"In Praise of Revolutions"

Excellent essay from Serge Halimi of CounterPunch.org: "In Praise of Revolutions"

Even so, a charge levelled against major revolutions is they were violent. Exception is taken to the massacre of the Swiss Guard during the storming of the Tuileries in August 1792, to that of the Russian royal family in July 1918 in Ekaterinburg and to the liquidation of Chiang Kai-Shek’s officers when the Communists took power in China in 1949. But if you object to those, then you shouldn’t ignore the famines of the Ancien Régime, which happened against a background of balls at Versailles and of tithes demanded by priests; or the hundreds of peaceful demonstrators massacred by Nicholas II’s troops in St Petersburg on Bloody Sunday in 1905; or the revolutionaries in Canton and Shanghai thrown alive into the boilers of locomotives in 1927. Not to mention the everyday acts of violence which were part of the social order the revolutionaries sought to overthrow.

The story of the revolutionaries who were burned alive hasn’t just affected those with an interest in China; it’s also known to the millions who have read André Malraux’s novel, La Condition humaine. For decades the greatest writers and artists made common cause with the workers’ movement to celebrate revolutions and the glorious future. In doing so, it is true, they underestimated the downside, the tragedies and the chilly dawns (with their political police, personality cults, labour camps and executions).

For 30 years, by contrast, those are the only consequences of revolution which have been spoken about; in fact it’s the recommended course of action for those who want to succeed at university, in the press – or the Académie Française. “Revolution inevitably means an irruption of violence,” explains Academic Max Gallo. “Our societies are extremely fragile. The major responsibility of those who have a public platform is to guard against this irruption”. For his part, Furet reckoned that any attempt at radical transformation was totalitarian or terrorist, that “the idea of another society has become almost inconceivable”. His conclusion is that “we are condemned to live in the world that we live in”. It’s not hard to imagine that such a destiny fits in with the expectations of his readers, who are generally protected from life’s storms by a pleasant existence of dinners and debates.

I've been looking to read something like that for a long time.

"Conservatives" -- Gutless Opponents of Anti-Semitism

Internet "conservatives" (Blogging Tories, RedState, Free Dominion, Free Republic types) tend not to like minorities. Canadian internet "conservatives" hate Aboriginals, blacks (especially Jamaicans), Arabs and/or Muslims. USian internet "conservatives" hate blacks, Hispanics, Arabs and/or Muslims.

So why do they get so worked-up about "anti-Semitism" against Jews? To some degree these wingnuts don't so much hate "anti-Semitism" as they support Israel due to its role in their ridiculous Biblical Book of Revelations fantasies. For that reason they are lukewarm in their hostitlity towards the anti-Semitism of out-and-out white supremacists. Then there are a few people of Jewish origins but sub-normal mental abilities (Ezra Levant, Joe Lieberman) who believe that this fundamentalist Christian regard for Israel constitutes actual affection for Jews and have thrown in their lot with their brothers and sisters in stupidity. And then, finally, there are your garden-variety internet "conservatives" who will embrace any struggle, any cause, so long as they don't have to do anything other than type about it.

Anti-Semitism used to be a HUGE thing in Europe, with pogroms and Holocausts and the like. It used to be a big deal in North America with employment discrimination, housing covenants restricting Jewish entry into WASP neighbourhoods and other forms of clear, practical racism or bigotry. Now, however, anti-Semitism tends to mean some marginal neo-nazi loser spray-painting a swastika somewhere. That's upsetting, but isolated and of little practical importance. Besides, leftist anti-fascist groups like Toronto's Anti-Racist Action had things covered. As well, the main focus of the internet "conservatives" is Israel, which has to suffer from detailed criticisms about its human rights abuses and other violations of international law, but which is otherwise safe. True it is surrounded by US puppet states who are amenable to a two-state solution, as well as countries like Lebanon which are incapable of attacking Israel and Syria which wants to limit Israel's depredations and to counter Israeli domination of Lebanon with Syrian domination. But even under these desperate circumstances, "tiny little Israel" is a nuclear power with the world's third-largest airforce of top of the line technology.

In other words, Israel isn't really in any danger and Jews aren't really in any danger here in North America. Perfect for your typical gutless internet "conservative" to bravely extend a hand in solidarity with. USian "conservatives" are infamous for sitting on their fat asses at home calling for continued fighting against "Islamo-fascism" in Iraq and Afghanistan, knowing that there's no draft so even though the US military is stretched to the breaking point, they won't ever be forced to serve in these wars unless they sign up. Which a majority of them haven't done and have no intention of doing. The fact that military recruiters are forced to lower their standards to take in genuine morons and convicted rapists hasn't registered with these buffoons who call the "War on Terror" the cause of their generation. It's this same cowardice that no doubt motivates their enthusiasm for "anti-Semitism." There's absolutely no danger they'll ever have to go up against any individuals or institutions with real power and at the same time they get to feel good about themselves as enemies of prejudice and bigotry.

Code Pink and Other Awesome Women

Here's the link to the USian women's peace activists "Code Pink." I'm posting it here because I've long admired their militancy (despite the USA's incredible propaganda machinery) and their courage (against police thuggery,* Kafka-esque legal thuggery, and right-wing goon squads). No, I don't know EVERYTHING about them. But what I've seen I like very much.

CODEPINK is a women-initiated grassroots peace and social justice movement working to end the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, stop new wars, and redirect our resources into healthcare, education, green jobs and other life-affirming activities. CODEPINK rejects foreign policies based on domination and aggression, and instead calls for policies based on diplomacy, compassion and a commitment to international law. With an emphasis on joy and humor, CODEPINK women and men seek to activate, amplify and inspire a community of peacemakers through creative campaigns and a commitment to non-violence.

To continue praising heroines of progressive causes, I present to you links which describe two brave, right-on women I've encountered in recent readings.

The first is Annie Besant:

Besant supported a number of workers' demonstrations for better working conditions. In 1888 she helped organise a strike of the female workers at the Bryant and May match factory in east London. The women complained of starvation wages and the terrible effects on their health of phosphorus fumes in the factory. The strike eventually led to their bosses significantly improving their working situation.
Social and political reform seems not to have satisfied Besant's hunger for some all-embracing truth to replace the religion of her youth. She became interested in Theosophy, a religious movement founded in 1875 and based on Hindu ideas of karma and reincarnation. As a member and later leader of the Theosophical Society, Besant helped to spread Theosophical beliefs around the world, notably in India.
Besant first visited India in 1893 and later settled there, becoming involved in the Indian nationalist movement. In 1916 she established the Indian Home Rule League, of which she became president. She was also a leading member of the Indian National Congress.

Okay, it seems Ms. Besant went a little crazy towards the end ...

In the late 1920s Besant travelled to the United States with her protégé and adopted son Jiddu Krishnamurti, whom she claimed was the new Messiah and incarnation of Buddha. Krishnamurti rejected these claims in 1929.

Then again, considering the drivel that bush II believes and that of the bulk of the Repugs and the herpecons, maybe we should cut her some slack.

The second is Louise Michel:

Louise Michel was born on 29th May 1830. She was raised by her mother and paternal grandparents. Her love and understanding of everything downtrodden, human and animal alike, developed from her empathy with her childhood world. Her compassion and sensitivity to suffering grew, as she grew. This, along with her instinct to rebel against social inequalities, led her along the revolutionary path. ... On 18th March 1871, the people of Paris reclaimed their city, for the people. They set up an independent 'commune', with the people themselves - rather than a corrupt, bourgeois government - controlling the destiny of the city. ... This became known as the Paris Commune. It was a social revolution, which tried to create freedom and equality for all the people of Paris. Louise Michel, like many others, gave her total self to the revolution. She fought on the barricades, devoting herself to the cause. She was eagerly willing to sacrifice her life for the "conquest of freedom". ... Louise Michel was sentenced to lifetime deportation. On 8th August 1873 she began her voyage to New Caledonia. It was during this journey that she met Natalie Lemel, who was responsible for introducing her to anarchism. The conditions in New Caledonia were harsh. There was a serious food shortage and very little medical care. After spending five years in exile, she was allowed to teach the Kanaks, and the children of colonists. She got to know and respect the Kanaks, the indigenous people. Her support for their struggles against French invasion and racism is remembered today in the capital city, Noumea, where there is a museum dedicated to anarchism.

I hope somebody finds these resources valuable.

*Don't read the comments to the YouTube video unless you want to be needlessly enraged by the debased cowards and their exteme misogynistic rage. The idiots at the right-wing goon squad video are bad enough.

Comfortable Canadians (Again)

A l-o-o-n-g time ago, in the misty early years of this blog, I wrote a "Quick Thought for the Day" about how hypocritical it was for comfortable Canadians to be smugly judgmental about the sometimes violent and hate-filled behaviour of people from other lands when at the same time some of us, having lived lives enjoying peace and perpetual abundance, are slavering for the brutal suppression of any and all First Nations' protests and for the torture and summary execution of suspected terrorists:

So, all the comfortable, sheltered Canadians who are willing to embrace torture and the summary execution of prisoners, out of anger over the killing of Canadian soldiers whom they don't know personally,* think that they're justified because our enemies are "savages."

Supposedly, the people of Afghanistan, having lived through three decades of almost constant warfare, and through grinding poverty under brutal dictatorships, ... if any of these people turn out to be cruel killers, well there's no excuse for that.

We can embrace torture and killing at the drop of a hat while still holding on to the claim that we're "civilized." But if people living under far more brutal conditions do this, they're monsters whose extermination is self-evidently required.

The whole notion went bad in the comments section as "Reason" of the Canadian Forces took my post as a slag against himself and other Canadian soldiers in Afghanistan. But I'd like to re-visit this concept. I've just finished reading a book about the Paris Commune of 1871 which ended with the slaughter of between 15,000-25,000 Parisians. Most of the killings were carried out by the "forces of law and order" representing bourgeoise interests and they were carried out in retaliation (supposedly) for the murder of between 500-1,000 soldiers and hostages taken by the Commune. Just having read that and also recently thinking about the Tamil community's blocking of the Gardiner Expressway outside of Toronto in response to the Sri Lankan government's bombardment of the last refuge of the Tamil Tigers and their Tamil hostages brought me back to the ideas in that early post.

For one thing, both the example of the Paris Commune and the bloody violence of both the Sri Lankan government and the Tamil Tigers, show how humans can descend into appalling cruelty quite quickly. We Canadians have, for the most part, never had to deal with these issues. Canada has for long been a peaceful country in which the majority of people enjoy ready access to the essentials of life and much, much more. This peace and prosperity has given some of us a sense of gratitude and a desire to protect, preserve and expand these blessings for ourselves and for the rest of the world. Then there are those who are cocooned in a blissful unreality, who believe that this state of affairs is mysteriously simply inherent to us either as human beings born within these lines of latitude and longitude, or out of some hocus-pocus of our political traditions. For these Canadians (let's call them "morons" or "blogging tories") we are simply better than these other people, these "savages," and whether this arises out of our genetic superiority or out of the political traditions that inferior, retrograde cultures can only attempt to emulate, the point is that nothing we can do will ever place us at the level of these inferiors.

Canadians of almost all stripes say that when you come to Canada you're supposed to leave your baggage from your homelands behind. We don't dwell in the past here in Canada. This has been the myth since the 1950s at the earliest. Before that there were simply too many fights between English and French and Catholic and Protestant to make that conceit even remotely true. Canadians have consistently tried to ignore their troublesome past when it comes to historical treaty obligations to the First Nations, so we were consistent on that point. But have we been consistent in ignoring the conflicts between other people in other lands? If so, then how do we explain our willingness to avenge the USA for the attacks of September 11th? Some Canadians were among those killed that day, but many of the Canadians crying for vengeance for those Canadians were less than concerned for Lebanese Canadians under Israeli bombardment in 2006.

The point is not many Canadians are immune to feeling tugs from issues in their countries of ancestry. It has always been thus.

The second point is that the smug condescension over the irrational, violent nature of others is unwarranted by those who practice it. For the most part it's these smug imbeciles who are labouring mightily to place us on the road to the sort of behaviour they condemn. Disregard for human rights? How many Blogging Tories supported and continue to support the overuse of Tasers by the police? Freedom of Speech? How many Blogging Tories support the free speech of anything other than nazis and Muslim-bashers? Human dignity? What's there respect for human dignity? Very selective I see. According to these vermin, our governments can capture people from anywhere in the world, far from any battlefront, call them "enemy combatants" in a "'War' on Terror" and deprive them of the right to face their accusers in court until such a time as a kangaroo court can be established to use their coerced testimony against them. If First Nations peoples mobilize after a century of theft and neglect and attempt to claim their legal rights, these fine "conservatives" shriek for the institutions of the police and the military to shut them up, shut them down and clear them out. This is their response to overwhelmingly peaceful protest campaigns. Imagine the slavering bloodlust that would be released if Canada's First Nations actually began to mimic the IRA or the Kosovar KLA or Kurdish or Tamil independence groups!

It is the work mainly of people on the left, "peaceniks," "bleeding-hearts" that keeps the Canadian political scene from descending into something like Iraq or Somalia. And much of our work consists of resisting the depraved impulses of these self-satisfied morons and fools.

Conservatives are Stupid Assholes, Part Six Zillion

My post for the day is inspired by a thunderbolt of realization about the enormity of the stupidity of "conservatives" and the treatment of Abousfian Abdelrazik.

To begin, this travesty was the product of a crazed "intelligence," "security" and "policing" bureaucracy, which was enabled by a sleazy Liberal government. But the heavy lifting these days which is perpetuating the sufferings of Mr. Abdelrazik is all the work of the herpercon "Conservative" government. And, for the most part, the enthusiastic support for the suppression of a Canadian citizen's constitutional rights comes from those same stupid, mouth-breathing, ugly minded cretins, the Canadian right-wing. A couple of posts ago I exhibited the deranged fantasies of one "Colin" who said that Canadian government has the legal right to subject citizens to indefinite exile based on top-secret information that nobody ever has to know about. "Colin" tried mightily to sound like a tough-minded realist, supporting an at times dirty, but highly necessary war against what is described as "Islamo-fascism" but in reality, "Colin" is a pathetic creature, frightened by his own delusions and given to murderous rants and an infantile devotion to authority.

There is no legal way that the Canadian government can exile a citizen of Canada. Here's the relevant section of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms:

"Every citizen of Canada has the right to enter, remain in and leave Canada."

It's clear. There can be no debating on this subject. Well, actually there is a bit of a debate. Whether Section Six, i) means a Canadian can't be extradited to another country for prosecution for crimes committed in that other country. But there's nothing about the government's right to prevent your return from a country that has no desire to keep you.

Abdelrazik has been stranded in the Sudan, staying in the lobby of the Canadian embassy in Khartoum since 2008 and it has been the stephen herpercon party that has been torturing him with broken promises and imbecilic arguments in order to prevent him from returning home.
Their latest idiotic argument is that although he is entitled to emergency travel documents as a Canadian citizen, and that although he has been cleared of any connections to international terrorism (someone [no doubt a victim of the USA's torture techniques] said Abdelrazik is a top-level Al Qaeda member, he nonetheless remains on a USA "no-fly" list and the UN's "no-fly" list. But the USA's list shouldn't make it impossible for Abdelrazik to fly home on a Canadian government jet, or a privately-chartered jet, or a Sudanese (their government has cleared him and offered to help send him home) airline. And the UN list specifically allows people on it to return to their home countries.
That's what made the knuckle-dragging vermin who work for the herpercons furrow their brows and fart out the following rationalization for leaving Abdelrazik stranded: It's true he can leave the Sudan and return to Canada, but what about the airspace of all the other countries in between?
A UN spokesperson replied that the airspace of other countries is a non-issue with regards to re-patriating citizens to their homelands.
Then the herpercon's lawyer tried to argue "National Security," but check out the details of the Act:

• 
  

  A person whose entitlement is under investigation is formally notified as such, is provided with the basis upon which Passport Canada began its investigation, and is given 30 days in which to respond or forward relevant information for consideration.

  
  
  

  A first draft recommendation is provided to the person under investigation, who is given 10 days in which to make further submissions.

It doesn't appear that Abdelrazik was provided with this notification. Had he been there isn't much that he could have done about it though:

Information reviewed during the investigation may be considered as "sensitive information", within the meaning assigned to that expression by section 38.01 of the Canada Evidence Act, and therefore cannot be disclosed to the person under investigation. However, Passport Canada will always inform the person under investigation that such information exists, and whenever possible, will provide a summary of the information.

The important thing though is that this desperate attempt at evading their obligations to this Canadian citizen is invalid because proper protocols were not followed. And for that reason the "national security" argument should be dismissed.
The whole reason that I'm typing this entry though is about the amazingly stupid behaviour of the herpecons. It's really extraordinary isn't it? Almost as stupid as the insane yammerings of their supporters. Check out this turd dropped in my comments section on another post about Abdelrazik's plight:

You left out the part about: 1)CSIS has accused him of being a member of a Montreal cell that supported Ahmed Ressam; 2) The US State Department has said that Abdelrazik is a personal acquaintance of Osama bin Laden, closely tied to Abu Zubaydah and attended an Afghan training camp in 1996.
Maybe, he should stay overseas.

Obviously, I went to town on the idiot and his complete amnesia about "due process" and "presumption of innocence." The nitwit no doubt regards himself as a defender of "Canadian values" and "Western Civilization" against the Islamo-fascist hordes. They all appear to do so, when it's them who are throwing hard-won freedoms and democratic rights into the toilet.
If you want to help Abousfian Abdelrazik then these wonderful people, "The People's Commission on Immigration 'Security' Measures can give you some pointers.
Supposedly I'm to sleep more soundly knowing that Abousfian Abdelrazik, a Canadian citizen who has been cleared by both CSIS and the RCMP of any criminal activities is being kept out of Canada where god knows what he would do. I'm supposed to be proud that my government is embarrassing itself and the entire country with these idiotic legal arguments.

Bizzie

No time for anything today. So, well, what about this drivel about Obama's "elitist" preferences in mustard? Is there anything more sad than right-wing shit-heads struggling to be cool? Is "dijon-gate" or "spicey-mustard-gate" (or whatevertheHell "gate" it's supposed to be) Sean Hannity's baby?

Sean Hannity's baby.

I'm seeing some 1970's horror flick.

Right-wing morons exist to make liberal assholes look good by comparison. That's it. Live it up Barack!

More on that "Revolutionary Consciousness" Thingy

So what the hell is so "revolutionary" about giving workers and elected members of the public two-thirds of the control over public sector institutions?

Well, as I said, it's about making people comfortable with being in control. This society that we've constructed is incredibly complex and it's been designed by and for capitalists and technocrats. But we can't just smash it. A lot of people don't want to smash it. But what do we do with it? First, more people have to get a chance to figure out how it works. These elected citizen representatives will be a part of this process. Every hospital will have a number of ordinary people up there representing the communities as potential users (and definitely the taxpayers) of that institution. Every water and sewer system, every highway, every local power facility and every local police service. Whoever is interested can run for a term or two as a paid representative of the general public.

So, ordinary people will get an understanding of how their society really functions and will have a hand in the sometimes difficult decisions of managing important public resources. I'm willing to bet that that alone will bring about a difference in the organization and delivery of services. As well, ordinary people, either as workers or as citizen representatives, will get empowered by having genuine decision-making capabilities, unmediated by a corporate hierarchy with a non-democratic agenda.

This is a "revolutionary" strategy that deals with the citizenry that we have now, where millions of people like their donut drive-throughs and their chemically-treated lawns. We'll have to get past the narcissistic, ecologically unsustainable nature of this society but we'll first have to get people unafraid of public management, of democratic control.