2566. Book Review: The Intimacies of Four Continents

By John Holmwood, Theory, Culture and Society, November 4, 2015

Abstract: Lisa Lowe’s book addresses the colonial relationships that connect the continents of Europe, Africa, Asia and the Americas. These relationships of appropriation and dispossession are integral to liberal thought and no matter how much it seeks to present itself as transcending these contexts, liberal thought is continually fractured by them. The book asks its readers to confront the formation of modern political subjectivity and its implication in the very disciplinary subjects through which we claim to know.

This is a challenging book, which should be read by all those interested in the history of capitalism and the formation of the social sciences. It is especially challenging to sociologists who have, for too long, worked with a standard account that serves to establish core concepts of contemporary sociology. According to this standard account, capitalist modernity is a key object of sociological inquiry which focuses on the rise in Europe of the nation state, political democracy and a civil society organised around market exchanges. The colonial conditions of modernity rarely get a look in.

Within sociology, the standard approach has been challenged by Gurminder K Bhambra (2014) and her idea of connected sociologies. Lisa Lowe – professor of English and American studies at Tufts University – develops a similar argument for an expansive understanding of the global social and cultural conditions of what is typically regarded as European modernity. For many of us working in the social sciences, we might be moved to ask at the end of the book; why has our range of engagements with the history of modernity been so limited? And why are the humanities more open to the insights of postcolonial critique than the social sciences?

Lowe’s arguments are compelling, even if her data is unfamiliar. The focus of her book is, “the often obscure connections between the emergence of European liberalism, settler colonialism in the Americas, the transatlantic slave trade, and the East Indies and China trades in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century” (2015: 1). Where do we learn of these phenomena in our histories of sociology? ‘Settler colonialism’, for example, is not one of our ‘forms’ of capitalist modernity, at least not in the standard sociological accounts, and not in what we teach our students. We may have learned to add to the writers deemed to be canonical, but we have yet to disrupt our conceptual canon.

Lowe makes a bold claim and a moral claim and I, for one, am persuaded by both aspects: “the social inequalities of our time are a legacy of these process through which ‘the human’ is ‘freed’ by liberal forms, while other subjects, practices, and geographies are placed at a distance from the ‘human’” (2015: 2). The dispossession of Native Americans through colonial enclosure, the movement of populations through enslavement and indenture – the figure of the ‘slave’ and the ‘coolie’ – are these not all implicated in the protection of our ‘hard-earned’ patrimony in the fences currently erected in the US and in Europe against migrants? We continue to promote our invention of freedom and deny it in the present, just as we denied it in the past. Importantly, we are implicated as liberal subjects – as citizens – but we are also implicated as purveyors of social scientific reason formed in the very concepts that are at issue.

The arguments of the book are more aligned to cultural studies than to studies of social structure, but we should not be insensible to their mutual implication. The chapters set out different ‘journeys’ and the narratives they describe illustrate and illuminate mutual entailments of freedom and subjugation, privilege and degradation, possession and expropriation – these entailments are the ‘intimacies’ of the title. They are geographically extensive and they bring social structures of colonial modernity in their wake.

Lowe sets out four key journeys: the life journey, or autobiography, of formerly enslaved African, Olaudah Equiano, published in London 1789 in the same year as the Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen in Paris; Thackeray’s Vanity Fair and the journeys of colonial commodities that embroider the text and provide key settings, unobtrusive in the background but defining meanings; the journeys of the East India Company to China and Hong Kong establishing trades in opium and indentured labour; the journeys of enslaved Africans and their representation in historical narratives that elide the self-emancipations recorded by C.L.R. James and W.E.B. Du Bois.

There is much to enjoy in each of these chapters, especially, the dialectical interweaving of liberal conceptions and their negation, and the careful delineation of context and claim. Ultimately, however, the book is a dissection of liberalism and its fractured and fracturing presence in the modern world. It takes its place alongside, Chakrabarty’s (1989) Provincializing Europe, or Mehta’s (1999) Liberalism and Empire. More than anything, it also sends us back to C.L.R. James (1963 [1938]) and his Black Jacobins, not least because one of the inspirations was his remark that, “Thackeray, not Marx, bears the heaviest responsibility for me” (cited by Lowe 2015: 73). For Lowe, it is Thackeray, rather than Marx, who registers the presence of colonial commodities and their circulation through Victorian households.

Yinko Shonibare’s ship in a bottle which was installed on the fourth plinth in Trafalgar Square in 2010-2012, confronted Nelson’s column celebrating his victory at the Battle of Trafalgar. Lowe chooses it as an illustration of her book and it is fitting. Shonibare’s ship confronts Britain’s colonial and Imperial past, but in looking to the past, it also brings that past into the present where it continues to live. This is precisely the point of Lowe’s book. Our political discourses and our disciplinary discourses are each formed by the past. The promise of freedom remains a promise precisely because it constructs ‘the human’ in a separation from ‘other humanities’ which remain always displaced in a promise that, for them, is unrealised.

References:

Bhambra, Gurminder K. (2014) Connected Sociologies, London: Bloomsbury Academic.

Chakrabarty, Dipesh (1989) Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

James, C.L.R. (1963) The Black Jacobins: Toussaint L’Ouverture and the San Domingo Revolution. New York: Vintage.

Mehta, Uday Singh (1999) Liberalism and Empire. A Study in Nineteenth Century British Liberal Thought. Chicago: Chicago University Press.

John Holmwood is Professor of Sociology in the School of Sociology and Social Policy at the University of Nottingham.

2565. 'Science for the people': Researchers Challenge Trump Outside US Conference

By Hannah Delvin and Alan Yuhas, The Guardian, February 19, 2017

Members of the scientific community, environmental advocates, and supporters demonstrate on Sunday in Boston. Photograph: Steven Senne/AP

Hundreds of scientists rallied in Boston on Sunday to protest what they call the “direct attack” of Donald Trump and Republicans on research, scientific institutions and facts themselves, as a community reckons, and argues, with a new era of American politics.

Gathering in Boston’s Copley Square, outside the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), several scientists gave speeches to a crowd holding signs shaped like beakers and reading “Stand up for science”. The speeches reflected a sea change in the culture of many labs and universities, where many researchers long maintained that good scientific work could speak for itself.

At the AAAS conference, scientists this week have discussed political activism, the psychology of “fake news” , and how to protect climate science from hostile governments. But a rift has opened up in the community between those in favor and those opposed to rallies focused on science, including a March for Science planned across multiple cities in April.

Professor Jim Gates, the eminent string theorist and former adviser to Barack Obama, told journalists that the march appeared to lack an end goal – a prerequisite for political action – and would simply be perceived as “science against Trump”.

“At least as far as I can detect, there is no theory of action behind this,” he said. “This bothers me tremendously.

“I don’t understand how the organisers of this march can guard against provocateurs, quite frankly,” he added. “I don’t think they’re ready for that, I don’t think they’re considering that kind of danger. To have science represented as this political force I think is just extraordinarily dangerous.”

Others urged the protesters on, including Rush Holt, the CEO of AAAS, said that his organization would work with other US societies to “make the march a success”.

“It’s the first time in my 50-year career that I have seen people speaking up for science at large,” he said. “I’ve seen for or against nuclear power or whatever. This is an unusual phenomenon.”

Astrid Caldas, a climate scientist and member of the Union of Concerned Scientists, said that the rally showed that “scientists who are usually happy in the corner of their labs are speaking”.

“I think that scientists are realizing that they have to use their voice, as scientists, in self-defense.”

Dr Jacquelyn Gill, an ecologist at the University of Maine, was one of the speakers Sunday, and is tentatively considering whether to run for Congress in 2018.

“A lot of scientists are realizing that the institutions that fund and support and science in this country – science for everyone, publicly funded and transparent – those institutions are under direct attack,” she told the Guardian.

Trump, she said, “not only doesn’t value our institutions, he doesn’t seem to value evidence-based decision making at all. That is alarming to us.”

The president’s views about science – he has variously called global warming a “hoax” and pledged to “unlock the mysteries of space” – is not the only concern on the scientists’ minds. “I’m concerned that we’re going to lose the EPA. I’m concerned that we’re going to lose regulations that have a direct impact on human health, like automobile emissions,” Gill said. “People will get sicker. People will die because of a lack of environmental regulation and medical research.”

 Activists in Boston call attention to what they say are the increasing threats to science and scientific research under the administration of Donald Trump.

Beka Economopoulos, one of the rally’s organizers and a co-founder of the Natural History Museum, a mobile exhibition, said that scientists could no longer truly avoid politics. “That ship has sailed,” she said, noting that researchers have a long history protesting, for instance against nuclear proliferation in the 1970s.

“It’s not just about scientists, it’s about science,” she said. “Communities are going to bear the brunt of the impacts of these attacks on science in the public interest.”

Gill also stressed that the nascent movement wanted to stress “science for the people, by the people and for the people”.

Arguments about “trimming the fat” of budgets, she said, did not stand up to scrutiny, considering that the government’s science and medical research funding makes up a tiny percentage of the federal budget.

“That money has got one of the best returns on investment you could possibly hope for,” she said. “The real stakeholders are the citizens that stand to gain or lose the most if the institutions are weakened.”

Another organizer, Emily Southard, said that the rally and the march in Washington, were meant to help “demystify what scientists do”.

She defended “science that delivers clean, safe drinking water to our faucets, science that’s being taken for granted – and that’s the science that’s being taken under attack.”

Economopoulos used the Environmental Protection Agency as an example, criticizing its newly confirmed head, who repeatedly sued the agency in favor of corporations as Oklahoma attorney general . “We have a sort of fox in the henhouse situation here with Scott Pruitt as head of the EPA, an agency that he has sued 14 times,” she said.

Gill also said that researchers needed to do more to take control of their image, noting the ways scientists had been politicized by lawmakers in debates over climate science. “Throwing more information or more data doesn’t really change minds, whether it’s climate change or vaccines,” she said. “Empathy trumps fact when it comes to people’s minds.”

Such disputes were nothing new, she said: “Science and religion clashes go back to Darwin and Galileo and Copernicus.”

Caldas said that she hoped scientists would continue organize at local levels. “The federal government may not be on board, but local government works hardest with people who see these problems at their doorsteps, and they cannot deny it.”

Members of Congress facing re-election, she said, were already starting to feel pressure from constituents about climate change. “The stakes are really high but there is a light at the end of the tunnel.”

2564. Book Review: Liberalism: A Counter-History

By Chris Byron, Marx and Philosophy, January 31, 2013

Liberalism: A Counter-History is Domenico Losurdo’s trenchant analysis of the question what is Liberalism in its historical development and who may we consider to be a Liberal? Without very serious reflection few people would contest that George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Adam Smith, John Locke, Thomas Paine, Alexis de Tocqueville, to name but a few, are both Liberals, and worthy of the designation. Losurdo however demonstrates that the classical Liberals we learned about in school are in fact separated by huge gulfs in their philosophical views and political practice. Moreover, what frequently unites them in practice is more their tolerance and often cheerful willingness in implementing certain forms of severe oppression (e.g., indigenous genocides, slavery, work labor camps). At the end of Losurdo’s masterful condemnation, the theory of Liberalism, which we have come to take for granted, and the founders who we assume with equal certainty to be embodying some particular philosophy, are left with only the most tenuous of connections to any set of pristine principles regarding the Liberty of man.

Losurdo opens his work admitting that even posing his question is somewhat ‘embarrassing’; the knee-jerk response is that Liberalism has always been the philosophic-politico tradition concerned with the Liberty of the individual. Yet the dawn of Liberalism on either side of the Atlantic, as best expressed by the writings of Locke, Grotius, Franklin, and Smith, were conjoined to, and involved in, ‘a process of systematic expropriation and practical genocide first of the Irish and then of the Indians’, not to mention the rapid rise of ‘black enslavement and the black slave trade’ (20).This simultaneous birth, which in itself is a politico-historical contradiction, also has deep seated philosophical contradictions. Whereas Grotius ‘affirmed’ slavery ‘without the least reticence’, Locke’s ‘legitimation of slavery’ is only perceptible between the lines of his written works (26-7). Both are historically considered Liberals, but the connection is now more tenuous than first appeared. And as Losurdo’s shrewd analysis shows, slavery was not an institution that unfortunately was grandfathered into the birth of Liberalism, instead slavery engendered its maximum development based upon the success of Liberal revolutions.

A general theme is consistent throughout Losurdo’s book. Each chapter takes a historical moment (e.g., French Revolution, Glorious Revolution, San Domingo Revolution), and points out the contradiction between several elements: philosophy, political practices, and important thinkers of the time. Liberalism as a philosophy and political practice are then juxtaposed to the ideas of certain Liberal thinkers, leading to the usual conclusion that what is common to all is often some support of oppression and not personal Liberty. Isaiah Berlin, as Losurdo points out, gave us the strong dichotomy between Positive and Negative Liberty. No one would doubt that slaves and victims of genocide are not exercising Positive Liberty. Strangely though, even advocates of Negative Liberty are often themselves not capable of exercising it due to their own tyrannical legislation. For instance, a common theme in the Liberal tradition was tantamount to eugenic breeding, that is, Liberal’s thought that breeding with the oppressed was to mix the superior with the inferior race. As Benjamin Franklin said to a doctor ‘Half the Lives you save are not worth saving, as being useless; and almost the other Half ought not to be sav’d, as being mischievous’, he goes on to condemn the doctor for declaring war on the ‘Plan of Providence’ (115). As a result of such horrifying views, members of the higher classes that may desire to marry or educate those seen as ‘useless’ and ‘mischievous’ were denied their Negative Liberty by their class’s own standards. This attitude led to a snowballing effect of how a slave or servant could be treated legally, even when the owner of said slave desired to treat his ‘property’ differently than the law commanded (e.g., slave owners who were disbarred from teaching their slaves to read). If the slave is property, by the Liberal standard, then this is most assuredly an infringement upon Negative Liberty.

Reverse oppression carries over into other areas besides Negative Liberty. For instance, Losurdo presents in alarming detail the degree to which ‘white slavery’ was rampant in Liberal societies. During the process of colonization, stricter penal codes and forced labor camps grew in tandem. But the penal code, initially intended to force labor upon the colonized, began to reverberate back upon whites. Forced labor and indentured servitude, of both slaves and now whites, became staples of the economy of colonizing nations; both in conquering, and conquered, states. In an eerily Orwellian spin, Liberal’s tried to say that indentured servitude did not so much deny Liberty, as embody it. Since agreed upon contracts are a staple of Liberal society, and servant and master enter into a contractual relation, the servant is exercising Liberty, according to Emmanuel Joseph Sieyès: “in the way most opportune to him”. Moreover, the servant is “receiving more than what he gives up” (82). As with Negative Liberty, Liberals have jettisoned Positive Liberty amongst the white race too.

Liberals might be inclined to disregard Losurdo’s work as bombastic and hyperbolic, but they would be exercising poor judgment to do so. Although a few references are to the works of Marx and other critics of Liberalism, the primary sources of Losurdo’s works are historical documents, the writings of Liberals, and scholarly texts on Liberal history. This is not revisionist history, but history told from the point of view of those who are making it. Almost each page of Losurdo’s work contains at least half a dozen footnotes from either contemporary scholarly research or the works of Liberals from the period he is analyzing. Of course this has its downside too. The footnotes can be rather jarring when you are trying to determine if the just cited sentence came from an actual Liberal or a recent historian, and at times they can make you wonder how much of Losurdo’s work is unique, and not just repetition. Nonetheless, the constant reminder of the sheer number of sources Losurdo has used to drive home his thesis is constant testament to the labor embodied in Losurdo’s writing.

But hia thesis itself remains somewhat confusing. Losurdo is essentially posing a philosophical question: what is Liberalism and who can we say belongs to its ranks? But the answer he gives in each chapter is less a philosophical one than an intricate empirical analysis of historical facts. The book sits atop a fence between philosophy and history, without being enough of one (philosophy) and too much of the other (history). After all Losurdo is an accomplished scholar on Hegel and Marx, not to mention an accomplished philosopher, but primarily this book reads as history, with a pinch of unanswered philosophical questioning peppered throughout. Perhaps that is Losurdo’s point, the fluidity of the Liberal philosophy, and its representatives, leads to the impossibility of a solid conclusion regarding the primary question of his research. But that too is a rather philosophical position that requires more elaboration than Losurdo has given us.

Without detracting too much from Losurdo’s accomplishment, another criticism needs to be considered. The structure of the book is often erratic and confusing. A chapter might begin with a question e.g., who was a Liberal in the French Revolution, and end with a summary of Christian Radicalism during American Industrialization. The connection between the introduction, and the conclusion, is often tenuous. To name one more example, during the middle of a discussion regarding the French Revolution, an unexpected detour is taken into Bolivar’s campaigns throughout Latin America. The reader will thus learn copious amounts of history, but at the end of many chapters will be left wondering how to tie it all together. And in this regard, the condemnation of Liberalism can seem a little helter-skelter.

Nonetheless, Losurdo’s historical account is as horrifying as it is vigorous. Radicals and Socialists have long known that the birth pangs of Liberalism have been bloody, authoritarian and hypocritical. He has offered compelling research to attest to our suspicions and he leaves no room for serious rebuttal. If one still wants to declare themselves a Liberal after reading this, they have a serious hurdle to face: their own philosophies genesis. As Losurdo has demonstrated, Liberalism is not Liberty for the individual in the positive or negative sense; it began, and continues to be, a fluid ideological defense for those in power to justify their positions of power.

2563. Neighborhood Committees in the Iranian Revolution of 1979: A Case Study

By Kamran Nayeri, February 20, 2017

A scene from the February 1979 insurrection. Photo: Iranian Historical Photograph Gallery. 

I arrived at Tehran’s Mehrabad International Airport on February 1, 1979, in a plane that took off from Paris Orly Airport soon after the plane that carried Ayatollah Khomeini and his entourage.  As our plane circled the sky above Tehran in preparation for landing, I could see the throng of people lining up the streets across the city to welcome Khomeini from the exile. BBC reported there were as many as 5 million people. 

When our plane landed and we were waved through customs and immigration I found the airport and the streets mostly empty of people as if the crowd had welcomed the Ayatollah and gone back home.  During those days, there was really no regular means of transportation due to strikes and demonstrations.  People often walked great distances or got rides from those traveling in their own cars and trucks. 

After I settled in my parents' house in the northeastern middle-class district of Tehranpars I quickly met with the young men there who were organizing local resistance to the Shah's regime. Even though I had been in the United States for the previous ten years, my integration into our neighborhood group was almost instantaneous.

Neighborhood committees were an important part of the grassroots movement that originated in the struggle against the Shah’s dictatorship.  During various strikes, especially the oil workers strike that began on October 21, 1978, there was a need to acquire and distribute goods and services in neighborhoods.  While stopping oil exports and oil flow to the Shah’s regime, oil workers delivered gasoline and cooking and heating oil and gas to the population to ensure they did not suffer in the cold fall/winter months. Neighborhood committees rationed and distributed these and other needed supplies equitably.  The need for the neighborhood committees became acute when the martial law was declared on November 6. 

Our neighborhood committee had already “expropriated” a house on the street where my parents lived as the owner, a man with close ties to the Shah’s repressive regime, had gone into hiding or fled the country. The neighborhood committee did not touch the furniture that was left behind. But the house provided a rent-free headquarter for the group where the assembly of a few dozens was held daily to discuss various issues, define tasks, get volunteers to carry them out, and so on.  

On February 4, Ayatollah Khomeini appointed Mehdi Bazargan, the leader of a very small Islamic-Nationalist party, Nehzat-e Azadi (Freedom Movement), as the prime minister of a provisional government in opposition to the government of Shahpour Bakhtiar that the Shah had installed on January 4 to appease the people. Bakhtair was the leader of the very small secular nationalist party, Hezb-e Iran (Iran Party). Khomeini’s move provided for a governmental dual power forcing a decision on who to support especially on those who worked for the government.  On February 9, Homafars (air force technicians) who were in Niroo Havayi (Air Force) Garrison in east Tehran declared their support for the Bazargan government.  Within hours the Imperial Guard moved to crush them and fighting broke out. I happened to be near the garrison when the fighting occurred and saw urban guerrilla fighters joining the fight in defense of the Homafars as did many ordinary people with military training and arms.  The Imperial Guard had to withdraw. The next day, February 10, Bakhtiar declared martial law which backfired as rebellion spread in the ranks of the armed forces and the general population began to attack police stations, garrisons, and military bases.  I saw the police station near my parents' house set on fire by the young men and some boys from the neighborhood. 

On that day, I went to the Eshrat Abad Garrison near Fawzieh Square (named after Shah’s first wife, Princess Fawzieh of Egypt and renamed after February 1979 as Imam Hossein Square, after the Shia’s third Imam).  Fighting was ending when I reached there.  The garrison surrendered after suffering some causalities and the soldiers joined the people. There were some casualties among the people, including a young Armenian Trotskyist. All armament were expropriated by the people. Even though I had no military training and no love for armament, I took several rounds of J3 battle rifle ammunitions for the neighborhood committee. 

On February 10 and 11 insurrections in all major cities and some smaller towns crushed the Shah’s armed forces and armed the population. People stormed the Shah’s prisons and torture chambers and all political prisoners were freed.  Tehran University became the tribune of the revolutionary youth where many open-air meetings were held, speeches delivered, literature, mostly by the socialist groups, distributed.  

An almost natural reaction by the neighborhood committees across Tehran was to set up road barricade as sniper attacks by the Shah’s armed supporters continued despite the regime’s collapse.   In our neighborhood assembly that met on February 11, we learned that collectively we had 30 J3 battle rifle and a lot of ammunition.  We quickly decided to centralize these arms in the headquarter and train volunteers to use them at the roadblocks.  There were 60 volunteers, most with some military training.  Kaveh, a young Trotskyist in the neighborhood who had just returned from London and had military training, headed up the effort to train others in the use of the J3. 

My own contribution was more political and organizational, to bring up the political aspects of our work and to help organize and run the assembly meetings and volunteers in a way to ensure our urgent tasks were carried out in a way consistent with the utmost attention to the democratic and national revolution underway.  All other neighborhood committee members were pulled into politics only in the past several months and even Kaveh had joined the Iranian Trotskyist group in England only a year earlier.  I had the good fortune of working single-mindedly as a socialist since 1971 gaining experience in practical socialist politics as well as intensely studying classical socialist literature. 

I wrote a one-page manifesto that defined the political function of the neighborhood committee, gave it a name, Defense Committee of the Southwestern Tehranpars, and with Kaveh’s help found a young woman in the neighborhood who typed it up. The assembly discussed and approved this initiative and we distributed copies to each household.

As the worries with the remnants of the Shah’s supporters diminished revolutionaries began to take notice of the repressive measures of the newly installed Khomeini-Bazargan provisional government. Within 24 hours after February 11 victory which lifted the censorship on the mass media, including in the state radio and television (Seda va Sima) which now broadcasted statements from various political groups, including the socialist currents, Khomeini reimposed censorship on the state-run radio and TV and appointed Sadegh Ghotbzadeh to purge its employees to impose an Islamic character on the state media.  At the same time, Khomeini called for the population to return their arms to the mosques that began to act as the headquarter for the neighborhood committees in the sections of the cities where practicing Muslims dominated.  

In our neighborhood, the cleric from the nearby mosque came to one of our assembly meetings, spoke highly of our effort but reiterated Khomeini’s call to turn all arms to the mosques, and invited us to function from the mosque and under its supervision and then left.  Some days later a military man came in uniform and said mostly the same things.  The committee membership was divided by these interventions.  Those who harbored religious feelings felt compelled to honor Khomeini’s orders and left to continue their volunteer work from the mosque. Those with a leftist political orientation remained but the future of the Defense Committee of the Southwestern Terhranpars was in question.  How could we justify it when almost half of our members left for the mosque already?  Also, there was much ambivalence towards the Khomeini-Bazargan government in those days, only the political current Kaveh and I subscribed, the Socialist Workers Party, publically held that it was a capitalist government that revolutionaries should not support. We advocated a government of workers and peasant in its place and a constituent assembly based on the grassroots movements that had emerged to draft its constitution.  Almost all other leftist political tendencies either supported the provisional government or did not speak in opposition to it.  Given this political crisis, the neighborhood committee dissolved. 

While I know of no study of the neighborhood committees as a grassroots movement, I believe a similar political crisis resulted in their dissolution across Iran except in some regions of the oppressed nationalities, like Turkman Sahra and Kurdistan.  In all other locations, they were reconstituted as the Islamic Revolution Committees (Komitehehaye Enghelab-e Eslami) that gradually became part of the oppressive forces of the Islamic Republic regime and continue to be so today.  As such, a revolutionary grassroots movement was destroyed by the clerical capitalist Khomeini regime and some its members recruited into an oppressive force.  A similar process befell other grassroots movements in Iran.  For example, the workers shoras (councils) were destroyed or replaced with Islamic Shoras or Islamic Associations (these are capitalized to denote that the very meaning of a shora/council which requires workers democracy was subverted).  

2562. Iranian City of Ahvaz Covered in Brown Dust

By Thomas Erdbrink, The New York Times, February 19, 2017

Ahvaz in dust storm. Photo: Mostafa Gholamnejad

TEHRAN — Days of protests over dust storms, power failures and government mismanagement in one of Iran’s most oil-rich cities subsided on Sunday after security forces declared all demonstrations illegal.

Residents of Ahvaz, a city with a majority Arab population near the border with Iraq, had been protesting for five days in increasingly large gatherings, shown in cellphone video clips shared on social media.

The region around Ahvaz is a center of oil production in Iran, and since economic sanctions were lifted, Iran’s government has been hoping for foreign investment in the area to update refineries and power stations and fix deepening ecological problems.

The cellphone clips show protesters calling for the resignation of the local governor. And as the number of demonstrators grew, the demands started to include a call for top officials from the capital, Tehran, to come to Ahvaz to see the problems for themselves.

Demonstrators can also be heard shouting, “Unemployment, unemployment,” another big problem in the region, and urging their countrymen to offer assistance: “Iranian compatriots, help us, help us.”

In the weeks before the demonstrations, Ahvaz was hit by large dust storms. Rain turned the dust into mud, which caused power stations to stop working.

Oil production was also affected, with the Ministry of Petroleum reporting that production had temporarily fallen by 700,000 barrels a day.

In addition to the short-term effects of the dust storm, the city is wrestling with long-term environmental challenges.

Ahvaz, home to around one million people, is surrounded by petrochemical factories that emit pollutants on a large scale.

A 15-year drought, in combination with poorly planned dam building, has caused local marshes to dry up, increasing the level of dust particles in the air to record highs.

The World Health Organization said in 2015 that Ahvaz was the most polluted city in the world.

Locals said they felt ignored and had had enough. “We feel as if we live in a special zone, where the government only makes money from,” said Mobin Ataee, a local student. “It seems they would prefer people to leave so they can turn this whole area into an oil-business-only region.”

State television, dominated by hard-liners, highlighted the protests at first, seemingly to place the moderate government of President Hassan Rouhani in a difficult position. One local reporter even presented the news wearing a protective mask against air pollution in protest.

But as the number of protesters started increasing, the official news media fell silent.

On Saturday, the local police issued a statement calling on people to refrain from “illegal gatherings,” warning that they would be “confronted” if they took part.

Witnesses reported the presence of riot police officers on the streets of Ahvaz. The Iranian authorities did not allow a New York Times reporter to visit the city.

“The major part of the flaws and defects have either been resolved or are in the process of being resolved,” said the police statement, published by the semiofficial Fars news agency.

The complex mix of problems facing the city, from dust to water shortages and unemployment, may prove hard to solve.

“The situation is terrible and extremely complex,” said Mitra Hajjar, a prominent Iranian actress and ecological activist.

A photograph of her posing on a landmark bridge in Ahvaz wearing a protective mask was widely shared on Instagram, Iran’s most popular social media tool that is not filtered by the authorities.

“The government is now trying to flood the marshes,” Ms. Hajjar said. “That is a good first step, but basically, we have to restore an entire ecosystem.”

Visitors to the city are often quick to complain of the pollution there, said Forough Emam, 26, an Ahvaz native who moved to Tehran to study. “But for us from Ahvaz, pollution means you can’t see two meters ahead, and everything is covered in brown dust.”

2561. Film Review: On the World Water Crisis

By Hydrationanywhere.com, April 1, 2016

Photo: Wall Street Journal

Fresh water is the vital resource without which no life on this planet would be possible – yet the amount of this unequivocally essential element grows more scarce each year. With human activities increasingly polluting fresh water beyond recoverable means through industrial and agricultural pollution, and with corporate and government interests working to privatize and commoditized the most valuable ingredient for life, increasingly water scarcity becomes more and more of a problem across the globe.

The impacts of this scarcity and decreasing availability of fresh water are felt most directly by those people in areas where water is most difficult to come by. Water-borne diseases thrive in areas where the impoverished lack proper sanitation or access to clean fresh water sources, accounting for up to 80% of all disease in developing nations. But even in the developed world, the diminishing supply of freshwater is causing terrible problems all its own, with waters tainted with fertilizers and agricultural waste, industrial by-products, and pharmaceutical drugs and their metabolites.

We took the time to watch five leading documentaries which aim to examine the world water crisis. These documentaries look at everything from where our water comes from to the political issues surrounding the current water issues and everything in between. While there is certainly some overlap between the themes and content of these documentaries, watching one or all of them will leave viewers with a good overview of some of the many issues contributing to the looming world water crisis.

Blue Gold: World Water Wars

Blue Gold World Water Wars Documentary CoverTaking a detailed look at the world’s shrinking supply of fresh water, Blue Gold: World Water Wars goes into great depth about the impacts of human activity on the world water supply. Looking at problems as diverse as top soil erosion, agricultural runoff industrial pollution, the impacts of dams and rerouting waterways and more, the film does a good job of highlighting the effects humanity has on its environment and how these effects are ultimately contributing to water scarcity.

The documentary also takes a close examination of the problems of water privatization, and how corporate and political interests are working to make a profit by controlling the supply of fresh water. Going into great detail about different issues faced across the globe as the result of attempts at privatization, this documentary is perhaps one of the best on this list for examining the role of corporate power in the world water crisis.

Based on the book “Blue Gold: The Fight to Stop the Corporate Theft of the World’s Water” the documentary certainly succeeds in living up to the subtitle, providing enlightening details about the ongoing struggle to kick corporate influence out of the world’s water management.

Tapped

Tapped Bottled Water Documentary Movie CoverFocusing on the environmental, political, and social impacts of the bottled water industry Tapped provides a fascinating window into the corporate and political climate in the United States which has allowed corporations to vastly exploit natural water resources. Exploring issues ranging from the pollution created by the bottles themselves to the efforts by corporations to create dependencies on bottled water, to the environmental impact of bottling operations on already dwindling fresh water resources, to the quality of bottled water itself.

An exceptionally well-produced and well-researched documentary, Tapped is an extremely informative 75-minute watch. It includes informative interviews with leading experts, scientists, and industry leaders. Of particular interest are the experiments explained in the documentary where laboratories analyzed water after storage in plastic bottles and demonstrated a range of contaminants.

Check out the trailer below. You can purchase or rent the film on Amazon.

FLOW: For Love Of Water

FLOW For Love Of Water World Water Crisis Documentary Movie Cover

The cleverly entitled FLOW is another look at the growing privatization of water resources across the globe. Identifying and describing the different parts and mechanisms behind the growing world water cartel, the documentary provides a good look into the environmental hazards of human activities of all descriptions.

With a look at climate change, the decreasing amount of fresh water, the exploitation of the water resources, companies attempts to capitalize on growing pollution, and raising a fundamental question about the morality of bottled water, FLOW paints a damning picture of human impacts and the corporate contribution to the growing water crisis.

Check out the trailer below or purchase or rent the movie on Amazon.

Bottled Life

Bottled Life The Truth About Nestles Business With Water Documentary Film Cover

Much like the film Tapped above, Bottled Life peers into the troubles being raised by the bottled water industry and their attempts to privatize water resources across the globe. Where Tapped narrows its focus onto the United States but looked at a spectrum of water bottling companies, Bottled Life instead narrows the focus specifically onto bottling giant Nestle while taking a broader and more international scope.

Identifying the problems created by Nestle’s activities on both a local and global level, the documentary succeeds in demonstrating the painful consequences of exploiting global water resources. Creating unnecessary waste, polluting water sources, harming local water supplies, and unnecessarily transporting water across the globe for profit, Bottled Life points the finger at Nestle as a major culprit in a growing world water crisis.

Check out the trailer below to get a glimpse at the film. You can purchase or rent the movie on Amazon. It is also available for free for Netflix subscribers.

PBS Frontline: Poisoned Waters

Frontline Poisoned Waters American Water Crisis Documentary Movie Cover

From season 27 of acclaimed PBS documentary series Frontline, Poisoned Waters provides an in-depth look at the growing water pollution epidemic across the United States. Focusing on the devastating ecological impact of pollutants in America’s waterways, the documentary includes a horrifying look at the impact of pollution on animal life and landscapes.

Going into detail about the growing variety of chemical contaminants, the documentary examines scientific evidence to demonstrate the human- and animal-health impacts from the growing contamination of waterways. With a broad scope focusing on both drinking water and non-potable water, the documentary provides an extremely educational tour of human impacts on water resources. Anyone who wants an in-depth look at why pollutants are being created, what they are and do, and how they pollute water resources should definitely check out this documentary.

2560. Donal Trump Ended the Myth of the "Middle East Peace Process"

By Rashid Khalidi, The Guardian, February 18, 2017

Netanyahu and Trump at the White House press conference.  Photo: Xinhua/Yin Bogu

“I’m looking at two-state and one-state, and I like the one that both parties like.” With these words at a joint press conference with Benjamin Netanyahu, Donald Trump may have finally dispelled the already receding mirage of any just solution. 

Trump was clearly seeking to please his guest, spurred by the zealots in his government, four of whom, Public Safety Minister Gilad Erdan, Education Minister Naftali Bennett, Sports Minister Miri Regev, and Deputy Foreign Minister Tzipi Hotovley, just publicly came out against the creation of a Palestinian state.

For decades, Israeli governments, pursuing the colonization of the entirety of “Eretz Israel,” have systematically destroyed the prerequisites for a solution involving a contiguous, sustainable, sovereign Palestinian state with Jerusalem as its capital. Nevertheless, the myth that a real Palestinian state is on offer, and that there actually is a genuine “peace process,” endures as one of the greatest examples of magical thinking in modern times. 

That myth has been crucial for the continuation of Israel’s permanent occupation and unending colonization of the West Bank and Arab East Jerusalem, shielding it from any serious international pressure.

The final interment of the already moribund “two-state solution” would force all concerned to face what is obvious to any honest observer. For decades, an imposed reality of one-state – the only sovereign entity enjoying total security control – has existed between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean. This one state is Israel. Irrespective of the label one uses for it, this is the only outcome that this Israeli government will accept, whatever subaltern, or helot, or “autonomous” status it deigns to allow the Palestinians. 

Netanyahu did not mince words while standing next to Trump. He said that in any peace agreement “Israel must retain the overriding security control over the entire area west of the Jordan River.” He has long stated that he would only allow the Palestinians a “state minus;” that most Israeli settlements must remain in place; that all of Jerusalem belongs to Israel alone; and that Israel must keep 50-60% of the West Bank including the fertile Jordan River Valley. 

It matters little whether this travesty is called a one-state or a two-state “solution,” or whether the Palestinians get the right to fly a flag over such a pitiful Bantustan. 

The Trump-Netanyahu press conference, and the Senate confirmation hearings for David Friedman as ambassador-designate to Israel give us a very clear picture of how much the Israel-United States relationship has changed since January 20, 2017. 

American presidents since Clinton have insisted on a Palestinian state, have condemned settlement expansion, and have tried to rein in the most egregious excesses of the Israeli government, while financing and defending at the UN the very activities they supposedly opposed. These feeble positions are now eroding. 

Having just cast doubt on the two-state solution, Trump stood by complaisantly while Netanyahu laid out preconditions universally recognized as deal-breakers for the Palestinians: besides permanent Israeli control of their “state,” he demanded recognition of Israel as a Jewish state, a designation that no other country is required to accept, and something Israeli itself has not formally adopted. Similarly, while Trump asked Israel to “hold back on settlements a little bit,” his administration has not responded to the massive settlement expansion announced by the Israeli government in recent weeks.

In Friedman’s prepared testimony, clearly scripted by Trump administration handlers, he aligned himself closely with the largely false claims made the previous day by Netanyahu: that the Palestinians have refused to recognize Israel or to renounce terrorism, and that they pay killers of Israelis. In fact, the PLO recognized Israel and renounced violence decades ago. 

The families of the 35,000 Palestinians killed by Israel since 1967 do receive compensation, including some who have engaged in violence against Israel and its military occupation, but that very total, many times larger than the number of Israeli soldiers, settlers and civilians killed, helps to explain the violence. This is the cost of an occupation whose very existence Netanyahu and Friedman deny. 

As Netanyahu put it while standing alongside Trump: “Jews are called Jews because they come from Judea. This is our ancestral homeland. Jews are not foreign colonialists in Judea.” This is perfectly in line with the views of Friedman, who has raised millions of dollars in tax-free donations to settlements built on stolen Palestinian private property in “Judea.” Clearly, the Trump administration has moved the goalposts on Palestine, tilting even further in the direction of the most extreme government in Israel’s history.

In this brave new world, it is more urgent than ever for the Palestinians to overcome their crippling internal divisions, reject the pressures of the external powers that have helped to keep their national movement fragmented, and produce a clear strategy for a future of complete equality between Palestinians and Israelis. Perhaps Trump has provided the opportunity for them to lay out what a truly just and equal one-state, or binational, or confederal, or two-state solution would look like. 

In any case, only a complete break with the failed strategies of the feeble leaderships in Ramallah and Gaza can provide a genuine alternative to the grotesque future of unending dispossession and oppression that Trump and Netanyahu envision for them.