Palestine
On Hindutva & Zionism
Like the anti-Zionist Jewish people, there are also anti-Hindutva Hindus. Like the Zionists describe their critics as "fake Jews" or Hamas agents, Hindutva ruling class also denounces their critics as self-hating Hindus and foreign agents. Like Zionists threaten their critics with "go live in Gaza", Hindutva folks challenge their critics to leave India and "go live in Pakistan." The ethnocentrism, ultranationalism, and xenophobia are exactly the same when it comes to Zionists and Hindutva brigades.
Refaat Alareer, the Poet they Couldn’t Kill
Dr. Refaat knew and taught to children of Gaza, what the immorals don’t know nor do they care to. One has to be in absolute love with their colonized land to free the people and in the process, death never becomes an obstacle. The world knows only too well, Palestinians can’t be scared - they refuse to leave and abandon their homes not because they have material prosperity there, but because it is their homeland with memories of their grandparents, of their dogs and cats and children and kites and pebbles and sparrows.
You Know Who You Are!
You know who you are, you filthy sadist hypocrites // It doesn't matter to you if bombs take Gazan kids // All you care for, are your vacations, retirement perks // Your yoga pants, detox veganism, positivity spirits
You're on evil side of history, your silence is violence // You can kill the Gazan kids, but they won't ever die // They will remind you; haunt you for rest of your life // If you still are left with a heart, a human conscience.
Gender
Vagina: Separation, Dialogue, Silence, Violence?
Obfuscation of women’s sexuality within the heteronormative world order has rendered women as not just passive recipients of male sexual monologues, it also continues to sustain juridical and cultural definitions that while attaching paramount importance on sexual intercourse and foreplay invariably involving penile penetration and its preparations, completely exclude gay and lesbian experience.
“Yes, Marcos is Gay”
Sexual orientation and gender identities, which frame the diversity of LGBT communities are deeply imbued within gender expectations. With a two-sex world relying upon gender roles socially assigned for heterosexual beings, what, then is left to be expected of the LGBT communities? Our heterosexist, conformist mainstream media provide the immediate answers.
Radical Roots of International Women's Day!
Very first official recognition of March 8th in the world was made in Soviet Union due to the efforts of Alexandra Kollontai, who went on to become the world’s first female ambassador (to Norway, in 1923). Kollontai considered Women’s Day as a “militant celebration”, a “day of international solidarity, and a day for reviewing the strength and organization of proletarian women.”
Philosophy
Matter & Consciousness: Revisiting Lokayata
The aim of the present study is to locate Marxism’s possible roots (spontaneous, or not) within the ancient Indian materialism: the Lokayata, which also remains as the very first exposition of empirical materialism in the history of philosophy. Lokayatikas considered the soul to be nothing but body with the attribute of consciousness. While seeing the soul in the body itself, they argued that there is nothing called soul apart from the body. According to them, consciousness emerges when transformed into the form of the body. That, the human being is nothing but a body qualified by consciousness.
Normalization of Isolation
The association of loneliness with the personal is based on a lingering myth. Far from being an individual symptom, loneliness is the inevitable outcome of an individualistic society. It is a state of being that prevents a person from exercising class prerogative and realizing their revolutionary potential. And to that extent, loneliness is a politically disempowered experience.
Normalization of loneliness therefore, typifies capitalism, without reference to its deliberate construction.
Fashion Dialectics
If we apply Adorno’s critique to the world of high fashion, more designs also mean less appreciation, simply because the reification remains in the mind of the individual who ends up becoming a “brand” loyalist, instead of appreciating fashion as an aesthetic. In effect, there is less informed criticism of fashion, and even lesser becomes the possibility of “autonomous art” – fashion as the expression of human autonomy and freedom.
This dialectic forms the core of fashion politics today.
Biographies
Shirley Chisholm: The Original Boss Lady of American Politics
Even while positing herself as a candidate beyond gender and race identifications, the way Shirley Chisholm managed to constantly draw national attention to problems of sexism and racism perplexed many. This extraordinary ability to navigate mainstream party politics while keeping the focus on issues impacting minorities led her to be criticized as a maverick and a boat rocker, to which she responded “I never entered Congress to behave myself.”
Lucy Parsons :: Revolutionary Feminist
Parsons recognized the class system in America as the prime factor in perpetuating racism. She was the foremost American feminist to declare that race, gender and sexuality are not oppressed identities by themselves; it is the economic class that determines the level of oppression people of minorities have to confront. Notwithstanding her social location of being a Black woman, Parsons declared that a Black person in America is exploited not because they are Black. “It is because he is poor. It is because he is dependent. Because he is poorer as a class than his white wage-slave brother of the North.”
Amiri Baraka: Angry Black Communist, the Soul of the Sun
What was controversial about furthering the cause of peace as an active oppositional stand against militarism and racism?
Amiri Baraka was neither controversial nor polarizing. He was a poet, a historian, a progressive, romantic, revolutionary communist. And he was always unafraid of truth. The truth to him was revolution. A revolution to him was beyond a certain group of people, certain race of people, or people of a certain nationality. Like Paul Robeson before him, he strove for that revolution through his art.
Disarmament
War & Peace
A world woven around material acquisitions and power privileges often is made to believe that acts of dialogue are signs of cowardice. Some of us seek a false sense of pride and superiority in ourselves as taught by the families struggling for identity restoration. Towards that, many young people in our age embrace a “Just Do It” philosophy that must necessarily rid itself of critical reflections. Critical thoughts and emancipating philosophies are sneered at as passivity in our age of scientific precisions.
India, Pakistan & the Peace Process: The Way Forward
In professing love for their respective countries, politicians from both India and Pakistan have established a woeful yardstick. Their barometer of patriotism involves maneuvered acquisitions, militarist occupations and immoral propaganda. In direct breach of peoples’ trust, beliefs, and needs, the nations have emerged as more powerful than their citizens, the administrative servants are now masters of the enslaved population – their phony diplomatic rounds and gimmicky bus trips devoid of sincere attempts to restore peace.
Einstein’s Promised Land
In the March 1926 letter to Blumenfeld, Einstein wrote, “I appreciate the educational achievements of Zionism. However, as an enterprise, I don’t know it well enough to support it with good conscience.” Even as his conscience would continue to haunt him, he was still optimistic about the forthcoming “Jewish center” of morality and intellectualism. He never got the “impression that the Arab problem might threaten the development of the Palestine project.” He said, “I believe rather that, among the working classes especially, Jew and Arab on the whole get on excellently together.” (1927)
International Relations
Pakistan: Dissent is Alive
Citizens of Pakistan never failed to register protest against their regimes for siding with the imperialists. During Afghanistan reforms which positively affected the subcontinent, people took to the media for greater support. Independent Islamabad daily newspaper, the Muslim, accused the United States of getting ready to “fight the last Afghan”… “We are not flattered to be termed a ‘frontline state’ by Washington. Washington does not seem to be in any mood to seek an early settlement of a war whose benefits it is reaping at no cost of American manpower.”
Burma: A Country in Exile
The celebrity status of a pacifist leader cannot transform a country that has been kept deliberately bereft of the knowledge of its peoples’ history. For Suu Kyi to truly become worthy of her father’s legacies, she needs perhaps to understand why Emma Goldman might not have stretched it too far when she said, “If voting changed anything they’d make it illegal.” And here is the consequent irony: Burma celebrating electoral democracy while Kyaw Zaw lives in exile and U Nu in anonymity is certainly a victory for the globally recognised Suu Kyi, but a resounding defeat for the anti-imperialist Aung San.
Medvedev & the Russian Question
Medvedev is lacking in political patience, theoretical understanding, and historical acumen to explicate why Russia is in shambles today. The country has greatest rich-poor gap since the time of Czar Nicholas II. There are hundreds of small towns called monocities that are dependant upon single enterprises. Public trust towards the government is at record low. People, irrespective of economic class, are sending their children abroad for education. Russia has suffered its worse recession in a decade. And Medvedev is right in losing patience.