Top good-byes:

#1:  People of the World Say Goodbye to War Criminal George Bush

Bush was touring Iraq, proclaiming his final aggressive escalation (”the surge”) as the greatest success in the history of the U.S. military.

Suddenly, at a press conference, an Iraqi television journalist, Muntader al-Zaidi, 28, a correspondent for Al Baghdadia, stood up about 12 feet from Mr. Bush and shouted in Arabic: “This is a gift from the Iraqis; this is the farewell kiss, you dog!” He threw a shoe at Mr. Bush, who ducked.  Zaidi then threw his other shoe, shouting in Arabic, “This is from the widows, the orphans and those who were killed in Iraq!

#2: Communist revolutionaries across U.S. say good-bye to RCP

Over a year of polemics, many revolutionaries have worked to excavate and repudiate the direction of the Revolutionary Communist Party. There is much to deepen, of course, especially in the sphere of theory and historical summation, as revolutionaries move forward to reconceive and regroup within new communist coherencies — but after this first year, the RCP appears increasingly in the rear view mirror.

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People We Will Miss (and Some We Won’t):

Anuradha Gandhi: Maoist leader in India

On April 12, 2008 Anuradha (alias Narmada, Varsha, Janaki, Rama) passed away after an attack of falciperum malaria. With this the Indian working class lost one of its ablest and topmost woman leaders who with sheer hard work, deep ideological and political study, and revolutionary dedication rose from the ranks to become a member of the Central Committee of the C.P.I (Maoist).

The oppressed women of India lost one of the greatest champions of their cause, one who, for more than three and a half decades, relentlessly organized them, led them into struggles against oppression and exploitation; the Nagpur dalit masses and workers of the unorganized sector lost a leader who stayed among them, awakening and organizing them; and the adivasi masses of Bastar, especially those of South Bastar, worst affected by the genocidal Salwa Judum, lost their beloved didi, who worked among them for years sharing their weal and woe; and the students and intellectuals lost a revolutionary role model, who gave up the comforts of a middle class life in order to integrate with the oppressed masses.

George Carlin: Unrepentant, Cranky, Radical, and Very Funny

When the culture began to change in the late 1960s — when the old one-liner comics on the Ed Sullivan Show were looking pretty tired and irrelevant to a younger generation experimenting with drugs and protesting the war in Vietnam — George Carlin was the most important stand-up comedian in America. By the time he died Sunday night (of heart failure at age 71), the transformation he helped bring about in stand-up had become so ingrained that it’s hard to think of Carlin as one of America’s most radical and courageous popular artists. But he was.

Truth-telling & Exile: One Moment with Eartha Kitt

There are many things to note about Eartha Kitt’s long career and rich life — and we will leave all but one of them to others. For the moment, let’s just tell the story of Eartha’s bold disruption of the Johnson White House during the Vietnam War — and her confrontation with LBJ’s wife Lady Bird.

It was January 18, 1968. and Earth Kitt had been summoned to the White House which someone else might have thought was a great honor. But Earth Kitt shared the mounting fury within the United States over the war in Vietnam and widespread poverty.  And she decided to confront the President openly.

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Kasama honors the memory of playwright Harold Pinter who died on December 24. The following rememberance first appeared on Monthly Review’s MRzine.

by Amir Hassanpour

It is gratifying to see the attention given to Harold Pinter, prominent British playwright who struggled for a better world and has just left us on the brink of an economic and political disaster that smacks of the 1930s. I do not intend to add to the flood of obituaries coming from the media all over the world. I offer, instead, reflections on how the mainstream media present his politics. There is much to reflect upon in the brilliant life of Pinter. I will focus on his connection with the Kurds. A Kurdish website has written: “Kurdistan Loses a Friend.”

Many obituaries mention Pinter’s leftist politics and cite his short 1988 play Mountain Language as evidence of his “controversial” politics. This play was inspired by his trip to Turkey, and his opposition to the repression of authors, journalists, and others, including the Kurdish people, who were denied basic rights such as speaking in their own language. Although the play does not allude to any geographic location or mention the Kurdish language, it shows prison guards banning the prisoners’ use of their native language. This was, in fact, happening in Turkey when Pinter visited the country in 1985. In the wake of the military coup of 1980, Kurdish political prisoners were not allowed to talk to visiting family members in their native tongue, and many visitors, especially the elderly and those from rural areas, were not familiar with the official state language, i.e., Turkish. Pinter noted that the play was inspired by the Kurdish experience but it was not about that particular context. The suppression of language rights was universal, he said. Actually, when Pinter decided to finish the writing of Mountain Language in 1988, Margaret Thatcher’s government had just banned the broadcasting of the voice of Gerry Adams, leader of Sinn Fein.

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Palestinians carry the body of a victim of an Israeli air strike in Rafah, southern Gaza Strip, 27 December 2008. (Hatem Omar/MaanImages)

The following piece comes from the important resource site Electronic Intefada.

by Ali Abunimah

“I will play music and celebrate what the Israeli air force is doing.” Those were the words, spoken on Al Jazeera today by Ofer Shmerling, an Israeli civil defense official in the Sderot area adjacent to Gaza, as images of Israel’s latest massacres were broadcast around the world.

A short time earlier, US-supplied Israeli F-16 warplanes and Apache helicopters dropped over 100 bombs on dozens of locations in the Israeli-occupied Gaza Strip killing at least 195 persons and injuring hundreds more. Many of these locations were police stations located, like police stations the world over, in the middle of civilian areas. The US government was one of the first to offer its support for Israel’s attacks, and others will follow.

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Stalin in Exile, 1915

Gary Leupp and Andrei both remarked that this may deserve comment:

One of those semi-scientific TV polls has the commentators of the West clacking their tongues:

Joseph Stalin, general secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union and leader of the third Communist International, was voted the third most popular Russian historical figure.

He came in behind Alexander Nevsky (a warrior-king who beat off an invasion by German knights in the Middle Ages) and Pytor Stolypin (a tsarist prime minister and advocate of capitalist modernization in the early 1900s).

More than 50 million people voted by phone, the internet or via text messages in the poll held by Rossiya, one of Russia’s biggest television stations.

The voting took place over six months as 500 original candidates were whittled down to a final 12.

In the official West media, Stalin is a symbol of everything horrific in the Russian past — but for large numbers of Russian people, Stalin is remembered, and loved, as the leader of the Soviet Union’s socialist days, and the period of great common struggle (for social advancement and the defeat of Hitler).

Lenin (the leader of the Soviet revolution) came in sixth.

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This is the final installment of “Evaluating the Cultural Revolution in China and its Legacy for the Future.” It was written by the by the MLM Revolutionary Study Group in the U.S. This comprehensive paper describes the course of the Cultural Revolution (CR) from 1966-1976, its achievements and shortcomings, and why future movements for revolution, socialism and communism must stand on its shoulders.”

This is the sixth of 8 articles composing a paper that was written by the MLM Revolutionary Study group. Part 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, and 7 are available on Kasama.

This final installment sums up the MLMRSG’s view of socialist society, and contains the conclusion to the pamphlet. It also includes an extensive bibliography of works on the Cultural Revolution.

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Evaluating the Cultural Revolution (9): Conclusion.

“Our attitude toward ourselves should be to be insatiable in learning and towards others to be tireless in teaching.” – Mao Zedong

In our view, the ability of socialism to thrive and advance towards communism involves several dialectically-related tasks. The principal tasks are to keep the Communist Party revolutionary; to continually unleash the initiative of the masses of working people to strengthen their ability to rule—to master the complex questions involved in running the economy, education, culture, international affairs and other areas of society; to thoroughly transform the relations of production [1] and social relations [2]; to restrict the operation of the law of value [3]  and of bourgeois right [4]; to proletarianize all classes in society ; and to be a firm support and nourishment for revolution throughout the world.

Working people cannot rise to these challenges and make new advances under socialism if their world outlook remains the same. As people learn to express themselves and organize in various political formations, they will find that this is not only a right, but a responsibility.

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Monthly Review provides video coverage of this important action

Stanley Rogouski published an online gallery of photography from this Emergency Protest to Stop the Massacres in Gaza, New York, 28.12.08.

Doug wrote to Kasama:

“The Israeli attack on Gaza is not only supported and encouraged by the US, but the US has paid for and supplied every bullet and bomb, jet and tank–in this attack and those before.  Here is a chart of US payments to Israel since its founding.  The totals for 2008 are yet to be totaled, but $30 billion in arms aid has already been pledged through 2018.  These payments have been made and pledged through consistently united efforts of both imperialist parties in the US.  This policy is supported and administered by the outgoing Bush Administration, and the new Obama Administration has pledged to continue it.”

He then pointed out the following table of U.S. aid to Israel since its founding in 1949:

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Quick Notes from Gary Leupp (with minor moderator editing.)

Might it be good to headline this for awhile to encourage discussion of what’s happening right now in Gaza? I’m personally starved for analysis.

I understand the viciousness of the Zionist regime, and the dead-end represented by Hamas’s Sunni fundamentalism, but the timing of the Israeli assault and its attribution to Hamas missile attacks (which I don’t understand, and which anyway seem like pin-pricks)…can anyone help clarify?

what I’m asking for was not so much a line-up of forces within the Israeli state and within Palestine or projection for a solution to the national oppression of the Palestinians but rather analysis of the background to the current invasion of Gaza.

Since Hamas swept the Palestinian elections in January 2006, and then seized power in Gaza in summer 2007 (preventing Fatah from pre-empting them in a move orchestrated from Washington by Elliott Abrams), Israel has punished the 1.5 million people of the territory by converting it into a vast concentration camp.

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U.S. made

“Israel Using New US-Supplied Smart Bombs in Gaza Attacks”
Livni Expects International Community to Support Operation

December 28, 2008

When Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice declared Hamas responsible for all the killings in Israel’s attacks on the Gaza Strip, it was easy to dismiss it as an expression of the Bush Administration’s “special relationship” with the Israeli government and knee-jerk support for any killings with the word terrorist remotely linked to them. Yet it seems there may have been a more practical concern of culpability at play.

When the Israeli government was bombing every police station in the densely populated strip, some of those attacks were coming by way of US-supplied GBU-39 smart bombs. It is unclear how many of the hundreds of people killed in the Gaza Strip in the past 48 hours died at the hands of American munitions, but to the extent that the carnage has gotten some television coverage in the United States, direct American involvement is likely to be unpopular with a war-weary nation.

And while the Bush Administration is unreservedly in support of the attacks, the incoming Obama Administration, just weeks from inauguration, is using it’s default cop-out excuse to avoid commenting, with David Axelrod declaring that “only one president can speak for America,” and “that president now is George W. Bush.”

But for the rest of the world, outside of the US and British governments, most urge both sides of the conflict to stop their attacks and return to the bargaining table. Israeli Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni lashed out at the calls for peace, demanding that the international community “support things that are not easy to support,” in this case the evisceration of the Gaza Strip. She insisted that only through backing the Israeli attacks will the offensive be short.

The following appeared in the british Guardian (28 December 2008). Original Title: “To be in Gaza is to be trapped.”

By Peter Beaumont

Gaza. Always the suffering of Gaza, most potent symbol of the tragedy of Palestine. In 1948, during the Nakba – or “The Catastrophe” as Palestinians describe the war that gave birth to the state of Israel – 200,000 refugees poured into Gaza, swelling its population by more than two-thirds. Then Gaza fell under Egyptian control.

The six day war of 1967 saw more refugees, but with it came the occupation of Gaza by Israel – an occupation that, despite Israel’s declaration under Prime Minister Ariel Sharon that it would unilaterally withdraw its settlements and troops in 2005, has never really ended.

It has not ended, for to be in Gaza is to be trapped. Without future or hope, limited to a few square miles. Its borders, land and sea, are defined largely by Israel (with Egypt’s compliance along the southern end of the Strip).

It is not open to the ocean apart from a narrow outlet accessible only to the fishing fleet, a coastal blockade policed by Israel’s gunboats, the boundaries of which have only recently been tested by boats of protesters sailing from Cyprus to draw attention to conditions inside Gaza.

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Thanks to model minority for pointing this out:

The hip-hop artist Common recently said he thought Obama would help bring a positive transformation in hip hop, producing a cascade of debate:

“‘I really do believe we as hip-hop artists pick up what’s going on in the world and try to reflect that,’ Common explained to CNN. ‘I think hip-hop artists will have no choice but to talk about different things and more positive things, and try to bring a brighter side to that because, even before Barack [Obama], I think people had been tired of hearing the same thing.’

The rapper said his new album represents the ‘broadening’ of hip-hop’s audience — one that demands evolution rather than reworking of old beats and rhymes.”

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The following reply popped up from blogger Ron Mexico:

I fucks with Common. For realsies, I do. There had even been a point in time during which I kinda wanted to be Common.

[Ron’s Note: This was definitely before LWFC and the devastating effects of Baduism. Electric Circus? Really?]

In the Mexico household, Lonnie R. Lynn had always been a beacon of sensibility amidst raucous West Coast gangsta rap and the hardcore influence of say, an Onyx. The score to a typical afternoon in Ricky and Ronnie’s room in 1994 would sound something like “Gin and Orange Pineapple Juice.”

Two years later it would actually be just The Score, but that’s another column altogether.

Ironically, today–a day his brown-covered album implored I look forward to–Common doesn’t make sense.

Hip-hop only exists as Common says in a fictional societal vacuum preserved since the onset of his own rap career. In 1989 you were more likely to find socially and politically-charged hip-hop in the mainstream. Tracks like “Self-Destruction” and “We’re All In The Same Gang” were commercially-released singles. Today most rap tunes with such relevance are relegated to mixtapes or are album filler at best.

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Thanks to Ka Frank for forwarding this to Kasama.

My Declaration of Withdrawal from the Party

My name is Zhang Laushi, born in 1928 April to a common peasant family on Gaozhou Peninsula, Shandong Province. At age 14, as a youth brigade leader, I joined the war to resist Japanese aggression and in the mid of the Huihai campaign when I was 20, I joined the Chinese Communist Party. It has been more than half a century now.

In the eyes of today’s young generation, I also can be counted as an old revolutionary.

After the Huihai campaign, I again participated in the Cross Yangzi River Campaign (Against KMT forces). At that time I was a corporal.

In the Anti-US-Help-Korea War, I served in the 68th Army as a communication corporal, got wounded, transferred to western Henan Province a mountainous county to be Director of Post and Telephone
Department and Party Secretary. I held that post for 20 years and retired as a technical category cadre. Several decades of life in revolution and war have allowed me to do a little work for the people and the Party. The Party and the people gave me more than a little honor. During the liberation war and the Korea War I have several times served with distinction and merit, received commendations and military medals which decorated my chest of my uniform. Even now I treasure my uniform of war, often taking it out to reminisce with deep emotion.

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This article appears online at lacan.com and is also available in video form. N3wday suggested posting it, saying there is value in examining  Zizek’s “4 antagonisms” of capitalism that cannot be resolved under the system (ecology, private property, technological developments, and new forms of apartheid.) Part 1 was posted yesterday.

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“The problem is thus that we can rely neither on scientific mind nor on our common sense – they both mutually reinforce each other’s blindness. The scientific mind advocates a cold objective appraisal of dangers and risks involved where no such appraisal is effectively possible, while common sense finds it hard to accept that a catastrophe can really occur. The difficult ethical task is thus to “un-learn” the most basic coordinates of our immersion into our life-world: what usually served as the recourse to Wisdom (the basic trust in the background-coordinates of our world) is now THE source of danger.

“One can learn even more from the Rumsfeldian theory of knowledge – the expression, of course, refers to the well-known accident in March 2003, when Donald Rumsfeld engaged in a little bit of amateur philosophizing about the relationship between the known and the unknown: ‘There are known knowns. These are things we know that we know. There are known unknowns. That is to say, there are things that we know we don’t know. But there are also unknown unknowns. There are things we don’t know we don’t know.’ What he forgot to add was the crucial fourth term: the “unknown knowns,” things we don’t know that we know – which is precisely the Freudian unconscious, the “knowledge which doesn’t know itself,” as Lacan used to say. If Rumsfeld thinks that the main dangers in the confrontation with Iraq are the “unknown unknowns,” the threats from Saddam about which we do not even suspect what they may be, what we should reply is that the main dangers are, on the contrary, the “unknown knowns,” the disavowed beliefs and suppositions we are not even aware of adhering to ourselves. In the case of ecology, these disavowed beliefs and suppositions are the ones which prevent us from really believing in the possibility of the catastrophe, and they combine with the “unknown unknowns.” The situation is like that of the blind spot in our visual field: we do not see the gap, the picture appears continuous.”

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Censorship Today: Violence, or Ecology as a New Opium for the Masses,  Part 2

by Slavoj Zizek

The lesson to be fully endorsed is thus that of another environmental scientist who came to the result that, while one cannot be sure what the ultimate result of humanity’s interventions into geo-sphere will be, one thing is sure: if humanity were to stop abruptly its immense industrial activity and let nature on Earth take its balanced course, the result would have been a total breakdown, an imaginable catastrophe. “Nature” on Earth is already to such an extent “adapted” to human interventions, the human “pollutions” are already to such an extent included into the shaky and fragile balance of the “natural” reproduction on Earth, that its cessation would cause a catastrophic imbalance. This is what it means that humanity has nowhere to retreat: not only “there is no big Other” (self-contained symbolic order as the ultimate guarantee of Meaning); there is also no Nature qua balanced order of self-reproduction whose homeostasis is disturbed, thrown off the rails, by the imbalanced human interventions. Indeed, what we need is ecology without nature: the ultimate obstacle to protecting nature is the very notion of nature we rely on.

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Thanks to E.A. for pointed out this article from IPS. Disinformation has been particularly intense in regard to such media “reports” on the Shining Path, so we urge our readers to read the following skepticism. However because such reports are rare, we are sharing it, confident that people are able to evaluate this for themselves. Originally titled: “PERU: Guerrillas on the Warpath for Peace Talks.”

By Ángel Páez

LIMA, Dec 24 (IPS) – A column of Maoist Sendero Luminoso (Shining Path) guerrillas operating in the northeastern coca-growing valleys of the Upper Huallaga river in Peru appears to be carrying out attacks in pursuit of a peace agreement, to include an amnesty and the restoration of the rights of those who took up arms in 1980.

That, at least, is what the records of police interrogations of Senderista leader Atilio Cahuana say.

Cahuana was captured in November 2007. His statements may explain why, a year after this reverse and the death of Sendero military commander Mario Espíritu Acosta, known as “Camarada (Comrade) JL”, the guerrillas have again ambushed a police convoy, killing five members of the force.

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STRENGTHEN THE PARTY AND INTENSIFY THE PEOPLE’S STRUGGLE IN CELEBRATING THE 40th FOUNDING ANNIVERSARY

Message of the Central Committee, Communist Party of the Philippines December 26, 2008

With utmost joy, we celebrate today the 40th anniversary of the founding of the Communist Party of the Philippines (CPP) as the advanced detachment of the Philippine working class under the theoretical guidance of Marxism-Leninism- Maoism. Forty years ago today, we reestablished on a new foundation what originally was the Communist Party of the Philippine Islands (CPPI).

On this happy occasion, we in the Central Committee of the CPP salute all comrades in all Party organs, units and spheres of work, all Red commanders and fighters of the New People’s Army, all allied forces in the National Democratic Front of the Philippines, all leaders and functionaries of the local organs of the people’s democratic government, all activists in the mass movement and the broad masses of the Filipino people.

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