The arrogance of power is especially ominous and despicable when a government leader risks huge numbers of lives in order to make a provocative move on the world’s geopolitical chessboard. Nancy Pelosi’s plan to visit Taiwan is in that category. Thanks to her, the chances of a military confrontation between China and the United States have spiked upward.
Long combustible over Taiwan, the tensions between Beijing and Washington are now close to ablaze, due to Pelosi’s desire to be the first House speaker to visit Taiwan in 25 years. Despite the alarms that her travel plans have set off, President Biden has responded timidly—even while much of the establishment wants to see the trip canceled.
“Well, I think that the military thinks it’s not a good idea right now,” Biden said about the prospective trip on July 20. “But I don’t know what the status of it is.”
Biden could have put his presidential foot down and ruled out Pelosi’s Taiwan trip, but he didn’t. Yet, as days went by, news trickled out that opposition to the trip was extensive in the upper reaches of his administration.
“National security adviser Jake Sullivan and other senior National Security Council officials oppose the trip because of the risk of escalating tension across the Taiwan Strait,” Financial Times reported. And overseas, “the controversy over the trip has sparked concern among Washington’s allies who are worried that it could trigger a crisis between the U.S. and China.”
Underscoring that the U.S. commander in chief is anything but an innocent bystander in terms of Pelosi’s trip, officials disclosed that the Pentagon intends to provide fighter jets as escorts if she goes through with the Taiwan visit. Biden’s unwillingness to clearly head off such a visit reflects the insidious style of his own confrontational approach to China.
More than a year ago—under the apt New York Times headline “Biden’s Taiwan Policy Is Truly, Deeply Reckless”—Peter Beinart pointed out that from the outset of his presidency Biden was “chipping away” at the longstanding U.S. “one China” policy: “Biden became the first American president since 1978 to host Taiwan’s envoy at his inauguration. In April, his administration announced it was easing decades-old limitations on official U.S. contacts with the Taiwanese government. These policies are increasing the odds of a catastrophic war. The more the United States and Taiwan formally close the door on reunification, the more likely Beijing is to seek reunification by force.”
Beinart added: “What’s crucial is that the Taiwanese people preserve their individual freedom and the planet does not endure a third world war. The best way for the United States to pursue those goals is by maintaining America’s military support for Taiwan while also maintaining the ‘one China’ framework that for more than four decades has helped keep the peace in one of the most dangerous places on earth.”
Now, Pelosi’s move toward a visit to Taiwan has amounted to further intentional erosion of the “one China” policy. Biden’s mealy-mouthed response to that move was a subtler type of brinkmanship.
Many mainline commentators, while very critical of China, acknowledge the hazardous trend. “The Biden administration remains committed to being more hawkish on China than its predecessor,” conservative historian Niall Ferguson wrote on Friday. He added: “Presumably, the calculation in the White House remains, as in the 2020 election, that being tough on China is a vote-winner—or, to put it differently, that doing anything the Republicans can portray as ‘weak on China’ is a vote-loser. Yet it is hard to believe that this calculation would hold if the result were a new international crisis, with all its potential economic consequences.”
Meanwhile, the Wall Street Journal summed up the current precarious moment with a headline declaring that Pelosi’s visit “would likely sink tentative rapprochement between U.S., China.”
But the consequences—far from being only economic and diplomatic—could be existential for all of humanity. China has several hundred nuclear weapons ready to use, while the United States has several thousand. The potential for military conflict and escalation is all too real.
“We keep claiming our ‘one China’ policy hasn’t changed, but a Pelosi visit would clearly be precedent setting and can’t be construed as in keeping with ‘unofficial relations,'” said Susan Thornton, a former acting assistant secretary for East Asian and Pacific Affairs at the State Department. Thornton added: “If she goes, the prospect of a crisis goes way up as China will need to respond.”
Last week, a pair of mainstream policy analysts from elite think tanks—the German Marshall Fund and the American Enterprise Institute—wrote in the New York Times: “A single spark could ignite this combustible situation into a crisis that escalates to military conflict. Nancy Pelosi’s visit to Taiwan could provide it.”
But July ended with strong indications that Biden has given a green light and Pelosi still intends to go ahead with an imminent visit to Taiwan. This is the kind of leadership that can get us all killed.
The execution of four well-known democracy activists by the military junta in Myanmar in June 2022 has angered and incensed those who cherish freedom and justice all over the world. The four , Phyo Zeyar Thaw, Kyaw Min Yu, Hla Myo Aung and Aung Thura Zaw have become immortalised in the noble struggle of the Myanmar people for their dignity and humanity. By killing these peaceful dissenters, the junta has in fact signed its own death warrant.
Since staging a coup against the democratically elected government of the day, the National League for Democracy(NLD), on the 1st of February 2021, the Myanmar military, the Tatmadaw, has become increasingly brutal and desperate. It has killed more than a thousand five hundred protesters including at least 44 children. It has detained thousands more. Torture of detainees is rife and rampant. Scores of people have disappeared.
Both the president, Min Nyint and State Counsellor, Aung San Suu Kyi are in jail. So are the Ministers, deputy Ministers and NLD members of parliament. Some civil servants, leaders of civil society, a number of Buddhist monks and scores of men and women from all walks of life are also behind bars.
The media is shackled. The Judiciary is totally subservient to the junta. The universities are mere appendages of the bureaucracy. All formal religious institutions are under the dictates of the military elite.
Though Myanmar in the course of the last 60 years has known brief periods of freedom, it has been in the grip of the military most of the time since General Ne Win conducted a coup against the civilian government in 1962. It is against this backdrop that one should view the February 1st 2021 coup and the more recent execution of dissenters.
Given this tragic history of suppression and oppression, it is remarkable that the flame of dissent has been kept alive for so long in Myanmar. Even in the last two years since February 1st, a lot of ordinary people have openly defied the junta through actions such as the striking of pots and pans in unison— a symbolic attempt to drive away evil — and organising a silent strike on the first anniversary of the coup this year which saw the closing of shops and the halting of all outdoor activities as men, women and children stayed at home. There have been even signs of a civil disobedience movement developing in protest against the excesses of the junta.
Even before the 2021 coup, in a situation where the military was already flexing its muscles, it is remarkable that millions of voters came out to support the NLD in the November 2020 election handing it a huge victory, 396 out of 476 parliamentary seats while the military backed party won only 33 seats. That was a dramatic expression of dissent within an environment where military dominance was overwhelmingly evident. Indeed, it is so obvious that it was because of the NLD’s performance that the military elite conducted the coup a few months later. The military elite knew that the people had repudiated its rule, had rejected its ruthless power.
When a people have demonstrated so much courage, shown such tenacity in the face of great odds, how should we as their neighbours respond? Some ASEAN governments have expressed unhappiness over the junta’s use of force against peaceful protestors but on the whole the regional grouping has refrained from advocating any punitive measures against the junta in Myanmar. The time has come for ASEAN to change its stand. As a collective it should now state explicitly that executing dissenters is the ultimate act of violence and it expects Myanmar to desist from such behaviour immediately. If it does not, then ASEAN will suspend all military, economic and educational ties with Myanmar. The same message should go out to all other countries that currently interact with Myanmar in these and other related spheres. Within Asia, China and India are cases in point.
It will not be easy for a number of ASEAN states or for China and India to act against Myanmar. They have often argued that such action will only drive a wedge between them and the ruling elite in Myanmar and it will become even more difficult to persuade the latter to change its behaviour. They forget that their present ‘soft’ stance has only encouraged the Myanmar military elite to become harsher and even more callous and cruel.
In this situation, civil society groups within ASEAN and Asia and citizens in general in the continent should pressurise their governments to act on the basis of fundamental moral principles. To do otherwise is not only a betrayal of their conscience but also a repudiation of those sacred values that lie at the heart of the illustrious civilisations that constitute our heritage.
Dr Chandra Muzaffar is the president of the International Movement for a Just World (JUST),Malaysia.
Ever since the early morning hours of November 9, 2016, standing in a ballroom with red-hatted Trump election celebrants in the New York Hilton, I’ve been waiting for this moment. This eruption of misogyny, unlike any since perhaps the witch trials and the burnings of midwives at the stake, was only a matter of time.
As shocking, as wildly insulting as that pussy-grabber winning the presidency was to American women and girls, it was just the beginning of what appears to be a long season of sadism.
Who Let the Dogs Out?
The election of Donald Trump signaled a cutting of the chain-link fence behind which something drooling and ferocious had been waiting. Unfortunately, what most of us didn’t fully grasp then was just how powerful that force of (male) nature was. Too late we understood that it had been long licking its wounds in a dark corner gathering strength. We sensed it for years, of course, but we didn’t know just how feral and hungry it might prove to be.
Remember the things that once had the power to shock us? They seem so meh now: American voters electing to the highest office in the land someone credibly accused of sexual harassment and assault, on record advising a younger man to “grab ’em by the pussy.” And that was after a presidential campaign in which he and his supporters had showered his female (“rhymes with witch”) opponent with profane misogynistic abuse.
Soon, The Donald and his followers had normalized everyday misogyny, celebrating their leader’s tendency to reduce all women to strip-club sexual attractiveness. Mini-Trumps sprouted in lesser elected positions across the country, publicly calling elected women or those campaigning for office witches and worse. We even got used to the seating of a new rightist Supreme Court with, for added insult, one new justice credibly accused of sexual assault and another a member of a religious cult that called women “handmaidens.”
Meh, meh. That, too, it turns out, was just the beginning.
We’re now living in the after-times of all that the Trump years unleashed.
In 1991, Susan Faludi wrote a book, Backlash:The Undeclared War Against Women, chronicling the ways in which the patriarchy was then fighting to reverse the gains made by our mothers and grandmothers. They were the ones who had braved public scorn in their struggle to pull American women out of their assigned roles as pointy-bra-wearing, breathy vixens consigned to housewifery or professional lives as secretaries, nurses, or at best teachers.
Faludi was spot on, of course. Sadly, though, the backlash of the 1980s she chronicled would prove to be just a prologue. Having had it named for us, you might think we could have checked that backlash and maintained momentum toward gender equality. Who in the 1990s could have imagined a day when elected men in at least 25 states would be legally enabled to force raped women to give birth or prevent doctors from performing procedures to save women likely to die of pregnancy? Who could have predicted the level of hatred toward women embodied in those very statutes and openly spoken of without shame or hesitation by elected leaders?
Obviously, we should have known better.
The change that felt so natural to those of us who came of age between 1970 and the turn of the century was not natural to them. Not even faintly. Never in recorded history had there been such an upending of patriarchal power as in the years when we grew up. We tend to take it all for granted, but the challenge to male power from the successes of second-wave feminism (and access to birth-control options) was indeed unique.
The facts speak for themselves: A majority of women now work outside the home, and we outnumber men in college attendance, too — signaling even greater numbers of women who should be able to rely economically on themselves instead of male partners. American women were enabled to escape lives of utter dependence on men, precisely because we had access to contraceptives and abortion, and for the first time in history were able to control if, when, and with whom we would bear children.
All that represented serious, deeply meaningful change. It altered the way young women and young men interacted, sexually and socially. Admittedly, we are still far from parity. The development of Silicon Valley, another economic revolution like the industrial one, created a new flood of male-only economic dynasties that once again shut out women (who weren’t wives) from the upper reaches of the economy. But the trend lines in general were upending eons of power relations between men and women at the most intimate, domestic level.
It was only a matter of time — and we should have known it — before such advances provoked the beast. The election of Donald Trump provided a green light for the release of sick, dark fantasies of revenge and a resurgence of the apparently ineradicable urge among some men to rule women utterly and completely.
The Predator’s Ball
I’ve always found the Hulu series The Handmaid’s Tale to be unwatchable, misogynistic torture porn. As a young English major in the 1980s, I read Margaret Atwood’s novel. I understood it then as a dystopic satire on the theocratic woman-controlling impulses already bubbling up around the edges of American society, which that Canadian writer had creatively taken to their logical conclusion.
The streaming series, however, was something else. The graphic and repeated scenes of actress Elisabeth Moss’s subjection as Offred, including the rapes and various bloody mutilations and punishments visited on her and her sister handmaidens, all converged into a category of visual titillation that went straight to the amygdala. I could imagine men who didn’t find such visual crap as impossible to watch as I did.
The fact that the producers were men had, I’m sure, something to do with the tone.
But today, the horror is this: it’s not confined to a Hulu series anymore. The extreme right in American politics is openly working off the playbook of Atwood’s fictional Republic of Gilead. Its urge is to construct an all-American theocracy in which the Old Testament Biblical rights of men to control women as reproductive chattel are restored to them.
There was a time not that long ago when American women could assume our foes were safely isolated in pockets of lunacy like Missouri, where 2012 Republican Senate nominee Todd Akin famously suggested that rape can sometimes prevent pregnancy. Another example: Nevada, where a 2010 anti-abortion Tea Party candidate explained her “no exceptions for incest” position by suggesting that girls impregnated by their own fathers should remember that “two wrongs don’t make a right.”
We laughed at them then. But the Supreme Court’s overturning of Roe v. Wade has emboldened those freaks to leave their hidey-holes and, as Dr. Phil might put it, open up about their true feelings.
Let’s start with Charlie Kirk, Jr., the co-founder of Turning Point USA (TPUSA), which exists mainly to bus conservative college students to fill seats at Trump rallies or form media-attracting long lines to shake hands with Marjorie Taylor Greene and harass progressive college professors.
Kirk has a podcast and a massive social media following. On June 24th, in the giddy aftermath of the Roe decision, he gushed about his feelings to his 1.7 million Twitter followers this way (italics mine): “Notice who is marching in the streets: single, unmarried, mostly white, college educated women. Frankly it’s foolish to call conservatives racist — who we actually can’t stand are angry, liberal, white women.”
He was probably disappointed when he only garnered 6,860 likes.
Kirk and his fellow travelers seem to be engaged in a competition to revile women. A few months before Roe was overturned, former NFL football player and Republican candidate for lieutenant governor of Minnesota Matt Birk actually got a twofer by slamming working women and supporting rapists simultaneously. Abortion rights, he said, lead to working women who then “go to the rape card” if abortion is restricted. He added: “It’s not over. Our culture loudly but also stealthily promotes abortion. Telling women they should look a certain way, have careers, all these things.”
Have careers, and all these things.
At Charlie Kirk’s recent TPUSA convention in Tampa, Florida, Republican Congressman Matt Gaetz brayed to a roomful of young men and women this way: “Why is it that the women with the least likelihood of getting pregnant are the ones most worried about having abortions? Nobody wants to impregnate you if you look like a thumb.” (Try to imagine the pasted-on cheerleader smiles of the women in his audience listening to that.)
Who cares about words, though, when sticks and stones — and laws — actually break our bones (or cause us to bleed to death)? Straight from the Gilead playbook, the theocrats are trying to force women who need abortions to stay within the restrictive borders of their states. You don’t even need to imagine how closely this tracks with scenes in Hulu’s Handmaid’s Tale. A liberal/left-leaning political advocacy group, Meidas Touch, has created a little video clip to help you see it all too graphically.
In the past few weeks alone:
Texas Attorney General and indicted securities fraudster Ken Paxton sued the federal government to stop the implementation of the Biden administration’s requirement that abortions be performed in case of emergency, when the life of a mother is at stake. Texas is officially on record now, working in the courts to make sure women likely to die of pregnancy actually do so.
Idaho Republicans rejected a measure to allow a life-saving abortion. The man behind the proposal to criminalize all abortions from the moment of conception, Scott Herndon, is running unopposed for a state senate seat. He called it a “declaration of the right to life for reborn children.”
Or look to Texas again for proof that “pro-life” care for the “pre-born” child is a lie and not the real reason for the race to control uteri. A recent Texas Tribune/ProPublica investigation revealed that ironclad anti-abortion Texas is one of just a few states that doesn’t allow Medicaid coverage for a full year after a poor woman gives birth. How caring!
Democratic and progressive strategists and speechwriters don’t have to look far to find outrageous anecdotes. When President Biden mentioned a 10-year-old Ohio rape victim forced to travel to Indiana for an abortion, the rightwing info-silo, including the Wall Street Journal, promptly cast doubt on the very existence of the child and the rape. When the alleged rapist was arrested, theocrats continued to offer up treacly, sick excuses, dripping with sanctimony, for why even children should be forced to give birth.
“She would have had the baby and, as many women who have had babies as a result of rape, we would hope that she would understand the reason and ultimately the benefit of having the child,” pro-life lawyer and former Indiana deputy attorney general Jim Bopp typically told Politico. He was, of course, speaking of that 10 year old whose medical care he would have wanted to prohibit in his state.
Reports of the post-Roe effects of care withheld are starting to hit the national news, with bleeding women and those with deadly infections having to wait for legal analyses or travel to distant places to find doctors. As one physician who narrowly saved the life of a miscarrying woman in Texas (having had to wait for the fetal heartbeat to finally stop) put it: “The patient developed complications, required surgery, lost multiple liters of blood, and had to be put on a breathing machine.” Her life was indeed saved, but in our new post-Roe world, barely.
The Disunited States of Pro-Choice
There is no doubt in my mind (nor in Margaret Atwood’s) that we’re now witnessing a real-life attempt to construct her once-fictional Republic of Gilead in our country. It will be complete with forced birth and rape as a means of master-race reproduction — plus lots and lots of female blood.
On the upside, the insane depredations, verbal and legal, being visited on women in these post-Roe months have already handed the Democrats a wealth of material from which to craft effective messages and potentially gain an edge in the coming midterm elections. The question is: Does the party have the will and skill to do it? If past is prologue, we can’t be sure.
For too long, the onus has been on women to figure out how to protect themselves from fanatical political misogyny. For example, when it comes to abortion, feminist activists have long urged women to “tell” their stories. Some are now bemoaning the fact that not enough of us did so before the Supreme Court overturned Roe.
The logic here is that if more women talked openly about their experiences, we would “normalize” that procedure. But is that true? Why should women have to “share” personal information in order to sustain our privacy, a right we actually possess, whether secured by law or not?
Our abortion stories couldn’t convert Justice Amy Coney Barrett or deter any other fanatical fetal rights activists from their appointed task before Roe was overturned. And why, in any case, should women ever have to discuss personal reproductive options and decisions outside a doctor’s office?
There is one exception. Survivors of illegal abortions do a service to the cause by sharing these stories. I recommend, for instance, French writer Annie Ernaux’s book The Happening, a short chronicle of her botched back-alley abortion in Paris in 1964. That bloody, terrifying account ranks with the most harrowing war stories ever written.
When abortion is relegated to dirty back rooms, women’s bodies become literal combat zones. The most resonant line among many comes when Ernaux describes the searing pain of a fake doctor inserting a tube into her uterus to start the process. “At that point I killed my mother inside me,” she writes.
A legion of organizations is now coalescing to assist women who will need abortions in the half of America where they’ll be faced with the same horrific choice Ernaux survived. (Some of those efforts are aggregated here and here.)
Doctors, to their credit, seem to be stepping up for women. The American Medical Association (AMA) issued a strong statement opposing the politicization of reproductive medicine. Its president, Jack Resneck, has warned lawmakers of the challenges they’re creating for doctors. The problem is, it might not matter. Like the American Bar Association’s declining influence in the selection of federal judges — unprecedented numbers of Trump’s appointees were deemed unqualified by that group — the AMA has limited influence in a world where significant numbers of the info-silo’ed believe Covid-19 is a hoax and the vaccines for it contain tracking microchips.
Politically, doctors aren’t going to save us anyway. For too long, even at the greatest women’s march of my adult lifetime, the anti-Trump protest in Washington on January 17, 2017, women have presented a disunited front. The history of the fracturing of the women’s movement is long and sad. Discussions of it are fraught territory, mined with political IEDs that I’d rather avoid. I’ll only say this: Why is it that Congress instantly got moving on the gay marriage law after Roe was overturned (and yes, I’m for it!), when it can’t even get the basics for women passed in the federal Women’s Health Protection act. (The Senate has blocked it twice already.)
The answer, at least in part: advocacy solely for women is always easier to defeat than advocacy for issues that also involve men.
Furthermore, we’re weakened from the inside. As Pamela Paul pointed out in a controversial post-Roe New York Times op-ed on the erasing of women, even Planned Parenthood, NARAL, and the ACLU have stopped using the word “women” in discussing abortion in favor of phrases like “pregnant people” or “birthing people.” That the very definition of women is now added to decades of the slicing and dicing of women’s groups into narrower and narrower subdivisions of identity only weakens the movement.
It’s true that heterosexual white women are historically privileged over women of color or of different sexual orientations. But if we can’t even agree that all “women” are ultimately people born with a uterus — a subset of human beings who, whatever our differences in terms of class, race, or ethnicity, share the utterly exceptional, unique challenge of being impregnable — we are going to lose this war.
Follow TomDispatch on Twitter and join us on Facebook. Check out the newest Dispatch Books, John Feffer’s new dystopian novel, Songlands (the final one in his Splinterlands series), Beverly Gologorsky’s novel Every Body Has a Story, and Tom Engelhardt’s A Nation Unmade by War, as well as Alfred McCoy’s In the Shadows of the American Century: The Rise and Decline of U.S. Global Power, John Dower’s The Violent American Century: War and Terror Since World War II, and Ann Jones’ They Were Soldiers: How the Wounded Return from America’s Wars: The Untold Story.
(This is part of my memoir I published successively on the pages of Countercurrents on the Zionist invasion of Lebanon in 1982 and the destruction of the Palestinian refugee camp and the jail experience in the Zionist jails.)
They took us to a detention camp in the Megiddo area, not far from where we were. There we found the prison contains hundreds of detainees who preceded us; most of them are Palestinians, some Lebanese, and some Arabs, but to a lesser extent.
Somebody told me that this was the place for the Egyptian prisoners after the 1967 war, but I do not know how accurate this is.
The health situation was bit better than the previous camp because it was equipped with madrasas, blankets, bathrooms, toilets, etc.
This camp consisted of groups of tents, each house about forty people, so the tent was a crowded place with detainees.
And I think this was a Zionist measure to keep the detainees in a state of conflict and strife. Indeed, there were daily conflicts and disagreements, often over trivial matters.
This is due to the psychological situation, and the state of tension experienced by the prisoners was so tricky that a small problem might become a big one.
And I often intervened as a known teacher to solve these problems.
Among the arrested Arabs, two Yemeni youths were severely beaten, and the Zionists shouted at them that they were coming from Yemen to kill the Jews!
I have endeavored to relieve them as much as possible by showing solidarity with them and strengthening their morale. And even at a later time, when disagreements occurred with them with some Palestinian detainees, primarily because of misunderstanding and the difference in dialect. I would stand by them. I hate fanaticism and tribal thought, which says if the oppressed is from my (tribe), I will stand with him, and if he were not from my (tribe), I would not stand with him.
And this is how I was all my life, standing with the weak, whoever he is. It is a principled and moral position that I have not deviated from throughout my life.
Each morning, we would get up to sit on the ground and knee and extend our hands up on the head in an excruciating movement.
We would stay in this position for an hour and sometimes longer until the soldiers arrived with sticks to count the detainees.
The slightest sign of a prisoner could lead to punishment. It was fierce, and I was feeling angry and humiliated. I kept wondering about the morality of this world we live in. About those criminals who play victim all time, and at the same time, their history in Palestine is a history of atrocities.
The tragic thing is that the Zionist state was planted by force in 1948, the same year as the Declaration of Human Rights. The Western countries that signed this declaration are the same ones who contributed to the tragedy of Palestinians.
I had feelings of joy, even if it was simple, that I was standing in my homeland for the first time, even if I was in detention. I felt it was my country, and all of my genes matched the earth and nature.
One of the cruel things that were taking place in the prison was taking the detainees for interrogation at the Al-Jalapa detention center. They come in the middle of the night, call the people to be investigated, and throw them after covering their faces in the car, like animals.
And one day, a civilian Zionist delegation visited me. I don’t know if it was from the Knesset or somewhere else. We collected small stones and put them in the form of words written justice for all and peace for all.
But after the delegation left, some of those who laid stones were punished, and I was one of those. Fortunately, they forgot me with a few others. The punishment was for the prisoner to stand on one foot for a long time, and it was painful because I was exposed to it later.
It was one of the most challenging days of my life. We were beaten and humiliated daily, and the soldiers treated us as if we did not belong to the human race. So I cannot hear a Zionist Jew talk about the persecution of Jews in Europe. What the Zionist Jews are doing now with the Palestinian people is just the same atrocities.
The Zionists always talk about peace, as if Palestinians went to Eastern Europe ghettoes to fight the Jews. The problem is that the Zionist Jews are the ones who came to Palestine to deprive the Palestinian people of their homeland.
The problem is the absence of justice for the Palestinians. The peace that the Zionists want is Roman peace (Pax Romana peace ), meaning the peace imposed by the occupier. The actual approach to peace is achieving justice for the Palestinian people who are deprived of their homeland. Without that, there will be no peace in the land of Palestine .
Zionist Jews are fighting a lost war .Despite all their power they shall be defeated no matter how much they kill and oppress.it is just a matter of time.
Dr Salim Nazzal is a Palestinian Norwegian researcher, lecturer playwright and poet, wrote more than 17 books such as Perspectives on thought, culture and political sociology, in thought, culture and ideology, the road to Baghdad. Palestine in heart.
People following the 2022 Sri Lanka political-economy crisis will be able to decipher that the two are closely linked. Political eruptions in Sri Lanka since April have usually followed intense periods of economic shortages. In March there were crippling 12-hour power cuts, resulting in small demonstrations that culminated on 9 April when thousands gathered at the Galle Face Greens. This was the beginning of the Araghalaya. In April and early May intense shortages of cooking gas and food brought misery to millions. Although the violence of 9 May cannot be attributed to this – it was a group of Rajapaksa party workers who attacked the protestors – it led to violence that resulted in the resignation of Mahinda Rajapaksa as Prime Minister. The most recent protest action on July 9 – with its arresting visuals of people occupying the Presidential secretariat – follows a period of intense fuel scarcity.
The shortage of fuel has crippled life in Sri Lanka. Vehicles queue up for a kilometer or longer in every direction outside petrol pumps. There are separate queues for two wheelers, tuk tuks and four wheelers. Vehicle owners can obtain fuel twice a week according to the last digit of their number plates: Mondays and Tuesdays for number plates ending in 0,1,2; Tuesdays and Fridays for 3,4,5 and Wednesdays, Saturdays and Sundays for 6,7,8,9. People park their cars a day or two before, in order to get their quota on the assigned day, and even this is not assured. Typically, about 150 vehicles can be filled before a petrol pump runs out of fuel. People line up early the previous day and leave their cars overnight in order to maximize their chances of getting precious fuel.
The disruption to normal life is difficult to describe to anyone who has not experienced extraordinarily long fuel queues. Waiting in queue has become the central organizing principle of one’s life in Sri Lanka. Everything else – work, family, friendships – have been rearranged around this. The physical and psychological toll is immense. At least 20 deaths have been documented in fuel queues at the height of the shortage in late June and early July, when waiting times of four and five days were not uncommon. People get mats and spread them out on the pavement next to their cars. This becomes a temporary work station as they spread their laptop and devices and take calls. People have reportedly given job interviews and got hired while waiting in the queues. New friendships and solidarities have been formed as people get deck chairs and exchange news and gossip while waiting for the queue to move. Invariably, politics and the state of the economy are discussed.
Peak oil and gas have been discussed ad nauseum by experts as the point where extraction of petroleum starts to decline. Numerous studies have pointed out that humanity needs to drastically decrease the consumption of climate-heating fossil fuels. However, any such exercise will have to take into account the calculus of energy use and political stability. Sri Lanka is a prime example of how political stability is closely linked to the availability or scarcity of economic resources. However, to be sure, Sri Lanka’s political crisis cannot solely be attributed to economics.
In 2019 Gotabaya Rajapaksa campaigned to become the President of the Island nation. His campaign was racist and sought to project him as a techno-militarist who would solve Sri Lanka’s problems and turn it into another Singapore. In effect, Gotabaya was saying he would succeed where Parliament had failed. There was also the Easter Sunday bombings which had created an aura of fear among the Sinhalese majority. Gotabaya capitalized on this and became the President in a landslide electoral victory. His actions betrayed an autocratic mindset and contempt for Parliamentary procedure. In the 2020 Parliamentary elections his party, the Sri Lanka Podujana Peramuna won a two thirds majority. This emboldened Gotabaya even more. A refusal to approach the International Monetary Fund as signs of an emerging economic crisis became visible, an overnight ban on chemical fertilizers and a massive tax cut and a programme of money printing to fill government coffers were some of the policy missteps. The cumulative effect of all these resulted in the economic collapse of Sri Lanka, followed by a political unraveling.
In the fuel queues none of this matters much. It is in the past and people are busy trying to get fuel in the present. The arrival of a fuel ‘bowser’ is greeted with great joy, because once the bowser empties its contents into the petrol pump’s tanks, the line will start moving. Four wheelers can fill up to LKR 7,000 at one go, and the allocation for cars is 20 liters a week. People get packed lunches and dinners and some stay overnight in their cars, while others go home and return the next morning. Staying in the cars is difficult in the July heat and humidity.
Sri Lanka’s reliance on imported fuels is what caused the crisis in the first place, but it cannot do without fossil fuels either. After Mahinda Rajapaksa became President in 2005 and the civil war ended in 2009, a new economic strategy of constructing domestic infrastructure was prioritized and the export-oriented focus toned down. Massive roads, expressways and ports were built. New roads meant the purchase of new cars and an increase in fuel imports. Sri Lanka’s rising per capita income also meant that people were demanding more consumer goods, which had to be met through imports. Between 1990 and 2000 Sri Lanka’s net energy imports as a percentage of total energy use doubled from 20% to 40%. In 2021 the country spent $3.7 billion importing oil and coal. Sri Lanka has good potential for solar and wind power, but has not developed either. It generates a third of its power from imported oil, another third with imported coal and the rest from domestic hydropower.
And now Sri Lanka has run out of foreign exchange dollars to pay for imports. At last count, the country had barely $50 million of forex, and it had been shut out of international capital markets since it defaulted on its debt. The shortage of fuel is affecting its tourism industry, one of its largest revenue earners. Cabs are charging LKR 15,000 (USD40) for a trip from Negombo airport to Colombo, a distance of 30 kilometers. This is three times the price of just a year ago. A thriving black market has emerged where fuel is selling for LKR 2,000 to 3,000 a liter. The pump rate is LKR 450 for 92 octane petrol.
Sri Lanka is a cautionary tale of what happens when a nation’s basic political and economic processes are replaced by the mythology of a ‘glorious ancient past’, religious nationalism or primal feelings of racial superiority. What matters ultimately to any modern-day population is what they need to survive in the present – food, fuel and electricity.
J.G.Pandit is a writer and journalist currently reporting from Sri Lanka
On Sunday, July 31, South Asian activists came together outside the Indian Visa and Passport Application Center in Surrey, BC, to raise their voices for a detained journalist and human rights defender
Teesta Setalvad was recently arrested on trumped up charges at the behest of the right wing Hindu nationalist BJP government in New Delhi for advocating for justice to the victims of 2002 anti-Muslim pogroms in Gujarat.
Thousands of Muslims were massacred in state-orchestrated violence after a train carrying Hindu pilgrims caught fire, leaving more than 50 passengers dead.
The then-Chief Minister of Gujarat, Narendra Modi, blamed the incident on Islamic fundamentalists, even though one commission of enquiry found that it was an accident. Though Modi was never charged for inciting bloodshed, he was denied US visa until 2014 when he became the Prime Minister.
Teesta was detained after the Supreme Court of India accused her of keeping the pot boiling, while rejecting a petition challenging a clean chit given to Modi in the massacre by the Special Investigation Team.
Since Teesta’s great grandfather Chiman Lal Setalvad had grilled a British army officer who ordered the killings of peaceful demonstrators in Jallianwala Bagh Public Park in Amritsar in 1919, the rally in her support was held on the martyrdom day of Udham Singh.
The Jallianwala Bagh episode galvanized the freedom movement in India. Udham Singh was executed in London on July 31, 1940, for assassinating the former Lt. Governor of Punjab Michael O’ Dwyer, who was instrumental behind the circumstances leading to the indiscriminate firing on the gathering of supporters of the passive resistance struggle against British occupation of India.
Organized by Radical Desi, an online magazine that covers alternative politics, the rally started with a moment of silence in memory of Vancouver-based Kat Norris, an indigenous activist, who passed away recently. Notably, Radical Desi had invited Teesta to Canada in 2018 close to the 100th anniversary of the Jallianwala Bagh massacre. She was honoured with a medal of courage at a public event held in Surrey that year.
Teesta has been consistently writing and speaking out against state violence and majoritarianism of the BJP government, under which attacks on religious minorities and political critics have grown.
The participants at the Sunday rally raised slogans in support of Teesta and asked for her release. They also unanimously demanded the scrapping of draconian laws being used to suppress any voice of dissent in India, and freedom for all political prisoners. They held out signs reading, “Free Teesta” on the occasion.
Those who spoke at the demonstration included Coalition Against Bigotry cofounder Imtiaz Popat, who is a Muslim of Gujarati heritage, as well as Sikh activists Barjinder Singh, Gian Singh Gill, Kesar Singh Baghi and renowned scholar Puran Singh Gill. Others who addressed the gathering were Radical Desi supporter Harbir Rathi, leftist activist Parminder Kaur Swaich, prominent Punjabi poet Amrit Diwana, well-known media personalities Gurvinder Singh Dhaliwal and Navjot Kaur Dhillon, and cofounder of Radical Desi Gurpreet Singh.
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