Radical media, politics and culture.

Anonymous Comrade writes:

"Sorry, Mr. Prime Minister, Afghanistan Is Not Canada's War"

John Chuckman

"Prime Minister Stephen Harper says he has trouble understanding Canadians who feel ardently that their country's soldiers should not be involved in Afghanistan." — Toronto Globe and Mail

Afghanistan is not our war, Mr. Prime Minister.

We are not threatened by voices in the Middle East opposing American policy, unless you believe one reference in a recording of bin Laden mentioning Canada along with other countries. That recording, along with other post-invasion recordings, was almost certainly a CIA fraud, for Osama bin Laden had to be killed in the heavy bombing of his mountain redoubt.

"Other Loves" in the "Other Campaign"- Oaxaca's Queer Community Looks for Common Ground with the Latest Phase of Zapatista Struggle

By Mark Swier


from Narco News

On his "Other Campaign" stops through Mexico, Zapatista
Subcomandante Marcos regularly invites the participation of
workers, farmers, indigenous peoples, women, youth and
elders in constructing a national anti-capitalist campaign,
"from below and to the left." But perhaps alone among
nationally-recognized political leaders he adds gays and
lesbians -- what he frequently refers to as the community of
"other loves" -- to the list of people who fight for a new
Mexico and who the Zapatistas seek to ally with in a larger
struggle. He has been met along the campaign trail by a
broad spectrum of the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender
and Queer (LGBTQ) community, a vital sector of allies who
have shown support both organizationally and individually to
the "Other Campaign" and its goals.

In fact, the EZLN has a long history of drawing connections
between the struggle for dignity and survival of indigenous
people in Chiapas and movements for liberation around the
world. There are plenty of beautiful words that stand as
evidence. The poetics of Marcos have referenced queer
movements at different times for the past 12 years, last
year even challenging Italian soccer giant Inter Milan to a
match, claiming that the Zapatista squad would be
representing with a lineup of queer and transgender players.

However, even in the "alternative media" very little
attention has been paid to the relationship between the
Mexican queer community and the Zapatista struggle. The
Other Journalism decided to begin our coverage of "other
loves in the other campaign" in the majority indigenous city
of Juchitán, Oaxaca, where Marcos visited on February 6, and
where a visible and very "out" queer and transgender
population has long played a significant role in the city's
social, cultural, economic and political life.

Custodians of chaos

Kurt Vonnegut

"Do unto others what you would have them do unto you." A lot of people think Jesus said that, because it is so much the sort of thing Jesus liked to say. But it was actually said by Confucius, a Chinese philosopher, five hundred years before there was that greatest and most humane of human beings, named Jesus Christ.

The Chinese also gave us, via Marco Polo, pasta and the formula forgunpowder. The Chinese were so dumb they only used gunpowder for fireworks. And everybody was so dumb back then that nobody in either hemisphere even knew that there was another one.

"Hey You! Stop!"

Dave Segal

NYC activist Dave Segal reported to prison Monday, March 13th, where he will serve six months for actions he took to protest the war in Iraq. These are his words about the experience that took him there.

"Hey you! Stop!"


Those words marked the beginning of a year and two month journey that will end in three days when I report to the Fort Dix Federal Prison. In the dark, early hours of January 31st, 2005, I found momentum pushing me to go ahead with an action that I had very poorly prepared for. I had come to the Bronx that night after having scouted out an Army recruiting station next to Westchester Square in the eastern part of the borough. With a few lighter fluid soaked rags, I hoped to put some small dent in the huge military machine. I failed pretty miserably.

I arrived that night with no lookout and a poorly thought out escape plan. The feelings in my stomach, which I should have seen as a warning to turn back, I interpreted as general nervousness. I would just go ahead with the action and any kinks would work themselves out. After hammering out a section of the glass door of the building, I took out one of the rags, lit it, and tossed it inside on the carpet. I like to think it was the adrenaline that made me think that lighting the carpet on fire would burn the place down. No matter the reason, I was very, very wrong.

Anonymous Comrade writes:

"The Parable of the Hatchet:

or, the Nonsense of Nation-Building in Afghanistan"

John Chuckman

Nation-building is a term created by people living off Pentagon contracts. It is one of those queasy political expressions with no hard meaning yet its use raises few eyebrows. The term sounds as though it means something, and it is treated as though it were something you might study. At least this is true in the United States where people are hypnotized by hype and substance-lacking words, where inflating nothing into something is an everyday art.

"Clausewitz on the Pampas:
An Argentine Snapshot as Latin America Moves Leftward"

Loren Goldner

(The following is based on a visit to Argentina
(February 2006) It makes no pretense to be comprehensive or anything beyond impressions. Most of it is based on conversations with militants and intellectuals. The main discovery of the trip was the current of the radical piqueteros,
who for nearly ten years have been grappling with the problem of strategy and tactics in the epoch of de-industrialization, precarious employment, temp jobs and mass unemployment, a period in which the old workplace-centered strategies no longer seem viable. The main aim of the article is to bring the rich Argentine experience of strategy and tactics to an international audience, to hopefully stimulate further discussion of its strengths and weaknesses.)

A left-ideological haze hangs over Argentina, and presumably much of Latin America. Figures as diverse as Castro, Guevara, Chavez, Sub-Comandante Marcos, and Evo Morales are viewed across the spectrum in a warm and fuzzy way, expressing an omnipresent populism, even by people who are critical of them politically. Argentine nationalism, and beyond that a palpable Latin American “continentalism”, are delicate subjects, laced with the hurt of centuries of imperialism, as is/was the 1982 Malvinas war. Even an older woman, self-professed anarchist and ex-lover of the (now deceased) interesting anarcho-Marxist theorist Abraham Guillen bristled when I suggested that Che Guevara had been a Stalinist. And Guillen’s life had been threatened by Castro and Guevara and he was forced to flee Cuba (ca. 1960) after falling out with them over their commitment to a rural foco guerrilla strategy (Guillen argued for an orientation to the urban working class).

Mathew G.H Toll writes:


"Australian Neo-Liberals Let Their Agenda Slip"

Matthew G.H. Toll


Senator Nick Minchin, leading member of the Australian federal government has been taped during a private meeting advocating further industrial relations reform if the liberal party is re-elected into another term.

"The fact is the great majority of Australians do not support what we are doing on industrial relations, they violently disagree," said Senator Minchin to HR Nicholls Society, a far-right wing group intent of the dissolution of the current IR system in favour a ‘flexible system’. Amounting to an IR system where workers rights effectively mean ‘take it or leave it’, lowering minimum wages and conditions.

Eric Hobsbawm and Jacques Attali on Karl Marx

New Statesman

In the past week Eric Hobsbawm, the pre-eminent historian and avowed communist, debated the role of Karl Marx in the 21st century with the one-time international banker Jacques Attali. They came to some unlikely conclusions.

Hobsbawm: Here we are, paying our respects to Karl Marx. Jacques Attali's biography of him, which has sold like hot cakes in France, is being translated in Britain. I've only done the biography of Marx in The Dictionary of National Biography, in a more modest way. When you consider, it's really rather strange that we should be here to talk to an enormous audience about it. One can't say that he died a failure in 1883, because his writings had begun to have some impact in Russia and a political movement in Germany was already in being under the leadership of his disciples. And yet, how could he have been satisfied with his life's work? He'd written a few brilliant pamphlets and the torso of an uncompleted major work: Das Kapital. His major political effort since the failure of the 1848 revolution, the so-called First International of 1864-73, had foundered. He had established no place of significance in the politics of the intellectual life of Britain, where he had lived for over half his lifetime. And yet what an extraordinary posthumous political success.

NOT BORED! writes:

"The Sick Planet"

Guy Debord

Today "pollution" is in fashion, exactly in the same manner that revolution is: it takes hold of the entire life of society, and it is illusorily represented in the spectacle. It is boring chatter in a plethora of erroneous and mystifying writings and discourses, and in reality [dans les faits] it gets everyone in the throat. It reveals itself everywhere as ideology and it gains on the ground as real process. These two [mutually] antagonistic movements -- the supreme stage of commodity production and the project of its total negation, equally rich in internal contradictions -- grow together. They are the two sides through which a single historical moment (long-awaited and often foreseen in inadequate partial figures) manifests itself: the impossibility of the continuation of the functioning of capitalism.

The epoch that has all the techincal means to absolutely alter the conditions of life of the entire Earth is also the epoch that, by the same separated technical and scientific development, disposes of all of the means of control and indubitable, mathematical prediction to exactly measure in advance where -- and when -- the automatic increase in the alienated productive forces of class-society will lead: that is to say, so as to measure the rapid degradation of the conditions for survival in the most general and trivial senses of the term.

While imbecilic reactionaries still hold forth on and against an aesthetic critique of all this, and believe themselves lucid and modern when they affect to marry their century by proclaiming that the super-highway and Sarcelles have their own beauty, which one must prefer to the discomfort of the "picturesque" old neighborhoods, or by gravely remarking that the entirety of the population eats better, despite those nostalgic for good food, the problem of the degradation of the totality of the natural and human environment already completely ceases to pose itself on the plane of so-called ancient quality, aesthetic or otherwise, and radically becomes the problem of the material possibility for existence of a world that pursues such a movement. This impossibility is in fact already perfectly demonstrated by all of separated scientific knowledge, which now only discusses the expiration [date] and the palliatives that, if one applies them diligently, can slightly delay it. Such a science can only accompany to destruction a world that has produced it and has it, but is forced to do so with open eyes. It thus shows, to a caricatural degree, the uselessness of knowledge without use.

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