[Marxism] an open letter to John Lewis

[Dennis Brasky via Marxism]

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https://thesouthlawn.org/2016/02/12/an-open-letter-to-rep-john-lewis/?utm_content=buffer6a1c4_medium=social_source=facebook.com_campaign=buffer
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[Marxism] Fwd: 4 Billion People at Risk as 'Water Table Dropping All Over the World' | Common Dreams | Breaking News & Views for the Progressive Community

[Louis Proyect via Marxism]

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http://www.commondreams.org/news/2016/02/12/4-billion-people-risk-water-table-dropping-all-over-world
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[Marxism] Fwd: Bernie Sanders and the question of Palestine | The Electronic Intifada

[Louis Proyect via Marxism]

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https://electronicintifada.net/content/bernie-sanders-and-question-palestine/15581
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[Marxism] Brisbane doctors 'risking jail' for refusing to discharge baby badly burnt on Nauru: Greens

[Jeff via Marxism]

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Medical staff have an ethical obligation to keep an asylum seeker baby at 
the Lady Cilento Children's Hospital in Brisbane, a doctors group says.

Protesters have been maintaining a vigil outside the South Brisbane hospital 
since Friday night in support of the doctors, who will not discharge the 
one-year-old girl known as Asha until a "suitable home environment is 
identified".
.
All three are due to be sent back to Nauru.

http://www.abc.net.au/news/2016-02-13/brisbane-doctors-risking-jail-refusing-discharge-burnt-baby/7165892

also:
http://www.bbc.com/news/world-australia-35568467
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[Marxism] Sunni Resentment Muddles Prospect of Reunifying Iraq After ISIS

[Louis Proyect via Marxism]

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(So interesting. This article minces no words about the sectarian 
viciousness of the American-supported Shiite regime in Iraq that is 
punishing the Sunnis in Anbar province in the same fashion as under 
George W. Bush. Ten years ago it was Christopher Hitchens, Kanan Makiya, 
Harry's Place et al cheering on the onslaught. Now it is 
"anti-imperialists" like Phil Greaves, Yoshie Furuhashi and Patrick 
Cockburn making the case for round two in the bogus War on Terror.)


NY Times, Feb. 13 2016
Sunni Resentment Muddles Prospect of Reunifying Iraq After ISIS
By TIM ARANGO

AMIRIYAT FALLUJA, Iraq — When Iraqi ground forces and American aircraft 
began assaulting the city of Ramadi more than a month ago, Ghusoon 
Muhammed and her family fled to the government’s front line, as did many 
other Sunni Arab families who had been trapped for months. Soldiers sent 
her and the children one way, and her husband another, to be 
interrogated in a detention facility.


She has not seen him or heard from him since. She and her children, who 
will most likely not be able to go home to Ramadi for months given the 
destruction, have been left to wait in a ramshackle tent camp here in 
Anbar Province. She is desperate, and adamant: “The innocent people in 
jail need to be released!” she said.


Standing nearby on Sunday was another woman, Karima Nouri. Her son, an 
auto mechanic, was also taken away by the authorities, and she has had 
no word about him for weeks. Ms. Nouri said the government considered 
civilians who remained in Ramadi to be sympathizers of the Islamic 
State. “But we had no ability to leave,” she said. “We are very poor.”


The retaking of Ramadi, the provincial capital, has been held out as a 
vital victory by Iraqi officials and their American allies, and one of 
the most crucial first steps in the government’s reclaiming of Anbar 
Province and other Sunni Arab places.


But even as military goals are being met, Sunni families like those of 
Ms. Muhammed and Ms. Nouri are still voicing their fear and resentment 
of the Shiite-dominated government in Baghdad, highlighting that the 
broader goal of political reconciliation is not yet being served. Their 
grievances today echo those that initially allowed the Islamic State, 
also known as ISIS or ISIL, to prosper two years ago as it began seizing 
territory from the Iraqi government.


As the military campaign in Anbar shifts its focus to Hit, an Islamic 
State-controlled town in the Euphrates Valley, critics say the American 
approach to Iraq is shortsighted in its focus on military gains without 
a political program to back them up. At the same time, each victory over 
the Islamic State sets off new humanitarian crises that Iraq and other 
nations have struggled to face. It seems to be the opposite approach to 
Syria, where the Obama administration has long said it sees no military 
solution and has pushed diplomatic efforts to broker a political settlement.


“There is no political architecture that will convince any Sunni over 
the age of 3 that he or she has a future with the Iraqi state,” said 
Ryan C. Crocker, a former American ambassador to Iraq and the dean of 
the George Bush School of Government and Public Service at Texas A 
University.


He continued, “The administration is trying to use a limited military 
weapon to defeat an adversary that only a political offensive can 
overcome, and we’re not willing or able to make that effort.”


Without political reconciliation and an ambitious program to rebuild the 
Sunni areas destroyed by the war — or at least restore vital services 
like electricity and water — those places are likely to be fertile 
ground for the Islamic State far into the future.


Kenneth M. Pollack, an Iraq expert at the Brookings Institution in 
Washington, worried that military gains in Iraq without political 
overhauls would be counterproductive. “At some point, they make things 
worse,” he said.


Anbar, a region of vast deserts stretching across about a third of 
Iraq’s territory, is where the Islamic State first flourished, having 
risen here in the crucible of the American occupation as Al Qaeda in 
Iraq. The effort to pacify the province cost the lives of more than 
1,300 American soldiers and Marines, billions of dollars in aid and 
intense efforts at reconciliation that resulted in the Sunni Awakening, 
the program in which tribal leaders were paid to switch sides and fight 
against Al Qaeda.


The group re-emerged as the Islamic State, strengthened, after the 
Americans left and as a response to the sectarian policies of the prime 
minister at the time, Nuri Kamal al-Maliki, who failed to deliver on a 

[Marxism] Fwd: insufficient respect: Too late for a no-fly zone

[Louis Proyect via Marxism]

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By Michael Neumann

http://insufficientrespect.blogspot.com/2016/02/too-late-for-no-fly-zone.html
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[Marxism] Chechnya and the National Question

[Ken Hiebert via Marxism]

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Andrew Stewart has this to say (February 12, 2nd message):
As for Checnya, you do understand
that their aspirations were manipulated and hijacked by CIA-linked World
Muslim League, right? This is the same set that was involved with al Queda
and bin Laden.
http://www.arabwestreport.info/en/year-1999/week-47/11-mwl-chief-calls-muslims-show-solidarity-chechens
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muslim_World_League

Vijay Prashad explaining the history of the World Muslim League last fall
re: Syria
http://therealnews.com/t2/index.php?option=com_content=view=31=74=14797

The world is sadly a violent place where the CIA has manipulated the
aspirations of people for its own ends and continues to.


* * * * *

Ken Hiebert replies:

Andrew uses the word aspirations without any adjective, so we don't know if he 
regards these aspirations as legitimate or illegitimate.  For my part, I regard 
them as legitimate.
But one thing we can say for certain, the crushing of Chechnya has not 
diminished those aspirations.  And it has strengthened the influence of the 
most reactionary Islamist currents among Chechens.

Lenin's views on the national question were not developed in ignorance of the 
possibility that national aspirations might be manipulated by reactionary 
forces.  On the contrary, his views were given greater force precisely because 
he did understand that possibility.  Unity between the workers of the oppressed 
nationality and the workers of the oppressor nation were all the more urgent 
because of this.  And that unity could only be achieved if the working class 
movement in the oppressor nation was at pains to free itself from any stain of 
great nation chauvinism.


The writings of Gerry Foley were imbued with this understanding.  I include two 
samples.

Russia Resorts to a Racist War Against the Chechens - November 1999
http://socialistaction.org/russia-resorts-to-a-racist-war-against-the-chechens/
The rulers of Russia argue that the breakdown of their rule over Chechnya 
produced a dangerous disorder, creating a breeding ground for terrorism. But 
their attempts to restore capitalism has led to deprivation and chaos 
throughout the former Soviet Union that are already far more disastrous than 
any conceivable “Islamic terrorism.”

The only thing that can stop the continuing slide into anarchy is the 
reorganization of the working people to take control of the economy and sweep 
away the profiteers and robbers spawned by the ultimate degeneration of the 
counterrevolutionary Stalinist bureaucracy.

In order to do that, the ideals and perspectives of socialism have to be 
revived. And that requires an unyielding fight against Great Russian 
chauvinism, which was the precondition for the victory of the Russian socialist 
revolution in the first place.

Today, it seems that most Russians have forgotten that the Chechen people, 
attracted by the Bolshevik leaders’ promises of self-determination, played a 
decisive role in the defeat of the reactionary White armies on the southern 
front during the civil war.

A new revolutionary leadership must remind them of this, and once again win the 
Chechen fighters as allies in the struggle against reaction, this time against 
the betrayers of the revolution.


Who Gains From the Slaughter in Chechnya? - March 2,000
http://socialistaction.org/who-gains-from-the-slaughter-in-chechnya/

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Re: [Marxism] Putin

[Andrew Stewart via Marxism]

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I think I have been pretty mature here. I am quite familiar with the
National Question and related ideas.

On the other hand, you are prone to this Manichean opposites game you call
Marxism that has almost no recognition of things that actual political
scientists talk about when they do actual Marxist studies on international
relations.

On Sat, Feb 13, 2016 at 12:22 AM, Louis Proyect  wrote:

> On 2/12/16 11:39 PM, Andrew Stewart wrote:
>
>> Does it ever occur to you that this line of discussion is very similar
>> in theme to the anti-Bolshevik Left discourse of a century ago?
>>
>
> No, it is consistent with Lenin's writings on the national question. You
> need to get up to speed on this, Andrew.
>
> Here's a good place to start:
>
>
> https://johnriddell.wordpress.com/2014/05/20/national-liberation-and-bolshevism-reexamined-a-view-from-the-borderlands/
>
>
>


-- 
Best regards,

Andrew Stewart
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[Marxism] Fwd: Exchange with Andrew Cockburn | Louis Proyect: The Unrepentant Marxist

[Louis Proyect via Marxism]

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https://louisproyect.org/2016/02/13/exchange-with-andrew-cockburn/
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[Marxism] [UCE] Proof that God exists

[Louis Proyect via Marxism]

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http://www.mysanantonio.com/news/us-world/article/Senior-Associate-Justice-Antonin-Scalia-found-6828930.php
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Re: [Marxism] [UCE] Proof that God exists

[Glenn Kissack via Marxism]

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> http://www.mysanantonio.com/news/us-world/article/Senior-Associate-Justice-Antonin-Scalia-found-6828930.php

That’s all the proof the public unions need. With Scalia in the ground, the 
Friedrichs case that seeks to curtail agency fee payments will probably be a 
4-4 tie, which saves the unions.

https://twitter.com/search?q=scalia+and+friedrichs_src=twsrc%5Egoogle%7Ctwcamp%5Eserp%7Ctwgr%5Esearch

Glenn

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Re: [Marxism] [UCE] Proof that God exists

[Ralph Johansen via Marxism]

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Louis Proyect wrote
  
http://www.mysanantonio.com/news/us-world/article/Senior-Associate-Justice-Antonin-Scalia-found-6828930.php


  One very interesting, obvious result: Republicans will do everything possible 
to prevent Obama in his last 11 months from appointing a “liberal” successor, 
who would tip the balance on the court. And then, with Sanders surging, what 
will the Dems make of this as to the next president?

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[Marxism] Robin Yassin-Kassab on Turkey's actions against Assadist positions

[Dennis Brasky via Marxism]

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Now here we are. Turkey is shelling Assadist positions in northern Aleppo
and northern Lattakia. (The US is asking it to stop). With the aid of
Turkish artillery, Turkmen Free Army brigades have just recaptured Alia
village in Lattakia. And Turkish artillery has stopped the PYD-Russian
advance on Arab-majority Azaz. It seems a Turkish red line is in fact a red
line. Russia's murderous imperialist onslaught on Turkmen and Arabs in
Syria, and its driving hundreds of thousands more refugees to the borders,
have brought Turkey a step deeper into the conflict. With all my dislike of
the authoritarian and hyper-nationalist aspects of the Turkish state, I
support its current action as an absolutely necessary break with the
disastrous appeasement of Assad, Russia and Iran, and more importantly, as
absolutely necessary for the survival of democratic communities in Idlib
and Aleppo provinces. If European powers have any sense of
self-preservation they will ignore the US and line up with Turkey here.
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