Author: badru

by SUZI WEISSMAN

Sociologist Boris Kagarlitsky, a prominent Russian Marxist imprisoned by Vladimir Putin’s government on false charges, has had his appeal denied. He deserves our solidarity.

Once again Boris Kagarlitsky requires our solidarity.

On June 5, 2024 the Russian Supreme Court’s Military Chamber rejected Boris Kagarlitsky’s appeal against his five year prison sentence for “justifying terrorism.” Kagarlitsky must now remain confined to a penal colony in Torzhok, some 155 miles northwest of Moscow. The decision was unjust, but not unexpected, and will be contested.

Kagarlitsky was initially jailed in July 2023 and held for nearly five months in pretrial detention. He was charged with “justifying terrorism” for ironic remarks he made on his social media channel after the 2022 explosion on the Crimean Bridge. In December 2023, a military court freed him after imposing a fine. But in February 2024, in an unexpected appeal trial, prosecutors overturned the December verdict, citing excessive leniency.

During the June 5 appeal hearing, Kagarlitsky said naming the offending YouTube video “Explosive Congratulations for Mostik the Cat” — a reference to a stray cat that lived on the Crimea bridge, was “an extremely unfortunate joke.” But he argued that his jail term was disproportionate to the offense. Kagarlitsky’s attorney plans to appeal the verdict with Russia’s Constitutional Court on the grounds that his client received excessive punishment.

The appeal court judges refused to change Kagarlitsky’s sentence, despite an appeal from thirty-seven international political figures and intellectuals, including Jeremy Corbyn, Jean-Luc Mélenchon, and Yanis Varoufakis, as well as Spanish government ministers and members of parliament from France, Portugal, Ireland, Belgium, and Brazil. An international petition demanding Kagarlitsky’s freedom has collected more than eighteen thousand signatures.

Spurred by the international campaign to free Boris, academic positions were secured for Kagarlitsky from top universities in Brazil and South Africa. It was hoped that Moscow might be induced to free him if he agreed he leave the country. But at the June 5 hearing, the judge refused to allow the official letters of appointment from the deans, rectors, and presidents of these universities, stating they were not relevant to the case. The judicial panel, however, decided to include the documents in the record.

For the time being Kagarlitsky is sitting in the gulag-period penal colony in Torzhok. Because of his age, sixty-five, Kagarlitsky is housed with other pensioners and is not required to work. But the conditions in this colony are inferior to those he had in pretrial detention in the Komi Republic. That was apparent when Kagarlitsky appeared in the courtroom through video link from Torzhok. He has lost weight and appeared haggard.

The judge’s decision ignored basic democratic and legal rights. It was simply a decision handed down in advance from the regime, determined to crush domestic opposition to the Kremlin’s war on Ukraine. It represents a gross but entirely deliberate miscarriage of justice.

Jacobin for more

by RENEE DUDLEY (with research by DORIS BURKE)

Former employee says software giant dismissed his warnings about a critical flaw because it feared losing government business. Russian hackers later used the weakness to breach the National Nuclear Security Administration, among others.

Microsoft hired Andrew Harris for his extraordinary skill in keeping hackers out of the nation’s most sensitive computer networks. In 2016, Harris was hard at work on a mystifying incident in which intruders had somehow penetrated a major U.S. tech company.

The breach troubled Harris for two reasons. First, it involved the company’s cloud — a virtual storehouse typically containing an organization’s most sensitive data. Second, the attackers had pulled it off in a way that left little trace.

He retreated to his home office to “war game” possible scenarios, stress-testing the various software products that could have been compromised.

Early on, he focused on a Microsoft application that ensured users had permission to log on to cloud-based programs, the cyber equivalent of an officer checking passports at a border. It was there, after months of research, that he found something seriously wrong.

The product, which was used by millions of people to log on to their work computers, contained a flaw that could allow attackers to masquerade as legitimate employees and rummage through victims’ “crown jewels” — national security secrets, corporate intellectual property, embarrassing personal emails — all without tripping alarms.

To Harris, who had previously spent nearly seven years working for the Defense Department, it was a security nightmare. Anyone using the software was exposed, regardless of whether they used Microsoft or another cloud provider such as Amazon. But Harris was most concerned about the federal government and the implications of his discovery for national security. He flagged the issue to his colleagues.

They saw it differently, Harris said. The federal government was preparing to make a massive investment in cloud computing, and Microsoft wanted the business. Acknowledging this security flaw could jeopardize the company’s chances, Harris recalled one product leader telling him. The financial consequences were enormous. Not only could Microsoft lose a multibillion-dollar deal, but it could also lose the race to dominate the market for cloud computing.

Harris said he pleaded with the company for several years to address the flaw in the product, a ProPublica investigation has found. But at every turn, Microsoft dismissed his warnings, telling him they would work on a long-term alternative — leaving cloud services around the globe vulnerable to attack in the meantime.

Propublica for more

by ELANA SPIVACK

The Mediterranean diet might conjure images of whole grains, fish, a side of cucumber and tomato salad, and a glass of red wine. While the diet, known for its link to longevity and health, has skyrocketed in popularity in recent years, this eating pattern is far from new. In fact, a recent study reveals that this way of eating has persisted for millennia. Published today in the journal PLoS ONE, a paper looked at the agricultural and diet patterns of people living in what’s now Syria during the Middle Bronze Age, which occurred from 2000 to 1600 BCE. It turns out humans have been eating a Mediterranean diet since at least the Bronze Age.

The research looks at plant, animal, and human remains from an archaeological site in modern-day Syria known as Tell Tweini on the coast of the Mediterranean Sea. Tell Tweini is located near the modern town Jableh, and was once part of an ancient harbor city called Gibala, the southernmost town of the Ugarit Kingdom in the Levant.

“Understanding ancient cultures is not only important for archaeologists, but for anyone interested in the history of the origins and development of humankind,” Simone Riehl, professor of archaeobotany at the University of Tübingen in Germany, tells Inverse. Food especially is telling of all sorts of conditions. “One of the oldest culturally anchored expressions of human life is food.”

Inverse for more

by MAGED MANDOUR & HOSSAM EL-HAMALAWY

Why the Egyptian military regime is more powerful — and more brutal — than its predecessors

It has been over a decade since a military coup in Egypt definitely quashed the hopes inspired by the Arab Spring. Led by officers under the command of Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, the regime he subsequently constructed consolidated itself on a foundation of mass repression and debt-fuelled infrastructure projects that systematically funnel money to the ruling elite while impoverishing wide swathes of the population.

How were Egypt’s revolutionary ambitions so decisively snuffed out? And what makes the new regime so ironclad and impervious to opposition? Hossam el-Hamalawy spoke with Maged Mandour, author of Egypt under El-Sisi: A Nation on the Edge, about the political economy of Egypt’s military dictatorship and why he believes Sisi will be much more difficult to topple than any of the strongmen who came before him.

Can you tell us what your new book is about, and what knowledge gaps it aims to fill?

The book looks at the emergence of the Sisi regime as a new phenomenon in Egyptian politics. Simply put, I argue that the regime represents a complete break with all post-1952 regimes. It is the first time that Egypt is ruled directly by the military, with no mass party or facade to counterbalance its dominance. It has led to a complete militarization of the state, political system, and economy.

This hyper-concentration of power has bred one of the most violent and radical regimes in the Middle East. As far as I know, mine is the first book looking exclusively at the Sisi regime, trying to chart its evolution, from the political, economic, and social perspectives.

How is Sisi’s regime different from its predecessors?

The hyper-concentration of power in the hands of the military has not only led to the complete closure of public space, but also to a fully militarized political system and economy — a new mode of militarized state capitalism, with devastating consequences for the poor and the middle class.

This, however, was only possible through the emergence of a revamped form of ideological justification for military rule, what I call a “Sisified version of Nasserism”. This ideological construct views the nation as an organic whole, an ethereal entity that has existed for thousands of years, with the military at the helm. It makes opposition to the military regime equivalent to national treason, which hence must be repressed. This proto-fascist ideology is augmented, and the explosive mix completed, by conspiracy theories of the fifth column, cosmic conspiracies against the state, and fourth- and fifth-generation wars.

This paved the way for a tidal wave of repression that is yet to abate, which was also fuelled by mass popular participation, what I term “societal repression”. The tactic is simple, yet devastating. Sisi has a skill for popular mobilization, using what can only be termed mass hysteria and blood lust, fuelled by his propaganda machine, for his mass repression. That has created a strong bond between him and his base, allowing him to claim that repression has a popular mandate — the ideal setting for a mass bloodletting the likes of which Egypt had not seen since the founding of the modern Egyptian state.

You write extensively on Egypt’s repressive apparatus. Why has the country seen such a high level of lethal and carceral violence since 2013?

Rosa Luxemburg Stiftungfor more

by MARJORIE N. FELD

Since October 2023, American Jews have been engaged in an intense, fractious debate over Israel’s war in the Gaza Strip.

Media reports say that American Jews are experiencing “the great rupture,” widening “rifts,” and stand at a “moral, political crossroads.”

While most American Jews remain broadly supportive of Israel, others have protested vigorously against U.S. support for Israel and are demanding a cease-fire in the Gaza war. They carry signs saying “Not in Our Name.”

Their slogan highlights the fact that American foreign aid to Israel has long relied on the support of American Jews. Unqualified U.S. support for Israel was built, in part, on the promise that Israel kept American Jews – and all Jews – safe, especially after the Holocaust.

But American Jews have never been entirely unified in their support for Israel or in their visions of what role Israel and Palestine should play in American Jewish life.

No consensus

My new book, “The Threshold of Dissent: A History of American Jewish Critics of Zionism,” analyzes a century of debates among American Jews over Zionism and Israel.

My account begins in 1885, when elite Reform Jews, with a goal of full integration in Jim Crow America, composed the Pittsburgh Platform, which rejected Jewish nationalism out of fear that it would make them targets of antisemitic accusations of dual loyalty.

Two years later, Austrian journalist Theodor Herzl founded the modern Zionist movement, relying on European powers for support for a modern Jewish state.

The genocide of Europe’s Jewish population in the Holocaust fundamentally altered American Jews’ perspectives on Zionism.

The Conversation for more

John Oliver discusses the elections in India, what Narendra Modi has been doing in office, what he might do next, and the proper way to eat a mango.

Youtube for more

by B. R. GOWANI

planting fear in people is a profitable business

religious leaders, corporations, governments, and others use it as a tool

religious leaders plant the fear of hell in the afterlife if …

you don’t follow their dictates

you don’t donate money to them

you don’t carry out the assigned work

you don’t see people of other religions as lesser beings then you

and so on

the hellish people have the nerve to threaten people with hell

corporations instill the fear of repossession and law & prosecution if …

you don’t pay the rent on time

you don’t pay the debt on time

you don’t pay the mortgage on time

you don’t pay the installment on time

and so on

the robber barons with most wealth who evade taxes, etc., talk about law

governments <1> plant the fear in the name of “national security” if …

you don’t pay the taxes

you don’t resist publishing its domestic & war crimes <2>

you don’t toe the line by accepting its dubbing of victims as “terrorists”

you don’t stop condoling with people it has wrongly labelled as “enemy”

and so on

the terrorist entity which commits most violence designates others as such

Notes

<1> US author Mark Twain once said:

“It could probably be shown by facts and figures that there is no distinctly native American criminal class except Congress.”

Twain though used the term “criminal class” for the politicians in the US Congress, it is equally applicable to most politicians inside the government and also who are not part of it.

<2> Chelsea Manning, Julian Assange, and many others have been persecuted, humiliated, and mentally tortured in the US for daring to publish US government criminal acts. It’s a worldwide phenomenon and many journalists and common people too suffer, sometime by paying with their lives.

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

by WANNING SUN

Yuan Yang is what migration academics call a “1.5 generation migrant” – meaning she was born in her country of origin and then migrated to another country as a child.

She belongs, too, to what Chinese people call jiulinhou – the generation of people born in the 1990s. As a writer, she is interested in the experience of individuals like her – young women eager to make something of their lives.

A journalist who reported on China as a correspondent for the Financial Times, Yang knows firsthand the editorial constraints of China reporting. In fact, a new study finds the vast majority of articles published in British media outlets between 2020 and 2023 framed China negatively, sometimes strongly so. For myriad, complex reasons, the dominant image of China constructed by foreign correspondents is largely one-dimensional, simplistic, and increasingly conforms to a Cold War editorial framework.

Increasingly, China is portrayed as an economic powerhouse, an authoritarian regime and a security threat. Some foreign correspondents, after a stint there, feel they know enough about China to write a book. Some claim to have found the ultimate “truth about China”. Consequently, the Chinese population is mostly imagined by Western readers as a monolith and faceless crowd: divided into those who are victims of a repressive Chinese regime, or heroic individuals who dare to defy the system.

Ordinary Chinese people living their mundane, unremarkable everyday lives are persistently missing. While Western media do report on the phenomenon of rural-to-urban migration in China, the cultural and emotional lives of rural migrants – their hopes and aspirations, worries and frustrations in private life, especially in intimate, familial relations – remain largely unknown.

As a journalist writing to meet the editorial agenda of her paper, Yuan Yang may not have been able to step outside the Financial Times’ negative framework of China reporting. However, her book does not fall into this trap. For this reason, she may not achieve the phenomenal fame of someone such as Jung Chang, author of Wild Swans, the story of three generations of Chinese women (published in 1991), which some claim pandered to Western readers’ pre-existing perceptions. The publishing world does not always reward nuance and complexity.

Yang’s book Private Revolutions is set in the the decades of economic reform, beginning in the 1980s, when China transformed from a socialist to a neoliberal market economy. This transformation resulted in the gradual withdrawal of state support in areas such as health, education and employment, and other market-oriented reforms.

As the state gradually outsourced the responsibility for such services to individual citizens, this has inevitably transformed people’s inner selves. Some China scholars call this process the privatisation of selfhood. The individuals in Yang’s book are caught up in this social transformation. Theirs are stories of inner revolution as they respond to, cope with, or even thrive in a dramatic new world.

Solving the problem of fear

Yang tells the stories of four women who grew up from the 1990s onwards. Three were born in rural China in very humble circumstances. The fourth was born and brought up in the city, but is the child of rural migrants. We follow their lives from the primary and middle school years in their villages.

The Conversation for more

DEMOCRACY NOW

VIDEO/Democracy Now/Youtube

We speak in depth with journalist Jonathan Eig about his new book, King: A Life, the first major biography of the civil rights leader in more than 35 years, which draws on unredacted FBI files, as well as the files of the personal aide to President Lyndon Baines Johnson, to show how Johnson and others partnered in the FBI’s surveillance of King and efforts to destroy him, led by director J. Edgar Hoover. Eig also interviewed more than 200 people, including many who knew King closely, like the singer, actor and activist Harry Belafonte. The book has also drawn attention for its revelation that King was less critical of Malcolm X than previously thought.

AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report. I’m Amy Goodman.

We spend the rest of the hour with the author of the first major biography of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. in decades. Jonathan Eig’s King: A Life was published this month and draws on unredacted FBI files, as well as the files of the personal aide to President Lyndon Johnson, that shows how he and others partnered with the FBI’s surveillance of King and efforts to destroy him, led by FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover.

Eig wrote in a New York Times opinion essay about the book that the documents reveal how, quote, “Johnson was more of an antagonist to King and a conspirator with Hoover than he has been portrayed. By personalizing the F.B.I.’s assault on King, Americans cling to a view of history that isolates a few bad actors who opposed the civil rights movement — including Hoover, Gov. George Wallace of Alabama and the Birmingham lawman Bull Connor. They thus fail to acknowledge the institutionalized, well-organized resistance to change in our society.” That’s Jonathan Eig, author of King: A Life, for which he also interviewed more than 200 people, including many who knew King closely, like the singer, actor and activist, the late, great Harry Belafonte.

The book has also drawn attention for its revelation that King was less critical of Malcolm X than previously thought. Eig found the original transcript of an interview King did with Alex Haley, who’s the author who collaborated with Malcolm X on his autobiography. The transcript shows how Haley misquoted and even made up part of King’s response. In fact, King never said, “Malcolm has done himself or our people a great disservice.” And King’s comment about “fiery, demagogic oratory” was not related to Malcolm X.

To talk about all of this, we’re joined in Chicago by Jonathan Eig.

Welcome to Democracy Now!, Jonathan. This is an epic work. Congratulations on years of research and writing. Why don’t we begin where I left off, on this exposé around what Martin Luther King really thought of Malcolm X? Talk about the significance of how Alex Haley shaped the narrative for so many decades, and who Haley was.

JONATHAN EIG: Alex Haley was one of the best-known African American journalists of his era. He wrote for a lot of mainstream white publications, like Reader’s Digest and Playboy. And the Playboy interview that he did with Martin Luther King was the longest interview — the longest published interview that King ever gave. So it had significant impact. It reached a lot of white readers who were not otherwise going to be exposed to such a long interview with King.

And because of the comments that King made, or supposedly made, about Malcolm X, it’s been handed down for decades, for generations, that this is what King actually thought about Malcolm X. And it was, as you pointed out in the introduction, largely fabricated.

AMY GOODMAN: And talk about how you found this out and what you understand King really thought about Malcolm X. They actually only met in person once — right? — in Washington, D.C., although Malcolm X did go to Selma. And talk about what he said to Martin Luther King’s wife, Coretta Scott King.

Democracy Now for more