By David North

We are publishing here a lecture delivered by David North on December 13 at the Friends Meeting House in London. North is the chairman of the International Editorial Board of the World Socialist Web Site and national chairman of the Socialist Equality Party (US). The lecture develops North’s critique of Service’s falsifications, initially discussed in the review, “In the Service of Historical Falsification: A Review of Robert Service’s Trotsky: A Biography”.

It has been reported in the Evening Standard that at the public launching of his new biography of Leon Trotsky at Daunt Books in London’s Holland Park, on October 22, Professor Robert Service declared: “There’s life in the old boy Trotsky yet—but if the ice pick didn’t quite do its job killing him off, I hope I’ve managed it.”

One might reasonably wonder what type of historian—indeed, what type of man—would describe his own work, and with evident satisfaction, in such a manner. Is it really the aim of a serious biographer to carry out the literary equivalent of an assassination? Every possible interpretation of this statement speaks against Mr. Service. Leon Trotsky was murdered, and in a particularly gruesome and horrible manner. The blunt side of an alpenstock was driven by the assassin into Trotsky’s cranium. His wife, Natalia, was nearby when it happened. She heard the scream of her companion of 38 years and, when she ran into his study, saw blood streaming down over his forehead and eyes. “Look what they have done to me,” Trotsky cried out to Natalia.

The death of Trotsky was felt by many as an almost unendurable loss. In Mexico City, 300,000 people paid tribute to him as his funeral cortège made its way through the streets of the capital. A private letter written by the American novelist, James T. Farrell, provides a sense of the traumatic impact of Trotsky’s assassination. “The crime is unspeakable. There are no words to describe it. I feel stunned, hurt, bitter, impotently in a rage. He was the greatest living man, and they murdered him, and the government of the United States is even afraid of his ashes. God!” [1]

A serious biographer of Trotsky would not joke about the “ice pick.” It is a despicable icon of political reaction. Mr. Service would, perhaps, protest that his biography has “assassinated” Trotsky only in the sense of bringing an end to all interest in and discussion of this particular individual. But is this a legitimate ambition? A genuine scholar hopes that his work contributes to, rather than stifles, the development of the historical discussion. But this was clearly not the intention of Mr. Service. As he told the Evening Standard, he hopes that he will achieve with his biography what Stalin failed to accomplish through murder—that is, to “kill off” Trotsky as a significant historical figure. With this aim in mind, one can only imagine how Service approached the writing of this biography.

Service’s remark at his book launch seems to reflect a state of mind that is fairly widespread in the reactionary milieu within which he circulates. A review of the biography written by the right-wing British historian Norman Stone, an admirer of Margaret Thatcher and Augusto Pinochet, is entitled “The Ice Pick Cometh.” Another glowing review, written by the writer Robert Harris and published in the London Sunday Times, congratulates Service for having “effectively, assassinated Trotsky all over again.”

This is the language of people who are very troubled—both personally and politically. Seventy years after Trotsky’s death, they are still terrified by the spectre of the great revolutionary. The very thought of the man evokes homicidal images. But do they really believe that Mr. Service’s book can accomplish what was beyond the power of Stalin’s totalitarian police state? That Mr. Service and his admirers can even entertain such a thought exposes how little they understand of Trotsky and the ideas to which he devoted his life.

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By Jane Guskin

Navidad hondureña, crisis e incertidumbre

In Colombia there is an expression: la paz del cementerio — the peace of the graveyard.  This is the kind of peace that powerful forces enjoy when everyone who resists them is dead and buried.

Colombia’s government and its military and paramilitary forces have spent decades working diligently for this kind of peace.  They’re so intent on winning it that they’ve even dispensed with the graveyard: according to Senator Gloria Inés Ramírez, more than half a million people have been forcibly disappeared in Colombia in the past 33 years.  The government’s own “Justice and Peace Unit” has reports of 210,000 forced disappearances, based on complaints lodged by family members between 2006 and mid-2009.  That suggests the 500,000 figure may be low; Yanett Bautista of the Nydia Erika Bautista Human Rights Foundation — named for one of the disappeared — estimates that family members have filed complaints in only 10% of the disappearance cases.  Of the cases investigated so far, fewer than 2,500 bodies have been located, mostly in mass graves.

Israel, meanwhile, has spent six decades building its own brand of graveyard peace in Palestine.  December 27 marks one year since Israel began a massive attack on the residents of Gaza, killing more than 1,400 people, including nearly 400 children, and transforming the tiny strip of land from a de facto prison into a cemetery.  Israel continues to strangle Gaza through a blockade and greets nonviolent protesters with tear gas and bullets.

In Honduras, the right-wing elite and military high command, which have close ties to the extremist Catholic group Opus Dei, seem similarly committed to a graveyard peace.  Last June 28 they toppled an elected president who in their eyes had bowed too far to pressure from progressive grassroots sectors.  Already strong, the country’s diverse social movements — including indigenous, African-descended, unionists, and lesbian and gay activists — responded to the coup by uniting and launching a coordinated nonviolent struggle from the streets.

Since the coup, 18 gay and transgender Hondurans have been among those murdered in a campaign of repression against the resistance movement, according to data compiled by the lesbian activist and research group Cattrachas.  Killings of transgender women in Honduras were already rampant: in four years from 2005 through 2008, Human Rights Watch reports that 17 transgender women were killed.  Now in just six months the coup government has doubled the number of victims.

MRZ for more

By Lisa Skeen

Who is Rody Alvarado Peña? For much of the 1980s and early 1990s, she was one of Guatemala’s thousands of battered women, suffering daily violent abuse at the hands of her husband. Since escaping to the United States in 1995, she has become a symbol of America’s ambivalent treatment of female asylum seekers. Three presidential administrations and countless judges deliberated, appealed and ultimately deferred decisions on her case, but a recommendation issued in October may finally make Ms. Peña a legal U.S. resident.

The Department of Homeland Security filed a brief statement in late October asserting that Ms. Pena “merits a grant of asylum as a matter of discretion.” Though an immigration judge must still make the official order, her petition is widely expected to be approved.

The facts of Ms. Peña’s case have never been the issue. According to a report by the Center for Gender and Refugee Studies (CGRG), after marrying a former soldier at the age of 16, he subjected her to ten years of extreme violence. He regularly “raped and sodomized [her], infecting her with sexually transmitted diseases, broke windows and mirrors with her head, dislocated her jaw, and tried to abort her child by kicking her violently in the spine.” The courts and local police did not intervene despite Ms. Peña’s multiple requests for help. Before reaching the United States, she made several unsuccessful attempts to flee and each time she was returned, she was beaten more savagely than before.

Had Ms. Peña remained in Guatemala, she would very likely have become a victim of femicide – murdered because she is female. Though murder rates in general are extremely high in Guatemala, femicides are particularly troubling because of their rate of increase. Another report by the CGRG claims that the number of women killed between 2002 and 2004 rose 56%, a full 20% faster than the rate of increase for male victims. In 2008 alone, 722 women were murdered.

The highly contentious question of whether gender-based human rights violations should be considered a basis for asylum is at the heart of Ms. Peña’s case. Judges continue to grapple with the question of whether widespread violence against women qualifies as persecution inflicted because of an individual’s membership in a particular social group, as outlined in international law. It is in part because Ms. Peña’s experience is so common that her case produced such deliberation. So many of the world’s women suffer from domestic violence that many fear a precedent-setting case would “open the floodgates” and render a small number of countries responsible for granting asylum to millions of battered women. Despite the fact that the great majority of women lack the means to make the expensive trip to the United States, the argument is salient in U.S. legal circles.

The tenuous relationship between U.S. jurists and Guatemala’s female refugees is only the most recent iteration of an entangled history. Many of the conditions that have allowed femicide to flourish arose in the wake of Guatemala’s 36-year civil war, with which the United States is widely acknowledged to have been involved.

Many of Guatemala’s femicides involve firearms, which is not surprising given the staggering number of them present in the country today. Small arms first flooded Central America in the 1980s as Washington and Moscow sought to arm their allies in proxy wars. At the official end of Guatemala’s civil war in 1996, just 1,500 weapons were surrendered by guerrilla units, and no other major disarmament efforts have been made. In 2008 it was estimated that there were 1.8 million firearms in Guatemala, 90% of which were unregistered. The United States continues to be a major supplier. According to data published by Just the Facts, U.S. suppliers have sold $27.5 million worth of commercial and military small arms and equipment to buyers in Guatemala since the peace accords were signed in 1996.

The proliferation of arms has been accompanied by heightening violence by Guatemala’s estimated 80,000 members of maras, or gangs. Interestingly, most of Central America’s gangs have roots in the United States, where thousands of young men fled seeking respite from the violent civil wars of the 1980s. Many took up residence in poor neighborhoods of Los Angeles and other urban centers, which were already rife with gang violence. Eventually, U.S. immigration authorities began deporting these young men – and their gang affiliations – back to Central America where the gangs have continued to grow.

With one of the highest impunity rates in the world, Guatemala’s justice system has been unable to respond effectively to gang violence, which has been compounded by the growing presence of drug cartels. Violent vigilantism against alleged gang members has become so widespread it is casually referred to as limpieza social, or social cleansing, and the killings have increasingly targeted women. A 2005 Amnesty International report noted that “controlling women’s sexual activity and fidelity has become a form of currency among men vying for power or control of a local area…women have been murdered as a form of punishment of the women themselves or of family members or as a demonstration of power between rival groups.”

A chilling thread runs throughout much of the violence today. Many of the increasingly indiscriminate limpieza social murders are attributed to police officers who have found more lucrative work as hired guns. Before they were police officers,many of these men were members of the military. It is therefore unsurprising that today’s femicides are hauntingly reminiscent of the military’s gruesome treatment of women during the war.

Given their military training in gender violence it is unsurprising that law enforcement bodies regularly blame femicide on the victims themselves, claiming that they were members of gangs. In June of 2004, La Naciòn newspaper quoted then-president Oscar Berger as saying “We know that in the majority of [femicide] cases, the women had links with juvenile gangs and gangs involved in organized crime.” The Amnesty International report goes on to describe the many ways in which discrimination against the victims has contributed to misreporting of statistics and widespread impunity in these cases.

The legacy of civil war is just one factor in contemporary Guatemalan society that is influenced by centuries of history, culture and political economy. But the war, and the U.S. involvement in it – has played a commanding role in cultivating the conditions that have allowed femicide to flourish there today. Guatemala’s murdered women are a silent reminder that war continues to claim victims long after peace accords have been signed.

Lisa Skeen is a NACLA Research Associate

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Posted by Jo Comerford at 10:30am, December 17, 2009.

Ashton Carter, undersecretary of defense for acquisition, technology and logistics, put the matter this way recently: “[N]ext to Antarctica, Afghanistan is probably the most incommodious place, from a logistics point of view, to be trying to fight a war… It’s landlocked and rugged, and the road network is much, much thinner than in Iraq. Fewer airports, different geography.”  In other words, we might as well be fighting on the moon.  In translation, this means at least one thing: don’t believe any of the figures coming out of the White House or the Pentagon about what this war is going to cost.

As Jo Comerford, executive director of the National Priorities Project points out below, the president’s $30 billion figure for getting those 30,000-plus new surge troops into Afghanistan is going to prove a “through-the-basement estimate.”  As for the dates for getting them in and beginning to get them out?  Well, it’s grain-of-salt time there, too.  According to Steven Mufson and Walter Pincus of the Washington Post, some of the fuel storage facilities being built to support the surge troops won’t even be completed by the time the first of them are scheduled to leave the country, 18 months from now.

And keep in mind the endless, and endlessly vulnerable, supply lines on which so much of that fuel — and almost everything else the U.S. military has to have to survive — travels.  Along those mountainous roads, trucks are “lost,” or Taliban-commandeered, or bribes are paid for passage, or some are simply destroyed in what can only be thought of as an underreported supply-line war.  All of this adds immeasurably to the staggering expense of the project.  According to August Cole of the Wall Street Journal, in fuel terms alone, to support a single soldier in Afghanistan costs between $200,000 and $350,000 a year.

And while we’re at it: don’t expect all those surging troops to make it into Afghanistan any time soon.  In the heroic tales of presidential surge deliberations (based on copious White House leaks) that appeared soon after the president’s West Point speech, much was made of how Obama himself had insisted on speeding up the plan to get the extra troops in place.  All would arrive, the White House said, within six months.  That was quickly changed to approximately eight months.  Now, Lt. Gen. David M. Rodriguez, deputy commander of American and NATO forces there, has just announced that it will take nine to eleven months (or maybe even “up to a year”), and that’s if none of the factors that could go wrong do — something not worth putting your money on when it comes to the Afghan War.

If all this leaves you with lingering worries about the success of both the surge and the war, you can put them to rest, however.  NBC’s Richard Engel found a “military schematic,” a single chart from the office of the Joint Chiefs, that offers a visual representation of the military’s full surge/counterinsurgency strategy.  It has to be seen to be believed.  (Just click here.)  It lays out as a flow chart (or perhaps overflow chart would be the more accurate description) just how our war will achieve success.  What could possibly go wrong with such a plan?  It’s hard to imagine.  In the meantime, let Comerford give you a little lesson in the economics of the Afghan War, and what we could have done with that low-ball figure of $30 billion, had we chosen not to fight a war on the moon.  Tom

$57,077.60
Surging by the Minute
By Jo Comerford

$57,077.60. That’s what we’re paying per minute. Keep that in mind — just for a minute or so.

After all, the surge is already on. By the end of December, the first 1,500 U.S. troops will have landed in Afghanistan, a nation roughly the size of Texas, ranked by the United Nations as second worst in the world in terms of human development.

Women and men from Camp Lejeune, North Carolina, will be among the first to head out. It takes an estimated $1 million to send each of them surging into Afghanistan for one year. So a 30,000-person surge will be at least $30 billion, which brings us to that $57,077.60.  That’s how much it will cost you, the taxpayer, for one minute of that surge.

TD for more

By Ali Younes

The Suez crisis was a watershed moment for the Arab world during the Cold War [GALLO/GETTY]

The fall of the Berlin Wall 20 years ago marked the end of the Cold War era, and with it the clash of ideology between East and West that had brought the world to the brink of nuclear war.

The wall had come to symbolise the post-Second World War geopolitical polarisation between what the US characterised as the ‘Free World’ and the ‘Evil Empire’.

But for Arab states and much of the third world, the Soviet Union had existed as an important counter-balance to US power, and played a crucial role in their political and economic sustenance.

Prior to the collapse of Communism at the end of the 1980s and beginning of the 1990s, the Arab states aligned themselves along the demarcation lines of the Cold War, with the Gulf States, Jordan and Egypt lining up behind the US, and others, such as Syria and Iraq, throwing their lot in with the Soviets.

The Soviet Union’s support for Arab states was motivated by plans to expand Communist influence throughout the world and contest US power wherever it was possible. For the Arab states, the Soviet Union was an important ally as they defined themselves in the post-colonial era.

Playing the superpowers

The Arab states learnt to play the rivalry between the feuding superpowers to increase their influence in the region and achieve geopolitical goals.

Gamal Abdel Nasser, the late Egyptian president, carefully positioned his country in a tug-of-war between the Soviets and the Americans when he sought western funding to build the Aswan High Dam, which he believed was crucial to developing the Egyptian economy.

When the US, Britain and the World Bank withdrew their initial offer to lend Egypt the money to build the dam in 1956, Nasser responded by nationalising the Suez Canal, triggering an international crisis that resulted in Britain, France and Israel occupying the canal, Sinai and Gaza.

In Washington, the Eisenhower administration calculated that if the crisis continued, it would be a matter of time before the Soviet Union started helping Egypt against the western powers. Seeing this as a potential Russian foothold in a strategically crucial region, the US pressured the occupying powers to withdraw their forces from Egyptian soil, handing a victory, of sorts, to Nasser.

Mohammad Dalbah, a Washington-based journalist who specialises in the Middle East views this crisis as the start of the Arab involvement in the Cold War. “If you look at the history of the region, you find that most Arab states achieved their independence during the Cold War,” says Dalbah.

“The existence of the Cold War and world powers’ rivalry was instrumental to the independence of Arab states, and others, ushering the end of western colonialism period in the Third World.”

The collapse

But the collapse of the Berlin Wall and consequent demise of the Soviet Union changed the regional dynamics in the Middle East, allowing the US to operate virtually uncontested in much of the region.

Arab states could no longer switch sides between the competing camps or play off one bloc against another to get what they wanted.
In 1990, a few weeks after Iraq invaded Kuwait, George HW Bush, the former US President, declared a “New World Order,” in which Washington would create a “rule of law that supplants the rule of the jungle.”

Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait, he said, was “the first assault on the New World that we seek, the first test of our mettle.”

AJ for more

By Donata von Hardenberg

Little is left of the once infamous wall that divided Berlin and Germany [GALLO/GETTY]

Two decades after the Berlin Wall was toppled, few people remember the exact spot where it once stood; not much is left of one of the most infamous barriers in the world.

But if 13 per cent of Germans had their way, the wall that split the country for 28 years during the Cold War would be resurrected.
“I have nothing better to be proud of than the German reunification,” Helmut Kohl, the German chancellor at the time the wall fell, said 20 years later.

However, a recent poll by Resuma GmbH, a German research firm, revealed that 34 per cent of West Germans do not share his enthusiasm and say they did not benefit from reunification. Thirteen per cent of East Germans felt the same way.

Sixteen per cent of those from the West – compared to 10 per cent from the East – said they would prefer to live in a divided Germany.

‘Blooming landscapes’

One year after the wall came down, East Germany (the former GDR) became part of the Federal Republic of Germany.

German unity meant the transplantation of West Germany’s legal, administrative and economic infrastructure to the former East.

The free market economy replaced the East’s centrally planned economy, state owned enterprises were privatised, and, in 1990, the Deutsche Mark became the currency for all Germans.

Kohl promised ‘blooming landscapes’ to the former East and citizens on both sides were euphoric.

But the shapers of this newly re-united Germany failed to address the mental barriers that divided East from West, believing that money alone would close the gap.

Hope and optimism soon gave way to disillusionment as the collapse of the socialist planned economy saw millions lose their jobs.

Stark divisions

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By Fabiana Frayssinet

RIO DE JANEIRO, (IPS) – The traditional campaign for a Christmas without Hunger in Brazil is in its 17th year. But in spite of ongoing programmes, food insecurity still affects 15 million people in South America’s giant, according to official figures.

The hunger to be combated is for food, but also “for play, study and dreams,” according to this year’s campaign slogan, Natal sem Fome dos Sonhos (Christmas without Hunger for Dreams). The non-governmental movement Açao da Cidadanía contra a Fome, a Miséria e pela Vida (Citizens’ Action against Hunger and Poverty and For Life) is only appealing for books and toys this time round.

But this does not mean that hunger for food has been eradicated, the movement that started the campaign 16 years ago emphasises.

The late sociologist Herbert de Souza started the campaign as a way of mobilising the whole of society behind the dream of a country without hunger or extreme poverty, where everyone enjoys their rights to citizenship and justice.

Between 1993 and 2005 the campaign collected more than 30,000 tonnes of food, which was donated to 15 million people, as a way of calling attention to the lack of effective policies against hunger.

The government of President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva has implemented programmes like “Fome Zero” (Zero Hunger), introduced when he first took office in 2003, in an attempt to fill the gap.

The Zero Hunger plan is part of a wider programme called “Bolsa Familia” (Family Grant), a conditional cash transfer programme for poor families, carried out by the Ministry for Social Development and the Fight Against Hunger.

Social Development Minister Patrus Ananías said the plan involves cash transfers to guarantee a minimum income for poor families, in return for the fulfilment of certain requirements, like regular school attendance and vaccination for children.

This approach is intended to establish “objective conditions for the eradication of hunger, malnutrition and extreme poverty, in order to break the inter-generational poverty cycle and to promote, in the medium and long term, the emancipation of the families in the programme,” the minister said.

Bolsa Familia officially benefits 12 million families, or 45 million people, in a country with a total population of about 190 million.

Ananías said that its ambitious goals have produced tangible results. The plan provides a monthly payment of between 40 and 97 dollars to each beneficiary family, amounting to a total monthly expenditure of 639 million dollars. Together with other social programmes, it has successfully reduced the country’s high poverty rate.

The Social Development Ministry says 19 million people were lifted out of extreme poverty between 2003, when Lula came to power, and 2008, according to statistics from the private Getulio Vargas Foundation.

The Institute of Applied Economic Research (IPEA) reported that the income of the poorest 10 percent of Brazilian society grew at six times the rate of that of the richest 10 percent, indicating that the inequality gap in the country is narrowing.

These official results are accepted by the Brazilian Institute of Social and Economic Analyses (IBASE), also founded by Herbert de Souza, who since 1993 has been arguing for emergency aid to fight hunger, coining the catchphrase “the hungry are in a hurry.” But IBASE analysts do have reservations about the Bolsa Familia programme, after carrying out an extensive investigation to evaluate its results.

The final report of their study indicated that some six million families in the programme were suffering from moderate to severe food insecurity, which meant that “in the three months prior to the evaluation they had suffered severe food restriction, and even hunger.”

Hunger is the bedfellow of a significant proportion of Brazilian families, which is “unacceptable in a country regarded as the sixth largest economy in the world,” the IBASE study says.

IBASE also recognises positive effects of the Bolsa Familia programme on family nutrition, such as greater “stability of access” and the “greater quantity and variety of food consumed.”

It says, however, that the persistence of high indices of food insecurity implies that hunger in Brazil is a complex issue and the Bolsa Familia programme is not sufficient to guarantee the population’s right to food.

Leonardo Ribas, a consultant with the non-governmental Harpia Harpyia Institute, told IPS that Bolsa Familia, as the government says, stimulates a local microeconomy which in turn drives the macroeconomy. However, the macroeconomy “is linked to a market that excludes people.”

Ribas, a lawyer specialising in legal aspects of the right to food, said the market is a far cry from “an economic model based on solidarity,” and is part of a general scheme that foments large-scale agribusiness, for instance, instead of stimulating family farms.

According to the Agrarian Development Ministry, 75 percent of rural workers are employed on family farms, which produce 70 percent of the beans, 87 percent of the cassava and 58 percent of the milk consumed in Brazil. In practice, it is family farming that guarantees the country’s food security.

Nevertheless, production and sale of food is market-oriented with a profit motive, and the high price of food hits the poorest families worst, according to the IBASE study.

IPS for more

By Nadeem F. Paracha

Advertising:
A very important phenomenon in the Pakistani electronic media, where little, irritating films about fairness creams and mobile phone connections become the lifeline of big, irritating seths running really irritating TV channels. Also, the constant source of that wonderfully poignant line, ‘choti si break,’ which, however, may last as long as a military dictatorship in Pakistan.

Asif Ali Zardari:
A custom-made punching bag with prominent teeth for talk show hosts to practice their jihadi judo chops and passionate, ‘anti-corruption’ missionary positions on.

Aamir Liaquat:
Name of a special Pilgrimage Package offered by Peo Travels (Pvt.) Ltd. to specifically attract fitnahs to go for Haj and get God’s approval of their meaningful hatred of sub-humans (such as Jews, Ahmadiyyas, Hindus, liberals and swine flu carriers). Also the name of a hyperbolic over-actor masquerading as a ‘religious scholar’ on a TV drama masquerading as a ‘religious advice show’ on a gossip channel masquerading as a ‘news channel.’

Aishwarya Rai:
Famous Indian tree-hugger (especially on mangals), who is also a favourite of rabid anti-Hindu Pakistanis who will let her go (along with her tree, but not her husband), when they conquer India during the Ghazwa-ul-Hind in 2012 AD and slaughter all the Hindus of the world with their nuclear-powered laser-swords and bad TV shows, such as Muhammad Bin Iqbal Saladin Qasim Ka Pakistan.

Aaj TV:
A TV channel you’d rather leave for kal (as in yesterday).

Aag TV:
The favourite music channel of freckled, teenaged fascists.

ARY News:
A TV channel set up by jewellers. Get the picture?

Bobby Master:
Some guy who serves tea at a famous Pakistani TV channel. Most probably the most intelligent fellow there.

Conspiracy Theory:
A theory that is not a theory at all but a hard fact on Pakistani TV channels. Anyone disagreeing with the hard and loud factoids (conspiratorially called conspiracy theorists), is a Mossad/CIA/RAW/NASA/KFC agent and a possible swine flu carrier who would be lined up against the walls of Delhi’s Red Fort and shot dead during the Ghazwa-ul-Hind in 2012 AD.

Dr. Danish:
A dentist.

Duniya TV:
A channel on which Sohail Warraich tries to be funny, and Najam Sethi, serious.

Dawn.Com:
A place where tiny worthless dots gather at dawn to receive handouts from the many myriad enemies of Pakistan –  such as, Indians, Americans, Israelites and Tellytubbies – so that they can use cyberspace to spread their anti-Islam, anti-Pakistan, anti-Shan propaganda through anti-Islam, anti-Pakistan, anti-Tigar Balm writers, columnists, subeditors, reporters, accountants, tea boys and gymnasts. Just what this article is doing on this site, I have no idea. All I know is it’s a conspiracy because Rana Naveedul Hassan said so.

DawnNews:
A groovy hang out where pleasant young men and women practice and sharpen their newly acquired American accents by toning their frequently mobile jaws. Here, cops become ‘caaps,’ jobs become ‘jaabs,’ Pakistan becomes ‘Pai-khis-tan,’ and Karachi becomes LA.

Dr. Shahid Masood:
A TV hakeem famous for his tangy concoctions and cocktails made from the equally famous witch-doctor Harun Yahya’s recipes of Vulcan stew, Martian soup, and other out-of-space (and out-of-mind) delicacies. If you look closely, you will notice that the good doctor also has a moustache, which many believe was gifted to him by Hamid Gul on his second birthday in 377 BC, during the first Ghazwa-ul-Hind.

Eeeeek!
A common female vocal response after watching Dr. Masood’s moustache fall every time someone mentions ‘PTV’ or something about him having a Canadian passport.
‘Me? No. (Plop!) Oops.’
‘Eeeek …!’

Express News:
An express-ion connoting something half-baked, done in a hurry. Example: ‘All pace and no substance makes Jack an Express News.’

Geo TV:
A Mongolian TV brand that can be watched on horseback while triumphantly marching into Hindustan during the Ghazwa-ul-Hind, Holi,Dewali, and Filmfare Awards. Shows programs hosted by hard, loud factoids bred on prime Vulcan stew and Hilal ki Ding Dong Bubblegum.

Ghazwa-ul-Hind:
A forthcoming Lollywood science-fiction blockbuster directed by Zaid Hamid, produced by Dr. Shahid Masood, and staring Maria B., Ali Azmat, Hamid Gul, Irfan Siddiqui, and Yoda.

Hamid Mir:
A wrestler.

Hamid Gul:
The guy who gave Shahid Masood his moustache and the man Masood hasn’t stopped thanking. ‘Thank you, Hamid Gul sahib, for coming on the show…’ ‘Thank you, Hamid Gul sahib, for coming on the show…’ ‘Thank you, Hamid Gul sahib, for coming on the show…’ ‘Thank you, Hamid Gul sahib, for coming on the show…’ Why can’t his show just be called The Gul-Masood Show?

Indus News:
A news channels watched on the banks of the River Indus. By fish.

Iqbal Ka Pakistan:
The show that makes the great allama roll in his grave each week.

Imran Khan:
A man who still thinks the Taliban is a brand name for a series of chubby, cuddly teddy bears.

Kashif Abbasi:
A TV anchor whose eyes turned green after he’s had a bit too much of Dr. Masood’s Vulcan stew.

Kamran Khan:
A very dry man.

Maria B.
A fashion designer who is a fan of Zaid Hamid and thus keeps getting a ‘C’ in politics. She should actually be called Maria C., or Maria Z. Or better, Maria GHB (Maria Ghuzwa-ul-Hind B).

Munawar Hussain:
A guy who believes the Taliban are bigger than Elvis.

Mushtaq Minhas:
A very strange man.

Nusrat Javed:
Another very strange man.

Nadeem F. Paracha:
An abomination brought to life by the Elders of Zion and the illuminati to misguide innocent young Pakistani patriots and mohib-e-watan-Ghazwa-ul-Hind warriors with the help of CIA money, NASA spacesuits, and KFC Zinger Burgers. Most probably has ancient Dravidian Hindu blood running in his veins and is certainly out to destroy the super-duper Muslim master-race.

Nadia Khan:
A woman who grew up watching too many Hasina Moin plays.

Nawaz Sharif:
The ‘N’ in PML-N, some of whose starlets are still trying to put an ‘N’ in the Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP) as well. Example: PTT-N. Likely to be disappointed.

PTV:
The channel only Rehman Malik and Bilawal Bhutto watch.

Qazi Hussain Ahmed:
A very old man.

Taliban:
Very hairy people who, in spite of being extremely obvious and ubiquitous, are still treated as ghosts by many TV hosts and their guests. They’d rather believe Elvis is alive than agree that it is the Taliban who are blowing themselves up in markets and mosques every now and then.
Example:
News Item: Taliban take responsibility for Pindi mosque blast.
Host: Who are these men?
News Item: Taliban take responsibility for Pindi mosque blast.
Host: Who can these terrorists be?
News Item: TALIBAN TAKE RESPONSIBILITY FOR PINDI MOSQUE BLAST!!!
Host: Who can do such a thing? Is it the Indians? Israel? CIA? Elvis?

Zaid Hamid:
A fast-talking rap artiste who stole Ali Azmat’s soul (and guitar), and turned Aag TV into the official Ghazwa-ul-Hind music channel. His biggest hits are ‘Let’s march on Delhi, y’all!’ ‘Hindus are insects, y’all,’ ‘I love wars, y’all,’ ‘M. B. Qasim is ma man, y’all,’ ‘So is Maria B, y’all,’ ‘Even though she’s a woman, y’all.’ Recently, Zaid also claimed that Ali Azmat’s tind is a UFO landing site. Ali was thrilled.

Nadeem F. Paracha is a cultural critic and senior columnist for Dawn Newspaper and Dawn.com.

The views expressed by this blogger and in the following reader comments do not necessarily reflect the views and policies of the Dawn Media Group.

Dawn for more

By B. R. Gowani

(On the occasion of the 200^th Birth Anniversary of Charles Darwin, other members of the Great Apes: a Chimpanzee (Chimpoo), a Female Gorilla (Gori), and an Orangutan (Orange) discuss why a century and half after Darwin’s discovery of the common roots of humans and apes do many humans still refuse to acknowledge their distant cousins while continuing their cruelty to animals and why do they super-exploit their own kind.)

Gori: Hey guys, did you know our Big Brothers are celebrating the 200^th birth anniversary of the guy who showed them their true roots?

Orange: Not everyone. There are many who refuse to acknowledge our common ancestry, despite the fossil evidence.

Some people believe that a Big Guy called God — or Big Gal called Goddess — made this Universe and its inhabitants in six days. And they were the last to be created in God’s image with a license to rule over fishes, birds, and all that moves on Earth.

Chimpoo: It saddens me to see that they deny our relationship, despite the 98% DNA similarities. They were more willing to accept the truth when they were walking on all fours. Even after they went bi-pedal, initially, they were not this unreasonable, as they struggled to meet their basic needs – not very different from our own.

Orange: Stories abound of the time when human-apes and other apes were culturally close: humans were content to acquire a little territory and sufficient food to fulfill their needs. Following that, they would be on watch to defend their families, or relax, or play with their children.

Gori: Playing with children! Now this is a thing of the past for millions of their families. Exploitation of one’s own has always existed. What has changed, however, is that some humans have become super-masters and have converted other human-apes into economic slaves.

Chimpoo: It’s a paradox, my dear. Many of their achievements such as telescopes and computers make me proud; but destructive and surveillance devices make me sick.

Orange: Hey Chimpoo, you’re getting a bit too sentimental. I know human-apes are closer to you then they are to us, but still they are very dangerous primates.

Chimpoo: I’m not that sentimental. I feel for my cousins. I don’t want to see them on the road of ruination and …

Gori: Chimpoo, howsoever articulately you try to put it, it’s hard to disagree with Orange. Listen! Those human-apes who are in power don’t give a damn about us or other chimps. If they drop a nuclear bomb tomorrow, and if some of us miraculously survive, don’t expect them to provide us with chemotherapy.

Orange: Chimpoo, if you read the history of our planet, they have committed the most violence of all the living beings. If we consider even the most ferocious animals, none of them match the violence that human-apes have committed over the ages. I would vote to stop considering them as our own.

Gori: As if they care.

Chimpoo: Your anger is not groundless; but, ask yourself: Is it fair to group all human-apes together? There are some who fight for our and other non-human animal rights.

(He then produced a couple of pictures lying under the tree trunk.)

Orange: Those few human-apes are indeed to be commended. But some of them have their own political agendas. Also, in the process of fighting for us, they exploit their own. For example: PETA [People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals] models fighting for our rights, are also pets of the fashion, modeling, and entertainment industry and are not people of normal weight. They perpetuate the myth that being of a certain size and shape is desirable.

Chimpoo: Do you want to save your skin or worry about PETA model ethics?

Gori: We should be grateful to these PETA models. Many of them have brought their kind closer to us, by shedding clothes and other inhibitions.

Orange: Do you think so?

Gori: On second thoughts … No! The capitalists would never let them revert to their original natural state. The fashion industry would go bankrupt.

Gori: [disdainfully] Put those pictures back under the trunk right away! The bitter fact is that this place ain’t big enough for animals and human-apes. This planet can only survive if human-apes leave. It seems in the process of destroying themselves; they may also eliminate the planet.

Orange: Chimpoo is right there are human-apes who care for us and do make efforts to protect us from vultures among them.

Gori: Looking at these PETA models, the human-apes will probably disregard our condition and ogle these models, instead. I prefer the video by Gary L. Francione to these models. Let me show you what I mean:

Gary L. Francione: Theory of Animal Rights

Theory of Animal Rights from Gary L. Francione on Vimeo.

(After the video Gori continued.)

Gori: These human-apes are miserable creatures. Have you ever seen any of our children working in factories for adults who generate huge profits from their labor?

Chimpoo: Look at me Gori Darling; you are comparing two different modes of life. They value insatiable materialism; we live content with fulfillment of basic needs.

(Gori cut him short.)

Gori: Mark my words Chimpoo! If tomorrow they come up with an idea to make money through you, they won’t hesitate to exploit you. If they develop taste for the chimpanzee meat, they’ll open chimp farms and start killing your kind. You have seen how cruelly they use animals in the circus. In spite of that, they have the nerve to make up phrases such as, the cunning fox, filthy pig, and they call the spotted hyenas as cowardly scavengers!

Chimpoo: Calm down, honey. If we were in their place, would we have been any better?

Orange: [quickly reacted] It is not a question of whether we would have been any better or not. We are fundamentally different in some ways. Many human-apes make their females wear veils. Some even kill their own kind by deceiving them. An example is the tobacco industry: Marlboro has so many different ways to entice the kids and adults alike: regular, light, ultra-light, menthol, menthol light, and list goes on.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Marlboro_products

Chimpoo: Let’s forget all this. I have some good fruit and vegetables: let us have a feast.

Gori: Let me tell you one thing. Our life is simple and most of us are quite content with what we have.

The condition of the human-apes, however, is pitiable. Many of them lack fulfillment of their basic needs. Their lack is particularly painful because of the tremendous pervasiveness of their advertising. Added to this is the flaunting of material riches by fellow members. The advertisers continue to relentlessly entice indiscriminately without penalty. The material plenty is produced by workers who are never able to afford these luxuries. Consequently, they die without satisfying their desires. This is the story of countless human-apes.

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