Guest Post: George Orwell

Light and shadow: Sometimes one stands on a crag whose shadow is cast hundreds of feet below. If one stands on the edge of it, naturally one’s shadow is cast beyond that of the crag. But I notice that whereas the shadow of the rock is black & solid, that of the human body, or anything over about 50 feet, is faint & indistinct, like the shadow of a bush. At short distances this is not noticeable, but at long distances, say 200 feet & over, one seems to have almost no shadow at all.

Many years later, his widow Sonia remarks: Of course he shot a fucking elephant. He said he did. Why do you always doubt his fucking word!

Thanks to Mark Collins for drawing it to our attention: For he was indeed an Englishman.

The Morning's Feuilletons

1. Resolved: "One must take a stand. One simply must. . . Let them worry. Let them wonder if we're carrying a tool or if we have a crew. I'd like to go back, do it properly, deface the thing with red paint so there's no swastika visible. You can't have the main street, a shopping and commercial street, in a civilized city patrolled by intimidators who work for a Nazi organization. It is not humanly possible to live like that. One must not do that. There may be more important problems in Lebanon, but if people on Hamra don't dare criticize the SSNP, well fuck. That's occupation.”

Everybody in favour signify by saying aye. Aye.

2. Ah yes, the peace of the concentration camp: Do pardon my language, Mullah Mutassim, but I must say, fuck you.

3. Am inclined similarly here. Just string him up. All his mates as well.

4. Local boy makes good.

5. Two can play at this "boycott" game: Just yesterday I got a dispatch via the pneumatique (which the young people nowadays call "email") from Shalom Lappin, containing a copy of his splendid letter to York University. I see it's all over the worldwide interwebs now.

6. Tom Hawthorn has never written an uninteresting story in his entire life. Dang, he's good.

7. Natasha Fatah, a journalist from whom we all should hear more, tells this story.

8. Dance, ye townie bastard!

And I am wholeheartedly in favour of this sort of innovation, now joined by this:

Paul Berman: The Bottom Line On Gaza

There is every reason to weep for Gaza, even if we can understand why the government of Israel is not awash right now in those particular tears. And there is every reason for the United States to do whatever can be done to help the Palestinians to a better life, liberated from these pathological ideologies whose adherents keep condemning their fellow Palestinians to ever lower rungs of suffering and sorrow. I don't know how much the United States can do to help the Palestinians throw off Hamas and a number of other groups, but, however much it is, I hope that Obama does it. To be pro-Israel is good - but the United States should show herself to be pro-Palestinian, too, in the simple belief that, in the long run, a pro-Israel position has to be pro-Palestinian, too, and vice versa.

- Paul Berman, in conversation with Michelle Sieff. Berman is the author of A Tale of Two Utopias, Power and the Idealists, and most importantly for our purposes here, Terror and Liberalism.

"He will kill us. He will throw acid on our face. He can do anything."

For a glimpse of the savage oppression involved in all this - and the great bravery of the people in the teeth of it - watch this brief New York Times documentary.

On the subject at hand, two views.

Mir Jamilur Rahman: "The Swat accord is not surrender and capitulation by the government, nor was the violence an insurgency for separation from Pakistan. It is a farfetched supposition that a different judicial system in Swat will lead to disintegration of the country. In fact, President Zardari, for the first time, has acted as a statesman rather than a politician. The insurgency was splitting the nation. It was damaging our newfound democracy. It was hampering our efforts against terrorism. If the agreement puts a stop to the mayhem, it is a substantive victory for the people of Pakistan."

Lakhkar Khan: "And what is the end result now? What is one to make of this deal? That Fazlullah has emerged victorious. And that both the federal and provincial governments are taking credit for the promulgation of Sharia in Swat. As for the people, they see this as nothing but an abject surrender to the forces of obscurantism and darkness, a surrender which presents a bleak future for the people of the area."

And that is the choice the fucking "free world" has abandoned these people to make, on their own.

From that mini-documentary, Malala, a young girl: "They cannot stop me. I will get my education, if it is in home, school, or any place. This is our request to all the world, that save our world, save our schools, save Pakistan. Save our Swat."

Swat Valley Zindabad.

“Faith Without Fear” Screening On International Women’s Day

CANADA-AFGHANISTAN SOLIDARITY COMMITTEE

CASC Event Draws Attention to the Impact of “Talibanization” on Women in Afghanistan and Around the World

VANCOUVER February 24, 2009 – On International Women’s Day, it’s more important than ever to recognize that in Afghanistan, women’s rights are under siege. A film screening in Vancouver of Canadian activist Irshad Manji’s “Faith Without Fear” on March 5, hosted by the Canada-Afghanistan Solidarity Committee aims to draw attention to the threat to women’s freedom and basic human rights inherent in not speaking out against extremism and cultural relativism.

“The film touches on the themes of self-censorship and cultural relativism, two issues which often characterize debate over Canada's role in Afghanistan,” says CASC co-founder and long-time Afghanistan human rights worker Lauryn Oates. “But the film also explores how extremist ideology is being used to justify inhuman acts like the unequal treatment of women within religious or cultural communities.”

Says CASC President Dr. Karim Qayumi: “Traditionally and historically, Afghans have a great deal of respect for women. The Taliban, by enforcing extreme ideologies, deny not only the basic human rights but also rights that the Afghan women have had traditionally.”

“Faith Without Fear” will be shown at the Vancouver Planetarium Theatre at 1100 Chestnut Street in Vancouver on Thursday, March 5th, at 7 pm.

CASC member Iona Campagnolo, well-known Canadian broadcaster, politician, and former lieutenant-governor of BC will help host the event.

Cost Is $12 regular, $8 for students. Space is limited, so participants are requested to RSVP at info@afghanistan-canada-solidarity.org or by leaving a voicemail at 604.781.3151

About the Canada-Afghanistan Solidarity Committee

The Canada-Afghanistan Solidarity Committee is an association of Canadians from all walks of life who are united in a commitment to the principle that as Canadians, we must honour our obligations to the cause of solidarity with the people of Afghanistan. Our message to Canada and Canadians is this: “Stay. Human rights are universal. The U.N. wants us there. A military component is vital and necessary.”

Website:
Email: info@afghanistan-canada-solidarity.org
Media Contacts
Lauryn Oates: Tel - 604.781.3151
Jonathon Narvey: Tel - 604.230.2638

Related: "Given the choice between the 'community' and the sister, we must always choose the sister."

One day all this will end, I tell myself.

A couple of years ago I helped put together an informal Canadian Friends of Sallahuddin Shoaib Choudhury, and we ended up thinking that we'd made ourselves useful at a critical juncture in the story of Choudhury's persecution. And perhaps we were useful, in some small way.

Only last week, it seemed that things were looking up for Choudhury, a recipient of the Freedom to Write Award from PEN USA and the Moral Courage Award from American Jewish Committee: On trial and facing a death sentence for treason, sedition and blasphemy in Bangladesh, Choudhury stood in a courtroom in Dhaka and was happily surprised to hear Metropolitan Session Judge Muhammed Bashir Ullah tell him that he should be thanked for his prophecy instead of being persecuted by the state.

Then, this morning, this urgent bulletin appears on the front page of Choudhury's newspaper, the Weekly Blitz:

At 10am Sunday, local time, internationally-acclaimed journalist Salah Uddin Shoaib Choudhury, was attacked as he was working in the office of his newspaper, Weekly Blitz, by “a gang of thugs” claiming to be from Bangladesh’s ruling Awami League. I spoke by telephone with Choudhury as he awaited medical treatment for eye, neck, and other injuries suffered in the attack. The renewed violence marks the first against him since he was abducted by Bangladesh ’s dreaded Rapid Action Battalion a year ago.

A large group led by one Shamim introducing himself to be an official of DGFI stormed Blitz premises and attacked newspaper staff until they found Choudhury. At that point, he said, “they dragged me [and two staff] into the street” where they beat them “in broad daylight…They looted my office and stole my laptop” with “all my sensitive information. " As of this writing, the attackers continue to occupy the Blitz office.

Judenstaatrein Qua Judenrein: A Natural History of Ideological Antisemitism

Irwin Cotler, Canada's former justice minister; founder of the Save Darfur Parliamentary Coalition; human rights scholar; international counsel to Nelson Mandela, Jacobo Timmerman, Andrei Sakarov, Aleksandr Nikitin, KunLun Zhang and Saad Ebin Ibrahim; MP for Mount Royal and all-round smart guy, explains:

"The first manifestation of this ideological antisemitism was its institutional and juridical anchorage in the 'Zionism is Racism' resolution at the UN. Notwithstanding the fact that the there was a formal repeal of this resolution, 'Zionism as Racism' remains alive and well in the global arena, particularly in the campus cultures of North America and Europe, as confirmed by the recent British All-Party Parliamentary Inquiry into Antisemitism.

"The second manifestation is the indictment of Israel as an apartheid state. This involves more than the simple indictment of Israel as an apartheid state. It also involves the call for the dismantling of Israel as an apartheid state as evidenced by the events at the 2001 UN World Conference against Racism in Durban.

"The third manifestation of ideological antisemitism involves the characterization of Israel not only as an apartheid state - and one that must be dismantled as part of the struggle against racism - but as a Nazi one.

"And so it is then that Israel is delegitimized - if not demonized - by the ascription to it of the two most scurrilous indictments of twentieth-century racism - Nazism and apartheid - the embodiment of all evil. . ."

Jonathon Narvey: Cheer The Hell Up

If there's a stalemate in Afghanistan right now, there seems to be a slow but visible kind of progress happening back on the home front in Canada. The clues are piling up.

Just a couple of middle-class, middle-aged guys with young families

So it is written.

But getting the story right appears to require having the name Andrew.

Andrew Coyne: If there is anything less attractive than the anti-American streak in our national character — a trait made worse, one suspects, for our neighbours’ sunny indifference to our seething — it is our tendency to prostrate ourselves before American celebrities.

Andrew Potter: We are such ouinies.

And incidentally, that "Canadian delicacy," a "sugar-coated, deep-fried pastry called a Beavertail"?

I've never even heard of it before. Must be an Ontario thing.

Sounds tasty, mind you.

Who should I meet but a tan puck goat, and he roaring with rage.

In Beirut, not at night, not in a bar, but in broad daylight, in a posh neighbourhood, Comrade Hitchens (who was not drunk) and Mike Totten and Jonathan Foreman find themselves in a bit of a spot, which ends with Hitchens taking a knock on the leg, a scrape on the face and a stomped-on writing hand. It started when the trio came upon a poster for the Syrian Nazi Party on an abandoned bagel shop.

Damn good story. Can't wait for Hitchens' version. And it just goes to show, the world is not made of atoms, but of good stories to tell over pints with your mates. Oh look. Here's another one just now.

Anyway, it seems like only yesterday that a celebration of the 74th birthday of the Syrian Nazi Party - which has its own stylized swastika and an anthem sung to the tune of Deutschland, Deutschland, Uber Alles - was convened in Ottawa, and went wholly unnoticed by the press, even though its guest of honour was the British Mosleyite, celebrity MP and "anti-war" hero George Galloway.

Support the Haft Tapeh Sugar Cane Workers

An independent union of 5,000 sugarcane plantation workers in southern Iran is fighting the Iranian government's efforts to crush the union by threatening lengthy prison sentences for 5 elected leaders, charged with acting against "national security" in connection with a strike last year and the formation of the union.

The five leaders are Ali Nejati, President, Feridoun Nikoufard, Vice President, Mohammed Heydari Mehr, Representative for Industry Affairs, Ghorban Alipour, Secretary, and Jalil Ahmadi, Member of the Board of Directors.

The union needs your support. Here's something you can do.

Dublin Traffic Comes To Halt As City Remembers 'An Optimist And A Gentleman'

Spanish Civil War Veteran Bob Doyle, 92. R.I.P.

“This is not nostalgic, it is actual. The fight for freedom for humanity is still alive and necessary today.”

Long-time friend Harry Owens said he was a trade unionist and republican in a broad sense.

“The peace process filled him with pure joy and hope,” he said.

“We were mates, he was a very honest man, very scrupulous, he could be quiet for a long time but was always aware of what was happening.”

Julian Doyle said his father was a “smiling revolutionary” and that it was great to see everybody at the event. “He’s done his fight – maybe people will pick it up and make a better world,” he said.

You can go with pride. You are history. You are legend. You are the heroic example of the solidarity and the universality of democracy. - Dolores Ibarruri.

h/t Will.

Tearing Down The Building

The man in the photograph is Ray Guno from New Aiyansh. He was an inmate at the Port Alberni Indian Residential School from 1961 to 1964, and the other day he traveled all the way from his home in Nisga'a territory, the Nass Valley, to help tear the place down. My old friend Wawmeesh George Hamilton reports:

Hefting an eight-kilogram sledgehammer in his weathered hands, Guno plunged it into the building’s outer husk three times, uttering the names of former students with each swing: Allan Clayton. Dan Guno. His late brother Larry.

“This was more therapeutic than any counseling or treatment centre I’ve tried,” Guno said.

In a separate essay, Wawmeesh writes:

I thought about my parents, who attended the school in the 1930s. They never lived to see this day. My father died when I was six, and my mother last December.

My mother only spoke about one residential school experience: seeing children rummage through the garbage for something to eat. The abuses wrought in the schools were universal though, and I imagine they never escaped it.

I took a couple of planks — one each for my parents — and placed them on the fire.

Tariq Ali: Archetype of the Dead Left

This is so unintentionally hilarious I can't let it pass without comment.

Ali: "Given the massive increase in support for the new version of the Taliban that is the result of the war and occupation, any government has to include their representatives."

Facts: Asked who they would rather have ruling their country, 82 per cent of Afghan poll respondents [pdf] said "the current government," while four per cent preferred the Taliban - up from three per cent three years ago. This is Ali's "massive increase" in support for the Taliban, for which we are admonished to blame the "war and occupation." (UPDATE: Even in the "Taliban heartland" of Kandahar where the "war and occupation" is especially fierce, polling data consistently shows support for the Taliban unchanged at 15-20 per cent, and even there, "support" is merely expressed as an opinion about who the local "authority figure" is. )

Necessary context: "Just as American officers found Vichy French colonial administrators and officers in 1943, American war makers today are discovering the congeniality of the 'good Taliban' in Afghanistan and Pakistan. . ." And Tariq Ali, being the reactionary auld bore that he really is, quite predictably makes the same discovery and pleads for an accommodation of the "new version of the Taliban."

Zombie catechism: Was Hamas to blame for provoking the recent Israeli military operation in Gaza? "The Western refusal to recognize Hamas was directly responsible for the Israeli assault on Gaza." Always blame the west, and where necessary, compound your gibberish with outright lies: "Trudeau was an independent-minded leader, not a stooge of the neighbouring country. The Count (as we called Ignatieff) supported the war in Iraq, defended torture and aligned himself in a dog-like coital lock with the Bush-Cheney gang." Ignatieff on torture: Those of us who oppose torture under any circumstances should admit that ours is an unpopular policy that may make us more vulnerable to terrorism.

For a natural history of this fascinating lie and the conspiracy theorists who make use of it, see here.

On Ali and his apologetics for the Taliban and Hezbollah, read Imtiaz Baloch. On why Ali is intellectually incapable of recognizing real imperialism when it's staring him right in the face, read Naeem Khan Wardag' s 'Tariq Ali, Pashtun Nationalism and Taliban.' On Ali's stunted political maturity, Tahir Aslam Gora observes that "leftists like Tariq Ali are caught up in their so-called Islamic heritage pride and are not liberated enough to support the true values of liberalism and secularism." Principia Dialectica sums up Ali as "a socialist who defends barbarism."

On the undead zombies who persist in slobbering on Ali's slippers: "The Left is dead—and whatever undead elements of it continue to stagger among us deserve to be put down before they demoralize and stupefy a new generation. . ."

(Any such zombies or allied trolls from the Ali fan club who show up here in comments will be deleted without exception.)

Toronto Rally Against Taliban Atrocities

Introducing Islamic law into the Swat Valley of northwestern Pakistan will only encourage the Taliban to terrorize a wider region than they do, Pashtun Canadian leaders told demonstrators at a Toronto rally yesterday.

The news out of NWFP overshadowed everything. More here. More photos here.

The rally was enthusiastically endorsed by the Canada-Afghanistan Solidarity Committee. Said CASC's Lauryn Oates: “Canadians must urgently confront the commonplace and bigoted misconception in this country that the Taliban are somehow a legitimate expression of Pashtun or Afghan culture or politics.”

UPDATE: For all those numpties who greet the news of this rally by asking stupid questions like 'Why haven't they raised their voices before?', as though they haven't, read this: Taliban Threats in Pakistan Are Heard a World Away. Plus, my comrade and CASC member Jim Monk was on hand and here are some of his photos (the first is one that someone took of our Jim):

More here.

Spencer Leonard on the Tacit Alliance between Islamist Fascism and the Left

There are deafening echoes of the 1930s all around, Spencer A. Leonard writes here in Platypus, which is a proper saucy group of students, activists, historians and intellectuals whose motto, if you could call it that, is: We declare that the Left is dead.

I would object to Leonard's implication that the NATO-ISAF intervention in Afghanistan constitutes a kind of anti-fascist imperialism, but if I'm wrong in reading him that way it's that he elides the question a bit too gracelessly. Leonard is certainly not wrong, however, when he points out that nowadays, in contrast with the 1930s, "the Left tends to keep company with fascist 'anti-imperialists.' "

He's too cynical for my tastes, at least in his view that the Left is powerless and can do little more than "watch the bullets fly." I'm inclined to think he's actually dead wrong about that. But he's dead right here: "In the here-and-now, it is clear that the political struggle against Islamism in South Asia, as elsewhere, has a military aspect and that any marginally desirable political outcome will have been brought about at least in part by means of the violence of state action. Moreover, as most Leftists would doubtless be loathe to admit, the very prospect of reconstituting Leftist politics in South Asia rides to no small extent on the ability of the U.S. and NATO to defeat the Taliban in Afghanistan and Pakistan."

Leonard hits one out of the park when he observes that "anti-imperialism in our time has become a smokescreen that obscures more than it reveals," and he's right again to assert that "the 'War on Terror' is no more horrific to contemplate than is the peace to be made with it."

Thanks to Andony Melathopoulos for bringing this to my attention. In my more low-brow fashion I take a rather different tack than Leonard, on the same subject, which Andony helped me explain, also in Platypus, here.

Meanwhile, I see Raphael Alexander has joined the conversation. I will disagree with Raphael in certain matters, and he will disagree with me, but we are part of the same conversation. We may specifically disagree from time to time on what progress looks like. But we agree it does not look like this:

Rally Against Taliban Atrocities: Sunday In Toronto

TORONTO – This Sunday in Toronto, the Canadian Pashtun community will be protesting the Taliban’s ongoing and brutal oppression of Pashtun people in Northwestern Pakistan. Answering the call of the Pashtun Peace Committee for a “first-ever anti-Taliban rally in Canada,” protesters will gather Sunday February 15 at the Ontario Legislature, Queen’s Park, 1-3 p.m.

Says rally spokesman Inayat Khan Kakar: "We want to educate and apprise fellow Canadians, the Canadian media and journalists of this unreported genocide by the Taliban, who are massacring Pashtuns in the name of Islam."

The Canada-Afghanistan Solidarity Committee is proud to join with the Pakhtunkhwa Peace Forum, the Pashtun Institute, the Canadian-Pashtun Cultural Society and others who have endorsed this rally. CASC is an association of Canadians who believe that Canada owes a solemn duty of solidarity to the Afghan people, and this duty includes the contribution Canadian soldiers are currently making to the UN-sanctioned military effort approved by the Afghan government.

"The Taliban attacks civilians, murders human-rights workers, uses children as suicide bombers and sprays acid on girls going to school," says CASC co-founder Jonathon Narvey. "We call on CASC members and Canadians of all backgrounds to stand with Canada’s Pashtuns on Sunday.”

Said CASC co-founder Lauryn Oates: “From public beheadings of teachers to the torching of girls’ schools, the Taliban’s grotesque human rights violations betray an ideology of fascism and the most brutal kind of misogyny. As the mounting Pashtun outrage about events in Northwest Pakistan makes painfully clear, Canadians must urgently confront the commonplace and bigoted misconception in this country that the Taliban are somehow a legitimate expression of Pashtun or Afghan culture or politics.”

Rally organizers were moved to organize Sunday’s protest by global inattention to the current emergency in Pakistan’s Swat Valley, where the Taliban have now driven one-third of the region’s 1.7 million people from their homes and their lands. Roughly 300 schools have been destroyed, hundreds of teachers and secular leaders have been beheaded and butchered, and more than 100,000 girls have been driven from their studies.

(Rally organizers are encouraging participants to bring Canadian flags. Inappropriate or provocative placards will not be allowed. Recommended placards include: Wake Up, Canada; Taliban/ISI: Stop the Killing of Pashtuns; Where Is the UN?; Where Is The Media?

For more information about the event, call Inayat Khan Kakar (905) 277 2854 - (647) 895-6566.

For CASC’s view, contact: Lauryn Oates, (604) 781-3151.

All that remains of Government High School, a girls' school in Qambar demolished by the Taliban, in the Swat Valley:

How we all evolved by natural selection to disbelieve in evolution by natural selection

Humans can anticipate future events, remember the past and conceive of how things could go wrong - including their own death, which is hard to deal with. You've got to figure out a solution, otherwise you're overwhelmed. When natural brain processes give us a get-out-of-jail card, we take it.

"Love of godhood is a result of intellectual organization." - Charles Darwin.

Happy Birthday, Maestro:

Pashtun Canadians To Rally Against Taliban This Sunday

TORONTO – Pashtun-Canadians of Pakistan and Afghanistan origin are organizing an anti-Taliban rally to protest the ongoing massacre of Pashtun people in Northern Pakistan by the Taliban. In our first ever anti-Taliban rally in Canada we are protesting outside Queen's Park to highlight the unreported "Genocide of 52 million Pashtuns" by the Taliban and militants.

The once peaceful and serene Swat Valley in northern Pakistan has now being transformed into another Afghanistan by the Taliban. While hundreds of innocent people have been beheaded and butchered, 300 educational institutions have been bombed and destroyed, people on ground perceive that the Pakistan ISI/military is supporting Taliban because of the infectivity of the operation and intentionally fanning extremist religious thought in the region. Out of the 1.7 million local population about 700,000 people have already forced to migrate to other areas by the war.

We want to educate and apprise fellow Canadians, the Canadian media and journalists of this unreported genocide by the Taliban, who are massacring Pashtuns in the name of Islam. We are urging Canadian newspapers and TV networks to send photographers, videographers and reporters to talk to hundreds of Pashtun women, children and men whose family members are being killed in Pakistan's Pashtun areas on the Pakistan-Afghanistan border.

Date: Sunday February 15, 2009 Time: 1:00 PM to 3:00 PM Location: Ontario Legislative Building , Queen's Park, Toronto.

-30-

For information call Inayat Khan Kakar (905) 277 2854 - (647) 895-6566
Canadian Pashtun Community 315 Elgin St N, Cambridge, ON, N1R 8C9

Meanwhile:

In Kabul, Taliban suicide bombers struck government buildings at three sites on Wednesday, killing at least 20 people and wounding 57 in coordinated attacks.

In the Swat Valley, militants have kidnapped a Red Cross worker, apparently an American, according to local media reports. The worker was kidnapped two days after Taliban militants beheaded a kidnapped Polish engineer when the government failed to meet its ransom demands.

"Everything in Swat is destroyed, they are bombing schools, killing notables and targeting government employees."

This is what's left of a school in the Swat Valley that the Taliban blew up three weeks ago, just hours after the Pakistan government promised to reopen the region's schools:

Warten auf die Aras: The writing life has formal satisfactions, but also its true rewards

I'm happy to see that Warten auf die Aras, the German edition of my book Waiting For The Macaws, is now published and in circulation. A handful of copies came by courier this morning, and it looks lovely. It's published by Zweitausendeins in the German rendering of the original title, while in America, Thomas Dunne published it as The Sixth Extinction and in the UK, Saqi published it under the title The Lost and Left Behind. All of which I find amusing, because it is a peculiar sort of book and difficult to situate in the any of the conventional categories, which was my intention when I set out to write the thing in the first place. It does drive the marketing-department boffins to distraction, mind you.

I'm also happy to see that the book will soon be the subject of a short documentary on Kulturzeit, which broadcasts in Germany, Austria and Switzerland.

But the news about the book that really makes me happy today is that it was more or less the inspiration behind the artist and cinematographer Apichatpong Weerasethaku's Primitive, a multiscreen installation that's opening at the Haus der Kunst in Munich later this month and will be released as a feature length film next year. "The book sparked my interest in issues of extinction, about the disappearance of species and beliefs," Weerasethaku says, and he chose the Thai village of Nabua, and its tragic story, to explore the questions raised in the book. Nabua became a"widow's town" during the Thai army's occupation from the 1960s to the 1980s, when Nabua's communist partisans were forced to flee into the jungle.

Weerasethaku got the book as a gift from Peter Sellars, and it is in these ways that ideas sometimes make their way through the world. Serendipity rears its lovely head now and again: After the Thai government decided to censor his film Syndromes and a Century, Weerasethaku founded the free speech mobilization called Free Thai Cinema, and you can sign its petition here.

Order from your Masonic overlords: Surrender peacefully and you will not be harmed

But quietly, the resistance grows: Mr. Yahya is opposed to Zionism and Freemasonry and sees them as very interrelated movements. He denounces terrorism, which he says is a product of Darwinism, while he considers Islam its antidote. Islam, he believes, is a religion of peace and love. Last year, he successfully applied to a court in Istanbul to block access to the website of Richard Dawkins, the author of the global bestseller The God Delusion.

Three days to go before the big anniversary celebration.

No, not this one.

Vancouver: A Poem and "the constant destruction and reconstructions of capitalism"

The building at Broadway & Commercial (northeast corner) was torn down because of drug dealers, now it's land cleared for a SkyTrain station, & it's behind a fence, & today on the fence they've hung pieces of murals - or of a mural - odd-shaped cutout poster plywood cartoons - images - of the places that were there before - & skimpy string of Christmas lights, & it's supposed to be safe.

(The whole place blown up, & the gas station & the 7-11, a big bloody shootout over drugs, cars crashing into each other, a driver gets shot and falls out of his cab into the snow & then the 7-11 going up in a big explosion. . .

- from George Stanley's latest volume, Vancouver: A Poem.

Stan Persky observes that the publication of this book was met by a curious indifference: If this sort of thing happened in France or Germany, where enough people still care about literature, the absence of attention to a significant literary work by a reasonably well-known author would be considered an intellectual scandal. Rather ironically, it’s the case that in France a segment of Stanley’s Vancouver is available in the most recent issue of the bilingual French literary journal, meet, a Vancouver/Cairo number co-edited by Hadrien Laroche, novelist and cultural attache at the French Consulate in Vancouver. In Canada, however, the little-noticed publication of Stanley’s book is just another, like, whatever, shrug.

I could understand the critical silence if Stanley were simply a novice poet, writing about some tired, poetically precious, or impossibly arcane topic. But he’s not. And it’s not. The 75-year-old self-described “senior” is the author of a dozen or so chapbooks and volumes — including, just in the last decade or so, Seniors (2006), A Tall, Serious Girl (2003), At Andy’s (2000), and Gentle Northern Summer (1995) — and he’s the 2006 winner of the Poetry Society of America’s prestigious Shelley Award. . .

John Harris offers his own take on the book here. My take is that Vancouver: A Poem is fucking brilliant, like.

Yankees Talking Sense

To this day, the vast majority of Afghans truly prefer U.S. forces over the Taliban. What they don't like, however, is our overwhelming failure to make progress after our initial gains in 2001 and 2002. If they hated us in general, the Afghans would've kicked out our meager force of 30,000 troops years ago. What they hate is when we tell them that we're going to run off the Taliban and fix their country--and then we don't. What they hate is when we offer them incentives to side with us against the Taliban, and then, when the Taliban return to their villages, we leave them hung out to dry. What they hate is when we are forced to rely on air power--resulting in unnecessary civilian casualties--because we don't have enough ground troops.

Here.

Vancouver's Finest

They're a bit partial to the mainland and it doesn't look like they'd make very good prospects for a dragon boat team, but I'd nonetheless recommend the Real Mackenzies to Todd Wong (i.e. Toddish McWong, Canada's answer to Obama), for his next bacchanalia, in a heartbeat:

Guantanamo Bay Is Not The Only Cuban Detention Camp

There are more than 200 political prisoners in Cuba, including 23 journalists in jail solely because of their dissident views. Last year, Cuban authorities also arrested and briefly detained more than 1,000 "suspected dissidents."

Ricardo González Alfonso, the Reporters Without Borders correspondent and editor of the magazine De Cuba, was returned to his cell last year after a long spell in the hospital of Havana’s Combinado del Este prison. He was repeatedly denied the right to speak to his children by telephone in December, after being awarded the 2008 Reporters Without Borders journalist of the year prize. Serving a 20-year jail sentence imposed during the 2003 “Black Spring” and now aged 58, González is currently being held in a damp and unhealthy isolation cell in which his health is deteriorating.

Fabio Prieto Llorente, 45, another independent journalist serving a 20-year sentence imposed in March 2003, is also being kept in solitary confinement. Held in El Guayabo prison on the Isle of Youth, where he is from, he has been on hunger strike since 28 January in protest against the harassment to which he has been subjected by the prison’s guards and the State Security (the political police).

Pablo Pacheco Avila, 38, a reporter with the Cooperativa Avileña de Periodistas Independientes who was also sentenced to 20 years in prison in 2003, was transferred from Morón prison to Canaleta prison in the central province of Ciego de Ávila at the start of January. According to a fellow detainee, he was moved because Morón prison needs to be repaired before the UN special rapporteur’s arrival.

And on it goes.

Attention holidaymakers: "The strange 'endophobia' displayed in excluding that which is similar, in denying equal rights to your own compatriots, is common on the streets of this island. Among the most intense impressions the city of Santiago de Cuba left me with is precisely that, of not being able to enjoy the same services as foreign tourists."

A Discussion In Platypus Review About Afghanistan, Internationalism and The Left

I am not prepared to simply “jettison” the instructive example of the Canadian volunteers in the Spanish War. I don’t know that I’d go so far as to say it holds the “key” to a revived internationalism, but it certainly does set a standard, and a similar popular-front strategy is not doomed to failure at all. In the 1930s, Western armies were not arrayed against Franco, Hitler and Mussolini. Today, the US, NATO and ISAF is in the fight in Afghanistan, and with the exception of the Americans’ disgraceful appeasements of the Pakistan military and intelligence complex, the armies of the West are, in fact, on the right side. I really think it’s important to acknowledge that, to get over it. The Taliban are not the Vietcong. The Sixties are over. It actually is possible for the American military to be on the right side of a struggle, and as some wag said, “It would be lovely if the Nelson Mandela Appreciation Society had the means to take on the job, but until that happens, I’m afraid we’re going to have to settle for the 101^st Airborne Division.”

That's my story, and I'm sticking to it. It's from my conversation with Andony Melathopoulos in the latest Platypus Review.

Interesting bunch, the Platypus 1917 crowd. Centered at the University of Chicago, Platypus contends that the contemporary "Marxist" left is a shambles and a ruin. While its downfall was largely self-inflicted, "the improbable — but not impossible — reconstitution of an emancipatory Left is an urgent task; we believe that the future of humanity depends on it. . . To abdicate this or to obscure the gravity of past defeats and failures by looking to 'resistance' from 'outside' the dynamics of modern society is to affirm its present and guarantee its future destructive reality."

I'm not sure I agree with the content of this, but I do occasionally share the sentiment: "The Left is dead—and whatever undead elements of it continue to stagger among us deserve to be put down before they demoralize and stupefy a new generation. . . To not be willing to recognize that the Left is dead is to have died with it."

If You Love Canada So Much, Why Don't You Go Live There?

Amusing Random Lunatic Outburst Generator (Google is Your Friend):

If you support the Iraq War so much go fight it yourself. If you love Israel so much why don't you go live there?

Rather than have Fidel come here, why don't you go live there with the real Cubans?

If you love Des Moines so much, why don't you go live there?

The Bahamas is a good example of what does happen when it is not stopped or people are not held accountable for their actions, why don't you go live there?

Don't try and get on his good side by bashing me, you homo! If you love Canada so much, why don't you go live there with those fucking hippies and blaze all day long!

Why don't you go live there then? (Iran)

They are Communist Countries. What do you expect? If you agree with them so much why don't you go live there? (Argentina, Venezuela)

People like you upset me. If you are so concerned about them (instead of us), then why don't you go live there? (Everywhere except the US and A)

Meme brazenly swiped from this crowd.

Hope Lies In The Proles

Remembering "a small-framed, dapper man with an intense gaze and an air of surprising calm," good news this way comes, from Iraq:

All the Islamic parties lost ground, especially that associated with the so-called "Shia firebrand", Moqtada al-Sadr, whose share of the vote went down from 11% to 3%. The principal Sunni Islamic party, the Islamic Party of Iraq, was wiped out.The only Islamic party to gain ground was the Dawa party of the Shia prime minister Nouri al-Maliki - and even that party dropped the word Islamic from its name.

Acknowledgements to Peter, who notices: "The response from the catastrophists? All is silence."

The Globe and Mail Needs To Apologize For Its Utterly Moronic Stupidity

It's one thing for semi-literate, pseudo-left wheezers to traffic in the lie that Liberal leader Micheal Ignatieff supports torture, but the Globe and Mail? In today's editions, the Globe and Mail repeats the canard in its account of what it calls a "fawning" New York Times essay about Ignatieff that ran on Sunday: "Politically, the Times piece suggests Mr. Ignatieff has taken some stances that are diametrically opposed to Mr. Obama's . It recalls, for example, the Liberal leader's onetime support of the U.S. invasion of Iraq and his public defence of torture."

Nevermind that there's nothing in the NYT essay that I can find that refers to torture at all; To even suggest that Ignatieff has ever defended torture, publicly or privately, is a sure sign of slobbering idiocy at work, but also of a specific kind of slobbering idiocy. It's not just a mistake, or a lie, or a libel. It's more interesting than that.

I confess to having long held a morbid fascination with the reasons why some people feel compelled to tell lies about Michael Ignatieff, but for my purposes here, what's especially illuminating about the content and function of the 'Ignatieff supports torture' myth is the way it entered popular circulation.

You have to begin with what can be best understood as a broad rather than specific libel against 'muscular' liberals, to the effect that their persistent articulation of universal principles has somehow helped provide intellectual justifications to which various shadowy Ziocons will handily resort as they go about the business of torturing and maiming people in the course of their shadowy, violent and imperialistic mischief.

If I'm not mistaken, the first Canadian articulation of this libel that specifically ensnared Ignatieff was set off by the Canadian philosophy professor Michael Neumann, an embarrassment to Trent University and a contributor to the American lunatic fringe publication Counterpunch. To be fair, while some people appear to believe the Ignatieff "supports torture" lie simply because some idiot said so or because they are intellectually incapable of grasping even the simplest forms of nuance, this is not a thing you can say about Neumann, who will happily point out the nuanced distinction between good and bad antisemitism: "Some of this hatred is racist, some isn't, but who cares?"

Anyway. In the evolution of the libel against 'muscular liberals' and Ignatieff 's inclusion in it, an important event occurred in February, 2005 when the human-rights professor Conor Gearty wrote an essay in Index on Censorship that singled out Ignatieff as an important figure within a caste of well-meaning liberal intellectuals who had handed famous American warmonger-plunderer and all-round cad Donald Rumsfeld "the intellectual tools" necessary to justify Yankee imperialism, even to the point of torturing people along the way. While Gearty was not so stupid and insulting as to suggest that Ignatieff in any way supported torture, Ignatieff was furious, and resigned from the editorial board of Index on Censorship. An amusing reconstruction of the whole rumpus can be found in Laurie Taylor's excellent essay in the New Humanist.

But how did we get to the point that the 'Ignatieff defends torture' myth not only ended up in public circulation in Canada but even gets reported, as fact, in Canada's venerable Globe and Mail? Perhaps it's at least partly because Ignatieff is a politician now, so some people see no particular shame in lying about him. But something else is at work, and here again, what's especially illuminating is the way that lie gets told.

When something approaching "evidence" is presented, it consists of a single out-of-context citation from either Ignatieff's 2004 book, The Lesser Evil: Political Ethics in an Age of Terror, or more usually (in this Age of The Interwebs) a citation of a single sentence from a synthesis of a single chapter in that book that Ignatieff wrote for the New York Times in 2004. Watch how easy it is to turn an argument against torture into what can be handily misrepresented as an argument defending torture, just by reciting a single sentence out of its proper context:

Ignatieff: "Permissible duress might include forms of sleep deprivation that do not result in lasting harm to mental or physical health, together with disinformation and disorientation (like keeping prisoners in hoods) that would produce stress."

Nevermind that even out of context, that sentence does not provide anything approaching evidence for the support of torture, and depends on the reader's knowledge that jurists have long recognized the important distinction between 'permissable duress' and torture. Here's that same sentence in its context:

"An outright ban on torture, rather than an attempt to regulate it, seems the only way a democracy can keep true to its ideal of respecting the dignity even of its enemies. For that is what the rule of law commits us to: to show respect even to those who show no respect for us.

"To keep faith with this commitment, we need a presidential order or Congressional legislation that defines exactly what constitutes acceptable degrees of coercive interrogation. Here we are deep into lesser-evil territory. Permissible duress might include forms of sleep deprivation that do not result in lasting harm to mental or physical health, together with disinformation and disorientation (like keeping prisoners in hoods) that would produce stress. What crosses the line into the impermissible would be any physical coercion or abuse, any involuntary use of drugs or serums, any withholding of necessary medicines or basic food, water and essential rest.

"Fine idea, you say, but who is to enforce these safeguards?"

And so on.

Meanwhile, in April, 2006, in an expansive essay arguing against the resort to torture even in the fabled "ticking bomb" scanarios, Ignatieff writes: Those of us who oppose torture under any circumstances should admit that ours is an unpopular policy that may make us more vulnerable to terrorism.

To be clearer, Ignatieff wrote: "For torture, when committed by a state, expresses the state's ultimate view that human beings are expendable. This view is antithetical to the spirit of any constitutional society whose raison d'etre is the control of violence and coercion in the name of human dignity and freedom. We should have faith in this constitutional identity. It is all that we have to resist the temptations of nihilism…"

Clear enough for you? Not for the Globe and Mail, obviously.

Hang the Judge. Hang the District Attorney. Then String 'Em All Up, Every Last One.

I know, it's wrong, and I'm against such intemperate outbursts, and besides, from a practical standpoint there simply aren't enough lamp posts. But then this:

A man who said he robbed a downtown Shreveport bank because he was out of a job and hungry has been sentenced to 15 years in prison for first-degree robbery.

Roy Brown, 54, of Audrey Lane, admitted walking up to a teller with one of his hands under his jacket and telling her it was a "stickup." The teller handed the man three stacks of bills and he took a single $100 bill, told her he was homeless and left, police said. Brown surrendered to police the next day, telling them his mother didn't raise him that way. Police let him sober up and interviewed him two days later. Police said Brown told them he needed money to stay in a downtown detox center, had nowhere to stay and was hungry.

And you put it up against this, in which Wall Street's criminal greedheads award themselves $18.4 billion in bonuses for 2008, the sixth-biggest bonus haul in history, in the very year that they wrecked the global economy, and got billions of tax dollars in public bailouts for their trouble, well, I'm speechless.

So, I will blame Will for leaving me so dyspeptic of a fine Sunday morning, and try to calm down by reflecting on the fact that we're relatively lucky here in Canada, having managed to dodge the worst of the capitalism's global crisis, leaving me, like most Canadians, unable to get too worked up either way about last week's federal budget, even.

News of the death of Sean Greenfield didn't help my mood. So, I'm speechless. But these lads aren't, so I'll let them do the talking (best at full volume, especially if you read this at work):