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By The Cradle

The social media giant has singled out an independent West Asian media outlet, as it intensifies its crackdown on Palestinian and regional voices, both on its platforms and among its employees.

19 Aug 2024 – On 16 August, Facebook and Instagram parent company Meta permanently banned The Cradle from its social media platforms for allegedly violating community guidelines by “praising terrorist organizations” and engaging in “incitement to violence.”

By Jeffrey D. Sachs

The very strong evidence of the U.S. role in toppling the government of Imran Khan in Pakistan raises the likelihood that something similar may have occurred in Bangladesh.

19 Aug 2024 – Two former leaders of major South Asian countries have reportedly accused the United States of covert regime change operations to topple their governments. One of the leaders, former Pakistan Prime Minister Imran Khan, languishes in prison, on a perverse conviction that proves Khan’s assertion. The other leader, former Bangladesh Prime Minister Sheik Hasina, fled to India following a violent coup in her country. Their grave accusations against the U.S., as reported in the world media, should be investigated by the UN, since if true, the U.S. actions would constitute a fundamental threat to world peace and to regional stability in South Asia.

The two cases seem to be very similar. The very strong evidence of the U.S. role in toppling the government of Imran Khan raises the likelihood that something similar may have occurred in Bangladesh.

In the case of Pakistan, Donald Lu, Assistant Secretary of State for South Asia and Central Asia, met with Asad Majeed Khan, Pakistan’s Ambassador to the U.S., on March 7, 2022. Ambassador Khan immediately wrote back to his capital, conveying Lu’s warning that PM Khan threatened U.S.-Pakistan relations because of Khan’s “aggressively neutral position” regarding Russia and Ukraine.

The Ambassador’s March 7 note (technically a diplomatic cypher) quoted Assistant Secretary Lu as follows: “I think if the no-confidence vote against the Prime Minister succeeds, all will be forgiven in Washington because the Russia visit is being looked at as a decision by the Prime Minister. Otherwise, I think it will be tough going ahead.” The very next day, members of the parliament took procedural steps to oust PM Khan.

On March 27, PM Khan brandished the cypher, and told his followers and the public that the U.S. was out to bring him down. On April 10, PM Khan was thrown out of office as the parliament acceded to the U.S. threat.

We know this in detail because of Ambassador Khan’s cypher, exposed by PM Khan and brilliantly documented by Ryan Grim of The Intercept, including the text of the cypher. Absurdly and tragically, PM Khan languishes in prison in part over espionage charges, linked to his revealing the cypher.

The U.S. appears to have played a similar role in the recent violent coup in Bangladesh. PM Hasina was ostensibly toppled by student unrest, and fled to India when the Bangladeshi military refused to prevent the protestors from storming the government offices. Yet there may well be much more to the story than meets the eye.

According to press reports in India, PM Hasina is claiming that the U.S. brought her down. Specifically, she says that the U.S. removed her from power because she refused to grant the U.S. military facilities in a region that is considered strategic for the U.S. in its “Indo-Pacific Strategy” to contain China. While these are second-hand accounts by the Indian media, they track closely several speeches and statements that Hasina has made over the past two years.

On May 17, 2024, the same Assistant Secretary Liu who played a lead role in toppling PM Khan, visited Dhaka to discuss the US Indo-Pacific Strategy among other topics. Days later, Sheikh Hasina reportedly summoned the leaders of the 14 parties of her alliance to make the startling claim that a “country of white-skinned people” was trying to bring her down, ostensibly telling the leaders that she refused to compromise her nation’s sovereignty. Like Imran Khan, PM Hasina had been pursuing a foreign policy of neutrality, including constructive relations not only with the U.S. but also with China and Russia, much to the deep consternation of the U.S. government.

To add credence to Hasina’s charges, Bangladesh had delayed signing two military agreements that the U.S. had pushed very hard since 2022, indeed by none other than the former Under-Secretary of State Victoria Nuland, the neocon hardliner with her own storied history of U.S. regime-change operations. One of the draft agreements, the General Security of Military Information Agreement (GSOMIA), would bind Bangladesh to closer military-to-military cooperation with Washington. The Government of PM Hasina was clearly not enthusiastic to sign it.

The U.S. is by far the world’s leading practitioner of regime-change operations, yet the U.S. flatly denies its role in covert regime change operations even when caught red-handed, as with Nuland’s infamous intercepted phone call in late January 2014 planning the U.S.-led regime change operation in Ukraine. It is useless to appeal to the U.S. Congress, and still less the executive branch, to investigate the claims by PM Khan and PM Hasina. Whatever the truth of the matter, they will deny and lie as necessary.

This is where the UN should step in. Covert regime change operations are blatantly illegal under international law (notably the Doctrine of Non-Intervention, as expressed for example in UN General Assembly Resolution 2625, 1970), and constitute perhaps the greatest threat to world peace, as they profoundly destabilize nations, and often lead to wars and other civil disorders. The UN should investigate and expose covert regime change operations, both in the interests of reversing them, and preventing them in the future.

The UN Security Council is of course specifically charged under Article 24 of the UN Charter with “primary responsibility for the maintenance of international peace and security.” When evidence arises that a government has been toppled through the intervention or complicity of a foreign government, the UN Security Council should investigate the claims.

In the cases of Pakistan and Bangladesh, the UN Security Council should seek the direct testimony of PM Khan and PM Hasina in order to evaluate the evidence that the U.S. played a role in the overthrow of the governments of these two leaders. Each, of course, should be protected by the UN for giving their testimony, so as to protect them from any retribution that could follow their honest presentation of the facts. Their testimony can be taken by video conference, if necessary, given the tragic ongoing incarceration of PM Khan.

The U.S. might well exercise its veto in the UN Security Council to prevent such a investigation. In that case, the UN General Assembly can take up the matter, under UN Resolution A/RES/76/, which allows the UN General Assembly to consider an issue blocked by veto in the UN Security Council. The issues at stake could then be assessed by the entire membership of the UN. The veracity of the U.S. involvement in the recent regime changes in Pakistan and Bangladesh could then be objectively analyzed and judged on the evidence, rather than on mere assertions and denials.

The U.S. engaged in at least 64 covert regime change operations during 1947-1989, according to documented research by Lindsey O’Rourke, political science professor at Boston Collage, and several more that were overt (e.g. by U.S.-led war). It continues to engage in regime-change operations with shocking frequency to this day, toppling governments in all parts of the world. It is wishful thinking that the U.S. will abide by international law on its own, but it is not wishful thinking for the world community, long suffering from U.S. regime change operations, to demand their end at the United Nations.

Jeffrey D. Sachs, Professor of Sustainable Development and Professor of Health Policy and Management at Columbia University, is Director of Columbia’s Center for Sustainable Development and the UN Sustainable Development Solutions Network.

26 August 2024

Source: transcend.org

By Vijay Prashad

Fascism is an insufficient term, as it denies the intimacy between liberal and far right forces. We present ten theses to understand this ‘intimate embrace’ and the rise of this far right of a special type.

15 Aug 2024 – There has been widespread consternation about how to understand Donald Trump’s emergence as a serious candidate for US president since 2016. Far from an isolated phenomenon, Trump rose to power alongside other strongmen such as Viktor Orbán (prime minister of Hungary since 2010), Recep Tayyip Erdoğan (president of Turkey since 2014), and Narendra Modi (prime minister of India since 2014). People like this, who came to power and cemented their rule through liberal institutions, seem to be impossible to permanently remove through the ballot box. It has become clear that a rightward shift is taking place in liberal democratic states, whose constitutions emphasise multi-party elections while allowing the space for one-party rule to be gradually established.

The concept of liberal democracy was and is a highly contested concept that emerged from European and US colonial powers in the 18^th and 19^th centuries. Its claims of internal pluralism and tolerance, the rule of law, and the separation of political powers came at the same time as its colonial conquests and its use of the state to maintain class power over its own societies. Liberalism today cannot be easily reconciled with the fact that the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO) countries account for 74.3% of world military spending.

Countries with constitutions that emphasise multi-party elections have increasingly seen the gradual establishment of what is effectively one-party rule. This one-party rule may at times be masked by the existence of two or even three parties, concealing the reality that the difference between these parties has become increasingly negligible.

It has become apparent that a new kind of right wing has emerged not only through elections but by exerting dominance in the arenas of culture, society, ideology, and the economy, and that this new kind of right wing is not necessarily concerned with overthrowing the norms of liberal democracy. This is what we called ‘the intimate embrace between liberalism and the far right’, following the writings of our late senior fellow Aijaz Ahmad.

The formulation of this ‘intimate embrace’ allows us to understand that there is no necessary contradiction between liberalism and the far right and indeed that liberalism is not a shield against the far right, and certainly not its antidote. Four theoretical elements are key to understanding this ‘intimate embrace’ and the rise of this far right of a special type:

1. Neoliberal austerity policies in countries with liberal electoral institutions vanquished the social welfare schemes that had allowed liberal sensibilities to exist. The state’s failure to take care of the poor turned into a harshness toward them.
2. Without a serious commitment to social welfare and redistributionist schemes, liberalism itself drifted into the world of far-right policies. These include increased spending on the internal repressive apparatus that polices working-class neighbourhoods and international borders alongside the increasingly stingy distribution of social goods, disbursed only if the recipients allow themselves to be stripped of basic human rights (such as by ‘agreeing’ to the obligatory use of birth control).
3. In this terrain, the far right of a special type found that it became more and more accepted as a political force given the turn by the parties of liberalism to the policies for which the far right had advocated. In other words, this tendency to draw from far-right policies allowed the far right to become mainstream.
4. Finally, the political forces of liberalism and the far right unified across the board to diminish the left’s grasp on institutions. The far right and its liberal counterparts have no fundamental economic differences regarding class. In the imperialist countries, there is a very high confluence of viewpoints on maintaining US hegemony, hostility and contempt for the Global South, and increased jingoism, as seen by the full-throttled military support for the genocide Israel is conducting against Palestinians.

After the defeat of Italian, German, and Japanese fascism in 1945, commentators in the West worried about the incubation of the far right in their societies. Most Marxists, meanwhile, recognised that the far right had not emerged out of nothing, but out of the contradictions of capitalism itself. The collapse of the Third Reich was only a phase in the history of the far right and the development of capitalism: it would emerge again, perhaps wearing different clothes.

In 1964, the Polish Marxist Michał Kalecki wrote the stimulating article ‘The Fascism of Our Times’ (‘Faszyzm naszych czasów’). In that essay, Kalecki said that the new kinds of fascistic groups that were emerging at the time appealed ‘to the reactionary elements of the broad masses of the population’ and were ‘subsidised by the most reactionary groups of big business’. However, Kalecki wrote, ‘the ruling class as a whole, even though it does not cherish the idea of fascist groups seizing power, does not make any effort to suppress them and confines itself to reprimands for overzealousness’. This attitude persists today: the ruling class as a whole fears not the rise of these fascist groups, but only their ‘excessive’ behaviour, while the most reactionary sections of big business support these groups financially.

A decade and a half later, when Ronald Reagan seemed to be on the threshold of becoming the president of the United States, Bertram Gross published Friendly Fascism: The New Face of Power in America (1980), which drew liberally from The Power Elite (1956) by C. Wright Mills and Monopoly Capital: An Essay on the American Economic and Social Order (1966) by Paul A. Baran and Paul M. Sweezy. Gross argued that since large monopolistic firms had strangled democratic institutions in the United States, the far right did not require jackboots and swastikas: this orientation would come through the very institutions of liberal democracy. Who needs tanks when you have the banks to do the dirty work?

The warnings of Kalecki and Gross remind us that the intimacy between liberalism and the far right is not a new phenomenon but one that emerges from deep within liberalism’s capitalist origins: liberalism was never going to be anything but the friendly face of capitalism’s normal brutality.

Liberals are using the word ‘fascism’ to distance themselves from the far right. This use of the term is more moralistic than precise since it denies the intimacy between liberals and the far right. To that end, we have formulated ten theses on this far right of a special type, which we hope will provoke discussion and debate. This is a provisional statement, an invitation to a dialogue.

Thesis One. The far right of a special type uses democratic instruments as much as possible. It believes in the process known as the ‘long march through the institutions’, through which it patiently builds political power and staffs the permanent institutions of liberal democracy with its cadre, who then push their views into mainstream thought. Educational institutions are also key to the far right of a special type since they determine the syllabi for students in their respective countries. There is no need for this far right of a special type to set aside these democratic institutions as long as they provide the path to power not just over the state, but over society.

Thesis Two. The far right of a special type is driving the attrition of the state and transferring its functions to the private sector. In the United States, for instance, its proclivity for austerity is helping gut the quantity and quality of cadre in core state functions, such as the US Department of State. Many of the functions of such institutions, now privatised, instead take place under the auspices of non-governmental organisations led by newly emergent billionaire capitalists such as Charles Koch, George Soros, Pierre Omidyar, and Bill Gates.

Thesis Three. The far right of a special type uses the repressive apparatus of the state as much as is legally permissible to silence its critics and demobilise movements of economic and political opposition. Liberal constitutions provide wide latitude for this kind of use, which liberal political forces have taken advantage of over time to quell any resistance from the working class, peasantry, and left.

Thesis Four. The far right of a special type incites a homeopathic dose of violence in society by the more fascistic elements within its political coalition to create fear, but not enough fear to turn people against it. Most middle-class people the world over seek convenience and are disturbed by inconvenience to themselves (such as that produced by riots, etc.). But, on occasion, an arms-length assassination of a labour leader or an arms-length threat made to a journalist is not blamed on the far right of a special type, which often hastily denies any direct association with the fringe fascistic groups (which are nonetheless linked organically to the far right).

Thesis Five. The far right of a special type provides a partial answer to the loneliness that is woven into the fabric of advanced capitalist society. This loneliness stems from the alienation of precarious working conditions and long hours, which corrode the possibility of building a vibrant community and social life. This far right does not build an actual community, except when it comes to its parasitic relationship with religious communities. Instead, it develops the idea of community, community through the internet or community through mass mobilisations of individuals or community through shared symbols and gestures. The immense hunger for community is apparently solved by the far right, while the essence of loneliness melts into anger rather than love.

Thesis Six. The far right of a special type uses its proximity to private media conglomerates to normalise its discourse and its proximity to the owners of social media to increase the societal acceptance of its ideas. This highly agitational discourse creates a frenzy, mobilising sections of the population either online or in the streets to participate in rallies where they nonetheless remain individuals rather than members of a collective. The feeling of loneliness generated by capitalist alienation is dulled for a moment, but not overcome.

Thesis Seven. The far right of a special type is a tentacular organisation, with its roots spread across various sectors of society. It operates wherever people gather, whether in sports clubs or charitable organisations. It aims to build a mass base in society rooted in the majority identity in a given place (whether race, religion, or a sense of national being) by marginalising and demonising any minority. In many countries, this far right relies upon religious structures and networks to ever-more deeply embed a conservative view of society and the family.

Thesis Eight. The far right of a special type attacks the institutions of power that are the very foundation of its socio-political basis. It creates the illusion of being plebian rather than patrician, when in fact it is deep in the pockets of the oligarchy. It creates the illusion of the plebian by developing a highly masculine form of hyper-nationalism, the decadence of which drips out in its ugly rhetoric. This far right straddles the testosterone power of this hyper-nationalism while playing up its portrayed victimhood in the face of power.

Thesis Nine. The far right of a special type is an international formation, organised through various platforms such as Steve Bannon’s The Movement (based in Brussels), the Vox party’s Madrid Forum (based in Spain), and the anti-LGBTQ+ Fellowship Foundation (based in Seattle, Washington). These groups are rooted in a political project in the Atlantic world that enhances the role of the right wing in the Global South and provides them with the funds to deepen right-wing ideas where they have little fertile soil. They create new ‘problems’ where they did not exist at this scale before, such as the fanfare over sexuality in eastern Africa. These new ‘problems’ weaken peoples’ movements and tighten the right’s grip over society.

Thesis Ten. Though the far right of a special type might present itself as a global phenomenon, there are differences between how it manifests in the leading imperialist countries versus the Global South. In the Global North, both liberals and the far right vigorously defend the privileges that they have gained through plunder over the past five hundred years – through their military and other means – while in the Global South the general tendency amongst all political forces is to establish sovereignty.

The far right of a special type is emerging in a period defined by hyper-imperialism to mask the actuality of hideous power and pretend that it cares about the isolated individuals that it instead harms. It knows human folly well and preys on it.

Vijay Prashad is an Indian historian, editor and journalist. He is a writing fellow and chief correspondent at Globetrotter.

26 August 2024

Source: transcend.org

By Medea Benjamin and Nicolas J. S. Davies

21 Aug 2024 – An Orwellian disconnect haunts the 2024 DNC. In the isolation of the convention hall, shielded from the outside world behind thousands of armed police, few of the delegates seem to realize that their country is on the brink of direct involvement in major wars with Russia and Iran, either of which could escalate into World War III.

Inside the hall, the mass slaughter in the Middle East and Ukraine are treated only as troublesome “issues,” which “the greatest military in the history of the world” can surely deal with. Delegates who unfurled a banner that read “Stop Arming Israel” during Biden’s speech on Monday night were quickly accosted by DNC officials, who instructed other delegates to use “We ❤️ Joe” signs to hide the banner from view.

In the real world, the most explosive flashpoint right now is the Middle East, where U.S. weapons and Israeli troops are slaughtering tens of thousands of Palestinians, mostly children and families, at the bidding of Israel’s Benjamin Netanyahu. And yet, in July, Democrats and Republicans leapt to their feet in 23 standing ovations to applaud Netanyahu’s warmongering speech to a joint session of Congress.

In the week before the DNC started, the Biden administration announced its approval for the sale of $20 billion in weapons to Israel, which would lock the US into a relationship with the Israeli military for years to come.

Netanyahu’s determination to keep killing without restraint in Gaza, and Biden and Congress’s willingness to keep supplying him with weapons to do so, always risked exploding into a wider war, but the crisis has reached a new climax. Since Israel has failed to kill or expel the Palestinians from Gaza, it is now trying to draw the United States into a war with Iran, a war to degrade Israel’s enemies and restore the illusion of military superiority that it has squandered in Gaza.

To achieve its goal of triggering a wider war, Israel assassinated Fuad Shukr, a Hezbollah commander, in Beirut, and Hamas’s political leader and chief ceasefire negotiator, Ismail Haniyeh, in Tehran. Iran has vowed to respond militarily to the assassinations, but Iran’s leaders are in a difficult position. They do not want a war with Israel and the United States, and they have acted with restraint throughout the massacre in Gaza. But failing to respond strongly to these assassinations would encourage Israel to conduct further attacks on Iran and its allies.

The assassinations in Beirut and Tehran were clearly designed to elicit a response from Iran and Hezbollah that would draw the U.S. into the war. Could Iran find a way to strike Israel that would not provoke a U.S. response? Or, if Iran’s leaders believe that is impossible, will they decide that this is the moment to actually fight a seemingly unavoidable war with the U.S. and Israel?

This is an incredibly dangerous moment, but a ceasefire in Gaza would resolve the crisis. The U.S. has dispatched CIA Director William Burns, the only professional diplomat in Biden’s cabinet, to the Middle East for renewed ceasefire talks, and Iran is waiting to see the result of the talks before responding to the assassinations.

Burns is working with Qatari and Egyptian officials to come up with a revised ceasefire proposal that Israel and Hamas can both agree to. But Israel has always rejected any proposal for more than a temporary pause in its assault on Gaza, while Hamas will only agree to a real, permanent ceasefire. Could Biden have sent Burns just to stall, so that a new war wouldn’t spoil the Dems’ party in Chicago?

The United States has always had the option of halting weapons shipments to Israel to force it to agree to a permanent ceasefire. But it has refused to use that leverage, except for the suspension of a single shipment of 2,000 lb bombs in May, after it had already sent Israel 14,000 of those horrific weapons, which it uses to systematically smash living children and families into unidentifiable pieces of flesh and bone.

Meanwhile the war with Russia has also taken a new and dangerous turn, with Ukraine invading Russia’s Kursk region. Some analysts believe this is only a diversion before an even riskier Ukrainian assault on the Russian-held Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant. Ukraine’s leaders see the writing on the wall, and are increasingly ready to take any risk to improve their negotiating position before they are forced to sue for peace.

But Ukraine’s recent incursion into Russia, while applauded by much of the west, has actually made negotiations less likely. In fact, talks between Russia and Ukraine on energy issues were supposed to start in the coming weeks. The idea was that each side would agree not to target the other’s energy infrastructure, with the hope that this could lead to more comprehensive talks. But after Ukraine’s invasion toward Kursk, the Russians pulled out of what would have been the first direct talks since the early weeks of the Russian invasion.

President Zelenskyy remains in power three months after his term of office expired, and he is a great admirer of Israel. Will he take a page from Netanyahu’s playbook and do something so provocative that it will draw U.S. and NATO forces into the potentially nuclear war with Russia that Biden has promised to avoid?

A 2023 U.S. Army War College study found that even a non-nuclear war with Russia could result in as many U.S. casualties every two weeks as the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq did in two decades, and it concluded that such a war would require a return to conscription in the United States.

While Gaza and Eastern Ukraine burn in firestorms of American and Russian bombs and missiles, and the war in Sudan rages on unchecked, the whole planet is rocketing toward catastrophic temperature increases, ecosystem breakdown and mass extinctions. But the delegates in Chicago are in la-la land about U.S. responsibility for that crisis too.

Under the slick climate plan Obama sold to the world in Copenhagen and Paris, Americans’ per capita CO2 emissions are still double those of our Chinese, British and European neighbors, while U.S. oil and gas production have soared to all-time record highs.

The combined dangers of nuclear war and climate catastrophe have pushed the hands of the Doomsday Clock all the way to 90 seconds to midnight. But the leaders of the Republican and Democratic parties are in the pockets of the fossil fuel industry and the military-industrial complex. Behind the election-year focus on what the two parties disagree about, the corrupt policies they both agree on are the most dangerous of all.

President Biden recently claimed that he is “running the world.” No oligarchic American politician will confess to “running the world” to the brink of nuclear war and mass extinction, but tens of thousands of Americans marching in the streets of Chicago and millions more Americans who support them understand that that is what Biden, Trump and their cronies are doing.

The people inside the convention hall should shake themselves out of their complacency and start listening to the people in the streets. Therein lies the real hope, maybe the only hope, for America’s future.

Medea Benjamin is cofounder of CODEPINK for Peace, and author of several books, including Inside Iran: The Real History and Politics of the Islamic Republic of Iran.

Nicolas J. S. Davies is an independent journalist, a researcher with CODEPINK and the author of  Blood on Our Hands: The American Invasion and Destruction of Iraq.

26 August 2024

Source: transcend.org

By Steven Sahiounie

22 Aug 2024 – Former Bangladeshi Prime Minister, Sheikh Hasina, has a shocking accusation against the US. On August 12, while in exile in India, she told the Economic Times, “I could have remained in power if I had surrendered the sovereignty of Saint Martin Island and allowed the U.S. to hold sway over the Bay of Bengal. I beseech to the people of my land, ‘Please do not be manipulated by radicals’.”

Hasina resigned on August 5 after weeks of violent street protests by students angry at a law that awards government civil service jobs. The protests began in June 2024 after the Supreme Court reinstated a 30% quota for descendants of the freedom fighters who won the independence for the country in 1971 after fighting against Pakistan with the help of an Indian military intervention. The students felt they were facing an unfair system and would have limited opportunity for a job based on their educational qualifications, instead of ancestry.

On July 15, Dhaka University students were protesting and calling for quota reforms, when suddenly they were attacked by individuals with sticks and clubs.  Similar attacks began elsewhere and rumors circulated that it was a group affiliated with the ruling Awami League.

Some believe the group who began the violence was paid mercenaries employed by a foreign country. Street protesters who were met by a brutal crackdown were the western media description of the March 2011 uprising in Syria. However, the media failed to report that the protesters were armed and even on the first day of violence 60 Syrian police were killed. The question is in cases like Bangladesh: was this a grass-roots uprising, or a carefully staged event by outside interests?

By July 18, 32 deaths were reported, and on July 19, there were 75 deaths. The internet was shut down, and more than 300 were killed in less than 10 days, with thousands injured.

Some call the Bangladeshi uprising the ‘Gen Z revolution’, while others dub it the ‘Monsoon revolution’. But, experts are not yet united in a source of the initial violent attack on student protesters.

Hasina had won her fourth consecutive term in the January 7 elections, which the US State Department called ‘not free or fair’.  Regional powerhouses, India and China, rushed to congratulate the 76-year-old incumbent.

Hasina had held the peace in a country since 2009 while facing Radical Islamic threats. Targeting Bangladeshi Hindus was never the message or the intent of the student movement, according to some student activists.

The Jamaat-e-Islami has never won a parliamentary majority in Bangladesh’s 53-year history, but it has periodically allied with the opposition Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP). Jamaat, as the party is widely known, was banned on August 1, when Hasina blamed the two opposition parties for the deaths during the anti-quota protests.

Muhammad Yunus, a respected economist and Nobel Laureate, accepted the post of chief adviser in a transitional government until elections are held. He said he will seek to restore order as his first concern.

The Saint Martin Island is a stretch of land spreading across merely three square kilometers in the northeastern part of the Bay of Bengal, and is the focus of the US military who seek to increase their presence in Southeast Asia as a balance against China.

On May 28, China praised Hasina for her decision to deny permission for a foreign military base, commending it as a reflection of the Bangladeshi people’s strong national spirit and commitment to independence.

Without naming any country, Hasina had said that she was offered a hassle-free re-election in the January 7 polls if she allowed a foreign country to build an airbase inside Bangladeshi territory.

“If I allowed a certain country to build an airbase in Bangladesh, then I would have had no problem,” Hasina told The Daily Star newspaper.

Bangladesh was formerly East Pakistan, becoming a part of Pakistan in 1947, when British India was divided into Hindu-majority India and Muslim-majority Pakistan. Bangladesh was founded in 1971 after winning a war of independence. On August 15, 1975, a military coup took over, and Hasina’s father, Sheikh Mujibur Rehman, was assassinated along with most of his family members.

The US State Department, aided by the CIA, have a long history of political meddling in foreign countries. Examples are the 2003 ‘regime change’ invasion of Iraq, and in the 2011 ‘Arab Spring’ we saw the US attack Libya to overthrow the government, the US support of the ‘freedom fighters’ in Syria who were Al Qaeda terrorists, and the US manipulated election in Egypt which installed a Muslim Brotherhood member as President. The American Lila Jaafar received a 5 year prison sentence for her manipulation of the Egyptian election, but Hillary Clinton evacuated her from the US Embassy in Cairo before she could serve her prison sentence, and she is now the Director of the Peace Corps with a White House office.

The US often uses sectarian issues and strife to accomplish their goals abroad. After the Islamists in Bangladesh drove out Hasina, reports of attacks on Hindu temples and businesses circulated on mainstream Indian TV channels.

Hindus, Muslim-majority Bangladesh’s largest religious minority, comprise around 8% of the country’s nearly 170 million population. They have traditionally supported Hasina’s party, the Awami League, which put them at odds with the student rioters.

In the week after Hasina’s ouster, there were at least 200 attacks against Hindus and other religious minorities across the country, according to the Bangladesh Hindu Buddhist Christian Unity Council, a minority rights group.

The police have also sustained casualties in their ranks, proving the protesters were armed as well, and went on a weeklong strike after Hasina fled to India.

Dhaka-based Bangladesh Institute of Peace and Security Studies said they believe inclusivity and plurality are important principles as Bangladesh navigates a post-Hasina era. Those exact words: inclusivity and plurality are current ‘buzz-words’ used in Washington, DC. based political and security groups.

Hasina is credited with doing a good job balancing Bangladesh’s relations with regional powers. She had a special relationship with India, but she also increased economic and defense ties with China.

In March 2023, Hasina inaugurated a $1.21 billion China-built submarine based at Bangladesh’s Cox Bazaar off the Bay of Bengal coast.

On May 28, China praised Hasina for refusing to permit a foreign air base. Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson Mao Ning said, “China has noted Prime Minister Hasina’s speech, which reflects the national spirit of the Bangladeshi people to be independent and not afraid of external pressure.”

Mao said some countries seek their own selfish interests, openly trade other countries’ elections, brutally interfere in other countries’ internal affairs, undermine regional security and stability, and fully expose their hegemonic, bullying nature.

China has invested over USD 25 billion in various projects in Bangladesh, next highest after Pakistan in the South Asian region, who also steadily enhanced defense ties with Bangladesh supplying a host of military equipment, including battle tanks, naval frigates, missile boats besides fighter jets.

Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Hasina had long ignored the democratic backsliding in each other’s countries to forge close ties, and bilateral trade increased with Indian corporations striking major deals

“I also congratulate the people of Bangladesh for the successful conduct of elections. We are committed to further strengthen our enduring and people-centric partnership with Bangladesh,” Modi said in a post on X in January.

Mainstream Indian news outlets, which often serve as mouthpieces for Modi’s Hindu nationalist government, have been focused on a Bangladeshi Islamist party. “What is Jamaat-e-Islami? The Pakistan-backed political party that brought down Sheikh Hasina’s govt,” read one headline. “Jamaat may take control in Bangladesh,” read another, quoting a senior member of Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP).

Some critics claimed India “covertly” helped Hasina win the election, while others said New Delhi used its influence to tone down US and European criticisms of the Bangladeshi vote.

Modi’s Hindu nationalist BJP party came to power in 2014, and Modi’s commitment to a Hindu rashtra, or Hindu nation, while turning its back on secularism has undermined a core Indian foreign policy principle.

In 2019, the Modi government passed controversial citizenship laws that were criticized as anti-Muslim. The BJP’s strident anti-migrant rhetoric sees hardline party members often railing against Muslim “infiltrators” with Indian Home Minister Amit Shah infamously calling Bangladeshi migrants “termites” during an election rally in West Bengal.

The revolution to oust a long-serving leader, who kept the Muslim majority and the Hindu minority in a peaceful coexistence, has opened a new chapter for Bangladesh society. Will this prove to be a destabilizing period in which the Islamic party, Jamaat, holds sway over the society? Will the secular history of Bangladesh be forgotten? The final question will be, when will the new US military base be opened on Saint Martin Island?

Steven Sahiounie is a two-time  award-winning journalist and political commentator.

26 August 2024

Source: transcend.org

By Jake Johnson

“Without an immediate cease-fire and access to vaccines and humanitarian aid across the strip, the people of Gaza are facing a public health disaster.”

20 Aug 2024 – Dozens of humanitarian aid groups and medical professionals warned Tuesday that Gaza could soon face a mass polio outbreak that would endanger children across the enclave and the region if Israel does not immediately stop its bombardment and siege of the Palestinian territory.

“Without immediate action, an entire generation is at risk of infection, and hundreds of children face paralysis by a highly communicable disease that can be prevented with a simple vaccine,” said Jeremy Stoner of Save the Children, part of a coalition of aid organizations and physicians that demanded “an immediate and sustained cease-fire to allow polio vaccinations to take place in Gaza.”

“For a polio vaccination campaign to be effective, it must be able to reach at least 95% of targeted children, and this cannot happen in an active war zone,” the coalition said. “Any cease-fire or pause requested by the U.N. must be used to facilitate full humanitarian access, not just for vaccines but for the full range of assistance needed to sustain civilians’ basic needs. All parties to conflict have an obligation to facilitate humanitarian access at all times, regardless of whether conflict is active or not.”

[https://x.com/Save_GlobalNews/status/1825899709929525608]

The groups’ call came days after Gaza health officials found the enclave’s first polio case in more than two decades after testing a 10-month-old child in Deir al-Balah—one of the cities in which Gaza’s health ministry and the World Health Organization detected polio virus in wastewater last month.

Much of Gaza’s population currently lives in makeshift tents surrounded by rotting garbage and other waste, unsanitary conditions that heighten the risk of infectious disease outbreaks. Israel’s relentless U.S.-backed bombardment of Gaza has decimated the territory’s waste-removal infrastructure and healthcare system, laying the groundwork for a public health catastrophe.

Nahed Abu Iyada, the health program field officer at CARE West Bank and Gaza, said Tuesday that “without an immediate cease-fire and access to vaccines and humanitarian aid across the Strip, the people of Gaza are facing a public health disaster that will spread and endanger children across the region and beyond.”

But the prospects of an imminent cease-fire agreement appeared remote Tuesday as Hamas accused the Biden administration of “buying time for Israel to continue its genocide” by pushing for a deal that grants some of far-right Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s major demands.

The New York Times reported that “under the new U.S. proposal, Israeli troops would be able to continue to patrol part of the Gazan border with Egypt, albeit in reduced numbers—one of Mr. Netanyahu’s core demands.”

Hamas has said that “any agreement must guarantee the cessation of aggression against our people, withdrawal from the Gaza Strip, provision of urgent relief in the form of food and medicine, and reaching a real deal to exchange prisoners.”

Jake Johnson is a staff writer for Common Dreams.

26 August 2024

Source: transcend.org

By René Wadlow

22 Aug 2024 – U.S.-sponsored talks began in Geneva on 19 Aug 2024 to address the ongoing conflict in Sudan, which has been devastating the country for more than 16 months.  Switzerland is co-host of the effort, but the U.S. has taken the lead. The representatives of the Regular Sudanese Army are not participating in the talks, so little progress is expected.

The civil war has gone on since April 2023 between the Rapid Support Forces led by General Mohamed Hamdan, known by his battle name of Hemedti, and the Sudanese Armed Forces led by General Abdul Fattah al-Burham. The fighting has led to some 15,000 persons being killed and 8 million displaced. The agriculture in the country is disorganized, and many people face acute hunger and, in some areas, famine.

Each of the two generals has created local militias which rob, torture, rape, and create conditions of disorder. Many of the militias use child soldiers in violation of UN treaties on the protection of children. Each of the two generals has opened the door to foreign fighters. There are Russian mercenaries which had been under the control of the Russian Wagner Group who had been fighting in Mali, Chad, Niger, and the Central African Republic. There are Ukrainian mercenaries who have come to fight the Russians.

It is difficult to understand the intensity of the current divisions represented by the two generals who had once been allies. The current divisions do not follow earlier fault lines in Sudan.

The Association of World Citizens has appealed for a ceasefire and the provisions for humanitarian assistance as there is an urgent need for food, medicine and health services.

At this stage it is difficult to know what outside parties might have an influence. We have to keep searching what can be done.

René Wadlow is a member of the TRANSCEND Network for Peace Development Environment. 

26 August 2024

Source: transcend.org

By Cynthia Chung

The Arctic: Theater of War or Global Cooperation? A Canadian Patriot Film

“Whenever the government of the United States shall break up, it will probably be in consequence of a false direction having been given to public opinion. This is the weak point of our defences, and the part to which the enemies of the system will direct all their attacks. Opinion can be so perverted as to cause the false to seem true; the enemy, a friend, and the friend, an enemy; the best interests of the nation to appear insignificant, and trifles of moment; in a word, the right the wrong, and the wrong, the right. In a country where opinion has sway, to seize upon it, is to seize upon power. As it is a rule of humanity that the upright and well-intentioned are comparatively passive, while the designing, dishonest and selfish are the most untiring in their efforts, the danger of public opinion’s getting a false direction is four-fold, since few men think for themselves.”

– James Fenimore Cooper (The American Democrat, 1838)

I think it is evident to most by now that the United States is presently undergoing a crisis that could become a full-blown second civil war.

Some might be wondering, is it really so bad that the United States could possibly collapse in the not-so-distant future? After all, isn’t it acting like the worst of empires? Isn’t it wreaking havoc on the world today? Is it not a good thing that it collapses internally and spares the world from further wars?

It is true that the United States is presently acting more like a terrible empire than a republic based on liberty and freedom. It may even be the case that the world is spared for a time from further war and tyranny, if the United States were to collapse. However, this is unlikely and it most certainly would be only temporary, since the U.S. is not the source of such monstrosities but rather is merely its instrument.

This paper will not only go through why this is the case but will also analyze Russia’s historical relationship to the United States in context to its recognition of this very fact.

The Great Liberators

In 1861, the Emancipation Edict was passed and successfully carried out by Czar Alexander II that would result in the freeing of over 23 million serfs. This was by no means a simple task and met much resistance, requiring an amazing degree of statesmanship to see it through. In a speech made by Czar Alexander II to the Marshalls of Nobility in 1856 he stated:

“You can yourself understand that the present order of owning souls cannot remain unchanged. It is better to abolish serfdom from above, than to wait for that time when it starts to abolish itself from below. I ask you to think about the best way to carry this out.”

The success of this edict would go down in history as one of the greatest accomplishments for human freedom and Czar Alexander II became known as the ‘Great Liberator’, for which he was beloved around the world.

Shortly after, in 1863, President Lincoln would pass the Emancipation Proclamation which declared “that all persons held as slaves” within the rebellious states “are, and henceforward shall be free.” There is astonishingly a great deal of cynicism surrounding this today. It is thought that because Lincoln did not announce this at the beginning of the war it somehow was never genuine. However, Lincoln was always for the abolishment of slavery and the reason for his delay was due to the country being so at odds with itself that it was willing to break into pieces over the subject, an intent that Lincoln rightfully opposed and had to navigate through.

Former slave and Lincoln ally, Frederick Douglass, though himself frustrated with the delay to equal rights, understood after meeting and discussing his concerns with Lincoln that the preservation of the country came first, stating:

“It was a great thing to achieve American independence when we numbered three millions [slaves], but it was a greater thing to save this country from dismemberment and ruin when it numbered thirty millions. He alone of all our presidents was to have the opportunity to destroy slavery, and to lift into manhood millions of his countrymen hitherto held as chattels and numbered with the beasts of the field.”

For more on the Lincoln-Douglass story refer to my paper.

In addition, there are many speeches Lincoln gave while he was a lawyer, where he most clearly and transparently spoke out against slavery. In a speech at Peoria, Illinois (Oct 16, 1854), 7 years before he would become president, Lincoln stated:

“This declared indifference, but as I must think, covert real zeal for the spread of slavery, I cannot but hate. I hate it because of the monstrous injustice of slavery itself. I hate it because it deprives our republican example of its just influence in the world—enables the enemies of free institutions, with plausibility, to taunt us as hypocrites—causes the real friends of freedom to doubt our sincerity, and especially because it forces so many really good men among ourselves into an open war with the very fundamental principle of civil liberty—criticizing the Declaration of Independence and insisting that there is no right principle of action but self-interest.”

During the civil war lord Robert Cecil (later called the Marquess of Salisbury and three-time Prime Minister of Britain) expressed his viewpoint on the matter in the British Parliament:

“The Northern States of America never can be our sure friends because we are rivals, rivals politically, rivals commercially…With the Southern States, the case is entirely reversed. The population are an agricultural people. They furnish the raw material of our industry, and they consume the products which we manufacture from it. With them, every interest must lead us to cultivate friendly relations, and when the war began they at once recurred to England as their natural ally.” [emphasis added]

By 1840, cotton made up more than half of American exports. More than 75% of slave cotton was exported to Britain. American slave cotton was the centerpiece of the British Empire’s world cheap-labor system.

The autumn of 1862 would mark the first critical phase of the Civil War. Lincoln sent an urgent letter to the Russian Foreign Minister Gorchakov, informing him that France was ready to intervene militarily and was awaiting England. The salvation of the Union thus rested solely on Russia’s decision to act.

The Foreign Minister Gorchakov wrote in response to Lincoln’s plea:

“You know that the government of United States has few friends among the Powers. England rejoices over what is happening to you; she longs and prays for your overthrow. France is less actively hostile; her interests would be less affected by the result; but she is not unwilling to see it. She is not your friend. Your situation is getting worse and worse. The chances of preserving the Union are growing more desperate. Can nothing be done to stop this dreadful war? The hope of reunion is growing less and less, and I wish to impress upon your government that the separation, which I fear must come, will be considered by Russia as one of the greatest misfortunes. Russia alone, has stood by you from the first, and will continue to stand by you. We are very, very anxious that some means should be adopted–that any course should be pursued–which will prevent the division which now seems inevitable. One separation will be followed by another; you will break into fragments.”

Russia’s proclaimed support in its letters to Lincoln would be put to the test during the summer of 1863. By then, the South’s invasion of the North had failed at Gettysburg and the violent anti-war New York draft riots also failed and Britain, as a result, was thinking of a direct military intervention with the backing of France. What would follow marks one of the greatest displays of support for another country’s sovereignty to ever occur in modern history.

The Russian Navy arrived on both the east and west coastlines of the United States late September and early October 1863.

The timing was highly coordinated due to intelligence reports of when Britain and France were intending their military action. The Russian navy would stay along the US coastline in support of the Union for 7 months! They never intervened in the American civil war but rather remained in its waters at the behest of Lincoln in the case of a foreign power’s interference.

If Russia had not done this, Britain and France would most certainly have intervened on behalf of the Confederate states as they made clear they would, and the United States would have most certainly broken in two at that point. It was Russia’s direct naval support that allowed the United States to remain whole.

Czar Alexander II, who held sole power to declare war for Russia, stated in an interview to the American banker Wharton Barker on Aug. 17, 1879 (Published in The Independent March 24, 1904):

“In the Autumn of 1862, the governments of France and Great Britain proposed to Russia, in a formal but not in an official way, the joint recognition by European powers of the independence of the Confederate States of America. My immediate answer was: `I will not cooperate in such action; and I will not acquiesce. On the contrary, I shall accept the recognition of the independence of the Confederate States by France and Great Britain as a casus belli for Russia. And in order that the governments of France and Great Britain may understand that this is no idle threat; I will send a Pacific fleet to San Francisco and an Atlantic fleet to New York.

…All this I did because of love for my own dear Russia, rather than for love of the American Republic. I acted thus because I understood that Russia would have a more serious task to perform if the American Republic, with advanced industrial development were broken up and Great Britain should be left in control of most branches of modern industrial development.” [emphasis added]

What was Czar Alexander II referring to exactly when mentioning the advanced industrial development of the American Republic? Well, in short he was referring to the Hamiltonian system of economics. Notably, Alexander Hamilton’s 1791 Report on the Usefulness of the Manufactories in Relation to Trade and Agriculture which was published in St. Petersburg in 1807, sponsored by Russian Minister of Finance D.A. Guryev.

It was Hamilton who pioneered a new system of political economy coming out of the war of Independence which saw America bankrupt, undeveloped, and agrarian. Hamilton solved this problem by federalizing the state debts and converting it into productive credit, channelled by national banks into large scale internal improvements with a focus on the growth of manufacturing. Anyone wishing to learn more about this should read Anton Chaitkin’s recent publication Who We Are: America’s Fight for Universal Progress.

In the introduction to the translated Hamilton pamphlet, Russian educator V. Malinovsky wrote:

“The similarity of American United Provinces with Russia appears both in the expanse of the land, climate and natural conditions, in the size of population disproportionate to the space, and in the general youthfulness of various generally useful institutions; therefore all the rules, remarks and means proposed here are suitable for our country.”

This “American system” was what Tsar Alexander II recognised as the only economic system to have successfully challenged the system of empire, which he recognized as the root of all slavery. The ineffective and ultimately costly labour of slaves was no match for competing against a machine tool industry to which Frederick Douglass attested. The construction of rail that was made possible through the development of this machine tool industry is what freed countries from Britain’s maritime supremacy.

The “American System”

In 1842, Czar Nicholas I hired American engineer George Washington Whistler to oversee the building of the Saint Petersburg-Moscow Railway, Russia’s first large-scale railroad. In the 1860s, Henry C. Carey’s economics would be promoted in St. Petersburg’s university education, organised by US Ambassador to Russia Cassius Clay. Carey was a leading economic advisor to Lincoln and leading Hamiltonian of his age.

Sergei Witte, who worked as Russian Minister of Finance from 1889-1891 and later became Prime Minister in 1905, would publish in 1889 the incredibly influential paper titled “National Savings and Friedrich List” which resulted in a new customs law for Russia in 1891 and resulted in an exponential growth increase in Russia’s economy. Friedrich List publicly attributed his influence in economics to Alexander Hamilton.

Lincoln’s Pacific Railroad superintendent, General Grenville Dodge, advised Russia on its Trans-Siberia railroad, built with Pennsylvania steel and locomotives from 1890-1905.

In his 1890 budget report, Sergei Witte- echoing the Belt and Road Initiative unfolding today, wrote:

“The railroad is like a leaven, which creates a cultural fermentation among the population. Even if it passed through an absolutely wild people along its way, it would raise them in a short time to the level requisite for its operation.”

Sergei Witte was explicit of his following of the American model of political economy when he described his re-organization of the Russian railways saying:

“Faced by a serious shortage of locomotives, I invented and applied the traffic system which had long been in practice in the United States and which is now known as the “American system.”

By 1906, Czar Nicholas II of Russia supported the plan for the American-Russian Bering Strait tunnel, officially approving a team of American engineers to conduct a feasibility study.

Russia would complete the trans-Siberian railway in 1905 under the leadership of “American System” follower Count Sergei Witte. On its maiden voyage the Trans-Siberian rail saw Philadelphia-made train cars run across the Russian heartland, and it is no accident that all of the key players involved in the Alaska purchase were also involved in the Russian continental rail program on both sides of the ocean.

Bismarck’s Zollverein

In 1876 Henry C. Carey organized the centennial exhibition where 10 million people from 37 countries came to Philadelphia to see the achievements of the United States in its advancements in machine tool industry, which propelled their economy to the first in the world.

Only three years later, Otto von Bismarck broke Germany’s free trade system implementing an American style tariff policy for his nation. The kinship between Germany and the United States became so strong at this time that Otto von Bismarck’s speech in the parliament (1879) was quoted by McKinley on the floor in US Congress:

“A success of the United States in material development is the most illustrious of modern time. The American nation has not only successfully born and suppressed the most gigantic and expensive war of all history, but immediately afterward disbanded its army, found employment for all its soldiers and marines, paid off most of its debt, given labour and homes to all the unemployed in Europe as fast as they could arrive within its territory and still by a system of taxation so indirect as not to be perceived, much less felt… Because it is my deliberate judgement that the prosperity of America is mainly due to its protective laws, I urge that Germany has now reached that point, where it is necessary to imitate the tariff system of the United States.”

Otto von Bismarck was heavily organising for the building of the Berlin to Baghdad railway, which after much resistance and delay would only be completed in 1940. If this has been accomplished during Otto von Bismarck’s life, the Middle East could have avoided the Sykes Picot carving up.

In 1869, Japanese modernizers working directly with the Lincoln-Carey strategists ran the Meiji Restoration which industrialized Japan.

In the 1880s and 90s, Lincoln-Carey Philadelphia industrialists were contracted for huge infrastructure and nation-building projects in China. Hawaiian Christian missionary Frank Damon, having participated in the Carey group’s strategies at a very high level, helped instigate, shape, and build the Sun Yat-sen organization that gave birth to modern China.

Sun Yat-sen referred to his admiration of Lincoln’s USA as the basis for a new multipolar system saying:

“The world has been greatly benefited by the development of America as an industrial and a commercial Nation. So a developed China with her four hundred millions of population, will be another New World in the economic sense. The nations which will take part in this development will reap immense advantages. Furthermore, international cooperation of this kind cannot but help to strengthen the Brotherhood of Man.”

How Did We End Up Where We Are Today?

With such a glorious outlay of cooperation and common interests across the globe united against an economic system of empire, it begs the obvious question “What went wrong? How did we end up where we are today?”

To give one a quick glimpse into the reason why, let us look at some of the major assassinations and soft-coups from the late 19th century and early 20th century of American system proponents (refer to the image below).

Henry C. Carey stated it best when he described the situation as such, in his “Harmony of Interests” (1851):

“Two systems are before the world; the one looks to increasing the proportion of persons and of capital engaged in trade and transportation, and therefore to diminishing the proportion engaged in producing commodities with which to trade, with necessarily diminished return to the labor of all; while the other looks to increasing the proportion engaged in the work of production, and diminishing that engaged in trade and transportation, with increased return to all, giving to the laborer good wages, and to the owner of capital good profits… One looks to pauperism, ignorance, depopulation, and barbarism; the other in increasing wealth, comfort, intelligence, combination of action, and civilization. One looks towards universal war; the other towards universal peace. One is the English system; the other we may be proud to call the American system, for it is the only one ever devised the tendency of which was that of elevating while equalizing the condition of man throughout the world.”

We have yet to conclude the victor between these two opposing systems, the fight is not over and we would be foolish to give up at the finishing line. What we do today will decide the course of things in the future, and whether we live under a true recognition of freedom and prosperity, or whether we are ruled-over and our liberties treated as “privilege,” that can be given or taken based on the judgement of a ruling class, remains to be seen.

Thus, let us hearken to the words of Lincoln, who in a debate with the slave power’s champion Stephen Douglas, said:

“That is the issue that will continue in this country when these poor tongues of Judge Douglas and myself shall be silent. It is the eternal struggle between these two principles – right and wrong – throughout the world. They are the two principles that have stood face to face from the beginning of time, and will ever continue to struggle. The one is the common right of humanity and the other the divine right of kings.”

For a more detailed overview of this history watch my lecture linked below:

WHY Russia Saved the United States: The Forgotten History of a Brotherhood

10 Dec 2022

Cynthia Chung is Editor-in-Chief and co-founder of the Rising Tide Foundation and a member of the TRANSCEND Network for Peace Development Environment.

26 August 2024

Source: transcend.org

By Maria Popova

Against the Illusion of Separateness

“There is no insurmountable solitude. All paths lead to the same goal: to convey to others what we are. And we must pass through solitude and difficulty, isolation and silence in order to reach forth to the enchanted place where we can dance our clumsy dance…”

The great Chilean poet and diplomat Pablo Neruda (July 12, 1904–September 23, 1973) was only a small boy, just over the cusp of preconscious memory, when he had a revelation about why we make art. It seeded in him a lifelong devotion to literature as a supreme tool that “widens out the boundaries of our being, and unites all living things.”

Although his father discouraged his precocious literary aspirations, the young Neruda found a creative lifeline in the poet, educator, and diplomat Gabriela Mistral — the director of his hometown school. Mistral — who would later become the first Latin American woman awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature and Chilean consul in Madrid, a post in which Neruda would succeed her during his own diplomatic career — recognized and nurtured the boy’s uncommon talent. Fittingly, Neruda’s first published piece, written when he was only thirteen and printed in a local daily newspaper, was an essay titled “Enthusiasm and Perseverance.”

These twin threads ran through the length of his life, from his devoted diplomatic career to his soulful, sorrowful, yet buoyant poetry. His landmark collection Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair, composed before he turned twenty, is to this day the most widely read book of verse in Latin literature and contains some of the truest, most beautiful insight into the life of the heart humanity has ever committed to words.

By the time he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature less than two years before his death, Neruda had become an icon. Gabriel García Márquez, whose own subsequent Nobel Prize acceptance speech echoed Neruda’s humanistic ideals, considered him “the greatest poet of the twentieth century in any language.”

On December 13, 1971, Neruda took the podium in Stockholm to deliver an extraordinary acceptance speech, later included in Nobel Lectures in Literature, 1968–1980 (public library). He begins with a lyrical, almost cinematic recollection of his 1948 escape to Argentina through a mountain pass when Chile’s dictatorial government issued an order for his arrest on account of his extreme leftist politics — a long, trying journey which embodied for the poet “the necessary components for the making of the poem.” He recounts:

Down there on those vast expanses in my native country, where I was taken by events which have already fallen into oblivion, one has to cross, and I was compelled to cross, the Andes to find the frontier of my country with Argentina. Great forests make these inaccessible areas like a tunnel through which our journey was secret and forbidden, with only the faintest signs to show us the way. There were no tracks and no paths, and I and my four companions, riding on horseback, pressed forward on our tortuous way, avoiding the obstacles set by huge trees, impassable rivers, immense cliffs and desolate expanses of snow, blindly seeking the quarter in which my own liberty lay. Those who were with me knew how to make their way forward between the dense leaves of the forest, but to feel safer they marked their route by slashing with their machetes here and there in the bark of the great trees, leaving tracks which they would follow back when they had left me alone with my destiny.

Each of us made his way forward filled with this limitless solitude, with the green and white silence of trees and huge trailing plants and layers of soil laid down over centuries, among half-fallen tree trunks which suddenly appeared as fresh obstacles to bar our progress. We were in a dazzling and secret world of nature which at the same time was a growing menace of cold, snow and persecution. Everything became one: the solitude, the danger, the silence, and the urgency of my mission.

Through this dangerous and harrowing journey, Neruda arrived at “an insight which the poet must learn through other people” — a profound understanding of the interconnectedness of each life with every other, echoing his childhood revelation about the purpose of art. In consonance with the Lebanese-American poet and painter Kahlil Gibran’s insight into why we create, Neruda writes:

There is no insurmountable solitude. All paths lead to the same goal: to convey to others what we are. And we must pass through solitude and difficulty, isolation and silence in order to reach forth to the enchanted place where we can dance our clumsy dance and sing our sorrowful song — but in this dance or in this song there are fulfilled the most ancient rites of our conscience in the awareness of being human and of believing in a common destiny.

Echoing physicist Freeman Dyson’s meditation on how our self-expatriation from history makes for a deep loneliness, Neruda adds:

Our original guiding stars are struggle and hope. But there is no such thing as a lone struggle, no such thing as a lone hope. In every human being are combined the most distant epochs, passivity, mistakes, sufferings, the pressing urgencies of our own time, the pace of history.

He concludes with a vision for what it would take to let go of our damaging illusion of separateness and inhabit our shared humanity:

It is today exactly one hundred years since an unhappy and brilliant poet, the most awesome of all despairing souls, wrote down this prophecy: “A l’aurore, armés d’une ardente patience, nous entrerons aux splendides Villes.” “In the dawn, armed with a burning patience, we shall enter the splendid Cities.”

I believe in this prophecy of Rimbaud, the Visionary. I come from a dark region, from a land separated from all others by the steep contours of its geography. I was the most forlorn of poets and my poetry was provincial, oppressed and rainy. But always I had put my trust in man. I never lost hope. It is perhaps because of this that I have reached as far as I now have with my poetry and also with my banner.

Lastly, I wish to say to the people of good will, to the workers, to the poets, that the whole future has been expressed in this line by Rimbaud: only with a burning patience can we conquer the splendid City which will give light, justice and dignity to all mankind.

In this way the song will not have been sung in vain.

****

Complement with Neruda’s beautiful ode to silence and this lovely picture-book about his life, then revisit other timeless Nobel Prize acceptance speeches from great writers: Toni Morrison (the first black woman awarded the accolade) on the power of language, Bertrand Russell on the four desires driving all human behavior, Pearl S. Buck (the youngest woman to receive the Nobel Prize in literature) on writing and the nature of creativity, and Saul Bellow on how art ennobles us.

_______________________________________

My name is Maria Popova — a reader, a wonderer, and a lover of reality who makes sense of the world and herself through the essential inner dialogue that is the act of writing.

26 August 2024

Source: transcend.org

By Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor

Geneva – Yemen is facing a nutrition emergency of catastrophic proportions, with three districts plunged into severe crisis and four more teetering on the edge of famine. This escalating disaster demands immediate global action and unwavering humanitarian support to avert further tragedy and safeguard countless lives.

While many countries face food insecurity and shortages, famine is only declared by the United Nations when certain conditions are met, using a scale known as the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification (IPC). A famine classification is the highest on the IPC scale, and is declared in an area where at least 20% of the population faces extreme food shortages, acute malnutrition rates exceed 30%, and two out of 1,000 people die from starvation on a daily basis.

For the first time, this level has been reported in Yemen by UN experts in three districts. A report published by the UN’s Integrated Food Security Phase Classification (IPC) Technical Group in Yemen, covering only areas under government control, found that two districts in Hodeidah Southern lowland and one in Taiz lowland (Makha) falls within Phase 5, which is considered the worst phase of the IPC, and four other districts—Mawza and Al Makha in Taiz lowland, and Hays and Al Khawkhah in Hodeidah lowland—are expected to follow by October 2024.

Yemen’s food crisis is a man-made result of the war there, with the most critical cases emerging along the war-torn country’s Red Sea coast. The protracted and devastating conflict that began in March 2015 continues to destroy Yemen, already one of the poorest countries in the Arabian Peninsula and the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region.

War ruins lives, uproots communities, and wrecks food systems, making it the primary cause of hunger in Yemen. In almost a decade, the conflict and its proxy war have killed more than 150,000 people there, caused economic collapse, and produced one of the world’s worst humanitarian crises.

Today, 21.6 million Yemenis—two-thirds of Yemen’s population—don’t know where their next meal is coming from, and more than 80% of Yemenis live below the poverty line.

As per the IPC report, malnutrition rates in Yemen have significantly worsened due to a combination of drivers, including a lack of drinking water, a shortage of nutritious food, the spread of diseases such as cholera and measles, and broader economic downturn.

The number of acutely malnourished children in the country has increased by 34% compared with last year, including more than 18,500 children under the age of five who are projected to be severely malnourished within the coming months.

Women and girls suffer disproportionately from food insecurity and malnutrition, and coping mechanisms are becoming increasingly desperate. Women eat last and least, giving priority to children and other relatives or using money for other household needs. Around 223,000 pregnant and lactating women are expected to be malnourished by the end of this year. In addition, early marriage has increased since the escalation of the conflict, and girls as young as eight years old are being married off to reduce the number of family members to feed, or as a source of income in order to feed the rest of the family and pay off debts.

Beyond the four districts projected to slip into famine, according to the IPC report, all 117 districts in government-controlled areas are expected to suffer from “serious” levels of acute malnutrition by October 2024.

About half of the country’s population—or 18.2 million people—is in need of humanitarian aid this year, even those hundreds of miles from the front line, because Yemen is critically dependent on imports, humanitarian funding, and incomes that have been knowingly undermined by parties to the conflict.

Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor emphasises the urgent need for the international community to work towards securing an end to this crisis and an inclusive peace in Yemen, stressing the crucial importance of increased humanitarian support and intervention to mitigate the impacts of the famine and acute malnutrition, especially on the lives of vulnerable individuals like pregnant women and children. Euro-Med Monitor also calls on the parties to the conflict to address the health and nutrition emergencies in Yemen and ensure access to sufficient nutritious food and safe drinking water; and notes that this will require the international community to unlock financial commitments and implement political solutions to safeguard the country’s food security and the overall future of Yemen’s population, revitalize the shrinking economy, and pave the way for peace.

Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor is a Geneva-based independent organization with regional offices across the MENA region and Europe

28 August 2024

Source: countercurrents.org