lsandals writes:

Between the Lines invites you to meet Michael Riordon, author of

An Unauthorized Biography of the World: Oral History on the Front Lines.

Tuesday, March 15, 7:00 pm
McNally Robinson Booksellers
52 Prince Street
All welcome.
Info: 212.274.1160

Thursday, March 17, 7:00 pm
Bluestockings Books
172 Allen Street
All welcome.
Info: 212.777.6028

An Unauthorized Biography of the World explores the practice of engaged oral history: the difficult, sometimes dangerous work of recovering fragments of human story that have gone missing from the official versions. Michael Riordon has thirty years' experience as a writer and broadcaster in the field. Readers will encounter a gallery of brave, passionate people who gather silenced voices and lost life stories. The canvas is broad, the stakes are high: the battles for First Nations lands in Canada; environmental justice in Chicago; genocide in Peru; homeless people organizing in Cleveland; September 11/01, and after, in New York City; gay survivors of electroshock in Britain; the struggle to preserve a people's identity in Newfoundland; peasant resistance to a huge transnational gold mine in Turkey.

s0metim3s write:

What’s SoS? A simple thing. A beautiful thing. A way to share your stuff with others ... while meeting physically, having a chat and generally enjoying the view.

You are already doing it! Everyone shares information and copies stuff for each other as gifts (legally, of course). Organising a Shivers of Sharing meeting is an opportunity to take that activity out and do it in public venues. Shivers of Sharing are already spreading accross Europe. Kuda in Novi Sad, Serbia will be hosting SoS Novi Sad #1 some time between 21-22 March 2005. Next London SoS is scheduled for 27 March 2005. More here

What to bring

Start your own

Anonymous Comrade writes

"Peasant Time Bomb"
Pepe Escobar, Asia Times Online

"There is chaos under heaven and things could not be better." — Mao Zedong

"The biggest danger to the Party since taking over has been losing touch with the masses." — Hu Jintao

SHANGHAI — Everywhere in developed, urban China — Shanghai, Beijing, Guangzhou — the message was the same. The next "counterrevolutionary rebellion" — as the Communist Party defined the student uprising in Tiananmen Square in 1989 — if it happens, will be a peasant revolution. Foreign diplomats and Chinese scholars in Beijing or young, urban, 'Net-connected professionals in Guangzhou have told Asia Times Online in unmistakable terms: nobody from the party's "fourth generation" leadership wants to go back to the Maoist model of economic autarky and foreign-policy isolation.

Robert S. Finnegan writes:

U.S. Army Sergeant Defies Orders, Refuses Re-Deployment to Iraq;
Two Soldiers Attemmpt Suicide at 2-7 Infantry, 17 Go AWOL

Benderman case sparks media feeding-frenzy as Army desperately initiates damage control measures

“Rock of the Marne” — On Friday, January 7, 2005 Sergeant Kevin Benderman, stationed with the 2-7 Infantry Battalion at Ft. Stewart, Georgia, refused an order from the Command Sergeant Major of his unit Samuel Coston to deploy to Iraq and requested a General Courts-Martial.

nolympics writes

Weird Anti Germans

There have been rumours circulating for a while that anti-fa groups in Germany have invented a new kind of anti Germanism. It seems to consist of being pro imperialist, that is supporting the US and UK in their various international efforts but also in expressing solidarity and support for Israel, presumably as a way of denying anti-semitism. Theres an old gag about Germans loving to carry a burden, particularly when its as light as a feather. We could rephrase it for this bunch of anti German leftists and say that they enjoy a burden if they can have the Palestinians carry it for them. Anyone know anything about this scene?

check out the photos

Despised in their Own Country

Gideon Levi

How is it that Mordechai Vanunu is regarded as an admired hero in Western Europe, and in Israel he is slandered, cursed and despised by all? And if some public debate has risen around him - even though no significant part of the public regards him as a hero, as might have been expected from a genuine left - why is it that only a screaming, uniform chorus opposes the international peace activists and the handful of Israelis trying to stop the separation fence with their bodies: both literally and figuratively, lying along the fence on its current route in an effort that many in the world consider justified? Why isn't an alternative voice of appreciation being heard for these opponents of the regime, these dissidents?

polo writes:

Small Victories and Long Struggles.
Not the best of times, nor the worst of times : a subdued 10th anniversary celebration in Zapatista heartlands.

By Ramor Ryan

Oventic, Chiapas, 31st December 2003

>On the eve of the 10th Anniversary of the Zapatista Uprising, Jan 1 1994, the indigenous rebels had an unexpected surprise for the thousands of supporters who gathered here in Chiapas to pay homage – they did nothing.
No spectacular celebration, no mass march upon San Cristobal, no bold new political initiatives, and certainly no new armed uprising. Instead there were a series of subdued celebrations in each of the 5 Zapatista Caracole centers, attended modestly by rank and file and somewhat more generously by national and international supporters.

Here in the Zapatista highlands headquarters of Oventic, some 800 people danced the night away cloaked in mud and fog. I recalled another New Years Eve here in this very arena some years ago and that night there were several thousand rebels out in force. Tonight’s demure festivities (midnight passes without much ado), the lackluster message read out by an unidentified masked rebel and the empty space enveloping the gathering, prompts some journalists present to ask - Where have the Zapatistas gone?

Ytzhak writes "Victoria Independent Media Center

(Vancouver island, British Columbia)

Original article is at http://victoria.indymedia.org/news/2003/07/15769.p hp

DIA: blacks and our depression #3
A note from Fernwood/The Hood/New Palestine
==============================
by  
Lawrence Ytzhak Braithwaite
An author in North America

There has been essays written concerning Blacks and depression (one of which is by Dalani Aamon entitled "Blacks and Depression") and one of the causes of this depression having come the residual effects of the African Americans Experience starting with slavery. Not all of us have been slaves or from a slave background nor were we raised in the US psychic landscape but we have been assaulted by it. A great deal of us are Diasporic and so the effects of the affected African American psychology has invaded our domes. The US racism and the Canadian supremacy has had a damaging impression on our lives and mental health. I am certain that there are those who suffer from chemical imbalance which render them privvy to mood swings on various scales. However, the state of dread and downpressor inwhich most of us have to exist offers us little moments of true being and I'm afraid prolonged exposure to the madness and twisted logic of North America only brings more pain and collapse.

We must realize that mental illness in Black people, on our continent, is not tolerated. Not by the medical profession nor our own peoples. When it comes to Blacks, especially Black men with mental illness, we have not progressed from the Restoration period and William Hogarth's depiction of Bedlam. Our Bedlam can be either the mess of North America, the ghetto, or the state found in the etched imprints in our mentals (minds).

We have become driven by this madness as did Tom Rakewell (an 18th century playa) who, disassociated with his home, becomes enveloped in the underlying message of greed and status orientated London, England (or as is refered to as being a "demented Britannia"). However, Rakewell, has little knowledge and absolutely no overstanding of the true makeup and motivation of the libertine rakish society inwhich he falls into and is seduced by. He only sees what is considered successful and acceptable and then follows through hoping that --no -- thinking that this will make him and remake him in the eyes of the new society. Rakewell's efforts lead him to riches, poverty and then madness.

We, as Black people, whether ghetto or yuppy or middle-class, are caught up in this disassociation of place and context. We cannot, although we may front on the matter, make sense of the cognitive dissonance that is this demented America. It as if we are children or men caught in an abusive household each one of us or as a collective have fallen into the familial role of those in an abusive home'
The perfect one,
The peace keeper,
The clown,
The rebel
But no matter how much we struggle in our roles we still fail to achieve the overstanding and remove ourselves from the situation. The house must fall. We must cease to help it exist with all it's secrets and past abuse. Our presence fuels it. It legitimizes it. The abusers knows, far more than we ever will, under these circumstances, how to push every button and manipulate us with status, money, power and maybe even a kind word and genteel touch here and there.

Right now, and for a longtime, a world has been fighting back to end this abuse or to stop the abuser from incorporating them in the vicious circle of this madhouse. We, as Black peoples, don't seem to overstand this -- fully. Which is why we assist in the assaults or close our doors (selves) to our own. We point fingers and take pleasure watching each other fall. We invent new philosophies and transforms ancient faiths to fit them into the demented American landscape. First on the list of blame is each other and then comes this metaphysical white man (a devil or snake or yacob). But very little is done to actualize our anger and redemption except when it comes to attacking each other (the lost, the mental slaves, the 85, the uncivilized, the gutter negro, the country nigger, the 10, the sellout...) we have many names for the understandably confused and depressed Black peoples and we are swift to attack each other and kill each other, especially in the most cruel of fashions, and that is in the willful destruction of a human beings aspiration -- our spirit our Black souls. It would be easier for us to achieve peace and overstanding of the system of downpressor than it would for us to overstand each other and accept out weaknesses and strengths and victories. So we hunt for leaders to lead us (because of slavery and this endless Moses metaphor). We choose dead heroes (silent and well printed posters on college walls or in house holds. Maybe a PBS documentary they offer us during a now infamous Black history month). Last we follow puritan inspired ranting fascist who distort philosophies and faiths for the purpose of power and control. But what we lack is a revolution of all our own. Where Blacks can finally be peoples with all the faults and greatness that most people know over this planet and are willing to starve and die for.

If you look at it this way who wouldn't be depressed. And if a Black man has a mental illness then it will certainly become magnified to the point inwhich it becomes madness -- as William Carlos Williams wrote of the Black peoples of North America "true products of America go crazy".

This pandering to abuse and the constant blaiming of each other is a suicide. It is a slow and cruel suicide as most true suicides are. Forget what you've heard and what you think or read or have been taught. A true suicide is not a call for help and the failed attempts are not failures. They are practice sessions to insure that when the time comes and the right mixture is found that it will have the perfect effect/affect -- it has become the a hard Science combinding proper elements. It has, unfortunately become true M.A.D.ness = Mathematics of the African Diaspora. That would be the North American obsession with the crossing, the passing, the otherside, what most humans call simply death. For it is in death, we are taught, once by this physical and now metaphysical slavemaster and now by each other that we truely achieve rest, perfection, peace and blessings and sometimes greatness.

Of course we have the right to sing the Blues. But I'm afraid that it has been optioned and copyrighted for pub houses and biker soundtracks. But so has every diasporic invention of art.

So that would make anyone sad or as Rod Serling once wrote a line in "Requiem for a Heavyweight", "don't it just make you want to lay down and die." ...or can it Bee, as Lauryn Hill once wrote, "Die for me/you said you'd die for me/live for me/why don't you live for me".

The future is ours if we remain what Marcus Garvey once called "The Nation" and we truely believe -- in each other = the original peoples, with all our faults; cease to submit to the effects of hypocrites/munafiquns in this "demented America".

 ___
Stay Strong

"The Fire Next Time"

http;//www/ilovepoetry.com/search.asp?keywords=bra ithwaite&orderBy=date

What We Teach (Redux)
Fernwood/New Palestine
http://victoria.indymedia.org/news/2003/07/15444.p hp

© 2000-2002 Victoria Independent Media Center. Unless otherwise stated by the author, all content is free for non-commercial reuse, reprint, and rebroadcast, on the net and elsewhere. Opinions are those of the contributors and are not necessarily endorsed by the Victoria IMC. Disclaimer | Privacy"

Anonymous Comrade writes:

(not) Marcos on `Anarchism`

(not)by Subcomandante Marcos

http://www.yearzero.org

http://www.chrisx.de/features/4.php

First and foremost, it must be said that only small elements of the Frente Zapatista are willing to engage in a debate with insignificant elements along an ideological fringe. One would find even fewer warriors within the Ejercito Zapatista who would be willing to engage in intangible rhetorical battles with people whose greatest virtue is spreading their lack of understanding and knowledge around in newspapers and magazines. But the article entitled “The EZLN Is NOT Anarchist” [authored by Theodore Kazcinski] reflected such a colonialist attitude of arrogant ignorance, several of us decided to write a response to you. You are right. The EZLN and its larger populist body, the FZLN are NOT Anarchist. Nor do we intend to be, nor should we be. In order for us to make concrete change in our social and political struggles, we cannot limit ourselves by adhering to a singular ideology.

please note there is some controversy over who actually wrote this article. Although it states that it was written by Subcomandante Marcos, the source might have been an editor of the publication Green Anarchy. I am looking into it and will let people know more soon -- U.F.

update 12/12 See my comment below about the source of the article. It was not written by Marcos, but might have come from others in the EZLN (or not?) - U.F.

Anarchist Platform writes:

"Istanbul: Anarchists in anti-war rally

Anarchist Platform participated massively in the rally against the war on Iraq on D1 in Istanbul with all its enthusiasm. Anarchist Platform has been an effective group in the rally with its banners “Özgür Hayat” (name of the bi-weekly newspaper published by the Platform) and “Capitalism Kills In War and Peace”, breads symbolizing poverty, “For Bread, Justice and Freedom: Anarchy” placards, and black, black-red, black-green flags. There were over 200 anarchists in the beginning of the rally, and afterwards the number of the people in the Anarchist Platform group rose to 300 (which is an important number for the anarchist movement here). During the rally the slogans of the anarchists were “Capitalism Kills In War and Peace”, “No Justice No Peace!”, “No Bread No Peace!”, “For Bread, For Justice, For Freedom, Action! Revolution! Anarchy!”, “Wallet or Conscience: Don’t Be a Soldier! Don’t Obey!”, “Capitalism’s War: Gun, Bomb, and Tear! Capitalism’s Peace: Blood, Violence, and Tear”, and “Earth Commune Freedom!”. The slogans accompanied by drums were yelled by the other individuals and groups in the rally. The autonoms and the organizations forming Anarchist Platform carried their own banners. Moreover, individuals from different social backgrounds besides the students and intellectuals (anarchism before jammed into these groups of people here) participated in the Anarchist Platform. This is an important situation for the anarchist struggle here.