PARALLELS

Her name is Zahra, a wife and mother in Tehran who starred in the 2010 online graphic novel Zahra’s Paradise. Zahra’s Paradise happens to be the name of a vast cemetery in the Iranian capital, Tehran, where Iranians from ayatollahs to war veterans to student dissidents are buried.

Readers were riveted by Zahra’s struggle to find her son Mehdi, who had disappeared during a street protest. As with many real-life Tehran mothers, Zahra’s search ended at a graveside in Zahra’s Paradise.

The Web comic became a global phenomenon and was translated into 15 languages. Now, Zahra’s creators and the human rights group United for Iran have launched a new storyline in which she runs for president.

In the panel below, Zahra’s best friend, Miriam, a caustic critic of the government who calls Iran’s clerical leaders “clowns” presiding over a circus, urges Zahra to enter the campaign, despite Zahra’s sighs that it won’t bring her dead son back:

Women Living Under Muslim Laws for more

by VANESSA BAIRD

A stylish couple dances the tango in front of the Recoleta Cemetery – the capital’s great baroque and over-the-top celebration of mortality. The pair’s moves are bold, provocative, challenging.

The same might be said of the style and policies being pursued by Argentina today, under the leadership of President Cristina Fernández de Kirchner. Challenges have been issued on various fronts:

To the vulture funds that are threatening to tip Argentina into another almighty default on its debt.
To the British government, accused of behaving like ‘a colonial power’ as Argentina musters international support for its reiterated claim on the Falklands-Malvinas Islands.
To the World Trade Organization, as Argentina goes its own way and applies import restrictions and currency controls – to the dismay of some of its trading partners.
To Argentina’s judiciary as the President tries to push through radical reforms to ‘democratize’ the courts.
And to the powerful Clarín group, as she tries to break up its media monopoly and restrict the number of cable licences it can hold.

Through its many outlets, Clarín tears into the government, blaming it for crime, corruption, economic slowdown and rising inflation. It also accuses the President of ‘authoritarianism’ and of trying to gag the ‘free press’. In April this year, massive protests brought more than a million Clarín supporters on to the streets of Buenos Air

These stories have featured prominently in the national and, to some extent, the international media.

But there is another story that generally slips under the mainstream media radar. A story not of government or policies or nationalism or media power, but of people and how they organize to survive. Of the challenges they face – but also those they present to business-as-usual.

It is a story of growing significance to people in parts of the world that are still struggling to survive the fallout of 2008’s catastrophic global financial crisis.

New Internationalist for more

by JOANNE LAURIER

You Tube

You Tube

Frances Ha, written by director Noah Baumbach (The Squid and the Whale, 2005, Greenberg, 2010) and the movie’s lead performer Greta Gerwig, follows the adventures of Frances Ha—her last name as it’s shortened to fit a letterbox name slot—as she flits through New York City in search of an undefined “something” (“I’m so sorry. I’m not a real person yet.”).
…
Sarah Polley’s Stories We Tell

In her documentary, Stories We Tell, Canadian actress-director Sarah Polley uses a mixture of interviews with family and friends, fictional recreations and footage from home movies to explore the fate of her mother Diane Polley, an actress and casting director who died when Polley was 11. Anecdotes and footage of Diane reveal her to be a captivating, vivacious personality whose untimely death left a deep hole in the lives of those she had been close to.

World Socialist Web Site for more

by MUKUL DUBE

The JD(U) has broken off with the BJP because Narendra Damodardas Modi apparently does not have “acceptable high secular credentials”. Will Messrs. Nitish Kumar and Sharad Yadav please tell us whom the RSS-BJP could have dredged up from their ranks who would have met the requirement? To any thinking person their choice makes clear their goal.

Did someone say Lal Kishenchand Advani? In “the 80s and 90s … Advani challenged the holy cow of secularism”, says Jyoti Punwani, and goes on with “Advani made Muslim-bashing popular.” Source: http://www.thehoot.org/web/Being-clear-eyed-about-Advani/6857-1-1-10-true.html

Let us not forget that Advani was the one who defended the Butcher of Gujarat 2002, also in Goa.

Mukul Dube can be reached at dube.mukul@gmail.com

by NINA MARTYRIS

Columbia’s Gabriel José de la Concordia García Márquez. PHOTO/Wikipedia

Reading Gabriel García Márquez’s morbidity in the happiest country on earth.

Gabriel García Márquez spent his best years as a journalist in two spectacular cities on Colombia’s Caribbean coast: Barranquilla and Cartagena de Indias. In January, I visited them on a cultural reporting fellowship established by García Márquez’s New Journalism Foundation and the Ministry of Culture Colombia, which brings together twenty writers from around the world to the cities that nourished the author’s literary vision. First to Barranquilla, where García Márquez joined the literary Barranquilla Group, fell in love with the “tough old broad” Virginia Woolf, and lived in a brothel grandly called Residencias New York—the brothel being the ideal place for a writer, according to his other great hero, William Faulkner. Then to Cartagena, once an imperial market for slaves and gold, where he arrived on the roof of a truck as a homeless twenty-one-year-old with four pesos in his pocket and a suitcase of dirty clothes and books of poetry. The truck driver yelled after him, “Be careful, they give medals to assholes there.”

Today, García Márquez owns seven homes in five countries. His journey from what Colombians call a “super-poor” person to a “mega-rich” one makes him one of the few people to have experienced both the crushing poverty and fabulous wealth that divides his country so starkly. For the last two decades, he has been the absentee landlord of a modish, red-walled house in Cartagena. Literary stalker types, including this reporter, sneak up to the terrace of the adjoining Hotel Santa Clara to stare into the casa’s empty compound and swimming pool. The hotel, housed in a four-hundred-year-old Franciscan convent, is where García Márquez set his eerie little novel Of Love and Other Demons. A gentle prod to the imagination, and the long red walls of the house undulate into the 22-meter “stream of living hair the intense color of copper” growing out of the skull of the young girl buried in the convent’s crypt.

If Barranquilla is a city of migrants—a port at the confluence of the Caribbean and the River Magdalena that served as a haven for Europeans fleeing World Wars I and II—Cartagena is Tourist Central. In January, its beautiful walled Old City, with Spanish houses burdened with bougainvillea and chic little restaurants, was overrun with visitors. A sunburned American complained loudly about the price of a shrimp salad in the sunlit square outside the Palace of the Inquisition, which was itself criticized for not having enough quality torture weapons; as one tourist on TripAdvisor grumbled, the museum had nothing that Mel Gibson hasn’t already shown us in Braveheart. Meanwhile, the seaport of Barranquilla was preparing for carnival, an annual four-day eruption of masks, booze, parades, and dancing that is named by UNESCO as a world masterpiece of intangible heritage. Costumes range from the traditional elephant-trunked Marimonda to more risqué getups, such as that of the youngster who appeared topless with pre-op marks sketched neatly across her torso to critique the national obsession with breast implants.

Guernica for more

by JOHN MATHEWS and MEI-CHIH HU

Abstract

This article reviews the current debate in Taiwan over the future of nuclear power in the country’s energy mix. Rather than debate a pro- or anti-nuclear stance, the authors develop the argument that Taiwan has more to gain in promoting renewable energy industries than in sticking with the nuclear option, both in terms of energy security and of building export platforms for tomorrow. Taiwan is justifiably proud of its achievement in building three ‘pillar industries’ in semiconductors, flat panel displays and PCs. Now it should be getting ready to add a fourth pillar industry, of comparable success – concentrated solar power (CSP) plants, solar PV, wind power, and wider renewable energy sources industry – utilizing all the institutional and entrepreneurial strategies perfected in Taiwan’s earlier development.

The Asia-Pacific Journal for more

by NAFEEZ AHMED

Top secret US National Security Agency (NSA) documents disclosed by the Guardian have shocked the world with revelations of a comprehensive US-based surveillance system with direct access to Facebook, Apple, Google, Microsoft and other tech giants. New Zealand court records suggest that data harvested by the NSA’s Prism system has been fed into the Five Eyes intelligence alliance whose members also include the UK, Canada, Australia and New Zealand.

But why have Western security agencies developed such an unprecedented capacity to spy on their own domestic populations? Since the 2008 economic crash, security agencies have increasingly spied on political activists, especially environmental groups, on behalf of corporate interests. This activity is linked to the last decade of US defence planning, which has been increasingly concerned by the risk of civil unrest at home triggered by catastrophic events linked to climate change, energy shocks or economic crisis – or all three.

Just last month, unilateral changes to US military laws formally granted the Pentagon extraordinary powers to intervene in a domestic “emergency” or “civil disturbance”:

“Federal military commanders have the authority, in extraordinary emergency circumstances where prior authorization by the President is impossible and duly constituted local authorities are unable to control the situation, to engage temporarily in activities that are necessary to quell large-scale, unexpected civil disturbances.”

Other documents show that the “extraordinary emergencies” the Pentagon is worried about include a range of environmental and related disasters.

Z Communications for more

Link TV & You Tube

by GARGA CHATTERJEE

In the subcontinent, not for once have I heard from the parents of any errant youth that bad actions of their child might have something to do with, well, their child. Typically, it is ‘bad company’ that is the culprit of choice. The reasons of all things bad with us are to be found outside of us – a curious position that helps a perpetrator look like a victim. Externalities explain our vices; our intrinsic qualities are the source of our virtues. When this way of absolving the self gains wide public currency as a social ideology, we have a society that is always looking for scapegoats. The types of scapegoats that are found also express the subterranean ideologies and anxieties we have. When the migration of the rural poor to the city gains currency as a ‘cause’ for rapes, it tells us less about causes of rapes and more about ideology and anxieties of the people with whom this ‘cause’ resonates with. Such is the case with pornography as another cause of rape. What is even better, pornography has also been bandied about as one of the causal elements in contemporary rape. Rather than implicating the training in gender violence that society and family’s own values and norms faithfully provide on a daily basis, porn has been identified as public enemy. Legislators and the chatterati in the Indian Union are deliberating whether pornography, especially the online variety, should be banned. ‘Does porn cause rape’ is a question that has been discussed in these circles for public consumption. Certain women’s rights workers, virulently swadeshi ‘porn is Western, rape-causing evil imported into pure India’-types, free speech wallahs and freelance libertarians debated the issue in various fora. Many asked whether anyone wants their mother to be a porn-star? No one asked whether anyone wants their mother to be brick-kiln worker working 16 hours a day at slave-wages.

Hajarduari for more

by FLORIAN KOHLBACHER

Japan’s population began to shrink in 2005, and it is also ageing: by 2010, 23% of Japanese were over 65 and 43% over 50, the highest ratios in the world. This may lead to a labour and skills shortage, and shrink the overall domestic market, but it also offers growth prospects for what in Japan is called the “silver market”.

By 2025, 33% of the Japanese population is expected to be 65 or older. The age structure will move further and further away from the classic pyramid shape, and closer to a kite shape. The number of senior citizens will grow, while the population will fall to 95 million in 2050, from just under 127 million in 2000, owing to the low birthrate.

Since 2005 this decline has been accompanied by a fall in the labour force. If nothing is done to increase the working-age population, it will decline sharply. The consensus in Japan is that more of the old should work, and more women: only 71.6% of Japanese women aged 25-54 work, compared with 75.2% in the US, 81.3% in Germany and 83.8% in France. But it could take time to change attitudes to gender equality, and population ageing is an immediate problem. According to a government white paper, the economically active population will fall from 66.57 million in 2006 to 42.28 million in 2050 (1).

Le Monde Diplomatique for more