Monday, January 19, 2009
Musical Innerlube: Korn - 'Freak on a leash'
Reminiscent of the bullet that pierced the fabric of Greek society...
Iran says AIDS doctors among US-backed plotters
Iran said on Monday that two doctors jailed since June were among a group convicted of a US-backed plot to overthrow the Islamic republic by creating social upheaval, Fars news agency reported.
"Among the four key elements arrested in this case there were two doctors named Arash and Kamiar Alaei," said the counter-espionage director at Iran's intelligence ministry, who was not named.
"Four people in this case who have been confronted were key elements who knowingly cooperated with US intelligence people in the region and fully implemented their demands," the official said.
The two brothers, who have been in jail since June, were known for their pioneering work in HIV/AIDS. Iran announced last week the group had been sentenced to undisclosed jail terms.
"People such as (US Under Secretary of State) William Burns, (Assistant Secretary of State for Educational and Cultural Affairs) Goli Ameri, (US official) Ramin Asgar and some other people linked with the US intelligence service in the region had a direct involvement in this project," the official charged, claiming the United States had spent 32 million dollars on the plot.
The intelligence official said the group sought to "incite social crises, organise street rallies and interfere in ethnic issues."
The Iranian judiciary recently disclosed details on a series of cases involving charges against opposition groups, including those said to have links abroad.
Tehran accuses Washington and London of backing violent and non-violent actions against the state.
"The United States sought to create a network inside Iran under cover of academic work and wanted to pursue a colour revolution by connecting with the elite and effective people," the security official said.
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Progressive revolution: We can't afford to play small-ball and tip-toe around right-wingers anymore
From an article by Mike Wiley posted on Alternet:
Fear has been a staple of every generation of conservatives .... Fear of the democratic mob. Fear of the freed slave. Fear of the liberated woman destroying the traditional family. Fear of freethinkers destroying religion. Fear of communism. Fear of gays and lesbians. Fear of hippies, "free love," and the drug culture. Fear of the immigrant. In a bizarre twist, Social Darwinism gave us fear of the weak, and in the modern version of Social Darwinism, Reagan gave us fear of the poor on welfare. Post-9/11, you can now add in the ever-potent fear of terrorism. Sadly, while some of those fears have faded with the passage of history, many remain with us, still powerful.
Many conservatives still fear feminism, sometimes to a hilarious degree. Here is one of my all-time favorite quotes, from the inimitable Pat Robertson: "[Feminism] is about a socialist, anti-family political movement that encourages women to leave their husbands, kill their children, practice witchcraft, destroy capitalism and become lesbians."
I had no idea feminism was so comprehensive, but there you have it. Of course, many men who are threatened by strong women aren't quite so hysterical, but like threatened people everywhere, they love to mock. Rush Limbaugh, who coined the feminazi, has this definition of feminism: "Feminism was established so as to allow unattractive women easier access to the mainstream of society."
The prospect of empowered women isn't the only fear that conservatives have carried throughout the years of our nation's existence. They have always feared free thinking, which opens the door to a range of ideas and beliefs. The notion that their children might be exposed to any ideas or scientific theories that are different from what is being taught at home, as exemplified by the battles that are fought daily about public education, still scares conservatives a great deal. Read articles from any local newspaper about the nature of their resistance-to the teaching of evolution, the discussion of global warming, the assignment of certain books by English teachers, and so on-and you will see parents who are terrified that their own children might learn a way of thinking contrary to their own.
Fears of communism and welfare have faded somewhat in the last twenty years because of the fall of the Soviet Union and the passage of welfare reform, but they have been quickly replaced by conservatives' finding new things to scare voters with. Terrorism and immigrants have become the new hot-button excuses for pushing the political fear button. Or maybe I should amend that: terrorism, at least, is relatively new as a major fear for voters because until 9/11, people knew it could be a problem but didn't worry about it much. After 9/11, it became the biggest thing Americans were scared of. Immigration, on the other hand, is a very old fear that conservatives have been exploiting with renewed vigor in recent years.
In the early days of the United States, immigrants were generally quite welcome because the country had an ever expanding need for new workers, farmers, and pioneers to go out west. But by the 1850s, as more poor and working-class Irish journeyed across the Atlantic to settle here, the combination of anti-poor and anti-Catholic bigotry stirred up the vicious anti-immigrant movement called, appropriately enough, the Know-Nothings (the name came from the fact that their leaders swore an oath of secrecy about being involved in the movement, so that if asked about it, they said they knew nothing).
To join the organization of the original Know-Nothing movement, the Order of the Star-Spangled Banner, you had to be white and male, be born in the United States, and not only be Protestant but have no family connection whatsoever to Catholicism. The Know-Nothing political party, called the American Party, won nine gubernatorial seats and controlled at least one branch of the legislature in six states during the mid-1850s. It ran former president Millard Fillmore as its presidential candidate in the 1856 election, and he received about a quarter of the votes. But the movement quickly faded because the slavery issue soon overwhelmed everything else.
Throughout the late 1800s, another conservative period in U.S. history, immigration was regularly featured in the American political debate. Concerns about Chinese immigrants in California and Irish immigrants in the east were a constant refrain in the arguments against voting rights and civil rights. Sadly, even the populist movement was tainted by anti-immigrant rhetoric, as well as by its alliance with southern segregationists.
The Chinese Exclusion Act was the first major restriction on immigration. Passed in 1882, it prohibited most immigration from Asia and took away the right of Chinese immigrants to become citizens. However, it was after World War I that anti-immigrant zeal truly reached its peak. Fearing a wave of postwar refugees and gripped by the conservative frenzy of the times, Congress passed legislation, in 1921 and 1924, that restricted immigration. The Emergency Quota Act of 1921 limited European immigration to 3 percent of the total population of each European nationality living in the United States as of 1910. The Immigration Act of 1924 went much further, limiting European immigration to 2 percent of each nationality living in the United States as of 1890.
Just as conservatives do today, back then they also used people's fear of immigrants to attack other progressive ideas and legislation. Congressional opponents of the 14th and 15th amendments, for example, worried that immigrants would take advantage of these new voting rights. In the 1920s and earlier, immigrant bashers were anxious about what kinds of communists, socialists, and anarchists might be coming over to contaminate our population.
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Brief article in defense of the anti-authoritarians
Published in the daily newspaper AVGI
Sunday, 14 December, 2008
by Thanasis Papakonstantinou
Every social group that possesses or desires power breeds and trains guard dogs. The state has the police and the para-state. Political parties have the so-called 'party-dogs'. Aggressive breeds are chosen and they are naturally trained to develop this tendency to the max.
On the other hand, various anti-authoritarian groups have no need of any such thing because they do not intend to seize power nor do they have a corral to guard. Thus they become more susceptible to provocation, but it is better to be free and vulnerable than enslaved and secure. Many hide their faces either for 'technical' reasons (protection from tear-gas as well as other paranoid implements of repression) or so that they will not be recognized when they commit illicit acts. It does not mean that whoever wears a hood is a coward. Is Subcomandante Marcos a coward, for instance?
I understand the violence of the weak who are rallying to defend human dignity - it has moral foundations. I fear, however, that whoever becomes infected by the virus of violence - even when the goal is a humanitarian one - shall ultimately fail. The means and the goal justify the result. Instead of violence I prefer the raising of consciousness and humanity as a means to a better life. Despite that, I consider the anti-authoritarians to be the most selfless and courageous segment of those engaged in social struggle, whether in our own recent incidents or in the remote past or in the future, locally or globally.
By way of an epilogue, perhaps capping off the above with something from my busking, I present the final two verses from my unreleased song 'San Michele had a rooster':
Tell me. Has the tub been found, where
I once bathed in sun and snow
or the lock of hair saved from my first haircut
by my mother who is still hanging up clothes?
Bakunin's cast iron spittoon,
comrades, has it been found
so I might spit in anger for the new ages
that make me look like a harlequin?
~ translated from the original Greek ~
image from http://www.spitting-image.net
