A massive march took the streets Saturday in the city of Buenos Aires for the Federal Anti-Fascist and Anti-Racist LGBTQIA+ Pride March. The protest is part of a rising tide that began in Buenos Aires and echoed throughout Argentina and beyond.
The action downtown Buenos Aires got going around 4 o’clock. It was over 30 degrees outside, but the atmosphere was energetic, protest organizers said millions attended throughout the country. Entire families pulled out their hand-painted signs and hugged each other on street corners. People came together without fear: artists wheatpasting posters, others arriving covered in glitter, or wearing green handkerchiefs, spreading a sense of collective performativity through the heart of the city.
There have been two key protests that have mobilized across social sectors since Javier Milei took office a year and two months ago.* The first was the March in Defense of Public University, which took place in October, and the second was on Saturday.
Organizing against Milei’s hate
The massive march last weekend was diverse and intersectional. It was led by members of a collective of travesti-trans and non-binary people, mothers and grandmothers of the disappeared, Black-anti-racist activists, racialized and Indigenous peoples, migrants, differently abled folks, elders and children. Behind them came the Antifascist Assembly, followed by trade union organizations, with members of political parties bringing up the rear.
The spark of resistance turned into fire after a speech given by Javier Milei at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, on January 23. Milei linked homosexuality with child abuse, argued that feminism distorts equality, and called “wokeism” an epidemic that must be excised like a cancer. His comments had the effect of fanning the fire.
For good people these are times to weep, rage and, above all, to
fight back! But sometimes we may allow ourselves a laugh. Such a time
arrived this past weekend in Brussels and at the Security Conference in
Munich. Though the big shots present were in no laughing mood—but in
shock!
The reason for an all too rare happy moment for some like me was
strangely due to the words of two men I have absolutely no love for, JD
Vance and his colleague, for whom probably nobody has any love, Defense
Secretary Pete Hegseth. Nor do I have a grain of affection for their
fearsome boss back home—or should I say two bosses?
How could one stop grinding teeth—and laugh? Despite many
complexities, one thing has been clear in recent years; the main ruling
powers in Europe, most menacingly its strongest, Germany, have shown a
greed, indeed a craving, for military adventurism, for spending ever
more euro-billions on armaments, frightful air power, naval maneuvers in
all surrounding waters, Baltic outposts. All are based on eastward
expansion, with one declared enemy, whose ruler is denounced, derided,
and demonized daily in most of the media. Hardly a page or newscast
fails to warn that Russia, if it wins out in the Ukraine, is an awful
threat not only to Poland, the Baltic countries, all its neighbors but
even to “our Germany” which, though without a common border, seems to
somehow want to feel equally threatened. The result: calls for a new
military draft, even for women, for air-raid shelters, school air-raid
drills and for strengthened bridges and highways if leading eastwards.
Almost audible is the hand-rubbing and heel-clicking among the generals,
nationalists, and imperialists generally. Hardly less audible; the
clinking of champagne glasses at offices of armament firms like
Rheinmetall, which are already raking in armament billions like never
before, all paid for with money stolen from the living standards of most
German and European civilians. And they want more!
This “readiness for war” demanded by Germany’s bloodthirsty Defense
Minister Boris Pistorius and backed by the equally belligerent Foreign
Minister Annalena Baerbock (whose declared aim is to “ruin Russia”) was
carried out under the aegis of the USA, the great protector of
“rule-based international order”, democracy and anti-authoritarianism
(also called anti-totalitarianism). Therefore: weapons for Zelenskyy,
bigger, stronger, further-reaching missiles, the Ukrainians must be
aided until all territories are regained (or all Ukrainians dead). And
Washington demanded 2% more of the budget, then 3.5%, maybe 5%.
Then suddenly an unloved vice-president and even more repugnant
Secretary of Defense came to Europe with the news that Trump had
telephoned with Putin and the two wanted to negotiate on peace in the
Ukraine. The greatest danger to Europe, they were told, was not Russia,
not China, but the “danger from within.”
The shock was visible in their faces. What? Peace? Has the USA gone
completely off its rocker? How can we justify our build-up? Our
strategies? Our maneuvers? To make matters worse, Vance not only
threatened with peace, but criticized the European countries for
repressing oppositional ideas. True, the object of his concern and
support was the far-rightist Alternative for Germany (AfD), with whom
Musk has become so chummy. For its own reasons, the AfD also supports a
swift end to the Ukraine war. Though Musk chose a nasty object for his
affection (and open intervention in a foreign election campaign), it is
true that many German leaders do want to get the AfD verboten—not
because of its antagonism toward all “foreigners,” which they
increasingly echo, but because it is polling in second place, at over
20%. There is indeed increasing repression of dissent in Germany and
Europe. It is directed against any criticism of Netanyahu’s Israel and
its fearful annihilation in Gaza, killing up to a hundred thousand
Palestinians. No, Vance wasn’t against that! But thus far mention of any
form of repression in “our freedom-loving Germany” has been mostly
leftist, hence taboo. But now suddenly from our Big Brother! Unheard of!
That is why those who want peace above all, from whatever quarter,
could laugh at those stony faces and enjoy their consternation when
their bellicosity and hypocrisy were so suddenly exposed, like never
before. Our joy fits the word “Schadenfreude”!
Of course, they hastened to shape up a counter-attack! In Paris the
worried leaders of Europe sought ways to put a spoke in the peace wheel.
“No negotiations without us!” they cried. “We must also be involved! Oh
yes, with Zelenskyy too of course!”, they recalled.
The BBC’s withdrawal of the powerful documentary, ‘Gaza: How to Survive a Warzone’, epitomises how much the UK’s national broadcaster is beholden to the Israel lobby.
The documentary focused on the experiences of several children trying
to survive in Gaza under brutal attack by Israeli forces armed to the
hilt with weaponry and intelligence from the US, the UK and other
western nations. It transpired that the film’s narrator, 13-year-old
Abdullah al-Yazuri, is the son of Ayman al-Yazuri, a deputy minister of
agriculture in Gaza’s government which is administered by Hamas.
Mr al-Yazuri previously worked for the United Arab Emirates’
education ministry and studied at British universities, obtaining a PhD
in chemistry from the University of Huddersfield. Middle East Eye (MEE),
an independently-funded online news organisation covering stories from
the Middle East and North Africa, described
him as ‘a technocrat with a scientific rather than political
background’, pointing out that ministers, bureaucrats and civil servants
in Gaza are appointed by Hamas.
‘Many Palestinians in Gaza have family or other connections to Hamas,
which runs the government. This means that anyone working in an
official capacity must also work with Hamas.’
A campaign was launched by pro-Israel voices, including Tzipi
Hotovely, Israel’s ambassador to the UK, and Danny Cohen, a former
director of BBC television, to pressure the BBC to drop the documentary
from iPlayer, soon after it was broadcast on BBC Two on 17 February.
Despite a countercampaign
by over 1,000 media and film professionals objecting to the ‘racist’
and ‘dehumanising’ targeting of the documentary by supporters of Israel,
the BBC quickly caved in, apologising
for ‘mistakes’ that they deemed ‘significant and damaging’. Notably,
however, the BBC did not point to any errors or inaccuracies in the
actual editorial content of the programme.
A woman holds a sign while stepping on an image of US President Donald Trump and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, in Tehran on 8 June 2018 IMAGE/AFP
The powerful words of Shaul Magid, Peter Beinart, Ta-Nehisi Coates and Pankaj Mishra are at the forefront of the global battle against colonial deceit
The publication in recent months of four books on the Israel–Palestine
conflict has given the world a solid moral platform to begin holding
genocidal Zionism accountable for the mass killing and annihilation that
has unfolded in Gaza.
These books could prove even more important than the judgements of international courts.
While they are preceded by countless publications on the subject by
Palestinian thinkers in multiple languages and on multiple platforms,
these four books have two particular features in common: none were
written by a Palestinian, Arab or Muslim, and all were published in the
shadow of the Gaza genocide.
To be sure, Palestinians themselves remain the principal spokespeople
for their cause, providing the most eloquent case against the historic
savageries they have endured for generations.
This image depicts Ali, a Jesus-like figure in Alawite theology.
It’s part of a twenty year trend in persecutions in the Middle East
Violent attacks in Syria against a pair of religious minorities
highlight the persistence of sectarian persecution in the Middle East
during the past two decades.
In the Mediterranean coastal city of
Latakia earlier this month, marauding Sunni Muslim militias killed more
than a thousand Alawites, a population that belongs to a religious sect
related to Islam. A small number of Christians, whose presence in the
country dates back two millennia, were also attacked and at least four
were killed.
Guilt by association is attributed to Alawites and Christian due to
their relations with the regime of Bashar al-Assad, who was ousted from
power in December after a long civil war. He had declared himself a
protector of both sects.
Such protection carries a cost, possibly
tarring minority citizens as favored by the ruler. In times of peace,
minorities are expected to at least show obedience, and even express
admiration, in return for protection from potential harm from
majorities. When the dictator is overthrown, wrath falls on the minority
populations considered lackeys of an evil regime.
Attacks from
within the mainstream Sunni Islam sect have also been fueled by the
emergence among radical Sunni groups of the view that minorities such as
Alawites and Christians are not only heretics but pariahs who must be
cast away. Similar attacks on minority religious and ethnic minority
groups have taken place in Egypt and Iraq.
More than a third of Americans cook with gas stoves, which can emit formaldehyde, carbon monoxide, and nitric oxides. IMAGE/ Chad Springer via Getty Images
A new study is heating up the debate over gas-powered stovetops
If you live in one of the 40 million American households with a gas stove, it could be leaking even when it’s turned off.
According to a new study from Stanford scientists, many stoves are
constantly emitting gasses that can warm the planet and pose serious
health risks when inhaled. The research, which appeared in the journal Environmental Science & Technology,
found methane emissions from gas stoves across the United States are
roughly equivalent to the carbon dioxide released by half a million
gas-powered cars in a year.
“The
mere existence of the stoves is really what’s driving those methane
emissions,” says study author Eric Lebel, a research scientist with PSE
Healthy Energy, to Danielle Renwick for Nexus Media News.
“We found that over three-quarters of the methane emissions from stoves
are emitted while the stove is off. So these little tiny leaks from the
stoves, they really do add up.”
While leaky natural gas pipelines
have been studied extensively, scientists know less about the climate
and health impacts of gas-burning stoves. More than a third of Americans
cook with gas, and some get additional exposure from space and water
heaters. All of these natural gas-burning appliances can emit gasses
that can trigger asthma, coughing, and potentially increase
susceptibility to respiratory infections.
To guage the impact of these emissions, researchers measured three
key gasses from stoves in 53 homes across seven California counties.
The team chose two gasses—methane and carbon dioxide—because of their
contribution to climate change, and selected nitrogen oxides because of
their known risk to human health. The scientists set up plastic
partitions between the kitchens and other rooms and used instruments
that measure wavelengths of light to determine the concentration of
certain gases.
To their surprise, they found that more than three-quarters of the
methane emissions happened when both old and new gas stoves were turned
off.
The
most significant health risks happen when the stove is lit, the authors
note, because the process creates nitrogen dioxide as a byproduct.
Increasing airflow by using a range hood can help reduce the personal
health risk of natural gas-burning appliances, but most individuals
report rarely using their ventilation system.
In a small kitchen, it only took a few minutes of unventilated stove
use to generate emissions levels above national health standards.
According to a meta-analysis from 2013,
children living in homes with gas stoves were 42 percent more likely to
experience symptoms associated with asthma, and 24 percent more likely
to be diagnosed with lifetime asthma.
Palestinian solidarity mural in Belfast, Ireland. IMAGE/PPCC Antifa/Flickr
Joseph Daher discusses regional and multipolar imperialism, the limits of Iranian resistance, and the international path toward Palestinian liberation.
The ceasefire agreement between Hamas and Israel, which had conducted
a genocidal war on Palestinians in Gaza for over a year, poses
strategic questions for the Palestinian liberation struggle and those in
solidarity with it. Up till now, the dominant strategy has been to
cultivate an alliance with Iran’s so-called “Axis of Resistance” to back
military assaults on Israel, but that network has suffered devastating
setbacks from the combined might of Israel and the U.S.
Israel’s repeated assassination of Iranian leaders and direct attacks
on Iran itself have exposed the weaknesses and challenges Iran faces in
the region. Tel Aviv’s brutal war on Lebanon significantly damaged
Hezbollah, the jewel in the crown of Iran’s Axis, and collectively
punished the Lebanese people, particularly Hezbollah’s base in the
country’s Shia population. The fall of Iran’s other close regional ally,
Bashar al-Assad, has further undermined the Axis. Only the Houthis in
Yemen have survived the onslaught relatively intact.
Of course, Israel did not accomplish its main goals in Gaza of
destroying Hamas and ethnically cleansing the population, and it has
been discredited and delegitimized globally as a genocidal,
settler-colonial, apartheid state. Nevertheless, the strategy of
military resistance to Israel based on support from the Axis has shown
its limitations if not its inability to win liberation. So, what have we
learned about the Axis? What is its future? What do the region’s masses
think of the Axis? What is the alternative to the military strategy
against Israel? How should the international Left position itself in
these strategic debates?
Origins and development of Iran’s so-called “Axis of Resistance”
In the 2000s, the Iranian regime expanded its influence in the Middle
East, primarily through The Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC)).
It took advantage of the defeat suffered by the U.S. and its allies in
their so-called War on Terror in the Middle East and Central Asia.
George Bush’s ambition for regional regime change was blocked by
resistance to the U.S. occupation of Iraq and Afghanistan. Iran secured
allies with Iraq’s various Shia Islamic fundamentalist parties and
militias and their representatives in state institutions, becoming the
most influential regional power in the country.
VIDEO/BBC/Youtube“A cladogram with eight primate species. The different colored lines highlight nested groups – clades – of species. Clades include an ancestor species (which lived at the point where a line splits into two) and all its descendants. Hominidae is nested inside Hominoidea, which is in turn nested inside Anthropoidea. Biologists arrive at these groups by comparing species with respect to many of their characteristics, including at the DNA and protein level. Note that a human is as much of a simian as a macaque is, and an orangutan is as much of a hominid as a human is, but that a macaque is not a hominid.” Ape evolution/family tree by Fabio Mendes IMAGE/TEXT/Indiana University
the long-tailed macaques hang around Uluwatu Temple in Bali, Indonesia
these monkey-apes <1> do snatch things from human-apes <2> in no time
they seize smart phones, eye/sun glasses, slippers, caps, jewelry, etc
mind you, these things they don’t steal out of greed like human-apes do
but it’s a means to an end — the real goal is food
the job is done for a bartering purpose
science journalist Signe Dean is a bit harsh on these monkeys
how wild monkeys embraced the thug <3> life to sell stolen human valuables for food
“Animals are infected with diseases that they would never normally contract, tiny mice grow tumors as large as their own bodies, kittens are purposely blinded, rats are made to suffer seizures, and primates’ skulls are cut open and electrodes are implanted in them. Experimenters force-feed chemicals to animals, conduct repeated surgeries on them, implant wires in their brains, crush their spines, and much more.”
so how the hell am I going to resist if they enslave me to work
it’s real hot, let me enjoy a mango drink as a barter for the smart phone
till the time I am free
future is uncertain
the world is changing very fast
the leaders are petty, hateful, ethnocentric/religiocentric
those power-loving human-apes don’t give a shit about us animals
but then they don’t give a damn about most of the human-apes either
NOTES
<1> Fabio Mendes to those who ask sarcastically as to how come apes are still around if we evolved from apes.
“We did not evolve from a modern, living ape, like a chimpanzee. We evolved and descended from the common ancestor of apes, which lived and died in the distant past. This means that we are related to other apes and that we are apes ourselves. And alongside us, the other living ape species have also evolved from that same common ancestor, and exist today in the wild and zoos.”
<2> Science communicator Cara Santa Maria points out the closeness between Bonobos, chimpanzees, and humans.
“Of the five living great apes (humans, gorillas, orangutans, chimpanzees, and bonobos), we share the highest DNA complement with chimps and bonobos (we only differ by ). To put that in perspective, we are closer to these ape relatives than they are to gorillas, closer than a dog is to a fox, or even an African elephant is to an Indian elephant. In fact, we (Homo) are thought to have diverged from Pan genus only 4-5 million years ago, an eyeblink in the grand evolutionary scheme of things.”
“Why should our nastiness be the baggage of an apish past and our kindness uniquely human? Why should we not seek continuity with other animals for our ‘noble’ traits as well?”
B. R. Gowani can be reached at brgowani@hotmail.com
Essayist and novelist Pankaj Mishra discusses the lesser-known genocidal escapades of Western governments and his latest book, The World After Gaza.
?The Holocaust is
the quintessential example of human evil for people in the West. In the
rest of the world, especially in the Global South, the atrocity of the
Holocaust — genocide — has had a closer proximity both in time and
place. Colonialism in Africa, destructive wars in Asia and most
recently, genocide in the Middle East, have shaped the lives of
billions of people.
On this episode of The Chris Hedges Report, essayist and novelist Pankaj Mishra joins host Chris Hedges to discuss his latest book, The World After Gaza.
Mishra
argues that the shifting power dynamics in the world means the Global
South’s narrative on atrocity can no longer be ignored and the genocide
in Gaza is the current crux of the issue.
“Large
parts of the world have a cultural memory, historical memory of the
atrocities that were inflicted on those parts of the world by Western
powers. And that has actually gone to the making of their collective
identity. And that is how they see themselves in the world,” Mishra
tells Hedges.
Mishra
explains that in the case of Israel, Zionist leaders weaponize this
narrative by tying the safety and existence of the state of Israel to
the defense against the evils of the Holocaust. In other words, the
Zionist state exploits the suffering of millions for the benefit of the
powerful.
“The
words of politicians like Netanyahu, the rhetoric of people like Joe
Biden insisting that no Jewish person in the world is safe if Israel is
not safe, consistently connecting the fate of millions of Jews living
outside of Israel to the fate of the state of Israel, I cannot think of
anything more antisemitic. And yet these people keep doing it,
endangering Jewish populations elsewhere,” Mishra says.
Host: Chris Hedges
Producer: Max Jones
Intro: Diego Ramos
Crew: Diego Ramos, Sofia Menemenlis and Thomas Hedges
Transcript: Diego Ramos
Transcript
Chris Hedges Pankaj Mishra in his latest book, The World After Gaza, argues that the postwar global order was shaped in response to the Nazi Holocaust. In the West the Shoah was the benchmark for atrocity, the paradigmatic genocide. Its memory serves to justify Israel’s settler colonial, apartheid state, as well as sanctify Jewish victimhood. But there were, he notes, other Holocausts, the German slaughter of the Herero and Namaqua, the Armenian genocide, the Bengal famine of 1943 — then British Prime Minister Winston Churchill airily dismissed the deaths of three million Hindus in the famine by calling them “a beastly people with a beastly religion” — along with the dropping of nuclear bombs on the civilian targets of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
Genocide
and mass extermination are not the exclusive domain of fascist Germany.
The millions of victims of racist imperial projects in countries such
as Mexico, China, India, the Congo, Kenya and Vietnam are deaf to the
fatuous claims by Jews that their victimhood is unique. So are Black,
Brown and Native Americans.
They
also suffered holocausts, but these holocausts remain minimized or
unacknowledged by their western perpetrators. Adolf Hitler, as Aimé
Césaire writes in Discourse on Colonialism, appeared
exceptionally cruel only because he presided over “the humiliation of
the white man.” But the Nazis, he writes, had simply applied
“colonialist procedures which until then had been reserved exclusively
for the Arabs of Algeria, the coolies of India, and the blacks of
Africa.”
Outside
of the West, Mishra argues, there is a very different paradigm. The
dominant story for much of the globe is that of decolonization and the
crimes of the colonizers. This divergence of experience and viewpoint
explain, Mishra writes, why there has been such disparate reactions to
the genocide in Gaza, why to those in the Global South there was an
instant understanding of the plight of the Palestinians, why they see
the clear color lines between the Israeli occupiers and the
Palestinians, why they grasp how, in the West, the world is starkly
divided into worthy and unworthy victims.
Joining me to discuss The World After Gaza is Pankaj Mishra, author of Age of Anger: A History of the Present and other works of fiction and nonfiction. He writes regularly for The New Yorker, The New York Review of Books, The Guardian and the London Review of Books, among other publications.
You
open the book by talking very early on about what watching this
live-streamed genocide has done. You call it a psychic ordeal, which it
is, of course, especially for those of us such as myself who worked in
Gaza, an involuntary witness to an act of political evil. But it sends
as you write a message, a clear unequivocal message, to the rest of the
world. What is it?
Pankaj Mishra: I
think it’s a message that we are perhaps moving into an era where
international law, basic morality, ordinary decency are not going to be
found much, especially not in the conduct of our politicians and
journalists. And that is, I think, you know, something much, much more
disturbing than what many people knew back in the 1930s, because back
then there were a lot of countries actively pushing back, resisting the
onslaught of fascism. And precisely those very same countries today are,
you could say, at the forefront of authoritarianism. Something worse
than authoritarianism, actually.
Chris Hedges: Why is it worse?
Pankaj Mishra: Well,
I think, you know, this is in the past we’ve had authoritarianism such
as that we’ve seen in China and elsewhere that has not made claims on
other people’s territory, especially territories thousands of miles
away. Yes, in the last couple of weeks, we have seen some extraordinary
series of statements and claims by the new U.S. president, which can
only portend an era of more bloodshed, more chaos. I mean there’s no
getting around this fact that is staring us in the face right now.
:focal(2085x2469:2086x2470)/https://tf-cmsv2-smithsonianmag-media.s3.amazonaws.com/filer_public/e0/80/e080ffcb-2ded-47b3-be63-3357059fc4a0/gettyimages-543202851.jpg)
