STRANGE TIMES

Here is some excellent news. If only more national “leaders” could move on when they know the game is over.

From http://www.al-monitor.com/pulse/originals/2013/12/somalia-democracy-surprise.html

Somalia’s Democracy a Pleasant Surprise

Yesterday, Dec. 2, Somalia’s parliament voted Abdi Farah Shirdon, the prime minister, out of office. For too long we have been hearing about tribal conflicts, pirates’ practices and terrorism by so-called al-Shabab and almost no other news of any significance.

The Arab League and the African Union should support the nascent democratic transition in Somalia.

Author Clovis Maksoud Posted December 3, 2013

The prime minister asked parliament on Sunday that he be allowed to defend his government against charges, but his request was rejected. The speaker provided the result of the vote in parliament to the Somali president as well as to the prime minister. A new prime minister will be named by President Hassan Sheikh Mohamud, who said, “I welcome parliament’s role as a strong signal of Somali democracy at work.” The president further added, according to a report in The New York Times, “It is important to emphasize that the constitution has been our clear guidance throughout this situation,” and expressed appreciation for the work of the departing prime minister.

The United Nations special representative for Somalia said, “Parliamentary business was managed in accordance with the provisional constitution,” adding, “Somalia’s institutions are coming of age!”

While this event constitutes a positive development and evidence of a growing democracy, it behooves the Arab states — especially the Arab League — to make this development an opportunity to empower this evidence of democratic governance by providing economic and financial aid in order to help bring about the capacity to sustain human development, the unity of Somalia, and to help build viable institutional infrastructures.

It is true that this positive development shows a serious commitment to a civilian regime, yet what has taken place in parliament constitutes an opening to enhance its capacity to unify Somalia to be empowered, to curtail what has for too long made Somalia a failed state.

This is a challenge for the Arab states in general — and for the international community in particular — to enhance this significant development, sustain the course of democratization, but more and equally urgent to empower its civil society and its ability to put an end to forces that have undermined its unity and its potential for stability.

Somalia deserves to have a renewed opportunity to render its democracy sustainable and, believe it or not, perhaps a sign of a spring that has arrived. When I say it is a pleasant surprise, it is because it comes as a desirable interruption in the sad sectarian conflicts taking place in other parts of the Arab nation.

The challenge of continued progress in Somalia is faced by both the Arab League and the African Union Mission; Somalia is a member of both.

Amid what is taking place, this is a development that seriously interrupts a hopefully temporary, prevailing despondency.

Read more: http://www.al-monitor.com/pulse/originals/2013/12/somalia-democracy-surprise.html#ixzz2mpGoXjfl

Can we move beyond Gonski and the paradigm imposed by the state and the teacher union bosses?

by B.York

I attended an over-crowded high school in Melbourne in the 1960s. There were 50 kids to a class. Today, the average is 24. Later, in the late 1970s, I was a teacher for a few years in the technical/secondary system and a relief teacher for periods in the 1980s. I have had a personal interest in education and schooling ever since.

My first reaction to current huffing and puffing about Gonski is that, when I look back on my experiences as a student, I am obliged to say that the quality of the teachers is more important than how many halls a school has. This is not to underplay the importance of good basic conditions. These have improved greatly since the 1960s, but there are still aspects in need of improvement. For instance, one thing I have never understood is why the state schools (I don’t know enough about the private sector) do not provide air-conditioning in each class-room during hot summer months. Is this a ‘green-save-the-planet’ thing? Within the system as it is, hot and humid classrooms obstruct students’ capacities to learn anything. I’m amazed that there has been no improvement on this front over the past 50 years.

I never would have expected to become an historian when I was a kid. It was touch-and-go as to whether I would get into university. No-one else in my family had reached that level of formal education (which was common for wage-worker families back then). But, despite being one of 50 kids in the class, I was inspired by a wonderful History teacher by the name of Itiel Bereson. We could have had ten kids in the class, or 70. He was inspirational. He mattered. He changed lives.

Second reaction. My experience as a classroom teacher in some pretty rough schools reinforced my feeling that the quality of teachers counts for a great deal and is underrated by those with an ‘industrial’ approach to teaching. To raise questions about quality was seen as akin to treachery, to serving ‘the bosses’ by pitting teacher against teacher. The emphasis was overwhelmingly on the day-to-day issues: holiday entitlements, wages, classroom hours, etc. I worked with a few teachers who were burned out and demoralised, and I worked with a few who were almost as good as Mr Bereson. The latter left their mark in the form of facilitating an interest in learning among some students. I don’t blame teachers: it’s easy to end up feeling like you’re just a glorified baby-sitter. And, as is the norm under capitalism, the workers (the teachers) were frequently consulted but never empowered. Yet it was, and is, the teachers who know best – the classroom teachers – not the senior executives in each school and even less the bureaucrats outside the schools.

Third: it’s about learning, not teaching. We forget what we’re taught but carry for life what we learn. Schools remain essentially the same structured institutions they were back in the days of the factory system in the C19th. They teach obedience to authority, no matter how they try to dress this up. The fact that I still refer to my inspirational teacher as “Mister Bereson” indicates how deeply this can go. Today, yes, teachers allow students to call them by their first names, sometimes, but this is superficial and doesn’t detract from the reality of a hierarchical structure, with the ‘font of all wisdom’ at the head of the classroom. Now, as in the C19th and C20th, schools imprison the mind. In the C21st we need a complete rethinking. Conservatism, the inclination to oppose significant change, and reactionary union bosses who think essentially in an ‘industrial’ way, are obstacles to necessary change.

Fourth: The old family structure of the early C20th no longer applies to most actual families. Working routines of parents, and indeed patterns of parenting, have changed. Hundred year old ‘school hours’ based on a late-morning-to-mid-afternoon single shift, are ridiculous in the C21st. They need to become flexible to meet the differing needs of parents. Shifts would be a good start.

Fifth: When our hierarchical school system, based on teaching, became free and compulsory in the late C19th, the mass of people were just starting to read and write. In the C21st, we have very high literacy and we have a thing called the World Wide Web. I observe young people increasingly teaching themselves – really learning – outside of school hours, thanks to the Internet. I know young people who have started the process of learning languages and musical instruments in this way, and teaching themselves techniques in sport and art and maths and Info Technologies as well. There’s no end to what one can learn via the Internet. Why then are young people of school age still compelled to be taught, for so many set hours each day, in buildings that are essentially no different in their arrangements and hierarchies than those of the factory era? Despite the placement of computers in schools, our old-fashioned and antiquated school system is holding back real learning.

Sixth: The essence of learning is ‘out there’ in the real world. I learned ten times as much about politics and how power works as a young revolutionist who took to the streets to overthrow capitalism than I ever learned at school or in ‘Politics 1’ at university. As Mao said: “If you want knowledge, you must take part in the practice of changing reality”.

Seventh: A good education is one that encourages – I mean, really encourages – dissent and critical thinking. The best subject I ever studied was a high school subject called ‘Clear Thinking’. It set me on the road of rebellion, of questioning all received wisdom, as did my History teacher’s lessons about how the ancien regimes of Europe regarded themselves as a permanent part of a natural order. (And how so many people accepted that state of affairs, for so long, until they woke up and overthrew them). Today, schools basically indoctrinate kids into the dominant ideology, the gloom and doom ethos of a zombie social system. Not surprisingly, the National History Curriculum advocates the reactionary idea that human progress has reached its ‘natural limits’. I doubt whether there was a school in Australia that didn’t show its students Al Gore’s ‘global warming’ sci-fi documentary; and I doubt whether there were many that encouraged students to consider the science-based critiques of Gore’s alarmism.

The level of civil disobedience appears to have picked up if these women welcome being detained by Saudi police. October 26th was a day of defiance where ‘dozens’ drove in disobedience of bans against women driving. Since then protesters have requested anonymity due to fears of reprisals by the secret police.

from http://edition.cnn.com/2013/12/01/world/meast/saudi-arabia-female-drivers-detained/
By Mohammed Jamjoom,
CNN December 1, 2013
(CNN) — Two of Saudi Arabia’s best-known female advocates for lifting the ban on women driving were detained on Friday after being caught behind the wheel in the country’s capital.

Aziza Al-Yousef, who was driving the car, and her passenger, Eman Al-Nafjan, tell CNN they were pulled over and spent a few hours at a police station in Riyadh until being released into the custody of their respective husbands.

Al-Nafjan, one of Saudi Arabia’s most prominent bloggers, and one of the organizers of the popular October 26 Women’s Driving Campaign, said she decided to go for a spin with Al-Yousef to attract more attention to her cause.

“We were looking for the police. We drove by the police station on purpose,” she explained, adding how she welcomed the detention.

Despite repeated attempts, CNN has been unable to reach Riyadh police for comment.

Al-Nafjan, who tweets as “Saudiwoman,” says she has grown tired of waiting for the Saudi government to allow women to drive.

Al-Yousef has driven before and was glad to get behind the wheel again on Friday but says she was not deliberately looking to be detained by the police.

“In a way it is good for the cause because you’ll the keep the issue in the mind of people,” said Al-Yousef. “However, some people might understand wrongly that we’re confronting the government and that might slow the process.”

Why Saudi Arabia can’t ban women from driving forever

Al-Yousef was initially concerned she and Al-Nafjan might go to jail, citing the presence of traffic police, regular police and secret police who were called to the scene. She says the mood of the police had lightened substantially by the time she and Al-Nafjan reached the station.

When her husband came for her, he was asked to sign a statement pledging Al-Yousef would not drive again.

Al-Yousef says her husband jokingly asked, “How can I do that? I can’t prevent her from driving. Only God can do that,” before signing. She was then released.

The issue of women driving is a particularly sensitive and controversial one in Saudi Arabia, the last country on Earth where females don’t have that right. In recent years, though, more women have challenged the government, urging officials to overturn the ban and taking to streets in remarkable displays of civil disobedience. Although women are not allowed to drive in the ultraconservative Kingdom, there is, in fact, no law barring them from doing so. But religious edicts are often interpreted to enforce the prohibition.

“We have tried all the legal channels,” explained Al-Nafjan. “The government keeps promising us that all we have to do is be patient and quiet, and we’ll eventually get the right to drive. Officials keep saying the women driving issue is one for Saudi society to decide. We wanted to prove that really isn’t the case and that the only people who really stop us is the police.”

In May 2011, Manal Al-Sharif was jailed for more than a week after posting a video of herself driving in Saudi Arabia online. She quickly became a hero to many and inspired dozens of women to drive throughout the streets of various cities in June of that year.

More recently, in September, a website for the October 26 Women’s Driving Campaign launched, and within a few weeks, tens of thousands had signed an online petition calling for an end to the driving ban for women in Saudi Arabia. As October 26 approached, numerous women filmed themselves driving in the conservative Kingdom and uploaded those clips to sites like YouTube.

Opinion: Give Saudi women the right to drive

In the weeks leading up to October 26, one Saudi cleric gave an interview in which he warned that Saudi women who drove risked damaging their ovaries. On October 24, the country’s Interior Ministry issued a statement telling women to stay off the streets.

Despite strong opposition by conservative quarters in the Kingdom, where a puritanical strain of Islam is practiced, October 26 saw dozens of women taking to the streets and driving. The campaign’s backers insist the movement is ongoing and has been a success thus far, while its critics say it has failed.

Last week, Al-Yousef had an audience with Saudi Arabia’s Interior Minister, Prince Mohammed bin Nayef, via teleconference. She conveyed a message on behalf of the growing number of women and men calling for an end to the driving ban.

Al-Yousef was told the matter was now in the hands of Saudi King Abdullah, considered a cautious reformer.

“I think it might have been a good thing,” said Al-Yousef. “Before the government had said the driving issue was a societal issue. But now that is not an issue anymore. The good thing is now we know clearly that society is not the decision maker.”

Al-Yousef added: “We are trying to find a way to reach the King now. We have a letter signed by 3,000-plus people asking for permission to allow women to drive, and we want to find a way to get that letter to the King.”

Al-Nafjan, who was detained before for the very same offense, says she will continue pushing the envelope, even if that gets her into legal hot water.

“I wouldn’t mind if they prosecuted me,” she says. “I think it will further the cause. It’s good publicity for the cause — to be prosecuted for being a passenger in a car driven by a woman. You can’t get more medieval.”

Pussy Riot’s Nadezhda Tolokonnikova is currently in a prison hospital in Siberia and is due to be released in March 2014.

Here Ms. Tolokonnikova and Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Žižek meet in an extraordinary exchange of letters.

Slavoj Žižek, Nadezhda Tolokonnikova

The Guardian, Saturday 16 November 2013

Nadezhda Tolokonnikova of Pussy Riot writing to Slavoj Žižek

‘We are the children of Dionysus, sailing in a barrel and not ­recognising any authority’ … Nadezhda Tolokonnikova of Pussy Riot writing to Slavoj Žižek.

Dear Nadezhda,

I hope you have been able to organise your life in prison around small rituals that make it tolerable, and that you have time to read. Here are my thoughts on your predicament.

John Jay Chapman, an American political essayist, wrote this about radicals in 1900: “They are really always saying the same thing. They don’t change; everybody else changes. They are accused of the most incompatible crimes, of egoism and a mania for power, indifference to the fate of their cause, fanaticism, triviality, lack of humour, buffoonery and irreverence. But they sound a certain note. Hence the great practical power of persistent radicals. To all appearance, nobody follows them, yet everyone believes them. They hold a tuning-fork and sound A, and everybody knows it really is A, though the time-honoured pitch is G flat.” Isn’t this a good description of the effect of Pussy Riot performances? In spite of all accusations, you sound a certain note. It may appear that people do not follow you, but secretly, they believe you, they know you are telling the truth, or, even more, you are standing for truth.

But what is this truth? Why are the reactions to Pussy Riot performances so violent, not only in Russia? All hearts were beating for you as long as you were perceived as just another version of the liberal-democratic protest against the authoritarian state. The moment it became clear that you rejected global capitalism, reporting on Pussy Riot became much more ambiguous. What is so disturbing about Pussy Riot to the liberal gaze is that you make visible the hidden continuity between Stalinism and contemporary global capitalism.

[Žižek then explores what he sees as a global trend towards limiting democracy.] Since the 2008 crisis, this distrust of democracy, once limited to third-world or post-Communist developing economies, is gaining ground in western countries. But what if this distrust is justified? What if only experts can save us?

But the crisis provided proof that it is these experts who don’t know what they are doing, rather than the people. In western Europe, we are seeing that the ruling elite know less and less how to rule. Look at how Europe is dealing with Greece.

No wonder, then, that Pussy Riot make us all uneasy – you know very well what you don’t know, and you don’t pretend to have any quick or easy answers, but you are telling us that those in power don’t know either. Your message is that in Europe today the blind are leading the blind. This is why it is so important that you persist. In the same way that Hegel, after seeing Napoleon riding through Jena, wrote that it was as if he saw the World Spirit riding on a horse, you are nothing less than the critical awareness of us all, sitting in prison.

Comradely greetings, Slavoj
23 February 2013

Dear Slavoj,

Once, in the autumn of 2012, when I was still in the pre-trial prison in Moscow with other Pussy Riot activists, I visited you. In a dream, of course.

I see your argument about horses, the World Spirit, and about tomfoolery and disrespect, as well as why and how all these elements are so connected to each other.

Pussy Riot did turn out be a part of this force, the purpose of which is criticism, creativity and co-creation, experimentation and constantly provocative events. Borrowing Nietzsche’s definition, we are the children of Dionysus, sailing in a barrel and not recognising any authority.

We are a part of this force that has no final answers or absolute truths, for our mission is to question. There are architects of apollonian statics and there are (punk) singers of dynamics and transformation. One is not better than the other. But it is only together that we can ensure the world functions in the way Heraclitus defined it: “This world has been and will eternally be living on the rhythm of fire, inflaming according to the measure, and dying away according to the measure. This is the functioning of the eternal world breath.”

We are the rebels asking for the storm, and believing that truth is only to be found in an endless search. If the “World Spirit” touches you, do not expect that it will be painless.

Laurie Anderson sang: “Only an expert can deal with the problem.” It would have been nice if Laurie and I could cut these experts down to size and take care of our own problems. Because expert status by no means grants access to the kingdom of absolute truth.

Two years of prison for Pussy Riot is our tribute to a destiny that gave us sharp ears, allowing us to sound the note A when everyone else is used to hearing G flat.

At the right moment, there will always come a miracle in the lives of those who childishly believe in the triumph of truth over lies, of mutual assistance, of those who live according to the economics of the gift.

Nadia

Nadezhda Tolokonnikova in a single confinement cell at a penal colony in Partza on 25 September Nadezhda Tolokonnikova in a single confinement cell at a penal colony in Partza on 25 September 2013. Photograph: Ilya Shablinsky/AFP/Getty Images
4 April 2013

Dear Nadezhda,

I was so pleasantly surprised when your letter arrived – the delay made me fear that the authorities would prevent our communication. I was deeply honoured, flattered even, by my appearance in your dream.

You are right to question the idea that the “experts” close to power are competent to make decisions. Experts are, by definition, servants of those in power: they don’t really think, they just apply their knowledge to the problems defined by those in power (how to bring back stability? how to squash protests?). So are today’s capitalists, the so-called financial wizards, really experts? Are they not just stupid babies playing with our money and our fate? I remember a cruel joke from Ernst Lubitsch’s To Be Or Not to Be. When asked about the German concentration camps in occupied Poland, the Nazi officer snaps back: “We do the concentrating, and the Poles do the camping.” Does the same not hold for the Enron bankruptcy in 2002? The thousands of employees who lost their jobs were certainly exposed to risk, but with no true choice – for them the risk was like blind fate. But those who did have insight into the risks, and the ability to intervene (the top managers), minimised their risks by cashing in their stocks before the bankruptcy. So it is true that we live in a society of risky choices, but some people (the managers) do the choosing, while others (the common people) do the risking.

For me, the true task of radical emancipatory movements is not just to shake things out of their complacent inertia, but to change the very co-ordinates of social reality so that, when things return to normal, there will be a new, more satisfying, “apollonian statics”. And, even more crucially, how does today’s global capitalism enter this scheme?

The Deleuzian philosopher Brian Massumi tells how capitalism has already overcome the logic of totalising normality and adopted the logic of erratic excess: “The more varied, and even erratic, the better. Normality starts to lose its hold. The regularities start to loosen. This loosening is part of capitalism’s dynamic.”

But I feel guilty writing this: who am I to explode in such narcissistic theoretical outbursts when you are exposed to very real deprivations? So please, if you can and want, do let me know about your situation in prison: about your daily rhythm, about the little private rituals that make it easier to survive, about how much time you have to read and write, about how other prisoners and guards treat you, about your contact with your child … true heroism resides in these seemingly small ways of organising one’s life in order to survive in crazy times without losing dignity.

With love, respect and admiration, my thoughts are with you!

Slavoj

Dear Slavoj,

Has modern capitalism really overtaken the logic of totalising norms? Or is it willing to make us believe that it has overpassed the logic of hierarchical structures and normalisation?

As a child I wanted to go into advertising. I had a love affair with the advertising industry. And this is why I am in a position to judge its merits. The anti-hierarchical structures and rhizomes of late capitalism are its successful ad campaign. Modern capitalism has to manifest itself as flexible and even eccentric. Everything is geared towards gripping the emotion of the consumer. Modern capitalism seeks to assure us that it operates according to the principles of free creativity, endless development and diversity. It glosses over its other side in order to hide the reality that millions of people are enslaved by an all-powerful and fantastically stable norm of production. We want to reveal this lie.

You should not worry that you are exposing theoretical fabrications while I am supposed to suffer the “real hardship”. I value the strict limits, and the challenge. I am genuinely curious: how will I cope with this? And how can I turn this into a productive experience for me and my comrades? I find sources of inspiration; it contributes to my own development. Not because of, but in spite of the system. And in my struggle, your thoughts, ideas and stories are helpful to me.

I am happy to correspond with you. I await your reply and I wish you good luck in our common cause.

Nadia

Dear Nadezhda,

I felt deeply ashamed after reading your reply. You wrote: “You should not worry about the fact that you are exposing theoretical fabrications while I am supposed to suffer the ‘real hardship’.” This simple sentence made me aware that the final sentiment in my last letter was false: my expression of sympathy with your plight basically meant, “I have the privilege of doing real theory and teaching you about it while you are good for reporting on your experience of hardship …” Your last letter demonstrates that you are much more than that, that you are an equal partner in a theoretical dialogue. So my sincere apologies for this proof of how deeply entrenched is male chauvinism, especially when it is masked as sympathy for the other’s suffering, and let me go on with our dialogue.

It is the crazy dynamics of global capitalism that make effective resistance to it so difficult and frustrating. Recall the great wave of protests that spilled all over Europe in 2011, from Greece and Spain to London and Paris. Even if there was no consistent political platform mobilising the protesters, the protests functioned as part of a large-scale educational process: the protesters’ misery and discontent were transformed into a great collective act of mobilisation – hundreds of thousands gathered in public squares, proclaiming that they had enough, that things could not go on like that. However, what these protests add up to is a purely negative gesture of angry rejection and an equally abstract demand for justice, lacking the ability to translate this demand into a concrete political programme.

What can be done in such a situation, where demonstrations and protests are of no use, where democratic elections are of no use? Can we convince the tired and manipulated crowds that we are not only ready to undermine the existing order, to engage in provocative acts of resistance, but also to offer the prospect of a new order?

The Pussy Riot performances cannot be reduced just to subversive provocations. Beneath the dynamics of their acts, there is the inner stability of a firm ethico-political attitude. In some deeper sense, it is today’s society that is caught in a crazy capitalist dynamic with no inner sense and measure, and it is Pussy Riot that de facto provides a stable ethico-political point. The very existence of Pussy Riot tells thousands that opportunist cynicism is not the only option, that we are not totally disoriented, that there still is a common cause worth fighting for.

So I also wish you good luck in our common cause. To be faithful to our common cause means to be brave, especially now, and, as the old saying goes, luck is on the side of the brave!

Yours, Slavoj

Dear Slavoj,

In my last letter, written in haste as I worked in the sewing shop, I was not as clear as I should have been about the distinction between how “global capitalism” functions in Europe and the US on the one hand, and in Russia on the other. However, recent events in Russia – the trial of Alexei Navalny, the passing of unconstitutional, anti-freedom laws – have infuriated me. I feel compelled to speak about the specific political and economic practices of my country. The last time I felt this angry was in 2011 when Putin declared he was running for the presidency for a third time. My anger and resolve led to the birth of Pussy Riot. What will happen now? Time will tell.

Here in Russia I have a strong sense of the cynicism of so-called first-world countries towards poorer nations. In my humble opinion, “developed” countries display an exaggerated loyalty towards governments that oppress their citizens and violate their rights. The European and US governments freely collaborate with Russia as it imposes laws from the middle ages and throws opposition politicians in jail. They collaborate with China, where oppression is so bad that my hair stands on end just to think about it. What are the limits of tolerance? And when does tolerance become collaboration, conformism and complicity?

To think, cynically, “let them do what they want in their own country”, doesn’t work any longer, because Russia and China and countries like them are now part of the global capitalist system.

Russia under Putin, with its dependence on raw materials, would have been massively weakened if those nations that import Russian oil and gas had shown the courage of their convictions and stopped buying. Even if Europe were to take as modest a step as passing a “Magnitsky law” [the Magnitsky Act in the US allows it to place sanctions on Russian officials believed to have taken part in human-rights violations], morally it would speak volumes. A boycott of the Sochi Winter Olympics in 2014 would be another ethical gesture. But the continued trade in raw materials constitutes a tacit approval of the Russian regime – not through words, but through money. It betrays the desire to protect the political and economic status quo and the division of labour that lies at the heart of the world economic system.

You quote Marx: “A social system that seizes up and rusts … cannot survive.” But here I am, working out my prison sentence in a country where the 10 people who control the biggest sectors of the economy are Vladimir Putin’s oldest friends. He studied or played sports with some, and served in the KGB with others. Isn’t this a social system that has seized up? Isn’t this a feudal system?

I thank you sincerely, Slavoj, for our correspondence and can hardly wait for your reply.

Yours, Nadia

• The correspondence was organised by Philosophie magazine in cooperation with New Times. Longer versions can be found in German at philomag.de or in French at philomag.com. Tolokonnikova’s letters were translated from Russian by Galia Ackerman

http://bit.ly/17WKj1v

By Mark Ames
On November 27, 2013

Who “owns” the NSA secrets leaked by Edward Snowden to reporters Glenn Greenwald and Laura Poitras?

Given that eBay founder Pierre Omidyar just invested a quarter of a billion dollars to
personally hire Greenwald and Poitras for his new for-profit media venture, it’s a question worth asking.

It’s especially worth asking since it became clear that Greenwald and Poitras are now the only two people with full access to the complete cache of NSA files, which are said to number anywhere from 50,000 to as many as 200,000 files. That’s right: Snowden doesn’t have the files any more, the Guardian doesn’t have them, the Washington Post doesn’t have them… just Glenn and Laura at the for-profit journalism company created by the founder of eBay.

Edward Snowden has popularly been compared to major whistleblowers such as Daniel Ellsberg, Chelsea Manning and Jeffrey Wigand. However, there is an important difference in the Snowden files that has so far gone largely unnoticed. Whistleblowing has traditionally served the public interest. In this case, it is about to serve the interests of a billionaire starting a for-profit media business venture. This is truly unprecedented. Never before has such a vast trove of public secrets been sold wholesale to a single billionaire as the foundation of a for-profit company.

Think about other famous leakers: Daniel Ellsberg neither monetized nor monopolized the Pentagon Papers. Instead, he leaked them to well over a dozen different newspapers and media outlets such as the New York Times and Washington Post, and to a handful of sitting senators — one of whom, Mike Gravel, read over 4,000 of the 7,000 pages into the Congressional record before collapsing from exhaustion. The Papers were published in book form by a small nonprofit run by the Unitarian Church, Beacon House Press.

Chelsea Manning, responsible for the largest mass leaks of government secrets ever, leaked everything to WikiLeaks, a nonprofit venture that has largely struggled to make ends meet in its seven years of existence. Julian Assange, for all of his flaws, cannot be accused of crudely enriching himself from his privileged access to Manning’s leaks; instead, he shared his entire trove with a number of established media outlets including the Guardian, New York Times, Le Monde and El Pais. Today, Chelsea Manning is serving a 35-year sentence in a military prison, while the Private Manning Support Network constantly struggles to raise funds from donations; Assange has spent the last year and a half inside Ecuador’s embassy in London, also struggling to raise funds to run the WikiLeaks operation.

A similar story emerges in the biggest private sector analogy — the tobacco industry leaks by whistleblowers Merrell Williams and Jeffrey Wigand. After suffering lawsuits, harassment and attempts to destroy their livelihoods, both eventually won awards as part of the massive multibillion dollar settlements — but the millions of confidential tobacco documents now belong to the public, maintained by a nonprofit, the American Legacy Project, whose purpose is to help scholars and reporters and scientists fight tobacco propaganda and power. Every year, over 400,000 Americans die from tobacco-related illnesses.

The point is this: In the most successful whistleblower cases, the public has sided with the selfless whistleblower against the power- or profit-driven entity whose secrets were leaked. The Snowden case represents a new twist to the heroic whistleblower story arc: After successfully convincing a large part of the public and the American Establishment that Snowden’s leaks serve a higher public interest, Greenwald promptly sold those secrets to a billionaire.

He justified this purely on grounds of self-interest, calling Omidyar’s offer “a once-in-a-career dream journalistic opportunity.” Speaking to the Washington Post, Greenwald used crude careerist terminology to justify his decision to privatize the Snowden secrets:

“It would be impossible for any journalist, let alone me, to decline this opportunity.”

News about Greenwald-Poitras’ decision to privatize the NSA cache came just days after the New York Times reported on Greenwald’s negotiations with major movie studios to sell a Snowden film. This past summer, Greenwald sold a book to Metropolitan Books for a reportedly hefty sum, promising that some of the most sensational revelations from Snowden’s leaks would be saved for the book.

Indeed what makes the NSA secrets so valuable to Greenwald and Poitras is that the two of them have exclusive access to the entire cache. Essentially they have a monopoly over secrets that belong to the public. For a time, it was assumed that Snowden had kept copies of the leaked documents, possibly on a number of laptops he was carting around the world. Greenwald and Poitras were simply conduits between Snowden’s cache and the public. In late August, Greenwald disclosed for the first time in a statement to BuzzFeed:

“Only Laura and I have access to the full set of documents which Snowden provided to journalists.”

Later, from his hideout in Russia, Snowden released a statement claiming he had left all the NSA files behind in Hong Kong for Greenwald and Poitras to take. A third Guardian journalist in Hong Kong at the time, Ewen MacAskill, confirmed to me on Twitter that only Greenwald and Poitras took with them the full cache. Even the Guardian was not allowed access to the motherlode.

Clearly, in a story as sensational and global and alluring as Snowden’s Secrets™, exclusive access equals value. And for the first time in whistleblower history, that value has been extracted in full through privatization.

It is one thing for Greenwald to maintain that exclusivity — or monopoly — while working with the Guardian, a nonprofit with institutional experience in investigative journalism. It is quite another for him to sell them to a guy with a history of putting profits before public interest. As Yasha Levine and I wrote at NSFWCORP, Omidyar invested in a third-world micro-loans company whose savage bullying of debtors resulted in mass suicides. Rather than acknowledge this tragedy, Omidyar Network simply deleted reference to the company from his website when the shit hit the fan.

This — this? — is the guy we’re supposed to trust with the as-yet unpublished NSA files? He’s the one we’re relying on to reveal any dark secrets about the tech industry’s collusion with the NSA? Let’s hope there’s nothing in there about eBay. Whoops! Deleted!

Since we first raised our concerns, Yasha and I have been swamped with responses from Greenwald’s followers. The weird thing is, not all of those responses have been negative: even Wikileaks — Wikileaks! — responded that, “We have not [fallen out with Greenwald] but @Pierre is seriously compromised by Paypal’s attacks on our organisation and supporters.”

Greenwald’s leftist and anarchist fans have always had an almost cult-like faith in his judgment, seeing him as little less than a digital-age Noam Chomsky. But now they’re reeling from cognitive dissonance, trying to understand why their hero would privatize the most important secrets of our generation to a billionaire free-marketeer like Omidyar, whose millions have, in some cases, brought market-based misery into some of the poorest and most desperate corners of the planet.

A Greenwald-Omidyar partnership is as hard to swallow as if Chomsky proudly announced a new major venture with Sheldon Adelson, on grounds that it’s a “once-in-a-career dream academic opportunity.”

WikiLeaks’ concern about Omidyar can be traced back to PayPal’s decision in December 2010 to blockade users from sending money to WikiLeaks. PayPal (founded by Pando investor, Peter Thiel — more on that below) is owned by eBay, where Omidyar has served as the chairman of the board since 2002. Before the blockade, PayPal was the principal medium for WikiLeaks donations, according to the Washington Post.

As the single investor, founder and CEO of “NewCo”, Omidyar’s self-professed helplessness at eBay doesn’t extend to his new journalistic venture.

More troubling for fans is that Greenwald has repeatedly provided cover for Omidyar, claiming that he “had nothing to do with [the blockade]” despite his board status. Whether or not eBay’s chairman really was ignorant of his company’s most controversial decision in years, there’s no denying that Omidyar is also eBay’s largest shareholder. At nearly 10%, his stake is worth billions and is more than twice as large as that of the next largest shareholder.

By Greenwald’s reasoning, even though Omidyar is the founder, largest shareholder, and chairman of the body responsible for eBay/PayPal management oversight, he had “nothing to do with” its policy towards Wikileaks. Zero. None. He was as helpless as you, me, Batkid, or Grumpy Cat.

Fortunately, as the single investor, founder and CEO of “NewCo”, Omidyar’s self-professed helplessness at eBay doesn’t extend to his new journalistic venture. With that level of autonomy, no one — not even Glenn Greenwald, who has admitted that Omidyar’s money is irresistibly persuasive — can tell him which secrets to publish on his new site, and which should remain hidden forever.

We can all rest easy in our beds, then, knowing that Omidyar is in charge of our secrets. Information of national importance, such as which major tech companies colluded with the US government to spy on private citizens, will be published at the discretion of the founder and largest shareholder of one of those companies.

Robbing Peter to Pay Paul (and Mark). An important footnote about Peter Thiel and Pando, by Paul Carr

When NSFWCORP’s acquisition by Pando was announced, Greenwald raced to Twitter to accuse us of hypocrisy because Peter Thiel (another billionaire whose previous business dealings could fill a book, and who sold PayPal to eBay in the first place) once invested $200,000 in PandoDaily, through his Founders Fund.

That’s absolutely true. Founders Fund’s investment is disclosed here on Pando’s main about page, along with the names of the other investors who collectively invested the remaining $2.8m raised by Pando.

The difference between us selling our company to a media outlet that once received a minority investment from Founders Fund and Greenwald being personally hired by Omidyar should be obvious to anyone with a brain. But at the risk that category excludes Glenn’s most ardent supporters, we’re happy to spell out the difference (apart from the monetary difference of $249,800,000 between Thiel’s $200k and Omidyar’s $250 million, of course):

Peter Thiel has no involvement with the running of Pando. Zero. He doesn’t make hiring or firing or any other kind of decisions (nor do any other investors), Founders Fund isn’t Pando’s only (or even closest largest) investor and no one from Founders Fund has a board seat, voting rights or any other input in business or editorial policy. In other words, Thiel has less ability to dictate editorial policy here, in fact, than the guy who cleans the coffee cups (at least that guy has a key to the office).

Pierre Omidyar is personally hiring the journalists for his new project, starting with Greenwald himself. He is the venture’s sole backer. But, you know what? All of that would still be OK if Greenwald would make a simple, unequivocal, public pledge: to cover any bad behavior by Pierre Omidyar in the same way that he would cover someone who wasn’t backing him with millions of dollars.

Should be a simple thing to promise, right?

Here’s our absolute, unequivocal pledge: we will cover Peter Thiel and Pando’s other investors just as fiercely as we cover Pierre Omidyar or anyone else. In fact, it’s likely due to proximity that we will cover Pando’s investors even more fiercely. That’s how we always worked at NSFWCORP — and it’s how we’ll work here. Our past coverage of Thiel can be found all over the web, including here, here and even right here on Pando. Or see how we’ve covered NSFWCORP/Pando investors CrunchFund and Vegas Tech Fund.

When we asked Glenn to make that same pledge about his single investor, in light of our coverage of Omidyar, he responded simply: “I can’t speak for Omidyar Network,” adding he had “no idea” about Omidyar’s involvement in micro loans.

We contacted Omidyar Network for comment on this story but neither had responded at press time. We’ll update here if they do.

Illustration by Brad Jonas.

Friday 22nd Nov 2013

On 21 November, over 100 states co-sponsored a resolution calling for a panel discussion on child, early and forced marriage and the post-2015 development agenda at the UN General Assembly next year.

The panel discussion will be a chance for the international community to reflect on the historic lack of attention to adolescent girls in development efforts, demonstrated by the continued existence of child marriage around the world. It will be an opportunity to discuss how it can be addressed in whatever development framework succeeds the Millennium Development Goals, which are due to expire in 2015.

The resolution follows the adoption in September of a resolution on child, early and forced marriage at the Human Rights Council, which stressed the need to include the issue in the post-2015 agenda and called for a report on preventing and eliminating the practice.

This latest resolution puts the issue of child, early and forced marriage on the agenda of the General Assembly in 2014, and offers a valuable opportunity to mobilise political commitments to address the issue at the highest levels over the coming year.

The resolution also calls on the UN Secretary-General to transmit the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights’ report on child early and forced marriage, and the summary report of the panel discussion at the Human Rights Council on the issue, to the UN General Assembly. This is significant as it will help ensure that child, early and forced marriage is treated as a human rights issue and that the two processes at the HRC and UNGA complement each other.

The Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights is calling for submissions on child, early and forced marriage to its report by 15 December. The report is likely to set the stage for discussions at both the Human Rights Council and the UN General Assembly over the coming year, so let’s ensure we make our voices heard!

Find out how to contribute here. http://www.girlsnotbrides.org/

The full list of 109 countries who co-sponsored the resolution:

Afghanistan; Albania; Andorra; Argentina; Armenia; Australia; Austria; Belgium; Benin; Bolivia (Plurinational State of); Bosnia and Herzegovina; Bulgaria; Burkina Faso; Burundi; Cabo Verde; Canada; Central African Republic; Chad; Chile; Congo ;Costa Rica; Croatia; Cuba; Cyprus; Czech Republic; Denmark; Dominican Republic; Ecuador; Equatorial Guinea; Eritrea; Estonia; Ethiopia; Finland; France; Georgia; Germany; Ghana; Greece; Grenada; Guatemala; Guinea; Guinea-Bissau; Haïti; Hungary; Iceland; Ireland; Israel; Italy; Japan; Kazakhstan; Kenya; Kiribati; Kyrgyzstan; Latvia; Lebanon; Liberia; Liechtenstein; Lithuania; Luxembourg; Madagascar; Malawi; Maldives; Mali; Malta; Monaco; Mongolia; Montenegro; Morocco; Netherlands; New Zealand; Nicaragua; Norway; Palau; Panama; Papua New Guinea; Paraguay; Peru; Poland; Portugal; Republic of Korea; Republic of Moldova; Romania; Rwanda; San Marino; Sao Tome and Principe; Senegal; Serbia; Seychelles; Sierra Leone; Slovakia; Slovenia; South Sudan; Spain; Sweden; Switzerland; Thailand; the former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia; Togo; Tunisia; Turkey; Turkmenistan; Uganda; Ukraine; United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland; United States of America; United Republic of Tanzania; Vanuatu; Venezuela (Bolivarian Republic of); Zambia

The UN is not renowned for getting things done, but I do hope that these initiatives are successful in thrashing out some solutions so that laments such as that seen in the Kath Walker poem A ‘Child Wife’ are a relic of the past.

WRITTEN BY SAM CHARLES HAMAD

For people like Pilger, Arabs have absolutely no agency – they either have to be the passive masses living under an ‘anti-western’ strongman like Assad, wherein their very real suffering is even reduced by Pilger and his ilk to a ‘western conspiracy’ (or it’s just ignored), or they are these seemingly mindless ‘proxies’ being manipulated by all and sundry.

In the recent piece by John Pilger he writes:

“Syria is the current project. Outflanked by Russia and public opinion, Obama has now embraced the “path of diplomacy”. Has he? As Russian and US negotiators arrived in Geneva on 12 September, the US increased its support for the Al-Qaeda affiliated militias with weapons sent clandestinely through Turkey, Eastern Europe and the Gulf. The Godfather has no intention of deserting his proxies in Syria. Al Qaeda was all but created by the CIA’s Operation Cyclone that armed the mujahedin in Soviet-occupied Afghanistan. Since then, jihadists have been used to divide and Arab societies and in eliminating the threat of pan-Arab nationalism to western “interests” and Israel’s lawless colonial expansion. This is Kissinger-style “realism”.”

Let me just make something very clear: John Pilger is basically saying here that the Syrian rebels are ‘jihadists’ being used to destroy the regime of Bashar al-Assad because it somehow represents a threat to ‘western interests’. It’s not just that Pilger’s understanding of the conflict is so utterly stupid and bereft of any logic or historical fact, but it is also in its content a very definite form of apologia for the regime’s crimes. Unlike most of the other witting and unwitting apologists for Bashar al-Assad on the left, Pilger doesn’t even bother paying lip service to Assad’s crimes (or the wider crimes of the Assad dynasty), but instead ‘treats’ us to the now familiar narrative of the conflict, wherein Assad is cast as the righteous protagonist, who was presumably just keeping on keeping on, when these vicious antagonists, the jihadist Al-Qaeda proxies, appeared from nowhere and started causing all kinds of fitna. Basically, it’s all a US plot and Assad’s ‘war on terrorism’ is very real and very righteous (unlike the west’s ‘war on terrorism’, every aspect of which Pilger was, as you might expect, dead against).

For people like Pilger, Arabs have absolutely no agency – they either have to be the passive masses living under an ‘anti-western’ strongman like Assad, wherein their very real suffering is even reduced by Pilger and his ilk to a ‘western conspiracy’ (or it’s just ignored), or they are these seemingly mindless ‘proxies’ being manipulated by all and sundry. The only time that somebody such as Pilger would ever comment on, let alone turn up with a camera to document, the suffering or resistance of the Arab peoples is if they are ‘victims’ of what he perceives to be the West, or, in other words, if they are Palestinians living under and resisting the Israeli occupation, or Iraqis being ravaged by US sanctions, or fighting against the imperialist occupation forces. However, if you are a Syrian who has been living under the cruel tyranny of the Assad dynasty, Pilger will not merely ignore your suffering or apologise for it, but if you resist such tyranny, he will actively essentialise you as being an ‘Al-Qaeda affiliated terrorist’ or a mere proxy for the West. His entire worldview is in essence the mirror image of the worldview of the defenders of US power and hegemony, who, for example, care only about the very few Israeli victims of rockets fired on Sderot from Gaza, while they actively deny the suffering of the Palestinian victims of Israeli state terror – or, as Pilger implies with Syria, they actually justify the death and destruction inflicted upon Gaza by Israel as being necessary in a ‘war on terror’.

To various different degrees (some more subtle than others), events in Syria have allowed this kind of facile ‘anti-imperialism’ to come to the fore among significant sections and individuals of the left, and you’ll notice that there has been – over the past two-and-a-half years – a gradual coalescence of not just the type of language used by some on the ‘anti-imperialist left’ and that of the pro-imperialists, but the actual substance of the arguments are basically the same, albeit with different ‘sides’ corresponding to the similar content and form of the arguments. This is not a type of leftism that I could ever accept or be a part of.
http://wewritewhatwelike.com/2013/09/19/pilgers-denial-of-syrian-peoples-agency/

By Gopal Sharma

KATHMANDU Tue Nov 26, 2013 1:43pm IST

(Reuters) – Nepal’s Maoist former rebels, trailing in last week’s election, have called for an independent investigation into complaints of vote fraud, but they also signalled willingness to compromise to end political deadlock in the Himalayan nation.

The Maoists, who fought a decade-long civil war before joining the political mainstream in 2006, alleged last week that the elections were rigged, saying ballot boxes had been hidden, stuffed or swapped.

Powerful Maoist leader and former rebel chief Pushpa Kamal Dahal – better known by his nom de guerre Prachanda – had also threatened to boycott the new constituent assembly tasked with drafting a new constitution.

That elusive landmark was a major condition in a peace deal that ended a conflict that claimed more than 16,000 lives.

“Our party wants a high level independent commission to investigate into the widespread conspiracy and fraud,” Maoist spokesman Agni Sapkota said in a statement.

“The new constitution should be prepared on the basis of a consensus among political parties … and even those parties that boycotted the elections should be involved in the making of the charter,” Sapkota said.

The marked softening in language, and reference to consensus, pointed to readiness to accept the outcome of the November 19 election, political analysts said.

Some Maoist leaders had already said they did not agree with Prachanda’s position and wanted to join parliament.

“There is a good chance they will participate in the constituent assembly, even if it is mainly to safeguard their pet agendas, including federalism,” said Deependra Bahadur Kshetry, a former central bank governor and now an analyst.

Kshetry was referring to Maoist demands for federal states in a country with more than 100 ethnic and linguistic groups.

INTENSE LOBBYING

Prachanda’s rejection of the poll outcome triggered intense lobbying from former U.S. President Jimmy Carter, who was in Nepal to observe the election, as well as by ambassadors from donor countries including the United States and India.

Nepal has languished in political inertia since Maoists laid down arms, with six governments failing to forge a constitution for the new republic that emerged after the war.

Nepal’s giant neighbours, India and China, as well as Western donors, are concerned about the prolonged struggle to build a stable nation to replace a centuries-old monarchy.

They fear the poor country of nearly 27 million people, which is dependent on tourism, remittances and aid, risks becoming a haven for militants and criminal gangs.

International observers, including from the European Union, have said the election was held in an “orderly and generally calm atmosphere”.

The Maoists, the biggest group in the 601-member assembly in 2008, trailed the centrist Nepali Congress and moderate Communist UML parties in the latest counting, the Election Commission said. Counting could continue into next week.

Prachanda won a seat from southeast Nepal but lost in his old constituency in Kathmandu.

He has faced accusations that he strayed from revolutionary ideals since joining the mainstream, moving from a life in the jungle during the insurgency to a luxury home in Kathmandu.

More than 70 percent of 12 million eligible voters cast ballots, a high turnout that underlined the desire for progress after previous failures to draw up a constitution.

The stalemate has damaged the business climate, slowed economic growth to 3.6 percent and forced an average of 1,600 young and unskilled Nepalis to leave each day for the Middle East, South Korea and Malaysia in search of menial work.
http://in.reuters.com/article/2013/11/26/nepal-maoists-elections-idINDEE9AP06220131126

(Reporting by Gopal Sharma; Editing by Mike Collett-White and Robert Birsel)

WRITTEN BY MOHJA KAHF
Posted: 11/15/2013
We are going through hell and our friends inside Syria are being torn limb from limb. You come in after three years of it and tell us what our uprising is and isn’t and what it should be and shouldn’t. We all started out together in it, hopeful, finding each other, Syrians, talking to each other again after years of monstrous silence twisted by so many layers of fear, generations of fear handed down by the trauma of families with absent members in prison. Young people began hearing their own voices for the first time, shouting “freedom.” “It was the first time I ever heard my own voice,” young women, young men, street protesters, have told me over and over. Working-class urban neighborhoods and farming- and middle-class rural villagers across the country came out for clearly stated goals of human rights and democratic freedoms and no more being ruled by police state, and it had nothing to do with Islamists but that was before you bothered to notice. Some 920 different locales were protesting nonviolently on a weekly basis by summer 2011, with at least 4 million of Syria’s 23 million people having protested at the height of 2011. Even this first reality, you won’t acknowledge.

Stunning arrogant brutality is how this police state met this uprising. Insane brutality and duplicity. House-to-house raids, tank and machine gun fire, ground troops, snipers, home burnings, the capture and torture of children, the siege of Daraa—all this before the uprising began to arm. The pressure for self-defense was intense. Come live in it for a day. I don’t think you’ve ever been stopped cold by the tears and the anguish in the individual self-defense argument from a real Syrian human being demanding, “if a regime militia is raiding my home, about to kill my children, how dare you tell me not to lift arms to try to save them.” I am stopped cold by it, every day.

My only answer is: “look, I’m really sorry, but look at the facts; after the revolution lifted arms, your children are dead and so is the whole neighborhood. Arms are not working; self-defense is not defending; it is making you a more legible target for the lethal regime. It defended that home for two hours or two weeks, but in the end the entire neighborhood was flattened by the regime, because the regime is hugely more armed. Nor will outside military intervention save you. You can only win if you band together in slow, organized, nonviolent resistance.”

I say this and I staunchly advocate nonviolence over the din of shelling, but my voice breaks saying it to someone whose children are cowering tonight because the home is shaking because the town is being shelled and his parents are already dead. Some far-sighted Syrians got that having the (secular) FSA only drew heavier regime fire. Most Syrians did not get it—gasp, they live in a pro-violence culture like most of the world—and felt the only answer to the inequity in arms only means all their problems would be solved by heavier arms for the (secular) FSA which they see as defending them. I know they’re only harming themselves in believing this romance of armed liberation, but I know it from their pain, and I can only tell them with my voice shaking because I am at a privileged distance from them, and because I haven’t been able to help them in any other way stronger than they see the (secular) FSA helping them, and then the armed Islamists—who did not come in until 2012, able to wedge in because of the regime devastation wreaked on nonviolent uprising Syrians whose screams went unheard by you, able to ride in on the false promise of armed liberation and humanitarian aid not provided by others.

And you hear their cry for arms, and you brand them intransigent militants, and demand why they won’t go to Geneva. I demand that too, but I do it from inside a Syrian anguish, at far higher damage to myself than it costs you. You then turn around and cast aspersions on me and Syrians with similar stands, not even allowing us our embattled path, because of our “associations;” we wake up damned if we do advocate nonviolence, and damned if we don’t.

Our “associations?” We are Syrians. We all started out together. Hopeful. Three years ago, we did not know how things would unfold. We began working together and creating histories and relationships. And now that different paths have been trod in this revolution, you come in and tell us we are not allowed to be associates, to be related to other Syrian people in this revolution who’ve taken other paths? There are people on the pro-FSA side who I think have done no end of damage to this revolution, but for whom I’d give my life as much as for people in civilian resistance. Yeah, those are my associations.

You breeze in and say, in effect, “how dare these Syrians fall for the romance of armed liberation. They offend my anti-imperialist stance as a progressive American. Every leftist revolution has fallen for that romance and every other revolution too, but how despicable and primitive of these Syrians to fall for it.” You demand we apologize for “associating” with each other. You demand we devote our energies to proving we are nonviolent and meet your standards, like a man demanding a feminist prove she is not a man-hater and has never associated with militant separatist feminists. This, while we get derision from fellow Syrians every day for insisting that this brutal regime can be stopped by nonviolence, hisses from starving freezing impoverished people facing its gun barrels in their faces every day, before whose trauma we tremble. Insulated from realities on Syrian ground, you point to one of us and say, in effect, “How dare any of you Syrian activists abroad be tempted, even for a moment, to see an iota of use in bombing assad’s military airports that are bombing your people?” In the din of this shriek of pain that we hear unceasingly, to the edge of our insanity, from Syrians in Syria, how dare we as Syrian peace activists abroad ever register the temptation to sympathize with the primal desire that someone, anyone just come and bomb the fuck out of this monster killing people we know daily. How dare I have a friend like that.

Instead of offering one bit of solidarity, you come in to tell us who we are and who we should be and are suspicious of us if we are not packaged into discrete separate compartments for you. We’re not up to your standards. We are Syrians and yes, we associate with each other, nonviolent proponents and Coalition and FSA-proponents and hard-drinking Syrian atheists and Muslim Brotherhood and gay Syrians and Nusra sympathizers, all fighting the regime together in our different ways; and some of us even have nephews in assad’s army just as much as nephews in assad’s prisons and in the FSA, and regime loyalist aunts, and military officer dads about whom we are terrified they could be killed and horrified they could be torturing someone. Yes, simultaneously. Because that is what it is to be Syrian today. Yes we are all cousins, all in-laws, all related, all family, and we all will have to live with each other for years to come in this Syria boat that is a life and a home and a country for Syrians even if it is an equation on a piece of paper for you, and we in this Revolution hate and love each other and fight with each other all while struggling against a brutal regime for a future Syria that has some ounce of justice, some human dignity and freedom in it, and for us there is green and good in Syrians worth struggling for still, and who on earth are you to drain one drop of our precious few remaining energies.

Originally published in the Age written by Pamela Bone:

Public execution of a woman by the Taliban

November 30, 2006

A MEETING of Muslim feminists from across the world in New York last week made a brief paragraph in The Australian, and in no other newspaper that I saw. It should have made front pages, being at least as important as the Group of 20 or Asia-Pacific Economic Co-operation meetings, which had as wide a coverage as sound editorial judgment demanded.

The reason I make such a claim is this: if Islam is to be reformed, and the world consequently made safer and happier for all, it is women who will do it. Yes, there are male Muslim reformers, but in general most Muslim men do not see a feminist interpretation of Islam as in their interest. Why should they? Western men didn’t see last century’s women’s liberation movement as in theirs. It had to be driven by women because the status quo advantaged men.

The meeting, of more than 100 female Muslim religious leaders, human rights activists and scholars, vowed to form an international shura council of Muslim women. “This is a historical and critical event in the history of Islam,” says Daisy Khan, director of the American Society for Muslim Advancement.

A shura council is an advisory body that interprets Islamic law for the political and religious leaders in its region of authority. The women’s council aims to overcome two stereotypes: that Muslims are terrorists and that Islam oppresses women. Leave aside the question of why anyone would put the words Muslim and terrorist together. Most Muslims are not terrorists; the point has been made a thousand times. As to whether Islam oppresses women, there is no Islamic society in which women are free. The question is whether it has to be this way.

The Koran seems fairly clear about women’s subordinate status, but then so is the Christian Bible. If Christian women have been able to argue, more or less successfully, that the misogynistic passages in the Bible are merely a reflection of the era in which they were written and have no relevance to today, there should be no reason Muslim women can’t do the same.

And why is it important that Muslim women be liberated? Well, if women’s freedom from honour killings, forced marriages and stoning for adultery were not reason enough, consider that any country in which women are badly oppressed is an economically and socially backward country, and that such conditions provide fertile ground in which resentments against the West can grow. As the 2002 UN Arab Human Development Report noted, a large part of the reason so many Arab countries are economic basket cases is the oppression of women.

One need only read the ravings of Sayyid Qutb, the Egyptian philosopher who provided the principal inspiration for al-Qa’ida, or the directions of the September 11 attacker Mohammed Atta that no woman was to touch his body, to see that political Islam has a deeply ingrained hatred of women. To a significant degree, the control of women is what the war on terrorism is about.

Some women from Muslim backgrounds believe that Islam and women’s rights are antithetical. Maryam Namazie, a British-based human rights activist, said recently: “Debating the issue of women’s rights in an Islamic context is a prescription for inaction and passivity, in the face of the oppression of millions of women struggling and resisting in Britain, the Middle East and elsewhere. Anywhere they (Islamists) have power, to be a woman is a crime.”

Namazie is of the Left. She is the director of the Worker-Communist Party of Iran’s International Relations Committee and has been named British secularist of the year. But in general, she notes, the Left, the traditional defender of human rights, is silent about the oppression of Muslim women. The reasons are that political Islam is seen as anti-imperialist, racism is these days much worse than sexism and minorities are automatically to be supported. (Some minority; Islamism is the strongest and fastest-growing ideology in the world.) Change must come from within, say the good liberals. Strangely, no one said that about South Africa’s apartheid system.

Today it is the Right that has latched on to women’s rights. John Howard was an unlikely feminist until various sheiks began expounding their theories about women’s role in society. It was only when Osama bin Laden became a threat that George W. Bush started talking about the freedom of Afghan women. No one cared about the Taliban when all they were doing was oppressing the female half of the population.

Given that a half-billion Muslim women are not going to abandon their faith, the only way they can be liberated is for Islam and women’s rights to be reconciled. That is why all power and support – and maximum publicity – should be given to Muslim women reformers.

We have today a war on terror and a (fairly half-hearted) war on poverty. It took the threat of global instability to convince some world leaders the present rich-poor divide is unsustainable. It is time it is recognised that there also needs to be a war to promote women’s rights because poverty, the oppression of women and the rise of religious extremism go together.

Western leaders should be pouring billions of dollars into the education and empowerment of women around the world. If John Howard really cares about the rights of women, he should increase Australia’s meagre overseas aid budget and direct it into health and education programs for girls who will then grow up to have healthier, better educated and fewer children.

If Western governments can’t manage to support women out of compassion, they should do so out of self-interest.

The following is lifted from Bloomberg.

This week, regular Libyan forces wearing crisp new fatigues and riding in Humvees took up positions in the capital, Tripoli, and ordinary Libyans ran into the streets to cheer the unfamiliar troops as liberators. The moment was extraordinary, because Tripoli had become a battle zone for rival militias, and few people knew the city even had functioning army units. Quietly, the U.S. and some allies have begun training regular Libyan soldiers. The public response shows why a bigger effort that’s now being planned is needed, and should be expanded.

In recent months, Libya has verged on being a failed state, as militias have run amok, kidnapping Prime Minister Ali Zaidan for a day and shutting down the country’s oil wells. (Last month, oil production fell to just 450,000 barrels a day, from a high of 1.6 million in July.) Last weekend, gunmen from the port city of Misrata killed at least 43 anti-militia protesters in the capital.

Many Libyans are sick of the chaos. And a total breakdown of governance in this North African country would be a nightmare for the region and for Europe. With about $60 billion worth of annual oil and gas exports to fund warlords and al-Qaeda affiliates, plentiful arms and uncontrolled borders, Libya also is a big concern for counterterrorism officials around the world.

The lawlessness didn’t emerge overnight. The militias have been a problem since 2011, when they removed dictator Muammar Qaddafi, with an assist from North Atlantic Treaty Organization jets. Afterward, Libya’s weak government tried to disarm the revolution’s fighters. Then it tried to co-opt them, paying them to provide security. Neither approach worked; the militias have only grown more powerful, routinely storming the parliament to strong-arm legislators.

The international effort to train Libyan soldiers has barely begun. Should they have to fight today, the two Tripoli brigades that the U.S. appears to have been training would be no match for the militias. Yet the best and perhaps only hope for Libya and surrounding countries is that the tiny force can be expanded.

It’s taken long enough for Libya’s allies to understand this: The Pentagon recently said it would train, starting next year in Bulgaria, up to 8,000 Libyan troops for general purpose infantry duty. The U.K. will train 2,000 more troops at a base in Cambridgeshire. Italy, Turkey and France will also take part, pushing through as many as 15,000 personnel.

The European Union in May started a program to train Libya’s border guards, investing 30 million euros ($40 million) and 110 people. The U.K. and other nations are attempting to train police officers, and a small team of NATO advisers is to help build the security infrastructure to make all this work. In post-Qaddafi Libya, pretty much all institutions have to be built from scratch.

The international help has been slow in coming partly because Libya took this long to request it, but also because the situation in Libya is so chaotic, nobody is sure the training programs will work. The EU, for example, hasn’t been able to get a list of people to train for its border mission, and its trainers are stuck in Tripoli for security reasons. Large swathes of the country’s borders can’t be covered because the militias and local tribes that guard them now live by smuggling and don’t answer to the central government.

Yet Libya’s allies cannot let such obstacles or resistance from the militias be used as an excuse to slow or gut the training effort. Libyans themselves will need to do most of the work to make the program a success — from raising state security salaries above those paid by militias, to creating a national security council. A recent Carnegie Endowment paper has laid out the framework required.

At a minimum, Libya needs a security force sufficient to guard crucial government institutions, oil fields and sensitive border crossings, as well as functioning police personnel to provide local security in place of the militias. The popular response to Monday’s first outing by Tripoli’s nascent regular army, and the decision of the Misrata militiamen to withdraw from the capital provide a glimmer of hope.

From Bloomberg http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-11-19/free-libya-from-the-liberators.htmlCY93

Prachanda

By Ammu Kannampilly (AFP) – 9 hours ago

Kathmandu — Millions of Nepalis defied low expectations and threats of violence to vote Tuesday in elections seen as crucial in stabilising the country and breaking its political deadlock seven years after a civil war ended.

A bombing in the capital Kathmandu early Tuesday injured three children, but the explosion and a campaign of intimidation by a hardline Maoist splinter group did not prevent a high turnout, according to election officials.

Chief Election Commissioner Neel Kantha Uprety told a press conference late Tuesday that preliminary figures showed a 70 percent turnout.

At this level it would be higher than the 63.29 percent turnout recorded during the country’s first post-war elections in 2008, when it voted for a constituent assembly tasked with writing a new constitution.

“Voters have given their decision and it clearly points towards a constitution. I hope this is the last election for a constituent assembly in Nepal,” Uprety said.

Since 2008, five prime ministers have served brief terms, the country had no leader for long periods, and the 601-member assembly collapsed in May 2012 after failing to complete the peace process.

“My vote is for the future of youngsters and the new generations,” 101-year-old voter Lal Bahadur Rai told AFP in a phone interview from a polling station in northeastern Sankhuwasabha district.

Many analysts had judged the national mood to be downbeat as threats of violence and intimidation added to years of political infighting and drift.

Hopes of political unity to complete the peace process were dashed when a 33-party alliance, led by the splinter Communist Party of Nepal-Maoist (CPN-M), announced it would boycott polls and intimidate voters.

In recent days, protestors have torched vehicles and hurled explosives at traffic, leading to more than 360 arrests and one death.

In Kathmandu, a crude bomb explosion in a middle-class residential neighbourhood was the only major violent incident amid a security crackdown which saw 50,000 soldiers and 140,000 police deployed.

“I was passing by when I saw three children lying on the ground, crying for help,” 28-year-old eyewitness Saroj Maharjan told AFP at the scene.

“One of the children, whose face was covered in blood, fainted in my arms as I carried him to a nearby hospital,” he added.

Home ministry spokesman Shankar Koirala told reporters late Tuesday: “25 people were injured in election-related clashes across the country”.

The Maoist party, led by Pushpa Kamal Dahal, known better by the nom-de-guerre Prachanda, swept the first constituent assembly polls in 2008, two years after signing a peace deal.

Prachanda, the former rebel leader whose lavish lifestyle has alienated many core supporters, voted in the southern district of Chitwan in the morning wearing a shirt and Western-style black suit.

Logistical headache

Organising the election has been a logistical headache in a country home to eight of the world’s 14 highest mountains, requiring helicopters, horses and porters to deliver ballot boxes to remote areas.

“Some of the voters have trekked for five hours to reach here. They include elderly as well as young first-time voters,” Gitachari Acharya, an official at the nearest polling station to Mount Everest, told AFP.

Nepal’s political deadlock in the last five years has had a severe impact on the economy, with annual GDP growth tumbling from 6.1 percent in 2008 to 4.6 percent last year, World Bank figures show.

With 39 percent of the country aged between 16 and 40, according to government data, jobs are a major issue for young first-time voters like Urmila Maharjan.

The 22-year-old Kathmandu-based student told AFP she hoped “the new assembly will address issues like unemployment”.

Voters at one central Kathmandu polling station applauded and chanted “victory to Nepal” as election officials packed up ballot boxes.

More than 100 parties, including three major ones — the Unified Marxist-Leninist, the Nepali Congress and the Maoists — are fielding candidates for the constituent assembly, which will also serve as a parliament.

The anti-poll alliance had said the vote could not be held under the interim administration headed by the Supreme Court chief justice and wanted elections to be postponed until a cross-party government was put in place.

“Had the anti-poll groups organised peaceful protests, they could have questioned the legitimacy of the elections,” Akhilesh Upadhyay, editor in chief of The Kathmandu Post, told AFP.

“How can they gain political traction while even children have been brutally attacked?”

Election officials said the counting of votes would begin at midnight and preliminary results would emerge within three days.

Full results will be announced in about ten days, the chief election commissioner said.

http://www.google.com/hostednews/afp/article/ALeqM5gmK-hIOX7WM_cUZP_GQqpOIz6mvw?docId=b8f04837-7dbc-459a-a611-9bd0634d28cd

Hello Friends and ‘strangers’. Well met.

Well met, because these ARE strange times and often confusing to me so the need for open discussion of almost all the pressing issues of our time is urgent. So, I’m  taking on the tasks of Editor as it seems a good place to put previous skills to use, and for myself as a historical dialectical materialist in the early 21st century one of the primary roles I see is as ‘myth-busters’ an it gives a good opportunity for that.   Almost anyone who previously engaged here is able to contribute in vigorous constructive debate, and no doubt they have been doing so on other sites since ST ceased to function.  This site lost impetus direction and remains directionless but I want to try and address that in the coming months.  Even directionless, it is at least another place to meet and exchange thoughts.

This is a site where people can openly challenge others and examine previously held beliefs and hopefully attempt to move forward in their thinking and to consider if old views are still applicable or appropriate for the 21st C.  So maybe people could post about ideas they have been proven wrong about over their now longish life’s experience. If anyone has an article on this or anything else please send it in!

This is a red site, so we are stuck with the necessary, though often unpleasant task of exposing the pseudoleft and the bankruptcy of green politics and philosophy. Everyone who has ever contributed to this site might be lost and confused about what to do right now but there is no confusion about the existence of these opponent political formations.

One of the reasons I asked for the opportunity to revive the Strange Times website, even though there will be a few steep learning curves coming up, is that keeping this blog going so that others can read some of the gems from the authors here is a good use of my time.  The pseudoleft, greens and liberals are now almost openly attacking the well-being of the masses, such as in raising prices via a carbon tax. (so that the masses don’t waste fossil fuels)  That strikes me as having zero future, but then I would never have thought such thinking would have come as far as it has.

For a real left, the question ought to be about how do we provide the masses plentiful and cheap power that they can use any way they choose. ( usage is now generally considered waste – another myth to bust etc.)  All who have contributed here in the past have in their own way asked the question in whose interest is ‘this’?  I think we can do summaries and draw older threads together for a wider audience.  Anyone interested in Philosophical topics will hopefully be inspired enough to start writing again soon, but if not then all I can ask is that they bring interesting stuff that they are coming across to other people’s attention.

The bankrupt enemy has politics that are divorced from the people and is contemptuous of any attempt to discover what is in the interests of the ordinary masses.   Over the years, authors here have consistently debated at a number of international websites that have often descended into a kind of madness, I will gather and edit some of those exchanges to illustrate what not to do.

Over all, the comments from contributors here, and their articles have stood the test of time, and so much so that they are often worthy of update so I will be encouraging that as well.

Journals such as these can’t function without content and so content generation is first and centre and that is where you dear reader transform into a contributor. The Lastsuperpower Strange Times data bases are a world of information and knowledge, dig into them and revive some of the issues in light of developments. For example how goes the war for greater Israel? What is the current U.S. policy towards the formation of a viable Palestinian state?

Those who wish to comment on a regular basis can subscribe via email to stlsanitagensec@gmail.com. So too, those wishing to submit an application to guest post; or to become a regular contributor please contact admin submitting your article.

P.S This is currently a directionless group blog with no new content so feel free to generate some!
best wishes Anita

Please be patient as we learn to navigate the WordPress environment and sort out any glitches.