Month: March 2010

by SERGE HALIMI

Echoing what Mao Zedong said back in October 1949, his distant, and very different, successor, Hu Jintao, declared 60 years later: “China owes its place in the world today to the achievements of socialism.” A proud claim. It’s a long time since China was humiliated and carved up by Europe and Japan, and some of its people are prospering – but socialism, that’s a different story. The claim is so far from the truth that you can even argue that Chinese growth – 9.6% in 2008; 8.7% in 2009 – took over when the American machine broke down, helping the capitalist system weather the worst storm since 1929. Globalisation, wounded on Wall Street, recovered its strength in Shanghai.

The old claim that the wind from the east would prove stronger than that from the west meant something else back in the days when the sky was red. Not just that China would export more goods than any other country and become a goldmine for supermarket chains: Carrefour has 156 branches, Tesco 72, and the US giant Wal-Mart would not be where it is today without cheap Chinese labour to help it slash prices (and crush its competitors).

If these are the criteria by which world revolution is to be measured, western businessmen have nothing to worry about. The Wall Street Journal is licking its lips: “China remains a highly attractive market for western businesses in search of growth… it is the emerging markets which are leading the world out of recession” (1). The United Steelworkers union is not nearly so enthusiastic: it has called on Washington to bring an action against China for dumping…

Le Monde Diplomatique for more

by STEFAN STEINBERG

This is the second in a series of articles on the recent Berlin International Film Festival, February 11-21. Part one was posted on 24 February.

One of the most engrossing films at the Berlinale was the new film by Raoul Peck. After treating developments in a number of African countries in his more recent films—Lumumba (2000) and Sometimes in April (2004), dealing with the massacre in Ruanda—Peck has turned his attention to his native Haiti.

The premiere of his film in Haiti itself was cancelled following the devastating earthquake in mid-January. Virtually the entire action in Moloch Tropical takes place within a fortress residence located high on a mountain. The opening shot is of the president of the land rising from his silk-sheeted bed and performing his morning ablutions. He appears nervous and strangely absent. In the course of getting up, he upsets a glass bottle on his bedside table and it falls to the floor and shatters.

Following his shower, the inevitable happens: the distracted president steps with his bare foot on a shard of glass. For the remainder of the film, he must conduct his affairs of state with a bandage on his foot and limping heavily.

In the first scene, we learn that the all-powerful president surrounded by his entourage of lackeys, officials and bodyguards is just as prone to mishaps as any other mortal. Peck keeps his camera on the figure of the president over the course of the next 24 hours, during which a popular uprising takes place and which ends with the president ousted from his post following the intervention of the US ambassador.

World Socialist Web Site for more

by MARWAAN MACAN-MARKAR

CHIANG MAI, Thailand, Feb 27, 2010 (IPS) – Even as they were prepared for the worst, supporters of ousted former Thai prime minister Thaksin Shinawatra conducted an eleventh-hour ritual in his home province this week, hoping for a miracle in Friday’s court verdict on the fate of his seized assets.

The ceremony outside a small hotel got underway just as the sun approached noon above this Thai northern city ringed by hills. The mix of prayers and pleas on Thursday, Feb. 25, had an offering to the spirits that included nine steamed pigs’ heads, 19 steamed chickens, 19 boiled ducks and 500 eggs.

“We prayed to get the support of the spirits in a country where there is injustice and double standards,” said Petcharawat Wattanapongsirikul, the owner of the 58-room hotel that has become the headquarters in this region for the red shirt-wearing members of the United Front for Democracy against Dictatorship (UDD), an anti-government protest movement whose political patron is Thaksin.

But by late Friday night, any hope among the UDD here of the sacrificial pigs coming to the rescue of the fugitive Thai politician was erased by the landmark ruling of the Supreme Court in an unprecedented, controversial case in this South-east Asian kingdom.

In a ruling followed widely across the country and read out over seven hours Friday, the judges found Thaksin, who was a billionaire before being elected prime minister, guilty of abusing his power in office from 2001 through mid-2006 by introducing favourable polices that benefited his family-owned telecommunications empire.

The court’s judgement that the Shinawatras had enriched themselves through Thaksin’s abuse of power and blatant conflicts of interest marked the first time that Thai courts have delivered such a verdict against the holder of the highest political office in the country.

Among Thaksin’s faults was his penchant for issuing executive decrees that earned the company he founded, Shin Corp, tax breaks and consequently denied substantial revenue to the state’s coffers. Thaksin’s habit of shaping his company’s interest while serving as the premier through a network of nominees chosen from among his family was a breach of the public officer holders’ law, the court noted.

Inter Press Service for more

by NADEEM F. PARACHA

It was called the ‘New Left.’ Emerging in Britain in the 1950s, the New Left was the left’s disparaging response to the authoritarian tendencies of Marxism mainly symbolised by so-called ‘Stalinism’. The New Left revisited Marxist doctrines and attempted to bring them more in line with concepts like liberal democracy.

The New Left criticised both western capitalism and Soviet communism and attempted to put forward a more non-dogmatic and democracy-friendly version of Marxism. By the 1960s, it was ideologically informing the evolution of the various leftist movements that began taking shape around the world.

The New Left thinking also contributed to the various contemporary socialist experiments taking place in the Muslim world at the time, where certain leaders and political organs attempted to cut through Marxist dogma and capitalist whiplash by fusing nationalism and the more egalitarian notions of Islam with socialist economics. By the early 1970s, the New Left had begun to influence conventional social-democracy in Europe as well, where leftist parties emerged without any ideological strings attached to the Soviet Union.

However, the oil crisis, brought on by Egypt and Syria’s war against Israel in 1973, triggered a serious economic downturn in the West. It also began generating a gradual reaction against the New Left politics and economics. Consequently a number of economists emerged who severely critiqued social-democracy, socialism and the concept of the welfare state.

By the early 1980s, this tendency was referred to as the ‘New Right’ and its early political and economic manifestations were defined by the Ronald Reagan presidency in the US and Margrate Thatcher’s rule in the UK. The New Right forwarded an aggressive mixing of free market economy, religion, patriotism and a militarist foreign policy, a tendency which, after the collapse of the Soviet Union, peaked in the shape of neo-conservatism during George W. Bush’s administration (2001-2008).

In Pakistan, the New Left’s frontline expressions were the students’ movement against Ayub Khan in the 1960s and the populist emergence of social-democratic parties such as the PPP. However, interestingly, just as the New Left was being wiped out in the West by the New Right in the 1980s, in Pakistan it was the old right (i.e. conventional religious parties in cahoots with a politicised military) that did the trick.

Dawn for more

by KELVIN MATHAYO

We are now witnessing an upsurge in the number of educational institutions in our country. This is true in relation to schools and universities, which proliferate every other day.

The proprietors of such institutions set up branches in practically every part of the country, and the number of students who enrol in colleges increases swiftly, as does that of university graduates.

This is no problem at all. Every right-thinking person would, no doubt, commend the efforts by our government and other stakeholders to give education to all Tanzanians.

Until 2004 there were only three public universities in the country.

I need not mention them because they are, I suppose, well known. But due to the burgeoning demand for higher education, the government decided to set up more higher learning institutions and to promote those which were university colleges to fully-fledged universities.

Hence, Ardhi University, Muhimbili University of Health Sciences and others became autonomous universities.

Thanks to our government! At the lower level, the government and private stakeholders have established new schools in response to the growing need for education among the Tanzanians.

So, we are better off now than we were in 2004, or before then.

There are, nonetheless, two knotty problems that bedevil our education system.

It seems as though there is no clear educational goal we want to achieve. Of course, the number of educated people increases daily, but virtually all those who receive education do so because they happen to have been to school or something. It seems that the government lacks a philosophy of education.

This makes one ask oneself such important questions as: why do we educate our citizens? Is education just a means to getting a job? Is our education just intended to give people certificates of various sorts? Frankly speaking, I am completely baffled by our current education system.

During Nyerere’s reign as president of this ‘Oasis of Peace’ the philosophy of education was quite clear and good. Nyerere intended to make us a self-reliant people.

To what extent that is true is open to debate, but it should be noted that education for self-reliance wasn’t any worse than the muddled, jumbled education system of today.

The Citizen for more

by UDI ALONI

Philosopher, professor and author Judith Butler arrived in Israel this month, en route to the West Bank, where she was to give a seminar at Bir Zeit University, visit the theater in Jenin, and meet privately with friends and students. A leading light in her field, Butler chose not to visit any academic institutions in Israel itself. In the conversation below, conducted in New York several months ago, Butler talks about gender, the dehumanization of Gazans, and how Jewish values drove her to criticize the actions of the State of Israel.

In Israel, people know you well. Your name was even in the popular film Ha-Buah [The Bubble – the tragic tale of a gay relationship between an Israeli Jew and a Palestinian Muslim].

[laughs] Although I disagreed with the use of my name in that context. I mean, it was very funny to say, “don’t Judith Butler me,” but “to Judith Butler someone” meant to say something very negative about men and to identify with a form of feminism that was against men. And I’ve never been identified with that form of feminism. That?s not my mode. I’m not known for that. So it seems like it was confusing me with a radical feminist view that one would associate with Catharine MacKinnon or Andrea Dworkin, a completely different feminist modality. I’m not always calling into question who’s a man and who’s not, and am I a man? Maybe I’m a man. [laughs] Call me a man. I am much more open about categories of gender, and my feminism has been about women’s safety from violence, increased literacy, decreased poverty and more equality. I was never against the category of men.
A beautiful Israeli poem asks, “How does one become Avot Yeshurun?” Avot Yeshurun was a poet who caused turmoil in Israeli poetry. I want to ask, how does one become Judith Butler -especially with the issue of Gender Trouble, the book that so troubled the discourse on gender?

Haaretz for more

AMY GOODMAN talks to DR. MARGARET FLOWERS and TRUDY LIEBERMAN

After nearly seven hours of televised debate, President Obama’s so-called bipartisan healthcare summit ended Thursday without any substantive agreement between Republicans and Democrats. Republican lawmakers remained staunchly opposed to using the federal government to regulate health insurance. We speak to Columbia Journalism Review contributing editor Trudy Lieberman and pediatrician Dr. Margaret Flowers of Physicians for a National Health Program.

Democracy Now for more

by HIROAKI SATO

NEW YORK — While visiting three capitals in Latin America on a lecture tour earlier this month, I wondered if Tokyo looked or felt like any of these cities to someone visiting it from New York or a large European city half a century ago.

The wonderment, on the face of it, was silly. The three cities — Quito, La Paz and Caracas — are all European in origin. Two of them, La Paz and Quito, are the world’s highest and the second-highest capital cities, and have little in common with Tokyo, which stands on alluvial plains.

Yet certain urban disharmonies — for example, the presence of ramshackle houses not far from the downtown where modern, gleaming towers mushroom — made me think of Tokyo of the past.

No, I never lived in the Japanese capital; I was a college student in Kyoto at the time. But because of a biography I am working on, I had known for some time that “Life” magazine had done a Japan special in the fall of 1964 to mark the Tokyo Olympic Games and that the writer it chose to make a coherent observation on the city was no less than Arthur Koestler — something I had been reminded of when a new biography of that famous writer came out: Michael Scammell’s “Koestler: The Literary and Political Odyssey of a Twentieth-Century Skeptic” (Random House, 2009).

So, as I returned to New York, I checked Koestler’s “Life” article, “For Better or Worse: Her Course Is Set” (Sept. 11, 1964). I did not have to go far into the article to find what I had expected. Tokyo is “the first city in the world with a monorail system linking airport to urban center,” he had written, “but it has no citywide sewage system.”

The Japan Times for more

The body reaches out to film and TV industry to create story lines based on issues the U.N. holds dear.

by RACHEL ABRAMOwITZ

When United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon was foreign minister of South Korea from 2004 through 2006, he experienced directly how entertainment can shape popular perceptions, when not one but two TV networks began airing miniseries about the lives of Korean diplomats.

Although the series romanticized diplomat life with requisite dashes of love and conflict, the net effect for the foreign ministry was a burnished public image. “Good storytelling is a very strong tool to change the attitudes and minds of people,” Ban recalled in an interview.

Ban said that’s what was on his mind this week as he led a veritable platoon of top U.N. officials, including the heads of UNICEF and the World Health Organization, on a mission to Hollywood to build relationships with the entertainment community and encourage film and television story lines about issues high on the U.N. agenda, such as climate change and violence against women.

Los Angeles Times for more

(Submitted by reader)

Press Trust of India

Indian movies and music have always left Pakistanis enchanted, but in a new trend more and more women here are taking up special Bollywood dance classes, not only to learn popular steps but also to keep in shape.

Women are willing to pay between Rs 5000 and 15,000 for three classes a week being offered by dance schools and private clubs.

“It is true that most of these women belong to the upper strata of society but this definitely is a new trend that Bollywood dance classes are being held,” said Zeenat, a trainer.

She said that the number of women taking up Bollywood dance lessens had grown over the last few months.

“These classes allow our women not only to express their freedom but also to keep fit and shed those extra pounds. And let’s face it, Bollywood dances and music have a universal appeal,” Pappu Samrat, one of Pakistan’s leading choreographer, said.

Another trainer at a private club pointed out that since European dance forms like Salsa and Tango are not very popular in Pakistan, Bollywood dances and music always have a special appeal here.

Samrat said that with Indian films now being released in cinema halls in Pakistan, the attraction of attending Bollywood dance classes has also grown among women in Karachi and Lahore.

Hindustan Times

(Submitted by Pritam Rohila)