redFlags

"I do not recognize myself anymore"

Found poem.

"Actually, everything is quite clear if one thinks it over and reaches the conclusion that indirect democracy is a hoax.  Ostensibly, the elected Assembly is the one which reflects public opinion most faithfully.  But there is only one sort of public opinion, and it is serial. 

"The imbecility of the mass media, the government pronouncements, the biased or incomplete reporting in the newspapers -- all this comes to seek us out in our serial solitude and load us down with wooden ideas, formed out of what we think others will think.  Deep within us there are undoubtedly demands and protests, but because they are not echoed by others, they wither away and leave us with a 'bruised spirit' and a feeling of frustration.  So when we are called to vote, I, the Other, have my head stuffed with petrified ideas which the press or television has piled up there.  They are serial ideas which are expressed through my vote, but they are not my ideas. 

"The institutions of bourgeois democracy have split me apart:  there is me and there are all the Others they tell me I am (a Frenchman, a soldier, a worker, a taxpayer, a citizen, and so on).  This splitting-up forces us to live with what psychiatrists call a perpetual identity crisis.  Who am I, in the end?  An Other identical with all the others, inhabited by these impotent thoughts which come into being everywhere and are not actually thought anywhere?  Or am I myself?  And who is voting?  I do not recognize myself any more."

• —Jean-Paul Sartre's Elections, A Trap for Fools

Howard Zinn: Put away those [American] flags

By Howard Zinn
for The Progressive

On this July 4, we would do well to renounce nationalism and all its symbols: its flags, its pledges of allegiance, its anthems, its insistence in song that God must single out America to be blessed.

Is not nationalism — that devotion to a flag, an anthem, a boundary so fierce it engenders mass murder — one of the great evils of our time, along with racism, along with religious hatred?

These ways of thinking — cultivated, nurtured, indoctrinated from childhood on — have been useful to those in power, and deadly for those out of power.

Nazim Hikmet: On Living

Living is no laughing matter :
you must live with great seriousness
                           like a squirrel, for example -
I mean without looking for something beyond and above living,
                           I mean living must be your whole occupation.

Living is no laughing matter :
you must take it seriously,
so much so and to such a degree
that, for example, your hands tied behind your back,
                     your back to the wall,
or else in a laboratory,
    in your white coat and safety glasses,
    you can die for people -
     even for people whose faces you have never seen,
     even though you know living
     is the most real, the most beautiful thing.

I mean, you must take living so seriously
that even at seventy, for example, you'll plant olive trees -
and not for your children, either
but because although you fear death you don't believe it,
                     because living, I mean, weighs heavier.

More poetry from Nazim Hikmet

A call to build the Iraq Moratorium Day

By by Jeremy Brecher & Brendan Smith
Originally published in The Nation

Though Americans disapprove of President Bush's handling of the situation in Iraq by more than two to one, they don't seem to be expressing that disapproval to anyone but pollsters. A plan to establish a monthly Iraq Moratorium Day may provide a way for them to do so.

Refitting an idea from the Vietnam era to the age of the Internet, organizers of the Iraq Moratorium Day are inviting ordinary Americans to demand an end to the war in targeted activities in their local communities and viral activities online. The goal is a "monthly expression of determination to end the war."

The initiators, a handful of individuals from different corners of the antiwar movement, are asking people to make a simple pledge:

"I hereby make a commitment that on Friday, September 21, 2007, and the third Friday of every subsequent month I will break my daily routine and take some action, by myself or with others, to end the War in Iraq."

U.S. Imperialism, Islamic Fundamentalism… and the Need for Another Way

by Sunsara Taylor, Revolution

As the U.S.'s crimes against humanity in the Middle East mount, it is of tremendous importance for people in the U.S. to honestly confront and rise to the profound challenges and responsibilities before us in bringing this to a halt. In this spirit, I welcomed the argument made by Hadas Thier and Aaron Hess in the Socialist Worker on April 20, 2007 entitled Standing up to Islamophobia, even while I find their central arguments to not only be wrong, but harmful.

I do not doubt that Thier and Hess want to oppose U.S. wars of aggression and their accompanying assault on Muslims, Arabs and South Asians living in the U. S. But they end up arguing for an approach that will neither meet the actual challenges of opposing the U.S. “crusade,” nor bring forward new, truly liberating possibilities here and around the world. They end up in this unfortunate place through the use of bad logic, flawed methodology, and a duck-from-unpleasant-realities epistemology (method for arriving at what is true).

Rupert Murdoch will cry about his TV stations too.

For anyone curious about why Hugo Chavez has taken the broadcast license from RCTV, here's a documentary that somehow never aired on our "free press", The Revolution Will Not Be Televised. If you haven't seen it yet, it's not only an open-and-shut case on the active, pre-meditated and grotesque collaboration of RCTV (and the Globovision news channel) in the failed military coup against Chavez, but a riveting inside story of the polarization gripping Venezuela. I also just found an interesting story at Znet on the rise of a co-op economy, one of many signs that the changes instituted by the Bolivarians aren't just rhetorical. One man (or family or privately held corporation) has no right to control the information commons, I'd say that on general principle – but when a pack of oligarchs openly conspires to impose a fascist dictatorship over the wishes of the people, by what right can they claim access to the people's airwaves?

Open Thread

Pending regular updates, here's an open thread for those wandering by.

The Activist Top Ten for 2007

Brought to you by History Is A Weapon:

1) There is no purchasing the revolution or surfing to it online. While this might seem like a no-brainer to most, the tendency to reduce social change to individual action penetrates even the sharpest minds. So while we might be too cool for the (red) scam, we can still get caught up in the American Apparel branding. Which brings us to...

2) A lifetime of purity is worth a good ten minutes of coalition. What's it worth if you believe all the right things but can't work with anyone who doesn't? People getting shot at in Iraq don't care if you're working with democrats, nationalists, liberal reform groups, or radical communists if it stops the war. Jerry Falwell and the Chamber of Commerce may not agree on banking regulation and sermon subjects (or they might...), but they rule because united they stand, divided we fall. We don't need to drink together, but we have to let bygones be bygones and keep our eyes on the prize.

3) Even a vigil a day won't keep the system at bay. A moral argument may convince regular people to join us, but the empire isn't rhetorical. Politicians and the various institutions of war, from Exxon to the Ivy Leagues, don't give a whit about our moral arguments: they know their goal and they've made calculations to achieve it. Getting them to change their actions means getting them to change those calculations: politicians want to stay in office and corporations want to maintain profits. Threaten their primary needs and they won't just listen, they'll respond.

Momentum Grows for March 20 Student Day of Action Against the War

By Brad Sigal

At colleges and high schools across the country, students are building for a day of protests on March 20 against the U.S. war in Iraq. Students at more than 60 schools have protests planned on that day, in the largest coordinated day of student anti-war protests in years. A press release for the March 20 actions says, "In the space of just three weeks, over sixty campuses have signed onto the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) call to action—from Tuscaloosa, Alabama to Grand Rapids, Michigan; from high schools in central North Carolina to the west coast campus of UC Santa Barbara; from urban centers of Chicago, Boston, New York, and Los Angeles to rural campuses of Tennessee and Iowa—and in dozens of places in between."

The Beginnings of a New Democratic Nepal?

by John Mage and Bernard D'Mello

Over the last year, as the world watched Nepal making a significant and qualitative break with its past, the EPW too was planning a special issue.  For the two of us, having come of political age in the 1960s and 1970s, an aphorism of those times that still lingers, "no investigation, no right to speak," may have been behind our joint decision to visit Nepal in February, to put our fingers to the pulse of things.  A "people's war" that lasted 11 years led by the Communist Party of Nepal (Maoist), the CPN(M), as well as the Jan Andolan in April last year, brought about profound shifts in the balance of power in national politics.  The 238-year old feudal monarchy has been marginalised, a preliminary step towards laying the foundations for a democratic republic.  The Nepali Maoists, for their part, are practising another one of those 20th-century aphorisms: "to rebel is justified."  They had waged a just war by raising an army -- the people's liberation army (PLA) -- ingrained with the democratic tradition of building close ties with the common people.  Their strategy required the establishment of "base areas" in rural Nepal, which have now been heralded as representative of a new Nepal in the making.  It was in this context that we decided to trek in Rolpa, located in mid-west Nepal, one of the first base areas in the people's war.