Kafka was a
lawyer by training. At the age of 25, two years after getting his law
degree, he began work at the Kingdom of Bohemia’s Workers’ Accident
Insurance Institute, where he devoted himself to the implementation of
the law on statutory occupational insurance, adopted by Austro-Hungary
in 1887—three years behind Germany and eleven years ahead of France.footnote1
Kafka specialists are divided as to whether his legal career hindered
or helped his literary work. His diaries and letters offer evidence to
support both views, which should not be surprising, since there is
barely a single affirmation from his pen that is not immediately
reconsidered from another point of view. Thus he famously wrote that his
legal studies involved living on sawdust, already chewed over by
thousands of mouths—but promptly added that, ‘in a certain sense’, this
was exactly to his taste.footnote2
This way of turning over the cards, not stopping at the first meaning
of a fact or symbol but always examining them from the reverse
perspective, is the hallmark of the legal mind—or, more precisely, of
the art of the trial, which is entirely governed by the rule of audi alteram partem: hear the other party.
This first rule of the art of law is known today as the adversarial principle—in French, the principe du contradictoire.
It is an ambiguous term, since consideration of the opposite point of
view doesn’t annul the first viewpoint but puts it to the test of truth,
allowing the party defending it to rebut in turn the arguments made
against it. In other words, the principle is valid only to the extent
that it is at the service of the law of non-contradiction: that
a thing cannot both be and not be at the same time. In the course of
legal proceedings, the play of these successive ‘speaking againsts’ thus
takes place on a terrain of rules that cannot themselves be
contradicted and which are based in law. The parties have to submit to
the same law for the trial to proceed; it is this common submission that
allows them to exchange words, rather than blows.
Houda Terjuman’s work Bridges not fences Casa Arabe _Laura
What does it mean when you are asked:
“Where are you from?” This often innocuous question provides information
to identify the historical background of a person but, more often than
not, also pigeon-holes migrants based on biases and stereotypes. The
project, Fondazione Imago Mundi, a project founded by Italian billionaire Luciano Benetton, has partnered with the Aga Khan Museum
to launch a new project changing the narrative of identity for
migrants. The partnership has kicked off with an exhibition in Italy
called “Don’t Ask Me Where I’m From.”
The
project channels the experiences of artists who are first, second, and
third-generation immigrants–a growing body of people raised in a culture
other than their parents–in a series of several works exploring
cross-cultural artistic realities. Don’t Ask Me Where I’m From features
new works by 15 artists, representing 25 different countries. From
Italy, the exhibition will travel to the Aga Khan Museum in March 2020
and then to venues across Canada, the United States, Europe, and the
Middle East.
While the spark for each protest might be different, it is not about left and right but the failure of neoliberalism
MARC STEINER: Welcome to The Real News, folks. This is Marc Steiner. Good to have you with us.
Bob Dylan wrote a song many moons ago,
and one of the lines went something like this: “Something is happening,
but you don’t know what it is, do you?” And I won’t say the rest, but
that song was called Ballad of a Thin Man. And we used to sing that song
to the establishment back in the 60s when the world was being rocked by
liberation movements and worldwide demonstrations. Now, from Colombia,
to Hong Kong, to Haiti, Bolivia, Egypt, and Iran, and a dozen more
countries, are exploding with demonstrations.
They’re not all erupting for the same
reason, at least not the same obvious reason, but the underlying causes
may be connected; from the failure of the neoliberal policies, to
international finance rules that benefit the elite and the wealthy but
leave the masses behind struggling in their wake, to capitalism’s
inability to answer the social and then the economic needs of the people
themselves. But given that, and how the right may support Hong Kong,
but the left may decry the coup in Bolivia–though I might add this whole
radical kind of supports both of them. But seriously, how do we connect
those dots, understand what is going on in this planet and how these
revolts may be confronting and defining the future for the 21st
century.
Ben Ehrenreich wrestles with this in his latest article for The Nation
called Welcome to the Global Rebellion Against Neoliberalism. And Ben,
welcome. Good to have you with us.
BEN EHRENREICH: It’s good to be here, Marc.
MARC STEINER: And let me just add before we
start that Ben’s most recent new book is The Way to the Spring, which is
based on his reporting from the West Bank. And next July we’ll see his
next book, Desert Notebooks: A Roadmap to the End of Time, which may be
appropriate for this conversation. Maybe not.
Well Ben, good to have you here. But I
think as you look first of all in a broader sense at these rebellions
taking place across the globe–and we covered some of this when we
covered Hong Kong. I had some people kind of writing on YouTube that
they thought I was being too liberal in supporting and having these
people–calling them socialists on the air, these people who were part of
the Hong Kong demonstrations. And then other people getting upset
because of the coup in Bolivia. And they seem really disparate in terms
of their political underpinnings. But in some ways, all these
things–from there, to Haiti, to the Sudan, to throughout the
world–there’s a connection here that is really hard for most people to
kind of put their hands around.
BEN EHRENREICH: Yeah. I think for a lot of
them there is. And I’ve been grappling with this for a few weeks, as one
after another country just sort of explodes into protest trying to
figure out why this is happening now; what, if anything, they all have
in common. Eventually, I just started making a list, and the list was
long. I mean, as you said, it’s more than a dozen countries that are now
in the last… since September have been thrown into turmoil by popular
uprisings. Some of them started a lot earlier than that. Hong Kong did,
and Haiti certainly did. And I started trying to make lists of what in
each country set them off, and the commonalities quickly began to stand
out. In most of them, whether it was a hike in a fuel tax or a hike in
transit fare as in Chile that set them off, it was austerity policies of
one kind or another that pushed people into the streets.
In other words, people are in all of
these countries getting more and more squeezed, which means the daily
life is harder. There is fewer and fewer social services available to
them from the government and they see in pretty much all of these
countries a corrupt, unaccountable elite, which is enriching itself
while the lives of most people become more and more difficult.
And I think in most of these countries, this has been happening for some
time. And there was some small spark like in Chile, the hike in transit
fares that pushed a few people into the street and then many more
people. And then of course governments tend to overreact to these things
with considerable brutality. And that pushes even more people in the
streets. And then within a few days you have a vast movement happening.
MARC STEINER: So I mean, when you look at
these things… I mean, one of the things that I’ve been thinking about
were these rebellions taking place, riots taking place, street
demonstrations across the globe. To me, there’s a connection between
that and the rise of the populist right. I’m not saying the populist
right is behind the demonstrations at all. But the connection is, it
seems to me–and I’d like to see what your thoughts on this–is the
inability of this neoliberal capitalist world to answer the questions of
people’s lives, so for people to survive. And I think that’s the
connecting dots, but it’s being used politically across the spectrum and
I think that’s what’s confusing people so much. How do you put your
finger on it?
BEN EHRENREICH: Yeah. I mean, I think you’re
right. I think in a lot of places, unfortunately the US being one of
them, people have turned to nationalists and various kinds of ethnos
chauvinist right-wing responses to some of the same challenges, right?
That people are more and more shut out of their own societies. That
people have a harder and harder time getting by. One case that was
pretty interesting, I think, was France, which just marked it’s 12 month
anniversary of the yellow vest protest, which of course were set off
when Macron decided as a good green European centrist to try to
discourage fossil fuel use by imposing a tax on fuel. Right? And he did
this, everyone noticed, shortly after slashing taxes on the very rich.
So it was really clear that whatever
transition was going to happen to agree in economy was going to happen
on the backs of ordinary people. And this sent people out into the
streets. Those protests were extremely tumultuous and have been
long-lasting, and there’s been a lot of hair-pulling over what that
means, I think among people on the left as well as the right… Because
there have been far right elements, antisemitic elements out in those
protests as well as folks on the left and the far left, and sometimes
they’ve gotten along and sometimes they haven’t. But I think you’re
right. I think the people on both sides of the spectrum are responding
in different ways to increasing social insecurity.
MARC STEINER: Yeah. And it seems to me that
one of the things you are wrestling with in your article which is really
important I think for us to wrestle with in a much broader and deeper
sense as well, is people can be so dismissive so quickly. What I was
alluding to earlier was when I did a piece with socialist activists who
were involved in the Hong Kong demonstrations, I get all these comments
from YouTube saying, “You’re a tool of the Western governments. This is
all being fomented by the United States deep state,” and all the rest.
When no… for us to understand that these things were erupting because
people have a deep discontent with their societies. And I think that
it’s something that has not happened before like this, and people on the
left especially are kind of grasping for how to define it and how to
respond to it. I think that’s part of the dilemma most people are
having. You haven’t seen very many articles like yours that are trying
to connect the dots.
BEN EHRENREICH: Yeah, I don’t… The U.S. has been quite good historically at fomenting coups–
Mass protests in Hong Kong put a team of journalists to test as they face intimidation and growing pressure from China.
In June 2019, a controversial new extradition bill in Hong Kong – which would allow people to be sent to mainland China for trial – sparked mass protests, with millions of citizens taking to the streets.
But as China is seen to flex more influence over the semi-autonomous territory, Hong Kong’s media also face pressure.
Among those covering the protests is Hong Kong Free Press (HKFP), an
independent news outlet whose journalists put themselves on the line to
cover the story – running a news website and streaming events on social
media as they navigate clashes between protesters and police and keep up
with the latest developments.
But they are up against an increasingly murky media landscape; HKFP’s
founder Tom Grundy believes press freedoms have eroded since 1997 when
Hong Kong was handed over to Chinese rule from Britain.
“The big problem when it comes to truth and accuracy is, they [news
outlets] tend to be either outright owned by China or they’re run by
tycoons with business interests in the mainland. Almost everybody it
seems is touched by if not outright censorship, but self-censorship. And
that’s the cancerous thing that has been spreading in Hong Kong for
some years,” says Grundy.
And as advertisers withdraw from media critical of the
establishment and the government increases control of all media,
journalists in Hong Kong operate in a period of intimidation and
uncertainty.
Still, the team is determined to maintain its independence in the face of biased media.
“I felt that it’s right that journalists reporting on Hong Kong
should have a very deep engagement in the fate of Hong Kong,” says Holmes Chan, an HKFP reporter.
Michelle Obama Slanders Black Men in Her Book, Adds to the Obama Family’s Long Anti-Black Tradition
The Obamas are cashing in on their lifelong project to further the destruction of Black people, while blaming the victim.
“When it comes to imperialism, it pays to be anti-Black.”
Black Agenda Report has spent over a decade analyzing the numerous
manifestations of the Obama family’s hatred of Black America. Michelle
Obama is currently on a book tour of her latest release, Becoming.
The overpriced book is but another addition to the post-Obama
Presidency family fortune. Barack and Michelle Obama have been busy
building a billionaire brand with
book deals and speaking arrangements with Wall Street. As Paul Street
noted, the Obama Foundation is putting the donations of Wall Street
corporations to good use by opening a “library”in
the heartland of Black Chicago. Just as during its tenure in the White
House, the Obama family is profiting from the promotion of white
supremacist policy and ideology directed against Black America.
Nowhere is this clearer than in the very words that have come out of
the mouths of both members of the Obama “power couple.” At a recent
speaking event at the Barclay’s Center in New York City, Michelle Obama
had this to say about Barack Obama:
“I had never met a black dude like Barack Obama. Not only his
background and where he had traveled and who is parents were and he was
always very introspective and he had been a community organizer. I
hadn’t met a Harvard black dude who had been a community organizer in
neighborhoods on the far south side where most people in the firm didn’t
know those neighborhoods, he had been all up in those neighborhoods and
those churches. So he understood the community in a full way but he was
not arrogant, he was humble. I also liked the way he treated others.”
“The Obama family is profiting from the promotion of white supremacist policy and ideology directed against Black America.”
Michelle Obama uses her husband’s falsified credentials as a weapon
against all Black men. Her statement that she had never met a “black dude”like
Barack Obama represents but another racist dog whistle to please white
America. The former First Lady of the United States has met plenty of
Black men; she was raised for a period in the South Side of Chicago
after all. However, as the Obamas have so plainly demonstrated, it isn’t
where you are from but who you serve that matters. Few things please
white America and its allies in the Black political class more than the
criminalization and demonization of Black men. True to U.S. history,
Michelle Obama invokes the image of the pathological, criminal, and lazy
Black male who could not possibly live up to the standards of her
“cultured” yet humble husband.
Texas A&M professor and scholar Tommy Curry is fighting
for the creation of Black Males Studies precisely because the
demonization of Black men is central in the shaping race, class, and
gender politics in the United States. Curry argues quite convincingly
that contemporary theories about race and gender are formulated around
the extermination of Black men ,
especially poor Black men. Black men suffer from disproportionate rates
of intimate partner violence, state violence, unemployment and
incarceration but are often considered to be sexual deviants and
criminals who possess “toxic masculinity.” Black men hold progressive views on gender and poll higher on these views than white women but are often thought to obsess over the patriarchal power of white men.
“As the Obamas have so plainly demonstrated, it isn’t where you are from but who you serve that matters.”
The legacy of mass Black enslavement, now manifested in the
incarceration regime, is the foundation from which anti-Black attitudes
against Black men and all Black Americans are nourished. One of Michelle
and Barack Obama’s signature achievements for the ruling elites of the
United States was the creation of massive amnesia in the Black polity
around this fact. Black Americans as a group became more pro-warand pro-state surveillancethan
at any point in its history. Black Americans were further unable to
muster any demands on the Administration around issues like forcing the
Justice Department to indict murderous police officers or for the state
to address the theft of Black wealth, even at the height of the Black
Lives Matter insurgency. Not only were the Obamas able to move Black
America to the right, but they were able to insult Black America every
step of the way.
Michelle Obama’s racist dog whistle against Black men wasn’t the
first time that the Obama duo attacked Black people. In 2008, then
Presidential candidate Barack Obama castigated Black men as absentee fathers . Obama didn’t mention that data suggests Black men are the most committed fathers of any other group studied
in the nation. But Obama’s comments are not about respectability. The
myth of the absentee Black father is but a trope for the criminalization
of Black men, where massive levels of exploitation and oppression by
way of discrimination, police violence, incarceration, and poverty faced
by Black people can be erased in favor of the Reaganite mantra of
personal responsibility.
“Not only were the Obamas able to move Black America to
the right, but they were able to insult Black America every step of the
way.”
Once in office, the Obama Administration made it clear that it was
the Presidency of all people, not Black people. Of course, what Obama
meant was that he was the President of Wall Street, the ruling elites,
and the white Americans who do their bidding. In a 2013 speech at Morehouse College,
Barack Obama lectured Black men about personal responsibility. He told
new graduates to stop blaming slavery for their problems and focus
instead on being good fathers. Thus, the Obamas are no stranger to
hurling insults at Black people whenever the opportunity arises. This
was an especially useful skill during the Black insurgency that
developed in the wake of the police state murders of Trayvon Martin and
Michael Brown. Obama made sure to repeat the mantra of demonic Black men
by criminalizing the victims as violent, drug-induced thugs and
labeling the righteous rebellion of Black people as “excuse making” and “criminal behavior.”
New trend : A user breathes in oxygen mixed with perfume at an oxygen bar in New Delhi. PHOTO/ANUSHREE FADNAVIS
No medical community has come forward to spread awareness on this captivating yet unscientific business
The popularity of packaged air began around four years ago when a
Canadian company launched ‘canned air’ for people in China when air
pollution in many cities became alarmingly high. The newer addition —
oxygen-bar — a recreational parlour or cafe which serves ‘pure oxygen’
is becoming a more attractive destination, particularly in cities with
dangerous levels of air pollution. At times, the oxygen comes in
different scented flavours.
In cities with highly polluted air,
the business of ‘canned oxygen’ or ‘oxygen-bar’ is flourishing. The
recent launch of such a recreational oxygen parlour in Delhi amidst the
city’s infamously bad air condition has caught significant media
attention. But how safe are they and are any benefits at all?
First,
do we really need this extra oxygen? The simplest answer is no. Unlike
conventional oxygen therapies used in respiratory conditions that is
administered for a short or long period in hospital or at home, people
take oxygen for an ultra-short period in these bars (30 minutes or
less). As per the standard clinical procedure, oxygen supplementation
can be administered only in case of hypoxemia (lowering of oxygen
saturation in the arterial blood below 95%) and it does not have any
consistent beneficial effect on non-hypoxemic patients.
Placebo, at best
It
must and should be remembered that the oxygen level does not alter in
the air even when the pollution level is high. The same applies to our
health — oxygen saturation in blood remains unchanged in healthy people
in normal conditions, and such recreational oxygen cannot provide any
health improvement. It can at best have a placebo effect. Though users
and proponents of purified oxygen claim several benefits such as
relieving stress, headache and migraine, and help in achieving better
energy and mood, there is no clinical evidence available so far in
support of the beneficial effects of recreational oxygen use.
Family Training, unknown artist, Ming (1368-1644) or Qing (1644-1911) dynasty. PHOTO/the Met Museum, New York
There’s something I don’t like about the ‘Golden Rule’, the
admonition to do unto others as you would have others do unto you.
Consider this passage from the ancient Chinese philosopher Mengzi
(Mencius):
That which people are capable of without learning is their genuine capability. That which they know without pondering is their genuine knowledge. Among babes in arms there are none that do not know to love their parents. When they grow older, there are none that do not know to revere their elder brothers. Treating one’s parents as parents is benevolence. Revering one’s elders is righteousness. There is nothing else to do but extend these to the world.
One thing I like about the passage is that it
assumes love and reverence for one’s family as a given, rather than as a
special achievement. It portrays moral development simply as a matter
of extending that natural love and reverence more widely.
In
another passage, Mengzi notes the kindness that the vicious tyrant King
Xuan exhibits in saving a frightened ox from slaughter, and he urges the
king to extend similar kindness to the people of his kingdom. Such
extension, Mengzi says, is a matter of ‘weighing’ things correctly – a
matter of treating similar things similarly, and not overvaluing what
merely happens to be nearby. If you have pity for an innocent ox being
led to slaughter, you ought to have similar pity for the innocent people
dying in your streets and on your battlefields, despite their
invisibility beyond your beautiful palace walls.
Shias in Pakistan reputedly account for about 20 percent of the
population — or 42 million out of the population of 210 million — making
it the second largest Shia population in the world outside Iran.
Although the subject has not attracted academic attention to the extent
it deserves, two very detailed and highly impressive books published in
the last few years by German academics Andreas T. Rieck and Simon
Wolfgang Fuchs have made enormous contributions in filling the gap.
In his pioneering 2015 book, The Shias of Pakistan: An Assertive and
Beleaguered Minority, Rieck — a German researcher who has served in both
Pakistan and Afghanistan — focused on the history of Shias in Pakistan,
the growth of Shia organisations and their conflictual relationship
with the Pakistani state. In his meticulously researched and stimulating
book titled In a Pure Muslim Land: Shi’ism between Pakistan and the
Middle East, Fuchs — a lecturer of Islamic and Middle East Studies at
the University of Freiburg in Germany — discusses in detail the
fundamental transnational transformation of Shia thought and religious
authority in Pakistan.
Detailing the growth of the Shia population in today’s Pakistan with
specific focus on Punjab, where there was no Shia religious seminary
till 1915 (as Lucknow was the pre-eminent city for Shia seminaries in
India) and only two till 1947, Fuchs argues that the number of
seminaries have increased since the creation of Pakistan and received an
impetus after the Irani revolution. By 2004, there were 374 Shia
seminaries for male and 84 for female students in the country, with 218
and 55 respectively in Punjab alone.
Apart from the long list of books that the author has made use of
during his extensive research in Pakistan, India, Iran and Iraq, Fuch
relies extensively on three Shia journals published in Pakistan: Al
Hujjat, Payam-i-Amal and Al Muntazar. He examines the role of Shia
political organisations in the run-up to Partition, conflict between
traditional and reformist Shia ulema after Partition, linkages between
Pakistani Shias and the Grand Ayatollahs in Iraq and Iran before the
Irani revolution, the impact of the Irani revolution on the Pakistani
Shia landscape, and increasing Sunni-Shia sectarianism against the
backdrop of growing local and transnational linkages.
The role of Shia politicians in the creation of Pakistan can be
described as not only undeniable but, in fact, decisive. Sir Aga Khan
III, an Ismaili Shia, was the first president of the Muslim League. The
first provisional committee of the Muslim League consisted of four Shia
members. Shia politicians played an important role in the Muslim League
in its initial decades and some — such as Syed Ameer Ali, Syed Wazir
Hasan, Raja Sahib Mohammad Ali Mohammad Khan of Mahmudabad, Sir Ali Imam
etc — became its president. Raja Sahib stepped down in 1930 and helped
Allama Muhammad Iqbal become president ahead of Iqbal’s famed Allahabad
address.
