Radical media, politics and culture.

"Hindu Warrior Back in His 'Chariot'"

Praful Bidwai


The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), which leads India's ruling coalition, has launched a new stratagem in its high-pitched election campaign to rake up its trademark issue of religious and ethnic identities.

Starting Mar. 10, Lal Krishna Advani, the part's best-known hawkish leader and Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee's deputy, will begin a month-long tour covering 12,000 kilometers and criss-crossing through more than a fifth of India's 545 parliamentary constituencies.

We all need to keep posted on what may be in store for civil life in this country. For example: What's a marriage?


The Presidential Prayer Team is currently urging us to: "Pray for the President as he seeks wisdom on how to legally codify the definition of marriage. Pray that it will be according to Biblical principles. With any forces insisting on variant definitions of marriage, pray that God's Word and His standards will be honored by our government."

Here, in support of the Prayer Team's admirable goals, is a proposed Constitutional Amendment codifying marriage entirely on Biblical principles:

"US-Haiti"

Noam Chomsky, March 09, 2004

Those who have any concern for Haiti will naturally want to understand how its most recent tragedy has been unfolding. And for those who have had the privilege of any contact with the people of this tortured land, it is not just natural but inescapable. Nevertheless, we make a serious error if we focus too narrowly on the events of the recent past, or even on Haiti alone. The crucial issue for us is what we should be doing about what is taking place. That would be true even if our options and our responsibility were limited; far more so when they are immense and decisive, as in the case of Haiti. And even more so because the course of the terrible story was predictable years ago -- if we failed to act to prevent it. And fail we did. The lessons are clear, and so important that they would be the topic of daily front-page articles in a free press.

hydrarchist writes:

First International Gathering on Social Movements and Research

[Jornades Internacionals Moviments Social i Recerca]

The first "International Conference on Social Movements and Research"
(Jornades Internacionals Moviments Social i Recerca), was held at the end
of January 2004 in Barcelona. It brought two hundred participants from
various places around the world together, who are doing activist research
or who are interested into it. It was a space for various discussions on
the relation between research and social movements and it was ideal for
exchanging ideas and to create research networks. A network of activists,
students and researchers from Barcelona organised the meeting.


In the last months there have been a lot of articles on the situation in Palestine -- check out Juliana Fredman's contributions. Whilst in Israel there is determined opposition to the wall and government policy. Often this movement does not get the attention it merits. Perhaps it's simpler for people to feel an easy solidarity with the Palestinians than to face the complexities of Israel's divided society. In the next weeks I'll try to remedy this lacuna a bit. Here is the first piece, written by a friend from Jerusalem last summern. [H.]

Ending the Israeli Occupation by Decentralizing Power

Ronen Eidelman

Ronen Eidelman is an activist, graphic designer and journalist living in Jaffa, Israel. Currently he is working on the campaign against the apartheid wall as part of the collective "anarchist against the wall".

One morning, in the first week of October 2000, I was awakened by a phone call; on the other end of the line was a good friend: “Ronen! We are at war.” “Who is {{we}}?” I muttered. It was my gut reaction. My sleepy head really had no idea what my friend was talking about. Was our football team having a big match today? Are the Orthodox in another big dispute with the seculars? Perhaps it’s south Tel-Aviv against north Tel-Aviv? God knows it could even be the crazy techno DJs fighting with the drum & bass posse.

"Egypt's Leading Feminist Unveils Her Thoughts"

Ahmed Nassef Interviews Nawal El Saadawi

[In an interview with Women's eNews, prominent feminist and
human rights activist Nawal El Saadawi discusses the current
crisis of Egyptian feminism and the role of progressive
activists living under repressive Arab regimes.]

CAIRO, Egypt --The subject of this interview, Dr. Nawal El Saadawi, one of the most well-known feminists
and political dissidents in the Arab world, was born in 1931
in Kafr Tahla, a small village north of Cairo.


A psychiatrist by training, she first rose to international
prominence with her 1972 book, "Women and Sex," which dealt
with the taboo topic of women's sexuality and led to her
dismissal as Egypt's director of public health. She also lost
her positions as the chief editor of the medical journal,
Health, and as the assistant general secretary of the
Egyptian Medical Association. Since then, her many books and
novels, most focusing on issues of Arab and Muslim women and
sexuality within the context of repressive religious
authority and tradition, have made her the target of both
Egypt's secular regimes and the Muslim religious
establishment.


"Struggle, Event, Media"


Maurizio Lazzarato

Why can the
paradigm of representation not function in politics, nor
in artistic modes of expression, and here especially in
the production of works that employ moving images?

I will attempt to
answer these questions by using the paradigm that imagines
the constitution of the world from the relationship
between event and multiplicity. Representation is conversely
founded on the subject-work paradigm. In this paradigm
the images, the signs and the statements have the function
of representing the object, the world, whereas in the
paradigm of the event, images, signs and statements
contribute to allowing the world to happen. Images,
signs and statements do not represent something, but
rather create possible worlds. I would like to explain
this paradigm using two concrete examples: the dynamic
of the emergence and the constitution of post-socialist
political movements and the way television functions,
in other words, signs, images and statements in contemporary
economy.

Here's a nice video from San Francisco Indymedia:

WarPigs

"A War Against the Elites:

The America That Will Vote for Bush"

Tom Frank, Le Monde Diplomatique, Feb 2004

The US is currently going through the peculiar process of deciding which
Democratic presidential candidate will stand against George Bush in
November. The aversion to Bush, at home and abroad, makes us forget how many
people support this spokesman for another America sure of its superiority
and its values.

For those who would like to see and hear a recent talk on the "Dance of the Dialectic" that
Bertell Ollman gave at the Rethinking Marxism conference last fall in Amherst, Massachusetts, check out Cultural Logic at this URL:

Ollman

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