Category: Politik

Tåregas og tortur i Bahrain

Nicholas Kristof, som jeg omtalte i mit sidste indlæg om anholdelsen af Zainab Alkhawaja, opsummerer situationen i Bahrain de seneste uger med to små billeder – det ene netop af Alkhawaja:

[Obama] should also  understand the systematic, violent repression here, the kind that apparently killed a 14-year-old boy, Ali al-Sheikh, and continues to torment his family.Ali grew up here in Sitra, a collection of poor villages far from the gleaming bank towers of Bahrain’s skyline. Almost every day pro-democracy protests still bubble up in Sitra, and even when they are completely peaceful they are crushed with a barrage of American-made tear gas.

People here admire much about America and welcomed me into their homes, but there is also anger that the tear gas shells that they sweep off the streets each morning are made by a Pennsylvania company, NonLethal Technologies. It is a private company that declined to comment, but the American government grants it a license for these exports — and every shell fired undermines our image.

In August, Ali joined one of the protests. A policeman fired a shell at Ali from less than 15 feet away, according to the account of the family and human-rights groups. The shell apparently hit the boy in the back of the neck, and he died almost immediately, a couple of minutes’ walk from his home.

The government claims that the bruise was “inconsistent” with a blow from a tear gas grenade. Frankly, I’ve seen the Bahrain authorities lie so much that I don’t credit their denial. (….)

The police have continued to persecute Ali’s family. For starters, riot policemen fired tear gas at the boy’s funeral, villagers say.The police summoned Jawad for interrogation, most recently this month. He fears he will be fired from his job in the Ministry of Electricity.

Mourners regularly leave flowers and photos of Ali on his grave, which is in a vacant lot near the home. Perhaps because some messages call him a martyr, the riot police come regularly and smash the pictures and throw away the flowers. The family has not purchased a headstone yet, for fear that the police will destroy it.

The repression is ubiquitous. Consider Zainab al-Khawaja, 28, whose husband and father are both in prison and have been tortured for pro-democracy activities, according to human rights reports. Police officers have threatened to cut off Khawaja’s tongue, she told me, and they broke her father’s heart by falsely telling him that she had been shipped to Saudi Arabia to be raped and tortured. She braved the risks by talking to me about this last week — before she was arrested too.

Khawaja earned her college degree in Wisconsin. She was sitting peacefully protesting in a traffic circle when the police attacked her. First they fired tear gas grenades next to her, and then handcuffed her and dragged her away — sometimes slapping and hitting her as video cameras rolled. The Bahrain Center for Human Rights says that she was beaten more at the police station.

Khawaja is tough as nails, and when we walked alongside demonstrations together, she seemed unbothered by tear gas that left me blinded and coughing. But she worried about her 2-year-old daughter, Jude. And one time as we were driving back from visiting a family whose baby had just died, possibly because so much tear gas had been fired in the neighborhood, Khawaja began crying. “I think I’m losing it,” she said. “It all just gets to me.”

Mine fremhævelser. Mahmood Al-Yousif har et længere blogindlæg, hvor han gør opmærksom på, at myndighederne i Bahrain fortsat torterer og myrder ganske ustraffet, som Kristofs historie om Ali desværrre siger alt om:

Maybe if you have a few atoms of humanity left in you, it might help you remove that veil off your conscience and see things for what they are:

This incident – amongst hundreds of others currently being meted out to the majority of villages in this country – should be independently investigated and the officers implicated and their masters who are doing nothing to stop this must be made to account for their actions and be punished. The government who oversees this situation should be summarily dismissed of course and with haste. Nothing else would do if that illusive “new page” is to become a reality.

Hvorfor greb man ind med bombning af Libyen for at standse overgrebene, mens for eksempel den amerikanske regering ikke lægger det mindste pres på Bahrain? Vel, en af forskellene er, at undertrykkelsen i Bahrain set i forhold til landets indbyggertal er værre end i Libyen. En anden er, at vestmagterne i stedet valgte at sætte kiggerten for det blinde øjne, da Bahrains kongefamilie diskret indkaldte forstærkninger i form af nogle tusinde soldater fra Saudi-Arabien, der kunne bistå i opgøret med de fredelige demonstranter. Money talks.

Dansk aktivist anholdt i Bahrain

Zainab Alkhawaja

Update, 21/12: Zainab er løsladt!

Update 2 – note to Boing Boing readers: Thank you for your interest in Zainab Alkhawaja and the human rights crisis in Bahrain. This is a Danish-language blog specializing in politics, tech (notably GNU/Linux and free software), culture and civil rights and a special interest in bottom-up movements like Occupy Wall Street and the Arab revolutions. Read this blog for info in English on Danish politics.

OK, overskriften på dette indlæg er måske en tilsnigelse. Der er nok ikke så meget dansk ved Zainab Alkhawaja. Ganske vist er hendes far, Abdulhadi Alkhawaja ud over at være menneskeretsaktivist også dansk statsborger, hvilket også vil sige, at hun er vokset op her i landet. Og faktisk er hun selv dansk statsborger og har alle de rettigheder, der følger med dén status. Men egentlig er hun jo fra Bahrain, og der er mange ting ved hende, der er helt og aldeles udanske.

For eksempel er hun kompromisløs, ukuelig og åbenbart totalt frygtløs. Selv efter, at hendes far blev fængslet, torteret, dømt til fængsel på livstid og tilsyneladende udsat for seksuelle overgreb i kølvandet på myndighedernes modreaktion på oprøret i Bahran; netop, mens de læger og sygeplejersker, som under demonstrationerne i februar og marts behandlede dødeligt sårede demonstranter, dømmes ved latterlige skueprocesser, deltog Zainab Alkhawja fortsat i demonstrationer mod de groteske menneskeretskrænkelser i det lille land, hvis “konge” stadig er dekoreret med én af Danmarks fornemste ordener.

Billedet (som er taget af Mazen Mahdi) viser den 28-årige Zainab, kort før hun blev arresteret. Den 15., da det skete, var det en stor historie i de internationale medier, og New York Times-journalisten Nick Kristof skrev på Twitter:

I suggest that Bahrain officials avoid torturing and imprisoning @AngryArabiya. Some day she could be their president.

I går var nyheden så nået frem til svensk presse, hvor man bl.a. kunne læse, at “danska medborgaren Zainab al-Khawaja, mer känd under smeknamnet “Angry Arabiya”, greps i Bahrain på torsdagen under en stillsam protest”. Som nogle af de sidste medier i verden tog de danske aviser så tråden op, og Politiken bragte en artikel om Zainabs anholdelse, der mest af alt handlede om hendes far.

Hvor er oprøret, vreden over at folk med tilknytning til Danmark behandles på den måde? Så langt væk Bahrain end ligger, har Zainab og hendes familie givetvis mere tilknytning til Danmark, end Wilson Kipketer og Viggo Mortensen nogensinde har haft. Hvor er Villy Søvndal og truslerne om diplomatiske repressalier? Hvor er interessen, når en person med så stor tilknytning til Danmark er helt i front og risikerer alt i kampen for menneskerettigheder og demokrati i et af de mest undertrykkende diktaturer i den arabiske verden? Er det, fordi hun er frygtløs og kompromisløs og vi ikke er det? Fordi hun risikerer alt for at gøre en forskel, hvilket vi aldrig selv ville?

Vi ser på vore hænder, skammer os og er helst fri for at høre mere. Jeg er klar over, at det selvfølgelig er noget sludder at tale om “danskerne” som et sådant abstrakt “vi”, men jeg har svært ved at se andre motiver for mediernes behandling af denne historie. Zainab Alkhawaja og kampen for et frit og demokratisk Bahrain fortjener vores støtte.

Du kan se anholdelsen af Zainab Alkhawaja her:

“Europagtens” nyttesløse, neoliberale chokterapi

Angela Merkels meget opreklamerede “europagt”, som Storbritannien nu har sagt nej til og Sverige tilsyneladende også er ved at sige nej til, er simpelt hen en juridisk grundfæstelse af den neoliberale politik, som under økonomen Milton Friedmans ledelse led et fuldstændigt nederlag i 1970ernes Chile, skriver Claus Elholm Andersen:

I, hvad der bedst kan betegnes som et ideologisk korstog, har Merkel vist, at hun sætter sine liberalistiske grundsætninger over EU-samarbejdets overlevelse. Og hun har afsløret, at gældskrisen for hende først og fremmest er en undskyldning for, at presse sin politiske dagsorden igennem, koste hvad det koste vil.Man skulle næsen tro, at der var tale om en skoleeksempel på det, som neoliberalismens fader, Milton Friedman, i sin tid kaldte ‘chokterapi’. Termen referer til, at enhver krise skal udnyttes til at få gennemtrumfet en neoliberalistisk økonomisk politik, hvor privatiseringer og kolossale offentlige nedskæringer netop skal indføres så pludseligt, at det kommer som et chok.

Det var under et besøg i Chile i 1975, at Milton Friedman første gang talte om chokterapi offentligt. Han var blevet inviteret til landet af diktatoren Augusto Pinochet, der havde korresponderet med Friedman i et par år og fulgt hans råd om økonomiske reformer.

Men chokterapien havde ikke virket efter hensigten. Afviklingen af det tætteste, noget sydamerikansk land nogensinde har været på en velfærdsstat, havde ført til en inflation på hele 375%, og det var derfor, at den amerikanske økonom, hvis anvisninger Pinochet havde fult til punkt og prikke, blev tilkaldt. Og Friedmans kur var klar: chokterapi, mere chokterapi og så mere endnu.

Knap var Friedman rejst, før Pinochet skrev til ham og fortalte, at Friedmans økonomisk plan “i dette øjeblik er ved at blive ført ud i livet.” I konkrete termer betød det en 27% nedskæring i alle offentlige udgifter fra den ene dag til den anden, samt yderligere privatiseringer og afvikling af toldmure. Men stik mod Friedmans forudsigelse, førte denne chokterapi ikke til masser af nye jobs i den private sektor, men tværtimod til øget arbejdsløshed og armod i en befolkning, som ikke kunne gøre indsigelse, fordi de blev holdt i jerngreb af diktatoren selv.

Den dag i dag forsøger de fleste neoliberalister at glemme, at Chile under Pinochet er det tætteste på en opfyldelse af deres ideologi, som verden nogensinde har set. Og det er ingen hemmelighed, at der går en direkte forbindelse fra Pinochet, og udlevelsen af den neoliberalistiske utopi, til den konservativisme, der personificeret i Margaret Thatcher, ramte Europa i begyndelsen af 1980′erne.

Det var ikke blot den samme ideologi som Pinochet, som Thatcher abonnerede på. Som Pinochet korresponderede også Thatcher med en af neoliberalismens koryfæer, Friedrich Hayek, der fortalte hende om nødvendigheden af chokterapi og opfordrede hende til bruge Chile som model økonomiske reformer, hvis hun ville gøre op den økonomiske politik, der i en engelsk sammenhæng i årtier havde baseret sig på økonomen John Maynard Keynes’ tanker.

Og Thatcher lod sig skam inspirere af Chile. Hun talte om “den imponerende succes med den chilenske økonomi,” som et “lysende eksempel på økonomisk reform, som vi kan lære meget af.” Ja, hendes beundring for Chile og den chilenske økonomi udviklede sig til et venskab med Pinochet, som jævnligt besøgte hende i London, mens hun forsvarede ham og krævede ham løsladt, og endda besøgte ham flere gange, da den tidligere diktator i slutningen af 1990′erne sad i husarrest i London.

Præcis, som der går en linje fra Pinochet til Thatcher, går der også en lige linje fra Thatchers opgør med keynesianismen og frem til det, som vi ser i EU i disse dage. For med Merkels påbud om strengere krav til, hvor stort de forskellige landes underskud må være, er der helt i Milton Friedmans ånd tale om opgør med et central element i Keynes økonomiske teori: At den bedste måde at komme igennem en lavkonjunktur er via offentlige investering, der kan sætte gang i hjulene igen.

Læs endelig det hele.

Egypten: Revolutionen fortsætter, men kommer til at vare længe

Den egyptiske journalist og revolutionære socialist Hossam El-Hamalawy forklarer i dette interview, hvorfor han stadig er optimistisk med hensyn til udsigten til at få afsat det diktatoriske regime. Han siger blandt andet, at det er forventeligt, at det hele ikke falder på plads på én gang, og at det uanset udfaldet af det seneste valg let kan tage tre til seks før der sker nogen mærkbar bedring af situationen:

Has this affected the legitimacy of the elections? Of course, it did. I had already taken the position even before the current uprising of boycotting the coming elections because they are happening while the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces (SCAF) is still in power. You cannot have clean elections while Mubarak’s generals are still running the show or when the army, together with the police, had just massacred people in Tahrir, and Maspero. They were not even held accountable, and now they are the ones supposedly in charge of supervising the whole process?

More importantly, it’s not about who you vote into this inept parliament. My argument was that even if you elect one hundred percent Revolutionary Socialists in parliament – forget about the Salafis or the Ikhwan – still you will not be able to achieve the goals of the revolution. If you bring a prophet or a saint to be the prime minister today in Egypt, he will still remain a puppet in the hands of SCAF. If you elect a president today, while the situation is still as it is, he will also be a puppet in the hands of SCAF. SCAF are opting for a model which is like the old Turkish model where you get the people enjoying elections, electing civilian politicians in suits, and having civilian cabinets, but with specific red lines that cannot be crossed, and once they are crossed you will get a phone call from the army – or you will get a coup.

The fierce level of confrontations with the police has definitely been unprecedented since January. You can draw parallels between them in terms of police brutality triggering the uprising, in terms of the tactic of occupying the square, in terms of even repeating the same battles on Mohamad Mahmoud Street that were very reminiscent of the 29th of January – the day after the ‘Friday of Anger’ there was a massacre on that street. But there are differences, of course. Not all sections of the population took part in the uprising, unlike January where there was a higher level of participation.

The other qualitative difference is that you were then revolting against Mubarak; now you are revolting against his own army generals. This is a plus, meaning we’ve come a long way. In February or March if you would have chanted against the army generals in a protest you could have been lynched by the people themselves – not by the military police – I mean by the people. Many people believed the lies and the propaganda of the army at the time about them protecting the revolution, or that it’s Tahrir that’s causing all of the instability, but ten months later when you get this full scale uprising basically against the military and a strong occupation that lasted for a few days with the one demand of putting the army generals in jail then you know you’ve come a long way in terms of the consciousness of the people

The uprising didn’t succeed, obviously; we still have the army generals running the country. But it’s not going to be the last uprising, and we have, at least, I would say, from 3 to 6 years of ebbs and flows, of battles to be won and others to be lost. But in general I’m optimistic. I’m not pessimistic about it.

En vigtig konklusion er, at den optimistiske forestilling om, at Mubarak ville gå af, og så får vi et overgangsstyre og en hurtig overgang til et frit og demokratisk samfund, trods alt er alt for optimistisk i et land, hvor militæret så at sige har ejet så stor en del af samfundets aktier (modsat Tunesien, hvor det trods problemer er gået noget bedre).

En vigtig detalje er også, at oprøret i januar og februar selvfølgelig ikke kun var det på Tahrir-pladsen – Tahrir har været vigtig, men Mubarak var aldrig blevet væltet, hvis ikke der var udbrudt demonstrationer og strejker over hele landet; og et endegyldigt opgør med militæriktaturet kræver tilsvarende, at oprøret generaliseres og kommer helt ud på arbejdspladserne:

According to a labour organizer friend of mine, you witnessed at least 1,500 industrial actions in February alone, which is the total amount of all industrial actions in 2010. Now, these actions continued in February through March, and went down a little bit in April, May, and June. But then you had September, which was probably the month that had the biggest hit in terms of strikes, where roughly three quarters of a million Egyptians took part in a strike; they were mainly in the public transport sector, the teachers, the doctors, and the sugar refineries. Here we are only mentioning the major blocs, but you opened up the newspaper at the time and all these wildcat strikes were happening everywhere.

We did not witness any strike actions in solidarity with Tahrir in this uprising; it is true that the Egyptian Federation of Independent Trade Unions, and some independent unions, supported Tahrir and they had their banners there and a symbolic presence there, but they didn’t mobilize full scale. My explanation for this is that, on the one hand, the Independent Federation is still not rooted enough so as to be able to put together a general strike; and number two, the working class is usually the last class to move – it’s very easy for the youth and the radicals to just leave their family or university for a month to go to Tahrir and set up a camp. If you’re a worker and you have four kids and you’re working a 9 to 5, and sometimes even a 9 to 7 job, to put together a strike action is a completely different story. They are usually the last to move, but when they move it’s game over.

The general strike is coming. I have no doubt about this; what you don’t know is what’s going to be the outcome of the general strike. But the ball is in our court – can we push it left or right, that’s what we’ll see. At the moment there are several important protests taking place, mainly in Alexandria. Tomorrow in Cairo there will be a protest in front of the State Council in Dokki on Giza Street – it’s called Magles Al-Dawla – where workers from two privatized factories are going to show up for a court case to demand the re-nationalization of their companies – which they already won, by the way. That’s the other problem: even when you have a strike that reaches victory it never means that the government is going to fulfill its promises. Just pick and choose the name of any company that’s right now on strike and I will tell you that they have been on strike since 2009, or even 2007!

Tahrir Square is for sure the symbol of this revolution but we will not fall into the trap of taking Tahrir as a barometer for how the revolution is progressing or regressing. That’s what we’ve been saying to activists for the past months who have been demoralized. For example, you call for a ‘Million Man Protest’ in Tahrir to denounce military tribunals and only a few hundred show up, so you get demoralized. But at the same time, within the same month, you have 750,000 Egyptians going on strike and, in effect, destroying the emergency law. Even if they didn’t show up at your own protest in Tahrir Square, they effectively broke the emergency law.

Der er mere – meget mere, så læs endelig det hele. El-Hamalawy taler også om den amerikanske og efterhånden internationale Occupy-bevægelse og mener analogt til, hvad der er brug for i Egypten, at bevægelsen kan få stor betydning – men at den er nødt til at nu ud over og væk fra de pladser, de er begyndt med at besætte:

If your movement remains confined to the square than you’re not going to succeed. You have to take this movement from the square to the workplaces and the university campuses. We did not topple Mubarak in Tahrir. Yes, Tahrir was a heroic battle, a heroic sit-in, and a heroic occupation, which will definitely go down in history as one of the most fantastic struggles that happened this century, but at the same time, the regime could have held out; Mubarak could have stayed in power for a much longer time if it wasn’t for the labour strikes that broke out. So, I’m very proud of our colleagues and brothers and sisters who have taken part in the Occupy movement everywhere, but they have to link their struggle to the workplaces. If they don’t bring in the working class – which is a big challenge, and I’m not saying it’s something easy – then this movement is going to die.

Og det kan de, der gerne vil se et vellykket oprør mod de økonomiske kræfter, der i disse år insisterer på at frede bankerne og samfundets rigeste, mens almindelige mennesker får lov at betale prisen, så få lov at tænke over.  A big challenge, and I’m not saying it’s something easy.

Link: The Egyptian Revolution Continues – an Interview with Hossam el-Hamalawy.

Trolexgate

Georg Metz rammer som ofte før hovedet på sømmet:

Hvordan kan nogen få den idé, at Venstre ikke ville gøre, hvad det skulle være for at forhindre Helle Thorning i at blive statsminister? Tror nogen, at Hjort, Pind, Jensen, Christensen og Løkke, m.fl. i selskab med deres presserådgivere dydsiret afstod fra at drøfte skattesagen, vurdere dens lovende muligheder, og hvad man kunne gøre for ikke at gøre dem mindre lovende? Tror nogen, at disse overskuelige karakterer, der aldrig mentalt kom ud over bøllestadiet i VU, at disse selvbenovede slagsbrødre ikke ville gå endog vidt for, at historien kunne komme til at spille en rolle i valgkampen? Tror nogen, at moral er afgørende parameter for folk, der kommer cigaretter og øller og naturfilm på offentlige bilag og i øvrigt er kendt for at bevæge sig hjemmevant i grænselandet mellem halve og hele usandheder?

Hvordan det kan være, at en tidligere statsminister og dreven politiker oven i købet med vind i meningsmålingerne op til skandalens udbrud kløjs i et selvindkaldt pressemøde? Men et forhold er frem for noget den afgørende blamage i denne historie og kan hænde en del af forklaringen på Løkkes lamslåede optræden forleden.Sagens ubønhørlige forfatningsmæssige alvor må være gået op for ham, og at han ikke kommer igennem uden så alvorlige skrammer, at hans omdømme tager varig skade.

Forsøget på med beskidte og/eller ulovlige midler at diskreditere en politisk modstander i det hele taget og med den åbenbare hensigt en uge før valget at påvirke et valgresultat, som det her utvivlsomt er sket, kan man uden at lade sig gribe af hysteri opfatte som et langsomt maskeret statskup. Det blev ganske vist ved forsøget, men ’sagen’ kostede Socialdemokraterne mandater og afgjorde magtforholdene i den nye regering. Ordet kup er brugt bevidst. Det er, hvad det dybest set var.

Læs blot det hele på Information.dk.

Occupy LA: En anholdelse og dens baggrund

Patrick Meighan, der blandt andet er manuskriptforfatter på TV-serien “Family Guy”, fortæller om sin anholdelse sammen med resten af Occupy LA:

I was arrested at about 1 a.m. Wednesday morning with 291 other people at Occupy LA. I was sitting in City Hall Park with a pillow, a blanket, and a copy of Thich Nhat Hanh’s “Being Peace” when 1,400 heavily-armed LAPD officers in paramilitary SWAT gear streamed in. I was in a group of about 50 peaceful protestors who sat Indian-style, arms interlocked, around a tent (the symbolic image of the Occupy movement). The LAPD officers encircled us, weapons drawn, while we chanted “We Are Peaceful” and “We Are Nonviolent” and “Join Us.”

As we sat there, encircled, a separate team of LAPD officers used knives to slice open every personal tent in the park. They forcibly removed anyone sleeping inside, and then yanked out and destroyed any personal property inside those tents, scattering the contents across the park. They then did the same with the communal property of the Occupy LA movement. For example, I watched as the LAPD destroyed a pop-up canopy tent that, until that moment, had been serving as Occupy LA’s First Aid and Wellness tent, in which volunteer health professionals gave free medical care to absolutely anyone who requested it. As it happens, my family had personally contributed that exact canopy tent to Occupy LA, at a cost of several hundred of my family’s dollars. As I watched, the LAPD sliced that canopy tent to shreds, broke the telescoping poles into pieces and scattered the detritus across the park. Note that these were the objects described in subsequent mainstream press reports as “30 tons of garbage” that was “abandoned” by Occupy LA: personal property forcibly stolen from us, destroyed in front of our eyes and then left for maintenance workers to dispose of while we were sent to prison. (…)

I unlinked my arms voluntarily and informed the LAPD officers that I would go peacefully and cooperatively. I stood as instructed, and then I had my arms wrenched behind my back, and an officer hyperextended my wrists into my inner arms. It was super violent, it hurt really really bad, and he was doing it on purpose. When I involuntarily recoiled from the pain, the LAPD officer threw me face-first to the pavement. He had my hands behind my back, so I landed right on my face. The officer dropped with his knee on my back and ground my face into the pavement. It really, really hurt and my face started bleeding and I was very scared. I begged for mercy and I promised that I was honestly not resisting and would not resist.

My hands were then zipcuffed very tightly behind my back, where they turned blue. I am now suffering nerve damage in my right thumb and palm. (…)

So that’s what happened to the 292 women and men were arrested last Wednesday. Now let’s talk about a man who was not arrested last Wednesday. He is former Citigroup CEO Charles Prince. Under Charles Prince, Citigroup was guilty of massive, coordinated securities fraud.

Citigroup spent years intentionally buying up every bad mortgage loan it could find, creating bad securities out of those bad loans and then selling shares in those bad securities to duped investors. And then they sometimes secretly bet *against* their *own* bad securities to make even more money. For one such bad Citigroup security, Citigroup executives were internally calling it, quote, “a collection of dogshit”. To investors, however, they called it, quote, “an attractive investment rigorously selected by an independent investment adviser”.

This is fraud, and it’s a felony, and the Charles Princes of the world spent several years doing it again and again: knowingly writing bad mortgages, and then packaging them into fraudulent securities which they then sold to suckers and then repeating the process. This is a big part of why your property values went up so fast. But then the bubble burst, and that’s why our economy is now shattered for a generation, and it’s also why your home is now underwater. Or at least mine is.

Anyway, if your retirement fund lost a decade’s-worth of gains overnight, this is why.

If your son’s middle school has added furlough days because the school district can’t afford to keep its doors open for a full school year, this is why.

If your daughter has come out of college with a degree only to discover that there are no jobs for her, this is why.

But back to Charles Prince. For his four years of in charge of massive, repeated fraud at Citigroup, he received fifty-three million dollars in salary and also received another ninety-four million dollars in stock holdings. What Charles Prince has *not* received is a pair of zipcuffs. The nerves in his thumb are fine. No cop has thrown Charles Prince into the pavement, face-first. Each and every peaceful, nonviolent Occupy LA protester arrested last week has has spent more time sleeping on a jail floor than every single Charles Prince on Wall Street, combined.

Og dette skrives, netop mens EU-landenes regeringer planlægger en traktat-ændring, der vil sikre, at heller ikke de europæiske finansfyrster kommer til at lide den mindste nød. Det bliver befolkningen, der kommer til at bære den byrde. Indtil altså nogen får nok og siger fra. Men så er der, som Meighans historie viser, pludselig ressourcer nok – i hvert fald inden for politiet.

Link: My Occupy LA Arrest

Tahrir-pladsen som lærestykke i decentral modstand

Den svensk-jordanske journalist Rami Abdelrahman, som vi efterhånden har citeret nogle gange – første gang, da han præsenterede sine overvejelser over, hvorfor han overhovedet var nødt til at forlade Jordan – har været på Tahrir-pladsen i Cairo og fortæller om, hvordan denne plads kan virke som en slags mikrokosmos af det mod til at ytre sig, som diktatorens fald (trods alle tilbageslag) har afstedkommet i det store land:

On Friday, the 25th of November 2011, a so-called “million-man march” was taking place.

I arrived just as a couple of hundred thousand Egyptians performed Friday prayers. In this blog post, I will revisit some of the observations I noted during my three-day activist tourism on the square. As soon as I approached the end of Talaat Harb St. leading to Tahrir Square, I came across a “control point” – youngsters have tied a rope across the street, and stood there as a human shield preventing anyone from going in without her/his ID checked and bag and pockets searched for weapons.

A young man informed me, as is the custom nowadays, that there is no reason to be offended or to feel targeted – this exercise is done to all visitors to Tahrir Square, and guarantees their safety in the occupied area. Then he said something that really struck me straight at the heart, when I asked him how they organised themselves between the different entrances to the square – he said “we’re not organised, there’s no central unit that gives out tasks, this is all done by volunteers, who keep watch, shift after shift.” True enough, even when I re-entered the square two nights later at 4:00 am in the morning, there were different volunteers guarding the same location, with one young man and one young woman tasked with searching the bags of visitors of their respective genders.

The “unorganisation” of the resistence that overthrew a dictator, took over Tahrir Square, and occupied the entrances to other key strongholds such as the Prime Ministry, the Parliament and the road to the Interior Ministry, etc, was what fascinated me the most. “The only thing that organises us is that we believe in the same thing” — that thing, being apparently a governance system of integrity and equality.

Tahrir Square was a bazaar for the newly regained freedom of expression, it had a festive feeling. Food vendors selling all sorts of street sweets, cold drinks, tea, koshari, fireworks, etc. Hundreds of thousands of demonstrators were engaging in all sorts of political debates and other trivia – with views ranging from radical islamism to ultra liberalism. The salafis had their area, press centre and clinics, and so did the seculars, and many other non-aligned groups.

The real Tahrir “revolutionists,” the disorganised organisers, seemed not to follow any particular sect, party or political ideology – but expressed rather deterministic opposition to the governance status quo, and to many of the options that the more organised parties are putting on the table.

Poverty was also something that struck me. A family consisting of two parents and their 6 children, slept on the street, simply because they received free food and blankets from the volunteers. An almost post-apocalyptic scene that I encountered at a later hour, and something that I’ll never forget.

The most fascinating aspect of it all is the joy, the determination, the pride, and the strength in many faces – the type of faces that tell you, we’re all stakeholders in this. The fresh scent of hope after decades of hopelessness. All with the modest twist of brotherly and sisterly sympathy. This last bit, is something I have never seen before, anywhere, ever. I could go into the political analysis of what is happening in Egypt, but it is irrelevant, in every possible way.  This is the very atom-heart of a long due, generational revolution that will create a parallel world order, if it doesn’t really break the rather fragile, illusionary, and patriarchal global political orders.

Mine fremhævelser. Tilbageslag eller ej, og hvor langt der end somme tider kan forekomme at være tilbage  – der er også sket noget vigtigt. Der er, som jeg så herover, dukket et mod til at være fri og kræve et frit og retfærdigt samfund.

Link: From Tahrir Square: Lessons in unorganized resistance

Israel skader verdens jøder

I hvert fald de amerikanske, skriver Philip Weiss – med sin uretfærdige og brutale besættelse, sit krigsmageri og ikke mindst den tåkrummende racisme blandt ekstreme zionister. Israel har efterhånden forvandlet sig til alt, hvad amerikanske jøder ikke ønsker at være, skriver han:

A feeling has taken root deep in the American Jewish community that Israel is hurting us, hurting our standing in the world and our future. The restrictions on democracy, the curbs on women, the intransigence vis-a-vis the Palestinians when Obama has demanded movement, the indifference to the Arab Spring– Israel is a society we no longer recognize as Jewish like we’re Jewish, and worst of all, its militarism is exposing American Jews to the accusation that we are dually loyal. And we don’t like that: We’re Americans.

The straw that broke the camel’s back was clearly the oafish ad campaign that targeted Christmas and intermarriage– the ad campaign that Netanyahu cancelled. Even rightwing Israel lobbyists were stunned by how clueless the ad campaign was. But it was an expression of genuine Israeli attitudes. And that is what’s so scary: American Jews are waking up to the fact that Israeli society is nothing like ours.

We are integrators. We live in America because we want to be Jews in a diverse society. That is the spirit of American Jewish life by and large. And now these Zionists–separatists whom we never completely trusted when we were arguing with them in Eastern Europe–are quietly understood to have hijacked Jewishness and taken it to a dark ugly place. And their cake is cooked; Israel has produced “apartheid on steroids,” as a Jewish leader in the Nation wrote this fall; he wanted no part of it.

Israeli values are incompatible with American Jewish values. Even Jeffrey Goldberg says the occupation is a “moral disaster.” Well guess what, it’s been going on for 44 years! In its segregated buses and roads, in its ad campaigns that targets intermarriage and Christmas, in the refusal to end the occupation– Israel is a different society than ours.

Læs endelig det hele på MondoWeiss.

Alan Moore om bogbranchen, Occupy-bevægelsen og politik generelt

Alan Moore er naturligvis ikke hvem som helst i forhold til Occupy-bevægelsen – det var, ham, der opfandt Guy Fawkes-masken i Hollywood-filmen V for Vendetta. Det er altså på grund af Alan Moores oprindelige tegneseriefigur, at Occupy-aktivister og Anonymous bruger lige netop den maske i deres aktioner (masken blev designet af tegneren David Lloyd til Lloyds og Moores gamle tegneserie V for Vendetta, som udkom i 1980erne).

Honest Publishing har interviewet Moore om vore dages bogbranche og rigets politiske tilstand, og det kom der en hel del  interessante betragtninger ud af:

[Om bogbranchen]

The people in publishing have given up any personal integrity in favour of sales returns. This has meant that presumably there are as many great first novels as there have always been, but when publishers insist upon squandering their budgets on people that they believe to be celebrities, they’re obviously not going to have anything left to encourage new talent, even if those are talents that could potentially change the entire literary scene or world of publishing. In Private Eye, they published a very informative list of sales figures for political biographies. These are all ones that had been trailered in the national press, had been talked about on television programmes, had been given an immense amount of hype. I think from the biographies they talked about, Cherie Blair’s was the out-and-out winner. I think it sold something like 167 copies. John Prescott had sold 65 copies of his biography, Prezza. What the advances were for that book I would estimate would be getting on for the quarter million mark, something like that. For something that sold 65 copies, if there was an advance of a hundred pound, you’d be lucky to make it back. (…)

[Om Occupy og Frank Millers kritik]

As far as I can see, the Occupy movement is just ordinary people reclaiming rights which should always have been theirs. I can’t think of any reason why as a population we should be expected to stand by and see a gross reduction in the living standards of ourselves and our kids, possibly for generations, when the people who have got us into this have been rewarded for it; they’ve certainly not been punished in any way because they’re too big to fail. I think that the Occupy movement is, in one sense, the public saying that they should be the ones to decide who’s too big to fail. It’s a completely justified howl of moral outrage and it seems to be handled in a very intelligent, non-violent way, which is probably another reason why Frank Miller would be less than pleased with it. I’m sure if it had been a bunch of young, sociopathic vigilantes with Batman make-up on their faces, he’d be more in favour of it. We would definitely have to agree to differ on that one.

[Om, hvad der bør laves om i det her samfund]

Everything. I believe that what’s needed is a radical solution, by which I mean from the roots upwards. Our entire political thinking seems to me to be based upon medieval precepts. These things, they didn’t work particularly well five or six hundred years ago. Their slightly modified forms are not adequate at all for the rapidly changing territory of the 21st Century.

We need to overhaul the way that we think about money, we need to overhaul the way that we think about who’s running the show. As an anarchist, I believe that power should be given to the people, to the people whose lives this is actually affecting. It’s no longer good enough to have a group of people who are controlling our destinies. The only reason they have the power is because they control the currency. They have no moral authority and, indeed, they show the opposite of moral authority.

Link: Del 1, del 2.