AFROL NEWS
The difficult past of Zambia’s ambiguous role in Namibia’s and Angola’s freedom fight is haunting current President, thus Foreign Minister, Rupiah Banda. The 1970s anti-communist Zambian regime is said to have killed Namibian freedom fighters in agreement with apartheid South Africa and Sam Nujoma. Historians confirm the allegations.
Afrol News for more
(See also, Tor Sellstrom, Sweden and National Liberation in Southern Africa, Ed.)
by SABA NAQWI and SMRUTI KOPPIKAR
Hindus are docile, peace-loving, non-violent people. India is a land of unity in diversity. This is, after all, the country that produced Mahatma Gandhi. Terrorists are always Muslims. What of the so-called Maoist terrorists? Oh, they are tribals and their leaders are communists. They are not really Hindus!
These are the stereotypes we live with, blinding us to an unfolding reality. That there is indeed a phenomenon that can only be described as ‘Hindu terror’. For the people who display trishuls, shout shrill slogans for Bharat Mata and believe in retributive justice against minorities are not fringe lunatics with crazy ideas. Increasingly, investigations reveal that they have actually taken to making bombs and planting them in places where Muslims would be blamed. Why do they do this? Perhaps, in their distorted worldview, any action that would mobilise the people against the minorities is justified.
Outlook India for more
L. J. HOLMAN
It is an old and tired truism: “If you don’t vote, you have no right to complain.” The idea supposedly is that voting is a privilege, a price one pays to live in the land of the free, and so integral to the democratic process that not voting is somehow un-American, that not voting means not participating (the implication is that one doesn’t WANT to participate) in our democracy, and therefore whatever happens in that democracy is outside the non-voter’s rights and privileges—but can this really be correct?
Dissident Voice for more
by JESSE BERING
And so I’m left wondering … in a world where sexual fantasy in the form of mental representation has become obsolete, where hallucinatory images of dancing genitalia, lusty lesbians and sadomasochistic strangers have been replaced by a veritable online smorgasbord of real people doing things our grandparents couldn’t have dreamt up even in their wettest of dreams, where randy teenagers no longer close their eyes and lose themselves to the oblivion and bliss but instead crack open their thousand-dollar laptops and conjure up a real live porn actress, what, in a general sense, are the consequences of liquidating our erotic mental representational skills for our species’ sexuality? Is the next generation going to be so intellectually lazy in their sexual fantasies that their creativity in other domains is also affected? Will their marriages be more likely to end because they lack the representational experience and masturbatory fantasy training to picture their husbands and wives during intercourse as the person or thing they really desire?
Scientific American for more
by VAISHNAVI CHANDRASHEKHAR
Every few years the world gets a glimpse of Indians’ peculiar fascination with Hitler. His autobiography, “Mein Kampf” (“My Struggle”), is a consistent bestseller here, selling 70,000 copies in the past decade. The book is popular among management students who see it as some sort of self-help or leadership strategy manual. (Copies lie alongside “Who Moved My Cheese?” at booksellers’ stands.)
Christian Science Monitor for more
(Submitted by reader)
by SARAH KHAN
In my recent posts on the LUBP, I have highlighted the pseudo-liberal inclination of several Pakistani intellectuals including bloggers.
Another common feature of Pakistani blogs is their selective understanding and representation of events in Pakistan.
…
Here is a most recent glaring example.
On Friday, 9 July 2010, a Taliban suicide bomber attacked a gathering of local population in Mohmand agency (FATA) killing more than 105 persons and injuring hundreds of others.
Let Us Build Pakistan for more
by JEFFREY ST. CLAIR and JOSHUA FRANK
On May 3, 1969, after hours of bitter debate, the Sierra Club fired David Brower. The organization’s first paid staffer, Brower had transformed the Club from an exclusive, politically timid, white male hiking outfit of 2,000 members. But the old guard didn’t like the direction that Brower, its executive director, was taking the staid organization: toward political confrontation, grassroots organizing and attacks on industrial pollution, nuclear power and the Pentagon.
This kind of green aggressiveness in the face of entrenched power alienated funders, politicians and, eventually, the Internal Revenue Service, which, after Brower’s successful international campaign to halt the construction of two mega-dams in the Grand Canyon, moved to strip the group of its tax-deductible status. The IRS action proved to be the final straw and Brower was booted out.
Counterpunch for more
by NiCOS RAPTIS
As expected, a very important visitor of Hitler’s in Landsberg prison was Ernst Sedgwick Hanfstaengl the 6′ 7″ tall Harvard educated aristocrat with an American mother and a German father, who was a friend of Franklin Delano Roosevelt and of (the very macho) Teddy Roosevelt. After all, Hitler had found refuge in the Hanfstaengl villa, where he was arrested. [For details see the above June 4, 1999 Commentary]. After such a visit to Hitler’s prison “cell” Hnfstaengl related that he thought as if he were “in a delicatessen shop”.
Z Blogs for more
by PATRICK O’CONNOR
One of the key factors in these extraordinary events was hostility, on the part of multi-national mining companies, to [Prime Minister Kevin] Rudd’s proposed Resource Super Profits Tax. The Labor Party apparatus is bound to the resource giants by a thousand threads, including campaign donations, personal connections, and employee exchanges. Within a week of Rudd’s ousting, Gillard had met the mining magnates’ deadline for a back down on the new tax, by awarding them a multi-billion dollar windfall through various concessions.
These sordid manoeuvres shed light on where political power really resides within so-called capitalist democracy. Economic and political policies are determined not by the people, expressing their will through democratically elected and accountable representatives, but by powerful corporate and financial interests which act ruthlessly, behind-the-scenes, to impose their demands. Behind the facade of bourgeois parliamentary democracy stands the dictatorship of capital, backed, as Friedrich Engels once explained, by the state—detachments of “armed men and also material adjuncts, prisons, and institutions of coercion of all kinds”.
World Socialist Web Site for more