polly7
polly7's JournalHere's why rape happens every 20 minutes in India
by Avaaz Team - posted 23 January 2013 16:15
Under pressure from street protesters and global interest in this case, the government moved to set up a judicial commission to look into tougher laws to protect women from sexual harassment and rape – this is an important first step. But the horrible truth is that what happened to Nirbhaya will happen again. And again. And again. Why? Because too many people in authority continue to blame the victim. Until there's a more fundamental shift in these attitudes, Nirbhaya's story will simply repeat. Here are just a few of the worst examples:
Manohar Lal Sharma, the lawyer representing three of the accused, suggested that Nirbhaya wouldn't have been raped if she were more virtuous:
"Even an underworld don would not like to touch a girl with respect." ..........
http://en.avaaz.org/1294/rape-india-schoolbus-delhi-sexist-authorities?utm_campaign=womens-rights&utm_source=post_action&utm_content=4113&utm_medium=avaaz_core
The New Fourth Estate: Anonymous, Wikileaks, and –archy
By Sebastian A.B.
– Alexis de Tocqueville
The wellspring of liberty runs dry without the free flow of information. The Egyptian government shut down their Internet on January 28, 2011, just after the Associated Press published video of a protestor being shot by riot police. [1] This came as a shock to the global community; censorship of such magnitude is only rivaled by nations like North Korea (where subjects have no internet access). A global trend of authoritarianism is emerging, and the West is not immune (and perhaps even leading the charge).
In Radical Priorities, Noam Chomsky and C.P. Otero wrote:
“The totalitarian system of thought control is far less effective than the democratic one, since the official doctrine parroted by the intellectuals at the service of the state is readily identifiable as pure propaganda, and this helps free the mind.” In contrast, “the democratic system seeks to determine and limit the entire spectrum of thought by leaving the fundamental assumptions unexpressed. They are presupposed but not asserted.”
Noam Chomsky tersely put it this way in in Chronicles of Dissent: “The smart way to keep people passive and obedient is to strictly limit the spectrum of acceptable opinion, but allow very lively debate within that spectrum.”
Full article: http://www.zcommunications.org/the-new-fourth-estate-anonymous-wikileaks-and-archy-by-sebastian-a-b
Grassroots Activists Speak on Chavez’s Absence: “We’ll Fight Even Harder”
By Tamara Pearson
Source: Venezuelanalysis.com
Monday, January 28, 2013
The opposition believes that when Chavez as a person disappears, the revolution is over, and we have to show them that it’s not like that."
http://www.zcommunications.org/grassroots-activists-speak-on-chavez-s-absence-we-ll-fight-even-harder-by-tamara-pearson
Michael Parenti: A Terrible Normality
By Michael Parenti
Saturday, January 26, 2013
Excerpts:
These occurrences must be seen as something more than just historic abnormalities floating aimlessly in time and space, driven only by overweening impulse or happenstance. It is not enough to condemn monstrous events and bad times, we also must try to understand them. They must be contextualized in the larger framework of historical social relations.
So, if the aberrant is the norm and the horrific is chronic, then we in our fightback should give less attention to the idiosyncratic and more to the systemic. Wars, massacres and recessions help to increase capital concentration, monopolize markets and natural resources, and destroy labor organizations and popular transformative resistance.
Full article: http://www.zcommunications.org/a-terrible-normality-by-michael-parenti
Huge March Defends Venezuela’s Democracy and Revolution
By Tamara Pearson
Source: Venezuelanalysis.com
Friday, January 25, 2013
The vice-president and ministers marched with up to a million people today to defend the Bolivarian revolution on Democracy Day, while the opposition march turned out to be a small rally. Further, sectors of the far right have called on the armed forces to resist what they referred to as the “invasion” of “Castro-communism” in Venezuela.
Today’s marches commemorate 23 January 1958, when a civic-military movement overthrew the Marcos Jimenez dictatorship. However, this year the opposition first called a march for the date, to reject what it has called the “unconstitutional” measures taken by the national government, as President Chavez wasn’t able to be present at his swearing-in ceremony on 10 January while he was recovering from an operation for cancer.
In response, the PSUV also convoked a large march, together with other movements and organisations, with the slogan “The people will never be betrayed again”.
http://www.zcommunications.org/huge-march-defends-venezuela-s-democracy-and-revolution-by-tamara-pearson
Letter to Patrice Emery Lumumba
By Ama Biney
Source: Pambazuka
Tuesday, January 22, 2013
Letter to Patrice Emery Lumumba
Africans produce what they do not consume and consume what they do not produce. To put it differently, the consumer lifestyles of most Westerners is dependent on the cheap exploitation of Africans and African wealth whilst most Africans remain impoverished due to the structural linkages of this relationship. Much has not changed since the era of colonialism.
Ama Biney
On the 52nd anniversary of the vicious assassination of Patrice Lumumba, Ama Biney reflects on both the current state of the DRC and Africa, arguing that the Congo is not only a ‘world problem’ but remains critical to the future unity of Africa due to its resources and geo-strategic location
"My dear Patrice,
On the 52nd anniversary of your brutal assassination on 17 January 1961, your people of 60 million have continued to see no peace, justice, nor liberation. The people have continued to profusely bleed to death. Rape has become a weapon of war against thousands of Congolese women. Between August 1998 and April 2007, up to six million Congolese have died through unspeakable atrocities, disease, starvation and malnutrition. This figure is almost the same number as the Jews who died in the Holocaust, which leads one to ask: is it because they are black skinned Africans that global humanity responds with paralysis and indifference? If they had been Europeans, would the killings have been averted or lessened? Surely the unfolding catastrophe in the Congo is of similar proportions to that of the Cambodian and Rwanda genocides, the Vietnam War, the wars in Europe known as the First World War, Second World War and the Balkans war? If you were alive today what would you say to the Congolese women who have been gang raped by fellow Congolese? How would you comfort the children left orphaned by the multitude of vicious male warlords seeking self-aggrandisement and personal riches from the wealth of the Congo? What would you say to the hundreds of street children, uneducated and unemployed youths who were enticed into the rebel armies to commit horrific crimes against fellow Congolese? How is it possible that after 50 odd years of so-called independence the life expectancy of a Congolese woman is 47 years and that of a Congolese man is 42 years?
CONGO’S RICHES VITAL TO WESTERN LIFESTYLES
Che Guevara was correct when he wrote in his diary in 1965 that ‘the Congo problem was a world problem.’ [1] Furthermore, Che could also see that ‘Victory [in the Congo] would have repercussions throughout the continent, as would defeat’. [2] Indeed the Congo remains a ‘world problem’ when it continues to provide 64 percent of the world’s reserves of coltan used in cellular phones, laptops, pacemakers, video cameras, jet engines, prosthetic devices, rockets, hearing aids, amongst other products. [3] Most of these products are only affordable in the developed world, yet the raw material is to be located in the Congo. This reinforces the reality that Africans produce what they do not consume and consume what they do not produce. To put it differently, the consumer lifestyles of most Westerners is dependent on the cheap exploitation of Africans and African wealth whilst most Africans remain impoverished due to the structural linkages of this relationship. Much has not changed since the era of colonialism. In the 19th century, the Congolese were being forced by the Belgians in savage conditions to produce quotas of rubber from which up to 10 million Congolese died and many lost their limbs for failure to meet production quotas. Now the pillage, plunder and looting of coltan by Congolese rebel groups with their backers in Rwanda, Uganda, US, Britain and various Western multi-national companies profit enormously from this wealth at the expense of the Congolese people who see little of this wealth invested in their country. As individuals upgrade their cellular phones as a matter of ‘natural’ entitlement, it seems ‘blood diamonds’ now co-exist with ‘blood coltan.’"
Full article: http://www.zcommunications.org/letter-to-patrice-emery-lumumba-by-ama-biney
Patrice Lumumba, The Sacrifice of a True African Leader
By Honourable Saka
Saturday, April 27, 2013
Patrice Lumumba (2 July 1925 – 17 January 1961), the first legally elected Prime Minister of the Congo Republic was murdered by a CIA- sponsored plot, over 50 years ago.
We must move forward, striking out tirelessly against imperialism. From all over the world we have to learn lessons which events afford. Lumumba's murder should be a lesson for all of us”. — Che Guevara, 1964.
“Dead, living, free, or in prison on the orders of the colonialists, it is not I who counts. It is the Congo, it is our people for whom independence has been transformed into a cage where we are regarded from the outside…” — Patrice Lumumba, October 1960.
Introduction
The truth surrounding the brutal murder of Patrice Lumumba is an embarrassing event which, when exposed to the African youth of today, will definitely send the US government scratching its head. The Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) has had a troubled history since the assassination of Patrice Lumumba. Currently there is conflict in the eastern DRC. But who are the main actors in the conflict this time? African leaders, it is important to remember history so that you can appreciate what is going on today in Africa and the rest of the world.
Full Article: http://www.zcommunications.org/patrice-lumumba-the-sacrifice-of-a-true-african-leader-by-honourable-saka
Is PTSD Contagious?
It's rampant among returning vets—and now their spouses and kids are starting to show the same symptoms.
—By Mac McClelland | January/February 2013 Issue
Brannan Vines has never been to war, but her husband, Caleb, was sent to Iraq twice, where he served in the infantry as a designated marksman. He's one of 103,200, or 228,875, or 336,000 Americans who served in Iraq or Afghanistan and came back with PTSD, depending on whom you ask, and one of 115,000 to 456,000 with traumatic brain injury. It's hard to say, with the lack of definitive tests for the former, undertesting for the latter, underreporting, under or over-misdiagnosing of both. And as slippery as all that is, even less understood is the collateral damage, to families, to schools, to society—emotional and fiscal costs borne long after the war is over.
Like Brannan's symptoms. Hypervigilance sounds innocuous, but it is in fact exhaustingly distressing, a conditioned response to life-threatening situations. Imagine there's a murderer in your house. And it is dark outside, and the electricity is out. Imagine your nervous system spiking, readying you as you feel your way along the walls, the sensitivity of your hearing, the tautness in your muscles, the alertness shooting around inside your skull. And then imagine feeling like that all the time.
Caleb has been home since 2006, way more than enough time for Brannan to catch his symptoms. The house, in a subdivision a little removed from one of many shopping centers in a small town in the southwest corner of Alabama, is often quiet as a morgue. You can hear the cat padding around. The air conditioner whooshes, a clock ticks. When a sound erupts—Caleb screaming at Brannan because she's just woken him up from a nightmare, after making sure she's at least an arm's length away in case he wakes up swinging—the ensuing silence seems even denser. Even when everyone's in the family room watching TV, it's only connected to Netflix and not to cable, since news is often a trigger. Brannan and Caleb can be tense with their own agitation, and tense about each other's. Their German shepherd, a service dog trained to help veterans with PTSD, is ready to alert Caleb to triggers by barking, or to calm him by jumping onto his chest. This PTSD picture is worse than some, but much better, Brannan knows, than those that have devolved into drug addiction and rehab stints and relapses. She has not, unlike military wives she advises, ever been beat up. Nor jumped out of her own bed when she got touched in the middle of the night for fear of being raped, again. Still.
Full article: http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2013/01/ptsd-epidemic-military-vets-families
Burn, Burn - Africa's Afghanistan
By Pepe Escobar
Source: Asia Times
Sunday, January 20, 2013
So this new, brewing mega-Afghanistan in Africa will be good for French neoloconial interests (even though Hollande insists this is all about "peace"
; good for AFRICOM; a boost for those Jihadis Formerly Known as NATO Rebels; and certainly good for the never-ending Global War on Terror (GWOT), duly renamed "kinetic military operations".
Django, unchained, would be totally at home. As for the Oscar for Best Song, it goes to the Bush-Obama continuum: There's no business like terror business. With French subtitles, bien sur.
Full article: http://www.zcommunications.org/burn-burn-africas-afghanistan-by-pepe-escobar
Here you go ...
http://www.zcommunications.org/zspace/ramzybaroudCheck this out for some really good, informative articles. If you put aside all hatred for the Palestinian people, you'll get a lot more out of it, imho.
Waking Up in Tehran
By David Swanson
Source: Warisacrime.org
Sunday, January 13, 2013
According to another theory -- a quaint little notion that I like to refer to as "verifiable history" -- the CIA, operating out of that U.S. embassy in Tehran in 1953, maliciously and illegally overthrew a relatively democratic and liberal parliamentary government, and with it the 1951 Time magazine man of the year Prime Minister Mohammad Mossadegh, because Mossadegh insisted that Iran's oil wealth enrich Iranians rather than foreign corporations. The CIA installed a dictatorship run by the Shah of Iran who quickly became a major source of profits for U.S. weapons makers, and his nation a testing ground for surveillance techniques and human rights abuses. The U.S. government encouraged the Shah's development of a nuclear energy program. But the Shah impoverished and alienated the people of Iran, including hundreds of thousands educated abroad. A secular pro-democracy revolution nonviolently overthrew the Shah in January 1979, but it was a revolution without a leader or a plan for governing. It was co-opted by rightwing religious forces led by a man who pretended briefly to favor democratic reform. The U.S. government, operating out of the same embassy despised by many in Iran since 1953, explored possible means of keeping the Shah in power, but some in the CIA worked to facilitate what they saw as the second best option: a theocracy that would substitute religious fanaticism and oppression for populist and nationalist demands. When the U.S. embassy was taken over by an unarmed crowd the next November, immediately following the public announcement of the Shah's arrival in the United States, and with fears of another U.S.-led coup widespread in Tehran, a sit-in planned for two or three days was co-opted, as the whole revolution had been, by mullahs with connections to the CIA and an extremely anti-democratic agenda. They later made a deal with U.S. Republicans, as Robert Parry and others have well documented, to keep the hostage crisis going until Carter lost the 1980 presidential election to Ronald Reagan. Reagan's government secretly renewed weapons sales to the new Iranian dictatorship despite its public anti-American stance and with no more concern for its religious fervor than for that of future al Qaeda leaders who would spend the 1980s fighting the Soviets with U.S. weapons in Afghanistan. At the same time, the Reagan administration made similarly profitable deals with Saddam Hussein's government in Iraq, which had launched a war on Iran and continued it with U.S. support through the length of the Reagan presidency. The mad military investment in the United States that took off with Reagan and again with George W. Bush, and which continues to this day, has made the nation of Iran -- which asserts its serious independence from U.S. rule -- a target of threatened war and actual sanctions and terrorism.
If we cannot learn from our own history or this kind of common sense, let us learn from Mossadegh. War is not a solution. War is not a tool of public policy. War is not the first option, the second option, or the last resort. War is out of the question.
Full Article: http://www.zcommunications.org/waking-up-in-tehran-by-david-swanson
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