“On November 14 the body of a gay 19 year old was found a few miles away from the town in which he was residing in called Caguas. He was a very well known person in the gay community of Puerto Rico, and very loved. He was found on the site of an isolated road in the city of Cayey, he was partially burned, decapitated, and dismembered, both arms, both legs, and the torso. This has caused a huge reaction from the gay community here, but its a difficult situation. Never in the history of Puerto Rico has a murder been classified as a hate crime. Even though we have to follow federal mandates and laws, many of the laws in which are passed in the USA such as Obama’s new bill, do not always directly get practiced in Puerto Rico. The police agent that is handling this case said on a public televised statement that ‘people who lead this type of lifestyle need to be aware that this will happen’. As If the boy murdered Jorge Steven Lopez was asking to get killed…”
“I Want to Dance With the Real Hero of My Country”
The Andolan in Kathmandu and the Revolution to Follow
By GARY LEUPP
“So far,” notes Peter Lee of the Asia Times, “Western media have reported remotely and somewhat uncomprehendingly on the massive demonstrations in Kathmandu led by the Communist Party of Nepal (Maoist), with a marked lack of interest. This perhaps reflects the shared desire of the Indian, Chinese and Western governments not to inflame the situation with excessive attention and rhetoric.” He refers to the two-day action in the Nepali capital Thursday and Friday.
But those demonstrations should be of enormous interest. According to AsiaNews, “The second phase of the so-called ‘people’s movement-III’ saw more than 150,000 participants, including former Maoist guerrillas and United Communist Party of Nepal-Maoist (UCPM-M) members of parliament and militants, gathered around the Singha Durbar, Nepal’s official seat of government.”
The Maoists virtually paralyzed the government in a stunning display of power. All the top Maoist leaders marched through the city, some meeting the police at the barricades and breaking through to assume positions around Singha Durbar where they addressed the huge crowd.
It is a deep thing that people still celebrate the survival of the early colonists at Plymouth — by giving thanks to the Christian God who supposedly protected and championed the European invasion. The real meaning of all that, then and now, needs to be continually excavated. The myths and lies that surround the past are constantly draped over the horrors and tortures of our present.
Every schoolchild in the U.S. has been taught that the Pilgrims of the Plymouth Colony invited the local Indians to a major harvest feast after surviving their first bitter year in New England. But the real history of Thanksgiving is a story of the murder of indigenous people and the theft of their land by European colonialists–and of the ruthless ways of capitalism.
* * * * *
In mid-winter 1620 the English ship Mayflower landed on the North American coast, delivering 102 exiles. The original Native people of this stretch of shoreline had already been killed off. In 1614 a British expedition had landed there. When they left they took 24 Indians as slaves and left smallpox behind. Three years of plague wiped out between 90 and 96 percent of the inhabitants of the coast, destroying most villages completely.
“THE BASES OF EMPIRE: The Global Struggle Against US Military Posts”
edited by Catherine Lutz, Pluto Press, London, 2009
Reviewed by Jeremy Agar
The bases of empire are the American military posts that sprinkle the planet like a disease. In her introduction Catherine Lutz notes that the US has 909 military facilities in 46 countries or territories. Those are amazing figures. Had I been asked to guess it, I would have come in at maybe a tenth of the first number. The map Lutz provides shows a measled world, with the thickest thicket being the dots that cover Afghanistan, Iraq, Japan, South Korea, Germany, Britain and Italy. These sites, which reflect the power politics of the past hundred years, need no explanation and this book wisely does not discuss them.
Lutz looks instead at the empire’s outposts, typically islands. After World War 2, the US was left as the world’s sole superpower. It seemed, in those Cold War days, that the former Soviet Union rivalled it, but Russia’s superpower status was based on its having nukes but not much influence. Global reach, economic and cultural as much as military, was American. It was a unique historical moment, one that is only now, perhaps, beginning to fade, when military planners looked at their globe and considered how it might become a place fit to host the American Century.
Almost everything I ever heard about Soupy Sales came by the grapevine, because I was rarely allowed to watch him when I was in grade school.
I heard again on that grapevine-of-life, today, in my neighborhood park, that Soupy Sales is dead. His life ended on October 22, and I had just not known.
Soupy (gov’ment name: Milton Supman) was filled with a wild subversive, under-the-radar rebelliousness that poured into impressionable minds (like mine) that gathered around the black and white boob tube.
You see: Soupy was the host of a TV kids’ show right on that teetering early edge of the hot sixties mix. He had been “in the business” since 1953, but hit the big time when he aired in New York City in 1964. He was an irrepressible, anarchic creature of that same pregnant period where Animal House, the movie, is set.
I remember kids whispering to each other that Soupy had asked, on the air, live, “Hey kids! What starts with F and ends in UCK?” Pause. “That’s right kids, firetruck!” Did the parents know? Did they get it? No. That was the point of the whispers and the secret joy.
In this interview, underground Maoist leader Kishenji speaks on issues such as peace talks, armed struggle, the party’s sources of funding, the difference between people’s democracy and India’s formal democracy, and the goals of the CPI (Maoist).
With unmistakable pride, he says he’s India’s Most Wanted Number 2. CPI (Maoist) Politburo member Mallojula Koteshwar Rao alias Kishenji, 53, grew up in the interiors of Andhra Pradesh reading Gandhi and Tagore. It was after understanding the history of the world, he says, that he disappeared into the jungles for a revolution. During search operations in 1982, the police broke down his home in Peddapalli village. He hasn’t seen his mother since, but writes to her through Telugu newspapers. After 20 years in the Naxal belt of Maharashtra and Chhattisgarh, he relocated to West Bengal. His wife oversees Maoist operations in Dantewada [a district in southern Chhattisgarh]. Now, at a hideout barely a few kilometres from a police camp in Lalgarh, he reads 15 newspapers daily and offers to fax you his party literature. If you hold on, he’ll look up the statistics of war on his computer.
Film on William Kunstler — the beloved and notorious legal defender of revolutionaries and radicals — in a look back on his life created by his daughters, Sarah and Emily Kunstler.
“Earlier in the week, Prachanda warned the government that he and his supporters could be forced to ‘take up arms’ if the government used the police and military to block demonstrations…”
HONG KONG — Communist protesters clashed with the police and surrounded the Singha Durbar, the seat of government in the center of the Nepalese capital, as they called for the resignation of the president, local news agencies reported Thursday.
Adrienne suggested we post the following piece. Her reasons are obvious. It appeared in BBC News.
Free market flawed, says survey
By James Robbins
Diplomatic correspondent, BBC News
Twenty years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, a new BBC poll has found widespread dissatisfaction with free-market capitalism.
In the global poll for the BBC World Service, only 11% of those questioned across 27 countries said that it was working well.
Most thought regulation and reform of the capitalist system were necessary.
There were also sharp divisions around the world on whether the end of the Soviet Union was a good thing.
Economic regulation
In 1989, as the Berlin Wall fell, it was a victory for ordinary people across Eastern and Central Europe.
It also looked at the time like a crushing victory for free-market capitalism.
Twenty years on, this new global poll suggests confidence in free markets has taken heavy blows from the past 12 months of financial and economic crisis.
20 millian yuan, in waterproof oilskins, retrieved from a pool where it had been hidden by former Chongqing Justice Dept. director Wen Qiang, a corrupt element exposed by Bo Xilai.
Capitalist restoration in China has unleashed the kinds of massive and systemic corruption that are typical in societies with powerful bureaucratic capitalist classes. It is hated by the people — who see the often shocking results, including when shoddy school buildings collapsed during earthquakes killing large numbers of children.
By contrast, the revolutionary days of Mao Zedong are widely remembered as being free from corruption, and as being a time when people felt the spirit of “serve the people” operating as a guiding principle.
It is not surprising, then, that various reform forces among the bureaucrat capitalists themselves repeatedly wrap themselves in that memory — and portray themselves as the inheritors of this or that feature of the earlier socialist society. Such people are not Maoists in any real or deep sense — but their adoption of that symbolism shows the many powerful ways that the Maoist legacy lingers — in the memory and desires of the ordinary people — and how the figure of Mao rises up (again and again) in many ways to indict and challenge the reckless and unrestrained capitalism of today’s society.
The following piece appeared on the blog “Serve the People” under the original title, “Bo Xilai and China’s Maoist Party.”It includes a report on a new party called the Communist Party of China (Maoist) — accompanied by a wise warning that it may be a hoax.
Saadia Toor is an assistant professor at Staten Island College, author of a forthcoming book on Pakistan from Pluto Press, and part of the group Action for a Progressive Pakistan.
The Pakistani Army has launched a major offensive against Taliban forces in the province of Waziristan. What is behind this assault, and what impact will it have on the people there?
The Army had been warning ever since it attacked in Swat earlier this year that its next move would be in South Waziristan. This area is incredibly undeveloped and has become a stronghold of the Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan (or TTP), which had been led by Baitullah Mehsud until he was killed in drone attack conducted by the U.S. earlier this year
In the run-up to this assault, there was a series of attacks and suicide attacks on state facilities across Pakistan as a warning to the Army to back off from the incursion. The TTP took responsibility for most of these.
However, under a lot of pressure from the U.S., and with full U.S. military support, the Pakistani Army has unleashed its terror in South Waziristan.
Just as we witnessed in Swat, the Army is causing another humanitarian catastrophe. It has already driven 150,000 people from the area, and experts estimate that at least 250,000 people — over half the population — will be forced to flee from the fighting. The government has stated that it is not going to make any arrangements to accommodate the refugees, because they supposedly all have families they can stay with! Read the rest of this entry »
“A présent nous nous concentrons sur le mouvement de masse… Nous pouvons maintenant vraiment pratiquer ce que nous avons enseigné. Cela signifie la fusion de la stratégie de GPP [Guerre Populaire Prolongée] et de la tactique d’insurrection générale. Ce que nous avons fait depuis 2005 est le chemin de préparation pour l’insurrection générale par notre travail dans les zones urbaines et notre participation dans le gouvernement de coalition.”
- Leader Maoïste Baburam Bhattarai, entretien avec le Mouvement de Résistance Populaire Mondial basé en Grande-Bretagne, le 26 octobre 2009
As the U.S. military honors itself in Fort Hood over the bodies of more dead, and as the new President considered his next escalation of unjust wars, we offer this beloved song by the Irish band Fureys. (It was originally called “No Man’s Land” by songwriter Eric Bogle.)
It reports a discussion with Baburam Bhattarai in which he says “contradictory statements from our leaders is one of our weaknesses.”
This is an acknowledgment of an obvious fact: That for a long time, the public remarks by leading Maoists in Nepal have contradicted each other, pointing in different directions and giving different explanations for policy. It is true of individual leaders (including Bhattarai himself) that their remarks (to put it mildly) vary.
This fact has produced quite a bit of debate among those of us who follow the Nepali revolution closely. It has caused controversy. Some forces internationally have seized on this or that phrase to justify their views (often their dismissal) of the Nepali Maoist strategies — as the rest of us repeatedly discover that other phrases are used at other times and create a more textured complexity to that party’s public expression.
What explains this?
Is it the case that the Nepali Maoists have “loosened” the hold of public discipline — allowing different leaders to act as individual public political players expressing their individual views?
Is it the case that the line struggle within the Maoist party has become sharp enough that different factions are publicly making their case and fighting for adherents?
Is it the case that the Maoists are expressing both tactical slogans in the politics of each moment (especially to the daily press), while also expressing long range strategic goals (especially in more formal documents)?
A War of Terror in Pakistan: Interview with Saadia Toor 
