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tisdag 27 januari 2015
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«We are Charlie» - A study in mass hypocrisy
Tortilla con Sal, January 11th 2015
The recent terrorist attack in Paris has cost the lives of a dozen victims as well as those of their terrorist assassins. The attacks deserve categorical condemnation. But they also deserve a less naïve view of Europe's reality, something, from a Latin American perspective, difficult to work out.
The Paris attack and other incidents in France over recent days are part of a cynical and hypocritical pattern long recognizable in Western history. That same pattern of sadistic racism prompted Frantz Fanon to write “Let us have done with this Europe that never stops talking about humanity and, even so ,murders people on every street corner, in every corner of the world....”
The foreseeable result of the terrorist attacks in France has been to tip Europe's political spectrum ever further to the right, facilitating the repressive agenda of the corporate elites who in effect own the respective governments of NATO's North American and European member countries. Domestically, they deliberately promote inequality so as to protect elite control of the West's corrupt, powerful financial system. Overseas, they engage in crude destabilizing interventions in other countries' internal affairs, or else carry out direct brutal armed aggression.
Since before the attacks in the United States on September 11th 2001, manipulating fears around terrorism has been a key tool used to intimidate people in Europe and North America into accepting elite-driven policies against their own interests.Now, the political forces that make up the French Left have joined in the chorus “We are all Charlie” with the far right National Front and the misnamed social democracy of President François Hollande, in solidarity with the murdered cartoonists and writers of the Charlie Hedbo publication, which purports to be a free-wheeling satirical magazine while really fulfilling a systematically provocative propaganda agenda.
While Marine Le Pen, president of the extreme right wing National Front political party demands restoration of the death penalty to punish people responsible for terrorist attacks like that on Charlie Hedbo, the misnamed socialist and Left parties argue against demonizing muslims too much, implying the same, by extension with regard generally to non-white people living in France. If one thing now really unites all the people who regard themselves as the real French with their counterparts in other European countries and in North America it is their shared conception of Western superiority, especially in relation to freedom of expression.
As is all too well documented, the argument of Europe's moral superiority has facilitated innumerable episodes of genocide throughout history, from the time of the Crusades, to the era of colonial conquests and on to the wars of independence of the 20th Century. In May 1945, the French colonial authorities massacred tens of thousands of Algerian civilians in response to an uprising in Sétif against the French colonial occupation. Similarly, between 1947 and 1948 in Madagascar, the French colonial authorities massacred tens of thousands of Malagasy civilians. But in 1945, hardly anyone in Europe even noticed, let alone declared themselves Sétif, nor, later, was anyone in the West interested in the genocide in Madagascar.
In Paris itself in 1961, the French authorities massacred as many as 200 Algerians at or near the Charonne metro station during a demonstration against the Algerian war. Not until 1998 were a few of those responsible brought to justice. One of the instigators of the events leading up to that massacre was Jean Marie Le Pen, father of Marine Le Pen.Only over the last ten years or so has it been possible to speak openly in France about the Algerian War because, until then, the French authorities persistently refused to recognize the conflict as a war, despite having deployed over 400,000 military personnel there at the height of the conflict. Now many people in Europe want us all to be Charlie Hebdo as if political violence in Europe or North America was a little known aberration rather than a regular and frequent phenomenon of European and North American political life over the last fifty years.
In modern times, perhaps Ireland is the country that has been most notorious for prolonged political violence. How many Europeans were Derry in 1972 when British paratroops murdered 14 civilians and wounded 17? And who was Ballymurphy in 1971 when the British army murdered 11 civilians and wounded a number still unknown? Or in October 1973, who was Greysteel, when terrorists murdered 8 people there? Or Omagh in 1998 when terrorists exploded a bomb murdering 29 people and wounding over 200?
Shocking political violence is nothing new in contemporary European and North American history. Globally, for centuries, the West has waged permanent war on people around the world who have resisted European and North American depredations. Western governments have systematically used genocide and political violence to, first, achieve and, then, defend their global economic domination and political power. What has changed since the end of the Second World War is the ever greater cynicism, sadism and hypocrisy with which Western powers have abused international law and institutions like the UN to get what they want.
That cynicism and political opportunism is evident in various developments across Europe, where a series of racist and xenophobic political parties have gained significant support in recent years even, in the case of France's National Front, to being on the verge of entering government. In other countries, they have managed to hold the balance of political power in divided parliaments condemned, as in Sweden, to form minority or coalition governments. The same has happened in Denmark with the extreme right-wing Danske Folkparti, which enjoys about 15% electoral support nationally.
In 2006, it was in Denmark that the right wing daily newspaper Jyllands Posten published a series of cartoons depicting the Prophet Mohammed in a way that not only denigrated Islam but all the people of the Middle East, casting them as backward, with a proclivity for terrorism. Those same cartoons, after already having offended millions of muslims around the world, were subsequently re-published by Charlie Hebdo the French magazine whose staff were murdered during the recent terrorist attack in Paris. At the time the cartoons appeared, back in 2006, the European mood towards muslims was very sinister, with firebombing of mosques, and the general sense that muslims were fair game for abuse and attacks.
In 2011, in Norway, the terrorist Anders Behring Breivik killed 77 people and wounded over 100 in an attack on a social democrat youth camp on the island of Utøya. Breivik's objective, he said, was to kill his country's whole government for its alleged permissiveness towards muslims. In Sweden, the artist Lars Vilks crafted dogs out of wood to which he added the face of the Prophet Mahommed before placing them at prominent traffic roundabouts. A series of anti-muslim cartoons by Vilks provoked very strong reactions both within Sweden and abroad. In the Swedish city of Malmö in 2010 an aryan terrorist deliberately shot at immigrants chosen at random, killing and wounding various of his targets.
According to the 2008 Survey of Minorities and Discrimination (EU-MIDIS) more than a quarter of immigrants and members of ethnic minorities in Sweden, when consulted, reported having been victims of crimes against the person for “racist motives” in the previous twelve months. They were referring to crimes of physical violence, threats and menaces or serious abuse. Leading the list were gypsies, Africans from both North and South of the Sahara, Turkish people, people from Eastern Europe and Arabs . The figure does not isolate the total number of muslims affected, but, from the list of nationalities, one can deduce that the great majority of the victims were indeed muslim.
In Spain, Germany, Italy and the United Kingdom, attacks agaianst immigrants from outside Europe and especially islamophobic attacks have been a constant characteristic in official statistics (for example, "Extractos de los informes del Observatorio Europeo del Racismo y Xenofobia (EUMC )”). Certainly, no demonstrations have ever been seen of the same size protesting the constant murders of Africans and Arabs as those seen in France over the massacre of the staff of Charlie Hebdo in Paris. The official explanation of this difference in the reactions by Europeans to racist murders and the attack on the French journalists is that the murder of the Charlie Hebdo staff was an attack on freedom of expression.
In fact, freedom of expression in Europe is as much a complex and carefully fabricated cultural myth as it is a fierce battleground of political and social power and privilege. Western apologists brandish “freedom of expression” as if it were in some way a knockdown argument justifying the superiority of their societies. Outside North America and Europe, the majority world sees it as a theoretical privilege, which, if it exists at all, does so paid for by centuries of Western colonial exploitation and genocide against the peoples of Oceania, Africa, Asia and Latin America
In principle, in Europe and North America, the freedom exists to say what you like but only on the basis of a total, systematic marginalization and demonization of legitimate anti-imperialist criticism of the West and its different societies. This fact has become ever more clear, especially after the 2006 defeat of Israel by Hezbollah in Lebanon, in the case of criticisms of Western support for the slow-motion genocide by Israel's zionist governments of the people of Palestine. In practice, freedom of expression in the West translates in practice into freedom with impunity for every type of slander and abuse directed against minorities, especially minorities from outside Europe and, above all now, against muslims or, more particularly, Arabs.
The recent attack against Charlie Hebdo, and, likewise, the murder of two police officers and the kidnapping of customers of a Jewish-owned business are indeed unpardonable . But they have nothing to do with freedom of expression nor, it is worth insisting, with Islam. It is one more deliberately obscure, much manipulated incident in the so called “Clash of Civilizations” invented by imperialist strategists in a forlorn attempt to put a brake on the now steadily accelerating decline of the Western system of global domination. That strategy's execution long ago revealed, in the clearest way possible, that Western corporate and alternative media are enthusiastic collaborators in the psychological warfare campaigns orchestrated by their countries' governments .
Those Western psychological warfare campaigns attack targets that change from one moment to the next as required – lately Laurent Gbagbo in Ivory Coast, Muammar al Gaddafi in Libya, Hugo Chávez in Venezuela, Bashar al Assad in Syria and Vladimir Putin in Russia. In the case of Islam and muslims generally, it is very convenient to interpret the recent events in France as a manifestation of an alleged inherent psychotic rage of muslims against the barbaric colonial oppression of the West. That treatment depicts the problem decisively as a deep rooted problem mass psychological problem of Arabs and muslims.
But the truth so desperately covered up by the "We are Charlie Hebdo" campaign is that the real problem, impossible to conceal by now, is quite the reverse. The real problem is the historic pyschological problem of mass hypocrisy in Western societies. It was the US government and its European allies that funded Osama Bin Laden and Al Qaeda, in exactly the same way that decades ago they supported the Muslim Brotherhood against Gamel Abdel Nasser in Egypt and the very same way, right up to the present day, they have validated, sustained and manipulated terrorist forces against the peoples of Libya, Syria, Iraq and Iran.
Those people who now identify themselves with Charlie Hebdo refuse to acknowledge the sinister terrorist shadow that is the inseparable doppelganger of their own governments' insane foreign policies. By identifying themselves as "We are Charlie", people in Europe effectively ratify the support of their governments for innumerable terrorist atrocities committed across Lebanon, Egypt, Siria, Iraq and Iran. But these atrocities have been committed by the same terrorist groups that attacked the US in 2001.
Subsequently, associated terrorist groups bombed London and Madrid, murdering and maiming hundreds of civilians. Now they have attacked civilian targets in Paris. But despite all the readily available documentation of Western government complicity in international terrorism, long standing Western political and media manipulation of the terror motif has created a psychotic context in which the atrocity in Paris will be used by Europe's ruling elites to justify their anti-democratic, anti-humanitarian agenda of relentless economic and political repression at home and of barbaric military aggression overseas.
The "We are Charlie" campaign is an integral part of that psychotic context.
The recent terrorist attack in Paris has cost the lives of a dozen victims as well as those of their terrorist assassins. The attacks deserve categorical condemnation. But they also deserve a less naïve view of Europe's reality, something, from a Latin American perspective, difficult to work out.
The Paris attack and other incidents in France over recent days are part of a cynical and hypocritical pattern long recognizable in Western history. That same pattern of sadistic racism prompted Frantz Fanon to write “Let us have done with this Europe that never stops talking about humanity and, even so ,murders people on every street corner, in every corner of the world....”
The foreseeable result of the terrorist attacks in France has been to tip Europe's political spectrum ever further to the right, facilitating the repressive agenda of the corporate elites who in effect own the respective governments of NATO's North American and European member countries. Domestically, they deliberately promote inequality so as to protect elite control of the West's corrupt, powerful financial system. Overseas, they engage in crude destabilizing interventions in other countries' internal affairs, or else carry out direct brutal armed aggression.
Since before the attacks in the United States on September 11th 2001, manipulating fears around terrorism has been a key tool used to intimidate people in Europe and North America into accepting elite-driven policies against their own interests.Now, the political forces that make up the French Left have joined in the chorus “We are all Charlie” with the far right National Front and the misnamed social democracy of President François Hollande, in solidarity with the murdered cartoonists and writers of the Charlie Hedbo publication, which purports to be a free-wheeling satirical magazine while really fulfilling a systematically provocative propaganda agenda.
While Marine Le Pen, president of the extreme right wing National Front political party demands restoration of the death penalty to punish people responsible for terrorist attacks like that on Charlie Hedbo, the misnamed socialist and Left parties argue against demonizing muslims too much, implying the same, by extension with regard generally to non-white people living in France. If one thing now really unites all the people who regard themselves as the real French with their counterparts in other European countries and in North America it is their shared conception of Western superiority, especially in relation to freedom of expression.
As is all too well documented, the argument of Europe's moral superiority has facilitated innumerable episodes of genocide throughout history, from the time of the Crusades, to the era of colonial conquests and on to the wars of independence of the 20th Century. In May 1945, the French colonial authorities massacred tens of thousands of Algerian civilians in response to an uprising in Sétif against the French colonial occupation. Similarly, between 1947 and 1948 in Madagascar, the French colonial authorities massacred tens of thousands of Malagasy civilians. But in 1945, hardly anyone in Europe even noticed, let alone declared themselves Sétif, nor, later, was anyone in the West interested in the genocide in Madagascar.
In Paris itself in 1961, the French authorities massacred as many as 200 Algerians at or near the Charonne metro station during a demonstration against the Algerian war. Not until 1998 were a few of those responsible brought to justice. One of the instigators of the events leading up to that massacre was Jean Marie Le Pen, father of Marine Le Pen.Only over the last ten years or so has it been possible to speak openly in France about the Algerian War because, until then, the French authorities persistently refused to recognize the conflict as a war, despite having deployed over 400,000 military personnel there at the height of the conflict. Now many people in Europe want us all to be Charlie Hebdo as if political violence in Europe or North America was a little known aberration rather than a regular and frequent phenomenon of European and North American political life over the last fifty years.
In modern times, perhaps Ireland is the country that has been most notorious for prolonged political violence. How many Europeans were Derry in 1972 when British paratroops murdered 14 civilians and wounded 17? And who was Ballymurphy in 1971 when the British army murdered 11 civilians and wounded a number still unknown? Or in October 1973, who was Greysteel, when terrorists murdered 8 people there? Or Omagh in 1998 when terrorists exploded a bomb murdering 29 people and wounding over 200?
Shocking political violence is nothing new in contemporary European and North American history. Globally, for centuries, the West has waged permanent war on people around the world who have resisted European and North American depredations. Western governments have systematically used genocide and political violence to, first, achieve and, then, defend their global economic domination and political power. What has changed since the end of the Second World War is the ever greater cynicism, sadism and hypocrisy with which Western powers have abused international law and institutions like the UN to get what they want.
That cynicism and political opportunism is evident in various developments across Europe, where a series of racist and xenophobic political parties have gained significant support in recent years even, in the case of France's National Front, to being on the verge of entering government. In other countries, they have managed to hold the balance of political power in divided parliaments condemned, as in Sweden, to form minority or coalition governments. The same has happened in Denmark with the extreme right-wing Danske Folkparti, which enjoys about 15% electoral support nationally.
In 2006, it was in Denmark that the right wing daily newspaper Jyllands Posten published a series of cartoons depicting the Prophet Mohammed in a way that not only denigrated Islam but all the people of the Middle East, casting them as backward, with a proclivity for terrorism. Those same cartoons, after already having offended millions of muslims around the world, were subsequently re-published by Charlie Hebdo the French magazine whose staff were murdered during the recent terrorist attack in Paris. At the time the cartoons appeared, back in 2006, the European mood towards muslims was very sinister, with firebombing of mosques, and the general sense that muslims were fair game for abuse and attacks.
In 2011, in Norway, the terrorist Anders Behring Breivik killed 77 people and wounded over 100 in an attack on a social democrat youth camp on the island of Utøya. Breivik's objective, he said, was to kill his country's whole government for its alleged permissiveness towards muslims. In Sweden, the artist Lars Vilks crafted dogs out of wood to which he added the face of the Prophet Mahommed before placing them at prominent traffic roundabouts. A series of anti-muslim cartoons by Vilks provoked very strong reactions both within Sweden and abroad. In the Swedish city of Malmö in 2010 an aryan terrorist deliberately shot at immigrants chosen at random, killing and wounding various of his targets.
According to the 2008 Survey of Minorities and Discrimination (EU-MIDIS) more than a quarter of immigrants and members of ethnic minorities in Sweden, when consulted, reported having been victims of crimes against the person for “racist motives” in the previous twelve months. They were referring to crimes of physical violence, threats and menaces or serious abuse. Leading the list were gypsies, Africans from both North and South of the Sahara, Turkish people, people from Eastern Europe and Arabs . The figure does not isolate the total number of muslims affected, but, from the list of nationalities, one can deduce that the great majority of the victims were indeed muslim.
In Spain, Germany, Italy and the United Kingdom, attacks agaianst immigrants from outside Europe and especially islamophobic attacks have been a constant characteristic in official statistics (for example, "Extractos de los informes del Observatorio Europeo del Racismo y Xenofobia (EUMC )”). Certainly, no demonstrations have ever been seen of the same size protesting the constant murders of Africans and Arabs as those seen in France over the massacre of the staff of Charlie Hebdo in Paris. The official explanation of this difference in the reactions by Europeans to racist murders and the attack on the French journalists is that the murder of the Charlie Hebdo staff was an attack on freedom of expression.
In fact, freedom of expression in Europe is as much a complex and carefully fabricated cultural myth as it is a fierce battleground of political and social power and privilege. Western apologists brandish “freedom of expression” as if it were in some way a knockdown argument justifying the superiority of their societies. Outside North America and Europe, the majority world sees it as a theoretical privilege, which, if it exists at all, does so paid for by centuries of Western colonial exploitation and genocide against the peoples of Oceania, Africa, Asia and Latin America
In principle, in Europe and North America, the freedom exists to say what you like but only on the basis of a total, systematic marginalization and demonization of legitimate anti-imperialist criticism of the West and its different societies. This fact has become ever more clear, especially after the 2006 defeat of Israel by Hezbollah in Lebanon, in the case of criticisms of Western support for the slow-motion genocide by Israel's zionist governments of the people of Palestine. In practice, freedom of expression in the West translates in practice into freedom with impunity for every type of slander and abuse directed against minorities, especially minorities from outside Europe and, above all now, against muslims or, more particularly, Arabs.
The recent attack against Charlie Hebdo, and, likewise, the murder of two police officers and the kidnapping of customers of a Jewish-owned business are indeed unpardonable . But they have nothing to do with freedom of expression nor, it is worth insisting, with Islam. It is one more deliberately obscure, much manipulated incident in the so called “Clash of Civilizations” invented by imperialist strategists in a forlorn attempt to put a brake on the now steadily accelerating decline of the Western system of global domination. That strategy's execution long ago revealed, in the clearest way possible, that Western corporate and alternative media are enthusiastic collaborators in the psychological warfare campaigns orchestrated by their countries' governments .
Those Western psychological warfare campaigns attack targets that change from one moment to the next as required – lately Laurent Gbagbo in Ivory Coast, Muammar al Gaddafi in Libya, Hugo Chávez in Venezuela, Bashar al Assad in Syria and Vladimir Putin in Russia. In the case of Islam and muslims generally, it is very convenient to interpret the recent events in France as a manifestation of an alleged inherent psychotic rage of muslims against the barbaric colonial oppression of the West. That treatment depicts the problem decisively as a deep rooted problem mass psychological problem of Arabs and muslims.
But the truth so desperately covered up by the "We are Charlie Hebdo" campaign is that the real problem, impossible to conceal by now, is quite the reverse. The real problem is the historic pyschological problem of mass hypocrisy in Western societies. It was the US government and its European allies that funded Osama Bin Laden and Al Qaeda, in exactly the same way that decades ago they supported the Muslim Brotherhood against Gamel Abdel Nasser in Egypt and the very same way, right up to the present day, they have validated, sustained and manipulated terrorist forces against the peoples of Libya, Syria, Iraq and Iran.
Those people who now identify themselves with Charlie Hebdo refuse to acknowledge the sinister terrorist shadow that is the inseparable doppelganger of their own governments' insane foreign policies. By identifying themselves as "We are Charlie", people in Europe effectively ratify the support of their governments for innumerable terrorist atrocities committed across Lebanon, Egypt, Siria, Iraq and Iran. But these atrocities have been committed by the same terrorist groups that attacked the US in 2001.
Subsequently, associated terrorist groups bombed London and Madrid, murdering and maiming hundreds of civilians. Now they have attacked civilian targets in Paris. But despite all the readily available documentation of Western government complicity in international terrorism, long standing Western political and media manipulation of the terror motif has created a psychotic context in which the atrocity in Paris will be used by Europe's ruling elites to justify their anti-democratic, anti-humanitarian agenda of relentless economic and political repression at home and of barbaric military aggression overseas.
The "We are Charlie" campaign is an integral part of that psychotic context.
onsdag 17 december 2014
Idag är det dags att fira. Imorgon kämpar vi vidare
Av Jorge Capelán, TcS/RLP.
För idag 6 år sedan, den 4 november 2008, anlände jag till Havanna för att delta i årets upplaga av det Internationella Mötet för Kampanjen Fria de 5 Kubanerna som tills idag har hållits i staden Holguin. (Vad kommer att hända med dessa möten i framtiden? Skulle man inte kunna fortsätta med dem, fast nu till stöd för alla folkens befrielse?)
Jag minns den kvällen. Jag hade precis kommit från flygplatsen. Man kunde lätt känna av den förväntansfulla stämningen i hotellets lobby, på gatorna och i stadens övriga offentliga platser. Det var lätt att förstå anledningen: Det var nämligen den kvällen, med Barak Obamas seger över republikanen John McCain, med 64.9% av elektorsrösterna, att man skulle kunna våga hoppas om en ändring i den kriminella politik som för över fyra decennier imperiet hade bedrivit mot det kubanska folket.
Att Obama verkligen skulle våga eller kunna materialisera sina vallöften om att ta sig an sitt eget folks sociala behov, samt på att vara mindre krigisk mot världens övriga folk än vad galningen Bush hade varit, var det många av oss som tvivlade på - även om vi alla önskade det. I hotellets lobby, såväl kubaner som utlänningar firade när teleSUR offentliggjorde valresultatet. Jag såg samma reaktioner på gatan när jag gick ut för en promenad några minuter senare.
I Kubas fall dröjde rättvisan länge, men det kom till slut. Idag håller Obama på att ta de första små stegen mot ett slut på blockaden och våra fem brödrar, de hjältar som kämpade mot terrorismen, är tillbaka på Kuba med sina nära och kära. Jag fortfarande minns uttrycket av smärta och ömhet i Doña Mirtas ansikte, när jag i Holguin räckte fram till henne ett exemplar av en diktbok av hans son, hjälten Antonio Guerrero, som hade översatts till svenskan av en av de lokala svenska kommittéer jag representerade den gången.
Doña Mirtas uttryck medan hon bläddrade i den tunna boken skriven på ett obegripligt språk, men med illustrationer och en namnteckning som låg henne tätt intill hjärtat, fick mig att förstå det ohyggliga lidande som både hon och resten av Hjältarnas anhöriga gick igenom. Samtidigt kunde jag se i hennes uttryck viljan att inte ge upp, att kämpa vidare, samt tilliten till en revolution och ett folk som har formats utifrån en rad principer som gör dem kapabla att stå emot de mest ohyggliga grymheterna från Jordens herrar.
Idag har Doña Mirta och alla de Fem Hjältarnas övriga anhöriga kunnat åter förenas med dem som imperiet hade gripit och spärrat in i sina fängelsehålor. Idag, som Fidel lovade för många år sedan, de Fem Hjältarna är tillbaka i deras hem, och oss alla som under alla dessa år, överallt i världen, någon gång hade delat ut ett flygblad, eller samlat in någon slant, eller sålt någon tidning, eller hållit någon föreläsning, så att De Fem skulle kunna återvända, kan också fira tillsammans med hela det kubanska folket.
Låt oss fira idag, eftersom vi imorgon måste fortsätta arbeta hårt så att Obama förverkligar och fördjupar vad han har lovat tills blockaden bara blir ett minne blott, tills USA även normaliserar sina relationer till Venezuela och Bolivia, så att stormakten inte lyckas förinta hela världen och en gång för alla inser att den måste acceptera Vårt Amerikas självständighet.
För idag 6 år sedan, den 4 november 2008, anlände jag till Havanna för att delta i årets upplaga av det Internationella Mötet för Kampanjen Fria de 5 Kubanerna som tills idag har hållits i staden Holguin. (Vad kommer att hända med dessa möten i framtiden? Skulle man inte kunna fortsätta med dem, fast nu till stöd för alla folkens befrielse?)
Jag minns den kvällen. Jag hade precis kommit från flygplatsen. Man kunde lätt känna av den förväntansfulla stämningen i hotellets lobby, på gatorna och i stadens övriga offentliga platser. Det var lätt att förstå anledningen: Det var nämligen den kvällen, med Barak Obamas seger över republikanen John McCain, med 64.9% av elektorsrösterna, att man skulle kunna våga hoppas om en ändring i den kriminella politik som för över fyra decennier imperiet hade bedrivit mot det kubanska folket.
Att Obama verkligen skulle våga eller kunna materialisera sina vallöften om att ta sig an sitt eget folks sociala behov, samt på att vara mindre krigisk mot världens övriga folk än vad galningen Bush hade varit, var det många av oss som tvivlade på - även om vi alla önskade det. I hotellets lobby, såväl kubaner som utlänningar firade när teleSUR offentliggjorde valresultatet. Jag såg samma reaktioner på gatan när jag gick ut för en promenad några minuter senare.
I Kubas fall dröjde rättvisan länge, men det kom till slut. Idag håller Obama på att ta de första små stegen mot ett slut på blockaden och våra fem brödrar, de hjältar som kämpade mot terrorismen, är tillbaka på Kuba med sina nära och kära. Jag fortfarande minns uttrycket av smärta och ömhet i Doña Mirtas ansikte, när jag i Holguin räckte fram till henne ett exemplar av en diktbok av hans son, hjälten Antonio Guerrero, som hade översatts till svenskan av en av de lokala svenska kommittéer jag representerade den gången.
Doña Mirtas uttryck medan hon bläddrade i den tunna boken skriven på ett obegripligt språk, men med illustrationer och en namnteckning som låg henne tätt intill hjärtat, fick mig att förstå det ohyggliga lidande som både hon och resten av Hjältarnas anhöriga gick igenom. Samtidigt kunde jag se i hennes uttryck viljan att inte ge upp, att kämpa vidare, samt tilliten till en revolution och ett folk som har formats utifrån en rad principer som gör dem kapabla att stå emot de mest ohyggliga grymheterna från Jordens herrar.
Idag har Doña Mirta och alla de Fem Hjältarnas övriga anhöriga kunnat åter förenas med dem som imperiet hade gripit och spärrat in i sina fängelsehålor. Idag, som Fidel lovade för många år sedan, de Fem Hjältarna är tillbaka i deras hem, och oss alla som under alla dessa år, överallt i världen, någon gång hade delat ut ett flygblad, eller samlat in någon slant, eller sålt någon tidning, eller hållit någon föreläsning, så att De Fem skulle kunna återvända, kan också fira tillsammans med hela det kubanska folket.
Låt oss fira idag, eftersom vi imorgon måste fortsätta arbeta hårt så att Obama förverkligar och fördjupar vad han har lovat tills blockaden bara blir ett minne blott, tills USA även normaliserar sina relationer till Venezuela och Bolivia, så att stormakten inte lyckas förinta hela världen och en gång för alla inser att den måste acceptera Vårt Amerikas självständighet.
tisdag 16 december 2014
Latin Americans ditch Facebook and start their own social media
Jorge Capelán, Tortilla con Sal, December 14th 2014
While thousands of European users have decided to sue Facebook, Latin America's popular movements have chosen to build their own alternative to what has become an infamous monopoly known for all sorts of abuses, from profiting from its users' postings and clicks to the selling of their personal data to corporations and the CIA.
It is like Facebook, but it's definitely not Facebook: It is called Facepopular, the new Latin American social media born in Argentina.
The «face» in its name has nothing to do with the English word – it's
an acronym for Frente Alternativo Contra el Estáblishment [Alternative
Front Against the Stablishment].
Launched in the middle of 2013, today, a little more than a year later, it has managed to reach 900.000 members from all over the region, a number in the same range of magnitude as the one achieved in their first year by all those social media that today rule the global Internet.
«The goal is to generate a channel for communication and communitarian interaction, free from the arbitrary and authoritarian models imposed by other social media designed and operated outside the Latin American region by multinational corporations.
It is a Latin American social network, for Spanish-speaking people, conceived and designed according to our own criteria and standards», write the creators of the site, which was launched on July 9th, 2013 - Argentina's Independence Day.
Facepopular was originally conceived by a group of Argentinean cyber-activists after a campaign named “I'm not going to the 11/8” aimed at countering a number of upper-class rightist pot-banging protests staged against the progressive government of president Cristina Fernandez back in November, 2012.
With a little help from government, lots of recycled computers, ingenuity and plenty of engagement, the activists have managed to pull the “Red Popular”, a battery of alternative grass-root outlets ranging from streaming radio and TV broadcasts to blogs and e-mail services with Facepopular as the flagship.
With Facepopular, Argentina becomes a member of the select club of countries that host their own social media, a group that includes the US, Russia and China. For that reason, Facepopular has been declared of public cultural interest by the Argentina's culture ministry.
However, Facepopular has not been conceived as some new version of Facebook, although its design has some similarities. Facepopular includes features not present in the US-American monopoly, such as a “Don't Like”-button, chat rooms, streaming media and forums. Generally speaking, Facepopular is more of a place that favors organized interaction than Facebook, which is focused on individually motivated contacts.
In contrast with Facebook, Facepopular does have an explicit set of values that any member must observe, namely: to support the idea of integrating the whole of Latin America and the Caribbean in a united “Patria Grande” (Big Homeland); to support democracy (and thus to refuse engaging in destabilizing activities against democratically elected governments); and to oppose discriminating ideologies such as racism and sexism. Otherwise, no conditions of party or ideological allegiances are posed on the members.
In contrast with commercial corporate social media, Facepopular both expects and encourages active participation by its users in the network's development and promotion. For example, a system of “ambassadors” has been developed in order to allow users in different countries to promote Facepopular.
An example of this is the campaign #48horasdefacepopular (#48hoursoffacepopular) starting at 0:00 GMT on December 15th, in which activists of the social media will spread information in the Latin American cyberspace in order to recruit new users/activists. This is the second campaign of this kind launched since Facepopular started a year ago.
“Our territory is the Net, and our weapon is the Culture; the objective is to make people aware of our need to become a united, free, thriving and egalitarian nation under the banner of all our particularities, our differences and our common history”, write the creators of Facepopular in the network's founding manifesto.
While thousands of European users have decided to sue Facebook, Latin America's popular movements have chosen to build their own alternative to what has become an infamous monopoly known for all sorts of abuses, from profiting from its users' postings and clicks to the selling of their personal data to corporations and the CIA.
It is like Facebook, but it's definitely not Facebook: It is called Facepopular, the new Latin American social media born in Argentina.
Launched in the middle of 2013, today, a little more than a year later, it has managed to reach 900.000 members from all over the region, a number in the same range of magnitude as the one achieved in their first year by all those social media that today rule the global Internet.
«The goal is to generate a channel for communication and communitarian interaction, free from the arbitrary and authoritarian models imposed by other social media designed and operated outside the Latin American region by multinational corporations.
It is a Latin American social network, for Spanish-speaking people, conceived and designed according to our own criteria and standards», write the creators of the site, which was launched on July 9th, 2013 - Argentina's Independence Day.
Facepopular was originally conceived by a group of Argentinean cyber-activists after a campaign named “I'm not going to the 11/8” aimed at countering a number of upper-class rightist pot-banging protests staged against the progressive government of president Cristina Fernandez back in November, 2012.
With a little help from government, lots of recycled computers, ingenuity and plenty of engagement, the activists have managed to pull the “Red Popular”, a battery of alternative grass-root outlets ranging from streaming radio and TV broadcasts to blogs and e-mail services with Facepopular as the flagship.
With Facepopular, Argentina becomes a member of the select club of countries that host their own social media, a group that includes the US, Russia and China. For that reason, Facepopular has been declared of public cultural interest by the Argentina's culture ministry.
However, Facepopular has not been conceived as some new version of Facebook, although its design has some similarities. Facepopular includes features not present in the US-American monopoly, such as a “Don't Like”-button, chat rooms, streaming media and forums. Generally speaking, Facepopular is more of a place that favors organized interaction than Facebook, which is focused on individually motivated contacts.
In contrast with Facebook, Facepopular does have an explicit set of values that any member must observe, namely: to support the idea of integrating the whole of Latin America and the Caribbean in a united “Patria Grande” (Big Homeland); to support democracy (and thus to refuse engaging in destabilizing activities against democratically elected governments); and to oppose discriminating ideologies such as racism and sexism. Otherwise, no conditions of party or ideological allegiances are posed on the members.
In contrast with commercial corporate social media, Facepopular both expects and encourages active participation by its users in the network's development and promotion. For example, a system of “ambassadors” has been developed in order to allow users in different countries to promote Facepopular.
An example of this is the campaign #48horasdefacepopular (#48hoursoffacepopular) starting at 0:00 GMT on December 15th, in which activists of the social media will spread information in the Latin American cyberspace in order to recruit new users/activists. This is the second campaign of this kind launched since Facepopular started a year ago.
“Our territory is the Net, and our weapon is the Culture; the objective is to make people aware of our need to become a united, free, thriving and egalitarian nation under the banner of all our particularities, our differences and our common history”, write the creators of Facepopular in the network's founding manifesto.
måndag 7 juli 2014
Multipolar soccer
By Jorge Capelán / Aydinlik (Turkey).
The Western global media dictatorship and its coverage of the FIFA World Cup in Brazil this year convey a tragicomic impression of schizophrenia. On one hand, for weeks and months the country has been portrayed as unable to host the championship because of inefficiency, corruption and sheer imbecility or outright contempt for human life, as in the case with the wild speculations about death squads killing street children in order to clean the cities for the incoming waves of tourists. On the other hand, in country after country, TV-audiences beat records by the day as people all over the globe gather to watch the performances of stars such as Messi, Neymar, Ronaldo, Robben or Klose, and the same media monopolies that between matches do their best to smear the event, photograph, record, describe and comment every tackle, foul, header or corner taking place as if it were the only important thing going on in the world right now.
Allegedly, Brazil is in a state of war because of the ongoing «anti-government» protests but the polls say that if elections were held today, president Dilma Rousseff would get more votes than all of her opponents together (Nobody seriously thinks that Rousseff will fail to get reelected on the elections scheduled later this year). It is not the hundreds of demonstrators around the arenas that have affected the World Cup, but traffic jams. Sure, there are plenty of reasons to be unsatisfied in today's Brazil, as well as there are plenty of reasons to be «critical» of FIFA's mafia, but most Brazilians can differentiate between real foes with capital letters such as Capitalism, Imperialism and the Corporate Global Sports Industry and PT's government, which has created none of the former and instead has attempted to address their consequences.
Brazil inherits many of the structural problems common to other big (and small) third-world countries: Vast inequalities; a political system that prevents democratic reforms and protects the power of corrupted cliques; a poorly integrated economy, depending heavily on the exploitation of natural resources, as well as racism, sexism and other expressions of oppression.
In spite of all that, since 2002, left-wing leaders Lula da Silva and Dilma Rousseff have managed to start a dramatic process of democratization in the most unequal country in the region and the world: 36 out of 200 million Brazilians have left behind extreme poverty, and a total of 13.8 million households, 50 million people, benefit from social programs that have considerably improved their living conditions. These programs have increased the children's school attendance by 85% and reduced maternal mortality by 40% during the past decade.
Brazil today is not what it was before Lula and Dilma came to power. It has become the world's sixth largest economy and, since its membership in the BRICS(+A) group, it has become one of the leading voices in the process of emergence of a multipolar world order. Between 2002 and 2008, its exports have more than tripled to staggering 200 billion dollars a year; the discovery of the Presal findings have made of Brazil an offshore oil superpower and its industry, stimulated by huge orders from the public sector, has been hugely strengthened.
The Western Multinational Corporate Media's smearing of Brazil's World Cup today mimics the global smear campaigns being waged against Russia (remember Sochi) and China. It is a part of the Empire's strategy for the global «contention» of a multipolar World Order. In the Latin American context, this campaign belongs to a strategy directed mainly (although not exclusively) against three South American countries: Brazil, Argentina and Venezuela. The first two are regional giants (both members of BRICS) without which no project for regional integration is viable. The third one, the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela, is the bearer of the most articulated anti-capitalist dimension of such a project of integration - a dimension without which the project itself would not be successful. That is why nobody should be surprised to see right now: a vicious campaign of US-sponsored «syrianization» against Venezuela; a Wall Street-backed speculation offensive of «vulture» hedge funds against Argentina and an outright character assassination of Brazil in the global Western media.
Emergent countries such as Brazil are not «cute» anymore. It's big time now and the hegemony of the tandem Wall Street/London City is at stake. Four years ago, South Africa hosted the FIFA World Cup and the treatment of the Western Media, in spite of the terrible social and economic conditions, was nowhere near the negative coverage received by Brazil today. If the World Cup were held today in South Africa, we would witness a similar smear campaign. As we today «learn» that there still exist poor people in Brazil, we would «learn» that white people still have privileges in South Africa.
The Western global media dictatorship and its coverage of the FIFA World Cup in Brazil this year convey a tragicomic impression of schizophrenia. On one hand, for weeks and months the country has been portrayed as unable to host the championship because of inefficiency, corruption and sheer imbecility or outright contempt for human life, as in the case with the wild speculations about death squads killing street children in order to clean the cities for the incoming waves of tourists. On the other hand, in country after country, TV-audiences beat records by the day as people all over the globe gather to watch the performances of stars such as Messi, Neymar, Ronaldo, Robben or Klose, and the same media monopolies that between matches do their best to smear the event, photograph, record, describe and comment every tackle, foul, header or corner taking place as if it were the only important thing going on in the world right now.
Allegedly, Brazil is in a state of war because of the ongoing «anti-government» protests but the polls say that if elections were held today, president Dilma Rousseff would get more votes than all of her opponents together (Nobody seriously thinks that Rousseff will fail to get reelected on the elections scheduled later this year). It is not the hundreds of demonstrators around the arenas that have affected the World Cup, but traffic jams. Sure, there are plenty of reasons to be unsatisfied in today's Brazil, as well as there are plenty of reasons to be «critical» of FIFA's mafia, but most Brazilians can differentiate between real foes with capital letters such as Capitalism, Imperialism and the Corporate Global Sports Industry and PT's government, which has created none of the former and instead has attempted to address their consequences.
Brazil inherits many of the structural problems common to other big (and small) third-world countries: Vast inequalities; a political system that prevents democratic reforms and protects the power of corrupted cliques; a poorly integrated economy, depending heavily on the exploitation of natural resources, as well as racism, sexism and other expressions of oppression.
In spite of all that, since 2002, left-wing leaders Lula da Silva and Dilma Rousseff have managed to start a dramatic process of democratization in the most unequal country in the region and the world: 36 out of 200 million Brazilians have left behind extreme poverty, and a total of 13.8 million households, 50 million people, benefit from social programs that have considerably improved their living conditions. These programs have increased the children's school attendance by 85% and reduced maternal mortality by 40% during the past decade.
Brazil today is not what it was before Lula and Dilma came to power. It has become the world's sixth largest economy and, since its membership in the BRICS(+A) group, it has become one of the leading voices in the process of emergence of a multipolar world order. Between 2002 and 2008, its exports have more than tripled to staggering 200 billion dollars a year; the discovery of the Presal findings have made of Brazil an offshore oil superpower and its industry, stimulated by huge orders from the public sector, has been hugely strengthened.
The Western Multinational Corporate Media's smearing of Brazil's World Cup today mimics the global smear campaigns being waged against Russia (remember Sochi) and China. It is a part of the Empire's strategy for the global «contention» of a multipolar World Order. In the Latin American context, this campaign belongs to a strategy directed mainly (although not exclusively) against three South American countries: Brazil, Argentina and Venezuela. The first two are regional giants (both members of BRICS) without which no project for regional integration is viable. The third one, the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela, is the bearer of the most articulated anti-capitalist dimension of such a project of integration - a dimension without which the project itself would not be successful. That is why nobody should be surprised to see right now: a vicious campaign of US-sponsored «syrianization» against Venezuela; a Wall Street-backed speculation offensive of «vulture» hedge funds against Argentina and an outright character assassination of Brazil in the global Western media.
Emergent countries such as Brazil are not «cute» anymore. It's big time now and the hegemony of the tandem Wall Street/London City is at stake. Four years ago, South Africa hosted the FIFA World Cup and the treatment of the Western Media, in spite of the terrible social and economic conditions, was nowhere near the negative coverage received by Brazil today. If the World Cup were held today in South Africa, we would witness a similar smear campaign. As we today «learn» that there still exist poor people in Brazil, we would «learn» that white people still have privileges in South Africa.
fredag 27 juni 2014
Tack, FIFA!
av Jorge Capelán.
Visst är fotbollen stor. Tack vare denna hälsosamma och uppbyggande idrott kan vi alla känna oss lite snällare, eftersom det finns en uruguayansk fotbollspelare över vilken vi nu kan ösa allt vårt hat och våra negativa känslor: Vi pratar såklart om «kannibalen» Luis Suárez.
Tack vare denna till sin natur patologiska varelse, denna kopia av Hannibal Lecter, såväl i sin kulaniriska smak som i sin maniska återfallsbenägenhet, som inte förtjänar att ingå i den mänskliga gemenskapen på grund av det uppenbart abnorma gärning av att ha knaprat på en back i det italienska landslaget, vi har allihopa blivit förlåtna både våra egna och våra fotbollslags synder:
- Tusentals mexikanska fans, som under VM:s matcher skrek «Bög!» till Brasiliens och Kameruns målvakter varje gång någon av dessa boxade iväg någon boll är förlåtna. Epitetet «är inte att betrakta som en förolämpning i detta specifika sammanhang» sade FIFA, som avfärdade en anmälan om «olämpligt uppträdande» mot det mexikanska fotbollsförbundet. Världens fotbollsälskande homofober och rasister, förena eder i ett enda bögskanderande! FIFA, så upptaget som det är med att få ett slut på antropofagin inom idrott bryr sig inte ett dugg om det, vare sig «i detta specifika sammanhang» eller i något annat om organisationen tjänar på det.
- Också Neymar, som i ögonvrån såg kroaten Luca Modric från långt håll komma springandes bakifrån och med Brasiliens djupaste illvilja och helt oprovocerat smällde till med en armbåge som nästan fick motståndaren att förlora ett öga. Självklart är också förlåtna alla backar i världen som «markerar» (som det eufemistiskt kallas) sina motståndare med en motorsåg. Allt är tillåtet eftersom, som i Bin Ladens fall, «ingenting» kan jämföras med vad Suárez gjorde.
- Naturligtvis är också förlåtna Kamerunspelarna Benoit Assou-Ekotto och Benjamin Moukandjo, som hamnade i ett slagsmål på fotbollsplanen i matchen mot Kroatien. Andra som självklart skall förlåtas är Ghanas sjärnor Kevin-Prince Boateng och Sulley Muntari, som slog och förolämpade sin tränare under ett bråk om pengar. Allt är frid och broderskap i fotbollens värld, utom för viss avskum med benägenheten att bita sina motståndare.
Det är tur att FIFA har beslutat att straffa kannibalen Suárez på det hårdaste sättet man kan föreställa sig, nämligen genom att skilja personen ifråga från det enda hon kan göra i livet under så lång tid att hon nästan tvingas säga adjö till sin karriär.
Här krävs största stränghet! Lyssna inte på vad offret för det uruguayanska antropofagen, den italienska backen Giorgio Chiellini nu säger, att FIFA:s straff mot Suárez är överdrivet strängt! Stackars Chiellini (hoppas att hans skuldra fortfarande är på plats) säkert befinner sig fortfarande i chocktillstånd pga det där odjurets bett. Det är vad som kallas för «Stockholmssyndromet», nämligen att offret försvarar sin plågoande. Stackars Chiellini!
Fortsätt med det, FIFA! Mera rättvisa, tack! Slå dig inte till ro tills varje fotbollsarena i världen bevakas av hundratals drönare och DNA-testerna blir obligatoriska för var och en som vill sätta sin fot på dem! Fortsätt att tillåta ölförsäljningen på fotbollsarenorna, särskilt när holländska och tyska fanns är med, men var extra sträng mot de chilenska fansen, eftersom sådana är säkert ute efter att ställa till med bråk.
Men, framför allt, tack FIFA för att ha avrättat Suárez! Tack vare all uppståndelse med Suárez behöver vi inte längre tänka på att ingen har valt Blatter, att endast de rikaste tevebolagen, dem som tjänar mest pengar och sätter de priser de vill, har företräde till sändningstillstånden. Tack vare uppståndelsen med Suárez behöver vi inte längre tänka på att vi är blåsta, och nästa gång vi ser en världsmästare kommer vi att vara säkra på att det handlar om en medlem i de lönsammas gäng.
Visst är fotbollen stor. Tack vare denna hälsosamma och uppbyggande idrott kan vi alla känna oss lite snällare, eftersom det finns en uruguayansk fotbollspelare över vilken vi nu kan ösa allt vårt hat och våra negativa känslor: Vi pratar såklart om «kannibalen» Luis Suárez.
Tack vare denna till sin natur patologiska varelse, denna kopia av Hannibal Lecter, såväl i sin kulaniriska smak som i sin maniska återfallsbenägenhet, som inte förtjänar att ingå i den mänskliga gemenskapen på grund av det uppenbart abnorma gärning av att ha knaprat på en back i det italienska landslaget, vi har allihopa blivit förlåtna både våra egna och våra fotbollslags synder:
- Tusentals mexikanska fans, som under VM:s matcher skrek «Bög!» till Brasiliens och Kameruns målvakter varje gång någon av dessa boxade iväg någon boll är förlåtna. Epitetet «är inte att betrakta som en förolämpning i detta specifika sammanhang» sade FIFA, som avfärdade en anmälan om «olämpligt uppträdande» mot det mexikanska fotbollsförbundet. Världens fotbollsälskande homofober och rasister, förena eder i ett enda bögskanderande! FIFA, så upptaget som det är med att få ett slut på antropofagin inom idrott bryr sig inte ett dugg om det, vare sig «i detta specifika sammanhang» eller i något annat om organisationen tjänar på det.
- Också Neymar, som i ögonvrån såg kroaten Luca Modric från långt håll komma springandes bakifrån och med Brasiliens djupaste illvilja och helt oprovocerat smällde till med en armbåge som nästan fick motståndaren att förlora ett öga. Självklart är också förlåtna alla backar i världen som «markerar» (som det eufemistiskt kallas) sina motståndare med en motorsåg. Allt är tillåtet eftersom, som i Bin Ladens fall, «ingenting» kan jämföras med vad Suárez gjorde.
- Naturligtvis är också förlåtna Kamerunspelarna Benoit Assou-Ekotto och Benjamin Moukandjo, som hamnade i ett slagsmål på fotbollsplanen i matchen mot Kroatien. Andra som självklart skall förlåtas är Ghanas sjärnor Kevin-Prince Boateng och Sulley Muntari, som slog och förolämpade sin tränare under ett bråk om pengar. Allt är frid och broderskap i fotbollens värld, utom för viss avskum med benägenheten att bita sina motståndare.
Det är tur att FIFA har beslutat att straffa kannibalen Suárez på det hårdaste sättet man kan föreställa sig, nämligen genom att skilja personen ifråga från det enda hon kan göra i livet under så lång tid att hon nästan tvingas säga adjö till sin karriär.
Här krävs största stränghet! Lyssna inte på vad offret för det uruguayanska antropofagen, den italienska backen Giorgio Chiellini nu säger, att FIFA:s straff mot Suárez är överdrivet strängt! Stackars Chiellini (hoppas att hans skuldra fortfarande är på plats) säkert befinner sig fortfarande i chocktillstånd pga det där odjurets bett. Det är vad som kallas för «Stockholmssyndromet», nämligen att offret försvarar sin plågoande. Stackars Chiellini!
Fortsätt med det, FIFA! Mera rättvisa, tack! Slå dig inte till ro tills varje fotbollsarena i världen bevakas av hundratals drönare och DNA-testerna blir obligatoriska för var och en som vill sätta sin fot på dem! Fortsätt att tillåta ölförsäljningen på fotbollsarenorna, särskilt när holländska och tyska fanns är med, men var extra sträng mot de chilenska fansen, eftersom sådana är säkert ute efter att ställa till med bråk.
Men, framför allt, tack FIFA för att ha avrättat Suárez! Tack vare all uppståndelse med Suárez behöver vi inte längre tänka på att ingen har valt Blatter, att endast de rikaste tevebolagen, dem som tjänar mest pengar och sätter de priser de vill, har företräde till sändningstillstånden. Tack vare uppståndelsen med Suárez behöver vi inte längre tänka på att vi är blåsta, och nästa gång vi ser en världsmästare kommer vi att vara säkra på att det handlar om en medlem i de lönsammas gäng.
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