I would be more worthy
if I am a wage earner
if I am male
if I am white
if I am not dis-abled
if I am least colonised
if I am from the mother country
if I am young and not too young
if I am seductively skinny
if I am gender normative
silent alliance and complicit silence
secret scythes to reproduce
and feed the dream
that steals from
all of us.
Jinjirrie, July 2013
Snowden
How we love Amerikkka, land of bugs and drones,
Where obscenely rich old men perch upon their thrones,
Spying on the world to keep their loot secure,
Destruction is their legacy, they will not endure.
The US gave us Hollywood to keep us occupied,
Sharing in the dream, we’d sleep, complicit in the lies.
Jinjirrie, July 2013
Independence What?
genocide
puffed pride
worlds collide
truth died
monoculture pesticide
unreconciled
desensitised
settler heart identified
To paraphrase a dead French guy badly, the surveillance state has to change people/populations into the kind of group that basically remains silent. That is what is needed first in order to make the unthinkable possible and finally, normal.
This is why, when they come for some of us, they actually come for all of us.
I smell the fear on your vinyl briefcase
as across the table like Captain Cook
you pity the poor natives.
Your backdoor agenda and verbal pyrotechnology’s
a front for the urgency to move onto lunch,
the bottom line, where you will be free
of the irritation of our disagreement.
Snake on a ladder, you have all the answers
before the questions are put, and if I resist
and say ‘what about this?’ I’ll be hived off.
You want your lunch and I have a hunch
you’ll have your way no matter what I say,
top down, bottoms up.
I’m not here for a handout, just some of our taxes back.
You have your priorities sent down the line
(I’ll scratch your back if you stab mine),
keeping the upper hand for the mortgage’s sake,
your PS perks and old boy lurks building
a superstructure of barbies and kids on Sunday
with the Director and the man on the next rung,
top down, bottoms up,
drinking and laughing about idealists
who’d like to step over your head.
I wonder if you hear us at all,
while unseen in the community
quiet synergy turns the wheels eventually,
bottoms up.
“There is unity in the oppression. There must be absolute unity and determination in the response.”
“The United States must renounce its witchhunt against Wikileaks.”
“The United States must pledge that it will not persecute journalists for shining a light on the rich and powerful.”
“The US war on whistleblowers must end.”
“Bradley Manning must be released. If Bradley Manning did as he is accused, he is a hero and an example to all of us and one of the world’s foremost political prisoners.”
‘The report said staff at two forensic laboratories were unable to find conclusive evidence of Mr Assange’s DNA on a torn condom provided by one of two women who claim to have been assaulted in August 2010.
However, the same analysts have found DNA believed to belong to Mr Assange on a condom from a second woman, The Mail on Sunday reports.’
“If our demands, these rights, threaten the existence of Israel, what does that say about Israel?”
“The hysteria about this conference tells us soemthing about the moment we are in, we are in the endgame.”
“Israelis don’t have a right to superiority.”
“We’re here for the dozens of children born at military checkpoints because Israelis have not allowed ambulances through.”
“We are here in solidarity with the prisoners, including nearly 200 Palestinian children.”
“It’s the occupation forces who should be standing trial, not the children.”
“We stand together against all forms of bigotry: against racism, against Islamophobia, against anti-Semitism; we are one against sexism, against homophobia, against discrimination due to physical ability; we affirm and embrace the rights, dignity and equality of all human beings; and all are welcome here tonight.”
“Palestinians are told: ‘you must be nonviolent’. Why don’t we hear that said to Israel?”
“End the military occupation, end all forms of discriminationa against Palestinians in Israel, recognise Palestinians’ right of return. None of these goals contradict the rights of Israelis.”
“We are the 99%, we have to link this struggle to so many other struggles, here and round the world.”
“We have an abuse of the Civil Rights act, insteading of opening the campus, it’s designed to silence discussion.”
“The BDS movement grew out of the realisation that the US and UN were not upholding their responsibilities.
They don’t because of the power realities. We have to do it ourselves. We’d like to reach a state where states acted responsibly. US resisted sanctions against SAfrica to the very end – it’s often citizens’ movements that push governments to act responsibly from the bottom up, not the top down.
The amazing thing about the movemetn is that it is led by Palestinians, the BNC, but the implementation is done by local initiatives and creativity all over the world. The question is where do you think it will go over the next 5 yrs – I look forward to your creativity. We have to do that work as part of the broader solidarity movement … It’s true Palestine has been a taboo even on the left in this country for a very long time.
Palestine was always pushed to the side, but this is changing. The shift is that Palestine is part of a much larger global struggle.”
‘The JDO is a self-described “militant” organisation, though others have labelled it a “terrorist group”. It is a splinter group from the more infamous Jewish Defence League (JDL), and like the JDL subscribes to the extremist Zionist ideology of Kahanism, and boasts of physically attacking pro-Palestinian activists in the US.’
‘All Israeli wars since 1973 were flawed wars of choice. Israel initiated all of them. None of them was inevitable, none resulted in any benefit that could not have been achieved using different means. In fact all of them were disastrous for us, even if the disaster was even greater for the other side. The most megalomaniac of them all, the Second Lebanon War, was also the most disastrous of them all. This bears remembering when debating the even greater megalomania of an attack on Iran. ‘
Growing up as a Jewish anti-apartheid activist in South Africa, I was often told by white racists to “go back to Israel”. The idea that Jews don’t belong among non-Jews is the traditional language of anti-Semitism – and also of the modern ideology of Zionism that emerged in the late 19th century. Zionism’s founder, Theodore Herzl, believed that anti-Semitism of the sort I encountered was inevitable and even “natural” whenever Jews lived among gentiles. He effectively concurred with the anti-Semites’ remedy: that I should “go back to Israel”.
Apartheid, by the way, denied black people the rights of citizenship on the basis that their “national homelands” were in Bantustans such as Transkei and Kwazulu – bogus “states” in which they supposedly would exercise their right to self-determination.
Jews have certainly suffered for the right to live in security and safety, but the majority have chosen to exercise that right not in a separate Jewish nation state, but instead as Americans, Argentines, British or French. When Mr Netanyahu proclaims himself not just the prime minister of Israel, but also the “leader of the Jewish people”, that’s an expression of an ideology that holds that we’re a separate nation. I don’t believe that the majority of diaspora Jews are comfortable with the idea that they’re not really Americans or other nationalities, but are instead part of a separate people whose “national home” is Israel. While their grandparents’ experience may have been one of Jewish persecution and impermanence, most young Jews in the West today are not assuming that their gentile neighbours are going to turn on them.
If the current distribution of the world’s Jewish population changes in the coming decades, Israel’s share is more likely to shrink than to grow. The Israeli government revealed in 2003 that some 750,000 Israeli Jews were living abroad. Israel’s former prime minister Ehud Olmert addressed French Jews a couple of years later and implored them to send their children “home” to Israel. Ironically, his sons were living in Paris and New York at that time.
By insisting that the Palestinians declare Israel “the national home of the Jewish people”, Mr Netanyahu is, in effect, asking Mahmoud Abbas to recognise a claim against which more than half of the world’s Jews have voted with their feet.
‘Charging these “Me Firsters” with principled loyalty to Israel drastically overestimates them. The record suggests that they are, as a rule, in it squarely for themselves. This confusion is significant, for example because a more realistic appreciation of the interests driving the Israel lobby and its sympathisers would draw attention to the ways in which support for Israeli militarism benefits and speaks to elite interests in the US, rather than just in Israel.’ (I’d go further about how US militarism benefits and speaks to elite interests in Israel 🙂
Delightful to read at Christmas time – Chavez nails Obama, figurehead of the neolib US plutocracy behemoth, as a miserly fraud.
The president of the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela, Hugo Chavez, replied to statements said by his counterpart from the United States, Barack Obama, who criticized the sovereign relationship between Venezuela and Cuba, among others.
Chavez asked Obama to take care of poor people in his own country, who since the arrival of winter have endured cuts in social assistance to pay for in home heating.
“Obama is a total fraud. He cut social assistance for home heating oil for the poor,” Chavez said during a cabinet meeting at the Miraflores Presidential Palace.
Given that situation, President Chavez said he had held a conversation with Oil Minister Rafael Ramirez so as to increase the support of Venezuela’s CITGO to poor people who endure temperatures below zero during the winter in the United States.
According to Chavez, Obama is just looking for votes by criticising others and Chavez called on him to work with “the good people” of the United States.
“Obama is just about to lose the elections and with these criticisms [of Venezuela] he just wants to win some votes. You are a fraud, a total fraud. If I could be a candidate in the United States, I would beat you. I would win 80-20, I would beat you with [the votes] of all the good people you have there,” Chavez said.
Referring way back to Trotsky, it may be worthwhile to consider the relevance of his thoughts to the Occupy movement, which has as yet not produced a revolutionary party capable of leading it to victory.
‘We must not identify war dictatorship — the dictatorship of the military machine, of the staff, of finance capital — with a fascist dictatorship. For the latter, there is first necessary a feeling of desperation of large masses of the people. When the revolutionary parties betray them, when the vanguard of workers shows it incapacity to lead the people to victory — then the farmers, the small business men, the unemployed, the soldiers, etc., become capable of supporting a fascist movement, but only then.
…
‘We may set it down as a historical law: fascism was able to conquer only in those countries where the conservative labor parties prevented the proletariat from utilizing the revolutionary situation and seizing power.”
from Leon Trotsky’s FASCISM What It Is and How To Fight It
