[Marxism] Similarity and Dissimilarity between the U.S. and Israel

[RKOB via Marxism]

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 Massacres, Plundering and Land Grabbing: The Similarity and
 Dissimilarity between the U.S. and Israel

https://www.thecommunists.net/theory/the-similarity-and-dissimilarity-between-the-u-s-and-israel-in-massacres-plundering-and-land-grabbing/ 



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Re: [Marxism] Raed Fares, leader of Kafranbel killed by HTS gunmen in Idlib

[Louis Proyect via Marxism]

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On 11/26/18 6:24 PM, Chris Slee via Marxism wrote:


This suggests to me that Raed Fares and Hamoud Juneid may have been murdered by 
the Turkish state or a group under its control.


Actually, there have been very few murders of civil society activists by 
Islamists in Syria. Of course, there is Daesh but it has nothing to do 
with the struggle against Assad. Frankly, for all of the junk put out by 
Norton, Blumenthal and Khalek, Syria would have been better off if 
Islamists had taken power in 2013 or so and rapidly closed economic and 
political ranks with Turkey. Of course, if the idiotic Kurdish 
leadership had continued its filthy non-aggression pact with Assad, 
there might have been consequences.

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Re: [Marxism] Raed Fares, leader of Kafranbel killed by HTS gunmen in Idlib

[Chris Slee via Marxism]

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Michael Karadjis says:

"Incidentally, while people like Raed and the Idlib civil resistance in
general were closer to the anti-HTS rebels in Idlib (ie, all of them except
HTS), due to HTS’s greater penchant for attempting repression, they were by
no means proxies for Ahrar or anyone else, even the FSA, and definitely not
for Turkey. Actually, the civil movement tended to be very critical of the
Russia-Turkey-Iran Astana process, in this sense their criticisms
paralleled HTS’s own criticisms, whereas the Turkish-backed front
hesitantly supported it."

This suggests to me that Raed Fares and Hamoud Juneid may have been murdered by 
the Turkish state or a group under its control.
 
Chris Slee


From: Marxism  on behalf of mkaradjis via 
Marxism 
Sent: Tuesday, 27 November 2018 1:21:02 AM
To: Chris Slee
Subject: Re: [Marxism] Raed Fares, leader of Kafranbel killed by HTS gunmen in 
Idlib

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Responding to my post on the murder of Syrian revolutionaries Raed Fares
and Hamoud Janeed, RKOB rightly cautions about the article title, which
directly accuses HTS of the killing.

It is quite true that there is no clear evidence for this. Certainly, in as
much as Raed fares allies are accusing HTS, their opinion seems well worth
taking into account. At the same time, I haven’t seen any more clarity the
last couple of days. I tend now to think this is much more likely the work
of Assad regime agents rather than HTS. Certainly they had much more to
gain, by trying to sow even deeper divisions than already exist; and of
course the regime has always wanted people like Raed dead. HTS has in the
past arrested, detained and harassed Raed and people allied with the civil
resistance, but then released him and belted up. It is unclear what they
would gain by killing him at this moment.

That said, a few comments on RKOB’s comments.

“1) They were killed in Kafranbel which is NOT under control of HTS but
Ahrar al-Sham.”

Clearly RKOB is not accusing Ahrar al-Sham of doing it, merely pointing to
difficulties for HTS, Ahrar’s enemy, getting close. But this does raise an
interesting general political point.

By Ahrar al-Sham, I think RKOB means the general military coalition Ahrar
is part of, the anti-HTS, Turkish-backed National Liberation Army, but
Ahrar may dominate in this part of Idlib. Here, Raed fares and his
democratic, secular, socially progressive Syrian civil resistance has run
the show throughout the entire Syrian revolution, as it does in many other
cities and towns in Greater Idlib. Yet virtually all commentary on Idlib in
the imperialist media, the alt-“left” media, and the Apoist media, paints
Idlib, war-on-terror style, as a theocratic tyranny “run by al-Qaida”
(“Al-Qaida” more or less doesn’t exist in Idlib, but they lyingly mean
HTS). Even though half of Idlib (including this region) does not even have
an HTS presence, the fact that an Islamist organisation with a spooky,
scary name like ‘Ahrar al-Sham’ is there would mean the same to this mass
of ignorance. We even read that Ahrar al-Sham is the Syrian equivalent of
the Taliban, an assertion straight out the theatre of the absurd. Not that
I like Ahrar, which has essentially become a Turkish proxy, but even in
that role, the fact of Kafranbel running its own show once again
demonstrates the relationship between the armed rebel groups and the
people’s revolution, showing we cannot judge the rebel-held regions on the
basis of the politics of armed factions.

“3) The people close to Fares have a political interest to accuse HTS of
this because they are very close to US and EU imperialism. Raed Fares
himself worked for a U.S. funded radio station
(
https://www.stripes.com/prominent-syrian-activist-killed-in-rebel-held-province-1.557758)
.”

I think you need to be just as careful about these kinds of assertions as
those I remarked on above, who think anyone with a scary Islamic name is
“al-Qaida’ or the Taliban. The Syrian revolution has no friends except
other people’s movements, but plenty who would try to coopt for their own
purposes.

In this case though you might have added that the Trump regime ended that
Obama-era US funding of Radio Fresh, and for the entire civil movement in
Syria (as well as, of course, ending the long defunct remaining bit of
funding for some FSA units). Yes, the US had been 

[Marxism] Syria: Opposition denies launching poison gas attack on Aleppo | News | Al Jazeera

[Louis Proyect via Marxism]

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https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2018/11/syria-opposition-denies-launching-poison-gas-attack-aleppo-181125104423008.html
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[Marxism] The Panic of 1857 and the Coming of the Civil War

[Dennis Brasky via Marxism]

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https://delanceyplace.com/view-archives.php?p=3726
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[Marxism] The Life and Death of the War Correspondent Marie Colvin

[Louis Proyect via Marxism]

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NY Times Sunday Book Review, Nov. 26, 2018
She Reported From the World’s Combat Zones, at the Cost of Her Life
By Joshua Hammer

IN EXTREMIS
The Life and Death of the War Correspondent Marie Colvin
By Lindsey Hilsum
Illustrated. 378 pp. Farrar, Straus & Giroux. $28.

The death of Marie Colvin under fire in Homs, Syria, in February 2012 
was, for many who knew her, both a shock and a tragedy foretold. I had 
first met this acclaimed journalist in the Albanian mountain town of 
Kukes in April 1999, during the Kosovo war. Alone among the scores of 
reporters who had converged on this dreary outpost, Colvin had crossed 
the border with a member of the Kosovo Liberation Army and spent several 
days in a muddy trench being shelled and shot at by Serb forces. Three 
years later, during the Aqsa intifada, I saw her again. After invading 
the West Bank town of Jenin, a center of Palestinian militancy, and 
fighting from house to house for almost two weeks, the Israeli Defense 
Forces pulled back far enough to allow reporters to sneak in and observe 
the destruction. With three others, I walked through rubble-filled 
alleys and entered one of the few homes that hadn’t been badly damaged. 
There sat Colvin — wearing the eye patch she had recently acquired after 
being half-blinded by a grenade in Sri Lanka — calmly sipping tea and 
smoking a cigarette. She had been reporting from inside the town, 
sheltered by a Palestinian family, throughout the battle.


Lindsey Hilsum’s “In Extremis: The Life and Death of the War 
Correspondent Marie Colvin” is an extraordinary account of one 
reporter’s fearless and ultimately fatal dedication. The international 
editor of Channel 4 News in Britain and a longtime combat reporter, 
Hilsum was one of many colleagues drawn into Colvin’s orbit. They flew 
in a rickety Ukrainian plane from Djibouti to Asmara to cover a 1998 war 
between Ethiopia and Eritrea; dined together in Tripoli, Libya; partied 
at Colvin’s home in London and conversed on Skype just before Colvin was 
killed. Members of a tiny coterie of female war reporters in an 
overwhelmingly male-dominated profession, the pair viewed themselves, 
Hilsum writes, as “the Thelma and Louise of the press corps.” But while 
Hilsum eventually scaled back her risk-taking, Colvin could never leave 
the front lines behind. Piecing together Colvin’s exuberantly messy life 
through more than a hundred interviews with ex-husbands, former lovers, 
family members, friends and colleagues, Hilsum draws an empathetic 
portrait of a woman whose courage often crossed into recklessness, both 
in combat zones and outside them.


Colvin grew up in Oyster Bay, Long Island, the daughter of 
schoolteachers who doted on their five children. Her upbringing was 
Roman Catholic, suburban and comfortably middle class. At Yale, she fell 
under the tutelage of John Hersey, author of “Hiroshima,” one of many 
influential figures who would shape her career. She got her start 
livening up a newsletter for the Teamsters in New York, jumped from 
there to U.P.I. and was soon dispatched to Paris. Hired away by Rupert 
Murdoch’s Sunday Times, she made her name in 1987 with a story about 
watching a young woman die after being shot by a sniper during a militia 
siege of a Palestinian refugee camp in Beirut. The reporting she did 
there — excruciatingly close, filled with intimate glimpses of human 
suffering — established a template. “It has always seemed to me that 
what I write about is humanity in extremis,” she would say in a 2001 
feature article, “pushed to the unendurable, and that it is important to 
tell people what really happens in wars.”


Hilsum unpacks one terrifying story after another to illustrate how far 
Colvin was willing to go to expose the truth. Trapped in Chechnya in 
December 1999 during an aerial bombing campaign by the Russian Army, she 
and a young Russian photographer were forced to hike for days through 
the snowbound Caucasus to the Georgian border. Stopping to rest meant 
becoming a target for bombs. “She struggled to breathe, regretting every 
cigarette she had smoked,” Hilsum writes in an excruciatingly vivid 
account. “Dima sat down, saying he could go no further. Marie knew that 
despair was even more dangerous than the cold. ‘Get up! Keep moving!’ 
she urged.”


Colvin also had a knack for gaining the confidence of dictators and 
demagogues. In 1986 she talked her way into the compound of the Libyan 
strongman Muammar el-Qaddafi in Tripoli. Hilsum delights in describing 
their first meeting: “After a few minutes Qaddafi entered dressed in a 
gray padded flight suit, sockless feet peeking from lizard skin slip-on 

[Marxism] Feminism & Transgender Politics

[A.R. G via Marxism]

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https://www.versobooks.com/blogs/4090-i-m-not-transphobic-but-a-feminist-case-against-the-feminist-case-against-trans-inclusivity

Feminist article with detailed response and thoughtful response to the
arguments of anti-transgender feminists. Food for thought.

Amith R. Gupta
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[Marxism] censorship at Amazon

[Dennis Brasky via Marxism]

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*James W. Loewen is a sociologist.  The New Press has just brought out new
paperbacks of Loewen's bestseller, Lies My Teacher Told Me
,
and Sundown
Towns
,
about places that were/are all-white on purpose. *

In 2016 I wrote here  about
Clyde Wilson’s scurrilous neo-Confederate pamphlet, “*Lies My Teacher Told
Me: The True History of the War for Southern Independence*
.”
It is a 38-page pamphlet that mostly reprints an article he wrote for what
is pretentiously titled the Abbeville Institute
 but
actually amounts to another neo-Confederate’s house.

Recently friends visited the Gettysburg Emporium, a Civil War re-enactors’
store in Gettysburg, where they saw copies for sale along with Confederate
and Union uniforms and paraphernalia. Appalled at both the rip-off of my
title and the content of the pamphlet, they told me about it. That spurred
me to go to Amazon.com , where I read several glowing
reviews of the work by other neo-Confederates.

I decided to post my own not-so-glowing review. “He stole my book title and
ignores the primary sources in *The Confederate and Neo-Confederate Reader*,”
I wrote.

https://historynewsnetwork.org/blog/154162
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[Marxism] Critics sceptical of Syrian government allegations of Aleppo chemical attack

[RKOB via Marxism]

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Two article which fortify me in my sceptical approach on this event

https://english.alarabiya.net/en/News/middle-east/2018/11/26/Syrian-opposition-leader-Iranian-militias-behind-chemical-attack-on-Aleppo.html

https://www.middleeasteye.net/news/syrian-government-allegations-aleppo-chemical-attack-critics-sceptical-1555062259 



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Re: [Marxism] The Weird History of Gender-Segregated Bathrooms

[MM via Marxism]

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> On Nov 26, 2018, at 11:15 AM, Louis Proyect via Marxism 
>  wrote:
> 
> full: 
> https://www.livescience.com/54692-why-bathrooms-are-gender-segregated.html 
> 

And of course this:

"Bathroom bills like North Carolina's often reflect ideas about sex and safety, 
Cavanagh said. However, there are no documented instances of a transgender 
person attacking anyone in a public bathroom, she said. A survey published in 
the Journal of Public Management and Social Policy in 2013 did find, however, 
that 70 percent of the transgender respondents from the Washington, D.C., area 
had experienced harassment or assault in bathrooms, or had been denied access 
to facilities.”

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[Marxism] New York State homeless population said to be larger than population in all but two NY cities

[Dennis Brasky via Marxism]

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https://www.nydailynews.com/news/politics/ny-pol-homeless-students-cuomo-hevesi-nortz-20181121-story.html
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[Marxism] The Weird History of Gender-Segregated Bathrooms

[Louis Proyect via Marxism]

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The first gender-segregated public restroom on record was a temporary 
setup at a Parisian ball in 1739, said Sheila Cavanagh, a sociologist at 
York University in Canada and author of "Queering Bathrooms: Gender, 
Sexuality, and the Hygienic Imagination" (University of Toronto Press, 
2010). The ball's organizers put a chamber box (essentially a chamber 
pot in a box with a seat) for men in one room and for women in another.


"Everyone at the ball thought this was sort of a novelty — something 
sort of eccentric and fun," Cavanagh said.


full: 
https://www.livescience.com/54692-why-bathrooms-are-gender-segregated.html

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[Marxism] Don’t Forget, We Came Up With the Green New Deal, Improved National Medicare for All! | Green Power Project

[Andrew Stewart via Marxism]

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http://greenpartypower.com/2018/11/26/dont-forget-our-green-new-deal/


Best regards,
Andrew Stewart 
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[Marxism] class prejudice and the Democrats' "blue wave"

[Dennis Brasky via Marxism]

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The exclusive focus on suburbs as if they are wall-to-wall white
middle-class professionals, which the influential Ron Brownstein

continues
to champion post-election, supports a Democratic political strategy that
wants to run against Trump’s offensive style and values rather than on a
substantive economic-justice program that could move toward renewing the
kind of multi-racial, cross-class coalition that was such an important part
of the Democrats’ 2008 sweep of executive and legislative power.  In my
view, that would be a horrendous strategic mistake.  But worse, and not
unrelated, it continues a moral narrative, common among many Clinton
Democrats, that implicitly and often very explicitly values people with
bachelor’s degrees over those without.  That attitude, as much as any
strategic choice, adds toxicity to our already toxic Trumpian environment.

https://workingclassstudies.wordpress.com/2018/11/26/class-prejudice-and-the-democrats-blue-wave/
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Re: [Marxism] Feminist site established to challenge gender self-ID legislation in New Zealand

[MM via Marxism]

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> On Nov 26, 2018, at 2:43 AM, Philip Ferguson  
> wrote:
> 
> So now feminists who defend women-only spaces are likened to Nazis or, at the 
> very least, Nazi enablers.
> 
> Unfortunately, this kind of nonsense pervades the responses to 
> gender-critical feminists although the most entitled of the biological males 
> who want access to women's spaces feel fairly unrestrained in issuing rape 
> threats, death threats, various other threats to gender-critical feminists, 
> try to get gender-critical feminists fired, censored, etc etc.
> 
> Why anyone on the left would want to enable this kind of behaviour directed 
> by biological males to women is odd indeed; although I guess women's rights 
> just comes way down the list of priorities for some left men, including a 
> load of the 'woke' ones.
> 
> Another site I'd recommend that defends women's rights and documents the 
> abuse (to put it mildly) that gener-critical feminists have been subject to 
> is Peak Trans: 
> https://www.peaktrans.org/ 
> 
> For some of the violent misogyny directed at gender-critical feminists by a 
> layer of trans, check out: 
> https://www.peaktrans.org/hate-from-trans-activists/ 
> 

All such bullying and harassment are toxic and should be vehemently opposed. 
But so should attempts at rationalizing traditional societal roles in the name 
of what’s “normal,” by claiming the space of “ordinary folks.” I realize this 
is unfamiliar and even uncomfortable terrain for many people, but it’s kind of 
astounding that someone who seems to see themselves as a thinker of the left 
could be so oblivious to the tyranny of inherited societal norms.
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Re: [Marxism] Feminist site established to challenge gender self-ID legislation in New Zealand

[Louis Proyect via Marxism]

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On 11/26/18 9:39 AM, David McDonald via Marxism wrote:


The nybooks article is behind a paywall.
_


How Ordinary Germans Did It
Christopher R. Browning JUNE 20, 2013 ISSUE

A Small Town Near Auschwitz: Ordinary Nazis and the Holocaust
by Mary Fulbrook
Oxford University Press, 421 pp., $34.95

Soldaten: On Fighting, Killing, and Dying: The Secret World War II 
Transcripts of German POWs
by Sönke Neitzel and Harald Welzer, translated from the German by 
Jefferson Chase

Knopf, 437 pp., $30.50

Growing consciousness of the Holocaust in both academic scholarship and 
society in general became evident in the late 1970s and intensified in 
the 1980s. Initially, important research focused on the different roles 
of Hitler, Nazi ideology, and the structure of the dictatorship in 
shaping the decision-making process that led to the Holocaust. Research 
also concentrated on the complicity of various professions and 
institutions in the Third Reich, and particularly on the SS. Still 
lacking was careful empirical study of how Nazi racial policy was also 
carried out by “ordinary” Germans.


Two events in the 1990s altered this situation. The first was the 
publication of my book Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and 
the Final Solution in Poland in 1992, quickly followed by Daniel 
Goldhagen’s Hitler’s Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the 
Holocaust in 1996. The second event was the exhibition of the Hamburg 
Institute of Social Research, “War of Annihilation: Crimes of the 
Wehrmacht 1941–1944,” which extensively toured Germany from 1995 to 1999 
and engendered both high attendance and considerable controversy. 
Ordinary Men and Hitler’s Willing Executioners overlapped in their focus 
on Reserve Police Battalion 101 as a test case because its commander had 
openly given his men—randomly conscripted, middle-aged reservists with a 
low rate of party membership and little police training and ideological 
indoctrination—the option not to participate in mass executions of Jews 
in Poland. Nonetheless the great majority did not avail themselves of 
this option.


Both books demonstrated that “ordinary” German men—and not just SS 
fanatics and ideologues, carefully selected and indoctrinated—had become 
mass murderers. But the two books differed significantly in trying to 
explain this phenomenon of noncoerced participation. I emphasized 
universal attributes of human nature and social-psychological factors 
shaping group dynamics, such as conformity, deference to authority, and 
adaptation to roles within an occupation unit stationed in enemy 
territory during wartime. Goldhagen emphasized German cultural 
particularity in the form of what he described as a deeply ingrained 
“eliminationist” anti-Semitism, which caused virtually all Germans to 
desire the death of the Jews and then to kill them with enthusiastic 
cruelty when given the personal opportunity.


Reserve Police Battalion 101 provided an exemplary case study to test 
and disprove assumptions about the factors often presumed necessary to 
explain individual participation in mass killing. Among those allegedly 
crucial factors were special selection by the Nazi authorities of those 
who would take part in the Holocaust, overt ideological commitment, 
harsh discipline and training, and coercion by means of binding orders 
and threatened punishment. None of these applied to the reserve 
policemen. But most of the ordinary German men who participated in the 
Nazi war effort and experienced the reality of the Nazi occupation of 
Europe did so in the armed forces, and not in the police battalions. 
Hence the explosive impact of the “Crimes of the Wehrmacht” exhibition 
in Germany. Despite two decades of scholarship to the contrary, the 
comforting postwar myth of the “clean Wehrmacht” had survived relatively 
intact in German popular consciousness into the mid-1990s.


The graphic photographs and chilling letters and documents in the 
Hamburg exhibition that portrayed the actions and attitudes of ordinary 
soldiers succeeded where scholarly books had not in finally establishing 
broader awareness that the horrific crimes of the German war and 
occupation in the East were not committed solely by, and known only to, 
the SS. The exhibition had some flaws. Some photographs turned out to 
have been falsely labeled and others upon closer inspection could not be 
verified; the letters and documents carefully selected for maximum shock 
effect may not have been representative in any statistical sense. But 
the overall lesson to the public was in line with decades of earlier 

Re: [Marxism] Trans Ideology

[Tristan Sloughter via Marxism]

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> Philip F.’s piece is a praiseworthy attempt to reject a false identity 
> politics substitute for class politics. 

What in any of this piece is about identity politics?

And what part explains how there is any relation for the worse to class 
politics?

This is a disgusting piece that attempts to act like it is science while mixing 
in insults and fearmongering you find on Fox News, "a gift to predatory males".

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Re: [Marxism] Feminist site established to challenge gender self-ID legislation in New Zealand

[David McDonald via Marxism]

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The nybooks article is behind a paywall.
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Re: [Marxism] Trans Ideology

[MM via Marxism]

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> On Nov 26, 2018, at 6:34 AM, C. G. Estabrook  wrote:
> 
> Philip F.’s piece is a praiseworthy attempt to reject a false identity 
> politics substitute for class politics. 

Defending class politics over identity politics is a laudible and necessary 
undertaking; doing so in relation to gender and sexuality is inevitably 
fraught, especially when so many people are so profoundly disenfranchised, 
exploited and oppressed, and thus may be expected to rely more heavily on 
identity categories to provide at least some sense of orientation and 
stability. This piece makes no serious or good-faith attempt at articulating 
the relationship between sexuality and gender, and mis-uses scientific data by 
invoking a statistical regularity as carrying normative weight in resolving 
complex social and political questions. Far from being a “praiseworthy attempt” 
at an important task, it is an abysmal and lamentable failure — a vivid example 
of the reactionary abuse of science, whether intended or not.
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Re: [Marxism] Raed Fares, leader of Kafranbel killed by HTS gunmen in Idlib

[mkaradjis via Marxism]

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Responding to my post on the murder of Syrian revolutionaries Raed Fares
and Hamoud Janeed, RKOB rightly cautions about the article title, which
directly accuses HTS of the killing.

It is quite true that there is no clear evidence for this. Certainly, in as
much as Raed fares allies are accusing HTS, their opinion seems well worth
taking into account. At the same time, I haven’t seen any more clarity the
last couple of days. I tend now to think this is much more likely the work
of Assad regime agents rather than HTS. Certainly they had much more to
gain, by trying to sow even deeper divisions than already exist; and of
course the regime has always wanted people like Raed dead. HTS has in the
past arrested, detained and harassed Raed and people allied with the civil
resistance, but then released him and belted up. It is unclear what they
would gain by killing him at this moment.

That said, a few comments on RKOB’s comments.

“1) They were killed in Kafranbel which is NOT under control of HTS but
Ahrar al-Sham.”

Clearly RKOB is not accusing Ahrar al-Sham of doing it, merely pointing to
difficulties for HTS, Ahrar’s enemy, getting close. But this does raise an
interesting general political point.

By Ahrar al-Sham, I think RKOB means the general military coalition Ahrar
is part of, the anti-HTS, Turkish-backed National Liberation Army, but
Ahrar may dominate in this part of Idlib. Here, Raed fares and his
democratic, secular, socially progressive Syrian civil resistance has run
the show throughout the entire Syrian revolution, as it does in many other
cities and towns in Greater Idlib. Yet virtually all commentary on Idlib in
the imperialist media, the alt-“left” media, and the Apoist media, paints
Idlib, war-on-terror style, as a theocratic tyranny “run by al-Qaida”
(“Al-Qaida” more or less doesn’t exist in Idlib, but they lyingly mean
HTS). Even though half of Idlib (including this region) does not even have
an HTS presence, the fact that an Islamist organisation with a spooky,
scary name like ‘Ahrar al-Sham’ is there would mean the same to this mass
of ignorance. We even read that Ahrar al-Sham is the Syrian equivalent of
the Taliban, an assertion straight out the theatre of the absurd. Not that
I like Ahrar, which has essentially become a Turkish proxy, but even in
that role, the fact of Kafranbel running its own show once again
demonstrates the relationship between the armed rebel groups and the
people’s revolution, showing we cannot judge the rebel-held regions on the
basis of the politics of armed factions.

“3) The people close to Fares have a political interest to accuse HTS of
this because they are very close to US and EU imperialism. Raed Fares
himself worked for a U.S. funded radio station
(
https://www.stripes.com/prominent-syrian-activist-killed-in-rebel-held-province-1.557758)
.”

I think you need to be just as careful about these kinds of assertions as
those I remarked on above, who think anyone with a scary Islamic name is
“al-Qaida’ or the Taliban. The Syrian revolution has no friends except
other people’s movements, but plenty who would try to coopt for their own
purposes.

In this case though you might have added that the Trump regime ended that
Obama-era US funding of Radio Fresh, and for the entire civil movement in
Syria (as well as, of course, ending the long defunct remaining bit of
funding for some FSA units). Yes, the US had been providing some $200
million in civil funds, some of which went to good projects such as this,
till Trump scrapped it. The civil movement accepted whatever cash it could
get, just like the Red Cross, Red Crescent, UNWRA and countless other
organisations around the world have to rely on such funding. To say “he
worked for a US-funded radio station”, rather than he helped set up a
people’s revolutionary radio station which reached out and acquired some
western funding, turns reality on its head. I’m not sure how this made him
“close” to anyone; I suggest the refusal of both the civil movement and the
FSA to ever become American proxies is why Trump made the decision to scrap
what he called this “dangerous and wasteful” funding.

“As far as I know he called for Western military intervention in Syria.”

We need better evidence than that, but if true, what kind of
“intervention”? Many in Syrian civil movements wanted some kind of no-fly
zone to prevent Assadist warplanes slaughtering them every day. Hell, who
wouldn’t want that? It’s this strange human characteristic to want to be
protected from being slaughtered, even by the devil. The fact that we see
this as any different to people calling the racist and murderous US cops to
protect them 

[Marxism] (3) Socialist Revolutionary Workers Party - W Cape - Home

[Louis Proyect via Marxism]

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NUMSA union in South Africa forms party. I hope they aren't planning on 
adopting "Leninist" norms given the name of the group that smacks of 
those traditions.


https://www.facebook.com/srwp.wcape/
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[Marxism] Everything you need to know about Russia seizing three Ukrainian naval ships near Crimea – VICE News

[Louis Proyect via Marxism]

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https://news.vice.com/en_us/article/kzv7ze/everything-you-need-to-know-about-russia-seizing-ukrainian-naval-ships-near-crimea
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Re: [Marxism] Trans Ideology

[C. G. Estabrook via Marxism]

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Philip F.’s piece is a praiseworthy attempt to reject a false identity politics 
substitute for class politics. 

> On Nov 25, 2018, at 11:57 PM, MM via Marxism  
> wrote:
> 
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> 
>> On Nov 25, 2018, at 3:10 PM, Praxis Perhaps via Marxism 
>>  wrote:
>> 
>> What a reactionary piece!  What ever possessed you to post such a thing!
> 
> I’d like to echo Praxis Perhaps’ sentiment, and reiterate this question. I 
> recognize that anything touching on gender or sexuality can be a prickly 
> subject, and that we may have to grapple with uncomfortable questions in 
> order to accommodate the full range of consensual human self-expression, but 
> I’d also like to hear from Philip F. why he thought this vile, fear-baiting, 
> reactionary diatribe deserved to be shared to the list without any critical 
> introductory comment — or even why anyone might consider it to be any part of 
> left discourse at all.
> 
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Re: [Marxism] latest gas attack in Syria

[Chris Slee via Marxism]

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RKOB says:

"I don't know about the example of the 6 civilians and 2 YPG figthers
in 2016 getting hurt which Chris is referring to. But even this is has
been the case, please let us not forget a sense of proportions. All the
real CW attacks of the Assadists have killed a number of people and
injured many more. Here we talk about 8 people injured."

I agree that the Assad regime is the main force that has used chemical weapons. 
 It is the only force that has used sarin - the most deadly chemical used in 
this war.

But this does not mean that no rebel group has ever used chemical weapons.  

My first message on this issue was in response to a query about whether forces 
other than the Assad regime have ever used chemical weapons.  I cited the 
Amnesty International report as evidence that on at least one occasion a rebel 
group has used chlorine as a chemical weapon.

Here is the Amnesty report again for those who missed it:

https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2016/05/syria-armed-opposition-groups-committing-war-crimes-in-aleppo-city

Chris Slee
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[Marxism] Russia seizes three Ukrainian ships in Black Sea

[RKOB via Marxism]

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For obvious reasons, this is an important event

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-ukraine-crisis-russia/russia-fires-on-and-seizes-ukrainian-ships-near-annexed-crimea-idUSKCN1NU0DL

https://www.rferl.org/a/ukrainian-lawmakers-to-consider-martial-law-proposal-after-russia-opens-fire-on-ships-in-black-sea/29620128.html

http://www.atlanticcouncil.org/blogs/new-atlanticist/russia-ukraine-feud-heats-up-the-sea-of-azov?fbclid=IwAR1ifsXuxs9NYZt69g8cuTSqkpJp1Lwd5Wrnm6vy2l_0STHTLFmBDTV1KpM#.W_usfPDijvk.twitter 



https://themoscowtimes.com/news/russia-reopens-kerch-strait-to-shipping-after-naval-clash-with-ukraine-63593 



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