Wamiq Jaunpuri’s original translation presented here is a fitting conclusion to Karl Marx’s bicentenary celebrations.
“The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways. The point, however, is to change it.” – Karl Marx
Europe in the 19th century gave birth to two
thinkers who changed everything about how we see the world. One was
Charles Darwin. The other was Karl Marx, who was born 201 years ago
today.
Darwin discovered the law of evolution
of plants and animals (the law of natural selection and survival of the
fittest), while Marx sought the law of evolution of human history.
Darwin’s discoveries sparked a revolution in the scientific world, while
Marx’s discoveries illuminated the pathways to social revolution.
At that time what eluded many was the plain and simple fact that
before serving the cause of politics, science, art, and so on, humans
needed water to drink, food to eat, clothing to cover themselves and
homes to seek shelter. To attain these basic necessities of life, they
make tools and implements and are forced to establish relations with
other humans. The relations of production are determined by the nature
of the geographical environment and the tools of production, and society
keeps changing them according to its needs. Changes in the method and
relations of production themselves are the reason for social revolution.
With the help of these ideas, Marx recognised and evaluated the capitalist system and pointed towards the sun of the new system which was about to dawn from the former’s womb.
Noted progressive poet Wamiq Jaunpuri – more famous for his iconic poem on the Bengal famine Bhooka Bangal (Hungry
Bengali) – wrote his own, little-known eponymous poetic tribute to
Marx, which is perhaps the best short ode and introduction to the latter
in all of Urdu literature, and whose original translation presented here is a fitting conclusion to Marx’s bicentenary celebrations.
Marx’s knowledge and wisdom has no parallel
Who does not benefit from his perception
The result of his wisdom is the nail which opens the knot
The sun of the brightness of conscience and cleverness
What to talk of those who love him
Even his enemies keep his Book as their pillows
His great compilation is a materialist history of the world
Das Kapital or the very essence of life
Upon reading which enslaved nations became prudent
The door of socialist philosophy opened in every heart
How many hells became Paradise with his single Manifesto
He who turned many a desert into a city of roses
Marx has embraced science and Man
He granted the mind a curriculum in the consciousness of life
His discernment, his excessive love of the glance of one acquainted with truth
Which unveiled the face of the poverty of wealth
The one who gave the title of ‘capital’ to the ‘usurper of wage’
His foresight unlimited, his logic unparalleled
He revealed the new sun to us
His every prediction is a veil cast down
No force can become a roadblock for him
When the very mandate of time arrives in the form of revolution
The war-song of the wise, and the shield of the peasant
The workers’ army is a fellow traveller and rider
When the blow of Moses cuts the spell of kingship
The Pharaohs of today will likewise
Gradually become the victim of revolution
The pocket of the capitalist after all is fighting the war
He does not even refrain from atomic weapons
The ungodly civilisation is hopeless for its future
The restlessness of the enemy of humanity is visible
Indonesia President Joko Widodo salutes during a ceremony to mark Independence Day at the Presidential Palace in Jakarta, August 17, 2017 PHOTO/Twitter
Incumbent Indonesian leader’s landslide election win was made official on May 21. Now the hard part begins
Confirming he will carry out a limited Cabinet reshuffle after the
annual post-Ramadan holidays, President Joko Widodo has offered a
tantalizing clue to the most intriguing question of all: Will Indonesia
see a very different president in his second term?
“In five years’ time I will have no more burden. I can’t be
re-elected again, so whatever I do will be for the benefit of the
country,” he said recently in what may have been a sign of a new
resolve, free of the political restraints that have marked his policies
so far.
Announcing the official result ahead of tomorrow’s deadline to take
the steam out of threatened protests over alleged voter fraud, the
National Election Commission has confirmed Widodo won the April 17
election by 55.5% to 44.5%.
The 11% gap, or more than 15 million votes, gives the government
justification for taking firm action against Islamic hardliners and
other opposition groups seeking to turn the election outcome into a
people’s power uprising.
Security forces have gone to their highest alert status, with
paramilitary police patrolling downtown Jakarta streets and Army
Strategic Reserve (Kostrad) troops conducting rappelling exercises in
Merdeka Square in the heart of the city.
The leaderships of the country’s two largest mass Muslim
organizations, Nahdlatul Ulama and Muhammadiyah, have called on their
more than 100 million members to stay away from the protests called by
losing ex-soldier candidate Prabowo Subianto.
Prabowo Subianto supporters attend a rally for the declaration of his victory in the 2019 Presidential election in Jakarta, April 19, 2019. PHOTO/Andalou Agency/AFP Forum/Eko Siswono Toyudho
Anxious to put the election behind him, the president has already
turned to business as usual, offering as a distraction his idea of
moving the capital to what he now thinks is the best alternative – a
site close to the Central Kalimantan province capital of Palangkaraya.
Widodo’s predecessor, Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono, never had it in him
to change in his second term. In fact, by discarding previous vice
president Jusuf Kalla, the one man who had cajoled him into making tough
decisions, he simply coasted along on a commodity boom some thought
would never end.
Widodo doesn’t have that luxury. Vice President Ma’ruf Amin is not
going to be of any help on anything, let alone economic issues, and with
growth stagnating on five percent he is under pressure from reformists
to change the nationalist course he inherited from Yudhoyono.
Economists like Australian Hal Hill aren’t hopeful, predicting the
new administration will be “pragmatic and cautious,” apart perhaps from
taking a few bold policy steps at the outset, as Widodo did with fuel
prices after his hard-fought victory in 2014.
Nor are many Indonesian reformists, including former ministers and
other senior officials who believe Widodo will find it difficult to
separate himself from the five or six political parties making up his
ruling coalition and, more importantly, the vested interests that come
with them.
What analysts do agree on is that without a significant revamp of the
presidential office, poor coordination in policy implementation and an
underperforming Cabinet will continue to weigh heavily on the new
government’s effectiveness.
“The police kill at least 14 young Black men in Brazil every single day,” said Prof. Jaime Amparo Alves, a member of the Brazilian Black Movement who teaches anthropology at the College of Staten Island, New York City. “Which country in the world,” he asks, “has this rate of Black genocide?” The election of racist right-winger Jair Bolsanaro to the presidency “cannot be understood without understanding the history of anti-Blackness in Brazilian society,” said Alves.
Lice, or ‘worms with feet’, were a common cause for concern in the Middle Ages. IMAGE/From ‘The Golden Haggadah’ (c1320 CE), Spain. Manuscript courtesy of the Trustees of the British Library
People in the Middle Ages took great care over cleanliness – except the clergy, who accepted filth as a sign of devotion
In the film Monty Python and the Holy Grail (1975), two
minor characters spot King Arthur. They know who he is because, as one
of them points out: ‘He must be a king … he hasn’t got shit all over him
like the rest of us.’ The scene encapsulates an enduring belief about
the Middle Ages: medieval people were dirty. Some might have heard
Elizabeth I’s famous (but probably apocryphal) declaration that she had a
bath once a month whether she needed it or not. In a time when only the
richest enjoyed running water in their homes, very few Europeans had
the resources to abide by 21st-century standards of hygiene, even if
they wanted to.
At the same time, the filthiness of medieval
people should not be exaggerated. Much evidence shows that personal
hygiene mattered to medieval people, that they made an effort to keep
clean. Popular advice books recommended washing the hands, face and
teeth on rising, plus further handwashing throughout the day. Other body
parts were washed less frequently: daily washing of the genitals, for
example, was believed to be a Jewish custom, and thus viewed with
suspicion by the non-Jewish population. Nevertheless, many households
owned freestanding wooden tubs for bathing, and late-medieval cities
usually had public bathhouses. Medical compendia gave recipes for
washing hair, whitening teeth and improving skin. Medieval clergymen
complained about the vanity of people who spent too much time fussing
over their appearance.
Nor were medieval efforts to keep clean
limited to the body. Delicate outer garments might be brushed and
perfumed, but undergarments and household linens were frequently
laundered. Advice books suggested that underwear should be changed every
day, and household accounts are scattered with payments to washerwomen.
Large rivers often had special jetties for the use of washerwomen:
London’s was known as ‘La Lavenderebrigge’.
Recent archaeological
discoveries have brought revealing details about the realities of
medieval hygiene. The preserved eggs of intestinal parasites have often
been found in excavated latrine pits: for example, a recent excavation
in the German port city of Lübeck suggested
high levels of roundworm and tapeworm in the medieval population. And
it wasn’t just the population at large who were affected. In 2012, when
Richard III’s body was excavated in Leicester, his remains were found
to be heavily infested with roundworm eggs. An examination of the
mummified corpse of Ferdinand II, King of Naples, who died in 1496, showed that he had both head and pubic lice.
The
archaeological record tells only part of the story. It can tell us
which parasites medieval people suffered from, but it can’t tell us what
medieval people knew about parasites. How did they treat them? How did
they feel about them? And what do their experiences with parasites
reveal about life in medieval Europe?
US Defense Department building know as the Paentagon PHOTO/Master Sgt. Ken Hammond, U.S. Air Force – Public Domain
The US Department of Defense’s bloated budget, along with CIA venture
capital, helped to create tech giants, including Amazon, Apple,
Facebook, Google and PayPal. The government then contracts those
companies to help its military and intelligence operations. In doing so,
it makes the tech giants even bigger.
In recent years, the traditional banking, energy and industrial Fortune 500
companies have been losing ground to tech giants like Apple and
Facebook. But the technology on which they rely emerged from the taxpayer-funded research and development of bygone decades. The internet started as ARPANET, an invention
of Honeywell-Raytheon working under a Department of Defense (DoD)
contract. The same satellites that enable modern internet communications
also enable US jets to bomb their enemies, as does the GPS that enables online retailers to deliver products with pinpoint accuracy. Apple’s touchscreen technology originated as a US Air Force tool. The same drones that record breath-taking video are modified versions of Reapers and Predators.
Tax-funded DoD research is the backbone of the modern, hi-tech
economy. But these technologies are dual-use. The companies that many of
us take for granted–including Amazon, Apple, Facebook, Google,
Microsoft and PayPal–are connected indirectly and sometimes very
directly to the US military-intelligence complex.
A recent report
by Open the Government, a bipartisan advocate of transparency, reveals
the extent of Amazon’s contracts with the Pentagon. Founded in 1994 by
Jeff Bezos, the company is now valued at $1 trillion, giving Bezos a personal fortune
of $131 billion. Open the Government’s report notes that much of the US
government “now runs on Amazon,” so much so that the tech giant is
opening a branch near Washington, DC. Services provided by Amazon
include cloud contracts, machine learning and biometric data systems.
But more than this, Amazon is set to enjoy a lucrative Pentagon IT
contract under the $10bn, Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure
program, or JEDI. The Pentagon says that it hopes Amazon technology will
“support lethality and enhanced operational efficiency.”
The report
reveals what it can, but much is protected from public scrutiny under
the twin veils of national security and corporate secrecy. For instance,
all prospective host cities for Amazon’s second headquarters were asked
to sign non-disclosure agreements.
But it doesn’t end there. According to the report,
Amazon supplied surveillance and facial Rekognition software to the
police and FBI, and it has pitched the reportedly inaccurate and race/gender-biased
technology to the Department of Homeland Security for its
counter-immigration operations. Ten percent of the subsidiary Amazon Web
Services’ profits come from government contracts. Departments include
the State Department, NASA, Food and Drug Administration and the Centers
for Disease Control and Prevention. In 2013, Amazon won a $600m
Commercial Cloud Services (C2S) contract with the CIA. C2S will enable
deep learning and data fingerprinting. Amazon’s second headquarters will
be built in Virginia, the CIA’s home-state. Despite repeated requests,
the company refuses to disclose how its personal devices, like Amazon
Echo, connect with the CIA.
Locals near the coming Heineken factory in Puebla meet to organize their opposition to it. PHOTO/Raul Rojano
Mexico is the biggest
beer exporter globally, but it barely has enough water for its
residents and farmers. Experiencing long-lasting droughts, the country,
which is half
desert, has become a cheap place for transnationals to consume its
remaining water, then send the products and profits to wealthier
regions.
In 2018, Mexico exported almost 40 million hectoliters of water, with 80% of that going to the US. Mexico’s beer production is monopolized
by two transnational companies: AB InBev, which acquired Grupo Modelo
in 2013, and Heineken, which acquired Cerveceria Cuauhtemoc Moctezuma in
2010. Between them, the companies own 97.5% of the domestic consumption
market. The Tecate brand, owned by Heineken, is one of the
fastest-rising beer brands in the US, and Corona Extra, owned by AB
InBev, is in the global top 10.
Heineken uses Mexico because of how profitable it is. “The country
has a young population, natural and human resources, and macro-economic
stability,” Dolf Van Den Brink, president of Heineken Mexico, said. The company built its seventh
brewery in Northern Mexico last year, choosing the location because it
was close to the US and they could easily export Tecate and Dos Equis
brands to US consumers.
Here in Puebla, in the center of the country, most residents only receive water twice a week for 15 minutes at a time, forcing us to severely ration water use. A new Heineken factory, currently being built 15 minutes from the city center, will make that even worse. The company is taking water directly from the domestic pipe network, rather than the industrial water supply, as laws mandate.
Omar Jimenez Castro, a water rights activist and lawyer who has taken
Puebla’s private water company Aguas de Puebla to court and won in
nearly 400 cases, reported
that drainage in that area of the city was at the point of collapse and
that it couldn’t cope with industrial use from the Heineken factory.
Locals have been documenting the excavations and operations the
company has carried out in the area with photos and video since June of
last year, and have noted that Heinekin’s pipes redirect water from
their domestic pipes.
“We’ve spent nine months monitoring what they are doing, and watching
over the construction. They’ve told us now that the water pipes they
are installing are just for two toilets for the workers, but the pipes
are huge,” Raul Rojano, a local opposed to the factory told me as we
tried to inspect the Heineken site. However, since protests and legal
steps were taken against it, the company has erected a tall brick fence
topped with barbed wire to stop locals from observing.
“They have something to hide,” one local commented. However, Jimenez
doesn’t just blame Heineken. The “three levels of government – federal,
state, and municipal ” are at fault for allowing a private company to be
responsible for the water supply, he told me. “On a daily basis they
systematically violate human rights,” he said, referring to the water
shortages and mass disconnections so that Aguas de Puebla can collect
more fees and also send more water to transnationals like Heineken and
Walmart.
Meanwhile, another Heineken factory inaugurated last year in
Chihuahua, on the border with the US, is using the amount of water that
would supply 200,000 houses. Residents there have become so desperate for water that enterprising individuals are selling
plastic containers of water off the back of their trucks. Northern
Mexico, with extremely hot summers and little rainfall year-round,
suffers from ongoing water supply issues. Due to over-exploitation,
Chihuahua only has about 10 years of water left, and activists, farmers,
and academics have spoken out against local authorities there, saying they put transnational companies first.
In 1950s California, publisher Lawrence Ferlinghetti took on the censors – and won.
In The People v Ferlinghetti: The Fight to Publish Allen Ginsberg’s ‘Howl’,
Ronald Collins and David Skover take us to the 1950s, and a California
on the verge of social change. At the heart of their uplifting story is
the business acumen and literary idealism of Lawrence Ferlinghetti.
Ferlinghetti, now aged 100 and still proprietor of City Lights
Bookstore and publishing house, is a seminal figure in San Francisco. He
is considered its poet laureate and a great contributor to its cultural
life, as a publisher, artist, activist and political renegade. His
idiosyncratic blend of environmentalism, anarchism, socialism and
artistic freedom has provided generations with inspiration; his poetry,
prose and polemic has impressed writers and given them the courage to
follow their convictions; his publications have introduced millions of
people worldwide to advanced writers.
San Francisco was the West Coast centre for the Beat Generation, a
counterbalance to its other centre in New York. On the evening of 7
October 1955, Gary Snyder, Philip Lamantia, Michael McClure, Philip
Whalen and Allen Ginsberg gathered at a gallery in San Francisco to read
poetry at an event called ‘6 Poets at 6 Gallery’ (the sixth poet was
either compere Kenneth Rexroth or the spirit of the late John Hoffman,
whose work was read by Lamantia). In the audience were Ferlinghetti and
Jack Kerouac.
Ginsberg read ‘Howl’, a long unpublished poem he had recently
composed. This was not only to be a breakthrough poem for Ginsberg – it
was also to be a watershed in American literary culture, shaping a
generation’s writing, from prose and poetry to rock lyrics. Yet on 7
October 1955, Ginsberg was virtually unknown to the wider public.
Ginsberg began to read:
‘I saw the best minds of my generation
destroyed by madness
starving, mystical, naked,
who dragged themselves thru the angry streets at
dawn looking for a negro fix.’
Ginsberg chronicled the insanity, death and degradation of his Beat
friends – incarcerated, murdered, exiled, starving, drug-addicted,
driven beyond endurance into states of wretchedness – and presented them
as holy beings made divine and transcendent through an unjust world.
Their suffering was a moral posture, a condemnation of a world gone
insane through Cold War division, and rife with hypocrisy and injustice.
The largest US military base in Bagram, Afghanistan PHOTO/Wikipedia
How appropriate, don’t you think? America’s longest war, the Afghan
one, now heading into its 18th year, may set another kind of record —
for the longest withdrawal ever. The Pentagon recently revealed news
of its daring “plan” to end that war. It will take up to five years to
get 14,000 U.S. troops (and unknown numbers of private contractors),
military equipment, and the like out of that country successfully,
ensuring a war of perhaps 23 years (without, of course, a victory in
sight). To add to the cheery news, just about everyone’s on board with
the plan, except perhaps for one recalcitrant individual. As the New York Times recently reported:
“So far, the plan has been met with broad acceptance in Washington
and NATO headquarters in Brussels. But American officials warned that
Mr. Trump could upend the new plan at any time.”
In other words, when it comes to setting records in Afghanistan (USA!
USA!), the news couldn’t be more upbeat if the president doesn’t
interfere (and his administration’s peace talks
with the Taliban don’t somehow get in the way). In fact, there might be
even better news lurking just offstage. The Pentagon’s “plan,” after
all, looks strangely like an effort to simply outlast the Trump era in
hopes that a future president might be far more intent on record-setting
than the present one. General Joseph Votel, who heads U.S. Central
Command, which oversees Washington’s never-ending wars across the
Greater Middle East, may be typical of top U.S. commanders when it comes
to such matters. He’s not just against
the president’s urge to withdraw American troops from Syria but
envisions a permanent war with ISIS into the distant future — and he
imagines something similar in Afghanistan. As he told
the House Armed Services Committee early this month, speaking of a
possible U.S. withdrawal from that country, “The political conditions,
where we are in the reconciliation right now, don’t merit that.”
So there’s no end to the records that could still be set, if it’s up to the generals, who — as TomDispatch regular
and retired Air Force Lieutenant Colonel and historian William Astore
points out today — are filled with similar wisdom when it comes to what
Pentagon officials have taken to calling “infinite war.” Tom
Whose Blood, Whose Treasure? America’s Senior Generals Find No Exits From Endless War By William J. Astore
“Veni, Vidi, Vici,” boasted Julius Caesar, one of history’s great military captains. “I came, I saw, I conquered.”
Then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton echoed that famed saying when
summing up the Obama administration’s military intervention in Libya in
2011 — with a small alteration. “We came, we saw, he died,” she said with a laugh about the killing of Muammar Gaddafi, that country’s autocratic leader. Note what she left out, though: the “vici”
or victory part. And how right she was to do so, since Washington’s
invasions, occupations, and interventions in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya,
and elsewhere in this century have never produced anything faintly like a
single decisive and lasting victory.
“Failure is not an option” was the stirring 1995 movie catchphrase
for the dramatic 1970 rescue of the Apollo 13 moon mission and crew, but
were such a movie to be made about America’s wars and their less-than-vici-esque results today, the phrase would have to be corrected in Clintonian fashion to read “We came, we saw, we failed.”
Wars are risky, destructive, unpredictable endeavors, so it would
hardly be surprising if America’s military and civilian leaders failed
occasionally in their endless martial endeavors, despite the
overwhelming superiority in firepower of “the world’s greatest
military.” Here’s the question, though: Why have all the American wars
of this century gone down in flames and what in the world have those
leaders learned from such repetitive failures?
The evidence before our eyes suggests that, when it comes to our senior military leaders at least, the answer would be: nothing at all.
