The Origin of Darwin

By Olivia Judson

MY fellow primates, 200 years ago today, Charles Darwin was born. Please join me in wishing him happy birthday!
Unlike many members of the human species, Darwin makes an easy hero. His achievements were prodigious; his science, meticulous. His work transformed our understanding of the planet and of ourselves.
At the same time, he was a humane, gentle, decent man, a loving husband and father, and a loyal friend. Judging by his letters, he was also sometimes quite funny. He was, in other words, one of those rare beings, as likeable as he was impressive.
For example, after his marriage, Darwin worked at home, and his children (of the 10 he fathered, seven survived to adulthood) remembered playing in his study. Later, one of his sons recounted how, after an argument, his father came up to his room, sat on his bed, and apologized for losing his temper. And although often painted as a recluse, Darwin served as a local magistrate, meting out justice in his dining room.
Moreover, while many of his contemporaries approved of slavery, Darwin did not. He came from a family of ardent abolitionists, and he was revolted by what he saw in slave countries: “Near Rio de Janeiro [Brazil} I lived opposite to an old lady, who kept screws to crush the fingers of her female slaves. I have stayed in a house where a young household mulatto, daily and hourly, was reviled, beaten and persecuted enough to break the spirit of the lowest animal …. It makes one’s blood boil, yet heart tremble, to think that we Englishmen and our American descendants, with their boastful cry of liberty, have been and are so guilty.”
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Self-Centered

by Kelly Zen-Yie Tsai

if i were the center of everything for a day…

everything would be aimed towards, dictated by, catered to,
tailored for five foot two tattooed Asian females

when you turned on the television – no martha stewart,
no oprah, no tom brokaw, katie couric, or steven colbert,
only five foot two tattooed Asian females giving
make-up tips for the Asian eye, how to raise children
multilingually in America, custom-design builders who
retrofit houses for the fabulously petite, news that focuses
the latest community organizing campaigns and
where the hottest DJ set is for that night.

everything catered to me – all the movies will tell the
stories of wayward brainiac liberated activist single girls
and their pot dealer mc boyfriends, healing wounds
with families overseas while striving to create fair wages for factory
workers around the world, which would be easier since all the governments
would be run by five foot two tattooed Asian girls,
we’d wave to the camera enthusiastically, give free sandwiches
out to the entire world every Wednesday, we’d match our
lipgloss to our fair trade boots and throw a dance party every time
we passed a truly revolutionary bill.

and i’d get to ask people dumb questions all day about things
that just never occurred to me, because isn’t everybody a five foot
two tattooed Asian girl, and isn’t it so great to be us?

but you know what? i might let you (non-five-foot-two-
tattooed-Asian-girl people) keep your languages, and
i might even give you equal access to health care and education too,
i might even let you share the airwaves, the houses of government,
and give you a shot of working your way up in the financial institutions,
because i know there is no you without me, and from the center to the
margin, there is no me without you.

Kelly Zen-Yie Tsai’s website

Pratap Chatterjee talks to Amy Goodman

Pratap Chatterjee on “Halliburton’s Army: How a Well-Connected Texas Oil Company Revolutionized the Way America Makes War”

Despite a storm of controversy involving allegations of bribery and wrongful death, the military contractor KBR has been awarded a new $35 million contract for electrical work in Iraq. We speak to award-winning investigative journalist Pratap Chatterjee, author of the new book Halliburton’s Army: How a Well-Connected Texas Oil Company Revolutionized the Way America Makes War. [includes rush transcript]

AMY GOODMAN: It’s good to have you with us. As the US government says that the troops will draw down over the next year, year and a half, in Iraq, what’s happening with Halliburton and, as you call it, Halliburton’s Army?
PRATAP CHATTERJEE: Well, the US military is completely dependent on Halliburton. Despite all the news that you read of, you know, soldiers being electrocuted, drivers being shot, the company continues to get contracts. And it’s because half the people in Iraq are contractors, and a large number of them are KBR employees. You know, they’re South Asian workers, they’re Indians, Pakistanis, they’re Southeast Asian Filipinos. They are Halliburton’s Army, and they make this military tick. They make this army—allow this army to march forward on its stomach. It’s because they feed that stomach.

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Click here for www.Corpwatch.org (Pratap Chatterjee’s site)

The nightmare must end

By Beena Sarwar

OF the many challenges Pakistan’s elected government faces perhaps the most menacing and deep-rooted is Talibanisation — a phenomenon identified earlier on by the then exiled Afghan government’s acting foreign minister, Abdullah Abdullah, on Sept 21, 2000, in his address to the United Nations General Assembly.

Pleading for urgent measures to combat this threat, Abdullah wondered “how far the evil threat of Talibanism shall expand … before the conscience of the international community would be awakened, not to just consider, but to adopt immediate and drastic preventive measures.”

His warnings fell on deaf ears. Today, Pakistan bears the brunt of the Taliban fallout, thanks to short-sighted Pakistanis fixated on creating an illusionary ‘strategic depth’ and Americans who thought routing the Taliban militarily in Afghanistan, thanks to superior technology, would ‘root out the evil’. All it did was push their support base underground for a while, even as the political vacuum created by mainstream Pakistani party leaders being in exile allowed the Taliban-sympathetic Muttahida Majlis-i-Amal (also referred to by Benazir Bhutto as the Mullah Military Alliance) to win elections and strengthen these forces.

They have been gaining ground since Pakistan’s creation, with formulations like the Objectives Resolution. The process accelerated with successive governments pandering to right-wing ideologues who practically took over the country during the Afghan war. Then it suited Washington and its allies, including the Zia regime, to arm and train the Mujahideen and initiate what Dr Eqbal Ahmad called ‘jihad international’.

Writers and artists also courageously took on these elements. The dozens of works exhibited recently by the Peshawar-based cartoonist Zahoor at The Second Floor in Karachi included one dated Dec 23, 2007 in which he personifies a cloud as an armed, bearded man (‘Taliban’ inscribed on his turban) hovering ominously overhead, moving from Darra towards Peshawar. Another cartoon titled ‘Scenic Swat Valley’ shows a mean-faced, hirsute volcano overseeing a pile of burning television sets.

Perhaps most prescient was the short-story writer Ghulam Abbas who during another time of ‘enlightened moderation’ (Ayub Khan’s) predicted the logical conclusion of organised bigotry and fanaticism in Hotel Mohenjodaro, a futuristic story in which guests at the fictional Hotel Mohenjodaro celebrate Pakistan becoming the first country to send a man to the moon (Abbas wrote it in 1967 or so, before Neil Armstrong’s feat).

Mullahs around the country condemn the astronaut’s act as heretical. They whip up a frenzy that topples the government, grab power, destroy universities, schools and libraries and impose strict gender segregation. They ban music, art, English and modern inventions — but don’t mind using these inventions (loudspeakers then, Internet, television and FM radio stations now) for their own purpose. Their infighting leads to anarchy. Pakistan is invaded and destroyed. Years later, a tour guide points to the spot in a desert “where, before the enemy struck, stood the Hotel Mohenjodaro.”

The Taliban have already reduced many hotels and educational institutions to rubble in Swat and other previously idyllic areas. Recovery from the nightmare they have unleashed will take much time, once it is over. And over it must be, later if not sooner. In the long term, as Pervez Hoodbhoy predicts, “the forces of irrationality will cancel themselves out because they act at random whereas reason pulls only in one direction.”

Those who justify the Taliban uprising in Pakistan as an anti-imperialist movement forget that since the Taliban first swept into Afghanistan in 1996 (with the blessings of the Pakistani establishment), they have been a threat to women, pluralism and democracy in the region. Their oppressive order in Afghanistan pre-dates the American invasion of Iraq, bombing of Afghanistan, and drone attacks in Pakistan.

Although many Afghans initially welcomed the Taliban for their ‘speedy justice’, oppressive measures like closing girls’ schools and pushing women out of the public sphere added to the people’s miseries. Forced to give up their jobs, thousands of women, the sole bread-earners for their families, had three choices: beggary, starvation or prostitution.

Pushed out of Afghanistan in 2001, the Taliban and their ideological extensions began attempting to enforce this order in Pakistan. Over the past months they have closed or demolished scores of girls’ schools in Swat and the Federally Administered Tribal Areas (Fata), forcing thousands of girls to discontinue their education.

The diary of a seventh-grade Swat schoolgirl writing under the pen name ‘Gul Makai’ (BBC Urdu Online) bears poignant testimony to these horrors. On Jan 3, she wrote, “I had a terrible dream yesterday with military helicopters and the Taliban. I have had such dreams since the launch of the military operation in Swat…. I was afraid going to school because the Taliban had banned all girls from attending schools.” That day, only 11 out of 27 students attended class because of the Taliban’s edict. Three of her friends had already moved to Peshawar, Lahore and Rawalpindi with their families. In the latest installment, her own family has moved to Islamabad.

Here in Karachi, even my seventh-grade old daughter argues that all this has nothing to do with Islam.

What it has to do with is territorial control and power. As the historian Rajesh Kadian notes, most of Asia’s major countries are “frayed at the edges with central authority barely maintaining the functions, power and dignity of the state”. Pakistan’s “frayed fringe” Fata was strategically important to the West during the Afghan war and after 9/11. The exception was “the extraordinary valley of Swat”, the cradle of Tibetan Buddhism, the home of Shah Mir whose piety converted the Kashmiris to Islam, boasting the highest literacy rates in the area especially among women. By targeting this peaceful, settled area with its diverse cultural and religious traditions, the Taliban have made life hell for its residents. They have also challenged the writ of the state by establishing their own parallel system.

This would have been impossible if the heavily armed and trained Pakistan Army meant business. Instead, they say they are unable to even neutralise the FM radio station from which daily announcements are made of the Taliban’s next targets. The army’s recently stated resolve to work in tandem with the civilian government counters public perceptions about its reluctance to do just that. Somewhere, the will seems to be lacking. It will continue to remain lacking unless those who control Pakistan realise that the target of these ‘jihadi’ forces is not just to control some areas, but to overrun the entire country, just as Ghulam Abbas predicted.

The writer is a freelance journalist and documentary filmmaker based in Karachi.

beena.sarwar@gmail.com
Submitted by Hamid Bashani Khan.
Originally published in Dawn

A thought on loss and suffering at home and in Gaza

by Sonja Kakar

Having just returned to my fire-ravaged home state Victoria after a 7-week absence, I doubt that any Australian would be giving much thought to the terror and devastation that wracked the lives of some 1.5 million Palestinians in Gaza only last month. But we cannot dismiss one disaster with a new one, even if it is our own. More than ever, Australians ought to feel some degree of empathy with the Palestinians who saw over 6,000 of their fellow citizens killed or injured in the attacks – a third of them children – and leaving almost 50,000 people homeless. One disaster was caused by a merciless fire storm that has had police and firefighters describing the charred wastelands and destroyed lives as akin to “a holocaust”; the other was caused by three weeks of merciless bombardments ordered by the state of Israel that few would dare to describe as “a holocaust” for fear of being charged with somehow trivialising a word long reserved for the genocide of European Jews more than half a century ago. But how else does one describe the sheer terror that people feel when they see the bodies of their loved ones shrivel before their eyes in blistering fire regardless if caused by nature or man? Whether it is 200, 1400 or 6 million people killed, the terror and overwhelming sense of loss the rest of a threatened population feels in the wake of such onslaughts, is the same. No one thinks of numbers when one is totally helpless to stop the tyranny of powerful forces. As we rush to help our suffering own and feel that sense of shared tragedy in the crisis of the moment, we should spare a thought for all those who are suffering similarly through no fault of their own. The aftermath inevitably comes and politicians, the media and those of us unaffected will eventually turn our attention to other matters, but the people who have borne the brunt of nature’s or human-contrived catastrophes will carry with them forever the scars of loves and labours lost. And when the world is silent and people turn the other way, the pain is that much harder to bear.

We should not forget the victims of the fires or the victims of war because life for them will never be the same again. They are part of the human family and none of us are any less vulnerable than the other to malevolent forces that threaten to strip us of everything near and dear to our hearts; we can only be grateful for the helping hand, the kind word, and those who are willing to reach out beyond the call of duty long after the fury unleashed is finally spent.
(Submitted by Ingrid B. Mork)

7th Kara Film Festival

Where does one even begin to talk about what the KaraFilm Festival has been through over the last two years? In December 2006, during the 6th KaraFilm Festival, we were musing about the direction the Festival should take after finally getting the State of Pakistan to accept its legitimacy and having celebrated six consecutive years of its existence. We were discussing how to consolidate the gains the Festival had made – and there were many – and how to take the next step towards translating those achievements into a more viable film industry in the country. “How do we ensure that this first step does not remain the only bright light on Pakistan’s film scene,” we wrote in our catalogue, “but feeds into better trained and more thoughtful filmmakers, a more conducive environment for good cinema and, indeed, better films being made?”
So it was ironic that, even as some of the fruits of our endeavours began to bear fruit – cinema attendances began to see an upsurge and at least some of the films made in Pakistan set people talking about a nascent “revival” – the subsequent months threatened the very existence of the Festival itself. Two years of political and social turmoil and ever increasing security challenges forced us, despite our best efforts and to our dismay, to twice postpone the 7th KaraFilm Festival. Like the thousands of people who looked forward to the annual ‘Kara experience’, we were extremely disappointed; more so, because we had put in months and months of hard work preparing for it. For some people, who perhaps did not understand the dynamics of an international film festival and all the behind-the-scenes negotiations that go into putting together an event of this magnitude, the postponements were inexcusable. But if anyone understood how much potential damage this still tender sapling could suffer if it was deprived of the sunlight of an annual airing, it was us, those who had planted it and nurtured it against all the odds.
But as if we did not have enough issues to contend with, in the last few months we have also been hit by the double-whammy of rampant inflation in Pakistan and the global economic downturn, imperiling the Festival’s financial resources. The rising tensions with our neighbour India after the brutal terrorist attacks in Mumbai have also negatively impacted the relationships we had so carefully cultivated over the last six years. Of course, we are not the only ones to suffer in the cultural sphere. Music concerts, theatre performances, filmmaking and fashion shows, all have suffered in the same environment. But perhaps because of the scope and ambitions of the Festival, and perhaps because we had nurtured this space precisely to fight against the decades-long marginalization of cinema in Pakistan, the implications are more far-reaching. In a country where creativity and film is once again under attack from forces of extremism, and precious few institutions of art and culture exist, it is particularly galling to stand by and see all of one’s efforts to establish just such a credible institution endangered.
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(Submitted by Pritam Rohila)