Dignified and Undignified Rage: Brief Notes on a Pending Invitation, the UK riots, and Our Collective Failure to Construct Revolutionary Responses to the Global Crisis
Kolya Abramsky

Up there, they intend to repeat their history.
They once again want to impose on us their calendar of death, their geography of destruction.
When they are not trying to strip us of our roots, they are destroying them.
They steal our work, our strength.
They leave our world, our land, our water, and our treasures without people, without life.
The cities pursue and expel us.
The countryside dies and we along with it.
Lies become governments and dispossession is the weapon of their armies and police.
In the world, we are illegal, undocumented, unwanted.
We are pursued.
Women, young people, children, the elderly die in death and die in life.
And up there they preach to us resignation, defeat, surrender, and abandonment.
Down here we are being left with nothing.
Except rage.
And dignity.[1]

With these words “the men, women, children, and elderly of the Zapatista Liberation Army in Mexico convoked all the rebellious of Mexico and the World” to attend the World’s First Festival of Dignified Rage, under the theme “Another World, Another Path: Below and to the Left”. Coincidentally, or not, the call was issued on the very same day that Lehmann Brothers bank, metaphorically, went up in flames, September 15th 2008.

Nearly 3 years later, in mid August 2011, the UK exploded in nearly a week of urban war. Sparked by the killing of a young Black man at the hands of the police, London and other major (and also not so major) cities proceeded to burn in the worst riots the country has seen in decades. A tinder box, waiting for a spark. And, though not directly related, it was nonetheless impossible not to notice the fact that the riots took place exactly the same time as the world’s stock markets once again found themselves hurtling towards a free fall.

Q&A: An Interview with Noam Chomsky David Samuels The world’s most important leftist intellectual talks about his Zionist childhood and his time with Hezbollah It seems safe to say that no living intellectual has enraged more people with more predictable regularity than Noam Chomsky. A biting and voluble critic of American power, Chomsky has been denounced as a traitor, a well-poisoner, the author of over 200 largely unreadable books, a pompous would-be prophet drunk on his own claims to moral authority, and a naïve apologist for Hezbollah [1] and the Khmer Rouge [2]. His political writings, speeches, and interviews over the past five decades have made him a hero of the global left and the world’s most quoted living thinker.

Costa Rican Supreme Court Temporarily Halts Entry of US Military Jamie Way, Narco News Bulletin The Costa Rican Supreme Court last week agreed to take a case challenging the constitutionality of a US-Costa Rican agreement that would allow for a massive US military presence. The agreement cannot go into effect until the Supreme Court rules, thus postponing the arrival of US forces.