Author: Justin Podur

I am happy to report that it seems some Colombian and Venezuelan readers have found this blog. I say it seems for two reasons – one is of course there’s no way of telling whether anyone is who they say they are online, which is why credibility is something that has to be carefully built and carefully guarded, and two is that of course I don’t know how many folks who do read this blog are Colombian or Venezuelan. Most of the friends whose analysis and so on I present in this blog do not read it, because they know what’s going to be in it and because it’s in english. So assuming these folks are who they say, it’s good that they’re reading and commenting. It’s a shame that some comments haven’t reached the level of constructive dialogue yet, but maybe we’ll get there (for those who are wondering what I am talking about, the comments are on relatively old posts, so you’d have to search in the Colombia & Venezuela section to find them).

Anyway on to substantive matters. There are things going on militarily in both Colombia and Venezuela. The US state department is “extremely troubled” by a Venezuelan plan to buy rifles from Russia – 100,000 AK-47s. Maybe they’re upset that Venezuela’s not buying them from the US, the world’s major arms supplier. Maybe they’re upset that after the purchase Venezuela will have a miniscule fraction of the small arms that the US citizenry has (to say nothing of US military and paramiltary forces, wandering the streets of the US and the world, armed to the teeth). Whatever they’re upset about, Venezuela’s not having it – the Vice-President of Venezuela said the US is saying this stuff to provoke Venezuela and that Venezuela won’t be provoked.

Chavez and Uribe are to meet to discuss the whole Granda affair (see the archives of this blog for links) on February 15. Uribe was supposed to meet Chavez earlier but fell sick.

The FARC has been busy on the military front as well. There have been major ambushes and assaults in various parts of the country over the past several weeks, in which the FARC have killed dozens of Colombian military forces. Colombia’s national newspaper, El Tiempo, had an editorial yesterday in which they said that while they don’t prove that Uribe’s vicious policies, called ‘democratic security’, which they endorse, have failed, they should raise some alarm bells. They indicate a continuing capacity for planning and execution at the national level, since they occurred in three different regions (Uraba, Putumayo, and Narino) within a short time span, were very successful militarily, and were outside the area of ‘Plan Patriota’ where the army is focusing its offensive. El Tiempo notes that it remains to be seen whether FARC can keep up the pressure, whether these attacks are designed to try to draw the army out and stretch it thin, whether these attacks will cost Uribe prestige. But it is certain that the FARC have proved again that they cannot be ignored.

And since we’re not ignoring them, it’s worth noting that Raul Reyes, spokesperson for FARC, said that there were no guerrillas operating in Venezuela some 10 days ago on Colombian TV.

A report from the International Crisis Group, quite long, takes the view that ‘not only is the coup bad in itself, but worse, it will help the insurgency’, but has lots of information at any rate.

Just poking around at some sites I don’t look at often enough I came across this article on LiP Magazine about an ideology called ‘activistism’. I thought it made some good points and liked its honest tone. I would have a hard time endorsing all of the authors, but the article is definitely worth reading.

We had to wait a little bit but I think that some people have made some sense of the Iraq elections. Chomsky’s blog, Mahajan’s blog, Tariq Ali’s column, Linda McQuaig’s column, and no doubt others I’ve missed, all made the point that the Iraqi elections were not a victory for Bush, but for Sistani, who forced elections on the US.

Chomsky goes farther and says it was a victory for nonviolent resistance. The US has been able to use the most brutal actions of the Iraqi armed resistance as a pretext for their counterinsurgency, but have had a much more difficult time containing the mass protests that Sistani called. It reminds me of something Eqbal Ahmad said (in a book called ‘Confronting Empire’) about anticolonial movements – the task of an anticolonial movement is to achieve the moral isolation of the colonizer, to out-organize, but ultimately to delegitimate the colonizer (As an aside, I liked Mandisi’s short note about decolonization).

Eqbal Ahmad was talking about Palestine when he made those comments. And it’s worth talking about Palestine today. The sham of ‘hopes for peace’ is kicking into high gear and will soon drown everything else out (maybe it has already). A cease-fire has been declared. And yet if you watch the wire at IMEMC.org, or read StoptheWall.org, you’ll see that the ceasefire offers the Palestinians nothing, not even relief from invasions, arrests, detentions, checkpoints…

In order to push all this through, the whole model for what is happening has to be misrepresented. Instead of colonization, the model is two warring sides, who need to figure out a way to live in peace. So long as that’s what Israelis think and what people think in the West, from where pressure could be brought on Israel to stop the ongoing ethnic cleansing, the Palestinians will never get any real relief, let alone a just peace.

It is colonization. It is ethnic cleansing. It is not two warring factions. It is the world’s only superpower and its client against a defenceless population. There are no ‘painful concessions from both sides’ and no deal brokered by the colonizer’s arms dealer that can stop an organized project of colonization, especially if no one is willing to name it as such. Nor can such deals stop the resistance to colonization, though such resistance can be crushed. Everyone in the world knows by now that Palestinians will not be crushed without a fight. But it gets later and later in the day, and the rest of the world is rapidly losing its chance to tell the Palestinians that they are not alone.

First, a reasonably good source on what is happening is the International Nepal Solidarity Network. They are pulling mainstream coverage (what little there is) and posting it several times a day.

Continue reading “More on Nepal”

I want to do some more assessment of material coming out of Nepal today. But a few things first.

Yesterday was the end of ‘Israeli Apartheid Week’ at the University of Toronto. It was organized by some energetic and brilliant young people who are called the ‘Arab Students Collective’. I didn’t attend the full week’s events, but I did attend last night’s closing event. There were two speakers, both extraordinary and actually complementary of one another in interesting ways.

Continue reading “So much to free speechify about, so little time…”

If you haven’t heard about the coup in Nepal, you shouldn’t blame yourself. After all, Nepal is a monarchy, so when the monarch asserts power, you can’t hardly call it a coup, can you?

Take a look at this anonymous note we got at ZNet. The entire country has been shut down. There is another piece on ZNet about this with a bit more analysis.

Continue reading “The Nepal Media Coup”

Full disclosure: I lacked the stomach to watch the whole thing, and anyway the television in the house was in intensive use (Gilmore Girls). But I caught the end, where Bush was talking about how America was the place of ‘big dreams’. From memory: “The abolition of slavery seemed like a big dream, until it happened.”

(I thought – yes, about 60 years after almost every other jurisdiction in the world and all the suffering and death implied there. And of course, the fact that every reference Bush makes to abolition is actually a coded message to his anti-abortion constituency).

Apologies for yet another absence.

It was technical difficulties again – a strange virus attack that had someone using my machine to send huge amounts of data (perhaps spam?). By the time I cleaned my machine my operating system was irretrievably damaged.

And so, those of you who have been advising me over the past weeks to switch to Linux – you have your wish. I am typing this from my old computer with a new operating system. There will be a time to talk about this more – I am getting more interested in both the technical side of these things and their larger implications.

Continue reading “Iraq’s election”