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A human face on post-Sept. 11 America
Homeland
By Dale Maharidge
Seven Stories (2004)
Review by Nicholas Holt
Aug. 16 (AGR) — Journalist Bill Maharidge writes that,
as he concluded Homeland — which the Library of Congress
files under social conflict, nationalism, and “September 11 Terrorist
Attacks, 2001 - Social aspects” — he fell “into
a funk” that far surpassed the blues that typically follow the
completion of an all-involving project of any sort.
“This book became my means of either coping or hiding in the face
of so much depressing news and social tension.”
Maharidge’s observation that “work is survival” resonated
deeply with this writer. I was a staff member at AGR for a few years,
each week compelled to spend many late nights in a cramped office when
I would really rather have been spending time thinking about anything
but the reports in the newspaper I was helping produce. And my compulsion
to volunteer was much more than a desire to “do my part” -
it became my means of coping with the terrible things humans were doing
to each other in the world.
Exchanging worries about human inflicted tragedies for worries about
word counts, column arrangements, and font selections, keeping up with
statistics on refugee populations, memorizing acronyms for armed rebel
groups, assembling separate reports of atrocities into proper chronological
order, swimming in the information rather than catching glimpses, all
these mechanical tasks became means of reducing mass tragedy into something
over which I could feel some degree of control.
And it would work for a while, till that late last night of production
when I was done for a few days and started to think about what I had
learned that week about humanity’s endless capacity to inflict
injury upon itself, and more than think, to feel about it.
Homeland is an emotional document, a book that reflects those unquan-tifiable
human feelings. It is not a source of hard-facts in the style of, say,
philosopher Noam Chomsky or historian Eric Hobsbawm. Maharidge, instead,
assembles anecdotes from dozens of personal interviews, collected as
he traveled the country to gauge the mood of Americans during George
W. Bush’s endless war. For example, it is useful to know that the
World Health Organization ranks health care in the US behind all other
industrialized nations.
It is in some ways just as important to read Maharidge’s account
of visiting Jim, an uninsured blue-collar worker from Chicago, unable
to get Medicare, who drops a bag on his kitchen table containing “some
$200,000 in medical bills he cannot pay.”
It is also important to learn that Jim thinks part of his problem getting
health care is immigration:
“ ‘Go see what kind of medical care they get!’ Jim shouted
of the immigrants. ‘The best!’ ‘ They won’t even
give him a medical card to help him,’ [his wife] said. ‘I
called. I told the woman, “It’s because he was born here.”
“That’s not true,” she said. I said, “Bullshit.”
’
Maharidge observes “the bosses of those who are now employed in
the United States make on average 419 times the lowest paid workers…We’ve
been taken but we don’t bring forth our wrath against the boss
men, the money people, the corporate boards, the Republicans and Democrats,
the aggregate collection of [those] who’ve sold us out.”
“Everywhere in Chicago I turned, I witnessed anger…similar
stories…I heard were depressingly repetitive. Prick the anger which
on the surface may be pro-war and anti-Arab, and one hears of ruined
401ks, health problems, lost work.”
It’s not a cheery book. Maharidge relates meetings with teachers
fired for teaching the history of Islamic civilization, Arab-Americans
suffering both institutional racism and personal violence, sick unemployed
workers, as well as members of organized white supremacist groups ready
to harvest the anger of frightened Americans.
Despite the gloom, it’s an important book to read, one that puts
faces and personalities to the dry stats of hard news reporting. And
in doing so, Homeland reminds those of us inclined towards social activism
of the human reasons for our work.
Local artists come together to help the
women of Afghanistan
By Shawn Gaynor
Asheville, North Carolina, Aug. 18(AGR) – Remember the
women of Afghanistan? We fought a war a few years back for their liberation
from fundamentalist terrorists, and of course oil pipeline rights through
their country. Well, with the support of its neighbors, and Bush regime
backing, the pipeline plans are going great – a true international
effort to liberate the Caspian sea region from its oil.
But wait … what about the women of Afghanistan, didn’t we
lead a righteous crusade with knights riding in on shining armor, in
the nick of time to save the women of Afghanistan? Well, they were quickly
forgotten by the Bush administration after their PR value was no longer
needed, and with all that good news about oil, and all that bad news
about Iraq, the Americans have largely forgotten their pledge to liberate
the women of Afghanistan.
But a group of Asheville artists are not content to let them fade back
into their hidden misery. On Saturday, Aug. 21 at 7:30pm they will come
together at The Big Idea on Carolina Lane in dowtown Asheville, in a
celebration of creativity to raise awareness about the continuing plight
of the Afghani women, and to raise money for their champion organization,
RAWA.
RAWA, the Revolutionary Association of the Women of Afghanistan, was
established in Kabul, Afghanistan, in 1977 as an independent political/social
organization of Afghan women fighting for human rights and for social
justice in Afghanistan.
The repression of women in Afghanistan has been a worsening situation
since that time.
Sahar Saba, the spokesperson for RAWA says the crisis for Afghani women
“started with the Russian invasion. When we say this, it is because
first of all [when] Afghanistan was invaded everyone including women
lost their freedom, everything.”
During the Soviet occupation, a growing number of RAWA activists were
sent to work among refugee women in Pakistan. For the purpose of addressing
the immediate needs of refugee women and children, RAWA established
schools with hostels for boys and girls, a hospital for refugee Afghan
women and children in Quetta, Pakistan with mobile teams. In addition,
it conducted nursing courses, literacy courses and vocational training
courses for women.
After the overthrow of the Soviet-installed puppet regime in 1992 the
focus of RAWA’s political struggle was against the ultra-fundamentalist
Taliban’s criminal policies and atrocities against the people of
Afghanistan in general and their incredibly ultra-male-chauvinistic
and anti-woman orientation in particular. Under their control, education
of girls and women became illegal, and women’s healthcare unobtainable.
But now that Afghanistan has been “liberated” the Northern
Alliance, largely holds power, bestowed by the US as a reward for their
role as a proxy army during the 2001 war.
“Northern Alliance has the upper hand in the government of President
[Hamid] Karzai,” says Saba. “The most powerful ministries
are in the hands of the Northern Alliance; the defense ministry which
rules everything, the foreign ministry. A few others like educational
and some other ministries are in the hands of the Northern Alliance.
The intelligence services are in their hands, the army, all decisions
in fact are [made] by NA.”
And the trouble with that, is that the Northern Alliance is made up
from the same US backed anti-soviet Jihadis that gave rise to the Taliban.
While some schools have opened for women in Kabul, outside of this colonial
fortress, much of Afghanistan is unchanged -- ruled by the same warlords
that have long ravaged this county.
RAWA has said no serious issue can be solvedthat in the presence of
fundamentalists warlords in Afghanistan, even if more ministries and
commissions were created for women.
Maryum, another RAWA member, said that no change is visible in the lives
of women in Afghanistan and they still feel insecure and undergo oppression.
“Out of extreme suffocation and terror in Herat which is in the
grip of Ismail Khan, hundreds of girls and women have committed suicide
by self-immolation in less than a year to free themselves of the freedom-killing
regime,” Shehla another Afghan woman says.
Amnesty International quoted an international NGO worker on the situation
in Afghanistan as saying: “During the Taliban era, if a woman went
to market and showed an inch of flesh, she would have been flogged.
Now she’s raped.”
But despite the situation, RAWA continues in its struggle against the
fundamentalists and warlords for a secular government that will uphold
the rights of women.
In order to draw attention to the current situation in Afghanistan,
a group of local painters, poets and musicians have come together to
do what they can to increase awareness about the ongoing plight of the
Afghani women, and support grassroots resistance to fundamentalism.
Poet Annabeth Schenck (known for her stinging anti-corporate rants),
will be joined by poetic powerhouses Ingrid Carson, Joel Brotherton
and Frieda Carson.
Local artists will also have works on display with proceeds benefiting
RAWA and local music favorites Hope and Anchor, and Tigers in the Sack
will entertain.
“We’re happy to use are art and our privilege to help people
who live on the line fighting fundamentalism, who are fighting for radical
autonomy and equality under the most oppressive conditions,” said
Shane Perlowin of Tigers in the Sack.
“We’re playing music and people are risking there lives to
get basic human rights of education and health care, so we are happy
to do what we can.”
What has changed since Seattle 1999?
Confronting Capitalism: Dispatches from a Global
Movement
Edited by Eddie Yuen, Daniel Burton-Rose, and George Katsiaficas
New York: Soft Skull Press, 2004
By Christina Gerhardt
Aug. 14 — Confronting Capitalism, an updated version
of The Battle of Seattle, takes stock of what has shifted in
the anti-globalization movement in the four years since the Seattle
WTO protests in 1999. In his astute introduction, Eddie Yuen (one
of the volume’s editors) adeptly lays out not so much a linear
history, but rather a constellation of concerns and tactics.
Arguing that “the potential of a deepening global network of
workers, students, farmers, youth, indigenous people, immigrants,
and ‘marginals,’ is the greatest source of hope today,”
Yuen shows the commonalities that draw together a global movement.
Yet he also pinpoints how the battle in the north contrasts with that
of the south.
As contributions by George Katsiaficas and others in Part I, “Roots
of the Movement,” point out, “the recent upsurge against
capitalist globalization has its origins not in Seattle but amongst
the peoples of the Global South.” For while many of the trade
organization meetings took place in the north, the tempest struck
the south — Asia, Africa and Latin America - hardest.
Areas affected by the IMF structural adjustment programs (SAPs) —
the south — actively fought against them: in Mexico, UNAM students
resisted the imposition of tuition; in Brazil, 15,000 campesinos protested
personal debt from their failed farms; in Bolivia, hundreds of thousands
demonstrated against a Bechtel World Bank contract to privatize water;
in Argentina, 80,000 people protested and 7.2 million went on strike
for twenty-four hours, which, together with the collapse of the Argentinian
economy, led to the resignation of several ministers and two presidents.
“By understanding these antecedents to Seattle,” Yuen argues,
“the movement in the overdeveloped world may be less seduced
by illusions of its own centrality and recognize that the global majorities
are not merely passive victims of ‘free trade’ and structural
adjustment.” These struggles from around the world and predominantly
the south — Argentina, Peru, Nigeria, South Africa, Algeria,
India, and China — are considered in Part IV, “Facts on
the Ground.”
Even in Part II, “Crashing the Summits” — a survey
of the summit disruptions from the anti-WTO demonstrations in Seattle
in 1999 to those of Cancun in 2003 - the “Writer’s
Bloc” points out the vital role of those from the south at the
WTO: “What stood out in Cancun was the leadership of the militant
South - the rural farmers of Mexico and Brazil, the unionists
of Korea, and the activists from the ghettos of the African continent.
Not surprisingly, it was these compañeros who brought the vision
and militancy to the demonstration’s small numbers and lack of
focus [...]” “As a result of their efforts, as Immanuel
Wallerstein points out in his article, the WTO “is now effectively
dead. It will survive on paper, as do many other instate institutions,
but it will longer matter.”
The Writer’s Bloc also underscores a point that comes up repeatedly
in the volume’s various articles as well as the introduction:
although Seattle was a crucial victory and the demonstrations at summit
meetings send a vital message — mainly, that the inhabitants
of the north are not in sympathy with the political and economic policies
of their leaders — many of the protests against free trade organizations
are led by those of the south. Furthermore, these participants underscore
the urgency of the policy’s impacts. For example, when Lee Kyung
Hae, a 56-year old Korean farmer, father of three daughters and a
militant revolutionary, committed suicide at the front gates of the
WTO, he — as one campesino woman put it — reminds us that
for some “the policies of the WTO are a matter of life and death.”
Other articles in this section discuss the protests of the IMF and
World Bank in Prague (2000); the G8 in Genoa (2001); the FTAA in Quebec
City (2001) and in Quito (2002); and the World Economic Forum in Cancun
(2001) and in New York City (2002). These discussions focus on nonviolent
direct action, direct democracy and network organizing.
Numerous articles in this section focus on the “Battle of Seattle.”
While many, for example ones by Jeffrey St. Clair and Barbara Ehrenreich,
discuss the protests in more familiar terms, chronicling the days’
events and accomplishments, Andrew Hsiao’s article “Color
Blind” sheds new light on questions of race within the Movement.
As Yuen himself pointed out in the introduction, rather than ghettoize
articles about racial diversity to one section, they have smartly
been included throughout on the grounds that this question should
be integral to the movement.
Part III, “We Are Everyone? NGOs, Social Forums, and Problems
of Representation,” presents articles on four issues that confront
activists: sectarianism, nongovernmental organizations, racial diversity,
and right wing anti-globalization groups. In one of this section’s
most controversial articles, “This is What Bureaucracy Looks
Like: NGOs and Anti-Capitalism,” Jim Davis points out that NGOs
have a very tricky role in the growing movement against capital. Arguing
that “in reality elite, decision-makers evaluate the NGO world
with a quick and pragmatic eye and see potential allies in the delicate
work of diffusing this new opposition,” Davis states that The
Economist, for example, “took note of this in pointing out that
when assaulted by unruly protesters, firms and governments are suddenly
eager to do business with respectable face of dissent.” He takes
an in-depth look at some of the limitations placed on NGOs, stemming
their radicalism and also some key moments when they have betrayed
their street activist counterparts.
Part V, “Articulating Resistance,” contains much discussion
on how the movement should theorize itself. In “Activistism:
Left Anti-Intellectualism and Its Discontents,” Liza Featherstone,
Doug Henwood and Christian Parenti argue that current leftist activists
sorely lack an intellectual awareness, stating “this brave new
ideology combines the political illiteracy of hypermediated American
culture with all the moral zeal of a nineteenth-century temperance
crusade.” While I appreciate their challenge for activists and
intellectuals to meet halfway, for their work to inform one another’s,
I am not so sure that it’s such a clear-cut dichotomy. Furthermore,
I believe their claim is a bit exaggerated as this volume well illustrates:
its editors and contributors include a wide array of activist intellectuals
or intellectual activists.
The volume also includes articles by Noam Chomsky, Barbara Ehrenreich,
Naomi Klein, Arundhati Roy, as well as a map and chronology of global
resistance, artwork, photographs, and a glossary by Iain Boal. Although
a number of volumes on the subject of the global movement have recently
appeared, given the range of authors and of subjects in this new volume,
it clearly should be one of the top ten books in the canon on the
subject.
Source: Counterpunch
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