Monthly Archives: March 2022

Fanfare for the Common Good – The New Republic

Posted: March 18, 2022 at 8:43 pm

Meadow sees the breakdown of any genuine sense of community among evangelicals as representative of the breakdown of community life all across America, at every level. For this he blames the Lockean philosophical tradition, with its emphasis on property rights and self-sovereignty, to which he opposes an ethic of solidarity with fellow citizens. But the authors of other books in my collection have found the source of contemporary political disorder in a more recent and insidious doctrine, that of neoliberalism, with its scorn of government and worship of private markets.

In Teacher Education Policies in the United States, a chapter in the book Navigating the Common Good in Teacher Education Policy, Barbara Bales explains that over a 25-year period beginning in 1992, the federal government systematically usurped oversight of teacher training from local school districts around the country and concentrated it at the federal level. The most jarring transition commenced in 2001, with the advent of the George W. Bush administration and the punitive neoliberal policies that characterized the No Child Left Behind Act and its audit-based accounting system. Bales quotes from a paper by education professor Ken Zeichner, who asserted that teachers had become instruments to further the spread of global capitalism in its current forms and lend support to elements of the current system such as free markets and trade agreements, economic rationalism, increased surveillance of workers, and greater privatization of public services. In his book For the Common Good: A New History of Higher Education in America, Charles Dorn, a professor of education at Bowdoin College, lambastes American universities for the corporatization of higher education, which he holds responsible for a crisis that includes soaring tuition costs, limited student learning, the decline of the humanities, increasing class stratification, and the unmaking of the public university. In From Commodification to the Common Good: Reconstructing Science, Technology, and Society, philosopher of science Hans Radder notes that since the commodification (i.e., patenting) of academic research, which he vehemently opposes, is part of a widespread pattern of profound social and economic development (in particular the rise of neoliberal doctrines and politics), there is no easy answer to the question of whether it can be stopped. Still, he says, the recent, more widely acknowledged criticisms of neoliberalism may be a sign of forthcoming change.

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Peaky Blinders: Ruby Shelby, Connie Barwell and the Cursed Sapphire – Den of Geek

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After Graces death, Tommy went with Johnny Dogs and baby Charles in a wagon to the Black Mountains. There, he sought the advice of gypsy matriarch Madame Boswell. He told her he was giving the sapphire away and asked whether or not she would take it. His wife was wearing it on the night she was shot, he told the wise woman, and he blamed himself. You want me to tell you this jewel is cursed and then her death wont be all your fault? she asked. If I believed in priests, Tommy said, I would confess and ask for forgiveness, but all I have is you, Madame Boswell. She said that the sapphire was indeed cursed, she could feel the curse burning through her hand. Tommy left the stone with her, and she shouted after him that from now on, he would be blessed with good fortune.

Its a great scene that, at the time, was marked by ambiguity. Was Madame Boswell lying to land herself a valuable jewel, or did she really feel the stones curse? Did Tommy truly believe in the curse, or did he just need an explanation for Graces murder that absolved him of guilt? In season six, that ambiguity was replaced with certainty. The sapphire was indeed cursed, Esme Shelby-Lee tells Tommy. Madame Boswell (renamed Barwell here, perhaps to avoid insult to the real-life Boswell gypsy tribe) gave it to her daughter Evadne, who put it around the neck of her seven-year-old daughter Connie, who immediately started coughing and was dead before morning.

The sapphire was thrown into the river and Evadne duly cursed Tommy Shelby, that if he should ever have a daughter, she would also die at that age. Her childs grave was marked by a cross bearing the inscription: Connie Barwell, seven years old, died of a cursed stone not forgotten, and then in red, what looks like the words Vengeance will come.

In season six, episode three Gold, vengeance did come. Tommys seven-year-old daughter Ruby died of tuberculosis, after hearing voices, seeing visions and speaking the Romani words for the devil. Ruby died from a curse laid in retaliation for Tommy having passed on an already-cursed sapphire to the Barwell family. Evadne Barwell (still listed under the familys original name of Boswell on IMDb), is credited as appearing in the next two episodes of season six, played by actor Gwynne McElveen.

If viewers chose to, they could dismiss all this talk of curses and jewels, and simply believe that Grace was shot by a foe, and that Ruby and Connie both died of TB and the sapphire had nothing to do with any of it. Tommy felt guilt over Graces death and needed something to blame that wasnt himself, so he seized on the idea of the cursed stone as an explanation. Tommys mind almost says as much when he had a vision of Grace holding the sapphire in season five and she gave voice to his greatest fear: It wasnt the blue stone, Tommy, it was you.

None of that dull rationalism though, would be very Peaky Blinders. This is a drama that believes in gypsy superstition, so why shouldnt we believe it too? The stone was cursed, and that curse killed Grace, Connie and indirectly, Ruby.

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Leo Kofler Was a Marxist and a Revolutionary Humanist – Jacobin magazine

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Before the rise of the Nazis, Germany with its powerful workers movement and mass social democratic and communistparties was home to a flourishing Marxist intellectual landscape. Marxist evening schools, party magazines, and scholarly journals fed a vibrant culture of debate that, while primarily the domain of intellectuals, far surpassed any left-wing milieu since then in both quantity and quality.

After 1945, Marxism was officially canonized as Marxism-Leninism in the German Democratic Republic (GDR) in the East, while in West Germany it was banished during the 1950s and survived only on the fringes of society. Marxism held on only in the form of the critical theory of the Frankfurt School and a handful of Marxist intellectuals scattered across the country. One of those intellectuals was Leo Kofler(19071995), an important but unfortunately often overlooked intellectual pioneer of the postwar German left.

While Ernst Bloch once praised his work as a direct successor to Gyrgy Lukcss pathbreaking classic, History and Class Consciousness, Leo Kofler generally had little luck with the more than thirty books and pamphlets published during his lifetime. For example, the mythical year 1968 was almost over by the time his manifesto, Perspektiven des revolutionren Humanismus (Perspectives of Revolutionary Humanism), was published by the renowned Hamburg publisher Rowohlt. Yet the West German extraparliamentary opposition (Auerparlamentarische Opposition, APO), then at its height, apparently had little use for his political and theoretical pamphlet, since practically no one referenced it or discussed it extensively after its publication.

Today, readers would be hard-pressed to find much trace of his public reception beyond a handful of rather distant and critical reviews in mainstream newspapers. This could be blamed on the flood of socially critical literature being published at the time, in which so much was overlooked and later forgotten, or on Koflers occasionally all-too-intricate writing style, which differed from his thrilling oratory style. One could also attribute it to the old-fashioned style that characterized his demeanor and that he happily affirmed in provocative fashion. Yet more than anything else, Koflers obscurity is the product of a profound alienation between the different generations of the political left.

The young protest generation of 1968, and especially its West German branch, was not free of illusions and hubris. One example was the way in which they perceived themselves as truly new, failing to grasp that they stood in a long tradition of protest against social democratic reformism on the one hand and Stalinism on the other.

Leaving aside the first isolated predecessors of the 1930s and the 1940s, the history of the New Left began in the middle of the 1950s not only but also in West Germany. Around this time, a network and milieu of groups and individuals, newspapers, and periodicals formed. Social democrats disappointed and radicalized by their partys accommodation and integration into the system; democrats dissatisfied with the postfascist restoration; communist dissidents inspired by destalinization and the rise of national liberation movements in the Third World; and left-socialists and -communists who had been politically homeless since the 1930s and 1940s all sought to break out of the Cold War superpower binary and pursue a third way or, as they put it, go back to Marx.

These social democratic dissidents represented many thousands in the years 195459. Among them were figures such as the former trade union theorist Viktor Agartz, the young left-wing Catholic Theo Pirker, the journalists Gerhard Gleissberg and Fritz Lamm, and the left-socialist jurist Wolfgang Abendroth. Leo Kofler, as a sort of wandering preacher in community colleges, trade unions, and student groups, introduced quite a few of them to the foundations and intricacies of an undogmatic Marxist theory reuniting the severed threads of freedom and socialism and anticipating many of the questions that Marxism would take up in the 1960s.

He had already founded a philosophy of praxis in the 1940s with his fundamental methodological work on Die Wissenschaft von der Gesellschaft (The Science of Society) and his writing on the relationship between history and dialectics, in Geschichte und Dialektik, published in 1955. Koflers philosophy of praxis argued for a renewal of Marxist thought in the spirit of what we now call Western Marxism beyond the vulgar materialist understanding of Marxism of the likes of Karl Kautsky or Joseph Stalin.

In his 1948 Zur Geschichte der brgerlichen Gesellschaft (On the History of Bourgeois Society) his most well-known work during his lifetime that exhibits interesting parallels to, as well as differences from, the school of British Marxist historians Kofler had traced the historical roots and paths of radical democracy and socialist conceptions of freedom. A few years later, at the beginning of the 1950s, he put forward the first systematic ideological critique of Stalinist theory and practice in the German-speaking world. For structural reasons, he wrote, Marxism-Leninism tended toward a vulgar materialist and undialectical indeed, almost anti-dialectical understanding of Marxism that was deeply anti-humanist, as it degraded the concrete humans to be emancipated into mere appendages of a new, bureaucratic ruling stratum.

As it also did elsewhere, the social and political upsurge pursued by the first generation of the New Left would ultimately fail in divided Germany. Exacerbated by the 1956 ban on the Communist Party in West Germany and the treason trials against Wolfgang Harich in East Germany and Viktor Agartz in the West in 1957, the communist and left-socialist milieu was permanently marginalized and repeatedly divided. The defeat of this socialist left also prepared the ground for the Social Democratic Party of Germanys (Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands, SPD) final retreat from any form of political or programmatic anti-capitalism, completed at its Bad Godesberg party congress in 1959. Together, these events culminated in the kind of lasting alienation between the political generations that could also be observed in neighboring European countries, even if it was not nearly as severe and long-lasting as in Germany.

The heavy burden that the failure of this first New Left left behind at the beginning of the 1960s can be seen in both political as well as theoretical debates. Even if the inventive power of the 1968 generation was impressive, it often reinvented the wheel. What Wolfgang Abendroth tried to diplomatically teach his young listeners during the revolt, Leo Kofler expressed in considerably blunter and harder-to-digest terms.

Even as a spectator of the movement, for Kofler 1968 nevertheless represented a world-historical new beginning. He was also keenly aware of everything that had transpired since the mid-1960s. While applying the final corrections and revisions to the new edition of his monumental Zur Geschichte der brgerlichen Gesellschaft in early 1966, he inserted the following formulation: An opposition that pushes for democratization is becoming visible in the people and the intelligentsia. The fateful question for Germany is whether they will be able to carry it through.

Like Herbert Marcuse, Leo Kofler was, with his heart and mind, fully on the side of the young generation. Unlike Marcuse, however, he was too much of an old left-socialist to turn into a simple apologist for the antiauthoritarian awakening. With a caustically sharp tone and frequently trenchant critique, he used every available opportunity for intraleft contestation, for the struggle between two lines within what he had for a decade been calling a progressive or humanist elite.

Whether dissident Communists battling against the half-measures of destalinization or oppositional social democrats and trade unionists fighting against bureaucratization and integration into the system, radical democratic citizens or socially engaged Christians they all became, willingly or not, an independent sociological layer, under the historically novel conditions of a bureaucratically blocked workers movement. They were an amorphous elite composed of progressive elements of socialist and nonsocialist origin, a formless mass with strongly heterogeneous and fluctuating tendencies heterogeneous in its social and political composition, its social and political views, and its habitus.

This progressive humanist elite (the term elite was not intended judgmentally; today we would perhaps say multitude) led a sort of pariah existence on the margins and in the niches of social organizations (parties, associations, cultural and religious communities) between all the camps. It stood socially and ideologically at odds with the traditional front lines of socialism and nonsocialism. It was full of contradictions, volatile, socially powerless and yet it is there and not without significance. According to Kofler, a real renewal of the socialist left, a return to health of revolutionary humanism could only succeed if this progressive elite reflected on its humanist sensibility and became a mediator between the old and new milieus.

This, in turn, would only succeed if they united the powerless academic left, the world of highly developed abstraction, with the powerful trade union movement (that world of vulgar practicality (which places itself against the sting of class struggle) on a new foundation. Yet both of these worlds, critical and oppositional according to their origin, barely come into contact, they go their own ways, he wrote in 1968. The consequence is obstinate practicality over here and complacent intellectualism over there, both sides observing each other suspiciously as though through glass walls, yet not influencing each other.

That was not the only unreasonable demand for the New Left in 1968. That Kofler was guided by the theories of Gyrgy Lukcs, above all his aesthetic theories, was already bad enough for the neo-vanguardists. That he was also critical or even hostile to the psychology of Sigmund Freud and bluntly insulted the Frankfurt School of Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno as Marxo-nihilists made him just as suspect to the younger generation, as did his downright pushy insistence that socialist humanism provided the main target for the rampant structuralist anti-humanism at the time.

Perhaps he demanded too much of the new movement, which in fact had already begun to fall apart by 1969. Yet these were and here Koflers originality seems to have been widely underestimated the unreasonable demands of a New Left fellow traveler, not a bourgeois or Communist critic. His ambitious attempt at an alternative social philosophy to that of the Frankfurt School had no chance with the generation of young intellectuals. Yet the idea that Kofler had nothing to say about the new phenomenon of welfare state capitalism is not borne out by his work. Starting in the 1950s, he was one of the first Marxists after World War II to grapple intensively with an analysis of the contradictions and pitfalls of a capitalism that promised prosperity for all.

His analysis, carried out in his works Staat, Gesellschaft und Elite zwischen Humanismus und Nihilismus (State, Society and Elite between Nihilism and Humanism), Der proletarische Brger (The Proletarian Citizen), and Der asketische Eros (The Ascetic Eros) and taken up again in Perspektiven des revolutionren Humanismusturned its gaze to the unprecedented integration processes of late bourgeois class society. Kofler saw this neocapitalist society as having transitioned into an epoch of deliberalization and spiritual demoralization (decadence) that did not want to be reminded of its early bourgeois promises of emancipation and, indeed, had become downright nihilistic.

The world, he wrote in the late 1950s,

only remains useful for the bourgeoisie, bearable for profit, otherwise it has become empty and meaningless. The leftover freedom is no longer the freedom to realize ideals and uplift humans whoever wants to do that becomes suspect! but rather the freedom of competition, of the jungle. Essentially, everything is achieved, there was history, but in the future there wont be any more.

This social stasis, condensing into a sort of cynical, nihilistic Weltschmerz and revealing a pessimistic concept of man, drove even its leftist adversaries piece by piece into a theoretical anti-humanism that isolated them from the one thing that could carry out a real transformation of society: the broad majority of working and thinking people.

According to Kofler, neocapitalism doubtlessly had quite a bit to offer its people: political freedom, more income and free time, more security and fewer taboos (including those of a sexual type). Yet at the same time, these new freedoms and possibilities shackled the individual more than ever to a form of society that was irrational in its principles. Hunger had indeed disappeared, but not deprivation. Consumption was possible, but only through asceticism before and after the consuming: Doing without in order to be able to afford something and affording something with the consequence of doing without afterward belong to the most self-evident forms of behavior of our time. What appeared to be de-ideologization was in fact total ideologization: individual rationalism was merely the epiphenomenon of collective irrationality, the democracy of the market the obfuscation of the despotism of the factory and the office.

Kofler pioneered a critique of bourgeois freedom in late consumer capitalism that avoided the then-predominant ideological pitfalls of an allegedly administered world, of a one-dimensional society or even an integral statism, without ignoring the social phenomena at the root of these misleading units of ideology. Postwar capitalism, restrained by the welfare state, was also, first and foremost, a class society an antagonistic form of society shaped by exploitation, injustice, and domination, in which some have what others do not.

There was still lord and servant, bourgeois elite and the wage-earning class, and consent had still not abolished coercion something only a few critical thinkers acknowledged back in the 1960s and 70s. Today, however, in the age of the war on terror and weaponized globalization, this has become undeniably clear. Thus Kofler described, in a way that was both old-fashioned and forward-looking, the class society we all live in, and reflected on what it meant for perspectives of emancipation.

He challenged many left-wing currents as well as certain interpretations of the Marx renaissance at the time, a challenge that has by and large been ignored. That applies to Koflers view of the questions of social psychology, his critical and productive discussion of certain Freudian theorems, and his argument for conceiving a new, contemporary Marxism, by thinking through and combining the theoretical ideas of Lukcs and Marcuse.

His critique of the structurally bureaucratized workers movement targeted, in different ways, both of its main currents: social democracy integrating itself into the bourgeois state with its merely ethical socialism as well as the socialist bureaucracy of the Communist movement with its incapacity for destalinization. This did not contribute to Koflers popularity; neither did his early ideological criticism of the Frankfurt School, which he had already developed by the mid-1960s, a decade before Perry Andersons famous critique of Western Marxism. This was especially true of his attempt to conceptually combine Western Marxism with a radical socialist humanism and thereby lay the epistemological foundations for a Marxist philosophical anthropology.

With his theory of society, Kofler drew on the early bourgeois, radical democratic ideals of freedom, equality, and solidarity turning them against the limited bourgeois, purely political form of freedom as well as the limited actually existing socialist freedom conceived merely in socioeconomic terms. He understood the socialist project to mean a comprehensive emancipation. Oppositional demands for freedom, progress, democracy, and self-realization, for a classless society in the common interest and for self-realizing individuality, must be undergirded by a conceptual orientation to humanity and an anthropological epistemology from a Marxist perspective.

We humans are, as Terry Eagleton once put it, cultural beings by virtue of our nature, which is to say by virtue of the sorts of bodies we have and the kind of world to which they belong. And where human beings stand, as it were, between nature and culture, human nature will indeed be changed through human culture but not eliminated. Forty years before Eagleton, this was also Koflers understanding. For him, this is fundamentally justified by the fact that it is the human brain and thus human culture that distinguish humans nature. It lies in the essence of this human nature that it is structurally dependent on ones fellow human beings and the forms of work and activity mediated by them. This practical, active work and its accompanying social forms of relation are creative and inventive in nature.

Koflers often misunderstood groundwork of a Marxist philosophical anthropology understands itself literally as the science of the unchanging preconditions of human changeability. It sees itself as a form of metatheory and auxiliary science that has no desire nor ability to be a guide for action but rather only shows why there was and will be a specifically human history at all, and why change in humans and their social conditions is fundamentally possible, if not concretely predetermined in its content.

Kofler provides us with a criterion for what humanitys self-realization can be, and thereby also precisely for what emancipation cannot and must not be. What practical significance such a discussion of anthropological concepts of man has is perhaps only truly clear today, in light of a neoliberalism rooted in a structural social Darwinism and the contemporary challenges of biological and neurological sciences intervening in human nature, along with the ever more obviously dysfunctional relationship between humanity and nature.

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And not just a tool for government oppression a remarkably comprehensive and efficient tool. Companies such as Spotify and Twitter and GoFundMe and so many others have helped to centralize communication in the public square, which is increasingly the internet, and they increasingly do the leftist governments bidding.

In its early days, the internet was supposed to facilitate free expression of ideas around the world. Great! Fab! But over time it has featured platforms that have centralized that information and grown to huge size, allowing their private owners to have tremendous power to censor and to affect politics around the world as they see fit.

We certainly saw that during the Trump years. The process is now close to Orwellian in scope even though its not usually the government doing it directly. And as a telescreen-equivalent, the internet isnt forced on people but is instead involuntary. We have forged our own chains or at least, weve put them around ourselves.

At the moment, alternatives to big companies with leftist-based censoring such as Twitter or GoFundMe are allowed to exist online (although remember how Gab was closed down for a while?). How long will these alternatives be allowed? Even when they exist, however, they are smaller and weaker than their well-established and more powerful rivals who have already been building their user bases for many years while holding themselves out as welcoming nearly all and then later coming down hard on the right.

The internet has also greatly facilitated the ability to spy on people in other words, to collect vast storehouses of information on them and to search it for whatever the government or the company is seeking. For example, GoFundMe has the personal information of everyone who donated to the truckers convoy; do you think they would protect that infomation if the government wanted it? I sure dont. In fact, its likely that the government already has access to it. And such goings-on also discourage people from contributing to conservative causes in the first place, because they fear the government will retaliate. Thats one of the goals of this entire process, too to induce fear and avoidance behavior.

Enormous amounts of information are on computers, far more than paper and pen could afford in the olden days, unless a person was a diarist suffering from OCD. Computers track what people read, buy and sell, wonder about, watch for entertainment, write, and financially transact. It all can be stored easily (none of the pneumatic tubes and paper archives of Orwell) and perhaps most important of all it can be accessed easily. A search for a certain word in all of someones correspondence that would take years with paper now takes seconds and can be expanded without much trouble at all to encompass many millions of people.

The internet is potentially (and perhaps already actually) the greatest totalitarian tool ever invented.

[NOTE: At the moment, the EARN IT bill has been introduced in the Senate by Blumenthal and Graham. It is supposedly meant to give the government the tools to investigate online-mediated child abuse, and if you read the material at that link, nothing about it sounds bad. But although Im not going to write a post about this right now Ive seen assertions online that it will give the government the power to scan all of our online communications. I have to say Ive suspected it was already doing that.]

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Joe Kent: Herrera Beutler is too ‘establishment | Government and Politics | tdn.com – The Daily News

Posted: at 8:41 pm

By Lauren Ellenbecker,The Columbian

As a soldier in the U.S. Army, Joe Kent says he dedicated his life to preserving Americas safety and integrity, and now hes fighting to restore it in the race for Washingtons 3rd Congressional District.

The former Green Beret, 41, said he didnt anticipate running for Congress until incumbent Rep. Jaime Herrera Beutler, R-Battle Ground, voted in favor of impeaching former President Donald Trump in 2021.

Now, Kent is weaponizing his Trump endorsement to challenge what he describes as the establishment, or Democrats and Republicans whom he says are plotting against the public through policy Herrera Beutler included, he said.

This rhetoric is common in many of Kents campaign messages many of which are broadcast on conservative platforms, including Tucker Carlsons Fox News television program and Steve Bannons War Room podcast. The appearances garnered him nationwide support, where he perpetuates far-right talking points to large audiences: claims of election fraud, calls for freeing political prisoners from the Jan. 6, 2021, riot, and repudiating gun regulations.

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Kent maintains a staunch group of supporters who help him remain in a comfortable position near the top of the list with campaign finances. The latest Federal Election Commission report showed that he holds $1.39 million in total, whereas the incumbent sits on $2.26 million.

Despite the gap in campaign finances, Kent says he is confident his goal in disassembling the establishment will encourage voters to join his efforts beginning with unseating Herrera Beutler.

Every time we need to stand up and actually fight for something that is going to benefit conservatives and the working class, she doesnt do it, he said. She passed her litmus test with the establishment.

Kent said he expects Democrats to vote for Herrera Beutler in the primaries if their partys candidate doesnt have a strong backing. Still, he isnt concerned about whether he will get booted out of the race for a seat in Congress.

The unity that we have to have is us shutting off our parties and doing whats best for the American people, Kent said.

National security, economic independence

As Kent pursues his goal, he says America should isolate itself from foreign companies, especially in the energy and manufacturing sectors. Furthermore, he believes the countrys military must maintain a strong foothold in technology in case of any future threats, especially as it relates to cyber warfare.

As it relates to the war in Ukraine, Kent said Russian President Vladimir Putins military action in the country has been too aggressive, but he has said that Putins reason for doing so was legitimate, according to The Centralia Chronicle. He added that America should promote aggressive diplomacy moving forward rather than enforcing sanctions or utilizing the military, they reported.

In light of the COVID-19 pandemic, Kent said he became dissatisfied with the closures of businesses and schools, citing it as a major influence in tanking the economy. Both COVID-19 mandates and environmental regulations on timber and fishing industries diminish a strong workforce, he said.

Bolstering the working class and reducing inflation are a prime focus in Kents campaign, which he seeks to address through supporting legislation to build a border wall and reduce funding to sanctuary cities. Along with unwarranted government spending, he says illegal immigration is a risk to the economy due to corporations valuing cheap labor rather than providing jobs to minimum-wage workers.

Law enforcement, education reform

As a veteran, Kent would seek ways to reduce veteran homelessness by finding ways to consolidate chronic homeless encampments and supporting social programs. However, he said he wouldnt back the allocation of federal funding to these programs unless law enforcement saw similar aid.

Conversely, Kent is adamantly against reducing police funding and police reform, such as Washington House Bill 1310.

Before we give up the smoke signs, I would want to repeal the constraints they put on law enforcement recently, he said.

Kent alleges that dismantling of democracy is worsened by the education system. He said the federal government supports curriculums that are antithetical to parents beliefs, including lessons about gender theory, sex education and the historical oppression of Black, Indigenous and people of color.

If we cant get rid of the Department of Education like Id like to, I would cut off funding to education around critical race theory and The 1619 (Project), Kent said.

Editors note: This part of a series of candidate profiles for Washingtons 3rd Congressional District. Each candidate who has consented to be interviewed will be profiled, with stories running in alphabetical order. Find all the profiles at columbian.com/election.

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Pada movie review: A sympathetic portrayal of the anger of the oppressed – The Hindu

Posted: at 8:41 pm

What director Kamal K.M. achieves with the material has much to do with the seamless coming together of Vishnu Vijays music, Shan Mohammeds editing and Sameer Tahirs cinematography

What director Kamal K.M. achieves with the material has much to do with the seamless coming together of Vishnu Vijays music, Shan Mohammeds editing and Sameer Tahirs cinematography

A majority of responses to injustice often serve the function of pressure releasing valves, as one-off protests calming the pent-up anger, while staying within the accepted confines of civil society. Once in a while, there are acts which break out of this safe zone with the victims of oppression putting even their lives on the line for what they believe is a just reaction. Pada is a cinematic chronicle of one such real-life incident, which is now almost forgotten in Kerala, although the issues raised remain as relevant now, as it was then.

On October 4, 1996, four men who claimed to be members of the Ayyankali Pada walked into the Palakkad District Collectors office and held him hostage for 10 hours, keeping the entire state administrative machinery on tenterhooks. They had only one demand: the State Government should withdraw the amendments made to the Kerala Scheduled Tribes (Restriction of Transfer of Land and Restoration of Alienated Land) Act 1975, which was enacted to return to the tribal people all the land taken over from them by settlers after 1960. Over the years, successive governments had watered down the law and the 1996 amendment was the last straw, driving four tribal activists to carry out a daring act to bring the government to the discussion table.

Pada

Director: Kamal K.M.

Cast: Kunchacko Boban, Joju George, Vinayakan, Dileesh Pothan, Prakash Raj, Unnimaya Prasad

In Pada, Kamal K.M. recreates the events of that day to raise the larger question of tribal land alienation. His debut film ID was written around the search for the identity of an unknown labourer who had collapsed at his workplace. Here too, the protagonists are from the marginalised sections, struggling to eke out a living. We get quick, but lasting glimpses of their backgrounds, in the frenzied preparation ahead of the day of action. Balu (Vinayakan) borrows his young daughters wristwatch, because timings are important, even as she asks him whether he is going to sell that too. Aravindan (Joju George) delivers a line about his helplessness when a lottery seller pesters him to buy one. Rajesh (Kunchacko Boban) seems to be the only one with a history of violent acts, while Kutty (Dileesh Pothan) is busy pacifying his wife Mini (Unnimaya Prasad), who is in the know of the plan.

The script lands straight into the hostage situation without wasting much time for the set up. Inside, it is a relentless shift between various tense situations, giving no respite to the audience. On one hand, there is the constant shift in dynamics between the captors and the Collector (Arjun Radhakrishnan), who is sensitive to their demands, while on the other side there is the Chief Secretary (Prakash Raj) and team racking their brains to calm down the captors. Outside, there is a clueless team of police officers looking for a way in.

Kamal is sure of the material he is working with, be it in the political sense or the technical sense. The background research to get right the little details from that day is also evident. The fictional elements or the cinematic liberties that he takes do not take away anything from the core issue that the film raises. But what he achieves with the material has much to do with the seamless coming together of Vishnu Vijays music, Shan Mohammeds editing and Sameer Tahirs cinematography. One drawback may be the presence of too many actors who do not have a standout role, especially that of Shine Tom Chacko, Karamana Sudheer and Jagadeesh.

Pada is a sympathetic portrayal of the justified anger of the oppressed.

Pada is currently running in theatres

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Australian government dumps two Iranian refugees in the US after nearly nine years of imprisonment – WSWS

Posted: at 8:41 pm

Two Iranian refugees who have been imprisoned by the Australian government for nearly nine years have been consigned to the United States under a 2016 refugee swap deal.

Adnan Choopani and Mehdi Ali, who are cousins, were 16 and 15 respectively when they were captured by the Australian navy and sent to the notorious immigration prison on Christmas Island, in the Indian Ocean, in 2013.

Now 24 and 25, they will be dumped in the US as part of a brutal resettlement deal struck with the Obama administration, allowing the Australian government to reject all responsibility for their wellbeing. They will be placed in a country that leads the world in COVID cases and deathsmany recorded in immigrant and refugee communities.

Their imprisonment has left significant psychological scars. The conditions they experienced underscore the cruelty of the bipartisan border protection regime, in which refugees who arrive to Australia by boat are subjected to indefinite detention.

Both are members of the Ahwazi Arab minority, who face oppression in Iran. They were separately urged by their families to flee the country for their own safety, and did not know the other was fleeing until they met up in Indonesia and boarded the same packed fishing vessel headed for Australia.

After being locked-up on Christmas Island for nine months, Mehdi was deemed to be a child and sent to live with other minors and families. Adnan, just some months older, was assessed as being 10 years above his age, and transferred to the adult male facility.

They were separated for this nine-month period until they were both transferred to the refugee prison camp on the small Pacific Island nation of Nauru. Adnans age was reassessed, and they were placed together in the family camp. Here they were subjected to years of psychological torture.

The Nauru facility is notorious for its squalid conditions and poor treatment of detainees. It has been the subject of a film, international inquiries and lawsuits. It had inadequate medical facilities. Prisoners, including families, were kept in tents that were filled with mold, causing skin irritation and respiratory problems.

In 2016 the Guardian published more than 2,000 leaked incident reports, dubbed the Nauru files, which documented officially buried cases of abuse, violence, mistreatment and suicide attempts among over 600 refugees, including 104 children.

The boys former teacher, Gabby Sutherland, told Al Jazeera: The boys were still kept in a cage within the camp. The cage was used to section off unaccompanied minors from other detainees.

In late 2014, their refugee status was formally recognised, but this did not change their situation. The Rudd Labor government in 2013 had declared that all asylum seekers who reached Australia by boat would never be allowed to settle in Australia.

In October 2014, 29 unaccompanied minors were removed from detention and placed in accommodation on the island. This granted little freedom and created great risk for the young men.

Nauru has been ravaged by major corporations for decades for its phosphate deposits. It now resembles a moon, with craters everywhere. Very little grows on the island. Most food must be imported and is highly processed.

This has created an obesity epidemic, along with high unemployment, fuelling discontent in the tiny country, with a population of just below 11,000. To divert this anger, the government has blamed the detainees for the poor social conditions. The young minors bore the brunt of this redirected anger.

Four boys were beaten and robbed in the first month alone, and threatening letters were sent to others. Adnan sewed his lips together in protest and sat outside the settlement services building. Mehdi joined him in solidarity. They were arrested, stripped naked and thrown in a prison cell where they were beaten, abused and spat on, although neither was ever charged.

They also watched their friends in the camp succumb to the torturous conditions. One of their friends burned himself to death, which led to them attempting suicide themselves.

In 2019 they were brought to Australia under a medevac bill. The legislation, later repealed, allowed doctors to recommend the transfer of asylum seekers to Australia. This did little to alleviate the suffering, as they were moved between detention centres and guarded hotel rooms.

Mehdi told the Guardian: Its been a complete trauma We came as children, we were boys, and we never had a childhood, we were just put in a cage. We did not receive a proper education, we were never allowed to have fun, we just had to try to survive in these harsh circumstances.

Adnan told the newspaper: Every day is still uncertain, that is the way they punish us. Every day we struggle to survive. They are going to leave us almost a decade with no update, no date of release, no charges, no nothing, its completely mental torture.

Mehdi spent his last birthday in detention sharing a hotel with the tennis star Novak Djokovic, who was detained there before being deported. Djokovic, a promoter of the anti-vaccine movement, broke COVID-19 rules when entering Australia. However, his treatment highlighted the plight of the asylum seekers imprisoned in the hotels.

With their consignment to the US, the future of the two young men is uncertain. And there are still hundreds of other refugees imprisoned or abandoned by the Australian government in countries such as Nauru and Papua New Guinea.

The entire Australian ruling elite is responsible for the inhuman treatment of refugees. The precedent was set by the Keating Labor government in the 1990s, which initiated the mandatory detention of all refugees who arrived by boat. Subsequent Coalition and Labor governments deepened this policy by introducing offshore detention on remote islands.

The Greens, who posture as refugee advocates, formed a minority government with Labor from 2010 to 2013 as it reopened the offshore camps and banned all asylum seekers who arrive by boat from ever settling in Australia, setting a policy that continues today. Such policies pioneered the pitiless treatment of refugees in the US, the UK and across Europe.

Join the SEP campaign against anti-democratic electoral laws!

The working class must have a political voice, which the Australian ruling class is seeking to stifle with this legislation.

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Australian government dumps two Iranian refugees in the US after nearly nine years of imprisonment - WSWS

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Muslims, The Global South And War In Ukraine: Towards A Politics Of Contribution – The Friday Times

Posted: at 8:41 pm

The normative Muslim position on the Russian invasion of Ukraine is simple. It is to stand against oppression wherever it may occur.

However, many people and governments from across the global South are not taking a categorical stand against Russian aggression. Instead, their focus is on European racism. They point to the overwhelming response of the West to aid Ukraine and highlight the ill treatment of African and South Asian students by Ukrainian and Polish border guards. However, this line of thought keeps us fixated on complaint and does not allow us to move towards contribution.

Racism is universal and as long as human beings exist, such a prejudice will always remain with us. While the popular social discourse emphasises the racism of white people against people of colour, it also manifests between various people of colour through colourism, casteism and classism. The treatment of the untouchables by upper-class Hindus or of poor Hindu girls by powerful Pakistani feudals showcases how this prejudice manifests in the Indian Subcontinent. The history of India and Pakistan also shows how mob frenzy took over in 1947 where Hindus and Muslims relinquished their humanity in mass massacre. Indeed, existential threat at times brings out the worst in people.

This context of an existential threat could explain the ill treatment of the Ukrainian and Polish border guards. It may also be explained through the environment created by the Belarusian dictator, who used refugees as pawns against the European Union. YouTube educator Dhruv Rathee goes into detail on how Belarus brought Afghan, Syrian and Iraqi refugees, gave them wire cutters, and let them fend for themselves at the Polish border. While this does not excuse the ill treatment of the Ukrainian and Polish border guards, it does provide a context to their ill actions.

Racism needs to be condemned anywhere and everywhere, just as the oppression of Ukraine by a much powerful Russia should be condemned without ifs and buts. Otherwise, we risk becoming tribal groups that are always lashing out at each others racism with whataboutisms. Such a predilection will not allow us to move away from complaint and towards actions that could help our fellow human beings in need. Thus, instead of worrying about the overwhelming response of white Europeans towards white Ukrainians, we can focus on what we have been doing to help our own people.

There are many resourceful Pakistani businessmen, powerful politicians and well-off Pakistani professionals in the West, who could have used their combined influence to rescue Pakistani students from their predicament. The Pakistani media could have played its role in giving more coverage to the plight of our students instead of worrying about how whites are helping other white people. In short, how does white people helping each other out prevent our people from helping their own?

If people are complaining about the diminished European response on Palestine, Yemen, and Syria, why do they ignore the muted response of Turkey, Saudi Arabia, and other rich Gulf countries on Muslim issues? In recent news, the Turkish President welcomed his Israeli counterpart on mutual cooperation. I wonder how Pakistanis of the PTI ilk would respond to this move by their favourite modern day Ertugrul Muslim leader Erdogan. Similarly, if Mohammed Bin Salman potentially sees Israel as an ally, then should the Palestinians be concerned about white Europeans who are overwhelmingly helping their white brethren, or should they be more concerned about the lukewarm reception by their own Arab brethren? Furthermore, under Mohammed Bin Salman, Saudi Arabia has used Sudanese soldiers in their oppression in Yemen. That is, Arab countries are drawing support from African nations to inflict oppression on fellow Arabs. How much of such news is being reported by Al Jazeera and other Muslim media sources or will their focus remain fixed on the racism of Europeans?

Additionally, do Putin fanboys in the global South (who get awed by his strategic comments against Islamophobia) forget that Russia, like the West, has targeted Afghanistan in the past, wreaked destruction in Chechnya and most recently in Syria? And to top it all, he is also recruiting both Syrian and Chechens against Ukraine, just as he had recruited Chechens in Syria? Are they so nave not to see through his strategic use of Muslim concerns for leverage?

Black American Muslim scholar, Abdullah Bin Hamid Ali, wrote a critical paper on critical race theory (CRT). His words are worth underscoring:

how absurd and idolatrous this belief is to the Islamic teachings. The truth is that colored people all around the world have power, many of them significantly more than millions of white people. If the teachings of CRT are taken to their logical end, this would mean that not one dictator in the Arab world is responsible for the carnage they create every time they massacre their people. Nor are the Chinese, Burmese, or any other person, group, or government represented by a particular ethnic enclave. This is not to say that the European political elite are not in fact culpable for great carnage, oppression, and savage treatment of others for many centuries. They are responsible for what they did and do. However, every soul is mortgaged for it earns. And, no bearer [of] burdens bears anothers burden.

Thus, if our social discourse remains fixated on CRT and decolonisation, then it takes away scrutiny from the Arab dictators and many other violators of human rights in the global South. Additionally, the whole decolonisation narrative may also be used to perpetuate more oppression. For instance, BJPs India is bent on decolonising the influence of past Muslim invaders by furthering the dharmic faiths (Hinduism, Sikhism, Buddhism and Jainism) at the expense of demonising present-day Muslims and Islam.

Many Ukrainians are leaving the comfort of their own homes in Canada and other Western countries to return to fight for their motherland. We can learn from the actions of a resolute people who are offering stiff resistance to a much stronger Russia. Indeed, it is time to move our lens away from constant complaint and towards positive action. Pakistanis need to focus on helping their own people in duress in Pakistan and across the Diaspora. Gulf Arabs need to question why is it that their own countries refuse to grant their Palestinian, Syrian, and Iraqi brethren citizenships and human rights and instead let them suffer at European borders? They need to question the actions of their own governments that are directly contributing to the plight of refugees.

In essence, the discourse that relies heavily on complaint does not lead towards an end goal. We cast stones at the white devil for our own catharsis but dont do much on improving the condition of our own people.

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Film sounds alarm on ‘authoritarian’ attacks on the right to boycott as government seeks new anti-BDS laws – Morning Star Online

Posted: at 8:41 pm

A TIMELY new film is sounding the alarm about authoritarian attacks on the right to boycott, as the government seeks to quietly introduce anti-BDS laws in Britain.

Last month, MPs passed an amendment to the Public Service Pensions Bill to prohibit public bodies from engaging in boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS) campaigns.

Award-winning filmmaker Julia Bacha, whose new documentary film Boycott details the impactof anti-BDS laws in the United States on freedom of expression, has warned moves to replicate similar legislation in Britainwould have tremendously harmful consequences.

Speaking ahead of a screening of the documentary at the Human Rights Watch film festival at the Barbican this weekend, the directortold the Morning Star that British MPs must stand up for the right to boycott.

The film, produced by Palestine-Israel focused company Just Vision, shines a light on the insidiousness of legislation passed at an alarming rate across the US with little media attention or public awareness of the issue.

Since 2014, 33 states have introduced policies or laws that punish US citizens, organisations or businesses for engaging with or calling for boycotts of Israel.

They were really being passed under the radar with very little scrutiny and we thought it was very important to lift that story up, Ms Bachasaid.

The documentary focuses on the personal stories of three US citizens who decided to challenge these laws on the basis that they violated their first amendment rights.

One of the protagonists, Bahia Amawi, a US-Palestinian speech therapist, lost her contract after refusing to sign a pledge not to boycott Israel.

I could not stay quiet and just go on with my life while I know that this law is going to make it OK to continue this kind of oppression against the Palestinians, she says in the film.

Ms Bacha warnedthe laws also pose a dangerous precedent. Texas legislators have since used anti-BDS law as a template to pass Bills preventing firms that boycott fossil fuels and firearms from securing state contracts.

We thought we were going to finish the film with this still being a theory and hypothesis, she said. But now its the reality.

The documentary also investigates where the Bills have come from, anduncovers a network of evangelical Christian and Israeli lobby groups, allegedly bankrolled by the Israeli government.

The importance of preserving the right to boycott is particularly pressing in the current context of the Wests response to Russias invasion of Ukraine, Ms Bachasaid.

If anyone had any doubt about the importance of boycott, divestment and sanctions, they really shouldnt have any doubts anymore, about how precious those tools are in a situation where you cannot go to war, she said.

We need to be able to decide those things in the public forum and have a dialogue and debate about these issues, and for you to take away that tool from your citizens feels, to be honest, incredibly authoritarian.

Anti-BDS laws have also been passed in Germany while in Britain, the Commons waved through Tory MP Robert Jenricks amendment on February 22, with Labour MPs ordered to abstain.

If the Bill is passed, local pension funds would be prohibited from making investment decisions that conflict with the UKs foreign and defence policy.

Warning against the moves, Ms Bacha added: Conservatives who officially have been the biggest defenders of freedom of speech should really think about their principles here.

And progressives and the Labour Party need to really think about where they historically want to stand on this and what are we taking away from our ability to advocate for social and political change in the future by not taking a stand now.

The screening of Boycott at the Barbican on March 20 at 3pm will be followed by a Q&A with Ms Bacha, and is available to stream across Britain and Ireland from March17-25https://ff.hrw.org/film/boycott

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Film sounds alarm on 'authoritarian' attacks on the right to boycott as government seeks new anti-BDS laws - Morning Star Online

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We have more in common – Morning Star Online

Posted: at 8:41 pm

WAR IS a catastrophe and the war in Ukraine is no exception. It has created a new and uniquely dangerous situation, altering the political balance in Europe, accelerating its militarisation, and raising the risk of nuclear war.

This will have a profoundly negative impact on our societies, far beyond the immediate catastrophe of war. We are seeing bellicose nationalism generated by warmongers on all sides, with politicians and media glorifying militarism, exploiting the refugee crisis and stoking racism and xenophobia.

One of the great dangers we face is that the far right, which has developed significantly over the last decade, feeding off economic crisis and weaponising the pandemic, will further develop in this new context.

We need to be very alert to that danger, and quick to counter it. Alarm bells have already been sounded by the appalling racism displayed towards African, Asian and Middle Eastern nationals attempting to leave Ukraine, and the verbal and physical abuse some have faced on arrival at the Polish border; the African Union summed this up as shockingly racist and in breach of international law.

As we mark the UNs Anti-Racism Day, we reject the brutality, the hatred and the oppression which this war fever on the part of our leaders is generating.

We reject the untold damage it will do to our society, and to our diverse communities. And we must be united in our determination to challenge the racism and xenophobia which so often accompanies war, and is used by government and media to distort public opinion and behaviour.

This week I heard a moving appeal from a Russian anti-war activist, who spoke of the millions of Russians that oppose the war and called on us all, in the peace movement and beyond, to oppose Russophobia.

As they face arrest, brutality and imprisonment for their protests, it would only add to their distress if all the Russian people were deemed pro-war because of the actions of their politicians.

During the Iraq war, we were very conscious of the crimes of our leaders and our cry Not in our name was our pledge to the world that we fought against that illegal war with all our strength. That same cry is coming from Russia and we must heed it.

Colonel Ann Wright, from US Veterans for Peace, wrote recently: As a US diplomat who resigned from the US government in 2003 in opposition to Bush and Blairs war on Iraq, I hoped at the time that all Americans (and British) citizens would not be vilified by the world for the actions of the Bush and Blair administrations.

I have visited Russia twice in the past seven years and I know most Russians do not want a war and object to Putins war on Ukraine.

We should not vilify Russians for the actions of their political leaders, and recognise that they face criminal actions for speaking out against the war and yet they still are speaking and writing.

I hope that we will be as generous to peace-seeking Russians as the world was to anti-war Americans and Britons.

This is a powerful message and one that I hope we will stand by, while the frenzied rush to sever civil society links continues.

To those breaking twinning links with Russian towns, I would say, maintain that contact, support anti-war voices, take steps to strengthen people-to-people connections against the war.

As the Russian peace activist said, let us explore new ways of international dialogue between peoples, to create strong new connections to help build the kind of future we want to see.

And we hear the same message from the peace movement in Ukraine, in the words sent to our recent rally in Trafalgar Square: We call for the solidarity of global civil society in seeking non-violent solutions to the current crisis with the help of all people in the world speaking truth to power together we could build a better world without armies and borders.

Never has it been more clear that the ordinary people of Ukraine and Russia and indeed of Britain and across the world have more in common with each other than they do with the leaders of their own countries.

Let us fight to make this the reality that determines policy across our countries, rather than the current imperatives of war and profit. Let us build this together and help create the world of equality, justice and peace that we wish to see.

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We have more in common - Morning Star Online

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