#struggle for freedom and democracy day

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Palestine Masterlist 

Introduction to Palestine: 

Decolonize Palestine:

Palestine 101

Rainbow washing 

Frequently asked questions 

Myths 

IMEU (Institute for Middle East Understanding):

Quick Facts - The Palestinian Nakba 

The Nakba and Palestinian Refugees 

The Gaza Strip

The Palestinian catastrophe (Al-Nakba)

Al-Nakba (documentary)

The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine: A History of Settler Colonialism and Resistance, 1917-2017 (book)

The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine (book)

Nakba Day: What happened in Palestine in 1948? (Article)

The Nakba did not start or end in 1948 (Article)

Donations and charities: 

Al-Shabaka

Electronic Intifada 

Adalah Justice Project 

IMEU Fundraiser 

Medical Aid for Palestinians 

Palestine Children’s Relief Fund 

Addameer

Muslim Aid

Palestine Red Crescent

Gaza Mutual Aid Patreon

Books:

A New Critical Approach to the History of Palestine

The Idea of Israel: A History of Power and Knowledge

Hidden Histories: Palestine and the Eastern Mediterranean

The Balfour Declaration: Empire, the Mandate and Resistance in Palestine

Queer Palestine and the Empire of Critique

From Haven to Conquest: Readings in Zionism and the Palestine Problem until 1948

Captive Revolution - Palestinian Women's Anti-Colonial Struggle within the Israeli Prison System

Palestine: A Four Thousand Year History

Except for Palestine: The Limits of Progressive Politics

Before Their Diaspora: A Photographic History of The Palestinians 1876-1948

The Battle for Justice in Palestine Paperback

Uncivil Rites: Palestine and the Limits of Academic Freedom

Palestine Rising: How I survived the 1948 Deir Yasin Massacre

The Transformation of Palestine: Essays on the Origin and Development of the Arab-Israeli Conflict

A Land Without a People: Israel, Transfer, and the Palestinians 1949-1996

The Iron Cage: The Story of the Palestinian Struggle for Statehood

A History of Modern Palestine: One Land, Two Peoples

Where Now for Palestine?: The Demise of the Two-State Solution

Terrorist Assemblages - Homonationalism in Queer Times

Militarization and Violence against Women in Conflict Zones in the Middle East

The one-state solution: A breakthrough for peace in the Israeli-Palestinian deadlock

The Persistence of the Palestinian Question: Essays on Zionism and the Palestinians

Fateful Triangle: The United States, Israel and the Palestinians

The False Prophets of Peace: Liberal Zionism and the Struggle for Palestine

Ten myths about Israel

Blaming the Victims: Spurious Scholarship and the Palestinian Question

Israel and its Palestinian Citizens - Ethnic Privileges in the Jewish State

Palestinians in Israel: Segregation, Discrimination and Democracy

Greater than the Sum of Our Parts: Feminism, Inter/Nationalism, and Palestine

Palestine Hijacked 

Palestinian Culture:

Mountain against the Sea: Essays on Palestinian Society and Culture

Palestinian Costume

Traditional Palestinian Costume: Origins and Evolution

Tatreez & Tea: Embroidery and Storytelling in the Palestinian Diaspora

Embroidering Identities: A Century of Palestinian Clothing (Oriental Institute Museum Publications)

The Palestinian Table (Authentic Palestinian Recipes)

Falastin: A Cookbook

Palestine on a Plate: Memories from My Mother's Kitchen

Palestinian Social Customs and Traditions

Palestinian Culture before the Nakba

Tatreez & Tea (Website)

The Traditional Clothing of Palestine

The Palestinian thobe: A creative expression of national identity

Embroidering Identities:A Century of Palestinian Clothing

Palestine Traditional Costumes

Palestine Family 

Palestinian Costume

Encyclopedia of World Dress and Fashion, v5: Volume 5: Central and Southwest Asia

Tent Work in Palestine: A Record of Discovery and Adventure

Documentaries, Films, and Video Essays:

Jenin, Jenin

Born in Gaza

GAZA 

Wedding in Galilee 

Omar

5 Broken Cameras

OBAIDA

Indigeneity, Indigenous Liberation, and Settler Colonialism (not entirely about Palestine, but an important watch for indigenous struggles worldwide - including Palestine)

Edward Said - Reflections on Exile and Other Essays

Palestine Remix: 

AL NAKBA

Gaza Lives On

Gaza we are coming

Lost cities of Palestine 

Stories from the Intifada 

Last Shepherds of the Valley

Voices from Gaza

Muhammad Smiry

Najla Shawa

Nour Naim

Wael Al dahdouh

Motaz Azaiza

Ghassan Abu Sitta

Refaat Alareer (murdered by Israel - 12/7/2023. Inna lillahi wa inna ilayhi raji'un)

Plestia Alaqad

Bisan Owda

Ebrahem Ateef

Mohammed Zaanoun

Doaa Mohammad

Hind Khoudary

Palestinian Voices, Organizations, and News 

Boycott Divest and Sanction (BDS)

Defense for Children in Palestine

Palestine Legal 

Palestine Action

Palestine Action US

United Nations relief and works for Palestinian refugees in the Middle East (UNRWA)

National Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP)

Times of Gaza

Middle East Eye

Middle East Monitor

Mohammed El-Kurd

Muna El-Kurd 

Electronic Intifada 

Dr. Yara Hawari 

Mariam Barghouti

Omar Ghraieb

Steven Salaita

Noura Erakat

The Palestinian Museum N.G.

Palestine Museum US

Artists for Palestine UK 

Eye on Palestine 

[rotzaprachim]

essential reading.

Opinion - There is a Jewish Hope for Palestinian Liberation. It Must Survive. - by Peter Beinart

 And perhaps one day, when it finally becomes hideously clear that Hamas cannot free Palestinians by murdering children and Israel cannot subdue Gaza, even by razing it to the ground, those communities may become the germ of a mass movement for freedom that astonishes the world, as Black and white South Africans did decades ago. I’m confident I won’t live to see it. No gambler would stake a bet on it happening at all. But what’s the alternative, for those of us whose lives and histories are bound up with that small, ghastly, sacred place?

"In 1988, bombs exploded at restaurants, sporting events and arcades in South Africa. In response, the African National Congress, then in its 77th year of a struggle to overthrow white domination, did something remarkable: It accepted responsibility and pledged to prevent its fighters from conducting such operations in the future. Its logic was straightforward: Targeting civilians is wrong. “Our morality as revolutionaries,” the A.N.C. declared, “dictates that we respect the values underpinning the humane conduct of war.”

Historically, geographically and morally, the A.N.C. of 1988 is a universe away from the Hamas of 2023, so remote that its behavior may seem irrelevant to the horror that Hamas unleashed last weekend in southern Israel. But South Africa offers a counter-history, a glimpse into how ethical resistance works and how it can succeed. It offers not an instruction manual, but a place — in this season of agony and rage — to look for hope.

There was nothing inevitable about the A.N.C.’s policy, which, as Jeff Goodwin, a New York University sociologist, has documented, helped ensure that there was “so little terrorism in the anti-apartheid struggle.” So why didn’t the A.N.C. carry out the kind of gruesome massacres for which Hamas has become notorious? There’s no simple answer. But two factors are clear. First, the A.N.C.’s strategy for fighting apartheid was intimately linked to its vision of what should follow apartheid. It refused to terrify and traumatize white South Africans because it wasn’t trying to force them out. It was trying to win them over to a vision of a multiracial democracy.

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Second, the A.N.C. found it easier to maintain moral discipline — which required it to focus on popular, nonviolent resistance and use force only against military installations and industrial sites — because its strategy was showing signs of success. By 1988, when the A.N.C. expressed regret for killing civilians, more than 150 American universities had at least partially divested from companies doing business in South Africa, and the United States Congress had imposed sanctions on the apartheid regime. The result was a virtuous cycle: Ethical resistance elicited international support, and international support made ethical resistance easier to sustain.

In Israel today, the dynamic is almost exactly the opposite. Hamas, whose authoritarian, theocratic ideology could not be farther from the A.N.C.’s, has committed an unspeakable horror that may damage the Palestinian cause for decades to come. Yet when Palestinians resist their oppression in ethical ways — by calling for boycotts, sanctions and the application of international law — the United States and its allies work to ensure that those efforts fail, which convinces many Palestinians that ethical resistance doesn’t work, which empowers Hamas.

The savagery Hamas committed on Oct. 7 has made reversing this monstrous cycle much harder. It could take a generation. It will require a shared commitment to ending Palestinian oppression in ways that respect the infinite value of every human life. It will require Palestinians to forcefully oppose attacks on Jewish civilians, and Jews to support Palestinians when they resist oppression in humane ways — even though Palestinians and Jews who take such steps will risk making themselves pariahs among their own people. It will require new forms of political community, in Israel-Palestine and around the world, built around a democratic vision powerful enough to transcend tribal divides. The effort may fail. It has failed before. The alternative is to descend, flags waving, into hell.

As Jewish Israelis bury their dead and recite psalms for their captured, few want to hear at this moment that millions of Palestinians lack basic human rights. Neither do many Jews abroad. I understand; this attack has awakened the deepest traumas of our badly scarred people. But the truth remains: The denial of Palestinian freedom sits at the heart of this conflict, which began long before Hamas’s creation in the late 1980s.

Most of Gaza’s residents aren’t from Gaza. They’re the descendants of refugees who were expelled, or fled in fear, during Israel’s war of independence in 1948. They live in what Human Rights Watch has called an “open-air prison,” penned in by an Israeli state that — with help from Egypt — rations everything that goes in and out, from tomatoes to the travel documents children need to get lifesaving medical care. From this overcrowded cage, which the United Nations in 2017 declared “unlivable” for many residents in part because it lacks electricity and clean water, many Palestinians in Gaza can see the land that their parents and grandparents called home, though most may never step foot in it.

Palestinians in the West Bank are only slightly better off. For more than half a century, they have lived without due process, free movement, citizenship or the ability to vote for the government that controls their lives. Defenseless against an Israeli government that includes ministers openly committed to ethnic cleansing, many are being driven from their homes in what Palestinians compare to the mass expulsions of 1948. Americans and Israeli Jews have the luxury of ignoring these harsh realities. Palestinians do not. Indeed, the commander of Hamas’s military wing cited attacks on Palestinians in the West Bank in justifying its barbarism last weekend.

Just as Black South Africans resisted apartheid, Palestinians resist a system that has earned the same designation from the world’s leading human rights organizations and Israel’s own. After last weekend, some critics may claim Palestinians are incapable of resisting in ethical ways. But that’s not true. In 1936, during the British mandate, Palestinians began what some consider the longest anticolonial general strike in history. In 1976, on what became known as Land Day, thousands of Palestinian citizens demonstrated against the Israeli government’s seizure of Palestinian property in Israel’s north. The first intifada against Israel’s occupation of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, which lasted from roughly 1987 to 1993, consisted primarily of nonviolent boycotts of Israeli goods and a refusal to pay Israeli taxes. While some Palestinians threw stones and Molotov cocktails, armed attacks were rare, even in the face of an Israeli crackdown that took more than 1,000 Palestinian lives. In 2005, 173 Palestinian civil society organizations asked “people of conscience all over the world to impose broad boycotts and implement divestment initiatives against Israel similar to those applied to South Africa in the apartheid era.”

But in the United States, Palestinians received little credit for trying to follow Black South Africans’ largely nonviolent path. Instead, the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement’s call for full equality, including the right of Palestinian refugees to return home, was widely deemed antisemitic because it conflicts with the idea of a state that favors Jews.

It is true that these nonviolent efforts sit uncomfortably alongside an ugly history of civilian massacres: the murder of 67 Jews in Hebron in 1929 by local Palestinians after Haj Amin al-Husseini, the grand mufti of Jerusalem, claimed Jews were about to seize Al Aqsa Mosque; the airplane hijackings of the late 1960s and 1970s carried out primarily by the leftist Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine and Yasir Arafat’s nationalist Fatah faction; the 1972 assassination of Israeli athletes in Munich carried out by the Palestinian organization Black September; and the suicide bombings of the 1990s and 2000s conducted by Hamas, Palestinian Islamic Jihad and Fatah’s Aqsa Martyrs Brigades, whose victims included a friend of mine in rabbinical school who I dreamed might one day officiate my wedding.

And yet it is essential to remember that some Palestinians courageously condemned this inhuman violence. In 1979, Edward Said, the famed literary critic, declared himself “horrified at the hijacking of planes, the suicidal missions, the assassinations, the bombing of schools and hotels.” Rashid Khalidi, a Palestinian American historian, called the suicide bombings of the second intifada “a war crime.” After Hamas’s attack last weekend, a member of the Israeli parliament, Ayman Odeh, among the most prominent leaders of Israel’s Palestinian citizens, declared, “It is absolutely forbidden to accept any attacks on the innocent.”Tragically, this vision of ethical resistance is being repudiated by some pro-Palestinian activists in the United States. In a statement last week, National Students for Justice in Palestine, which represents more than 250 Palestinian solidarity groups in North America, called Hamas’s attack “a historic win for the Palestinian resistance” that proves that “total return and liberation to Palestine is near” and added, “from Rhodesia to South Africa to Algeria, no settler colony can hold out forever.” One of its posters featured a paraglider that some Hamas fighters used to enter Israel.

The reference to Algeria reveals the delusion underlying this celebration of abduction and murder. After eight years of hideous war, Algeria’s settlers returned to France. But there will be no Algerian solution in Israel-Palestine. Israel is too militarily powerful to be conquered. More fundamentally, Israeli Jews have no home country to which to return. They are already home.

Mr. Said understood this. “The Israeli Jew is there in the Middle East,” he advised Palestinians in 1974, “and we cannot, I might even say that we must not, pretend that he will not be there tomorrow, after the struggle is over.” The Jewish “attachment to the land,” he added, “is something we must face.” Because Mr. Said saw Israeli Jews as something other than mere colonizers, he understood the futility — as well as the immorality — of trying to terrorize them into flight.

The failure of Hamas and its American defenders to recognize that will make it much harder for Jews and Palestinians to resist together in ethical ways. Before last Saturday, it was possible, with some imagination, to envision a joint Palestinian-Jewish struggle for the mutual liberation of both peoples. There were glimmers in the protest movement against Benjamin Netanyahu’s judicial overhaul, through which more and more Israeli Jews grasped a connection between the denial of rights to Palestinians and the assault on their own. And there were signs in the United States, where almost 40 percent of American Jews under the age of 40 told the Jewish Electoral Institute in 2021 that they considered Israel an apartheid state. More Jews in the United States, and even Israel, were beginning to see Palestinian liberation as a form of Jewish liberation as well.

That potential alliance has now been gravely damaged. There are many Jews willing to join Palestinians in a movement to end apartheid, even if doing so alienates us from our communities, and in some cases, our families. But we will not lock arms with people who cheer the kidnapping or murder of a Jewish child.

The struggle to persuade Palestinian activists to repudiate Hamas’s crimes, affirm a vision of mutual coexistence and continue the spirit of Mr. Said and the A.N.C. will be waged inside the Palestinian camp. The role of non-Palestinians is different: to help create the conditions that allow ethical resistance to succeed.

Palestinians are not fundamentally different from other people facing oppression: When moral resistance doesn’t work, they try something else. In 1972, the Northern Ireland Civil Rights Association, which was modeled on the civil rights movement in the United States, organized a march to oppose imprisonment without trial. Although some organizations, most notably the Provisional Irish Republican Army, had already embraced armed resistance, they grew stronger after British soldiers shot 26 unarmed civilians in what became known as Bloody Sunday. By the early 1980s, the Irish Republican Army had even detonated a bomb outside Harrods, the department store in London. As Kirssa Cline Ryckman, a political scientist, observed in a 2019 paper on why certain movements turn violent, a lack of progress in peaceful protest “can encourage the use of violence by convincing demonstrators that nonviolence will fail to achieve meaningful concessions.”

Israel, with America’s help, has done exactly that. It has repeatedly undermined Palestinians who sought to end Israel’s occupation through negotiations or nonviolent pressure. As part of the 1993 Oslo Accords, the Palestine Liberation Organization renounced violence and began working with Israel — albeit imperfectly — to prevent attacks on Israelis, something that revolutionary groups like the A.N.C. and the Irish Republican Army never did while their people remained under oppression. At first, as Khalil Shikaki, a Palestinian political scientist, has detailed, Palestinians supported cooperation with Israel because they thought it would deliver them a state. In early 1996, Palestinian support for the Oslo process reached 80 percent while support for violence against Israelis dropped to 20 percent.

The 1996 election of Benjamin Netanyahu, and the failure of Israel and its American patron to stop settlement growth, however, curdled Palestinian sentiment. Many Jewish Israelis believe that Ehud Barak, who succeeded Mr. Netanyahu, offered Palestinians a generous deal in 2000. Most Palestinians, however, saw Mr. Barak’s offer as falling far short of a fully sovereign state along the 1967 lines. And their disillusionment with a peace process that allowed Israel to entrench its hold over the territory on which they hoped to build their new country ushered in the violence of the second intifada. In Mr. Shikaki’s words, “The loss of confidence in the ability of the peace process to deliver a permanent agreement on acceptable terms had a dramatic impact on the level of Palestinian support for violence against Israelis.” As Palestinians abandoned hope, Hamas gained power.

After the brutal years of the second intifada, in which Hamas and other Palestinian armed groups repeatedly targeted Israeli civilians, President Mahmoud Abbas of the Palestinian Authority and Salam Fayyad, his prime minister from 2007 to 2013, worked to restore security cooperation and prevent anti-Israeli violence once again. Yet again, the strategy failed. The same Israeli leaders who applauded Mr. Fayyad undermined him in back rooms by funding the settlement growth that convinced Palestinians that security cooperation was bringing them only deepening occupation. Mr. Fayyad, in an interview with The Times’s Roger Cohen before he left office in 2013, admitted that because the “occupation regime is more entrenched,” Palestinians “question whether the P.A. can deliver. Meanwhile, Hamas gains recognition and is strengthened.”

As Palestinians lost faith that cooperation with Israel could end the occupation, many appealed to the world to hold Israel accountable for its violation of their rights. In response, both Democratic and Republican presidents have worked diligently to ensure that these nonviolent efforts fail. Since 1997, the United States has vetoed more than a dozen United Nations Security Council resolutions criticizing Israel for its actions in the West Bank and Gaza. This February, even as Israel’s far-right government was beginning a huge settlement expansion, the Biden administration reportedly wielded a veto threat to drastically dilute a Security Council resolution that would have condemned settlement growth.

Washington’s response to the International Criminal Court’s efforts to investigate potential Israeli war crimes is equally hostile. Despite lifting sanctions that the Trump administration imposed on I.C.C. officials investigating the United States’s conduct in Afghanistan, the Biden team remains adamantly opposed to any I.C.C. investigation into Israel’s actions.

The Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement, or B.D.S., which was founded in 2005 as a nonviolent alternative to the murderous second intifada and which speaks in the language of human rights and international law, has been similarly stymied, including by many of the same American politicians who celebrated the movement to boycott, divest from and sanction South Africa. Joe Biden, who is proud of his role in passing sanctions against South Africa, has condemned the B.D.S. movement, saying it “too often veers into antisemitism.” About 35 states — some of which once divested state funds from companies doing business in apartheid South Africa — have passed laws or issued executive orders punishing companies that boycott Israel. In many cases, those punishments apply even to businesses that boycott only Israeli settlements in the West Bank.

Palestinians have noticed. In the words of Dana El Kurd, a Palestinian American political scientist, “Palestinians have lost faith in the efficacy of nonviolent protest as well as the possible role of the international community.” Mohammed Deif, the commander of Hamas’s military wing, cited this disillusionment during last Saturday’s attack. “In light of the orgy of occupation and its denial of international laws and resolutions, and in light of American and Western support and international silence,” he declared, “we’ve decided to put an end to all this.”

Hamas — and no one else — bears the blame for its sadistic violence. But it can carry out such violence more easily, and with less backlash from ordinary Palestinians, because even many Palestinians who loathe the organization have lost hope that moral strategies can succeed. By treating Israel radically differently from how the United States treated South Africa in the 1980s, American politicians have made it harder for Palestinians to follow the A.N.C.’s ethical path. The Americans who claim to hate Hamas the most have empowered it again and again.

Israelis have just witnessed the greatest one-day loss of Jewish life since the Holocaust. For Palestinians, especially in Gaza, where Israel has now ordered more than one million people in the north to leave their homes, the days to come are likely to bring dislocation and death on a scale that should haunt the conscience of the world. Never in my lifetime have the prospects for justice and peace looked more remote. Yet the work of moral rebuilding must begin. In Israel-Palestine and around the world, pockets of Palestinians and Jews, aided by people of conscience of all backgrounds, must slowly construct networks of trust based on the simple principle that the lives of both Palestinians and Jews are precious and inextricably intertwined.

Israel desperately needs a genuinely Jewish and Palestinian political party, not because it can win power but because it can model a politics based on common liberal democratic values, not tribe. American Jews who rightly hate Hamas but know, in their bones, that Israel’s treatment of Palestinians is profoundly wrong must ask themselves a painful question: What nonviolent forms of Palestinian resistance to oppression will I support? More Palestinians and their supporters must express revulsion at the murder of innocent Israeli Jews and affirm that Palestinian liberation means living equally alongside them in safety and freedom.

From those reckonings, small, beloved communities can be born, and grow. And perhaps one day, when it finally becomes hideously clear that Hamas cannot free Palestinians by murdering children and Israel cannot subdue Gaza, even by razing it to the ground, those communities may become the germ of a mass movement for freedom that astonishes the world, as Black and white South Africans did decades ago. I’m confident I won’t live to see it. No gambler would stake a bet on it happening at all. But what’s the alternative, for those of us whose lives and histories are bound up with that small, ghastly, sacred place?

Like many others who care about the lives of both Palestinians and Jews, I have felt in recent days the greatest despair I have ever known. On Wednesday, a Palestinian friend sent me a note of consolation. She ended it with the words “only together.” Maybe that can be our motto.

[kokote]

The Korean War, which broke out on June 25, 1950, followed the example set by the United States during World War II of massive bombing campaigns targeting civilians and civilian infrastructure. Nevertheless, throughout the war, American leaders claimed that U.S. airstrikes were being used in a “discriminate manner,” avoiding harm to civilians.

During the war, the American military stretched the term “military target” to include virtually all human-made structures. Under this logic, almost any building could serve a military purpose, even a minor one. Nearly all of the civilian infrastructure on the side of North Korea was deemed a military target and open to attack.

“More than 428,000 bombs were dropped on Pyongyang alone, the number more than that of Pyongyang citizens at that time. The U.S. had completely reduced the whole territory of Korea into ashes by showering bombs of nearly 600,000 tons, 3.7 times greater than those dropped on Japan during the Pacific War, even using napalm bombs prohibited by the international conventions."

On December 15, 1950, under the guise of preventing the “communist imperialist” threat to world peace and the liberties the American people enjoy, President Truman declared a state of emergency and the necessity to increase the military budget given the “recent events” in Korea. About a month later, on January 15, 1951, Truman requested from Congress 71.5 billion dollars (840 billion dollars today, adjusted for inflation) for a new defense budget.

President Truman’s December 15 proclamation stated:

“whereas if the goal of communist imperialism were to be achieved, the people of this country would not longer enjoy the full and rich life they have with God's help built for themselves and their children; they would no longer enjoy the blessings of the freedom of worshiping as they severally choose, the freedom of reading and listening to what they choose, the right of free speech including the right to criticize their Government, the right to choose those who conduct their Government, the right to engage freely in collective bargaining, the right to engage freely in their own business enterprises, and the many other freedoms and rights which are a part of our way of life…”

Despite the U.S. state narrative, the U.S. sought the division of Korea to secure and advance U.S. political and economic interests in Northeast Asia, economically and militarily expanding into new markets and puppet states for cheap labor and resources.

Korea and its proximity to Northeast Asia represents strategic importance to the U.S., and the Middle East occupies just as important, if not a greater position, in U.S. geopolitical interests. Access to cheap oil is essential for the economy of the U.S., and since 1945, the U.S. has made continuous and sustained efforts to secure its grip on the region.

Back in 1948, the same year the United States divided Korea into North and South, the U.S. became the first country to recognize the state of Israel over the land of Palestine. From 1948 until this day, Israel has received more than $280 billion in direct military assistance and economic support, making it the largest recipient of U.S. foreign aid. Israel has U.S. interests in formulating its foreign policy. U.S. and Israeli military presence furthers its economic interest in oil, controlling the trade route of the Suez Canal, and maintaining a monopoly on the extraction of resources from the Middle East.

The U.S. genocidal support for Israel’s crimes is not out of the ordinary. Israel is a carbon copy of what the U.S. did to the indigenous people of Turtle Island, and all the crimes it has since committed against anti-colonial struggles in the global south in the name of “freedom” and "democracy." Israel is a continuation of American and European capitalist expansion post-World War II and its project of European white supremacist dominance over the world. 

Their methods and lies for destruction are all the same. The U.S. pays, the media lies, and civilians are gunned down in the name of “peace”.  

Today Palestine shows the world the truth and depth of American intervention and imperialism overseas. 

[southeastasianists]

Asia’s youngest nation emerges as a voice of conscience on Myanmar

Two decades ago, freedom fighters on a mountainous island in southern Indonesia won a long, bloody struggle against a corrupt military regime, establishing East Timor, also known as Timor-Leste, the first independent state of the 21st century. Memories of airstrikes and indiscriminate killings are still fresh here. And they’ve led the country’s leaders to take an unusual interest in another fight for freedom in Southeast Asia.

In 2021, a group of generals overturned an elected government in Myanmar, formerly known as Burma, starting a civil war that some conflict monitoring groups consider the most extreme in the world today. Many countries have looked away — much as they did for 24 years, East Timor’s leaders say, as Indonesian soldiers fought Timorese independence fighters.

“For so long, nobody paid attention to us,” Xanana Gusmao, the prime minister of East Timor, said during an interview in the capital, Dili.Gusmao led the insurgency against the Indonesian military, later serving two terms as East Timor’s president and now, his second as prime minister. At 77, with a head of white hair and a stiff back from years of imprisonment, he still remembers every person he saw killed or tortured in the jungles of Timor, he said.

“I do not accept the suffering of the Burmese people,” Gusmao said. “I cannot.”

Many in East Timor, even opposition politicians and civil society leaders critical of Gusmao on other issues,said in interviews that they agree. The country of 1.3 million, with an economy one-seventh the size of Vermont, has gone further than almost any other in supporting the Myanmar resistance, receiving its leaders as state representatives and openly advocating on their behalf at international forums.In the coming months, East Timor will let Myanmar pro-democracy groups open offices in the country to help coordinate resistance activities and take in a number of political refugees, officials say.

Increasingly, human rights activists say they see Dili as a voice of conscience, challenging more powerful countries that have been too distracted or too divided to press for change in Myanmar. “What the Timorese are doing is vital,” said Debbie Stothard, a Malaysian rights advocate.

Regional inaction

The U.N. Security Council has repeatedly called on Myanmar’s military government to comply with a peace plan adopted by the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN), and Western officials, including from the United States and the European Union, have also cited that plan for resolving the conflict.

But ASEAN, which operates on a principle of “noninterference” and includes Myanmar as a member, has largely failed to convince the junta to cooperate.

In 2021, ASEAN adopted the “Five-Point Consensus” on Myanmar, which calls for a cessation of violence and a dialogue among all parties. The junta signed the plan but has ignored it with little consequence. The military has ramped up airstrikes to a rate of nearly once a day, according to conflict monitoring groups, and faces mounting allegations from human rights groups of carrying out mass killings, beheadings and other atrocities. Myanmar has declined invitations from ASEAN to meet with resistance leaders.

“The five-point consensus has failed,” said Saifuddin Abdullah, who served until last year as foreign minister for Malaysia, an ASEAN member. The plan, which has no enforcement measures, is being disregarded not only by the Myanmar government but by other ASEAN members, Abdullah said.

In April, Thailand’s foreign minister traveled to Myanmar and met with junta leader Gen. Min Aung Hlaing without notifying other ASEAN members. Thailand, which borders Myanmar, has also hosted secret meetings with junta officials and mooted the idea of ASEAN “fully re-engaging” military leaders.

By normalizing relations with the Myanmar opposition, East Timor is trying to pull the region in the opposite direction — but at some risk to itself. The country is in the final stages of negotiating admission into the bloc and was allowed last year to attend meetings as an “observer.” Its outspoken stance on Myanmar could jeopardize its application or otherwise alienate some of its neighbors, analysts say.

East Timor can’t afford to be excluded from ASEAN, Gusmao admitted. With more than 40 percent of its population living in poverty, the country is in dire need of foreign investment. It has 15 years to find an alternative to its dwindling petroleum revenue, according to the International Monetary Fund, and has struggled since independence to feed its people,a problem set only to worsen with climate change.

At the same time, political scientists say, the country’s history has made it particularly sensitive to authoritarianism. East Timor has become probably the most robust democracy in Southeast Asia, according to experts.It’s the only country in the region ranked “free” by the think tank Freedom House and was recently listed 10th in the world for press freedom by Reporters Without Borders.

Smoking as he paced a meeting room in Dili’s government palace, Gusmao said that when he watches extensive coverage of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine on television, he often thinks about suffering elsewhere, in Yemen, Somalia, Myanmar. Powerful countries aren’t obliged to care about crises that don’t affect them, Gusmao said.

Among small, fragile nations, he added, “all we have is our solidarity.”

A diplomat expelled

When Gusmao was inaugurated in Dili two months ago, a visitor from Myanmar was seated in the front row alongside cabinet ministers and diplomats from various countries. It was Zin Mar Aung, foreign minister for Myanmar’s National Unity Government (NUG), formed in opposition to the junta after the coup.

That event marked the first time any country had formally received an NUG official and sparked indignation from Myanmar’s military government, which demanded that Dili cut contact with what it called “terrorist groups.” The following month, when East Timor hosted a second NUG official in Dili, the junta expelled Avelino Pereira, East Timor’s top diplomat in Myanmar.

While some countries have downgraded diplomatic relations with Myanmar, the junta had not thrown out any foreign representatives until Pereira and hasn’t since.When other governments meet with opposition officials, they’ve done so privately or informally. Dili’s actions were “public and senior level barbs” at the junta, said a Western embassy official in Yangon, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because that person had not been given authority to speak on the issue.

“It showed great courage,” said Aung Myo Min, the NUG’s minister for human rights, the second opposition official to visit Dili. “It empowers us to know we’re not alone.”

Some Timorese officials worry Pereira’s expulsion could affect the country’s ASEAN bid. But President Jose Ramos-Horta, who was behind both invitations to the Myanmar opposition figures, said he was unperturbed. “It was an honor,” he said, eyes crinkling behind dark Ray-Ban sunglasses during a recent interview as he was traveling between official engagements in Dili.

Ramos-Horta, who shares the 1996 Nobel Peace Prize with Bishop Carlos Filipe Ximenes Belo for his opposition of Indonesian oppression, led the “diplomatic front” for East Timor’s sovereignty. Over years, Ramos-Horta formed alliances with activists from other countries, including Myanmar.

In recognizing Myanmar’s opposition government, Ramos-Horta, 73, said he was paying back the support that Myanmar pro-democracy groups gave East Timor. But he was also, he said,acting in line with historical precedent: During World War II, the Allied powers recognized Free France, a government in exile, over the Vichy government that collaborated with Nazi Germany.

“Are we supposed to accept the norm that elections can be disregarded?” asked Ramos-Horta. “The answer, at least for us, is no.”

‘Who is listening?’

When Gusmao attended the semiannual ASEAN summit in August, he was feeling contrite, he said.

He’d been chided by his staff a few weeks earlier for saying East Timor would reconsider its ASEAN application if the bloc couldn’t end the violence in Myanmar. Those were “uncontrolled” remarks, he reflected later, and at the summit in Jakarta, he had intended to stick to his prepared speeches.

But faced with leaders from the United States, China and Russia, Gusmao decided again to go off-script. News reports had said Aung San Suu Kyi, Myanmar’s deposed civilian leader, was ill, Gusmao told the room. The junta should provide medical care, he appealed. No one responded.

“We will speak out, always. But we are a small country,” Gusmao said as he recounted the incident. “Who is listening?”

Diplomats and aid workersin Dili say Gusmao and Ramos-Horta might have a bigger impact than they know. The two leaders have allies in places from Europe to Africa, and they command respect as that rare breed of statesmen who fought for freedom and won, said Olufunmilayo Abosede Balogun-Alexander, the U.N. resident coordinator for East Timor. On the world stage, she added, “they have an outsize voice.”

Earlier this year, at the World Economic Forum meeting in Davos, Switzerland, Ramos-Horta said he watched as heads of state and chief executives rose one after another to lambaste Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and rally Western governments to supply Kyiv with weapons. He was stunned, he remembered, that virtually no one mentioned Myanmar.

“Next year, I will,” said Ramos-Horta, days before departing for the U.N. General Assembly session last month in New York, where he again met with the NUG. “I will say something,” he continued. “So at least people there will hear the word, ‘Myanmar.’”

[pettania]

Today, Ukrainians mark the Remembrance Day of the Heavenly Hundred Heroes who sacrificed their lives during the heroic and tragic events of the Revolution of Dignity. It became a turning point in Ukraine's national struggle for democracy, freedom, and a European future.

February 18-22, 2014, turned into the most violent phase of the Revolution. The special police units beat protesters, and snipers were stationed on the roofs, targeting people. February 20 in Kyiv became known as "Bloody Thursday". On this day, snipers killed 48 protesters. In total, 107 Ukrainians gave their life during the Revolution of Dignity and would later be known as the "Heavenly Hundred".

Today, we still pay a heavy price for the right to determine our future. But the heroism and self-sacrifice of the Heavenly Hundred inspire us to fight against the aggressor for independent, united, strong, and democratic Ukraine.

[andmaybegayer]

It's Struggle for Freedom and Democracy day so there's Events on Národní Třída.

a solid 75% of the photos I took today are unusable because of focus and low light problems I really gotta get one of those mirrorless things going.

[mariacallous]

The 2023 Nobel Peace Prize has been awarded to jailed Iranian activist Narges Mohammadi for “her fight against the oppression of women in Iran and her fight to promote human rights and freedom for all,” the Norwegian Nobel Committee announced in Oslo on Friday.

Mohammadi, 51, has been sentenced to more than 30 years in prison, and has been banned from seeing her husband and children. Her name has become synonymous with the battle for human rights in Iran, where nationwide protests broke out last year following the death of Mahsa Amini. Amini was a 22-year-old woman who had been taken into custody by the regime’s notorious morality police.

In awarding the prize to Mohammadi, the Nobel Committee said it “recognizes the hundreds of thousands of people who in the preceding year have demonstrated against the theocratic regimes’ policies of discrimination and oppression targeting women.”

“Her brave struggle has come with tremendous personal costs. Altogether, the regime has arrested her 13 times, convicted her five times, and sentenced her to a total of 31 years in prison, and 154 lashes,” Norwegian Nobel Committee chair Berit Reiss-Andersen said at the announcement ceremony.

“Ms. Mohammadi is still in prison as I speak,” Reiss-Andersen added.

Mohammadi said she will continue striving for “democracy, freedom, and equality” in a message shared with CNN by her family on Wednesday, to be released in case she won the prize.

It is not clear whether Mohammadi knows about her win. Her friends and family told CNN that those detained in Iran’s notorious Evin Prison are not allowed to receive calls on Thursdays and Fridays.

In the statement, Mohammadi said she would stay in Iran to continue her activism “even if I spend the rest of my life in prison.”

“Standing alongside the brave mothers of Iran, I will continue to fight against the relentless discrimination, tyranny, and gender-based oppression by the oppressive religious government until the liberation of women,” she said.

Taghi Rahmani, Mohammadi’s husband, told CNN that the prize is “for all the people of Iran.” Rahmani, a fellow activist and former political prisoner who served a total of 14 years in regime jails, lives in exile in France with their twin children.

“This prize is not just for Narges; it is for all the people of Iran. A movement in which Iranian women and men took to the streets, stood for months, and fought to show that they will continue to struggle for democracy and civil equality,” Rahmani said.

In a separate statement to CNN, Mohammadi’s family said: “Although the years of her absence can never be compensated for us, the reality is that the honor of recognizing Narges’ efforts for peace is a source of solace for our indescribable suffering. “It has been more than eight and a half years since she has seen her children, and she has not heard their voices for over a year. All of this signifies what she has endured on the path to realizing her aspirations. Therefore, for us, who know that the Nobel Peace Prize will aid her in achieving her goals, this day is a blessed day,” the family statement added.

Incarcerated, but not silenced

Despite being jailed, not even the dark cells of Tehran’s Evin Prison have crushed Mohammadi’s powerful voice.

In an audio recording from inside the jail, shared with CNN ahead of Friday’s announcement, Mohammadi, is heard leading the chants of “woman, life, freedom” – the slogan of the uprising sparked last year by Amini’s death. Amini was arrested for allegedly not wearing her headscarf properly.

The recording is interrupted by a brief automated message – “This is a phone call from Evin Prison” – as the women are heard singing a Farsi rendition of “Bella Ciao,” the 19th-century Italian folk song that became a resistance anthem against fascism and has been adopted by Iran’s freedom movement.

“This period was and still is the era of greatest protest in this prison,” Mohammadi told CNN in written responses to questions submitted through intermediaries.

Mohammadi was one of 351 candidates for this year’s award – the second-highest number in the history of the Nobels. She became the 19th woman to win the award in more than 120 years of the prize.

Oleksandra Matviichuk, a Ukrainian human rights lawyers who won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2022, commended the committee’s decision to honor Mohammadi.

“We live in a very interconnected world. Right now, people in Iran are fighting for freedom. Our future depends on their success,” Matviichuk posted on the social media platform X, formerly known as Twitter.

At Friday’s news conference announcing the award, Reiss-Andersen said: “Only by embracing equal rights for all can the world achieve the fraternity between nations that Alfred Nobel sought to promote,”

“The award to Narges Mohammadi follows a long tradition in which the Norwegian Nobel Committee has awarded the Peace Prize to those working to advance social justice, human rights and democracy. These are important preconditions for lasting peace,” she added.

‘Woman, life, freedom’

Henrik Urdal, director of the Peace Research Institute Oslo, described Mohammadi’s win as “a tremendous achievement for women’s rights in Iran.”

“Women in the country have been fighting for equality and freedom for generations, and the death of Mahsa Amini became a catalyst against oppression and violence,” Urdal said in a statement to CNN.

“Today’s laureate, unfairly jailed in Tehran, sends a powerful message to the leaders of Iran that women’s rights are fundamental everywhere in the world,” he said.

Mohammadi’s recognition comes after a year of huge upheaval in Iran, sparked by Amini’s death, which swelled into nationwide protests lasting months. Reiss-Andersen described the unrest as “the largest political demonstrations against Iran’s theocratic regime since it came to power in 1979.”

They were met by a brutal government crackdown. “More than 500 demonstrators were killed. Thousands were injured, including many who were blinded by rubber bullets fired by the police. At least 20,000 people were arrested and held in custody,” Reiss-Andersen said.

Last month marked the one-year anniversary of Amini’s death. Video obtained by CNN showed further demonstrations throughout multiple cities in Iran, including capital Tehran, Mashad, Ahvaz, Lahijan, Arak and the Kurdish city of Senandaj.

Many of the protesters shouted “Woman, Life, Freedom,” and others chanted slogans against Iranian Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei.

The long road to the Nobel

Mohammadi, who studied for a degree in physics at Imam Khomeini International University in the 1990s, initially worked as an engineer, while writing columns for reformist Iranian newspapers, Berit Reiss-Andersen said at Friday’s news conference.

In 2003, she joined the Defenders of Human Rights Center in Iran, an organization founded by the Nobel Peace Prize laureate Shirin Ebadi.

Mohammadi was arrested for the first time in 2011 and convicted in part because of her membership of the Defenders of Human Rights Center. After being released on bail two years later, Mohammadi began to campaign against the use of the death penalty.

“Iran has long been among the countries that execute the highest proportion of their inhabitants annually,” the committee acknowledged. Since January last year, more than 860 prisoners have been punished by death in the country.

Mohammadi was arrested and sentenced again in 2015 for her activism against capital punishment. But her work continued from inside Evin, as she began to oppose human rights abuses committed against political prisoners.

CNN reported last year on how Iran’s security forces used rape to quell the protests that broke out after the death of Amini.

With media access inside Iran severely constrained, CNN went to the region near Iraq’s border with Iran, interviewing eyewitnesses who had left the country and verifying accounts from survivors and sources both in and outside Iran, to corroborate several reports of sexual violence against protesters.

One Kurdish-Iranian woman, whom CNN is calling Hana for her safety, says she both witnessed and suffered sexual violence while detained. “There were girls who were sexually assaulted and then transferred to other cities,” she said.

Iranian officials did not respond to CNN’s request for comment on the alleged abuses.

Since the anniversary of Amini’s death, Iran has continued its crackdown on women’s rights. Its parliament passed draconian new legislation in September, imposing much harsher penalties on women who breach hijab laws. The so-called “hijab bill,” which will be enacted for a three-year trial period, sets out various regulations around the wearing of clothing, which if violated can carry up to 10 years in prison.

UN experts said the new law could amount to “gender apartheid.”

“Authorities appear to be governing through systemic discrimination with the intention of suppressing women and girls into total submission,” the experts said in a statement.

[religion-is-a-mental-illness]

By: Matt Johnson

Published: Jan 27, 2023

“Christopher Hitchens: From socialist to neocon.” It was an irresistible headline because it’s a story that has been told over and over again. The novelist Julian Barnes called this phenomenon the “ritual shuffle to the right.” Richard Seymour, who wrote a book-length attack on Hitchens, says his subject belongs to a “recognisable type: a left-wing defector with a soft spot for empire.” By presenting Hitchens as a tedious archetype, hobbling away from radicalism and toward some inevitable reactionary terminus, his opponents didn’t have to contend with his arguments or confront the potentially destabilizing fact that some of his principles called their own into question.

Hitchens, who died in 2011, didn’t make it easy on the apostate hunters. To many, he was a “coarser version of [conservative commentator] Norman Podhoretz” when he talked about Iraq, and a radical humanist truth-teller when he went on Fox News to lambaste the Christian right: “If you gave Falwell an enema,” he told Sean Hannity the day after Jerry Falwell’s death, “he could be buried in a matchbox.” Then he gave Islam the same treatment, and he was suddenly a drooling neocon again. He defied easy categorization: a socialist who spurned ideology, an internationalist who became a patriot, a man of the left who was reviled by the left.

The left isn’t a single amorphous entity—it’s a vast constellation of (often conflicting) ideas and principles. Hitchens’s style of left-wing radicalism is now out of fashion, but it has a long and venerable history: George Orwell’s unwavering opposition to totalitarianism and censorship, Bayard Rustin’s advocacy for universal civil rights without appealing to tribalism and identity politics, the post-communist anti-totalitarianism that emerged on the European left in the second half of the twentieth century.

Hitchens described himself as a “First Amendment absolutist,” an echo of historic left-wing struggles for free expression—from Eugene V. Debs’s assertion of his right to dissent during World War I to the Berkeley Free Speech Movement. Hitchens argued that unfettered free speech and inquiry would always make civil society stronger. When he wrote the introduction to his collection of essays For the Sake of Argument in 1993, he had a specific left-wing tradition in mind: the left of Orwell and Victor Serge and C.L.R. James, which simultaneously opposed Stalinism, fascism, and imperialism in the twentieth century, and which stood for “individual and collective emancipation, self-determination and internationalism.”

Hitchens’ most fundamental political and moral conviction was universalism. He loathed nationalism and argued that the international system should be built around a “common standard for justice and ethics”—a standard that should apply to Henry Kissinger just as it should apply to Slobodan Milošević and Saddam Hussein. He believed in the concept of global citizenship, which is why he firmly supported international institutions like the European Union. He didn’t just despise religion because he regarded it as a form of totalitarianism—he also recognized that it’s an infinitely replenishable wellspring of tribal hatred.

He also opposed identity politics, because he didn’t think our social and civic lives should be reduced to rigid categories based on melanin, X chromosomes, and sexuality. He recognized that the Enlightenment values of individual rights, freedom of expression and conscience, humanism, pluralism, and democracy are universal—they provide the most stable, just, and rational foundation for any civil society, whether they’re observed in America or Europe or Iraq.

And yes, he argued that these values are for export. Hitchens believed in universal human rights. This is why, at a time when his comrades were still manning the barricades against the “imperial” West after the Cold War, he argued that the North Atlantic Treaty Organization should intervene to stop a genocidal assault on Bosnia. It’s why he argued that American power could be used to defend human rights and promote democracy. As many on the Western left built their politics around incessant condemnations of their own societies as racist, exploitative, oligarchic, and imperialistic, Hitchens recognized the difference between self-criticism and self-flagellation.

-

One of the reasons Orwell accumulated many left-wing enemies in his time was the fact that his criticisms of his own “side” were grounded in authentic left-wing principles. When he argued that many socialists had no connection to or understanding of the actual working class in Britain, the observation stung because it was true. Orwell’s arguments continue to sting today. In his 1945 essay “Notes on Nationalism,” he criticized the left-wing intellectuals who enjoy “seeing their own country humiliated” and “follow the principle that any faction backed by Britain must be in the wrong.” Among some of these intellectuals, Orwell wrote: “One finds that they do not by any means express impartial disapproval but are directed almost entirely against Britain and the United States. Moreover they do not as a rule condemn violence as such, but only violence used in defense of the Western countries.”

Hitchens observed that many on today’s left are motivated by the same principle: “Nothing will make us fight against an evil if that fight forces us to go to the same corner as our own government.” This is a predictable manifestation of what the American political theorist Michael Walzer calls the “default position” of the left: a purportedly “anti-imperialist and anti-militarist” position inclined toward the view that “everything that goes wrong in the world is America’s fault.”

Indeed, the tendency to ignore and rationalize even the most egregious violence and authoritarianism abroad in favor of an obsessive emphasis on the crimes and blunders of Western governments has become a reflex. Much of the left has been captured by a strange mix of sectarian and authoritarian impulses: a myopic emphasis on identitarianism and group rights over the individual; an orientation toward subjectivity and tribalism over objectivity and universalism; and demands for political orthodoxy enforced by repressive tactics like the suppression of speech.

These left-wing pathologies are particularly corrosive today because they give right-wing nationalists and populists on both sides of the Atlantic—whose rise over the past several years has been characterized by hostility to democratic norms and institutions, rampant xenophobia, and other forms of illiberalism—an opportunity to claim that those who oppose them are the true authoritarians. Hitchens was prescient about the ascendance of right-wing populism in the West, from the emergence of demagogues who exploit cultural grievances and racial resentments to the bitter parochialism of “America First” nationalism. He understood that the left could only defeat these noxious political forces by rediscovering its best traditions: support for free expression, pluralism, and universalism—the values of the Enlightenment.

Hitchens closes his book Why Orwell Matters with the following observation: “What he [Orwell] illustrates, by his commitment to language as the partner of truth, is that ‘views’ do not really count; that it matters not what you think, but how you think; and that politics are relatively unimportant, while principles have a way of enduring, as do the few irreducible individuals who maintain allegiance to them.” Despite the pervasive idea that Hitchens exchanged one set of convictions for another by the end of his life, his commitment to his core principles never wavered. They are principles that today’s left must rediscover.

Matt Johnson is a journalist and the author of the forthcoming book, How Hitchens Can Save the Left: Rediscovering Fearless Liberalism in an Age of Counter-Enlightenment, from which this piece is excerpted.

[antifainternational]

⭕ The famous speech of anarchist Juan Garcia Oliver on 20 November 1937 at Montjuic Cemetery, in Barcelona, in homage to Buenaventura Durruti, who died on 20 November 1936.

(English Subs).

Who was Durruti, as summarized by Joe King in theanarchistlibraryorg:

To reduce to a few hundred words the life story of an almost mythic figure is not an easy task. It can be said, without fear of exaggeration, that Buenventura Durruti symbolised in his person the courageous struggle of workers and peasants in that country, and more specifically symbolises the spirit of Spanish anarchism.

He was born the son of a railway worker on July 14th 1896 in Leon, a city in central Spain. Aged 14 he leaves school to become a trainee mechanic in the railway yard. Like his father, he joins the socialist UGT union. He takes an active part in the strike of August 1917 when the government overturned an agreement between the union and the employers. This soon became a general strike throughout the area. The government brought in the army and within three days the strikers had been crushed. The troops behaved with extreme brutality, killing 70 and wounding 500 workers. 2,000 strikers were jailed.

Durruti managed to escape to France, where he came into contact with exiled anarchists, whose influence led to him joining the anarchist CNT union upon his return in January 1919. He joins the fight against dictatorial employers in the Asturian mines and is arrested for the first time in March 1919; he escapes and over the next decade and a half he throws himself into activity for the CNT and for the anarchist movement.

These years see him involved in several strikes and being forced into exile. Unwittingly the Spanish government ‘exported’ rebellion, as Durruti and his close friend Francisco Ascaso happily joined the struggle for freedom wherever they ended up, in both Europe and Latin America.

The Spanish monarchy fell in 1931 and Durruti moved to Barcelona; accompanied by his French companion Emilienne, pregnant with their daughter Colette. He joined the Iberian Anarchist Federation (FAI), a specifically anarchist organization, and together with other militants they form the ‘Nosotros’ group. These were members within the CNT of a radical tendency that harboured no illusions with respect to the recently proclaimed Republic, maintaining that the moment was ripe for continued progress towards a social revolution.

With the electoral victory by the liberal/reformist Popular Front in February 1936, Left and Right were on a collision course, initiated very rapidly by Franco’s military rebellion on July 19th 1936. The CNT and the FAI confronted the army with courage, organization and mass mobilizations.

They triumphed in much of Spain despite the fascist superiority in weapons and resources. The anarchist contribution was decisive in resisting the fascists throughout the country and in Catalonia defeated the rebels singlehandedly, Durruti being one of the boldest fighters in this battle. It was here that Francisco Ascaso lost his life.

On July 24th, from Barcelona where the anarchist goal of workers’ control, direct democracy and liberty was starting to be a reality, Durruti left with an armed column towards Zaragossa, occupied by the fascists. Through hard battles this workers’ militia, without officers or other military trappings, advanced and saved the Aragon front against much better equipped regular troops.

Parallel to this, the anarchist forces supported a social transformation which meant the establishment of agricultural collectives in Aragon, upsetting the authoritarians of the Communist and Socialist parties, according to whom the war could not be won with the revolution going on. War or no war these would-be rulers would never have liked a real workers’ democracy.

After the liberation of Aragon, Durruti was interviewed by Pierre van Passen of the Toronto ‘Star’. “For us,” said Durruti, “it is a matter of crushing fascism once and for all. Yes, and in spite of the government. No government in the world fights fascism to the death.

“When the bourgeoisie see power slipping from its grasp, it has recourse to fascism to maintain itself. The Liberal government of Spain could have rendered the fascist elements powerless long ago. Instead it compromised and dallied. Even now at the moment there are men in this government who want to go easy on the rebels.”

And here Durruti laughed. “You can never tell, you know, the present government might yet need these rebellious forces to crush the workers’ movement...

“We know what we want. To us it means nothing that there is a Soviet Union somewhere in the world, for the sake of whose peace and tranquillity the workers of Germany and China were sacrificed to fascist barbarians by Stalin. We want revolution here in Spain, right now, not maybe after the next European war.

“We are giving Hitler and Mussolini far more worry with our revolution than the whole Red Army of Russia. We are setting an example to the German and Italian working class how to deal with fascism.”

But, interjected van Passen, even if you win “You will be sitting on a pile of ruins.” Durruti answered “We have always lived in slums and holes in the wall. We will know how to accommodate ourselves for a while. For, you must not forget, we also know how to build. It is we the workers who built these palaces and cities, here in Spain and in America, and everywhere.

“We, the workers, can build others to take their place, and better ones! We are not in the least afraid of ruins. We are going to inherit the earth, there is not the slightest doubt about that. The bourgeoisie might blast and ruin its own world before it leaves the stage of history. We carry a new world, here, in our hearts. That world is growing this minute”.

Durruti embodied the feelings and goals of the workers in arms, being a peculiar “chief” whose main privilege was to fight in the first line and whose only rank was the esteem his equals had for him. His courageous life came to an end in November of that same year. On the 15th Durruti arrived with a force of 1,800 men to reinforce the defence of Madrid, where they went immediately to the toughest section and on the 19th he was struck by a bullet. He died at dawn on the 20th, being buried two days later at Montjuich’s cemetery in Barcelona, accompanied by 500,000 people carrying the red & black flags of anarchism. It was the largest funeral cortege ever seen in that city.

Here was a man who fought for his union and anarchist ideals; who never sought any special privileges for himself, who acted as much as he read or thought, who loved, dreamed and was determined to leave this world a better place than when he entered it.



[rynnaaurelius]

I've been deeply unwell about Andor for the last month and a half, and I keep thinking about Nemik's "Remember this: Try." from the finale and its response to Yoda from Episode Five.

In the greater cultural consciousness, that line is taken as a "You either do it or not," as a sort of "Ignore those doubts and suck it up, buttercup, you're gonna do it," and Nemik's line is taken as a rebuke to that, and I think there's validity to that, I do, particularly considering Maarva's speech about how it might be too late, but she'll fight anyway, and the general interpretation of Star Wars when you're not on Tumblr, but also--

In Empire Strikes Back, Yoda says it to Luke because he doesn't believe. He doesn't believe that he can lift the X-Wing, he thinks it's impossible, and says that he'll try in the same way an atheist goes to church.

And Yoda. Yoda tells him to do. Because Yoda is a Jedi, Yoda believes. And he does it, and it's incredible, and at the end, Luke says:

"I don't believe it."

"And that is why you fail."

It's not a matter of strength of will. It's a matter of faith in what you do, something that Star Wars champions from the start. To close your eyes, damn rational thought, and make that leap, to destroy the Death Star, to have faith in your father, in the Chosen One, in your friends, regardless of what your eyes tell you about failure.

It's been in the fabric of Star Wars for decades.

And then we have Nemik. Nemik, who is called the "true believer" by Skeen. Nemik, who encourages the galaxy to try, who has his faith, who calls Cassian, who believes in no greater ideal when they meet, "my ideal reader."

And it's important, I think, to remember the role the Jedi played in the galaxy, both from an in-universe perspective and that of the story itself. They were peacekeepers and guardians, fighting the ultimate bad guys and trying to do good in the galaxy.

They were superheroes. Upholding justice and compassion and democracy and all that good stuff against the darkness.

But the darkness won. The Sith won. The Jedi were wiped out so completely that they and the Force are little more than obscure rumor by the time of Andor.

And with them went that faith--and I mean faith in a mostly secular way, I think. The belief that good trumps evil, that there is a better world to defend, that kindness will bring reward instead of pain.

The Jedi eventually win, of course. Luke Skywalker comes along with destiny and the Force and a ghost mentor and all that entails to make him believe that there is good in Vader.

But--this isn't A New Hope. Cassian Andor is not the son of a Jedi, with a laser sword and Jedi Master to train him in higher ideals and superpowers as he completes the Hero's Journey and saves the galaxy. This is Andor, and everyone on this show is just trying to survive the Empire they live under and not get killed by a trigger-happy Imperial schmuck.

Without the Force, without that faith in a galactic battle between Light and Dark, with just fascism's boot on your throat, one among millions, how do you believe that anything could be good again? That there's a good worth fighting for, when it's mud and death and desperation?

Without a destiny and Chosen Ones and the Force and ghostly mentors, how do you believe in the ability to win against the darkness? How do you recover that faith when it and its protectors have been wiped out from the galaxy?

And Nemik, who is no Luke Skywalker, who is going to die within days of meeting a disbelieving Cassian Andor, who has likely never heard the word Jedi, or seen how fear made one man destroy the Republic, or has the comfort of an all-consuming magical Force to lean on when people keep suffering:

There will be times when the struggle seems impossible. Freedom is a pure idea. Oppression is the mask of fear. One single thing will break the siege. Remember this.

Try.

[stalkurs]

❥ ℙ𝕣𝕠𝕟𝕠𝕦𝕟𝕤 ༒ 𝕊𝕙𝕖/ℍ𝕖𝕣

❥ 𝕀𝕟𝕥𝕖𝕣𝕖𝕤𝕥 ༒ 𝔸𝕣𝕥𝕚𝕔 𝕄𝕖𝕣𝕞𝕒𝕟

   Living within a small fishing town as a ship captains daughter was an easy life. There was no king, or mayor, that taxed you, and the only time someone was required to purchase something was when one of the fishermen brought in only a few, tasty fish. Or when the traveling merchant came to town with a cart of new clothes, and crops, sometimes a chicken or two. Yet, sometimes the people of the town got boring, and repetitive. Seeing the same people doing the same things at the same times every single day could send someone crazy.

   Especially if said someone was an adventurous 20 year old woman named Y/N. Yet her yearn for adventure never got her far, as the village she lived in with her father was located on a small island north of Antarctica. Far enough they had decently cold winters, and hot but short summers. By the end of her 18th summer she had explored nearly all of the above ground, from the edge of the dense pine trees untouched by the village, to the highest she could walk on the cliff peak opposite said forest. The island was about a quarter size of those island, enough to support one village and walk from side to side within only 4 hours starting from the furthest beach.

   Living on the island was a lonely existence without friends or family, and the villagers knew this. With the lack of a prison building, people of wrong doing are were beat with brooms, and ones who committed the worst of all crimes were thrown into the ocean to fend for themselves. With no government to tell them otherwise this is what the village did in means of keeping themselves safe and alive. But of course, with also the lack of any law enforcement it caused the people to leave the punishments based off of democracy. This sometimes leads to an unfair judgement by the village, making an innocent man well framed die.

   This was the fate of a boy named Matthew Williams. A friend of Y/N, a friend she had know since she was born. He was her neighbor all through her child and teenage hood, settling in a deep place in her heart. So when he was framed for a murder of a small child only born yesterday, and decided to be thrown to the ocean, her heart broke. She knew he would have never done such a horrid act to the villagers.

   The day was gloomy, almost as if mother nature was grieving for a fallen child, rain plummeted to the ground. Two large and burly men charged into the Williams home, despite the screams and pleas of his mother and little sister, they pulled the young man out of his home. His struggling left a trail in the muddy paths, leading to the docks where two men stood. Y/N father and on of his friends, a small fishing boat floating next to the creaky dock. Knowing about the event taking place Y/N had woken early, and stood quietly next to her father.

Hot tears falling down her face as she watched her friend being drug to his death. As she was noticed his pleas for freedom died down as he stared at her with sad and pleading eyes.

"Y/N please! Tell them, you know I would never do this! Please!"

She turned her head away as she wiped her face with the sleeve of her light parka, pulled the hood down so the fur lining hid her tired and glossy eyes. Seeing the betrayal Matthew went silent as he was lifted into the boat and had his hands tied together behind his back. By now over half of the village parents had gathered around, the women wrapping their sleep robes tightly around their frame, few holding their trembling children close to their sides. Others peaked outside their frosty windows, watching as the young man was being prepared for death. When the boys engine started the men and Y/N climbed into the dirty boat, Y/N sitting in front of her childhood friend.

She set a hand on his knee, rubbing her thumb across the top of his knee as they both sobbed. Within a minute of the boat ride she moved next to him, holding onto his underdressed and trembling form.

"I'm so sorry.. I couldn't do anything."

Her eyes became glossy and wet with upcoming tears.

"I'm sorry."

He moved so his head was resting in the nook of her neck as an attempt to comfort the heartbroken girl. They stayed like that for just a moment before they both lurched forwards because of a sudden stop from the boat. The motor noises slowly dulling down till they were nothing but silence.

"God damn old thing! Can't get nothin' done!" Y/N's father yelled.

He leaned over the back of the boat by his waist, slamming his fist on the side of the motor, causing large ripples in the water and any nearby fish to quickly swim away. Y/N sniffled, her cheeks and nose bright red against her pale and cold form. She glanced out to the water, the noises of her fathers anger a distant noise blurred by her mind as she focused onto the dark and calm waves. The sight of a fairly transparent fish similar to many normal fish caused her to jerk and quickly stand. Nearly falling off the other side of the small boat but catching herself and sitting.

The commotion got her family friends attention as he gave a strange look towards the young girl.

"Girl you okay there? You look like you just saw a ghost." He scooted closer. "Maybe the cold is gettin' to ya."

She frantically shook her head as she saw the fin expose fully along with part of the back it was attached to. A deep blue and slightly transparent skin with opaque black stripes quickly made its way towards the boat, and within a blink of an eye here father was gone. The only evidence of his disappearance being the large splash and ripples next the motor, along with sparse bubbles. In a panic the mans friend rushed over and made the same mistake of leaning over the edge as he ran his hand in the water. The man too was grabbed within a split second and pulled under, this time a red color colored the naturally dark water behind him.

Y/N screamed and began to sob at the sudden event.

"Y/N! Y/n! There's no time to cry! Grab the knife in the tackle box and untie me! Quick!" Matthew yelled, taking the lead of survivor.

Weakly nodding she followed his order, opening the messy tackle box and retrieving the hunting knife, beginning to saw at the cloth ropes with the dull and bloody knife. Blurring out the sounds of bubbles and aggressive splashing coming from most likely the monster in the water. Once the restraints were removed he grabbed Y/N by her arm and pulled her to the middle of the already small boat, continuing to mush themselves together.

"We need to stay in the middle. Its the safest place from that thing, plus we need to conserve body heat."

She nodded and removed her already overly large coat, draping it over both of them, more onto Matthew due to him being out here without any proper warm clothing longer.

_____________________

The monster made no other attempts to get at the two in the boat, only every now and then bumping the sides of the tinted green boat. The two cold young adults had also yet to see the thing harassing them, the closest they getting to see being the back and the back fin. It was beginning to get dark, and the friends were beginning to get tired. They had moved to lay on the floor of the boat, both curled up with their limbs intertwined, the coat draped over them. Each side held tightly to prevent a large gust of wind from coming through and essentially causing their death by making the clothing fly away.

Their eyes began to droop and they both fell asleep within a few minutes of each other.

By the time Y/N woke it was by angry splashing and masculine screams. Taking a moment to process what was happening she jumped up and over to the edge where a tail was flailing around and she could see Matthews bloodied and dismembered body floating. Letting out a fearful scream the monster quickly calmed and peaked its head out of the surface of the water, staring at the woman with hungry eyes. She sobbed as she jerked back and listened to what Matthew had said before, sitting in the middle of the boat. Despite her placement it seemed to not effect the monster at all, as it simply grabbed the side and began to yank it down.

Making Y/N scrambled to the opposite side the monsters long and clawed hands. Within no time the boat got enough water in it that it no longer evened out, and now began to sink to the right end. Despite her attempts the monster grabbed her ankle and yanked her body, pulling her into the frigid waters and against its slimy coated body. It let out a gleeful clicking noise similar to an orca as it drives down despite her wiggling and fight. Her attempts to hold her breath was futile as she eventually attempts to breath, instead being greeted with a harsh burning in her nose and empty feeling in her chest. Along with a feeling of panic in the bottom of her stomach as her vision began to become speckled by black dots. As her vision turned black multiple white fish fished figures filled her field of vision and her body went limp in the monsters arms.

[geek-and-destroy]

'Progressive' hindu nationalists - why are they Like That?

Tomorrow is the 26th of January, the 74th Republic Day in India - the day the Indian constitution was formalized and adopted. I thought i'd mourn my fast-fading nationalism on this occasion by kinda airing out some bullshit and starting a political longpost, which is always a good idea right? right???

Since about the end of last year, I've seen some blogs on here that define themselves around hindutva - hindu nationalism, the idea that India is a hindu nation and must abandon its secular status. Any leftie/liberal with any awareness of the news will know their rhetoric is bullshit. Anyone who isn't really aware of Indian religious dynamics would know to spot their Islamophobia from a mile away, because seriously, the discourse is Ben Shapiro levels of bad.

The most egregious of these include hindulivesmatter, rhysaka, yato-dharmasto-jaya, vindhyavasini and others. Basically a small hindu nationalist clique. They're actually not that big a deal even on this hellsite, but they keep annoyingly popping up to start firebrand arguments under posts. But they're not uncommon in the real world. In fact, i think the majority of the Indian urban youth is Like That - anti-homophobia, anti-misogyny, theoretically anti-islamophobia, the same general left-leaning values associated with Gen Z; but with a weird blind spot when it comes to the fascist decline of their own country.

These users are not too different from TERFs, with their couching of hate in progressive, tumblr-social-justice language. There's been a lot of discourse around why TERFs are the way they are, why their otherwise feminist and progressive values eventually shatter in favour of their hate. I want to do something similar for hindutva tumblr, because i see in it a newer kind of hindu nationalist aggression, yet one that i am very familiar with, as an urban upper-middle-class Indian born into a Marathi Hindu family.

The main question i want to answer is this: why does someone espousing dire Islamophobic rhetoric also sincerely believe in progressive ideas? Why do they not see the contradictions? To do that, we need a little primer in post-independence Indian history.

So, it's often said that Indian democracy was not handed to us; this is not only in the sense that we had to fight for our freedom against the Brits, but also in the sense that there were long deliberations on the exact type of republic we wanted to be. The constitution was drafted, finalized and adopted a full three years after the Brits left. This framing of a philosophical struggle stayed on, throughout the tumult of the following decades.

This is how the modern Indian is taught about our history: Several riots, the Emergency in the 70s, the wars with Pakistan and China, the formation of Bangladesh, the victory at the cricket world cup, the Cold War international policy of non-alignment, the Green Revolution, all of these are presented through a frame of struggle, with the Kargil War and the 1991 liberalization being the point of stabilization. The median citizen of 1971 was politically aware and politically involved. That of 2001 was most likely not. At least, that's the narrative of capitalism in the country. This narrative of a 50-year prolonged post-independence struggle is why Indian nationalism is so potent, even outside of the newer Hindu fascist rhetoric. We've got a very intense sense of national pride. I'm guilty of it myself.

In 1991, the economy was opened up to multinational corporations and eventually led to the formation of an Indian petit bourgeois. The period from 1991 to roughly 2011 is seen as a period of idyllic peace much like the Clinton administration in the US. Culturally, this was the time of the Bollywood masala movie - light, apolitical and all about a big Hindu joint family that preaches benevolent unity of all religions. But the thing that was never mentioned in these movies was caste - an elephant in the room that i haven't addressed yet. Just like the 'default' US Culture is white suburban christian, the default culture here is upper caste middle-class hindu. The aforementioned rise of the middle class was largely along caste lines. Households in the US have microcultures along ethnic lines, and they can be similarly mapped in India through caste and religion.

The Indian equivalent of the megachurch pastor is the ruling BJP's paramilitary parent organization, the RSS, as well as others like the Vishwa Hindu Parishad, the Karni Sena, etc - organizations that normal people largely didn't agree with but whose values and morals were ingrained in their subconscious. The apolitical Hindu in like 2004 did not believe, like the RSS does, that India should be a Hindu nation; but he (i use 'he' here because male tends to be default in this case, and that's a whole different conversation) did believe in the greatness of traditions, the Indian armed forces and in ancient Hindu scientific supremacy (which at the time was limited to Aryabhatta's zero and the actual progress in the sciences from ancients like Charaka and Sushruta to more modern ones like Ramanujan and CV Raman - it hadn't gone into cuckoo fantasy land yet, where we showhow had stem cell research and aeroplanes in ancient India and the Ramayana is apparently actual history now). To this person, Savarkar was an icon of the freedom struggle along with others like Gandhi, Bose, Ambedkar, etc, but he didn't know or care about his religio-fascist ideology. Fascist elements existed then and had their pockets of support - the Shiv Sena in Maharashtra, Modi's CM-hood in Gujarat, and the first BJP national administration came up during this time. To the normal citizen, they were simply extremists with 'some good points'.

2008 was the year of the 26/11 attacks in Mumbai. Islamophobia didn't fully enter Indian discourse just yet, largely because of the assertion of the city's multicultural identity, but the seeds were certainly sown. In fact, blatant Islamophobia wouldn't be mainstream till 2016 or so - the BJP's 2014 election was won on middle-class concerns. The petit bourgeois finally made its voice heard politically in the 2011 anti-corruption protests spearheaded by Anna Hazare and Arvind Kejriwal, the latter of whom is the founder of the newest major political party in the country. It's typical of protests of this kind, agitating against a vague idea of corruption with not many tangible demands. It is true that by 2011, the Congress government was notoriously bloated, corrupt and ineffectual at a systemic level. The BJP gained a single-party majority on an anti-corruption and pro-welfare platform, with religion not really a factor.

The middle class celebrated this as an ultimate affirmation of their hegemony, and the RSS-derived values kicked into high gear. The celebrations have now become a gloat-fest, kinda like vindicated Marvel fans when their Disney product makes a bajillion dollars. The best example of this is the Ram Mandir inauguration earlier this week. Modi cultivated an image of a messiah figure who could do no wrong. Anyone who opposed their goals is now an anti-national and a traitor. General attitudes as a whole have grown a lot more bloodthirsty and carceral. Propaganda, degradation of public discourse, weakening of the media and public institutions, the whole gamut.

The people running the above-mentioned blogs are quite representative of this demographic. They probably fully believe what they spout. They fully believe that Hindus and Hinduism are under threat in India, that love jihad ("forced conversion") is a real thing, that Islamists are taking over their nation, and even that Hindus have been 'sleeping' and are just now being 'woken up'. At the same time, they believe in socially progressive values. The supposedly pro-LGBT+ and pro-feminist stances taken by the RSS are very much targeted at urban Hindus, not at the West as PR.

The propaganda directed at them (which includes movies, social media and tragically, many news outlets) often appeals to the traditional acceptance of queer individuals in mythological texts to get straight, cis, sheltered urban Hindus of all ages to reconcile bigotries and get on board the hate train. It is often in a comparative frame, juxtaposed with the bigotry in Islamic or Christian texts and historical persecution in the West (btw, the term acceptance is very loose here, they often equate mention of a thing with acceptance of that thing even if it's derogatory. Ancient hindu culture only 'accepted' trans women, and that was a marginalized acceptance at best).

The RSS often preaches that Hinduism is the religion of tolerance, and advocates for a twisted version of the tolerance paradox. It's reached a level where propaganda doesn't have to be deliberate - the citizens will do it for them. These blogs are true believers despite the contradictions, but their online activity is probably a deliberate form of praxis, with the co-opting of social justice vocab and appealing to white/western/Indian expat guilt etc. So yes, very much like TERFs, except that TERFs are an actual minority whereas Hindutva ideology is increasingly the default 'apolitical' belief. The reactionary internalization has been successful.

Tl;dr: people like hindulivesmatter are sincere in their bigotry towards Muslims as well as their progressive beliefs, because Indian culture as a whole oriented itself towards appealing to the urban upper caste middle class.

[orassian]

/ FOREIGN SYSTEM OVERRIDE DETECTED / / COUNTERMEASURES FAILED / / HOMING ONTO THE INCOMING TRANSMISSION /

Testing reception... 1... 2...

Actually, I think that's no longer necessary, seeing that we are able to penetrate the Matriarchy's frequency cyber-coverage with little difficulty these days.

Start the video feed.

/ INITIATING TRANSMISSION FEED /

Yshiradh, Orassian nation and aliens from the beyond. Broadcasting currently from Libertopia, @union-replicants space. Weather here is lovely with occasional rainfall. A prime time to hit the beach and enjoy the light of the parent sun, since it's predicted to shine bright today, as it is for the Orassian Liberation Front in home space.

This is 'People's News Republic', an independent news agency geared towards unbiased coverage about current events happening in the Orassian space. I'm your hostess, Erhrdra D'Kara, and here are the latest developments.

The liberation forces have made significant advancements in the west of Gaurdis system and have secured ample space and time for the OLF to install a defensive station in the system.

The fight was hard, but the competency of the Liberation Front, and the help lent to them by the aliens not indifferent to our fight for democracy, had pulled them through the struggle. The push is currently moving to Oros and the broken ruins of the homeworld, but the resistance and the presence of the loyalists there is still significant. The potential capture of Orassia is anticipated to improve morale among the fighting forces, and the OLF needs what it can muster to bring an end to one of the only oppressive dictatorships in the Eastern Quadrant.

Among the greatest news today is the complete liberation of the H'Oumukh Region! In their strategic push, and with the aid of many volunteers from other interstellar states, the OLF managed to secure the region and clear it of all presence of loyalists. According to the words of the soldiers, it was "as if the whole comms network of the Matriarchy's forces in H'Oumukh started malfunctioning, which allowed for the offensive to be successful in the first place." It is unknown at the moment who was responsible, but, whoever it may have been, they have just helped to bring the tyranny of the Matriarchy one step closer to its end.

In other news, our news network, with the help of our allies, have reached out to Region of J'Horrim to spread the message of truth. When we heard that they still believe that no civil war is currently happening on their doorstep at all, we were shocked. The propaganda wall of the Matriarchy had certainly worked wonders for them at the time, but not at that moment.

At least some of the citizens in the region got to hear the realities of what was happening, and they would share them with the rest gradually. Our agency certainly received potential points of contact, which we will gladly share with our allies.

We have received word that the OLF is to hold memorials to the fallen soldiers in the capitol city of the region, Atasaŋ. The insurgents have suffered their share of losses they intend not to be forgotten by the fighters. We, the free Orassian people, will keep on pushing against the tyranny of dictatorships, and our promise to never stop fighting will never be broken.

For tonight, this concludes our news coverage. Thank you for listening. This has been 'People's News Republic'.

Truth to the people.

Freedom to the Orassian people.

Peace to the fallen.

/ TRANSMISSION END /

[aronarchy]

Women and the Subversion of the Community

…

THE ORIGINS OF THE CAPITALIST FAMILY

In pre-capitalist patriarchal society the home and the family were central to agricultural and artisan production. With the advent of capitalism the socialization of production was organized with the factory as its center. Those who worked in the new productive center, the factory, received a wage. Those who were excluded did not. Women, children and the aged lost the relative power that derived from the family’s dependence on their labor, which was seen to be social and necessary. Capital, destroying the family and the community and production as one whole, on the one hand has concentrated basic social production in the factory and the office, and on the other has in essence detached the man from the family and turned him into a wage laborer. It has put on the man’s shoulders the burden of financial responsibility for women, children, the old and the ill, in a word, all those who do not receive wages. From that moment began the expulsion from the home of all those who did not procreate and service those who worked for wages. The first to be excluded from the home, after men, were children; they sent children to school. The family ceased to be not only the productive, but also the educational center.[2]

To the extent that men had been the despotic heads of the patriarchal family, based on a strict division of labor, the experience of women, children and men was a contradictory experience which we inherit. But in pre-capitalist society the work of each member of the community of serfs was seen to be directed to a purpose: either to the prosperity of the feudal lord or to our survival. To this extent the whole community of serfs was compelled to be co-operative in a unity of unfreedom that involved to the same degree women, children and men, which capitalism had to break.[3] In this sense the unfree individual, the democracy of unfreedom,[4] entered into a crisis. The passage from serfdom to free labor power separated the male from the female proletarian and both of them from their children. The unfree patriarch was transformed into the “free” wage earner, and upon the contradictory experience of the sexes and the generations was built a more profound estrangement and therefore a more subversive relation.

We must stress that this separation of children from adults is essential to an understanding of the full significance of the separation of women from men, to grasp fully how the organization of the struggle on the part of the women’s movement, even when it takes the form of a violent rejection of any possibility of relations with men, can only aim to overcome the separation which is based on the “freedom” of wage labor.

THE CLASS STRUGGLE IN EDUCATION

The analysis of the school which has emerged during recent years—particularly with the advent of the students’ movement—has clearly identified the school as a center of ideological discipline and of the shaping of the labor force and its masters. What has perhaps never emerged, or at least not in its profundity, is precisely what precedes all this; and that is the usual desperation of children on their first day of nursery school, when they see themselves dumped into a class and their parents suddenly desert them. But it is precisely at this point that the whole story of school begins.[5]

Seen in this way, the elementary school children are not those appendages who, merely by the demands “free lunches, free fares, free books,” learnt from the older ones, can in some way be united with the students of the higher schools.[6] In elementary school children, in those who are the sons and daughters of workers, there is always an awareness that school is in some way setting them against their parents and their peers, and consequently there is an instinctive resistance to studying and to being “educated.” This is the resistance for which Black children are confined to educationally subnormal schools in Britain.[7] The European working class child, like the Black working class child, sees in the teacher somebody who is teaching him or her something against her mother and father, not as a defense of the child but as an attack on the class. Capitalism is the first productive system where the children of the exploited are disciplined and educated in institutions organized and controlled by the ruling class.[8]

The final proof that this alien indoctrination which begins in nursery school is based on the splitting of the family is that those working class children who arrive (those few who do arrive) at university are so brainwashed that they are unable any longer to talk to their community.

Working class children then are the first who instinctively rebel against schools and the education provided in schools. But their parents carry them to schools and confine them to schools because they are concerned that their children should “have an education,” that is, be equipped to escape the assembly line or the kitchen to which they, the parents, are confined. If a working class child shows particular aptitudes, the whole family immediately concentrates on this child, gives him the best conditions, often sacrificing the others, hoping and gambling that he will carry them all out of the working class. This in effect becomes the way capital moves through the aspirations of the parents to enlist their help in disciplining fresh labor power.

In Italy parents less and less succeed in sending their children to school. Children’s resistance to school is always increasing even when this resistance is not yet organized.

At the same time that the resistance of children grows to being educated in schools, so does their refusal to accept the definition that capital has given of their age. Children want everything they see; they do not yet understand that in order to have things one must pay for them, and in order to pay for them one must have a wage, and therefore one must also be an adult. No wonder it is not easy to explain to children why they cannot have what television has told them they cannot live without.

But something is happening among the new generation of children and youth which is making it steadily more difficult to explain to them the arbitrary point at which they reach adulthood. Rather the younger generation is demonstrating their age to us: in the sixties six-year-olds have already come up against police dogs in the South of the United States. Today we find the same phenomenon in Southern Italy and Northern Ireland, where children have been as active in the revolt as adults. When children (and women) are recognized as integral to history, no doubt other examples will come to light of very young people’s participation (and of women’s) in revolutionary struggles. What is new is the autonomy of their participation in spite of and because of their exclusion from direct production. In the factories youth refuse the leadership of older workers, and in the revolts in the cities they are the diamond point. In the metropolis generations of the nuclear family have produced youth and student movements that have initiated the process of shaking the framework of constituted power: in the Third World the unemployed youth are often in the streets before the working class organized in trade unions.

It is worth recording what The Times of London (1 June 1971) reported concerning a headteachers’ meeting called because one of them was admonished for hitting a pupil: “Disruptive and irresponsible elements lurk around every corner with the seemingly planned intention of eroding all forces of authority.” This “is a plot to destroy the values on which our civilization is built and on which our schools are some of the finest bastions.”

THE EXPLOITATION OF THE WAGELESS

We wanted to make these few comments on the attitude of revolt that is steadily spreading among children and youth, especially from the working class and particularly Black people, because we believe this to be intimately connected with the explosion of the women’s movement and something which the Women’s movement itself must take into account. We are dealing with the revolt of those who have been excluded, who have been separated by the system of production, and who express in action their need to destroy the forces that stand in the way of their social existence, but who this time are coming together as individuals.

Women and children have been excluded. The revolt of the one against exploitation through exclusion is an index of the revolt of the other.

To the extent to which capital has recruited the man and turned him into a wage laborer, it has created a fracture between him and all the other proletarians without a wage who, not participating directly in social production, were thus presumed incapable of being the subjects of social revolt.

Since Marx, it has been clear that capital rules and develops through the wage, that is, that the foundation of capitalist society was the wage laborer and his or her direct exploitation. What has been neither clear nor assumed by the organizations of the working class movement is that precisely through the wage has the exploitation of the non-wage laborer been organized. This exploitation has been even more effective because the lack of a wage hid it. That is, the wage commanded a larger amount of labor than appeared in factory bargaining. Where women are concerned, their labor appears to be a personal service outside of capital. The woman seemed only to be suffering from male chauvinism, being pushed around because capitalism meant general “injustice” and “bad and unreasonable behavior”; the few (men) who noticed convinced us that this was “oppression” but not exploitation. But “oppression” hid another and more pervasive aspect of capitalist society. Capital excluded children from the home and sent them to school not only because they are in the way of others’ more “productive” labor or only to indoctrinate them. The rule of capital through the wage compels every ablebodied person to function, under the law of division of labor, and to function in ways that are if not immediately, then ultimately profitable to the expansion and extension of the rule of capital. That, fundamentally, is the meaning of school. Where children are concerned, their labor appears to be learning for their own benefit.

Proletarian children have been forced to undergo the same education in the schools: this is capitalist levelling against the infinite possibilities of learning. Woman on the other hand has been isolated in the home, forced to carry out work that is considered unskilled, the work of giving birth to, raising, disciplining, and servicing the worker for production. Her role in the cycle of social production remained invisible because only the product of her labor, the laborer, was visible there. She herself was thereby trapped within pre-capitalist working conditions and never paid a wage.

And when we say “pre-capitalist working conditions” we do not refer only to women who have to use brooms to sweep. Even the best equipped American kitchens do not reflect the present level of technological development; at most they reflect the technology of the 19th century. If you are not paid by the hour, within certain limits, nobody cares how long it takes you to do your work.

This is not only a quantitative but a qualitative difference from other work, and it stems precisely from the kind of commodity that this work is destined to produce. Within the capitalist system generally, the productivity of labor doesn’t increase Unless there is a confrontation between capital and class: technological innovations and co-operation are at the same time moments of attack for the working class and moments of capitalistic response. But if this is true for the production of commodities generally, this has not been true for the production of that special kind of commodity, labor power. If technological innovation can lower the limit of necessary work, and if the working class struggle in industry can use that innovation for gaining free hours, the same cannot be said of housework; to the extent that she must in isolation procreate, raise and be responsible for children, a high mechanization of domestic chores doesn’t free any time for the woman. She is always on duty, for the machine doesn’t exist that makes and minds children.[9] A higher productivity of domestic work through mechanization, then, can be related only to specific services, for example, cooking, washing, cleaning. Her workday is unending not because she has no machines, but because she is isolated.[10]

CONFIRMING THE MYTH OF FEMALE INCAPACITY

With the advent of the capitalist mode of production, then, women were relegated to a condition of isolation, enclosed within the family cell, dependent in every aspect on men. The new autonomy of the free wage slave was denied her, and she remained in a pre-capitalist stage of personal dependence, but this time more brutalized because in contrast to the large-scale highly socialized production which now prevails. Woman’s apparent incapacity to do certain things, to understand certain things, originated in her history, which is a history very similar in certain respects to that of “backward” children in special ESN classes. To the extent that women were cut off from direct socialized production and isolated in the home, all possibilities of social life outside the neighborhood were denied them, and hence they were deprived of social knowledge and social education. When women are deprived of wide experience of organizing and planning collectively industrial and other mass struggles, they are denied a basic source of education, the experience of social revolt. And this experience is primarily the experience of learning your own capacities, that is, your power, and the capacities, the power, of your class. Thus the isolation from which women have suffered has confirmed to society and to themselves the myth of female incapacity.

It is this myth which has hidden, firstly, that to the degree that the working class has been able to organize mass struggles in the community, rent strikes, struggles against inflation generally, the basis has always been the unceasing informal organization of women there; secondly, that in struggles in the cycle of direct production women’s support and organization, formal and informal, has been decisive. At critical moments this unceasing network of women surfaces and develops through the talents, energies and strength of the “incapable female.” But the myth does not die. Where women could together with men claim the victory—to survive (during unemployment) or to survive and win (during strikes)—the spoils of the victor belonged to the class “in general.” Women rarely if ever got anything specifically for themselves; rarely if ever did the struggle have as an objective in any way altering the power structure of the home and its relation to the factory. Strike or unemployment, a woman’s work is never done.

…

[2] This is to assume a whole new meaning for “education,” and the work now being done on the history of compulsory education—forced learning—proves this. In England teachers were conceived of as “moral police” who could 1) condition children against “crime”—curb working class reappropriation in the community; 2) destroy “the mob,” working class organization based on family which was still either a productive unit or at least a viable organizational unit; 3) make habitual regular attendance and good timekeeping so necessary to children’s later employment; and 4) stratify the class by grading and selection. As with the family itself, the transition to this new form of mini control was not smooth and direct, and was the result of contradictory forces both within the class and within capital, as with every phase of the history of capitalism.

[3] Wage labor is based on the subordination of all relationships to the wage relation. The worker must enter as an “individual” into a contract with capital stripped of the protection of kinships.

[4] Karl Marx, “Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of the State,” Writings of the Young Marx on Philosophy and Society, ed. and trans. Lloyd D. Easton and Kurt H. Guddat, N.Y., 1967, p.176.

[5] We are not dealing here with the narrowness of the nuclear family that prevents children from having an easy transition to forming relations with other people; nor with what follows from this, the argument of psychologists that proper conditioning would have avoided such a crisis. We are dealing with the entire organization of the society, of which family, school and factory are each one ghettoized compartment. So every kind of passage from one to another of these compartments is a painful passage. The pain cannot be eliminated by tinkering with the relations between one ghetto and another but only by the destruction of every ghetto.

[6] “Free fares, free lunches, free books” was one of the slogans of a section of the Italian students movement which aimed to connect the struggle of younger students with workers and university students.

[7] In Britain and the US the psychologists Eysenck and Jensen, who are convinced “scientifically” that Blacks have a lower “intelligence” than whites, and the progressive educators like Ivan Illyich seem diametrically opposed. What they aim to achieve links them. They are divided by method. In any case the psychologists are not more racist than the rest, only more direct. “Intelligence” is the ability to assume your enemy’s case as wisdom and to shape your own logic on the basis of this. Where the whole society operates institutionally on the assumption of white racial superiority, these psychologists propose more conscious and thorough “conditioning” so that children who do not learn to read do not learn instead to make molotov cocktails. A sensible view with which Illyich, who is concerned with the “underachievement” of children (that is, rejection by them of “intelligence”), can agree.

[8] In spite of the fact that capital manages the schools, control is never given once and for all. The working class continually and increasingly challenges the contents and refuses the costs of capitalist schooling. The response of the capitalist system is to re-establish its own control, and this control tends to be more and more regimented on factory-like lines.

The new policies on education which are being hammered out even as we write, however, are more complex than this. We can only indicate here the impetus for these new policies: (a) Working class youth reject that education prepares them for anything but a factory, even if they will wear white collars there and use typewriters and drawing boards instead of riveting machines. (b) Middle class youth reject the role of mediator between the classes and the repressed personality this mediating role demands. (c) A new labor power more wage and status differentiated is called for. The present egalitarian trend must be reversed. (d) A new type of labor process may be created which will attempt to interest the worker in “participating” instead of refusing the monotony and fragmentation of the present assembly line.

If the traditional “road to success” and even “success” itself are rejected by the young, new goals will have to be found to which they can aspire, that is, for which they will go to school and go to work. New “experiments” in “free” education, where the children are encouraged to participate in planning their own education and there is greater democracy between teacher and taught are springing up daily. It is an illusion to believe that this is a defeat for capital any more than regimentation will be a victory. For in the creation of a labor power more creatively manipulated, capital will not in the process lose 0.1% of profit. “As a matter of fact,” they are in effect saying, “you can be far more efficient for us if you take your own road, so long as it is through our territory.” In some parts of the factory and in the social factory, capital’s slogan will increasingly be “Liberty and fraternity to guarantee and even extend equality.”

[9] We are not at all ignoring the attempts at this moment to make test-tube babies. But today such mechanisms belong completely to capitalist science and control. The use would be completely against us and against the class. It is not in our interest to abdicate procreation, to consign it to the hands of the enemy. It is in our interest to conquer the freedom to procreate for which we will pay neither the price of the wage nor the price of social exclusion.

[10] To the extent that not technological innovation but only “human care” can raise children, the effective liberation from domestic work time, the qualitative change of domestic work, can derive only from a movement of women, from a struggle of women: the more the movement grows, the less men—and first of all political militants—can count on female baby minding. And at the same time the new social ambiance that the movement constructs offers to children social space, with both men and women, that has nothing to do with the day care centers organized by the State. These are already victories of struggle. Precisely because they are the results of a movement that is by its nature a struggle, they do not aim to substitute any kind of co-operation for the struggle itself.