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Showing posts from June 12, 2016
"People are violent, and people can dress their violence up in any number of justifying causes that seek to relieve people of their personal responsibility because the cause or religion, be it Communism or Catholicism or Islam , is simply bigger than themselves." ( Foreignpolicy.com ) I read that and smiled. The liberals too hide their heads in the sand and turn a blind eye on the violence of capitalism and imperialism since the inception of the system: the slave trade, slave labour, conquests and colonization, two world wars, and to this day the violence of the global system is both direct and symbolic and we can see its effects also on nature and on our Earth. Actually, a serious observer traces the emergence of Daesh not only to the Iraq occupation, but also to the neoliberal policies of the Assad regime, climate change and the drought in Syria.
" The ceremony was followed by a panel discussion about trade union rights in the Middle East in which I participated, together with three people who've been featured in LabourStart campaigns: Nermin Al-Sharif, head of the Libyan Dockers’ and Seafarers’ Union, victim of an assassination attempt. Kamal Abbas, founder of the Cairo-based Centre for Trade Union and Workers Services, arrested numerous times by the authorities for his work. Mahdi Abu Dheeb, president of the Bahrain Teachers Association, just released after five years in prison."
Tunisia قرقنة: على خط المواجهة في مقاومة صناعة البترول Kerkennah : en première ligne du changement climatique et de la résistance à l’industrie fossile
"The Orlando shootings did not happen in a vacuum: we are being killed every day. We are being killed by a lack of social housing and increasingly punitive welfare reforms . We are being killed by inhumane austerity cuts to life-saving mental health services. Systematic homophobia, transphobia and racism come from the top. They come from policies ingrained with intolerance, and from right-wing and neoliberal ideologies. Only a grassroots, militant movement from the bottom up has any chance to disrupt it: the master’s tools will not dismantle the master’s house." 'All Cops are Bastards.  Even the Gay Ones'
"It may seem absurd to conflate the fear and hatred of Muslims with the fear and hatred of Jews when the two groups are united in the popular imagination only by their fear and hatred of each other. But they both appeal to the same dark archetype in the European imagination: swarming, sinister, lecherous, and dirty . Both are supposed to have subverted the elites to strike at the common people. Both are supposed to constitute an existential threat to civilisation."
While the French police says that most of the violence in France was caused by Russian football fans... " If the psychic energies of the average mass of people watching a football game or a musical comedy could be diverted into the rational channels of a freedom movement, they would be invincible. — Wilhelm Reich .
Orlando mass shooting: US President  Barack Obama  described the attack as "an act of terror and an act of hate". Nothing new here. Obama and co will continue to wrongly describe such acts and talk superficially. " According to Omar Mateen’s father, the reportedly Islamic State-supporting terrorist had expressed revulsion  at the sight of two men kissing. His co-workers have described  his anti-gay comments . Omar Mateen could have chosen many clubs, full of people laughing and living, but he chose a LGBT venue. This was homophobia as well as terrorism. It is not enough to simply condemn violence: we have to understand what it is and why it happened . " It wasn’t only Sky News at fault. In the New York Times’ original reporting, it didn’t even point out that a gay club had been targeted. The Daily Mail didn’t bother to put the atrocity – the worst terrorist attack on US soil since 9/11 – on its front page, instead  opting to stir up xenophobia  ove...
" Such visitations of providence as these no government can do much either to prevent or alleviate." It did not end anytime soon. Famines recurred in 1869 and 1874. Between 1876 and 1878, during the Madras famine, anywhere from four to five million people perished after the viceroy, Lord Lytton, adopted a hands-off approach similar to that employed in Ireland and Orissa.  By 1901, Romesh Chunder Dutt, another leading nationalist, enumerated 10 mass famines since the 1860s, setting the total death toll at a whopping 15 million. Indians were now so poor - and the government so indifferent in its response - that, he stated, "every year of drought was a year of famine." The British Rule and the Famines in India. The Orissa Famine as an Example.
“If more Englishmen do not come out & unequivocally condemn this violence, people will think those drunk extremists represent all of us.”