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By Prabhat Patnaik

Socialism consists not just in building a humane society; it consists not just in the maintenance of full employment (or near full employment together with sufficient unemployment benefits); it consists not just in the creation of a Welfare State, even one that takes care of its citizens “from the cradle to the grave”; it consists not just in the enshrining of the egalitarian ideal. It is of course all this; but it is also something more. Its concern, as Engels had pointed out in Anti-Duhring, is with human freedom, with the change in the role of the people from being objects of history to being its subjects, for which all the above conditions of society, namely full employment, Welfare State measures, a reduction in social and economic inequalities, and the creation of a humane order, are necessary conditions; but they are, not even in their aggregation, synonymous with the notion of freedom. And hence they do not exhaust the content of socialism.

The conceptual distinction between a humane society and socialism comes through clearly if we look at the writings of the most outstanding bourgeois economist of the twentieth century, John Maynard Keynes. Keynes abhorred the suffering that unemployment brought to the working class. The objective of his theoretical endeavour was to end this suffering by clearing the theoretical ground for the intervention of the (bourgeois) State in demand management in capitalist economies. He was passionately committed to a humane society, and believed that the role of economists was to be committed in this manner. Indeed he saw economists as the “conscience-keepers of society”.

But at the same time Keynes was anti-socialist, not just in the sense that bourgeois intellectuals usually are, i.e. of seeing in socialism an apotheosis of the State and hence a denial of individual freedom, but in a more fundamental sense. He too would have seen in socialism a denial of individual freedom, but his objection to socialism was more basic, and expressed in the following words: “How can I adopt a creed which, preferring the mud to the fish, exalts the boorish proletariat above the bourgeois and the intelligentsia, who, with whatever faults, are the quality in life and surely carry the seeds of all human advancement? . . . It is hard for an educated, decent, intelligent son of Western Europe to find his ideals here, unless he has first suffered some strange and horrid process of conversion which has changed all his values” (Essays in Persuasion, 1931). Keynes’ objection in other words was precisely to the idea of the people becoming the subjects of history. He was full of humaneness; but he baulked at this idea of freedom that would transform the people, led by the proletariat, from being objects to being subjects.

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By DEVIN BEAULIEU

It is a strange and unexpected sound in the middle of Bolivia, but everyday from the curved towers of a mosque in the city of Santa Cruz goes out the call for Muslim prayer. One would not be embarrassed to have never imagined that the Bolivian Islamic Center ever existed in this country heavily dominated by Roman Catholicism and with a majority indigenous population. It is one of a handful of Islamic centers serving a tiny population of Bolivian Muslims estimated to be comprised of 1,000 people. But despite its size the population has become the new subject of security interest of the United States.

The head of the Islamic Center, Mahmud Amer Abusharar, an elderly grey haired Palestinian refugee sitting in his front office appeared humorously bewildered when presented with recent US intelligence and media reports detailing him among others in a study of “extremist threats” in Bolivia.

“The Islamic center is a Bolivian institution, which has no discrimination, whatsoever, against anyone… white like the Europeans, or brown like the Bolivians… Thank God we call on the people to be good to be universal and honest, not to be aggressive,” Abusharar told me.

“I never thought that the Islamic Center forms danger to the United States, but who is introducing this idea to the United States public; he must be the one looking to harm the North American people.”

In a June 6th piece, Fox News published “Bolivia becoming Hot Bed of Islamic Extremism, Report Concludes” based on a May 2009 US intelligence report on Bolivian Muslims. The reporter, Nora Zimmett, cites the report to paint the potential threat of advancing terrorism in the Western Hemisphere from “Anti-American” attitudes of Bolivian Muslims, the leftist Bolivian government’s increasingly strained relations with Washington, and budding relations with Iran. She quoted an unnamed US intelligence official, “There’s a theory that they may believe — Latin America, particularly with its Leftist leanings in recent years, may be more receptive to the anti-American-type rhetoric that we’ve been accustomed to hearing from Iran…The goal of the [Islamic] revolution is not just for Iran, but they feel an obligation to spread it. So we see their outreach as not just an economic one, but also a cultural one. Now, is there potential that could be capitalized by some other for some more nefarious purposes? There’s a lot of possibilities out there.”

While Fox News and their anonymous source push the potential likelihood of such a threat the actual report prepared by the Open Source Center (OSC) of the Director of National Intelligence is void of specific or possible security threats and concludes that Bolivian foreign relations are “not a result of Bolivian Muslim influence.”

Instead the report’s dissection of eight Bolivian Muslim organizations directs attention to critical attitudes of United States and Israeli policies held by local religious leaders. The Islamic Center is described having the supposed contradictory view of both voicing support for “open-mindedness and peace” while “numerous on-line statements reveal a strong anti-US position”, citing statements in opposition to the US invasion of Afghanistan: “Today we see the US declaring armed Jihad against terrorism. They aim their bombs at UBL and Afghanistan, whom they financed and trained.”

“The fox is known to be a most sneaky animal,” Abusharar said referring to the reports. “Criticism is normal. In a democratic country, if we want to keep democracy we cannot behave like this.”

“These people, they want something. To convince the US government they have to write something.”

“I don’t think the CIA needs to write a report like this. They know me personally,” describing previous visitors whom he believes work for US intelligence services. “I opened all the doors and you know what I told them, ‘Take all the photographs you want’.”

He emphasized, “It is not the Muslims who are the problem of the United States in Bolivia. It seems that our government is the problem and they are looking for motives to threaten our government or looking for reasons why they have bad relations with Bolivia.”

The government of Evo Morales which has initiated pro-indigenous and socialist reforms has butted heads with the United States in recent years. Contentious issues include expelled US diplomat Philip Goldberg and other US agencies links to violent rightwing opposition, the nationalization of natural gas exploitation, and supposed setbacks in Bolivian anti-narcotics measures following the expulsion of the DEA for alleged political activity. Evo Morales described the recent suspension of Bolivia from the Andean Trade Promotion and Drug Eradication Act as based on “false accusations of the Obama administration against the Bolivian government to suspend the tariff preferences and in a political program of open interference by the United States government against the Bolivian people.”

The OSC report naming the Bolivian Islamic Center additionally details local Muslim protests against the Israeli offensive in Gaza which sparked friction between the two countries. Morales expelled the Israeli consulate in response and called for the Israeli leadership to be tried for war crimes.

Counterpunch for more

A little boy’s miracle-working throws light on the workings of the Indonesian state and the hunger for salvation amongst ordinary people

By M. Fajar

‘Dukun Cilik dari Jombang’, the Little Sorcerer from Jombang, is the boy’s nickname. Only nine years old, Ponari, born in Balongsari village, in the district of Jombang, East Java, is still at primary school, but he’s become famous in the past year.

It began with a lightning strike on December 12, 2008, says Ponari. In the middle of a hard rain, the lightning left behind a mysterious stone. According to Ponari and his followers, when he dunks the stone in water and the water is drunk by a sick person, it can heal the person’s illness. As the mass media coverage of his powers spread, so did Ponari’s popularity. First, it was just the people of Balongsari village who came to see him. Then, as word spread, large numbers of people, around 5000 per day, spilled out of Jombang and even travelled from the towns of Central Java to come and visit Ponari, each paying Rp.5,000 (US$ 0.5) to visit him.

Four people died, crushed by the crowds. For several months, every day the line would stretch hundreds of metres in front of Ponari’s house, as people waited for him to sink his stone into the glasses of water they brought with them. Those who could not wait in line scraped up soil from around his house and plastered it on their bodies, or collected water from his family’s well, hoping it would cure whatever ailed them.

Ponari and his stone not only attracted people, but also attracted a large amount of money. The money that circulated in Balongsari village as a result of the Ponari phenomenon was estimated to be as much as one billion rupiah (US$100,000) per day. Most of this money went to local businesses, including local merchants who sold food, water and accommodation for those who wanted to wait in the queue to see the child healer. There was even a soft drink named after him, Ponari Sweat, evidently borrowed from the popular Pocari Sweat drink.

For Ponari’s family, however, the story of Ponari’s success had a bitter side to it. Ponari’s life changed completely and his days became thoroughly consumed with healing, leaving no time for school or normal childhood activities, and leading to pressure from the National Commission for Child Protection. Ponari was even the centre of a quarrel between family members. In February 2009 the police shut down Ponari’s practice. His father, Khomsin, was beaten in a fight and hospitalised for trying to take Ponari away from the control of extended family members who wanted to reopen the practice.

A plethora of prophets
The Ponari phenomenon is not new. Before Ponari, there have been many miracle workers, alternative healers, and prophets who claimed to have magical powers to heal and bring good fortune. Lia Eden, for example, is a woman who proclaimed herself a prophet and tried to construct a new religion based on a blend of Islam and Christian doctrines. She was first known as Lia Aminuddin and declared herself as the heir of Muhammad, the last prophet in Islam. Her first public appearance was in 1998 when she claimed she was Imam Mahdi, a manifestation of the Islamic belief that a person will appear at the end of the world to spread peace and justice. She was jailed for two and a half years for blasphemy last June.

Another figure is Agus Solichin, a man who declared himself as a satrio piningit (saviour knight), a figure based on the legend of a person who will emerge to overcome goro-goro (great chaos). He first appeared in 2002 in Bekasi, West Java. He established a group with controversial teachings and rituals regarding sexual relations between husbands and wives. When protests occurred in 2009 about the rituals, the police shut down the house where Agus practiced.

The miracle workers and prophets all make two different but related claims. Firstly, they claim they can heal the sick of their mental and physical ailments. For instance, Agus Solichin forbade one of his followers to go to hospital and consume drugs from the doctor.

Instead, he convinced his follower to trust his healing methods. (In the end, the patient died because of lack of treatment.) Secondly, they all promise a doctrine of liberation and salvation. Lia Eden, for example, announced her house was a Kingdom of God. She preached that the end of days would arrive soon and those who wanted to survive must obey her teaching. When the prophets heal or ‘save’ people, their patients worship them in return.

Inside Indonesia for more

By Matt Walker

A new species of giant rat has been discovered deep in the jungle of Papua New Guinea.

The rat, which has no fear of humans, measures 82cm long, placing it among the largest species of rat known anywhere in the world.
The creature, which has not yet been formally described, was discovered by an expedition team filming the BBC programme Lost Land of the Volcano.

It is one of a number of exotic animals found by the expedition team.
Like the other exotic species, the rat is believed to live within the Mount Bosavi crater, and nowhere else.

“This is one of the world’s largest rats. It is a true rat, the same kind you find in the city sewers,” says Dr Kristofer Helgen, a mammalogist based at the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History who accompanied the BBC expedition team.

BBC for more

On June 9, 2009, the Silk Road Ensemble with Yo-Yo Ma performed a free concert at Damrosch Park in New York City, which was broadcast on “Live From Lincoln Center.” In this excerpt, the Ensemble and guest artists from Manhattan School of Music and the University of Michigan perform “Wa Habbibi” and “Tancas Serradas a Muru,” movement’s from composer Osvaldo Golijov’s “Air to Air.” Golijov has described this piece as “music born from community.” The Silk Road Project shares this excerpt courtesy of Live From Lincoln Center.

Silk road project for more

Damascus is rediscovering its architectural gems, but hasty restoration puts history at risk.

By Frederick Deknatel | Contributor to The Christian Science Monitor

Beit Nizam is one of three elaborate 18th- and early19th-century homes – palaces, really – being renovated by the Aga Khan Development Network into a luxury hotel in Damascus, Syria.
Photos by Matjaz Kacicnik/Aga Khan Development Network

Damascus, Syria – It claims to be the world’s oldest capital city, outlived only by Aleppo, Syria; and Jericho, on the West Bank. The proof is there, in Mesopotamian texts that mention Damascus and in a deep urban foundation of streets, houses, and sewers from every civilization, piled on top of one another.

The fairly straight street that cuts across Damascus’s Old City was once a colonnaded Roman road: the Via Recta or “Street Called Straight” from the Bible. After the Muslims conquered Syria, then ruled by the Byzantines, Damascus became the capital of the first great Islamic empire. At its peak in the 8th century, the Umayyad dynasty spread from North Africa across Asia, its center at the sparkling Great (Umayyad) Mosque, a former pagan temple, then a church, that claims to house the head of John the Baptist.

But it is the city’s more recent history that is reshaping contemporary Damascus. As Syria slowly opens its socialist economy to tourism and development, scores of traditional Arab houses from the 17th to 19th centuries have been restored and reopened as boutique hotels and restaurants in the capital’s UNESCO-protected Old City.

Three late-Ottoman era houses south of Straight Street – Beit Nizam, Beit Sibai, and Beit Kuwatli – that were once the residences of Damascene notables and later, European consuls, are at the center of an increasingly frenetic pace of development often motivated more by profit than good preservation practice. The Aga Khan Development Network (AKDN), which promotes historic preservation and development projects throughout the Muslim world, has invested $20 million to restore and reopen the three houses as a boutique hotel.

The scheme is far better funded and staffed than other restorations in the Old City, which – along with Aleppo – has the highest concentration of preserved, traditional Arab residential architecture in the Middle East. The AKDN aims to set standards in preservation practice, expand the shrinking number of traditionally skilled craftsmen and carpenters, and produce what it calls “a model for cultural and tourist development.”

“We think of the revitalization of cultural assets in order to use them as a catalyst for development,” says Ali Esmail, CEO of Aga Khan Cultural Services in Syria. “And we want others to copy what we are doing.”

Whether or not private investors will follow AKDN’s model is another question. Investments have boomed in the Old City and throughout Damascus in the last decade. Yet many developers use cheap, damaging materials like concrete and cement plaster instead of traditional wood and mud brick in order to speed up conversion work and maximize returns.

Concrete and cement cannot breathe the way wood and mud brick do in the hot Syrian summer. Nor do they trap heat as effectively during damp winters.

Today, such commercial and inattentive restorations threaten the area’s unique architectural heritage.

CS Monitor for more

Calling all Documentary makers!

Pakistani documentary makers are invited to submit their work for selection for the SAFMA South Asian Documentary Festival to be held in Mumbai, India, in December 2009.

Documentaries will be selected under the following categories:

Conflict and peace.
Peoples and Cultures
Women of South Asia
Education and Environment

All documentaries must be subtitled or versioned in English language. All entries must be accompanied by a short description of the documentary and the director/producer.

Shortlisted entries will be screened at The National Documentary Festival to be held in Lahore at South Asian Media Centre from 28th-30th September 2009.

Deadline of submission: 19th September 2009

Send in your entries on DVD format to:

Ms Sarah Tareen
Coordinator
Address:
South Asian Documentary Festival
Lahore Film and Literary Club
177-A,Shadman-2,Lahore
South Asian Media Centre.
(92-42) 7555621-8

Ms. Sarah Tareen
(92) 7555621-8
0300-4591184

By Edward S. Herman and David Peterson

It was just a matter of time before members of the collapsing left enlisted in the imperial attack on the most fundamental principles of the UN Charter, and added their voices to the growing chorus of support for Western power-projection under the Responsibility to Protect doctrine (R2P) and the International Criminal Court (ICC). But this has now been done in Foreign Policy in Focus by John Feffer, Ian Williams, and David Greenberg.1 That such a rightward turn could find a home at the Institute for Policy Studies, whose biweekly bulletins still arrive under the heading “Unconventional Wisdom,” and which connects the “research and action of more than 600 scholars, advocates, and activists seeking to make the United States a more responsible global partner,” we find deeply troubling.

Chapter I of the UN Charter states: “To maintain international peace and security,” all member states shall respect the “principle of the sovereign equality” of their fellow members, “settle their international disputes by peaceful means,” and “refrain in their international relations from the threat or use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of any state.”2 These principles rest on the fact that at the end of World War II, in 1945, it was understood that the greatest threat to world order was posed, not by events occurring inside single countries, whether caused by natural or human agency, and no matter how catastrophic the loss of life, but by aggressive, cross-border wars waged by states — “not only an international crime,” in the Nuremberg Judgment’s famous phrase, rendered 15 months after the UN’s founding conference in San Francisco, but the “supreme international crimediffering only from other war crimes in that it contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole.”3 Article 2(7) therefore wisely removes the temptation to intervene, with its unlimited potential for abuse by the greater powers, from even the United Nations itself: “Nothing contained in the present Charter shall authorize the United Nations to intervene in matters which are essentially within the domestic jurisdiction of any state.” It is not by fetishizing “national sovereignty” over human rights (though this canard has spread like a weed the past 20 years4), but by raising a barrier to aggression and its threat to human rights that the Charter organizes its world order. When purported “revolutions” in the advancement of human rights and international justice are purchased at the price of overturning this order, we ought to regard them with the utmost skepticism. Particularly when the cases in hand reveal no real difference from the past.

In reality, the UN Charter did little to impede the exercise of U.S. power from 1945 on. Instead what impeded its exercise were the military constraints that other powers placed on its capacity to act. But while the collapse of the Soviet bloc and of the Soviet Union itself (1989-1991) removed the most important of these constraints, it also removed the standard Cold War framework of propaganda for U.S. action. In his prepared remarks for the UN General Assembly’s Thematic Dialogue on the Responsibility to Protect on July 23, Noam Chomsky pointed out that the so-called “‘normative revolution’ declared by Western commentators took place in the 1990s, immediately after the collapse of the Soviet Union, which had, in earlier years, provided an automatic pretext for intervention. . . . New pretexts for intervention were needed,” Chomsky continued, “and the ‘normative revolution’ entered the stage. The natural interpretation of the timing gains support from the selectivity of application of R2P”5 — not, for example, to protect Iraqis against “sanctions of mass destruction,” not in response to the 2003 U.S.-U.K. military attack and occupation, not to defend the people in the eastern Congo against the transnational corporate networks and their local agents who “loot and plunder the country’s resources with impunity,” and not to defend the Gaza Palestinians against the Israeli military, even though Palestinians are supposedly protected under the Geneva Conventions, but to protect Kosovo Albanians against the Serbs, and Darfur’s “African” tribes against the “Arab Islamists” in Khartoum.6

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By Norman Solomon, ZSpace

Yesterday, I met a little girl named Guljumma. She’s seven years old, and she lives in Kabul at a place called Helmand Refugee Camp District 5.

Guljumma talked about what happened one morning last year when she was sleeping at home in southern Afghanistan’s Helmand Valley. At about 5 a.m., bombs exploded. Some people in her family died. She lost an arm.

With a soft matter-of-fact voice, Guljumma described those events. Her father, Wakil Tawos Khan, sat next to her. He took out copies of official forms that he has sent to the Afghan government.

Like the other parents who were gathered inside a crude tent in this squalid camp, Khan hasn’t gotten anywhere through official channels. He’s struggling to take care of his daughter. And he has additional duties because he’s a representative for 100 of the families in the camp, which is little more than ditches, mud structures and ragged canvas.

Khan pointed to a plastic bag containing a few pounds of rice. It was his responsibility to divide the rice for the 100 families.

Basics like food arrive at the camp only sporadically, Khan said. Donations come from Afghan businessmen. The government of Afghanistan does very little. The United Nations doesn’t help. Neither does the U.S. government.

Khan emphasized his eagerness to work. We have the skills, he said — give us some land and just dig a well, and we’ll do the rest. From the sound of his voice, hope is fraying.

You could say that the last time Guljumma and her father had meaningful contact with the U.S. government was when it bombed them.

If rhetoric were reality, this would be a war that’s about upholding humane values. But rhetoric is not reality.

The destructiveness of this war is reality for Guljumma and her father. And for hundreds of families at Helmand Refugee Camp District 5. And, in fact, for millions of Afghan people. The violence of this war — military, economic and social — keeps destroying the future. Every day and night.

Is the U.S. government willing to really help Guljumma, who now lives each day and night in the squalor of a refugee camp? Is the government willing to spend the equivalent of the cost of a single warhead to assist her?

So far, the answer is obscenely clear. But maybe we can force a change by contacting representatives and senators in Washington and demanding action — for Guljumma, for Wakil Tawos Khan, for all the other long-suffering residents of Helmand Refugee Camp District 5 and for all the victims of war in Afghanistan.

Success for one girl or one refugee camp might be a helpful baby step toward reversing the priorities that now have the U.S. government spending about 90 percent of its budget for Afghanistan on military efforts.

Official Washington could start a move toward decency now. Helmand Refugee Camp District 5 is easy to find. It’s in the capital of Afghanistan, on Charahe Qambar Road. A government that uses satellite guidance systems to aim missiles should be able to find it.

Z for more

By: Aunohita Mojumdar

After decades of upheaval, Afghanistan today finds itself unable to remember its cultural past.

Bollywood songs blare from taxis and street corners. In wedding halls, guests sit glued to the next episode of “Kyunki saas bhi kabhi bahu thi” dubbed into Dari, the main language in Afghanistan. In shops selling pirated CDs and DVDs in Kabul’s busy Flower Street, young Afghans walk in to ask for the latest Hollywood action movie, the music of a hot new Tajik singer or the most recent Iranian soap opera. The removal of the Taliban has been celebrated as the end of cultural censorship in Afghanistan, and the easy availability of imported pop culture touted as evidence of new freedoms. But the tragedy of the years of conflict in Afghanistan runs much deeper. What remains after years of violence and fighting, displacement and censorship, is a void. Built over years of absence of art and culture, what echoes today is the lack of an audience where once existed a deep appreciation of arts and music. This is an emptiness – as opposed to a simple tug of war between cultural freedoms and censorship, which could be resolved by lifting the arbitrary restrictions of the Taliban regime. It is also a void that is being filled too quickly and indiscriminately with whatever is at hand.

Himal Mag for more