RDF India: “Resist the Indian government’s war on the people! Stand by the struggling masses fighting for their land, life and livelihood!”
16 November 2009. A World to Win News Service. Following is a statement by the Revolutionary Democratic Front of India (rfindia.gmail. com).
The former U.S. President George W. Bush declared a “War on Terror” on the pretext of 9/11, and attacked Iraq and then Afghanistan so that U.S. imperialism could capture oil, gas and other natural resources in these foreign countries. The prime minister of India too made an open declaration of “war against terrorism” after 26/11. P. Chidambaram [The Home Minister in charge of "Operation Green Hunt"] too recently announced the government’s decision to go on a military offensive adhering to the dictates of the U.S. This time the offensive was aimed at the people of this country, those who are among the most deprived and exploited. This is just to facilitate the handing over of the country’s natural resources to the plunder and loot of foreign corporations, even though purported aim is to re-establish the sovereign rule of the Indian state in Maoist-influenced regions.
The following presentation was given at the Rethinking Marxism conference. It is detailed and nuanced — but on hearing it delivered by Barbara Foley there was also a very sharp and even emotional impact. It lays bare the fact that Obama’s politics and purpose are the opposite of the hidden socialism he is accused of. It shows the construction of a careful political ideology and persona – familiar (in many way) with active radicals, but deeply different and systematically disdainful. And, in many places, like when the piece discusses Obama’s approach to the Suharto massacre in Indonesia, you get a sharp sense of the unrepentant imperialism that underlies his overt anticommunism.
Six months ago, I wrote this piece after traveling through high passes and forests. Now we are returning as the snow starts to fall there. The rest of our moderator team will maintain the site, as we go welcome in December with the wolves.
Some of my projects for Kasama will be on hold. For the coming week, write to the kasamasite email rather than my personal address. Send suggestions about posts, videos and any alerts about site problems. Also, we will be using Kasama Threads more to discuss this site and its progress.
Talk to you a little later — about ten days later.
By Mike Ely
We were staying in a green flat valley in the northern Rockies. A steep snow-covered ridge of mountain started to rise abruptly just a short walk from the house. At about 2 am in the morning there was a knock on the door. “Come outside. Hear this.”
We stepped out onto the wide porch, into a slight chill, and listened — looking up at that wall of mountain in black silhouette against the stars.
We waited, and there it was.
A wolf howled loud, and held its note. And then, far to the right on a different part of mountain, came a reply, mournful, searching. And then another. Over and over they howled in longing.
A wolf pack must have gotten separated during their nighttime adventures. They were seeking each other out. Howling, and moving closer to connect, in the dense woods above the valley.
The rightwing is using a secret Christian code that means “Kill the President!’ And are circulating it on bumper stickers, t-shirts, and poster at their teabagger rallies.
The vicious and barely hidden racism of this campaign, complete with the casual dehumanization of a Black figure and his family is hideous, and all the more hideous because it has a fervent mass character in some parts of the country.
[the following is drawn from a report on the Gawker, but the sightings are everywhere.]
Posters to various message boards tell stories of seeing bumper stickers with the message “Pray for Obama—Psalm 109:8″ on the highway, only to look up the verse and find,
“Let his days be few;
and let another take his office.”
“Sri Lanka solution” threatened for Maoist-led uprising in India – Excerpts from Arundhati Roy
16 November 2009. A World to Win News Service. The Indian government is preparing “Operation Green Hunt”, a counter-insurgency operation on an unprecedented scale. As many as a hundred thousand soldiers and other security forces are to be sent into the forested hills of eastern and central India to crush the rebellion of adivasi (tribal peoples) led by the Communist Party of India (Maoist). This is no short-term incursion: the authorities have announced that they plan to station massive numbers of troops in the tribal areas for years to come.
Several commentators have warned of the danger that the Indian government plans to seek a “Sri Lanka solution”, modelled on the recent protracted government offensive there. Massive ground forces and air assaults were used to defeat the Tamil Tigers, and then hundreds of thousands of the region’s civilian population were imprisoned in detention camps, where most still languish. Now what may be permanent military bases are being built in the Tamil heartland. The Indian government no doubt noted the implicit U.S. approval for that operation. At the U.S ’s behest, the IMF granted the Sri Lankan government a huge financial package almost immediately after the massacre.
Following are excerpts from an article by Indian writer and activist Arundhati Roy that appeared in the October 31 issue of the Sri Lanka Guardian (srilankaguardian. org). The full article online gives much more detail for her arguments and a more all-around representation of her views. The November 2009 issue of People’s March (peoplesmarch. googlepages. com, or bannedthought. net) has two recent statements by the Communist Party of India (Maoist) and other material on this offensive.
The low, flat-topped hills of south Orissa have been home to the Dongria Kondh [one of several tribal peoples in the region] long before there was a country called India or a state called Orissa. The hills watched over the Kondh. The Kondh watched over the hills and worshipped them as living deities. Now these hills have been sold for the bauxite they contain…
Kasama received the following report from Troubadore:
Approximately 1,500 students, faculty, an supporters held a rally and marched today at UC Berkeley to protest budget cuts increasing tuition, and reduced faculty. The rally formed at Sproul early morning, the main plaza where Mario Savio stood up during the Free Speech Movement. C
ontingents of students blocked main entrances to the university calling for people not to enter. One protester was confronted by university police to attempt to break the strike line, but the line held mostly steady.
Faculty, students, and free speech movement veterans spoke in the plaza, mostly on budget cuts, although one speaker made clear there is wealth in the US, but not in the hands of students.
Another speaker spoke of the need of an internationalist outlook.
Later the protest took the form a march to Berkeley High calling for students to join in, but Berkeley High security prevented students from joining in, the protest marched on to a junior college that was occupied for a while. Protests are scheduled to resume tomorrow.
The radical lawyer Lynne Stewart has been ordered to prepare herself to surrender and enter prison — after a federal appeals panel upheld her conviction (stemming from her 2005 legal representation of an imprisoned Egyptian cleric who was on trial for terrorism.)
A persecution of a people’s lawyer, that was started by the fascist John Ashcroft, is now coming to the prison gates under the Obama administration. Lynne Stewart will be the first new revolutionary political prisoner shoved behind bars in this new Obama era — and it stands as a sharp warning of how little has changed.
A simple chilling question demands our attention and outrage: What happens if the defense lawyers themselves face prison for representing government-targeted clients?
Lynne said this ruling amounted to a threat against any lawyers planning to provide legal defense to tortured U.S. captives now housed at Guantanamo Bay. It is a warning to lawyers in such cases to act a extensions of the government apparatus, not actual defenders and potential whistle blowers.
Lynne faces the current 28 month sentence, but (even more disturbing) the ailing 70 year old Stewart may face a life term in prison, since the panel sent the case back to the trial judge to determine whether she should be given an even longer sentence. The prosecutors had sought 30 years. The following report appeared in the New York Times (Nov. 18, 2009).
Interview of Lynne Stewart by Clark Kissinger describing her initial prosecution (audio). You can hear from this discussion how almost-inconceivable it was then that the state might actually imprison her for these outrageous charges.
Conviction of Sheik’s Lawyer for Assisting Terrorism Is Upheld
A federal appeals court panel in Manhattan on Tuesday upheld the conviction of Lynne F. Stewart, the outspoken defense lawyer who was found guilty in 2005 of assisting terrorism by smuggling information from an imprisoned client to his violent followers in Egypt.
The three-judge panel of the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit also ordered the trial judge to revoke Ms. Stewart’s bond, and said that she must begin serving her 28-month sentence.The panel also sent the case back to the trial judge, John G. Koeltl of Federal District Court, to determine whether she deserved a longer sentence in light of the seriousness of her conduct and the possibility she had lied at trial. Prosecutors had sought a term of 30 years.“I’m too old to cry, but it hurts too much not to,” Ms. Stewart said at a late-afternoon news conference where she appeared with her books and medication, saying that she still hoped to be able to go home that evening. Ms. Stewart, 70, was being treated for breast cancer at the time of her sentencing in 2006.
Green-Red wrote as introduction for this posting on the November 4 actions in Iran:
“‘Scenes of Class Struggles in Tehran and…’ was the title the Red Neda comrades had chosen for the report of this demonstration. Here is the text of the report and, i hope, many other people hope as well, that it was a good lesson and productive experience for the people, as an introductory session to the December 7 demonstration which is the real historic students’ day, that its origin goes back to the Shah’s time during a visit of Richard Nixon’s to Iran… [when] the Shah’s regime guards and soldiers fired into the crowd of students and three activist students, Shariat Razavi, Ghandchi and Bozorghnia died. Ever since then, this date is the hottest day of student movement’s legacy.
Scenes of Class Struggle in Tehran and …
Report of the November 4th Demonstrations in Iran (originally published Saturday, November 14, 2009)
Although, The Telecommunication Bureau had blocked the secure communication protocols such as VPN and HTTPS, tens or maybe hundreds of written, video and graphical reports of Nov. 4th demonstrations were sent online, even before we had a chance to establish a secure connection. Fortunately, this is an indication of the Islamic republic regime’s utter defeat in their attempts to censor the reports of the people’s struggles. The rise in numbers of reports, from one action to another, blocks the regime and the liberal analysts’ attempts to abuse and misrepresent the nature of the peoples’ struggle to the internal and international public.
“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.
A single spark can start a prairie fire Mao Zedong
When I first began to wrangle with radical politics near the end of my time in high school one of the first books of Marxist literature I picked up and read was a small collection of Mao Zedong’s writings, which included such important works as On Practice: On the Relation Between Knowledge and Practice, Between Knowing and Doing, On Contradiction, Combat Liberalism, On the Correct Handling of Contradictions Among the People, Where Do Correct Ideas Come From?, Concerning Stalin’s ‘Economic Problems of Socialism in the USSR and, Critique of Stalin’s ‘Economic Problems of Socialism in the USSR.
However, although I was at the time making a break with the political norm pushed in my colonial British private school, I had been indoctrinated enough into standard thought on already existing socialism that I still viewed the process of the Chinese Revolution, including the Cultural Revolution, with a large degree of cynicism.
As such the natural direction that I first developed in was one more influenced by trends that ranged from critical to dismissive of the Chinese Revolution, especially anarcho-syndicalism and Trotskyism of one variant or another.
However since the summer of 2008, thanks in no small part to my engagement with comrades involved with the Kasama Project and Freedom Road Socialist Organization, I have begun a reassessment of my relationship to what was known first as “Mao Zedong Thought”, and later by many as “Maoism.”
RDF India: “Resist the Indian government’s war on the people! Stand by the struggling masses fighting for their land, life and livelihood!”
by 