[Marxism] Fwd: Why Syriza Hasn’t Threatened to Leave the European Union—Yet - In These Times
POSTING RULES NOTES #1 YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. #2 This mail-list, like most, is publicly permanently archived. #3 Subscribe and post under an alias if #2 is a concern. * Consider the statements by the party’s other prominent economist, Costas Lapavitsas, in the Guardian: “First, the forces of austerity currently strangling Europe should not be allowed to crush the Syriza experiment, or turn it into a moth-eaten compromise; second, Syriza should make solid and meticulous preparations for all eventualities, a point that is well understood by many within it.” Having expected harsh resistance and an onslaught of veiled threats from the financial community, it would be naive to imagine Syriza hasn’t prepared for this exact scenario. If Varoufakis’ proposals, which are viewed as reasonable by most Greeks, are rejected by E.U. officials, more Greeks will consider leaving the European Union a necessary evil. At that point, if a Syriza government still exists, Greece can threaten to leave the union. (It should be noted that in his book Crisis in the Eurozone, Lapavitsas has supported a Greek exit from the Eurozone and has argued that austerity throughout Europe has been counterproductive.) That’s when the German government’s mettle will be tested. Can the European Union afford a “Grexit” and its potential implications for Spain and other austerity-ravaged countries? A Syriza government that remains in the union poses a problem for Germany and the United States on another front. Syriza has made it clear that it will veto any attempt to ratify the Trans-Atlantic Trade and Investment Partnership, an international trade agreement that both Germany and the U.S. want ratified urgently. At that point, does the E.U. want Syriza to capitulate on a debt if it means the loss of the TTIP? Perhaps a Greek exit benefits the E.U. on that front. But can the E.U. afford to let Greece out if it means destabilizing the currency union further? full: http://inthesetimes.com/article/17638/greece_eurozone _ Full posting guidelines at: http://www.marxmail.org/sub.htm Set your options at: http://lists.csbs.utah.edu/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
[Marxism] Fwd: Syria’s Lost Spring by Robyn Creswell | NYRblog | The New York Review of Books
POSTING RULES NOTES #1 YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. #2 This mail-list, like most, is publicly permanently archived. #3 Subscribe and post under an alias if #2 is a concern. * For an introduction to the ideas and culture of the original Syrian protesters—about which Adonis has curiously little to say—one can scarcely do better than Syria Speaks, an anthology of visual and literary work, most of it from the early days of the uprising. Published by Saqi Books, an independent London-based publishing house of Arab and English-language books, Syria Speaks includes political posters, stencils, cartoons, photography, rap lyrics, fiction and poetry, along with essays tracing the cultural and political background of this work. Much of the material gathered in the book was made in the ambit of Local Coordinating Committees, a loose network of civil society groups at the forefront of the early revolts (and now increasingly beleaguered), which have their roots in leftist opposition groups of the 1970s and 80s. Insofar as the original protests had any kind of organizational structure or political platform, it was mainly provided by the LCCs. It is striking how closely these works of art model the sort of civil society that Adonis called for. The culture one finds here is pacifist, anti-sectarian, and feminist. The artists do not shy from slogans (sometimes that is the whole point) and so their political commitments are clear. Their posters, for example, call for civil disobedience and deplore the regime’s choice to confront peaceful protesters with guns. Other works depict the results of this policy of repression à l’outrance: martyred children, political prisoners stuffed into cells, a rosary made of human heads. But this is to make the art sound more earnest and less pleasurable than it often is. The best work is blackly humorous, profane, or bluntly insulting—for instance, a stencil by Alaa Ghazal of Bashar al-Assad’s face with the caption, “Step here.” full: http://www.nybooks.com/blogs/nyrblog/2015/feb/16/syria-lost-spring/ _ Full posting guidelines at: http://www.marxmail.org/sub.htm Set your options at: http://lists.csbs.utah.edu/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
[Marxism] Fwd: Syrians have been oppressed by a dictator and jihadists, and bombed by the west – and you call us terrorists? | Zaina Erhaim | Comment is free | The Guardian
POSTING RULES NOTES #1 YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. #2 This mail-list, like most, is publicly permanently archived. #3 Subscribe and post under an alias if #2 is a concern. * At first we didn’t recognise our friend. He had lost more than 10kg and had trouble standing up. His face was the colour of a ripe lemon, his clothes as filthy as if he had just climbed out of a tomb. Could that really be Mohammad? A week ago the 30-year-old pharmacist had been abducted in an Aleppo suburb by Islamic State. Most of his friends had assumed that Mohammad (not his real name) was gone for ever. “No one goes into Isis prisons and comes out alive, especially those who are accused of being secularists,” his friend Rand said. Mohammad is a devout Muslim, but for Isis a secularist is simply anyone who dares stand up to them. The irony is that while Mohammad is a dangerous secularist in the eyes of Isis, the west sees him as a dangerous Islamist. After Isis occupied some Aleppo suburbs, Mohammad and many other medics decided not to leave their home town but to continue helping local people – despite the risk and personal sacrifice involved. Yet they now find themselves treated as terrorists wherever they go, simply because they have come from Isis-occupied territories. Last month Mohammad and a group of doctors were not allowed into Turkey, although their passports are valid. A border guard told them to “go back to your Islamic State”. full: http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/feb/17/syrians-oppressed-dictator-jihadists-bombed-coalition-called-terrorists _ Full posting guidelines at: http://www.marxmail.org/sub.htm Set your options at: http://lists.csbs.utah.edu/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
[Marxism] Disorder Rules the Universe
POSTING RULES NOTES #1 YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. #2 This mail-list, like most, is publicly permanently archived. #3 Subscribe and post under an alias if #2 is a concern. * NY Times, Feb. 17 2015 Disorder Rules the Universe ‘The Quantum Moment’ Recounts the End of Determinism By AMIR ALEXANDER The Quantum Moment: How Planck, Bohr, Einstein and Heisenberg Taught Us to Love Uncertainty. By Robert P. Crease and Alfred Scharff Goldhaber. W.W. Norton. 352 pages. $29.95. “On or about September 1927,” wrote the philosopher Ray Monk, “the physical world changed.” Until then, according to Robert P. Crease and Alfred Scharff Goldhaber’s rich and entertaining new book, “The Quantum Moment,” we lived in a homogeneous, continuous, Newtonian world in which all objects moved seamlessly from the past to the future, governed by universal mathematical laws. But in that fateful year, everything changed: Objects now follow different rules depending on their size, and we can never be sure where they are or what they are doing. In fact, we can’t even say what they are, because that depends on how we observe them. Our reality became one of unpredictable “gaps, inconsistencies, warps and bubbles,” as John Updike put it, and we are still struggling to find our way in the quantum universe. Dr. Crease is a philosopher and Dr. Goldhaber a physicist at Stony Brook University, and their book is an introduction to the brave new world we inhabit. The harmony of the Newtonian universe, they argue, began to fray in 1900, when Max Planck discovered that to correctly describe “black box” radiation, he had to make a radical and unwarranted assumption: that light radiation was not continuous, but came in discrete and irreducible packets of a fixed size, or quantum. Classical physicists believed the discontinuous quantum was a mere computational trick, but rather than fade away as expected, the mysterious energy packets started popping up in more and more places. In 1905, Einstein demonstrated that the quantum explained the photoelectric effect and the strange phenomenon known as Brownian motion. Some years later, a young Niels Bohr came up with a model of the atom in which electrons moved between specified “orbits” when they absorbed or emitted energy quanta. The unwelcome interloper, it seemed, was here to stay. For Newtonian physics, much worse was to come. From 1925 to 1927, quantum mechanics moved from challenging the contents of classical physics to undermining its deepest foundations. It was during those intense years that Werner Heisenberg proposed his uncertainty principle, which posited that the location and momentum of particles could not both be known with certainty at the same time. Almost simultaneously Erwin Schrödinger proposed his psi function, which describes the probability that a particle will be found in a given location in terms of a wave, which in turn led Bohr to formulate his complementarity principle: An object can be a wave or a particle depending on how it is measured. The location and momentum of an object, and even whether it is a wave or a particle, was no longer a free-standing fact of nature. It depended on the act of observation. Dr. Crease and Dr. Goldhaber make these mind-boggling theories plausible to the lay reader, but their focus is on the cultural implications of the quantum revolution. What can one make of a world in which particles move seemingly as they please, where a particle can also be a wave, and measurement can affect its location, momentum and even what it is? And how does that change how we see the world? Clearly the new science has given rise to a new way of experiencing the world. Updike, the authors point out, likened reconstructions of John F. Kennedy’s assassination to the indeterminacy of subatomic particles; the artist Antony Gormley created series of sculptures exploring how form takes shape through randomness; a character in Teju Cole’s novel “Open City” perceives the illusion of life’s continuity. And some of those nearest to the storm made more sweeping claims. Already in 1928, the famed British astronomer Arthur Eddington argued that the indeterminacy of the quantum universe opened the way for the reintroduction of the spiritual into the world, initiating a line of thinking that associates the paradoxes of the quantum world with the mysteries of religion. Some years later, the American physicist Arthur H. Compton argued that the quantum world pointed to the existence of God; in the 1970s, the Fundamental Fysiks Group related quantum mechanics to New Age Eastern mysticism. For Dr. Crease and Dr. Goldhaber, however, the significance of the moment lies elsewhere. Quantum mechanics changed the world not by reintroducing spiritualism into science but by
[Marxism] Fwd: Russia shelled Ukrainians from within its own territory, says study | World news | The Guardian
POSTING RULES NOTES #1 YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. #2 This mail-list, like most, is publicly permanently archived. #3 Subscribe and post under an alias if #2 is a concern. * Relies on the always reliable Brown Moses. http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/feb/17/russia-shelled-ukrainians-from-within-its-own-territory-says-study _ Full posting guidelines at: http://www.marxmail.org/sub.htm Set your options at: http://lists.csbs.utah.edu/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
[Marxism] The problem in Libya
POSTING RULES NOTES #1 YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. #2 This mail-list, like most, is publicly permanently archived. #3 Subscribe and post under an alias if #2 is a concern. * Posted to FB by Sam Charles Hamad, my good friend and comrade: The problem in Libya wasn't NATO intervention. Indeed, whatever you think about the motivations for the NATO intervention (and they weren't 'humanitarian'), the NFZ provided the revolutionary forces with a hub wherein the military and civil wings of the revolution could interact freely and coherently, namely Benghazi, which until the point of the NFZ was something similar to Homs in Syria when the rebels controlled it, with the regime using its air force to making the stability necessary for any kind of revolutionary coherence an impossibility. The NFZ helped to unite diverse revolutionary forces towards the singular goal of overthrowing Gaddafi and defeating his forces. Indeed, the forces currently involved in this crisis in Libya are *all* anti-Gaddafi forces - the pro-Gaddafi insurgency was defeated and its remaining agents have now attached themselves to one pole, in my opinion, the counter-revolutionary pole, of the anti-Gaddafi forces: Libya has descended into civil war, one that is shaped both by the internal dynamics of Libyan society and what amounts to a wider regional counter-revolution, with the UAE, Saudi Arabia and the Al-Sisi regime in Egypt sponsoring and aiding the forces aligned to Khalifa Haftar against the so-called 'Islamist' forces. It has nothing to do with the NATO intervention. If it makes the Glenn Greenwalds of this world feel better, the former forces would appear to have the implicit backing of the US and, presumably, the EU and NATO. As much as people need NATO or the West to be the problem everywhere, and they are often the problem in many different areas around the world, they simply aren't the current cause of Libya's problems. It might be difficult to grasp for Greenwald, but tyrannies root themselves in and shape societies, attempting to mould every aspect of life in the direction of maintaining their own power. When they are uprooted, as we've seen throughout history, the consequences can be harsh and far from ordered. If this is too much for you to handle, then you might as well support, rather ridiculously, some idea of everything remaining motionless, which is actually the very definition of 'reaction'. But, it's out of your hands. It has nothing to do with what I or Glenn Greenwald support - tyrannies by their very nature produce their own gravediggers, but the gravediggers are themselves shaped by and subject to the social dynamics that have been moulded and maintained by the tyrannies themselves. The breakdown of this is the veritable antithesis to the idealistic, fetishised and mythic notions of 'revolution' that much of the left have, while it affects liberals like Greenwald or two-campist leftists, such as George Galloway, to give a good example, in manners not dissimilar to their equivalents on the right of the spectrum, with their adherence to 'geopolitical' 'realism' and Realpolitik (just contrast the logic of the arguments from the right in favour of Saudi Arabia or Al-Sisi in Egypt with the logic used by Greenwald or two-campists when it comes to Libya or Syria, it's essentially the same phenomenon). However, you'd be hard pressed to find many Libyans who think the answer to their current problems is the recreation of the Gaddafi regime or something similar, but even if they did think this and somehow enact it, it would, at some point, inevitably be overthrown, just as the Gaddafi regime was. Don't force me to quote Shelley's 'Ozymandias'. _ Full posting guidelines at: http://www.marxmail.org/sub.htm Set your options at: http://lists.csbs.utah.edu/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
[Marxism] Fwd: At Chipotle, How Many Calories Do People Really Eat? - NYTimes.com
POSTING RULES NOTES #1 YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. #2 This mail-list, like most, is publicly permanently archived. #3 Subscribe and post under an alias if #2 is a concern. * Most meals have more than 1,000 calories and almost a full day’s worth of sodium. full: http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2015/02/17/upshot/what-do-people-actually-order-at-chipotle.html When I first learned of Chipotle's problems, I posted a note on Facebook. Several people replied, one of them upset that Ells and his company were being abused by the government. This person said that she ate at Chipotle often, that it was an environment- and farmer-friendly restaurant serving healthy food, and that this small business was singled out by ICE because of Ells' progressive politics. Before responding, I did some quick research. This, along with what I have found out since, calls into question her view of Chipotle. First, the healthfulness of at least some of Chipotle's food is open to question: A Center for Science in the Public Interest report stated that Chipotle's burritos contain over 1,000 calories, which is nearly equivalent to two meals' worth of food. MSNBC Health placed the burritos on their list of the 20 Worst Foods in America because of their high caloric content and high sodium. When a burrito with carnitas, rice, vegetables, cheese, guacamole, and salsa was compared with a typical Big Mac, the burrito had more fat, cholesterol, carbohydrates, and sodium than the Big Mac, and the burrito had more protein and fiber. full: http://mrzine.monthlyreview.org/2011/yates310511.html _ Full posting guidelines at: http://www.marxmail.org/sub.htm Set your options at: http://lists.csbs.utah.edu/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
[Marxism] Fwd: On Collective Guilt » CounterPunch: Tells the Facts, Names the Names
POSTING RULES NOTES #1 YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. #2 This mail-list, like most, is publicly permanently archived. #3 Subscribe and post under an alias if #2 is a concern. * We can’t leave the Holocaust alone. That might be a good thing if we had the courage to view it honestly. We don’t though. We insist that it’s a puzzle we continue to try to solve, ostensibly so that we will know where to place blame, and in that way also know how to ensure that it will never happen again. We refuse, however, to place blame where it really belongs and so we keep turning it over and over, searching for something we will never find. Why the Germans? Why the Jews? are questions that Götz Aly takes up in a new book the title of which begins with these questions (Metropolitan Books, 2014). Götz’s theory, not particularly novel, is that the social and economic advances made possible for Jews in Germany as a result of a series of legal reforms in the various German states in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries made them objects of envy. “Not all Nazi voters,” acknowledges Christopher R. Browning in a review of Götz’s book, “were anti-Semitic, but they at least tolerated Nazi anti-Semitism” (“How Envy of Jews Lay Behind It,” The New York Review of Books, January 8, 2015). “But how to explain,” Browning continues, “this ‘moral insensibility’ and ‘moral torpor’ of 1933-1944, which underpinned the ‘criminal collaboration’ between the German people and the Nazi regime?” The answer Aly offered first in Hitler’s Beneficiaries (Metropolitan Books, 2005), was material gain. Aly’s new work supplements the motive of material gain with a “new morality” involving race theory that would justify such collaboration. full: http://www.counterpunch.org/2015/02/17/on-collective-guilt/ _ Full posting guidelines at: http://www.marxmail.org/sub.htm Set your options at: http://lists.csbs.utah.edu/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
Re: [Marxism] Al-Akhbar editor at his most psychotic
POSTING RULES NOTES #1 YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. #2 This mail-list, like most, is publicly permanently archived. #3 Subscribe and post under an alias if #2 is a concern. * On Tue, Feb 17, 2015 at 8:09 AM, Michael Karadjis mkarad...@gmail.com wrote: So Nasrallah agreeing with the rest of the Lebanese population that these minor issues are not worth another Zionist armageddon, and therefore keeping the border quiet, does not prove that Hezbollah is not “steadfast” or “resistant.” But neither can it show that it is these things. So the question remains: what do these words mean when applied to Hezbollah, more comically to Iran, and in an alternative universe to Assad? Among other things, this bloc of powers has done more than anyone else to provide military aid to the Palestinian resistance. In fact, they're the only ones to have done anything at all! http://english.al-akhbar.com/node/13950 http://www.bigstory.ap.org/article/gazans-thank-iran-help-battling-israel http://www.al-monitor.com/pulse/originals/2013/05/gaza-islamic-jihad-and-iranian-arms.html http://english.farsnews.com/newstext.aspx?nn=13930924000425 Meanwhile Turkey and Qatar, the KSA and the UAE, and - needless to say - Western leftists have yet to send their first bullet. Critics may bemoan this support as insufficient, or unsatisfactory. Nevertheless, it's the only support of its kind to have arrived in Gaza, although shipments have slowed since Egypt's coup regime largely closed the Rafah tunnels. (No, you didn't imagine the inferior quality of this past summer's rockets.) That's why the armed wings of every Palestinian group of significance, including Hamas, maintained their alliances with the axis of resistance, whatever speeches their political leaderships delivered. -- Hige sceal þe heardra, heorte þe cenre, mod sceal þe mare, þe ure mægen lytlað. _ Full posting guidelines at: http://www.marxmail.org/sub.htm Set your options at: http://lists.csbs.utah.edu/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
Re: [Marxism] Al-Akhbar editor at his most psychotic
POSTING RULES NOTES #1 YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. #2 This mail-list, like most, is publicly permanently archived. #3 Subscribe and post under an alias if #2 is a concern. * re arms provided: After twenty years of lethargy during which they were lulled by the promises of the Arab governments, the Palestinian people - more precisely, the most severely tried section of it, the Palestinian refugees quartered in the “camps”, were rudely awakened, shaken by the Arab defeat and the new Palestinian exodus that resulted from it. The growth of the Palestinian resistance expressed primarily the desire of the Palestinian people to take charge of the struggle for the liberation of Palestine, their native country. But the spontaneity of this reaction also indicated its limitations. As a group composed largely of non-producers and, above all, containing few owners, bereft even of territory, the Palestinian refugees formed a social milieu particularly receptive to any maximalist tendency, inasmuch as having absolutely nothing to lose they had, on the other hand, a country to win. This fact helps to explain the immense popular support for the Palestinian Resistance despite its distinctly maximalist slogans and its conception of the liberation of Palestine. The Palestinian Resistance, at least the greater part of it, advanced a perspective- of a “people’s war of liberation”, a strategic goal totally unrealistic without a precise social content and without transitional political, organisational, and military objectives. It is absolutely illusory to think that the Palestinian Resistance, even with its unquestionable popular support, can settle accounts with the Zionist army, which also has close ties with the popular masses, although on a reactionary basis, and is infinitely better equipped. Achieving such a goal requires not only the participation of the Jewish revolutionists, who alone are capable of undermining the ideological foundations of the cohesiveness that characterises the population of the Zionist state and from which it draws its strength, but also and above all, the participation of the Arab peoples in a generalised revolutionary war against imperialism and its Zionist bastion, which is the only realistic road to victory. The Palestinian Resistance was unable to advance any programme capable of insuring the combined participation of the Arab and Jewish masses in the struggle. Its maximalism was intrinsically linked to its Palestine-centric regionalism. In this there was a reflection of the historical experience of the Palestinian people, among whom particularist tendencies have been favoured by the peculiar fate they have suffered and their disillusionment with the Arab regimes. But, whatever their importance, these underlying objective factors did not make the maximalist regionalist orientation of the Palestinian Resistance inevitable; they merely produced a tendency in this direction. A revolutionary marxist workers vanguard could have combated the illusions existing amongst the Palestinian masses and explained to them that the liberation of Palestine necessarily involved a revolutionary overturn of the established Arab regimes, which was impossible without a working class leadership for the entire Arab region., including revolutionists fighting in Israel itself. Avoiding these pitfalls and deceptions, such a vanguard would have been able to incorporate its military struggle against the Zionist state in an overall revolutionary strategy. In this way without presenting it falsely as a “people’s war of liberation”, such military activity could have made an extremely important contribution to building a revolutionary party for the entire region. But a vanguard of this type was historically absent. http://www.internationalviewpoint.org/spip.php?article1608 This, once again, is why I insist comrades read Bassem Chit's class analysis of Hizbollah, the latest practitioner of the failed bourgeois militarist strategy. On Tue, Feb 17, 2015 at 2:30 PM, Joseph Catron via Marxism marxism@lists.csbs.utah.edu wrote: POSTING RULES NOTES #1 YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. #2 This mail-list, like most, is publicly permanently archived. #3 Subscribe and post under an alias if #2 is a concern. * On Tue, Feb 17, 2015 at 8:09 AM, Michael Karadjis mkarad...@gmail.com wrote: So Nasrallah agreeing with the rest of the Lebanese population that these minor issues are not worth another Zionist armageddon, and therefore keeping the border quiet, does not prove that Hezbollah is not “steadfast” or “resistant.” But neither can it show that it is these things. So the question remains: what do these words mean when applied to
Re: [Marxism] Al-Akhbar editor at his most psychotic
POSTING RULES NOTES #1 YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. #2 This mail-list, like most, is publicly permanently archived. #3 Subscribe and post under an alias if #2 is a concern. * On 2/17/15 2:50 PM, Andrew Pollack via Marxism wrote: This, once again, is why I insist comrades read Bassem Chit's class analysis of Hizbollah, the latest practitioner of the failed bourgeois militarist strategy. I would urge comrades not to waste too much time debating Joseph Catron who by his own admission describes himself as not a Marxist. The Marxism list has attracted non-Marxists over its nearly 17 year existence but I generally find debates within Marxism more productive. _ Full posting guidelines at: http://www.marxmail.org/sub.htm Set your options at: http://lists.csbs.utah.edu/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
[Marxism] Technical assistance needed
POSTING RULES NOTES #1 YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. #2 This mail-list, like most, is publicly permanently archived. #3 Subscribe and post under an alias if #2 is a concern. * A North Star comrade needs some help in setting up a livestream. Please contact me off-list if you have experience. _ Full posting guidelines at: http://www.marxmail.org/sub.htm Set your options at: http://lists.csbs.utah.edu/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
Re: [Marxism] The Problem in Libya
POSTING RULES NOTES #1 YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. #2 This mail-list, like most, is publicly permanently archived. #3 Subscribe and post under an alias if #2 is a concern. * I see George Galloway's name mentioned in this item. I recall very well that while Galloway took a position against Western intervention, he in no way supported Gaddafi. He was quite harsh in his descriptions of Gaddafi. ken h https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zk2u-pvOpcc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lRaSEA_2KbY _ Full posting guidelines at: http://www.marxmail.org/sub.htm Set your options at: http://lists.csbs.utah.edu/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
Re: [Marxism] The Problem in Libya
POSTING RULES NOTES #1 YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. #2 This mail-list, like most, is publicly permanently archived. #3 Subscribe and post under an alias if #2 is a concern. * On 2/17/15 12:31 PM, Ken Hiebert via Marxism wrote: I see George Galloway's name mentioned in this item. I recall very well that while Galloway took a position against Western intervention, he in no way supported Gaddafi. He was quite harsh in his descriptions of Gaddafi. ken h https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zk2u-pvOpcc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lRaSEA_2KbY I am pretty sure that the connection was with Syria, not Libya. _ Full posting guidelines at: http://www.marxmail.org/sub.htm Set your options at: http://lists.csbs.utah.edu/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
[Marxism] Fwd: A dialectical approach to technology | Louis Proyect: The Unrepentant Marxist
POSTING RULES NOTES #1 YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. #2 This mail-list, like most, is publicly permanently archived. #3 Subscribe and post under an alias if #2 is a concern. * This dialectical approach to technology avoids a techno-utopian outlook that imputes naturally given revolutionary character to the Internet. At the same time, this dynamic approach recognizes the critical and likely realist analysis of technology embodied in Dean’s work, while not seeing the capture of technology as complete or given. In this sense, as other research has shown, “if capital ‘interweaves technology and power, this weaving can be undone, and the threads can be used to make another pattern” (Dyer-Withford 1999). This reweaving of technology is illustrated by Frantz Fanon in Studies of a Dying Colonialism (1965), when he famously described how the Algerian National Liberation Front (FLN) reappropriated the radio, changing it from a tool of French colonial domination to a fundamental weapon of resistance. As Fanon argues, “[T]he creation of a Voice of Fighting Algeria” (93) and the correspondent construction of an Algerian version of truth put the French truth, which for so long was unchallenged in Algeria, on the defensive. Thus, while in the hands of the French, the radio served to further French domination, obscuring social relations and isolating “natives” from one another, whereas the FLN’s reappropriation turned the radio into a tool of information, connection, and unification by creating a new language of Algerian resistance and nationhood. Thus, it was not radio alone that produced change; in fact, Algerians would not adopt the radio while it was a tool of French domination. It was the social use of radio by the FLN that made it a revolutionary tool in Algeria. full: http://louisproyect.org/2015/02/17/a-dialectical-approach-to-technology/ _ Full posting guidelines at: http://www.marxmail.org/sub.htm Set your options at: http://lists.csbs.utah.edu/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
[Marxism] Brown Moses--always reliable?
POSTING RULES NOTES #1 YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. #2 This mail-list, like most, is publicly permanently archived. #3 Subscribe and post under an alias if #2 is a concern. * https://notthemsmdotcom.wordpress.com/2013/12/12/brown-moses-new-media-same-as-the-old-media/ _ Full posting guidelines at: http://www.marxmail.org/sub.htm Set your options at: http://lists.csbs.utah.edu/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
[Marxism] Fwd: Unions Need to Step Up for Equality - Commentary - The Chronicle of Higher Education
POSTING RULES NOTES #1 YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. #2 This mail-list, like most, is publicly permanently archived. #3 Subscribe and post under an alias if #2 is a concern. * Unions Need to Step Up for Equality By Keith Hoeller Last fall an adjunct professor, who wishes to remain anonymous, created a Facebook page titled National Adjunct Walkout Day and posted the following: On February 25, 2015, adjuncts across the country will come together to insist on fair wages and better working conditions. Since 2000, various faculty and union groups have participated in Campus Equity Week to increase awareness of the inequities faced by contingent faculty members. But this call for a walkout is a different strategy that has attracted interest across the country—and rightly so, because though the approach may be new, the problem is not. In the 1970s, colleges and universities, mimicking corporate America, embarked on a policy whereby students would be taught by a huge cadre of faculty members teaching off the more lucrative and secure tenure track, largely earning low pay, few or no benefits, and no job security. These contingent faculty members now account for about 75 percent of the professoriate, surpassing one million in number. full: http://chronicle.com/article/Unions-Need-to-Step-Up-for/190053?cid=megamenu _ Full posting guidelines at: http://www.marxmail.org/sub.htm Set your options at: http://lists.csbs.utah.edu/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
Re: [Marxism] Al-Akhbar editor at his most psychotic
POSTING RULES NOTES #1 YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. #2 This mail-list, like most, is publicly permanently archived. #3 Subscribe and post under an alias if #2 is a concern. * From: Joseph Catron Sent: Tuesday, February 17, 2015 3:50 PM “Except, of course, when it hasn't been: http://english.al-akhbar.com/node/23433” That linked article refers to the recent bout of shadow-boxing. So I was talking about the 9 years between 2006 and 2015, so my point still stands. Perhaps this latest round may herald things to come, changing realities, perhaps not. We’ll see. But I think it deserves its own analysis and doesn’t alter the fact that the border has been quite since 2006. “But that's not the silliest error here. Are you unaware that Hamas also maintains and enforces ceasefires with Israel? And this involves not only the al-Qassam Brigades standing down, similar to Hezbollah, but also suppressing retaliatory fire from other resistance groups. None of this is a secret.” Yes, well aware. But you see I am not writing on a computer far far away condemning Hezbollah (or of course Hamas) for NOT sending rockets into Israel. I am not demanding people on the other side of the world carry out military actions to get themselves and hundreds of civilians slaughtered by the entity in order to prove their revolutionary purism. Rather, the question is, just what does “steadfast” mean? What does “resistance” mean? I maintain that for Hezbollah, the Lebanese government, Jordan and Egypt it means zero (and for Syria with the Golan it means less than zero, while for Iran the loudness of the rhetoric is in proportion to how far away it is from Zionist borders). The fact that none of these four actors which border Israel, nor even Hamas for much of the time, carry out attacks across the Zionist border does not make them collaborators, does not prove they are not “steadfast,” but also does not prove that they are. But so what does prove that they are, or are not? What does it even mean? The reason I say the only “resistance” organisation in the Middle East is Hamas is because Palestine is still under occupation and Hamas resists it. It is not about how many rockets Hamas fires or doesn’t fire or that it enforces ceasefires or doesn’t. So when you say “The biggest difference between Hamas and Hezbollah in terms of their military (not political) characteristics is that Hezbollah has actually liberated land and defended it, rather than shifting it from one form of occupation to another,” well, yes, but that is the point: before 2000, when Lebanon was under Zionist occupation, it was correct to call Hezbollah a resistance organisation, just like Hamas now; but since the liberation of south Lebanon was complete, the meaning of the term is obscure. Perhaps that wouldn’t matter so much and maybe it is fine to rest your “resistance” credentials on past glories IF something on a much grander scale were not occurring right now, especially since Hezbollah and its apologists cravenly use these ‘resistance” credentials of previous decades to justify its counterrevolutionary action now. “And as for this all moral support business, I can do no better than to quote Sartre's preface to Fanon's The Wretched of the Earth, which I've inexcusably waited this long to read: Sometimes the Left scolds them ... 'you're going too far; we won't support you any more.' The natives don't give a damn about their support; for all the good it does them they might as well stuff it up their backsides. In the absence of some concrete mechanism for leftists in the West to turn their moral support into actual material support, their online ruminations will count for still less than that.” Fine. No, I don’t think Hezbollah cares that someone wrote an email thousands of miles away offering them some degree of moral support and someone else replied that they have become a Shiite sectarian death squad. Of course not. Just like Syrian rebels with their backs up against the wall, under barrel bombs, ballistic missiles, sarin, starvation sieges etc etc don’t care much that comfortable western lefties thousands of miles away scratch every surface to try to find some evidence of them appealing for western intervention or some evidence of a few western supplies of ready-meals, tents, radios or half-supportive speeches in order to “expose” them. No, they don’t care about such crap either. We’re analysts, that’s all. Neither Hezbollah nor Syrian rebels give a fig about our analysis, just as I likewise don’t give a fig when someone writes on an email, 1000s of miles from me, that my carefully argued views will “amuse those of us with some grounding in reality.” Sorry – it only encourages me ;-] _ Full posting guidelines at:
Re: [Marxism] Brown Moses--always reliable?
POSTING RULES NOTES #1 YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. #2 This mail-list, like most, is publicly permanently archived. #3 Subscribe and post under an alias if #2 is a concern. * On 2/17/15 2:15 PM, Ron Jacobs via Marxism wrote: https://notthemsmdotcom.wordpress.com/2013/12/12/brown-moses-new-media-same-as-the-old-media/ Don't you realize that Phil Greaves is a case-hardened Stalinist who has described Russia, Syria, Iran and the Shia state in Iraq as the axis of resistance? Greaves: Marx, Engels, Lenin, Stalin and Mao have all shown us through conscious scientific practice(7) – ie: dialectical materialism(8) – that although there are Absolute truths to be found, they are not static abstract eternal truths, but constantly changing and evolving within themselves relative to history, motion; the transient aspect of all things. full: https://notthemsmdotcom.wordpress.com/author/philbobaggins01/ Right. Someone putting Stalin and conscious scientific practice in the same sentence disqualified him right off the bat from attacking Brown Moses. Now I can understand that you probably share his fondness for the first three, albeit with a but surely you must understand that Maliki was no Che Guevara. Right? Got my fingers crossed here. Greaves: But the historical record shows that Maliki’s more recent attempts to reverse this destructive process, along with a multitude of other policies which upset US strategic ambitions, including his refusal to allow the permanent installation of US military bases; his governments close alliance with neighbouring independent Iran; their efforts to aid the Syrian government against the NATO-sponsored Wahhabi insurgency; and not least attempts to remove the vassals of the GCC from Iraqi politics–formed the real motives behind the US-Saudi-led campaign to incite Wahhabi fundamentalists against Maliki’s Shia dominated government. full: https://notthemsmdotcom.wordpress.com/2014/09/18/orientalism-and-the-isis-spectacle/ What breath-taking stupidity. _ Full posting guidelines at: http://www.marxmail.org/sub.htm Set your options at: http://lists.csbs.utah.edu/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
Re: [Marxism] Al-Akhbar editor at his most psychotic
POSTING RULES NOTES #1 YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. #2 This mail-list, like most, is publicly permanently archived. #3 Subscribe and post under an alias if #2 is a concern. * Lou, it makes sense for Andy and I to compare ideas, because we often interact through - get this! - actual, offline political activities. I know, right? Crazy stuff. I've been told you yourself once engaged in such wacky hijinks, about the time I was learning how to walk. For everyone else, Lou tries this desperate maneuver every time facts he dislikes are put on the table. I trust it's transparent enough to require no further commentary. On Tue, Feb 17, 2015 at 3:09 PM, Louis Proyect via Marxism marxism@lists.csbs.utah.edu wrote: I would urge comrades not to waste too much time debating Joseph Catron who by his own admission describes himself as not a Marxist. The Marxism list has attracted non-Marxists over its nearly 17 year existence but I generally find debates within Marxism more productive. -- Hige sceal þe heardra, heorte þe cenre, mod sceal þe mare, þe ure mægen lytlað. _ Full posting guidelines at: http://www.marxmail.org/sub.htm Set your options at: http://lists.csbs.utah.edu/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
Re: [Marxism] Brown Moses--always reliable?
POSTING RULES NOTES #1 YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. #2 This mail-list, like most, is publicly permanently archived. #3 Subscribe and post under an alias if #2 is a concern. * And Moses Brown collaborates with Human Rights Watch...so what?My point was merely to question your assertion that he is always reliable as if we weren't supposed to challenge his claims. Anyhow hasta luego. On Tue, Feb 17, 2015 at 3:06 PM, Louis Proyect l...@panix.com wrote: On 2/17/15 2:15 PM, Ron Jacobs via Marxism wrote: https://notthemsmdotcom.wordpress.com/2013/12/12/ brown-moses-new-media-same-as-the-old-media/ Don't you realize that Phil Greaves is a case-hardened Stalinist who has described Russia, Syria, Iran and the Shia state in Iraq as the axis of resistance? Greaves: Marx, Engels, Lenin, Stalin and Mao have all shown us through conscious scientific practice(7) – ie: dialectical materialism(8) – that although there are Absolute truths to be found, they are not static abstract eternal truths, but constantly changing and evolving within themselves relative to history, motion; the transient aspect of all things. full: https://notthemsmdotcom.wordpress.com/author/philbobaggins01/ Right. Someone putting Stalin and conscious scientific practice in the same sentence disqualified him right off the bat from attacking Brown Moses. Now I can understand that you probably share his fondness for the first three, albeit with a but surely you must understand that Maliki was no Che Guevara. Right? Got my fingers crossed here. Greaves: But the historical record shows that Maliki’s more recent attempts to reverse this destructive process, along with a multitude of other policies which upset US strategic ambitions, including his refusal to allow the permanent installation of US military bases; his governments close alliance with neighbouring independent Iran; their efforts to aid the Syrian government against the NATO-sponsored Wahhabi insurgency; and not least attempts to remove the vassals of the GCC from Iraqi politics–formed the real motives behind the US-Saudi-led campaign to incite Wahhabi fundamentalists against Maliki’s Shia dominated government. full: https://notthemsmdotcom.wordpress.com/2014/09/18/ orientalism-and-the-isis-spectacle/ What breath-taking stupidity. _ Full posting guidelines at: http://www.marxmail.org/sub.htm Set your options at: http://lists.csbs.utah.edu/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
Re: [Marxism] Meeting Over Greek Debt Ends in Acrimony
POSTING RULES NOTES #1 YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. #2 This mail-list, like most, is publicly permanently archived. #3 Subscribe and post under an alias if #2 is a concern. * No Time for Games in Europe by Yanis Varoufakis NYTimes OpEd February 17, 2015 http://www.nytimes.com/2015/02/17/opinion/yanis-varoufakis-no-time-for-games-in-europe.html _ Full posting guidelines at: http://www.marxmail.org/sub.htm Set your options at: http://lists.csbs.utah.edu/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
Re: [Marxism] Al-Akhbar editor at his most psychotic
POSTING RULES NOTES #1 YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. #2 This mail-list, like most, is publicly permanently archived. #3 Subscribe and post under an alias if #2 is a concern. * On 2/17/15 4:40 PM, Joseph Catron wrote: For everyone else, Lou tries this desperate maneuver every time facts he dislikes are put on the table. I trust it's transparent enough to require no further commentary. I actually admire your dedication to the Palestinian cause. I only wish you were half as dedicated to the Marxist cause. _ Full posting guidelines at: http://www.marxmail.org/sub.htm Set your options at: http://lists.csbs.utah.edu/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
[Marxism] Human Rights Watch
POSTING RULES NOTES #1 YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. #2 This mail-list, like most, is publicly permanently archived. #3 Subscribe and post under an alias if #2 is a concern. * On 2/17/15 4:29 PM, Ron Jacobs wrote: And Moses Brown collaborates with Human Rights Watch...so what? I have one more thing to say about this. Compared to Phil Greaves, a Stalinist hack who asks us to take Russia's word that the Syrian rebels were using sarin gas and not the military whose bullets they pay for, Human Rights Watch is pure as the driven snow. In places like Cuba and Venezuela, their dice is obviously loaded but in Syria, where there are no commies to be seen at least within the country, they have been fairly scrupulous. Here's an example: “Samih,” another Syrian activist who said he has worked closely with the FSA in Saraqeb, told Human Rights Watch that while he was there he saw residents of Saraqeb complain to the FSA on more than one occasion that the Al-Nur battalion, a Salafist group that is not part of the official FSA structure, was kidnapping civilians for ransom. He said, “The people in Saraqeb were fed up with the battalion and asked the FSA to intervene but the Al-Nur battalion did not respond to the FSA.” “Samih” also told Human Rights Watch that members of the FSA were kidnapping soldiers: They would kidnap them and ask their parents to pay a ransom to let them go. One time, the FSA in Saraqeb kidnapped a colonel from the Presidential Guard. In return, the military kidnapped two children from Saraqeb. The children were 15 and 16-years-old. I was working with the FSA members and local government officials to negotiate a trade. At one point, the family members of the two kids called me pleading that I speed up the negotiations as much as possible. They said that they got a call at home from the captors and that they could hear their kids being tortured. They told them their kids would be released when the FSA released the colonel. We were able to negotiate a trade for the colonel and the kids have now been released. full: http://www.hrw.org/news/2012/03/20/syria-armed-opposition-groups-committing-abuses Frankly, when it comes between Phil Greaves and Who Ghouta, I'll stick with HRW and Brown Moses. Ron is free to drink the Greaves kool-aid if he wants. After all, it is a free country. _ Full posting guidelines at: http://www.marxmail.org/sub.htm Set your options at: http://lists.csbs.utah.edu/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
[Marxism] Fwd: The Portland Red Guide - Ooligan Press
POSTING RULES NOTES #1 YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. #2 This mail-list, like most, is publicly permanently archived. #3 Subscribe and post under an alias if #2 is a concern. * So the city is not completely wicked. http://ooligan.pdx.edu/nonfiction/the-portland-red-guide/ _ Full posting guidelines at: http://www.marxmail.org/sub.htm Set your options at: http://lists.csbs.utah.edu/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
Re: [Marxism] Al-Akhbar editor at his most psychotic
POSTING RULES NOTES #1 YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. #2 This mail-list, like most, is publicly permanently archived. #3 Subscribe and post under an alias if #2 is a concern. * From: Joseph Catron Sent: Tuesday, February 17, 2015 6:27 PM On Tue, Feb 17, 2015 at 1:38 AM, Michael Karadjis via Marxism marxism@lists.csbs.utah.edu wrote: The conflict was over Hezbollah killing a couple of Zionist troops near the border. Now I don’t much care about Zionist troops, but one may well ask what the attack was about. Israel had been provocative, was reportedly breaking the sound barrier in the region etc. Israel still held a tiny area, the Shebaa Farms. If Hezbollah’s attack had the upfront, announced explicit aim of liberating that small region it is certainly justified. But the price was that Israel again destroyed the whole of Lebanon and massacred hundreds of Lebanese, a price, it seems, Lebanese as a whole are not willing to pay again for a few square km in Shebaa. This, I genuinely don't understand. You obviously know the history of the 2006 war. Do you not buy the story that Hezbollah sought to capture Israeli soldiers to exchange for Lebanese and Arab prisoners held by Israel, as they ultimately did with bodies of two in 2008? MK: Well, I mentioned Israeli provocative actions and the Shebaa Farms, OK, yes there was also this issue. Three prisoners held by Israel for a very long time. Yes, also a valid issue. But once again 3 people is hardly the stuff that will make Lebanese people willing to see their children blown to bits by another Zionist blitzkrieg and seeing their whole country in ruins yet again, especially when one of those 3 prisoners was an infamous child killer. And as you say, “even Nasrallah admitted in August 2006 that the cost of the operation had not been worth it.” Exactly. So we are back to square one. So Nasrallah agreeing with the rest of the Lebanese population that these minor issues are not worth another Zionist armageddon, and therefore keeping the border quiet, does not prove that Hezbollah is not “steadfast” or “resistant.” But neither can it show that it is these things. So the question remains: what do these words mean when applied to Hezbollah, more comically to Iran, and in an alternative universe to Assad? And my answer remains: nothing. That’s all. _ Full posting guidelines at: http://www.marxmail.org/sub.htm Set your options at: http://lists.csbs.utah.edu/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
[Marxism] Taps Start to Run Dry in Brazil’s Largest City
POSTING RULES NOTES #1 YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. #2 This mail-list, like most, is publicly permanently archived. #3 Subscribe and post under an alias if #2 is a concern. * NY Times, Feb. 17 2015 Taps Start to Run Dry in Brazil’s Largest City São Paulo Water Crisis Linked to Growth, Pollution and Deforestation By SIMON ROMERO SÃO PAULO, Brazil — Endowed with the Amazon and other mighty rivers, an array of huge dams and one-eighth of the world’s fresh water, Brazil is sometimes called the “Saudi Arabia of water,” so rich in the coveted resource that some liken it to living above a sea of oil. But in Brazil’s largest and wealthiest city, a more dystopian situation is unfolding: The taps are starting to run dry. As southeast Brazil grapples with its worst drought in nearly a century, a problem worsened by polluted rivers, deforestation and population growth, the largest reservoir system serving São Paulo is near depletion. Many residents are already enduring sporadic water cutoffs, some going days without it. Officials say that drastic rationing may be needed, with water service provided only two days a week. Behind closed doors, the views are grimmer. In a meeting recorded secretly and leaked to the local news media, Paulo Massato, a senior official at São Paulo’s water utility, said that residents might have to be warned to flee because “there’s not enough water, there won’t be water to bathe, to clean” homes. “We’re witnessing an unprecedented water crisis in one of the world’s great industrial cities,” said Marússia Whately, a water specialist at Instituto Socioambiental, a Brazilian environmental group. “Because of environmental degradation and political cowardice, millions of people in São Paulo are now wondering when the water will run out.” For some in this traffic-choked megacity of futuristic skyscrapers, gated communities and sprawling slums, the slow-burning crisis has already meant no running water for days on end. “Imagine going three days without any water and trying to run a business in a basic sanitary way,” said Maria da Fátima Ribeiro, 51, who owns a bar in Parque Alexandra, a gritty neighborhood on the edge of São Paulo’s metropolitan area. “This is Brazil, where human beings are treated worse than dogs by our own politicians.” Some residents have begun drilling their own wells around homes and apartment buildings, or hoarding water in buckets to wash clothes or flush toilets. Public schools are prohibiting students from using water to brush their teeth, and changing their lunch menus to serve sandwiches instead of meals on plates that need to be washed. Officials are promising ambitious solutions, like new reservoirs. But they are a long way off, and many people in this vast metropolitan region of 20 million are frightened by forecasts at Brazil’s natural disaster monitoring service that São Paulo’s main reservoir system could run dry in 2015. Experts say the origins of the crisis go beyond the recent drought to include an array of interconnected factors: the city’s surging population growth in the 20th century; a chronically leaky system that spills vast amounts of water before it can reach homes; notorious pollution in the Tietê and Pinheiros rivers traversing the city (their aroma can induce nausea in passers-by); and the destruction of surrounding forests and wetlands that have historically soaked up rain and released it into reservoirs. Deforestation in the Amazon River basin, hundreds of miles away, may also be adding to São Paulo’s water crisis. Cutting the forest reduces its capacity to release humidity into the air, diminishing rainfall in southeast Brazil, according to a recent study by one of the country’s leading climate scientists. Officials also point to global warming. “Climate change has arrived to stay,” Geraldo Alckmin, the governor of São Paulo State, said this month. “When it rains, it rains too much, and when there’s drought, it’s way too dry.” Shrinking water supplies are afflicting Rio de Janeiro and Minas Gerais, two other powerful states, while some smaller cities in the region are canceling Carnival festivities this week over worries about the lack of water to clean trash-strewn streets after celebrations. But São Paulo’s crisis is particularly acute. Officials at Sabesp, the water utility controlled by São Paulo State, have acknowledged lowering the water pressure in the distribution network. While that effectively reduced the amount of water flowing through the system, the authorities have frequently insisted it is not the same as rationing, sowing confusion and anger among those unable to get water. The water utility says it is pursuing a grandiose project to draw water from a nearby river basin and the construction of new
Re: [Marxism] Al-Akhbar editor at his most psychotic
POSTING RULES NOTES #1 YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. #2 This mail-list, like most, is publicly permanently archived. #3 Subscribe and post under an alias if #2 is a concern. * Admittedly I've only skimmed all the replies in this thread, but from what I saw the entire discussion has revolved around military moves by Hezbollah and Israel. I definitely side with Michael K. and those critical of Hezbollah's bluster in that sphere. But now it's time to turn to a class analysis of the Resistance. On that the late Bassem Chit's piece is essential (search for hizb not hezb) http://www.isj.org.uk/index.php4?id=1034issue=145 On Tue, Feb 17, 2015 at 6:15 AM, Michael Karadjis via Marxism marxism@lists.csbs.utah.edu wrote: POSTING RULES NOTES #1 YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. #2 This mail-list, like most, is publicly permanently archived. #3 Subscribe and post under an alias if #2 is a concern. * From: Joseph Catron Sent: Tuesday, February 17, 2015 3:50 PM “Except, of course, when it hasn't been: http://english.al-akhbar.com/node/23433” That linked article refers to the recent bout of shadow-boxing. So I was talking about the 9 years between 2006 and 2015, so my point still stands. Perhaps this latest round may herald things to come, changing realities, perhaps not. We’ll see. But I think it deserves its own analysis and doesn’t alter the fact that the border has been quite since 2006. “But that's not the silliest error here. Are you unaware that Hamas also maintains and enforces ceasefires with Israel? And this involves not only the al-Qassam Brigades standing down, similar to Hezbollah, but also suppressing retaliatory fire from other resistance groups. None of this is a secret.” Yes, well aware. But you see I am not writing on a computer far far away condemning Hezbollah (or of course Hamas) for NOT sending rockets into Israel. I am not demanding people on the other side of the world carry out military actions to get themselves and hundreds of civilians slaughtered by the entity in order to prove their revolutionary purism. Rather, the question is, just what does “steadfast” mean? What does “resistance” mean? I maintain that for Hezbollah, the Lebanese government, Jordan and Egypt it means zero (and for Syria with the Golan it means less than zero, while for Iran the loudness of the rhetoric is in proportion to how far away it is from Zionist borders). The fact that none of these four actors which border Israel, nor even Hamas for much of the time, carry out attacks across the Zionist border does not make them collaborators, does not prove they are not “steadfast,” but also does not prove that they are. But so what does prove that they are, or are not? What does it even mean? The reason I say the only “resistance” organisation in the Middle East is Hamas is because Palestine is still under occupation and Hamas resists it. It is not about how many rockets Hamas fires or doesn’t fire or that it enforces ceasefires or doesn’t. So when you say “The biggest difference between Hamas and Hezbollah in terms of their military (not political) characteristics is that Hezbollah has actually liberated land and defended it, rather than shifting it from one form of occupation to another,” well, yes, but that is the point: before 2000, when Lebanon was under Zionist occupation, it was correct to call Hezbollah a resistance organisation, just like Hamas now; but since the liberation of south Lebanon was complete, the meaning of the term is obscure. Perhaps that wouldn’t matter so much and maybe it is fine to rest your “resistance” credentials on past glories IF something on a much grander scale were not occurring right now, especially since Hezbollah and its apologists cravenly use these ‘resistance” credentials of previous decades to justify its counterrevolutionary action now. “And as for this all moral support business, I can do no better than to quote Sartre's preface to Fanon's The Wretched of the Earth, which I've inexcusably waited this long to read: Sometimes the Left scolds them ... 'you're going too far; we won't support you any more.' The natives don't give a damn about their support; for all the good it does them they might as well stuff it up their backsides. In the absence of some concrete mechanism for leftists in the West to turn their moral support into actual material support, their online ruminations will count for still less than that.” Fine. No, I don’t think Hezbollah cares that someone wrote an email thousands of miles away offering them some degree of moral support and someone else replied that they have become a Shiite sectarian death squad. Of course
