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Showing posts from July, 2020

Syria: Arabs Joining Kurdish-Led Forces

“Analysts have thus far tended to ignore those Arabs who support the political project in north and east Syria. Several observers have amplified the voices of those Arabs who are critical of it, perhaps because that narrative fits more easily into the simple trope of sectarianism.” Arabs Across Syria Join the Kurdish-Led Syrian Democratic Forces

Coronavirus

As of 27 July 2020, UK tops the list of countries with the highest deaths per thousand people.

Tunisia

  لا لتوظيف التسامح الديني كمطية  للتطبيع مع الكيان الصهيوني Using “religious tolerance” as a springboard to normalisation with the Israeli state

Patriotism

Consider this: what if the following comment from [Mark] Twain’s notebook appeared as a boxed quote in history textbooks? Patriotism “is a word which always commemorates a robbery. There isn’t a foot of land in the world which doesn’t represent the ousting and re-ousting of a long line of successive ‘owners’ who each in turn, as ‘patriots,’ with proud swelling hearts defended it against the next gang of ‘robbers’ who came to steal it and  did —and became swelling-hearted patriots in  their  turn.” What if teachers asked students to write essays agreeing or disagreeing with this idea in high school? Or what if the final exam required students to respond to a comment Twain made in the  North American Review  five years before his death—“the modern patriotism, the true patriotism, the only rational patriotism is loyalty to the nation all the time, loyalty to the government when it deserves it”? Mark Twain’s Inconvenient Truths Related: Censoring Mark Twain’s ‘n-words’ is unacceptab

Morocco

The Ministry of Health: your son died of coronavirus. The family of the deceased: no, he died of a heart attack. The Ministry: And what was the cause of the heart attack? The family: he accumulated too much debt. The Ministry: Why did he get so much in debt? The family: Because he was made unemployed. The Ministry: Why was he made unemployed? The family: Because of coronavirus. The Ministry: That’s what we’ve said! Translated from Moroccan Arabic. Source: Tarik Benziade on Facebook

China

Two main things are at stake if sourcing cotton from Xinjiang, China, would stop tomorrow: the fashion industrialists have to a find other suppliers of cotton at the same/similar price, for the rate of profit is key, and a risk that shops in the West and elsewhere would be unable to provide apparels at an affordable price for consumers. At the end of the day, this type of complicity has been going on for decades. “Virtually entire fashion industry complicit in Uighur forced labour”

UK

Citizenship Test ‘misleading’ and ‘false’ on slavery I suggest the following question be added to the Test: The following is an account that took place in a British colony. When and where did it happen?  1. India between 1870-1876 2. Iraq between 1920-1922 3. Kenya between 1952-1956 "Interrogation under torture was widespread. Many of the men were anally raped, using knives, broken bottles, rifle barrels, snakes and scorpions. A favourite technique was to hold a man upside down, his head in a bucket of water, while sand was rammed into his rectum with a stick. Women were gang-raped by the guards. People were mauled by dogs and electrocuted. The British devised a special tool which they used for first crushing and then ripping off testicles. They used pliers to mutilate women’s breasts. They cut off inmates’ ears and fingers and gouged out their eyes. They dragged people behind Land Rovers until their bodies disintegrated. Men were rolled up in barbed wire and kicked aroun

US and Western Europe

“You know there is something wrong with your economy when it’s more impoverishing to be in work than out of it.” An advice from an FT columnist to the capitalists 

António Guterres

The Secretary General of the UN

UK

Surprise! Surprise! Ethnic minorities: those who do not work hard enough, don’t speak our language, lack the skills, don’t want to integrate, don’t climb the property ladder, live on benefits, etc, etc. Covid-19 impact on ethnic minorities linked to housing and air pollution

Finance

Just more of some of the usual crimes Via Michael Roberts “The finance sector is really just a criminal conspiracy to steal from the public. So much for regulation rather than public ownership and control. Take the Wirecard scanda l. Wirecard, which started out processing payments for adult entertainment and gambling websites, filed for insolvency on June 25 after the discovery of a 1.9 billion euro hole in its accounts. German prosecutors have since opened investigations into suspected money laundering, fraud and market manipulatio n at the company. Markus Braun, the company’s former chief executive, was arrested. The company's accountants failed to carry out basic obvious auditing of the accounts and the German government ignored whistleblowers about the company and instead tried to prosecute them! Then there is the Apple tax dodge . With the connivance of the Irish government, Apple booked huge amounts of its global profits in Ireland where tax rates were deliberatel

UK

“[ P]rogressives remain fixated on how to revive the world that engendered the present disorder. They constructed and managed that world, and it flattered their self-image as the rational vanguard of the species. It is only to be expected that they should yearn for the return of their now bankrupt authority. Yet few aspects of the contemporary scene are more laughably grotesque than defunct politicians and advisers demanding a return to the politics of competence and expertise that produced the dysfunctional euro, the ruinous Iraq War, the financial crisis, anarchy in Libya and the regime of globalisation that is currently collapsing.” State of the nation - we are entering a new age of disorder

Exploitation

Just a mere new story of exploitation Shocking conditions [for whom?] in PPE factories supplying UK or Workers making sacrifices to save lives in the West!

Russia and UK

“ So, Russian "actors" (why actors?) sought to influence the outcome of the UK general election by amplifying (not leaking, but amplifying) a dossier about US - UK trade talks which showed that the NHS was being put on the table by the Tory government.  I mean, only someone really stupid would think that the serious thing here was the Russian actors amplifying, and not the actual report showing the Tories were selling off the NHS to Trump! Did the British public not have the ri ght to know? I would say that, if anything, these Russian "actors" should be thanked for having acted in the interest of democracy in revealing these scandalous secret deals being hatched behind the backs of the British electorate. And this, ladies and gentlemen, is the reason why this report on Russian meddling has not seen the light of day while the Tories had control of the intelligence and security committee.  This is also likely to be the reason why on the same day that the rep

Sudan

People’s own struggle achieves in months what NGOs cannot achieve (or hinders to achieve) for decades. Activists react as Sudan ditches “Islamist laws” A background 

Hong Kong

It’s a shame that Cheng has not expanded on the concept of “freedom” in the U.S. as a capitalist but also an imperialist state. Allowing the privileged few to flee Hong Kong isn’t liberation

Fascism and Science

The century of Einstein and Planck was also the century of Hitler. The Gestapo and the scientific renaissance were children of the same age. How humane the nineteenth century seemed, that century of naive physics, when compared with the twentieth century, the century that had killed his* mother. There is a terrible similarity between the principles of Fascism and those of contemporary physics. Fascism has rejected the concept of a separate individuality, the concept of 'a man', and operates only with vast aggregates. Contemporary physics speaks of the greater or lesser probability of occurrences within this or that aggregate of individual particles. And are not the terrible mechanics of Fascism founded on the principle of quantum politics, of political probability? Fascism arrived at the idea of the liquidation of entire strata of the population, of entire nations and races, on the grounds that there was a greater probability of overt or covert opposition among these

UK

Someone asked this question: If a person born in the UK is asked to leave the country, why should an American of Turkish descent, for example, remain? The violence of the nation state. Glasgow-born singer given two weeks to leave the country

US and Russia

When the US swung a Russian election The full article requires subscription. Here is the rest of the main points: “When Yeltsin announced he was standing in February 1996, his chances of success were small. His political movement Our Home — Russia, had only won 10% of the vote in the legislative election of December 1995. The Communist party, headed by Gennady Zyuganov, Yeltsin’s rival for the presidency, had become the biggest party in the State Duma with nearly 25% of the vote and 157 seats (up from 42 in 1993).  A former member of Yeltsin’s team recalled of the real-life events, ‘We managed to create panic at the idea that communism was returning ... queues, shortages of alcohol, cigarettes, soap. Vote, or you’ll lose! God save us from communism! Last chance to buy food! Those slogans worked’ (BBC in Russian, 5 July 2016). Time  magazine revealed ‘the secret story of how American advisers helped Yeltsin win’; its front page carried a now famous caricature of the victorious

Iran

The Politics of Class and the Culinary Consumption in Tehran

US

‘Defund the Police,’Cancel Rent’ Related How Defund and Disband Became the Demands Books about the power of protest

US

  In 2016 the  Washington Post  published 16 articles hostile to Bernie Sanders in 16 hours ... The Sanders-media showdown

Racism

More were afraid to speak out and more will speak about a form of oppression. Médecins Sans Frontiére is ‘institutionally racist’

Ayn Rand

Via Michael Roberts The hypocrisy of ideology of the superiority of the rich and greedy, as propounded by the philiosopher Ayn Rand has been exposed. Ayn Rand has been followed as a guru for free markets, laisser faire and the rich's right to rule by the likes of Alan Greenspan, Paul Ryan and Rand Paul in the US. In a 1962 essay, Rand wrote of seventeenth century French businessmen: “They knew that government ‘help’ to business is just as disastrous as government persecution, and that the only way a government can be of service to national prosperity is by keeping its hands off.” But now the Ayn Rand Institute has accepted state bailout funding of up to $1m from the Trump administration. The Institute commented: "We will take it unapologetically, because the principle here is: justice, "adding that as "the government has no wealth of its own…. It can only redistribute the wealth of others." Related Ayn Rand, Pope Francis and the philosophy o

Arab History

“I  was astonished to learn, first of all, that members of the secret Arab nationalist group Fatat had read President Woodrow Wilson’s political textbook,  The State.  Second, I was also fascinated to discover how closely Prince Faisal worked with Sheikh Rashid Rida. His presence in Damascus and his central role in drafting a democratic constitution have not been previously studied. Third, I realized that the constitution drafted at Damascus disestablished Islam eight years before Ataturk did so in Turkey. Syrian Arabs did so through peaceful negotiation, not by crushing the religious class. Finally, I was horrified to learn that the French deliberately mistranslated the constitution to make Article 1 read “Islam is the religion of the state” and so to suggest that the Syrian Arab Kingdom was a theocracy intolerant of Christians. In fact, Article 1 read “Islam is the religion of the King,” not the state, precisely because Congress delegates rejected an Ottoman-style religious state. T

تونس، أمريكا، الجمعيات

رغم كلّ رأيناه من الدولة الأمريكية في حقنا (إغراقنا بالديون وفرض شروط اقتصادية وسياسية وتواجد عسكري متزايد على أرضنا) وفي حقّ أشقائنا بالبلدان العربية (احتلال ليبيا والتسبب في حرب أهلية، احتلال جزء من سوريا وتجويع شعبها، الدعم المتزايد للكيان الصهيوني وفرض "صفقة القرن"، تواصل التدخل العسكري في العراق، دعم الحرب السعودية على اليمن، التدخل في شؤون لبنان والخ)، ورغم ما رأيناه من جرائم وعدوان حول العالم (حصار فنزويلا وإيران والتآمر عليها، حصار كوبا، كوريا الشمالية، دعم أنظمة فاشية  في الهند والبرازيل والفيلبين والسعودية وعقوبات ضد الصين والخ)،  ورغم رأيناه من انتهاكات لحرية التعبير والاعلام (ملاحقة جوليان أسانج وماننيج والتجسس عبر الأنترنات على الناشطين) ولحقوق الانسان في ومأ نفسها (آخرها الجرائم العنصرية المتواصلة ضدّ السود واللاتينيين والسكان الأصليين والتمييز ضد العرب والمسلمين منذ 11 سبتمبر)  ووهذا بدون الحديث عن سياسات التفقير والتهميش (اللي تفسر ارتفاع الاصابات بكورونا في صفوف السود الفقراء مثلا) وسياسات التسلح وبيع الأسلحة والانسحاب من اتفاقيات الحدّ من التسلّح وسيا

France

A very good movie. Free to watch on putlockers.fm (Patience required with pop up windows)

US: Republican or Democratic Party?

    Hampton Institute

UK

"Civilsation" means that it  is the only country in Europe that doesn’t have a  time limit  on detention. "The UK once welcomed refugees – now we detain them indefinitely"

Palestine

"As destructive as the legacies of the Paris Protocol have been for the PA’s fiscal health, its current insolvency cannot be reduced to the misdeeds of Israel alone. Another major problem is the PA’s local revenue generation efforts.  The PA’s woeful performance in terms of local revenue generation ultimately derives from the class biases, ideological delusion and rampant corruption that have undergirded the Palestinian national project ever since its reterritorialization within the Occupied Territories (if not before). These pillars of the contemporary political economy were laid down at the foundation of the PA, when the political party Fatah’s returning heroes opted to cede development planning and economic management to World Bank technocrats and a narrow coterie of business elites, the majority of whom had accumulated their fortunes while exiled in the petromonarchies of the Gulf. Provided ideological cover by PLO and Fatah leader Yasser Arafat’s axiomatic assertion that s

UK Coronavirus

— What do global death patterns reveal about the UK? — Blunder, incompetence, negligence, scandal, arrogance, filth under the surface, inequality ...

Israel

“This book places the Israeli army under an uncompromising lens. It reveals a yawning gap between the propaganda about ‘the most moral army in the world’ and the dark reality. Through a wide-ranging historical survey, studded with little known facts, it exposes the army for what it really is: a brutal police force of a brutal settler-colonial state. Essential for understanding the political sociology of Israel today and the reasons for the impasse in the Israeli-Palestinian so-called ‘peace process.’” – Avi Shlaim, author of  The Iron Wall: Israel and the Arab World An Army Like No Oher

The Environment

A liberal view that doesn't answer the questions: How could capitalism, a system based on profit and capital accumulation, protect nature? Could capitalist production develop technological means to maintain both: private accumulation and safe eco-systems? Could that happen without exploitation and obscene inequality, and with continuous growth? We are seeing some movement towards green transport, for example. To what an extent though such a movement could be extended to encompass the major global industries without at the same time jeopardising the rate of profit? Will states be able to impose new ways of production in a system where private owenership of such industries reign? Or, will states themselves carry out a change in investing in green and sustainable ways of how we produce, eat, and move? Coronavirus is a warning to us to mend our broken relation with nature . Who's "us"? "Us" implies that we are all responsible and we should work together

Racism

"[W]hile ... biblical and theological justifications for racism maintained some purchase and an ongoing foundational influence, racism as we understand it in the modern context crystallised with the emergence of the Enlightenment in the eighteenth century. It was through Enlightenment ideals and science that racist theories developed, spread and really gained hegemonic power. As a more humanistic and universal vision of society developed in parts of Europe, science and reason came to replace or complement older ideas. While the Enlightenment is often described uncritically as the origin of our progressive modern world, and used to demonstrate the west’s ‘civilisational superiority’, it was also inextricably linked to the rise of racism as a new pretext for domination by the white man." Excerpts from Reactionary Democracy How the racism and the populist far-right became mainstream

Britain

The tip of the iceberg. Just scratch the head of the majority and you will find them Starkeys. The BBC : David Starkey has been criticised for saying slavery was not genocide because of the survival of "so many damn blacks."  Starkey has been dropped by publisher and unversity . 

England

Water firms discharged raw sewage into England's rivers 200,000 times in 2019

Britain

This is about some of the racism in the British army. I wonder what type of racism is expressed when British soldiers are in Iraq or Afghanistan. "The British invented racism, the Americans perfected it"

Gilead Sciences

A company that Donald Rumsfeld was for a time one of its board members. On December 26, 2018,  The Times  reported that Gilead had used the  Double Irish arrangement  to avoid U.S. corporate taxes on non–U.S. profits, reporting that "A US pharmaceutical firm used a controversial tax loophole arrangement to shift almost €20 billion in profits through an Irish entity in just two years". Gilead Sciences The US public paid to develop remedesivir