Skip to main content

Posts

Showing posts with the label war

Quote of the Week: Questioning

Free yourselves from the indoctrination presented to you as innate knowledge. My generation lived through war and fascism. Through this experience, we reached the conclusion that there should never be war again. My generation experienced fascism, which at first we accepted. We didn’t know about what was going on in the concentration camps — there were no Jews in my Pomeranian village, and we didn’t know what was happening to Jewish people. These were all realizations that I had to come to later. It was then that I came to the conclusion that this fascism — which was, of course, also an outgrowth from humanity — had an economic base supporting it. Where did the cannons come from, who built the bombers, who desired this? And who is alive today and profiting from war? Where do new developments come from? Anyone sitting in their car today with their sat nav should be aware that this is a by-product of the production of weapons for war. So, the only advice I can give is to critically questi

Is Sudan Still a State?

“Far from being caused by personal rivalry, this conflict is rooted in the long history of the region and Sudan’s never-ending economic and social crisis. The conflict between the North and the South claimed between half a million and a million lives from 1955 to 2002. And herein lies the cause of the fighting tearing Sudan apart. To understand it requires going back to 2011. The secession of South Sudan and the rise of guerrilla movements within the North’s Muslim populations had weakened President Omar al-Bashir’s authority. His increasingly unpopular Islamist regime had been in power since the coup of June 1989 and was rotten with corruption. The regime sent the Janjaweed to fight in Yemen on behalf of the Saudis – who paid handsomely – and then tasked them with repressing the northern guerrillas of the Sudan People’s Liberation Movement-North (SPLM-N), first in Darfur and then throughout the country. From the day after the coup, there were obvious tensions between the two forces, e

François Hollande and Israel’s War ‘Collateral Victims”

“It cannot be the same tribute. A life is a life and one life is equivalent to another but there are victims of terrorism and victims of war. Being a victim of terrorism means being attacked as a French person or as a defender of a way of life. A collateral victim, you are in war… it's not of the same nature.”  — Former French president François Hollande It a whole neocolonial racist mindset. Fascists encouraged a distinction between members of the nation who merited protection and outsiders who deserved rough handling. One of the most sensational cases of Nazi violence before power was the murder of a communist laborer of Polish descent in the town of Potempa, in Silesia, by five SA men in August 1932. It became sensational when the killers’ death sentences were commuted, under Nazi pressure, to life imprisonment. Party theorist Alfred Rosenberg took the occasion to underscore the difference between “bourgeois justice,” according to which “one Polish Communist has the same weighti

What the Houthis Want

Although I don’t agree with the use of some of the language such as ‘the international community’ by a supposedly a radical leftist magazine, it is a history and context, power struggle and geopolitics, internal dynamic and social forces that help us understand a movement and its actions .   An interview with Yemen scholar Helen Lackner

The BBC on the Houthis

The BBC drenching the conflict and the war in Yemen in (neo-)orientalist narrative. After all, the Houthis are directly attacking ‘our interest’ and interrupting ‘the free market’ as well as they might slow down the Israeli terror and destruction.  " They [the Houthis] are generally more war-like, violent and cruel ," says Edmund Fitton-Brown, who was UK ambassador to Yemen from 2015-17.  "I encountered astonishing instances of brutality in Aden and Taiz. The Houthis consider themselves an elite from an elite (the Zaidi sect). Some of their casual viciousness towards Sunni civilians in central and southern Yemen has been remarkable: a readiness to deploy snipers and kill non-combatants for fun." Now let’s compare that to the narrative deployed to describe the Australian elite troops in Afghanistan: “And it wasn't just that these alleged executions took place, it was the manner of impunity by which they happened. In fact, according to the report, there was an air

Palestine Demonstration in London

Why I have not taken part in protests for years. In UK alone hundreds of thousands demonstrated prior to the war on and invasion of Iraq. They were sent/went back home on the same day. They did not stop the British regime from being part of the crime, and the destruction of Iraq that ensued and lasted for years. May times demonstration/protests in support of the Palestinians took part in London. They did not change the British regime’s policy in supporting the Israeli state. In this regard, Mark Fisher’s argument is still valid : radicals in Britain should direct their efforts to mobilise working people around social issues at home and attack the British regime’s socio-economic policies.  A regime change at home is the way forward. We have seen that even with a self-proclaimed socialist like Bernie Sanders , leaders can side with the oppressors and be complicit in crime. Sanders would have not changed American imperialist support of the Israeli state. Social movements in the beginning

Israel Responds to ‘Hamas Crimes by Ordering Mass War Crimes in Gaza

“Years of impunity for Israeli crimes against civilians have bred a culture of disregard for international law.” Alice Speri on The Intercept follows the mainstream – delusional belief and misleading – concept of ‘international law’. As a counter-argument I have chosen a selection from Between Equal Rights “The debate between jurists is not whether this or that action is a reprisal and therefore illegal, but whether reprisals as a category are illegal. Here, the importance of ‘authoritative’ decision is key. After all, the majority of writers agree that reprisals are illegal. However, as long as Israel, for example, is able to interpret reprisals as legal, openly to claim its activities as reprisals, and to be a strong enough power (with the US’s support) to defeat or silence any dissenters, then it is nonsensical to claim that reprisals are functionally illegal. The same unresolvably structured arguments – again with the weight of opinion against the US – have been batted back and for

Eqbal Ahmed: Terrorism – Ours vs. Theirs

Against Amnesia The experience of violence by a stronger party has historically turned victims into terrorists. That's what happens to peoples and nations. When they are battered, they hit back. State terror very often breeds collective terror. –Eqbal Ahmed, 1998 [Ahmed though does not explicitly include the state terrorism of Western states. He merely talks about the how US ‘promotes terrorism’, for instance.] From a transcript of a talk by Eqbal Ahmed University of Colorado, Boulder, on 12 October 1998 “By 1942, the Holocaust was occurring, and a certain liberal sympathy with the Jewish people had built up in the Western world. At that point, the terrorists of Palestine, who were Zionists, suddenly started to be described, by 1944-45, as 'freedom fighters.' Then from 1969 to 1990 the PLO, the Palestine Liberation Organization, occupied the center stage as the terrorist organization. Yasir Arafat has been described repeatedly by the great sage of American journalism, Willi

The War on Migrants: Tunisia

“Speaking to the BBC, the city's health director, Hatem Al-Sharif, said more than 700 unidentified people, including young children, have been buried in unmarked graves on the outskirts of Sfax since the beginning of this year.” a Sudanese man, Adel Adbullah, said: "I fled from war. I don't think I will see any worse at sea than I already have. I have nothing to lose ."

Europe’s True Heartless Face?

David Hearst.: “ Britain offered $2.7bn in arms to Ukraine and $6m in disaster relief for 23 million people in Turkey and Syria? Is this for real? Apparently yes. ” I think this is a simplistic argument, especially that Hearst does not explain the reasons. There are priorities that dictate the big powers policies, including the UK’s. And those priorities are not new and one needs to mention and explain them. Talking about ‘morality’ or ‘a moral duty’ is misleading and throwing dust in the eyes.

Palestine – and Syria – in One Painting

عماد أبو اشتية – رسام وفنان تشكيلي أردني فلسطيني