by B. R. GOWANI

the long-tailed macaques hang around Uluwatu Temple in Bali, Indonesia

these monkey-apes <1> do snatch things from human-apes <2> in no time

they seize smart phones, eye/sun glasses, slippers, caps, jewelry, etc

mind you, these things they don’t steal out of greed like human-apes do

but it’s a means to an end — the real goal is food

the job is done for a bartering purpose

science journalist Signe Dean is a bit harsh on these monkeys

how wild monkeys embraced the thug <3> life to sell stolen human valuables for food

Merriam Webster‘s definition of thug:

“a violent or brutish criminal or bully”

the monkeys hanging around the temple are not violent

nor are they brutish or criminal

yes, they are rough, one has to admit

once the temple staff gives food, they return the item without a 2nd thought

like most of the human beings, monkeys want to be treated equally

a monkey who got cucumber goes mad when another one gained a grape

recently, a monkey in Vrindavan, India stole a smart phone

Samsung’s Galaxy S25 Ultra worth rupees or Rs129, 999 or US $1505

the monkey thought: should I keep the phone …

but then, if I keep the phone …

I’ll be busy playing around with it

I’ll stop observing, thinking, imagining, fooling around

I won’t be too much social, familial, natural, that is, nature loving

an emergence of a new model will force me to steal or work to get it

please, don’t laugh — I am not kidding

dogs, oxens, camels, donkeys, mules, cows, horses, elephants, llamas, …

they do back-breaking stressful jobs in many places around the world

snakes, cormorants, eel, and others also work for human-apes

rats are used to detect minefields, seals and dolphins for military purpose

not to ignore the animals used in laboratories andd the cruelty they face

PETA aptly depicts the cruelty lab animals face

“Animals are infected with diseases that they would never normally contract, tiny mice grow tumors as large as their own bodies, kittens are purposely blinded, rats are made to suffer seizures, and primates’ skulls are cut open and electrodes are implanted in them. Experimenters force-feed chemicals to animals, conduct repeated surgeries on them, implant wires in their brains, crush their spines, and much more.”

People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals

each year more than 110 million animals are killed in US labs

our cousins, the capitalist human-apes even make human children work

so how the hell am I going to resist if they enslave me to work

it’s real hot, let me enjoy a mango drink as a barter for the smart phone

till the time I am free

future is uncertain

the world is changing very fast

the leaders are petty, hateful, ethnocentric/religiocentric

those power-loving human-apes don’t give a shit about us animals

but then they don’t give a damn about most of the human-apes either

NOTES

<1> Fabio Mendes to those who ask sarcastically as to how come apes are still around if we evolved from apes.

“We did not evolve from a modern, living ape, like a chimpanzee. We evolved and descended from the common ancestor of apes, which lived and died in the distant past. This means that we are related to other apes and that we are apes ourselves. And alongside us, the other living ape species have also evolved from that same common ancestor, and exist today in the wild and zoos.”

<2> Science communicator Cara Santa Maria points out the closeness between Bonobos, chimpanzees, and humans.

“Of the five living great apes (humans, gorillas, orangutans, chimpanzees, and bonobos), we share the highest DNA complement with chimps and bonobos (we only differ by ). To put that in perspective, we are closer to these ape relatives than they are to gorillas, closer than a dog is to a fox, or even an African elephant is to an Indian elephant. In fact, we (Homo) are thought to have diverged from Pan genus only 4-5 million years ago, an eyeblink in the grand evolutionary scheme of things.”

<3> Stephen Jay Gould is so right when he questions:

“Why should our nastiness be the baggage of an apish past and our kindness uniquely human? Why should we not seek continuity with other animals for our ‘noble’ traits as well?”

B. R. Gowani can be reached at brgowani@hotmail.com

by CHRIS HEDGES

Essayist and novelist Pankaj Mishra discusses the lesser-known genocidal escapades of Western governments and his latest book, The World After Gaza.

?The Holocaust is the quintessential example of human evil for people in the West. In the rest of the world, especially in the Global South, the atrocity of the Holocaust — genocide — has had a closer proximity both in time and place. Colonialism in Africa, destructive wars in Asia and most recently, genocide in the Middle East, have shaped the lives of billions of people.

On this episode of The Chris Hedges Report, essayist and novelist Pankaj Mishra joins host Chris Hedges to discuss his latest book, The World After Gaza.

Mishra argues that the shifting power dynamics in the world means the Global South’s narrative on atrocity can no longer be ignored and the genocide in Gaza is the current crux of the issue.

“Large parts of the world have a cultural memory, historical memory of the atrocities that were inflicted on those parts of the world by Western powers. And that has actually gone to the making of their collective identity. And that is how they see themselves in the world,” Mishra tells Hedges.

Mishra explains that in the case of Israel, Zionist leaders weaponize this narrative by tying the safety and existence of the state of Israel to the defense against the evils of the Holocaust. In other words, the Zionist state exploits the suffering of millions for the benefit of the powerful.

“The words of politicians like Netanyahu, the rhetoric of people like Joe Biden insisting that no Jewish person in the world is safe if Israel is not safe, consistently connecting the fate of millions of Jews living outside of Israel to the fate of the state of Israel, I cannot think of anything more antisemitic. And yet these people keep doing it, endangering Jewish populations elsewhere,” Mishra says.

Host: Chris Hedges

Producer: Max Jones

Intro: Diego Ramos

Crew: Diego Ramos, Sofia Menemenlis and Thomas Hedges

Transcript: Diego Ramos

Transcript

Chris Hedges Pankaj Mishra in his latest book, The World After Gaza, argues that the postwar global order was shaped in response to the Nazi Holocaust. In the West the Shoah was the benchmark for atrocity, the paradigmatic genocide. Its memory serves to justify Israel’s settler colonial, apartheid state, as well as sanctify Jewish victimhood. But there were, he notes, other Holocausts, the German slaughter of the Herero and Namaqua, the Armenian genocide, the Bengal famine of 1943 — then British Prime Minister Winston Churchill airily dismissed the deaths of three million Hindus in the famine by calling them “a beastly people with a beastly religion” — along with the dropping of nuclear bombs on the civilian targets of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

Genocide and mass extermination are not the exclusive domain of fascist Germany. The millions of victims of racist imperial projects in countries such as Mexico, China, India, the Congo, Kenya and Vietnam are deaf to the fatuous claims by Jews that their victimhood is unique. So are Black, Brown and Native Americans.

They also suffered holocausts, but these holocausts remain minimized or unacknowledged by their western perpetrators. Adolf Hitler, as Aimé Césaire writes in Discourse on Colonialism, appeared exceptionally cruel only because he presided over “the humiliation of the white man.” But the Nazis, he writes, had simply applied “colonialist procedures which until then had been reserved exclusively for the Arabs of Algeria, the coolies of India, and the blacks of Africa.”

Outside of the West, Mishra argues, there is a very different paradigm. The dominant story for much of the globe is that of decolonization and the crimes of the colonizers. This divergence of experience and viewpoint explain, Mishra writes, why there has been such disparate reactions to the genocide in Gaza, why to those in the Global South there was an instant understanding of the plight of the Palestinians, why they see the clear color lines between the Israeli occupiers and the Palestinians, why they grasp how, in the West, the world is starkly divided into worthy and unworthy victims.

Joining me to discuss The World After Gaza is Pankaj Mishra, author of Age of Anger: A History of the Present and other works of fiction and nonfiction. He writes regularly for The New Yorker, The New York Review of Books, The Guardian and the London Review of Books, among other publications.

You open the book by talking very early on about what watching this live-streamed genocide has done. You call it a psychic ordeal, which it is, of course, especially for those of us such as myself who worked in Gaza, an involuntary witness to an act of political evil. But it sends as you write a message, a clear unequivocal message, to the rest of the world. What is it?

Pankaj Mishra: I think it’s a message that we are perhaps moving into an era where international law, basic morality, ordinary decency are not going to be found much, especially not in the conduct of our politicians and journalists. And that is, I think, you know, something much, much more disturbing than what many people knew back in the 1930s, because back then there were a lot of countries actively pushing back, resisting the onslaught of fascism. And precisely those very same countries today are, you could say, at the forefront of authoritarianism. Something worse than authoritarianism, actually.

Chris Hedges: Why is it worse?

Pankaj Mishra: Well, I think, you know, this is in the past we’ve had authoritarianism such as that we’ve seen in China and elsewhere that has not made claims on other people’s territory, especially territories thousands of miles away. Yes, in the last couple of weeks, we have seen some extraordinary series of statements and claims by the new U.S. president, which can only portend an era of more bloodshed, more chaos. I mean there’s no getting around this fact that is staring us in the face right now.

Consortium News for more

by NICKY REID

(TRIGGER WARNING: The following story includes detailed descriptions of childhood sexual abuse.)

Once upon a time, there was a little girl named Nicholas, or at least that is what her parents named her. She wasn’t exactly sure just what she was, but she knew from a very young age that she wasn’t a boy. Her big brother was a boy and every time that her parents insisted that she be like him she became furious. The little girl didn’t know how to tell her parents how wrong they were with words so she showed them in every other way that she could. Anytime her parents told her that “if you want to be like your big brother” you’ll do this, she responded by doing the polar opposite.

Her big brother ate his fruits and vegetables, so the little girl refused to even touch another fruit or vegetable. Her big brother drank his juice from a sippy cup, so the little girl refused to drink anything but water even though juice was her favorite drink. Still, somehow, the little girl’s parents were not getting the message, but when it came to potty training, things went too far fast. Suddenly, people were policing parts of the little girl’s body that she found terrifying and confusing and then telling her to just behave like her big brother. Even worse, they demanded that she comply so they could send her away to the same Catholic school that was making her brother such a well behaved ‘big boy.’

The little girl didn’t know what to do so she did what she had always done and refused to comply, but her parents seemed to simply ignore her protests, cleaning up her messes and sending her away to that scary preschool anyway. This went on for nearly two years until the little girl’s mother finally realized that her ‘accidents’ were deliberate and reacted to this discovery with violence for the first and only time in the little girl’s childhood. Not long after this incident, the little girl’s preschool teacher did the same but took it much further, dragging her by the arm to the bathroom that she refused to use, stripping her naked from her shoulders to her ankles and beating her with her bare hands.

Before the little girl could even figure out what had gone wrong, a Catholic priest visiting the church next door to the school observed her misbehavior and saw an opportunity. The young man in the white collar offered his expert guidance to the clearly frustrated preschool teacher. She was more than happy for the help and seemed to have no problem with this grown man taking a young child into the bathroom alone to show her exactly how a man is supposed to behave. What he did was molest the child. He put his hands and his mouth all over her body and made it do frightening things. The little girl was horrified but every other adult was allowed to put their hands on her body so why not this this man of God? How could she possibly say no?

Incredibly, things got worse. One day the visiting priest stopped by the preschool playground and with the approval of the little girl’s teacher took her down the street to visit the rectory where he was staying. He fixed her a sandwich in the kitchen and then sent her upstairs to the bedroom. The moment the little girl entered that room she knew something was horribly wrong. Another man, a priest from her church was already in there naked. The visiting priest came into the room behind her, sat down on the bed in front of her, and removed his pants. The little girl knew right then and there exactly what these two men of God wanted her to do because one of them had already done it to her. She cried and begged the men not to make her do those things. She promised to be good. She promised to behave like her big brother.

The priests literally laughed in her face. The visiting clergyman joked to the other about how much the little girl had enjoyed what he did to her, about how big he manipulated the scary parts of her body into becoming. The little girl just kept sobbing and begging until the two priests lost their patience. One of them grabbed her by the shoulders and forced her mouth onto the other. She choked. She couldn’t breathe. She thought that she was going to die. When the first priest had finally finished, he attempted to pass the gagging child to the other, but the little girl threw up before he could. The priests got mad. They looked at their soiled victim like a broken toy who had just ruined their good time. 

Exile in happy valley for more

by SARA AWARTANI, PABLO SEWARD DELAPORTE, LINDA QUIQUIVIX, & GEORGE YGARZA

The Winter 2024 issue of the NACLA Report explores transcontinental encounters between the land of historical Palestine and the land we know as the Americas.

This piece appeared in the Winter 2024 issue of NACLA’s quarterly print magazine, the NACLA Report.

How do we even begin
to open our mouths
when all we can do
is scream                           
only to be met
with deafening silence

– Leslieann Hobayan, “Scattered”

When this is over there is no over but quiet.
Coworkers will congratulate me on the ceasefire
and I will stretch my teeth into a country.
As though I don’t take Al Jazeera to the bath.
As though I don’t pray in broken Arabic.
It’s okay. They like me. They like me in a museum.

– Hala Alyan, “Naturalized”

Ante la muerte, las palabras solo atestiguan.

– Yamil Maldonado Pérez, “Esta noche todos mis muertos me acompañan”

In 2014, when Palestinian Chilean novelist, essayist, and scholar Lina Meruane returned to Palestine “in place of the other,” of her father and grandfather, to whom the Israeli state had repeatedly denied the right to return, what most shocked her was the silence. Yet as she ponders in her 2023 book Palestina en pedazos, surely there must have been “an incessant bustle” before the displacement. Back in New York after her trip, Meruane’s elderly neighbor, a “Russian-Jewish-woman-from-the-diaspora,” shares just such a memory: “that the pogroms her mother had escaped were preceded by noise. Horseshoes on the cobblestones. Shattered glass.” Meruane observes: “Only then did the silence break… The silence weighed on them as it does now on the streets of Hebron.” 

As a member of the 500,000-strong diaspora in Chile, Meruane forms part of the largest community of Palestinians not only in Latin America and the Caribbean, but outside the Arab world. For her, as for many other Palestinians born in exile in the region, the silence that accompanies genocide is not simply a mark of absence and loss; it reveals something about the world. Just months after Meruane returned from her 2014 visit, the Israeli state killed more than 2,000 Palestinians during its so-called Operation Protective Edge. A decade later, the writing and editing of these pages happened as we, collectively, bore witness to yet another Israeli assault on Palestine, this time of genocidal proportions.

Attending to collective realities, interconnected struggles, and geographies of violence, authors examine solidarities extended by states and pueblos, from above and below, from Abya Yala to Palestine.This issue of the NACLA Report explores transcontinental encounters between the land from the river and the sea and the land we know as the Americas. Attending to collective realities, interconnected struggles, and geographies of violence, authors examine solidarities extended by states and pueblos, from above and below, from Abya Yala to Palestine. At a time when news from Gaza presents seemingly endless horrors, and frustration with political leaders here in the heart of empire continues to deepen, these pieces chart nodes in a global network of anticolonial consciousness and solidarity.

More than 500 years into the colonization of the Americas, an important project within the “Indigenous renaissance,” as Maya Jakaltek scholar Víctor Montejo has termed it, has been to reconceptualize these lands as Abya Yala or Abiayala. Loosely translated to “land of full maturity,” Abya Yala is the word the Guna people of the region otherwise known as Panama and Colombia used to refer to the present world. Since the late 1970s, when the Guna offered the term to Aymara leader Takir Mamani of Kolla Suyu (Bolivia), the concept has taken on a hemispheric significance. As we put this region in conversation with another land suffering under a violent settler colonial project, we intentionally use Abya Yala to read through colonial impositions, such as borders, and to elevate the societies creating and sustaining life in the face of dispossession. While many authors in this issue speak of Latin America and the realities of the colonial state and politics as they exist today, others engage with Abya Yala as a prism through which to view the connections among pueblos, or peoples, in spite of and in opposition to the state.

NACLA for more

by LAM LE

Global leap to 4G and 5G would cut off phone access for millions of vulnerable people.

• Telecom companies aim to profit from the 2G-to-5G transition as governments worldwide face pressure to free up mobile spectrum.
• Vietnam is the latest country to shut down 2G by offering free 4G phones to the poor.
• India and South Africa have expressed concern that the strategy would cut off phone access for millions of vulnerable people.

Last November, Nguyen Thi Que’s mobile phone suddenly stopped working as telecom companies in Vietnam permanently shut down the 2G network.

“I thought of buying a new phone, but I don’t have money,” the 73-year-old, who sells iced tea at a bus stop in Hanoi, told Rest of World in late January.

Vietnam’s plan was simple: Offer free 4G feature phones to help low-income 2G consumers adapt to the change. The strategy paid off, reducing the number of 2G subscribers from over 18 million in January 2024 to 143,000 in November the same year. The country earned a spot among a growing list of nations — including Australia, Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, the UAE, Brunei, Switzerland, Costa Rica, and Jamaica — that have discontinued 2G technology.

As many as 61 countries, ranging from the U.S. and Brazil to South Africa, India, and China, have either planned or initiated the process to shut down 2G networks, according to data from GSMA Intelligence, the research wing of a telecom industry group. The goal is to enhance 4G and 5G bandwidth by repurposing the existing 2G spectrum, which reduces maintenance costs and drives subscriber growth and revenue. This has raised concerns about wider digital exclusion largely affecting the poor, making the decision to switch off 2G a complicated one.

Hundreds of millions of people globally still rely on 2G phones. Factors such as affordability, lack of digital skills, and poor connectivity have kept basic phones relevant in the smartphone age.

“If we take into consideration countries like Vietnam, like Pakistan, like India, they want to attract investment into their countries and having a good quality (4G, 5G) network is very, very important to them,” Jeanette Whyte, head of public policy for Asia-Pacific at GSMA, told Rest of World. “But to move to 5G, we need spectrum and spectrum is in short supply, it’s a scarce resource.”

Rest of World for more

by ADITHI RAMAKRISHNAN

Scientists have dated the skeleton of an ancient child that caused a stir when it was first discovered because it carries features from both humans and Neanderthals.

The child’s remains were discovered 27 years ago in a rock shelter called Lagar Velho in central Portugal. The nearly complete skeleton was stained red, and scientists think it may have been wrapped in a painted animal skin before burial.

When the humanlike child was discovered, scientists noted that some of their attributes—including body proportions and jawbone—looked Neanderthal. The researchers suggested that the child was descended from populations in which humans and Neanderthals mated and mixed. That was a radical notion at the time, but advances in genetics have since proven those populations existed—and people today still carry Neanderthal DNA.

But trying to figure out when exactly the child lived has been difficult. Small roots had grown through the bones and contamination—from plants or other sources—made it impossible for scientists to use traditional carbon dating to measure the child’s age. They instead dated the charcoal and animal bones around the skeleton to between 27,700 and 29,700 years ago.

Physorg for more

by ROBERT REID

On February 6, a U.S. military-contracted plane crashed in Mindanao, Philippines, killing four Americans: one U.S. military service member and three defense contractors, unequivocally exposing the active role of the United States in the “counterinsurgency” war against the Filipino people and highlighting the involvement of U.S. military personnel and equipments in the war effort.

According to the U.S. Indo-Pacific Command Public Affairs, “The aircraft was providing intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance support at the request of our Philippine allies. The incident occurred during a routine mission in support of US-Philippine security cooperation activities.” But there is nothing ‘routine’ about a U.S. military-contracted plane conducting operations in the Philippines. The mere presence of U.S. military forces in the Philippines—especially their involvement in military operations—blatantly violates the Filipino people’s independence, and should be condemned as acts of U.S. imperialist aggression, military intervention and war in the Philippines.

The crash of a U.S. military-contracted plane in the south of the Philippines, further concretizes and proves the indispensable role of the United States in the design and implementation of the ongoing “counterinsurgency” war. It underlines the evidence presented to the International People’s Tribunal of 2024 on war crimes in the Philippines, which highlighted the complicity of the United States in International Humanitarian Law and human rights violations committed against the Filipino people, such as the use of indiscriminate bombings of rural communities, enforced disappearances, extra-judicial killings and many other war crimes.

Throughout his presidency, the U.S.-backed Marcos Jr. administration has proven to be an agent to U.S. imperialism, expanding U.S. military presence in the Philippines. This includes reaffirming the 1951 Mutual Defense Treaty, expanding the number of U.S. military bases under the Enhanced Defense Cooperation Agreement (EDCA) to nine confirmed sites, increasing joint military exercises and “security collaboration,” as well as boosting military aid—an additional $500 million in 2024 and a proposed $2.5 billion in Foreign Military Financing to modernize the Armed Forces of the Philippines (AFP) over five years. This also includes the secret deployment of U.S. Typhon missile systems to an undisclosed location within the country.

While many of these military cooperations are disguised as supposedly efforts to “counter” aggression by China, their real target is the crushing of the Philippine revolutionary movement, ensuring that the Philippines remains a tool in U.S. imperialism’s pursuit of dominance in the Asia-Pacific region. It is the Philippine revolution that forms the main stumbling block to the United States fully using the Philippines as its pawn—which is why they seek to destroy it.

Monthly Review Online for more

by RAQUEL GUTIERREZ AGUILAR

On March 8, International Women’s Day, we’ll return to the streets to condemn the multiple forms of violence that rage against our bodies. We’ll come together to continue to forge justice, a process at once uncomfortable and life-affirming. And together, we’ll take the time to feel our collective strength.

The old world is dying. The patriarchal, capitalist and neocolonial structures that have governed individual nation states and the international order over previous decades have ruptured.

A group of male millionaires, many old and some younger, is destabilizing the old scaffolding. They are interested only in increasing their holdings and profits. In order to do so, they can draw on immense military power.

Let’s call this group of conmen, who are intensifying the war against women, against gender dissidents and migrants, against territories and against minimum material guarantees for the conditions of social reproduction, the “chainsaw gang,” after the phallic instrument they wave around as a sign of their contempt for life, for rights, for women and for dissidents. The chainsaw gang is pathetic, ridiculous and, unfortunately, very dangerous.

Members of this gang include rulers like Javier Milei, Nayib Bukele, Daniel Noboa and, of course, Donald Trump. They believe that everything from the natural wealth of vast territories, to the bodies, dreams and diverse peoples that inhabit the world, exists only for their service and enjoyment. Their arrogance is as vast as the fortunes they possess.

Through their assertion that there are only two genders, they have set in motion a revanchist process of colonization. In doing so, they ignore the overflowing of historically fixed gender roles, a process led by the diverse multiplicity of bodies that we are, and which have mobilized intensely in recent years. As Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui explains, reinstalling the monopolization of “naming and norming” is at the core of the colonial process, which is what excluding everything that exceeds and challenges gender binarism attempts to do.

Banning anti-racist education, as is happening today in the United States, as well as striving to erase the memory of recent and earlier anti-racist and Indigenous struggles, is another step in the colonial and capitalist restoration of a patriarchal order in decline. The actions of the chainsaw gang expose the fear felt by its members and their followers in the face of destabilizing mass movements that have erupted over the past decades.

In countries like Colombia, Bolivia, Chile and Mexico, where voters have expelled the most delusional versions of right-wing corporate governments from power, those who govern continue to plunder territories and encourage militarization. The rulers who today claim to be left-wing also ignore and deny the rights and desires of women. They have been unable to break with economic models based on extractivism and sweatshops that prey on the fabric of life and undermine the possibility of dignified life.

There is a transparent need for an internationalist, anti-racist and anti-militarist trans-inclusive feminism that takes a stand against the advance of the far right and war, that is critical of the left-in-power, and that firmly supports migrants.

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How South Africa’s ccoal exports to Israel undermines its Palestine solidarity

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