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Archive for December, 2007

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India: Maoist Jailbreak

Posted by Mike E on December 16, 2007

110 Maoists escape from Dantewada jail

16 Dec 2007, 1846 hrs IST,PTI
RAIPUR: In a daring jailbreak, 299 inmates including 110 naxal
activists escaped from the Dantewada jail in Chattisgarh after prison
guards were overpowered in a planned action in which three guards and
two undertrials were injured during firing and clashes.

The incident happened around 4.35 PM when the inmates were being
served food after a lone naxalite commandar Sujit Kumar overpowered a
jail guard inside the prison and snatched his weapon.

Kumar then fired and injured three other guards, Dantewada jail
sources said. As many as 377 inmates are in the district prison, about
375 km from the state capital, which is located in a naxal infested area.

The naxals snatched six rifles of the guards and one wireless set
belonging before they fled.

Rahul Sharma, Superintendent of Police, Dantewada said the jail break
was a “pre-medidated conspiracy” hatched by the undertrials who were
mostly naxal supporters.

A search operation has been launched.

Posted in >> communist politics, India | Leave a Comment »

SFGate: Maoist Growth in India

Posted by Mike E on December 4, 2007

 

ScottH sent:

 

 

Rebel armies tap into popular grievances in India

Jason Motlagh, Chronicle Foreign Service, Sunday, December 2, 2007

Maoist fighters in India

(12-02) 04:00 PST South Bastar, India — Two years ago, Comrade Sunil spent his days studying in a school classroom and toiling in corn and rice fields in his ancestral village. But life abruptly changed one night after he returned to find his home torched and his older brother shot dead by a state-sponsored civilian militia on the pretext that he had been a rebel sympathizer.

Now, warming his hands by a campfire deep in the mountain jungles of southern Chhattisgarh state, the 18-year-old member of the People’s Liberation Guerrilla Army promised never to give up the homemade rifle lying on his lap.

“The government does not care at all about the people here, and armed revolution is the only way to change this,” said Sunil, who refused to give his real name. The movement “is getting stronger because they know we fight for them.”

In the shadow of Bollywood and the info-tech boom, a little-known guerrilla war is being waged in at least 16 states across India by insurgents known as Naxalites. Estimated to have 20,000 fighters backed by a network of tens of thousands of villagers, they control about one-fifth of India’s forests and are active in 192 of the nation’s 604 administrative districts. Currently, 20 of India’s 28 states are affected by separatist conflicts, with Naxalites fighting in about 16 states, according to the Institute for Conflict Management, a New Delhi think tank. Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in >> communist politics, India, Iraq war | Leave a Comment »

Political Islam Serving Imperialism

Posted by Mike E on December 3, 2007

Political Islam in the Service of Imperialism

by Samir Amin (from Monthly Review)

All the currents that claim adherence to political Islam proclaim the “specificity of Islam.” According to them, Islam knows nothing of the separation between politics and religion, something supposedly distinctive of Christianity. It would accomplish nothing to remind them, as I have done, that their remarks reproduce, almost word for word, what European reactionaries at the beginning of the nineteenth century (such as Bonald and de Maistre) said to condemn the rupture that the Enlightenment and the French Revolution had produced in the history of the Christian West!

On the basis of this position, every current of political Islam chooses to conduct its struggle on the terrain of culture—but “culture” reduced in actual fact to the conventional affirmation of belonging to a particular religion. In reality, the militants of political Islam are not truly interested in discussing the dogmas that form religion. The ritual assertion of membership in the community is their exclusive preoccupation. Such a vision of the reality of the modern world is not only distressing because of the immense emptiness of thought that it conceals, but it also justifies imperialism’s strategy of substituting a so-called conflict of cultures for the one between imperialist centers and dominated peripheries. The exclusive emphasis on culture allows political Islam to eliminate from every sphere of life the real social confrontations between the popular classes and the globalized capitalist system that oppresses and exploits them. The militants of political Islam have no real presence in the areas where actual social conflicts take place and their leaders repeat incessantly that such conflicts are unimportant. Islamists are only present in these areas to open schools and health clinics. But these are nothing but works of charity and means for indoctrination. They are not means of support for the struggles of the popular classes against the system responsible for their poverty.

On the terrain of the real social issues, political Islam aligns itself with the camp of dependent capitalism and dominant imperialism. It defends the principle of the sacred character of property and legitimizes inequality and all the requirements of capitalist reproduction. The support by the Muslim Brotherhood in the Egyptian parliament for the recent reactionary laws that reinforce the rights of property owners to the detriment of the rights of tenant farmers (the majority of the small peasantry) is but one example among hundreds of others. There is no example of even one reactionary law promoted in any Muslim state to which the Islamist movements are opposed. Moreover, such laws are promulgated with the agreement of the leaders of the imperialist system. Political Islam is not anti-imperialist, even if its militants think otherwise! It is an invaluable ally for imperialism and the latter knows it. It is easy to understand, then, that political Islam has always counted in its ranks the ruling classes of Saudi Arabia and Pakistan. Moreover, these classes were among its most active promoters from the very beginning. The local comprador bourgeoisies, the nouveaux riches, beneficiaries of current imperialist globalization, generously support political Islam. The latter has renounced an anti-imperialist perspective and substituted for it an “anti-Western” (almost “anti-Christian”) position, which obviously only leads the societies concerned into an impasse and hence does not form an obstacle to the deployment of imperialist control over the world system.

Political Islam is not only reactionary on certain questions (notably concerning the status of women) and perhaps even responsible for fanatic excesses directed against non-Muslim citizens (such as the Copts in Egypt)—it is fundamentally reactionary and therefore obviously cannot participate in the progress of peoples’ liberation.

Three major arguments are nevertheless advanced to encourage social movements as a whole to enter into dialogue with the movements of political Islam.

Read more…

Posted in >> analysis of news, >> communist politics | Leave a Comment »

Waterboarding = Torture

Posted by Mike E on December 2, 2007

Waterboarding is tortureWaterboarding IS Torture

by C. Clark Kissinger November 8, 2007

When we rolled up to the Justice Department in Washington, we didn’t know what to expect. But we knew that we had to be there. A Senate Judiciary Committee vote on Judge Michael Mukasey to be the next Attorney General would be the next morning, yet he was still refusing to say whether waterboarding is actually torture. We were there to demonstrate that it most definitely is torture.

I had come down from New York only a couple days before with the idea of putting on a very graphic demonstration. Getting on the phone, I quickly found people from a number of local groups who saw the urgency of doing this, including activists from the World Can’t Wait, Iraq Veterans Against the War, Catholic Worker, Code Pink, Montgomery Peace Action, and the Democracy Cell Project.

The most challenging problem came from the press trying to downplay waterboarding as simply “simulated drowning.” How could we demonstrate the awful seriousness waterboarding, yet not endanger our “victim”? Helpfully, Steve Lane from Montgomery Peace Action had already designed a face towel with a piece of plastic behind it to protect the victim from the full force of the water.

We had a chance to try it out Sunday morning when Senator Diane Feinstein was scheduled to be on CNN’s Late Edition with Wolf Blitzer. Feinstein had just announced that she would be voting for Mukasey. Code Pink su Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in >> analysis of news, torture | 4 Comments »

Vid: dixie chicks not ready to make nice

Posted by Mike E on December 1, 2007

Posted in music, video | 1 Comment »

Nepal’s Maoists may take up arms again

Posted by Mike E on December 1, 2007

Chitwan, November 24, The Himalayan Times Online
PrachandaCPN-Maoist chairman Prachanda said today that the Maoist People’s Liberation (PLA) army would fight for 40 years for people’s liberation, if necessary.

Speaking on the occasion of the seventh anniversary of the founding of the PLA at the PLA’s third division here, Prachanda said that as long they exist, the CPN-Maoist and the PLA will continue to work for the welfare of the people.

“We had decided that after the 10-year-long conflict and the 19-day April uprising, there should be no more bloodshed. However, if the government and the other parties do not understand certain ground realities, we would be forced to take up arms again,” he said.

Prachanda said that this time the conflict would not end in 10 years, but would go on for 40 years.

“We have not yet decided to resort to an armed struggle. Instead, we are for peaceful solution to all issues. We are still in favour of sorting out differences through dialogue. However, if the situation does not work out in favour of the people, another mass uprising will ensue which will be spearheaded by the CPN-Maoist and PLA.”

The programme, chaired by PLA deputy commander Pasang, was attended by the UN weapons inspection and control team chief John Eric Wilhensen. Senior Maoist leaders including Dr Baburam Bhattarai, Mohan Baidya ‘Kiran’, Ram Bahadur Thapa ‘Badal’, Diwakar and PLA deputy commander Ananta, were also present.

Posted in Nepal | 2 Comments »

AWTW: Pakistan & Musharraf’s 2nd coup

Posted by Mike E on December 1, 2007


From AWTWNS (26 November 2007) email: news@aworldtowin.org

pakistan and its neighborsPakistan, never a calm country even in ordinary times, has been in even more intense turmoil since General Pervez Musharraf, the country’s president and head of its army, declared a state of emergency.

The only reason Musharraf’s emergency rule is not more commonly labelled military dictatorship is that he took all authority into his own hands in his person as civilian president, not as head of the armed forces, although it was a military coup that made him president in 1999

Emergency rule meant the suspension of the constitution, including the right of an arrested person to be informed of the charges against them and to have a lawyer, freedom of movement and other individual rights. Although most people in Pakistan have never enjoyed any rights at all, in fact, if not in words, this gave Musharraf the power to act arbitrarily against anyone. Most importantly, it allowed him to dismiss all the Supreme Court judges and detain its chief judge, Iftikhar Chaudhry. Then he launched a clampdown on opposition political forces, human rights activists and lawyers. Privately owned TV stations were forced off the air for a time, and when they began broadcasting again they faced severe restrictions on what they were allowed to show and say. Nearly 6,000 people were arrested and detained; despite the announcement of the release of 3,000 people on 21 November, several thousand more are still in jail and the arrests of journalists and students are continuing. Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in >> analysis of news, AWTW news, Pakistan | Leave a Comment »

lessons of cointelpro

Posted by Mike E on December 1, 2007

cointelpro jacking up antagonism among progressive and revolutionary forcesA sister in the Revolutionary Communist Youth Brigade passed on a new link about cointelpro from Z-net. (“The House of Reps Vote 404 to 6 to Pass the Bill that Legalizes COINTELPRO?” by Justin Ponkow and Troy Nkrumah)

For many reasons, the lessons of cointelpro in the 60s and the dangers of cointelpro now are worth thinking through.

Historically the political police (FBI) tried to spark violent conflict between revolutionary groups. People often had real and principled differences of politics and ideology. But the police tried to get groups to view those expressing such differences as as enemies and police agents. Police infiltrators in various political groups would accuse other political trends of being “police agents” or “enemies.” They would hype a sense of possible attack and mutual antagonism. They would invent statements and charges — and circulate them. Some times honest revolutionaries would get caught up in the “badjacketing” of false accusations true (sometimes even on their own) spreading or believing false charges against other activists.

We need a revolutionary atmosphere where “a hundred flowers bloom and a hundred schools of thought content.” We need a revolutionary movement where people can express sharp and principled mutual criticism — where we struggle over truth and line from the high plane. where we all are conscious enough not to see such criticism or the people raising such criticism as “enemies.”

Posted in >> analysis of news, cointelpro, fascism | Leave a Comment »

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