[Marxism] Protests in India - 3
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. * The NY Times coverage of Aishe Ghosh, the Students Union President of Jawarlal Nehru University in Delhi is mostly unbiased. Ms. Ghosh is a brave girl, who had stood against the Hindutva fascists, following a tradition set by her seniors like Kanhaiya Kumar, former President of the Student Union at JNU (Jawarlal Nehru University). It was set up in the 70's as a state run university to enable poor talented students from across the country to access world class education. There are many progressive intellectuals among the teaching staff and the students learn to question existing power relations and explore the causes of inequalities. JNU had produced many eminent politicians and government officials, besides law makers. The incumbent Finance Minister in Modi's cabinet is a former JNU student of economics. And the General Secretary of the Communist Party of India (Marxist), Sitaram Yechury is a former student of JNU. The spirit of enquiry and questioning injustice naturally brings out Leftist political thinking. A visit to the JNU campus reveals the living activism - posters of Che, Bhagat Singh (the legendary leftist martyr, who was hanged by the British colonial authorities) and of course Marx, Engels, Lenin, Fiedel Castro and Mao. This progressive leftist atmosphere and the air of defiance is what makes the conservative, neoliberal and brazenly fascist leaders like Modi feel very uncomfortable. Many leaders of his party, the ruling BJP had called for clearing the university of Communist elements and converting it into a school to teach Hindu scriptures. One even went to the extent of suggesting that it should be raged to the ground. Modi had brought in a boot-licker as the head of the university, who had the mandate to clean the campus of "Tukde - Tukde" Gang, a Hindi acronym for breakers of the nation. But JNU students and teachers stood defiantly to defend the progressive spirit of the institution. A former president of JNU, Kanhaiya Kumar, who hails from a backward region of Bihar, one of the poorest states in India, was charged with sedition in 2016 and was arrested and trashed by lawyers supportive of BJP in the court premises itself, Modi's political outfit. But now, after 4 years of struggles,he had emerged a prominent voice against Modi and his Hindutva agenda. His freedom song, "Aazadi" reverberates across the country in protest rallies and Modi is worried about Kumar's soaring popularity. At a recent rally in his home state Bihar, when the three hundred thousand strong gathering urged him to sing his Aazadi song, the whole crowd broke in to a frenzy, singing Aazadi along with him. This is exactly what is worrying Modi and his party. Vijaya Kumar M _ Full posting guidelines at: http://www.marxmail.org/sub.htm Set your options at: https://lists.csbs.utah.edu/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
[Marxism] How Leo Hurwitz, hounded by McCarthy, changed documentary film | PJ Grisar | The Forward
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[Marxism] The Pesticide Industry’s Playbook for Poisoning the Earth
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[Marxism] A radioactive legacy haunts this Navajo village, which fears a fractured future
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. * Washington Post, Jan. 18, 2020 A radioactive legacy haunts this Navajo village, which fears a fractured future By Will Ford RED WATER POND ROAD, N.M. — The village of Red Water Pond Road sits in the southeast corner of the Navajo Nation, a tiny speck in a dry valley surrounded by scrub-covered mesas. Many families have lived here for generations. The federal government wants to move them out. In what might seem a cruel echo of history, officials are relocating residents to the city of Gallup, about a half-hour away, and surrounding areas. This echo is nuanced, however. The village sits amid a Superfund site loaded with uranium mine waste. Mitigation has been delayed for decades, along with remedies for hundreds of other abandoned uranium mines across the tribe’s lands that boomed during the Cold War. The Environmental Protection Agency aims to haul away thousands of truckloads of the radioactive waste over the next seven years. Residents do not want to stay during that work, but many fear losing their way of life if they are uprooted and unmoored from rural roots and traditions. They have countered the agency’s plan with another solution: construction on a nearby mesa of an off-grid, solar-powered community designed by an architecture group at the University of New Mexico. The EPA had rejected the idea but is facing new pressure from lawmakers and community members to reexamine it. “I feel empowered with those people,” resident Edith Hood says of the university’s proposal. “I feel hope.” Red Water Pond Road has seen little reason to hope for a long time. Starting in the mid-1950s, mining companies extracted about 30 million tons of uranium from Navajo lands. It was just down the road on a July morning in 1979 that an embankment broke on a uranium tailings pond, releasing 1,000 tons of waste that traveled more than 80 miles downstream through arroyos, creeks and rivers. The Church Rock Spill remains the largest nuclear waste spill in U.S. history. Even four decades later, only scattershot mitigation has occurred. Residents, activists and some nonprofit groups have cited a variety of health concerns, including cancer and risks to pregnancy and newborns, related to uranium contamination here. No comprehensive study on the health effects from uranium contamination on Navajo lands has been done. The Superfund site includes two waste piles that were once owned by Kerr-McGee/Quivira, which later became part of Anadarko Petroleum, and United Nuclear Corp., now owned by General Electric. The most immediate cleanup plan focuses on the latter site, with the EPA intending to move the mine waste to tailings piles just under a mile away but over the Navajo border. The agency says it has offered voluntary relocation to some 75 Red Water Pond Road residents. Of the residents who have accepted, nearly four dozen have moved or are preparing to do so. Many describe the process as a painful dissolution of their village — like a real estate developer clearing out a neighborhood by picking off families one by one. “Government is supposed to have cultural sensitivity training,” one woman said at a community meeting in September. “Where is that?” Edith Hood, who once worked in the uranium mines surrounding Red Water Pond on the Navajo Nation, has long pushed for cleanup of the radioactive waste left behind. (Steven St. John/for The Washington Post) Edith Hood, who once worked in the uranium mines surrounding Red Water Pond on the Navajo Nation, has long pushed for cleanup of the radioactive waste left behind. (Steven St. John/for The Washington Post) In a lengthy letter in November to several New Mexico lawmakers, the EPA defended its actions to date as “consistent with all relevant laws, guidance and policies. We continue to seek collaborative solutions and appreciate the Community’s efforts to bring additional resources and perspectives to bear on the challenges posed by both short and long-term disruptions.” The letter also explained that officials have tried to work with residents “in a manner that reflects our respect for the Navajo people, their cultural traditions and the entire Community’s concerns.” Residents have twice proposed alternatives to the agency’s plan. The first involved construction of temporary homes on the adjacent Standing Black Tree Mesa, a few hundred feet above the village. Federal officials cited cost and agency housing standards in saying no. They also pointed out that the EPA does not operate in a vacuum and must rely on local and federal partners; the tribal utility, for one, said providing power and
[Marxism] [UCE] new book
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[Marxism] A Communist Designed Your Kitchen | Marcel Bois | Jacobin
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[Marxism] Capitalism and ‘Culturecide’
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 Op-Ed, Jan. 18, 2020 Capitalism and ‘Culturecide’ By Ai Weiwei BERLIN — Lu Xun, the greatest Chinese writer of the 20th century, created a character named Ah Q who became both adored and feared among Chinese for his wicked display of flaws in China’s “national character.” When Ah Q grew scabies on his head, he forbade people in his presence from pronouncing the word “scabies” — or any other word that sounded like it or might conjure it. Such words were taboo. “Verboten.” A few weeks ago, here in Berlin, I received notice of a lawsuit that had been filed against me by a casino clerk. The complaint said I had called him a Nazi and a racist without any factual basis. I had two weeks to present a written response, failing which I would be subject to punishment. The notice came as I was about to set out for England. I passed the matter to a lawyer and departed. But the complaint led me to prod my memory. Yes, about a year ago I had played cards at the Berlin Casino in Potsdamer Platz and at the end of play had put my chips on the counter of the cashier’s window for redemption. The clerk, who may have been in his 50s, was leaning back in his chair. He looked at me but made no move. Then, enunciating each word distinctly, he said in English, “You should say please.” I was put off. “What happens if I don’t?” “You’re in Europe, you know,” the clerk said. “You should learn some manners.” I found the comment irritating but not wholly strange. Immigrants to Germany do hear such things. I pressed on: “Fine, but you’re not a person who can teach me manners.” That caused him to lean forward. He fixed me with a gaze and said, “Don’t forget that I’m feeding you!” The ante was raised. Behind his almost comical facade, I sensed a truly powerful disdain and resentment. “That’s a Nazi attitude,” I said, “and a racist comment.” I gave up arguing and went to the casino manager. After a bit of investigating, the manager offered me a detailed apology, and that was that — or so I thought until the notice of the lawsuit arrived. I don’t know what will come of that complaint, but it is a small matter compared with the issue that I now want to raise. The casino clerk had cloaked his ethnic prejudice as a question of culture: Immigrants (whom we Germans are “saving”) should be learning European civilization. This made me reflect on where else “cultural difference” has been a euphemism under which bias, slavery and genocide have all had their ways. Hitler’s Germany? Apartheid? Bosnia? The American South? Too often! But indeed these are cultural matters. Is Nazi thinking merely a tumor that can be cut from the body politic and discarded? I doubt it. For good or ill, cultures last for years. In today’s world, authoritarian politics and predatory commerce cooperate to exploit “cultural differences.” Nowhere is this point clearer than in the symbiosis in recent decades between Western corporations and the Communist elite in China. The West offers capital and much-needed technology, while China’s rulers supply a vast, captive, hard-working, low-paid and unprotected labor force. Western politicians, as if trying to justify the unholy collusion, for years argued that rising living standards in China would produce a middle class who would demand freedom and democracy. It is clear by now that that has not happened. The Chinese elite, now far wealthier than before and as in control as ever, can laugh up its sleeve at the Westerners and their visions of inevitable democracy. Instead the West’s own hard-won democracy has become vulnerable. But does the West know it? Look at Hong Kong. Courageous protesters have persisted for more than six months in confronting the world’s mightiest dictatorship, a regime with a record of ironclad rejection of both reason and compromise when it deals with protesters or rivals. Hong Kong’s young democrats have looked for support from the world’s democracies. They stand at today’s edge of what may well be the greatest confrontation of the 21st century. Can the Western world see that helping them is not charity but self-defense? When protesters in Hong Kong look to the vast northwest area in China called Xinjiang, they can see what happens when Beijing-engineered change reaches full throttle. In recent years (at first barely noted in the West), an annihilation of the language, religion and culture of Muslim Uighurs has proceeded systematically. About a million people have been sent to “re-education camps,” where they have been forced to denounce their religion and to swear fealty to the Communist Party of China.
[Marxism] A Blow to the Head Makes an Instant Hero in India
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, Jan. 18, 2020 A Blow to the Head Makes an Instant Hero in India By Jeffrey Gettleman and Hari Kumar NEW DELHI — Under a highway bridge in New Delhi, where a large protest had shut down several lanes of traffic, a coterie of veteran dissidents took turns speaking: men with shaggy beards, singers strumming guitars, social activists so impassioned that spit flew from their wet lips. But a jolt of electricity passed through the crowd when a slight woman — younger, smaller and more vulnerable looking than anyone else — stepped up to the mic. She carried no notes. She wore a bandage on her forehead. Her arm was in a cast. “Many people ask me whether I’m scared,’’ she began. “And I tell them: How can I be scared?” People nodded their heads, seeming to follow her words carefully. She wasn’t frightened of Amit Shah, the home minister, she said, or Narendra Modi, the domineering prime minister who has sent India down a Hindu nationalist path. “Even if you beat us, we won’t step back,’’ she thundered. “Long live the revolution!” The crowd roared. The biggest and most energized protests India has witnessed in a generation are sweeping the country and one young woman has been thrust to the fore: Aishe Ghosh. Earlier this month, while leading a peaceful demonstration on her university campus, Ms. Ghosh was attacked by Hindu nationalist goons. After they cracked her in the head with an iron bar and thrashed her body, images of her blood-smeared face were instantly beamed nationwide. But it was the photograph made two days later that etched her into the Indian psyche: It showed Ms. Ghosh, 25, staring straight into the camera, her head wrapped in a doughnut of white medical tape, her hair wild and her eyes radiating a resolve that seemed indestructible. “Every protest has a face,’’ said Vidit Panchal, a young doctor who traveled across India this week to meet her. The product of politically active parents from West Bengal, Ms. Ghosh was a talented painting student before entering university to study politics. Last fall she was elected president of the student body at one of India’s liveliest and most prestigious schools, Jawaharlal Nehru University, a bastion of anti-Modi dissent. Even in the weeks before she was attacked by the gang of Mr. Modi’s supporters, Ms. Ghosh was marching in protests, coordinating strikes and recruiting followers — in essence, galvanizing the resistance. Now, she is being invited everywhere to speak. To be a student leader in India, it’s a thrilling time. “Professors have been writing mails to us saying that you should be going to the protests, because protests teach you more than I can teach you in the four walls of the classroom,’’ Ms. Ghosh said, clearly excited by all this. “We have politicized so many people. It gives me so much pride.’’ Ever since modern India was envisioned, a fundamental question has been how Hindu-oriented should it be, given that the population, about 80 percent Hindu, has long hosted a dizzying array of different cultures, including a Muslim minority that today, at 200 million people, would on its own be one of the largest Muslim nations in the world. Mr. Modi has taken a clear position, pushing a slate of divisive Hindu nationalist policies that play quite well with a large segment of society but have deeply worried minorities and progressives. “A Germany in the making,’’ Ms. Ghosh calls it. Since Mr. Modi’s re-election in May, his government has plowed ahead with a contentious citizenship review in northeastern India widely seen as a test run for a nationwide attempt to identify and marginalize Muslim families. In August he summarily deleted the statehood of Kashmir, which had been India’s only Muslim-majority state. These moves raised some eyebrows, especially in rival Pakistan, which also claims Kashmir. But the issue that sent millions of Indians over the edge was Mr. Modi’s new citizenship law, which creates a special path to Indian citizenship for migrants from all major South Asian religions bar one: Islam. Mr. Modi has insisted that the law is intended to protect persecuted migrants from neighboring countries, but many Indians see it as blatantly anti-Muslim and discriminatory. As soon at it passed in December, universities across the country exploded in protest. Jawaharlal Nehru University, in central New Delhi, where Ms. Ghosh is working on a master’s degree on climate change, has been one of India’s most reliable incubators of dissent. It’s a big leafy campus, known for its liberal arts programs, and on a recent day professors and students
[Marxism] False flags and fakery: the battle of narratives in Syria | al-bab.com
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[Marxism] Corbyn was intensely moral, but never a working class hero | openDemocracy
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Re: [Marxism] Times publishes op-ed from white nationalist Center for Immigration Studies.
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[Marxism] The Democratic Quest: Marxism Versus Liberalism – New Politics
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[Marxism] National Archives exhibit blurs images critical of President Trump
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[Marxism] Times publishes op-ed from white nationalist Center for Immigration Studies.
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[Marxism] The Truth About the Trump Economy by Joseph E. Stiglitz - Project Syndicate
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[Marxism] Still in the Danger Zone | Shimshon Bichler and Jonathan Nitzan | Socialist Economist
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[Marxism] How Left Are The 2019 Oscar Films? | Ezra Brain | Left Voice
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