-5000-tribal-militiamen-and-supporters-at-an-april-rally-near-bastar-india.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5411242357198342322" border="0" /></a><br /><h1>Biggest Land Grab After Columbus</h1> <div style="display: none;" id="formArticleDiv" class="sendMailCommentary"> <form id="sendMail" method="post" name="sendMail" action="/zspace/sendMailCommentaries"><input id="commentaryId" value="4055" name="commentaryId" type="hidden"> <table border="0" cellpadding="2" cellspacing="0"> <tbody> <tr> <td style="text-align: center;"> <h4>Send commentary through e-mail</h4></td> <td style="text-align: center; width: 30px;"><a onclick="document.getElementById('formArticleDiv').style.display = 'none';" href="javascript:void(0);"><img style="margin: 2px;" alt="X" src="http://www.blogger.com/images/closeSendMailArticle.gif" /> </a></td></tr> <tr> <td> <p>You must be logged in to use this feature.<br />If you are not a member yet, <a href="https://www.zcommunications.org/zsustainers/signup">sign up here</a> for a free membership account </p></td></tr></tbody></table></form></div> <p class="byLine"><span id="date"></span><b>By <span style="color: rgb(153, 51, 153);font-size:130%;" > Devinder</span></b><span style="color: rgb(153, 51, 153);font-size:130%;" ><span style="font-weight: bold;"> </span><b style="font-weight: bold;">Sharma</b> </span><br /></p><span> <p><span style="font-family:Verdana;">I think the eulogisation of Tata's has gone too far. Behind all the glamour, sobriety and humanitariasm that we read and hear about Tata's, there is a dark hidden side which is kept under wraps. It is time we look at the destructive role Tata's have played over the years in uprooting thousands of poor families, and the resulting destruction of livelihoods and the environment. </span></p> <p><span style="font-family:Verdana;">To overcome their guilt, and that too aimed at pacifying the liberal voices in the urban centres, I am sure Ratan Tata would be thinking of setting up schools and funding some NGO activities in the tribal lands as part of their Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR). </span></p> <p><span style="font-family:Verdana;">What a sophisticated way to cover your dark underbelly !</span></p> <p><span style="font-family:Verdana;">I was quite taken aback today to see a frontpage headline in The Hindustan Times: The biggest land grab after Columbus. As the blurb says: Government report criticises corporate exploitation of tribal lands; tribals turn to new friends: Maoist. And if you remember only a few days back, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh had publicly accepted, and made a promise: "The systemic exploitation of our tribal communities can no longer be tolerated." </span></p> <p><span style="font-family:Verdana;">Do you think Manmohan Singh will do anything to stop this? You bet, he will simply push for more such projects that will eventually destroy the social fabric of these tribal lands. If you think I am wrong, let us take the land-grab in Bedanji, a remote rural expanse in Bastar in Chhatisgarh, as a test case. The Tata's plan to set up a Rs 19,500 crore steel plant for which ten villages have to be emtied. </span></p> <p><span style="font-family:Verdana;">Interestingly, a report of the PM-appointed Ministry of Rural Development committee on Land Reforms has succintly said: "This open declared war will go down as the biggest land grab ever, if it plays out as per the script." The Hindustan Times report quotes the just-released government report warning against the corporate takeover in the Bastar hinterland: "The biggest grab of tribal lands after Columbus." </span></p> <p><span style="font-family:Verdana;">You can read the full news report here:<br /></span><a href="http://www.hindustantimes.com/The-biggest-land-grab"><span style="font-family:Verdana;">http://www.hindustantimes.com/The-biggest-land-grab</span></a><span style="font-family:Verdana;">-<br />after-Columbus/H1-Article3-476125.aspx</span></p> <p><span style="font-family:Verdana;">I was reading another detailed field report from Pravin Patel, a human rights activist. It tells you how the State government is helping facilitate the process of the massive takeover of tribal lands. It tells you how the official machinery has actually been hand in glove with the industrial houses to ruthlessly exploit the tribals. </span></p> <p><span style="font-family:Verdana;">This is what he writes: In Chattisgarh the tribal district Batar, District administration has played in the hands of house of Tatas by way of stage managed public hearing bluntly violating the norms and set procedures as laid down in the Notification to grant Environmental Clearances. </span></p> <p><span style="font-family:Verdana;">By making mockey of the conditions of the Notification where Public Hearing is a mandatory requirement where consultation with the likely affected villagers are held. But to fulfill this mandatory requirements, public hearing was held at the campus of the district collector, which is at a distance of about 30 Kms from the project area. This was done with mischivious motives as it is known to all that the villagers are strongly opposing the setting up of any steel plant in their area. </span></p> <p><span style="font-family:Verdana;">The entire drama was enacted to show off that the mandatory public hearing is held. This has proved to be nothing less than a puppet show of the district administration where except the most of the tribals who are residents of the villages to be affected, all others were present whom the project proponent hired or managed with the help of District Administration to dance to the tunes of the project proponent house of Tatas. </span></p> <p><span style="font-family:Verdana;">You may like to read his full report. Please click on:<br /></span><a href="http://mail.google.com/mail/?hl=en&shva"><span style="font-family:Verdana;">http://mail.google.com/mail/?hl=en&shva</span></a><span style="font-family:Verdana;">=<br />1#inbox/124f0af3377e6531</span></p> <p><span style="font-family:Verdana;">And finally, what does all this translate into. Well, you guessed it right. The tribals have no one else to seek solace and help from, except Maoists. What to talk of help, no one is willing to even listen to them except the Maoist. No wonder, Naxalism is growing. </span></p> <p><span style="font-family:Verdana;">As Gandhian Himanshu Kumar said the other day in an interview with the Times of India, (Nov 13, 2009) : Salwa Judum saw a 22-fold increase in Maoist numbers. Green Hunt will result in genocide of Adivasis. Those who survive will become Naxalites.<br />(Read the interview: </span><a href="http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/home/opinion/edit-page/"><span style="font-family:Verdana;">http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/home/opinion/edit-page/</span></a><span style="font-family:Verdana;"><br />Green-Hunt-will-result-in-genocide-of-Adivasis/articleshow/5223813.cms)</span></p> <p><span style="font-family:Verdana;">How true? But do you think anyone cares, least of all Manmohan Singh? Ha, he is more hinged to the GDP than the welfare of the human beings that he represents. With Tata's investing Rs 19,500-crore, which will add to the GDP, and that will be his government's report card.</span></p></span>Uday Prakashhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07587503029581457151noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9181128932143875441.post-46142064741505047442009-10-10T21:30:00.000-07:002009-10-10T21:41:29.530-07:00Nobel for Promises and Promises?by <span style="font-weight: bold; color: rgb(255, 0, 0);">Howard Zinn</span><br /><br />I was dismayed when I heard Obama was given the Nobel Peace Prize. A shock, really, to think that a president carrying on wars in two countries and launching military action in a third country (Pakistan), would be given a peace prize. But then I recalled that Woodrow Wilson, Theodore Roosevelt and Henry Kissinger had all received Nobel Peace Prizes. The Nobel Committee is famous for its superficial estimates and for its susceptibility to rhetoric and empty gestures, while ignoring blatant violations of world peace. <p> Yes, Wilson gets credit for the League of Nations - that ineffectual body which did nothing to prevent war. But he also bombarded the Mexican coast, sent troops to occupy Haiti and the Dominican Republic and brought the US into the slaughterhouse of Europe in the first World War - surely, among stupid and deadly wars, at the top of the list. </p><p> Sure, Theodore Roosevelt brokered a peace between Japan and Russia. But he was a lover of war, who participated in the US conquest of Cuba, pretending to liberate it from Spain while fastening US chains around that tiny island. And as president he presided over the bloody war to subjugate the Filipinos, even congratulating a US general who had just massacred 600 helpless villagers in the Phillipines. The Committee did not give the Nobel Prize to Mark Twain, who denounced Roosevelt and criticized the war, nor to William James, leader of the anti-imperialist league. </p><p> Oh yes, the Committee saw fit to give a peace prize to Henry Kissinger, because he signed the final agreement ending the war in Vietnam, of which he had been one of the architects. Kissinger, who obsequiously went along with Nixon's expansion of the war with the bombing of peasant villages in Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia. Kissinger, who matches the definition of a war criminal very accurately, was given a peace prize! </p><p> People should not be given a peace prize on the basis of promises they have made (as with Obama, an eloquent maker of promises) but on the basis of actual accomplishments towards ending war. Obama has continued deadly, inhuman military action in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan. </p><p> The Nobel Peace Committee should retire, and turn over its huge funds to some international peace organization which is not awed by stardom and rhetoric, and which has some understanding of history. </p><p> --------</p><p style="font-style: italic; color: rgb(51, 0, 51);"><span style="font-size:85%;"> Howard Zinn is a historian, playwright and social activist, and has received the Thomas Merton Award, the Eugene V. Debs Award, the Upton Sinclair Award and the Lannan Literary Award. He is perhaps best known for "A People's History of the United States."</span> </p>Uday Prakashhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07587503029581457151noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9181128932143875441.post-91692386655461628642009-10-04T10:15:00.000-07:002009-10-04T10:19:11.871-07:00Gandhi Today<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh4VUDAaEjMLCN7JLJIpCwfEL13ww0PrRkGJ2rHsPcPWaGE0i8Wyn3Vw89YSTBi0iJ3S9YmvKw4wJAi_lSl3ioKXp2hf3Cib5cFRWFx7Cr952mNpReADqS0Y2e2uIGkDpOp57H0Yg3iV5Bo/s1600-h/gandhi.jpg"><img style="margin: 0pt 0pt 10px 10px; float: right; cursor: pointer; width: 296px; height: 320px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh4VUDAaEjMLCN7JLJIpCwfEL13ww0PrRkGJ2rHsPcPWaGE0i8Wyn3Vw89YSTBi0iJ3S9YmvKw4wJAi_lSl3ioKXp2hf3Cib5cFRWFx7Cr952mNpReADqS0Y2e2uIGkDpOp57H0Yg3iV5Bo/s320/gandhi.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5388795188324927890" border="0" /></a><br /><br /><br />Oct 03, 2009<br /><p>By <span style="color: rgb(153, 51, 153);font-size:130%;" ><b>Ted Glick</b><a style="font-style: normal; font-family: Gill Sans,Helvetica,sans-serif; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none;" href="http://www.zcommunications.org/zspace/tedglick"></a></span><br /></p><p> </p><p><span style="font-family:Verdana;"><span style="color: rgb(51, 51, 153);font-size:85%;" ><span style="font-style: italic;">"Somewhere there's a sweet spot, that produces enough without tipping over into the hyper-individualism that drives our careening, unsatisfying economy. The mix of regulation and values that might make such self-restraint more common is, of course, as hard to create in China as in the United States; far simpler just to bless an every-man-for-himself economy and step aside. But creating those values, and the laws and customs that will slowly evolve from them, may be the key task of our time here and around the world." </span><br /><span style="font-style: italic; font-weight: bold; color: rgb(255, 102, 0);">- Bill McKibben, Deep Economy</span></span><br /><br />140 years today Mohandus Gandhi was born in Gujarat province in India. I didn't learn this from the New York Times, CNN, or any other mainstream media source. I didn't learn about it from progressive media outlets, although it is very possible that one or more of them publicized it and I missed it.<br /><br />I learned about this as a result of being invited to speak yesterday at William Patterson University in northern New Jersey by a professor who organized a program about Gandhi's relevance for today. Thanks to Balmurli Natrajan, Director of the Gandhian Forum for Peace and Justice, I've spent the last few days reflecting on this question.<br /><br />When I was asked this question directly at yesterday's forum, what came to mind is this: Gandhi is important, is of continuing relevance, because he wasn't just a great, if imperfect, leader of India's successful struggle for independence from colonial Britain. He is important because he understood that it was necessary for him personally, and for his people, to be about the process of personal and cultural change if they were to have a chance of truly lasting, truly revolutionary change, in the best sense of the term.<br /><br />Gandhi did his best to live a life which reflected the values of justice and love which he understood were central to the teachings of all great spiritual leaders. He went on fasts that were directed not just against the British but for his own people, calling upon them to refuse to mimic English violence and repression in their struggle for independence.<br /><br />The words of Gandhi that I have used most often over the years are these: "Fasting is the sincerest form of prayer." I've used them as I've learned their truth, as I've learned about prayer, during long fasts that I've undertaken in connection with the campaign to free Leonard Peltier, against the Iraq war and for strong government action to address the climate crisis.<br /><br />There's another fast very much in the Gandhian spiritual and political tradition that will be taking place about a month from now, a Climate Justice Fast (http://www.climatejusticefast.org). This is a fast initiated by young people in Australia, Europe and elsewhere specifically directed at the leaders of the world's governments as they move toward the Dec. 7-18 international meeting in Copenhagen, Denmark to try to come up with a stronger climate treaty than the Kyoto Protocol. As I write, things are not looking good at all that they will do what is needed.<br /><br />Anna Keenan, youth climate activist and one of the initiators of this fast, wrote yesterday about Gandhi. She began with a quote of his, that "the world has enough for everyone's needs but not for everyone's greed." She went on to "share another great Gandhi quote: 'Under certain circumstances, fasting is the one weapon God has given us for use in times of utter helplessness.' In just over a month, on the last day of the Barcelona[climate] talks [November 6], I and other activists around the world will be beginning the Climate Justice Fast and continuing until Copenhagen [over 40 days, on water only].<br /><br />"While the concept of the fast may shock some, it will be a non-violent, morally forceful and peaceful action, and is perhaps one of the few types of action that we have available to us that is capable of deeply communicating the gravity of the situation that we now find ourselves in, both in terms of the profound disaster of unchecked climate change and the profound opportunity provided by the Copenhagen summit."<br /><br />I know that there are many climate and progressive activists who have problems with the idea of fasting. It's too bad this is the case, because I have learned that fasting isn't just one of a number of tactics that we need to keep in our quiver to use as we struggle for a world based on love and compassion. Fasting is a form of action that is very valuable in building the internal discipline and the deeply-felt understanding of what's really important in this world that we individually need to stay true to our best ideals.<br /><br />When you fast for more than a few days, especially on a water-only fast, you are forced to think about the reasons for your fasting, why you are putting yourself through this. You spend time thinking about all of the people all over the world who "fast" involuntarily because of an unjust world order which is dominated by a relative handful of billionaires and multi-billionaires. When on a fast related to the issue of climate, you think about the almost-certain catastrophic droughts, famines and other disasters affecting not millions but billions later in this century if we don't rapidly make a shift away from the burning of fossil fuels and earth-destroying practices.<br /><br />It is difficult not to feel helpless in the face of the timidity and resistance of far too many of the world's government leaders to doing what clearly must be done. It's maddening knowing that a serious commitment to the enactment of a clean energy revolution can be the decisive shift that opens up all kinds of possibilities for a very different future as the nations of the world work together to clean up the environmental mess capitalism has created.<br /><br />In the words of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, killed because of his leadership in the anti-Nazi German resistance movement, "Real generosity toward the future lies in giving all to the present." Yes. Yes. Now and always.<br /><br /><br /><span style="font-size:85%;"><span style="font-weight: bold; color: rgb(255, 102, 0); font-style: italic;">Ted Glick</span><span style="font-style: italic;"> <span style="color: rgb(102, 0, 204);">is the Policy Director of the Chesapeake Climate Action Network and a long-time progressive activist.</span></span></span></span></p>Uday Prakashhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07587503029581457151noreply@blogger.com0