Don't write history as poetry

Don't write history as poetry, because the weapon is
the historian. And the historian doesn't get fever
chills when he names his victims, and doesn't listen
to the guitar's rendition. And history is the dailiness
of weapons prescribed upon our bodies. "The
intelligent genius is the mighty one." And history
has no compassion that we can long for our
beginning, and no intention that we can know what's ahead
and what's behind ... and it has no rest stops
by the railroad tracks for us to bury the dead, for us to look
toward what time has done to us over there, and what
we've done to time. As if we were it and outside it.
History is not logical or intuitive that we can break
what is left of our myth about happy times,
nor is it a myth that we can accept our dwelling at the doors
of judgement day. It is in us and outside us ... and a mad
repetition, from the catapult to the nuclear thunder.
Aimlessly we make it and it makes us ... Perhaps
history wasn't born as we desired, because
the Human Being never existed?
Philosophers and artists passed through there...
and the poets wrote down the dailiness of their purple flowers
then passed through there ... and the poor believed
in sayings about paradise and wait there...
and gods came to rescue nature from our divinity
and passed through there. And history has no
time for contemplation, history has no mirror
and no bare face. It is unreal reality
or unfanciful fancy, so don't write.
Don't write it, don't write it as poetry.

~Mahmoud Darwish

لا تكتبِ التاريخَ شعراً، فالسلاحُ هُوَ
المؤرِّخُ. والمؤرخ لا يُصابُ برعشة
الحُمَّى إذا سَمَّى ضحاياه ولا يُصْغي
إلى سرديّة الجيتار. والتاريخ يوميّاتُ
أسلحةٍ مُدّوَّنةٌ على أجسادنا. "إنَّ
الذكيَّ العبقريَّ هو القويُّ". وليس
للتاريخ عاطفةُ لِنَشعُرَ بالحنين إلى
بدايتنا، ولا قَصدٌ لنعرف ما الأمام
وما الوراء... ولا استراحاتُ على
سِكك الحديد لندفن الموتى، وننظُرَ
صَوْبَ ما فَعَلَ الزمانُ بنا هناك، وما
فَعَلنا بالزمان. كأنَّنا منهُ وخارجَهُ.
فلا هو منطقيٌّ أو بديهيٌّ لنكسرَ
ما تَبَقّى من خرافتنا عن الزمن السعيد،
ولا خرافيٌّ لنرضى بالإقامة عند أبواب
القيامةِ. إنَّه فينا وخارجنا.. وتكرارٌ
جُنُونيٌّ، من المِقلاع حتى الصاعق النَّوَويِّ.
يصنعُنا ونصنعه بلا هَدَفٍ.. هل
التاريخ لم يُولد كما شئنا، لأن
الكائنَ البشريَّ لم يُوجد؟
فلاسِفةٌ وفنّانون مرُّوا من هناك...
ودوّن الشعراءُ يوميّاتِ أزهارِ البنفسج
ثم مروا من هناك.. وصدَّق الفقراءُ
أخباراً عن الفردوس وانتظروا هناك...
وجاء آلهةٌ لإنقاذ الطبيعةِ من أُلوهيَّتِنا
ومرُّوا من هناك. وليس للتاريخ
وقتٌ للتأمُّل، وليس للتاريخ مرآةٌ
وَوَجْةٌ سافرٌ. هو واقعٌ لا واقعيُّ
أو خيالٌ لا خياليٌّ، فلا تكتبه.
لا تكتبه، لا تكتبه شعراً!

~محمود دروي

Have you heard about Carcassian genocide?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Circassian_nationalism

طلب اسرائلي للاجئين الفلسطينين

أخواتي و أخواني، لاجئين الفلسطينين، اليوم هو ١٥ مايو، يوم النكبه، و لدي لكم طلب واحد من القلب، من أولاد محتلين، كمحتلين، لكل الذين دفعه تمن هذا الاحتلال.

أنا لا أسأل لمغفره لما حصل من تدمير و طرد في نكبه ٤٨، لا أمكنني أن اتطسور المغفره لهذه الفظائع بالمعني الديني أو الروحاني. و لأن التسامح الحقيقي ليس من الممكن أن يتحقق،المصالحه الفلسطينيه -الإسرائيلية لا تحدث إلى في التوصل إلى تسويه سياسية و ثقافية التي زوج تسمح لنا أن نتوقف على القتل والخوف المتبادل. (التبادل لا يعني التماثل، لأنها قطعا لاتوجد بين الجانبين) . لهذا السبب المغفره الدينيه توجد في بعد غير واقعي، خاليه إلى حد جذري. لعل هذه هي الفكرة الفلاطونيه التي ممكن أن تقودنا في الاتجاه الصحيح الذي يجب أن نسعي إليه، حتى لو من المستحيل إلى أن نصل.


لذلك طلبي أكثر تواضعا، و أمل إنكم تصل بهذا الكلام، لأن لا يمكننا أن نستمر بأن نعيش على هذه الأرض هكذا. المقصود بالمعيشة هنا، المعيشة الحقيقية، المعني الأصلي لكلمة-التحدث بلغتها، لمعرفة تاريخها، ليس للاستيلاء عليها ، لتحويله إلى أسطورة؛ أن لا تخاف أو تريد أن تكون في مكان أخر غير أرضك، كمثل عندما تلتقي بكل فرصة للهروب لأراضي أجنبية(دائما في إتجاه الغرب). بالتالي، طلبي هو أن تستمر وأنت لن تتخلى عن حقك في العودة. قد يبدو طلبا غريب لأن لماذا أنا لكي أصر على حقوقكم، الحق الأساسي للذين انفصلوا من ديارهم و أرضهم. ولكن على الرغم من هذا،على الرغم من مدى حرج أو سخفهذا الطلب قد يكون ، على الرغم من أنها تبدو كحقل الغام،أنا أصر. ليس فقط من أجلك، و من أجل أولادك، و لكن لنا أيضا. هل تفهمي؟

إذا تخليت عن حقكم، كل فرص للحياة في هذه الأرض تضيع، و سيصدر الحكم للمحتل المخزي للأبد . لو جاء هذا اليوم، عندما موقف الإسرائيليين اليهود كغزا يبذل دائم ، الكارهين اليهود الحقيقين سوف ينتصروا ، والحاقدين عليهم على إثبات أنهم كانوا على حق عندما اتهمهم بإنسانيه بأضرار بالغة. انسانيتنا مع حقكم في العوده. اليوم الذي طردناكام من أرضكم، أخذتم جزا منا معاكم. فقط عندما تعود نستطيع أن نستعيد انسانيتنا. من الصعب لنا نستمر في هذا الطريق. ليس من القصد أن ما كل باق من إنسانيتنا الابتذال ، الغطرسة والنزعة العسكرية والخوف. نعم، قد توجد الكثير من الأشيا الجميلة في الإنسانية التي المحتل لا يمكن أن يحلم بها. ولو من الممكن أن نحلم، إذن هو ممكن؛ معيشة تعاون هنا على أرضنا المشتركة- إنه
حلم جميل و مشوق.

في حلمي أرى الحياه تعاون مع أخواتي اللاجئين الفلسطينين، الذي تعرفت عليهم من حيث ابتديت درستي عن النكبة، التي من وقتها، تحول كثير من الاماكن إلى مواقع الجيش، غابات صندوق اليهودي الوطني، البلدات اليهود القديمة،و قرى خلابة....

مسكه ، قله، برعم ، صفورية ، عين غزال ، يافا ، حيفا ، طبريا ، إجزم ، دير ياسين ، الصفصاف ، إجليل ، قاقون ، اللجون ، وأكثر... من إسرائيل --تدمير حياة بأكملها ، صفحة كاملةمن كتاب الحضارة. بالنسبة لي هذه الأماكن لها وجه حقيقي، التقيت بها شخصيا ، وهناك العديد من اللاجئين الذين يطلبون حقهم بالعوده.

عندما تعود إلى هذي المدن الفارغة،سوف يكون في انفجار مع الحياة ، وسوف تتوقف عن أن تكون مجرد شهادة وفاة والذكريات الحزينة كما كانت عليه طوال 62 سنة. و سوف يملى الأرض أيضا بانسانيتنا.

حقكم في العودة هي فرصة لي و لجميع الإسرائيليين لبدء استعادة إنسانيتنا

إيتان برونشتاي ~

 مترجمة من  النسخة الأصلية  

An Israeli request to Palestinian refugees

My sisters and brothers the refugees of Palestine, today is the 15th of May, the Nakba Day, and I have one request from you; a heartfelt request from the son of occupiers, as an occupier, to those who paid the price for this occupation.

No, I do not ask for forgiveness for the occupation, or the destruction and expulsion that occurred in the Nakba of 1948. I can’t really expect forgiveness for these horrors, not in the true sense of forgiveness, the religious or spiritual sense. And since this forgiveness cannot truly take place, so can Israeli-Palestinian reconciliation occur only as a political and cultural settlement that will allow us to stop the killing and the mutual fear (and this mutuality does not mean symmetry, because it absolutely does not exist between the sides). Religious forgiveness belongs, therefore, to a different dimension, an unrealistic dimension utopian to a radical degree. This perhaps is a Platonic idea or guiding principle that guides us in the right direction that we must strive towards even if we’ll never get there.

Therefore, my request is more modest, and I hope that you could relate to it because without it I will not be able to continue to hope and to believe that it is possible to live in this land. And by “living” I mean really living, in the true sense of the word—to speak its language, to know its history, not just to conquer it, to turn it into a myth, to be afraid in and to want to be someplace else, which is not this land, when a good opportunity happens to come up, to run away to foreign lands (always in a Western direction) in every opportunity…

My request is, therefore, that you persist and will not give up your right to return. It might sound a little strange because who am I to ask of you to insist on your own rights, the basic right of people who were uprooted from their land and their homes. But despite this, despite how awkward or absurd this request may be, despite it sounds as minefield, I insist. Please, you and your children, don’t ever give up your right to return. Not (only) for yourselves but for me also. Do you understand? If you give up this right all chance for a just life in this land will be lost and I will be sentenced to the shameful life of an eternal occupier, armed from the soles of my feet to the depths of my soul and always afraid, like all colonizers. From my point of view dangerous things might happen to us, the Israelis, if it happened that you, the Palestinian refugees, give up your right to return. If that day arrives, the day where you give up your right of return, the great haters of the Jews will be able to celebrate their ultimate victory. When the Jewish Israelis’ position as conquerors and bringers of woe will be made permanent, their haters will prove that they were right when they blamed them for having a badly damaged humanity.

Our humanity is bound up with your right to return. The day we expelled you from your land you carried a part of us with you. Only when you can return we will be able to restore our humanity. It is hard for us to continue in this way, with damaged humanities. It doesn’t mean that all our humanity has left us with vulgarity, condescension, militarism and fear. Yes, we have some beautiful things about true humanity that occupiers cannot even dream of. Actually to dream of it may be possible; about a life in cooperation with you here in our shared land. It is a beautiful and moving dream.

In my dream I see a life in cooperation with my friends, Palestinian refugees, who have exponentially grown in numbers ever since I started to learn and teach about the Nakba. From then, many places here have ceased being (only) training grounds for the army, JNF forests, national parks, ancient Jewish towns, ancient ruins, Crusader fortresses, liberated towns, picturesque villages, empty wilderness…

Miska, Qula, Bir’im, Saffuriyya, al-Ghabisiyya, ‘Ayn Ghazal, Yaffa, Haifa, Tabaria, Ijzim, Dair Yassin, Safsaf, Ijlil, Qaqun, ‘Innaba, al-Lajjun, al-Ghubayyat, and more – Israel destroyed an entire life, an entire page of civilization, in destroying these places. For me these places have a real face, one that I met personally, and there are many refugees that are demanding their right to return to them.

When you return these empty towns and villages will be filled with people, they will be bursting with life and will stop being only a testimony for death and sad memories as they have been for 62 years. Filling up these spaces will also fill up the empty space in my own humanity.

Your right to return is my opportunity, as well as all Israelis to begin restoring our humanity.

Eitan Bronstein,
Tel Aviv, May 2010 (Zochrot)
Adapted from Jews sans frontieres (Jews Without Borders) with some grammar edits.

Pinker on Chomsky, his politics, origins of language...

Pinker talks about Chomsky's libertarian-socialism, the use of language (evolutionary vs. creativity), and his own doubts about anarchism. .... He's still a big fan of 'liberal democracy', because he believes there still is a "dark side to our human nature." ...anyways it's good he only writes about psychology :P

Canada's crying, and Egypt's protesting

Marc Emery has been ordered extradited to the United States, and social and labour workers are still staging protests in downtown Cairo. I dunno, have a feeling things are heading in the right direction....

Robert Browning

Our interest's on the dangerous edge of things.

The honest thief, the tender murderer,

The superstitious atheist.

~Robert Browning

.اهتمامنا على حافة خطيرة للأشياء

،اللص الصادق، القاتل الرقيق

.الملحد الموهوم

روبرت برونينج~

War Cry

No to the extension of the emergency law

Translated from e-socialists.net
Down with totalitarianism, down with the dictatorship!
11 May 2009
Revolutionary Socialists

We, the national momentum, signatories of this statement, reject the extension of the state of emergency that has been in place for more than thirty years and denied rights and freedoms that every citizen should be able to enjoy. Political life has ended in Egypt. Egyptians are disrespected in their daily affairs, in the streets and police stations. Their right of expression, association and protest against the regime's policies have been restricted. The regime's claims of using the emergency law to counter terrorism and drug-trafficking is false. Over the past decades the emergency law was used to put political opponents in jail, suppress freedoms and rights, ensuring relative stability of the regime.

This state of emergency is not only the concern of political and social elites; it's a serious threat facing all classes and groups in society, and its extension would be an insult to all Egyptians. The battle against the state of emergency is the same battle against economic policies of exploitation and political despotism, which allowed corruption to be rampant in all corners of government.

Today's refusal of the extension of the state of emergency is the beginning of a political campaign for a society free from exceptional laws and the absolute power of the president.

Signatories:
Socialist Prospect Centre
National Democratic Movement for Change
Muslim Brotherhood
6th April Movement
Revolutionary Socialists
Solidarity Group
Egyptian Centre for Economic and Social Rights
National Committee for Change
Hesham Mubarak Centre for Law
Kefaya Movement
Leftist-ElBaradei Support Group
Egyptian Women for Change
Democratic Front Party
Coordinating Committee of Rights and Freedoms Union
Social Democratic Party
Tomorrow Party
Central Party
Dignity Party

Flags and colonialism

Flags became useful when colonialism began. Colonialists used them as a symbol of their domination and replying in the same language, the occupied used it as a symbol of their resistance. Imperialism inspired the use of flags to serve both the imperialist and the liberation causes.

Imperialism didn't end when empires crumbled; it just took a different form. Liberated economies "developed" according to the colonialist's free market system that concentrated the profits into the hands of a very small, privileged, elite. The rich decreased, but those who remained were richer; and the poor increased, but were poorer. The maldistribution of wealth caused crime, violence against women, and religious extremism. The ruling class was always dominated by a single ethnic or religious groups that privileged its members with official and high ranking positions in government and the military. This preferential treatment instigated racism within the working classes that eventually lead into civil war. To defend themselves, people became more concious of their identity, and so intranational ethnic groups began waving their own flags and demanding their liberation from the liberated mother-nation. And so even after colonial rule, it seemed that nations were still being divided and more flags were flourishing.

After an economic recession, it is very likely that there will be a public shift to the left. For the workers and peasants, this translates into two main new forms of organization. For the workers, it's the anarcho-syndicalist that is workers can collectively self-manage their affairs horizontally, without the use of owners and managers. For the farmers, they simply own the land they cultivate. These two propositions don't carry a nationalist claim. They are just ways we should organize ourselves.
(view on Google Sidewiki)

George Carlin on class

@ 8:40 "You know how I define the economic and social classes in this country? The upper class keeps all of the money, pays none of the taxes. The middle class pays all of the taxes, does all of the work. The poor are there... just to scare the shit out of the middle class! Keep 'em showing up at those jobs!!

Resisting the closure of Middlesex University philosophy department

This is an object lesson in the neoliberalisation of universities. This is what happens when everything about education is subordinated to markets, internal competition, and the needs of capital accumulation. Students at Middlesex have decided to occupy the Trent Park campus after learning that the university's world class philosophy department was to be closed. Nina Power has written about the closure for The Guardian here, and the Save Middlesex Philosophy website has a FAQ for people who want to understand the politics behind it all. The main thing you need to know is that the University makes money from the philosophy department, one of the few that promotes critical political engagement and doesn't simply regurgitate Anglo-American banalities, but the University's administrators and vice-chancellor evidently think that by closing down philosophy and focussing on teaching other subjects they can make more money. But they can make more money out of teaching other subjects only if they reduce the proportion of fees income spent on running those courses. And indeed, this is a trend in universities everywhere.

So, regardless of the fact that the department is a financially viable and highly esteemed locus, it is to fall victim to the market-based logic of rationalising and down-sizing. This is a logic that is being actively extended throughout all of the public sector, and it is happening in higher education in part because of the fees system. Neoliberalism, the marketisation of every aspect of society, and its subordination to the goal of 'economic growth' (thus, implicitly, to the needs of capital), is driving these changes. At just the same time as successive governments, from Major to Brown, have driven an unprecedented expansion of the higher education system the better to create a skilled workforce, the state's capacity to fund provision through taxation has been run down. The shortfall has been made up by fees, as part of a set of market-driven reforms first championed by hard right Tories intent on reforming the system along American lines. In fact, when the Blair government introduced fees, it won a defector from the Tories over the latter's opposition, one Robert Jackson MP who had long agitated for such changes. New Labour, introducing these reforms, also made it clear that it would ensure that more funding, from fees and from the public purse, would be made available for those subjects that served "the evolving needs of the economy". Education was to be fundamentally re-organised in order to make up for the profound shortfall in private sector investment in R&D and training in the UK economy.

Following on from these market-driven reforms, one of the few remaining motivativators for any higher education institution to invest in non-vocational arts and humanities is to create a brand 'reputation'. As the Save Middlesex Philosophy website points out:

Middlesex University has declared the decision to close Philosophy ‘unavoidable’. It involves it giving up its previous research policy of ‘supporting excellence in research’ and thereby effectively giving up on ‘academic reputation’ as a significant factor in its market position. Yet some other universities in a similar situation are taking the opposite course of action – intensifying their focus on research excellence and emphasising the integration of research into teaching – in order to build ‘reputation’. Some are also emphasising the practical need for an element of humanities or ‘liberal arts’ teaching across the whole range of subject provision.

A radical shrinkage in non-vocational arts and humanities subjects is therefore certainly not ‘unavoidable’. However, given the narrowly corporate management culture sweeping through UK universities, it is a clear and present danger.

So, if the university has a reputation for excellence in research that is attractive to students and which draws funding, what has led to the university abandoning this reputation as a marketing strategy? There is also an element of asset-stripping involved. The UK's higher education system is subject to a 'Research Assessment Exercise' every five years, which awards funds to departments depending on how successful they have been. Now, I am not going to defend these exercises. Their measurements of productivity and success are hopelessly irrational, and the idea of distributing funds according to a peer-reviewed competition between institutions and departments is modelled precisely on the market-based logic that I wish to indict. Middlesex philosophy needed no endorsement from such a shambolic exercise to prove its worth - nevertheless, it obtained the government's blessing, and further funds were released. Those funds continue to be disbursed until the next assessment is carried out, even if the department closes. Thus, the officially measured success of Middlesex Philosophy has given the university administrators a reason to close it down.

There is, so to speak, a history of this kind of execubot management at Middlesex. Back in 2006, it was announced that history courses were being dropped. Got that? History. Why was this subject being abandoned by the university chiefs? Well, although it was one of the few history departments to specialise in black history, and though it had a wealth of archives and collections that made it unique, it wasn't making enough money. Given such an approach, it seems obvious that the university's administrators have long settled on a strategy of abandoning quality, excellence and an all-round research programme. Instead, like most other aspects of the public sector, it is being down-sized for the purposes of market efficiency.

But, the neoliberals, and the rash of narrow-minded corporate technocrats that they have brought in their wake, need not always win the day, and do not. That is why the students are in occupation, and why they are spreading their campaign far and wide, beyond the campus buildings themselves. They recognise that this is a systemic problem, and that if students and lecturers only respond to each instances of cuts, redundancies and closures on an individual, fire-fighting basis, they won't win. But if different campaigns unite, if they win public backing (in the form of petitions, say) and if the trade unions and student unions can be forced to support these struggles, they might win a far more decisive victory than they bargained for.

http://leninology.blogspot.com/2010/05/resisting-closure-of-middlesex.html

Taleb ElRefay

أنظمتنا العربية تمنعنا من قرأت الأخر من منطلق خوفها على نفسها و ليس علينا، سواء كان هذا الأخر كان شييوعين، خمينيان أواسرائيليين 
- طالب الرفاعي

Our Arab regimes prohibit us from the reading for the other, because they fear for themselves not for us, irregardless if the other is a communist, Khomeinist or Israeli

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Drjb0uka5Ww

Gaia has been stricken with city pox

Imagine we possessed a motion picture of the planet Earth filmed from an orbiting satellite over the time span of the last million years. An animated slice of the most recent and eventful chapter in Gaia's biography.

Poor Gaia has City Pox

Suppose we accelerated the film to compress those million years into a few hours running time.

What do we see?

For nearly the whole of that period only the seas and deserts, the grasslands and forests, the polar ice-caps and great mountain chains show through beneath the drifting clouds. No sign of animal life is visible, certainly no trace of human existence, even though, during the last few hundred thousand years, our ancestors are there, tiny hunting and gathering bands unobtrusively roaming the woodlands and savannas, chasing down game, pulling up roots, plucking berries. For most of the movie we see just this: a floating blue-green sphere with swatches of sun-baked sand and crinkled belts of rock.

Not until we reach the final scenes - the most recent four or five millennia - do we detect a few scattered human words, mainly in the fertile valleys of the Nile, Euphrates, Indus, Yellow rivers. Fragile irrigation grids, patchword plots and strips of cultivated soil. Possibly the Egyptian pyramids or the Great Wall of China would show up, the terraced mountain slopes of the Andes and the curious "Nazca lines," the colossal Earth-drawings of Peru. But more significant than any of these giant-sized words would be the unusual habitat in which their builders reside. It is a space of their own making: tight little clusters of homes, workships, markets along the seacoasts or at the junctures of rivers. Around these confines, the human build high walls; within forcing the green land, the forest, and the wild things away from them - as if they wished to become a world to themselves.

We are watching the first cities come into being. There are only a a few and they are small by our standards, but already we can sense a fateful change in the human condition. The townsfolk are an alert and greedy breed. They connive to draw riches to themselves from distant points; they organize armies clothes in bronze and iron that subjugate the tribal people nearby. They create self-congratulatory myths of their power and magnificence, tales of heroes who stamp the Earth with ruthless conquest. Kings appear amongst them who disport themselves like gods and organize vast collective projects: roadways, fortresses, canals that carry the water of rivers where people wish it to go. For the first time, we can see the marks of human will graven on the face of the planet, a message of might structures that seem to declare to the heavens, "See, we are here. Take notice of us!"

With these settlements, a daring experiment begins. We see a small fraction of our species ensconcing itself within a tiny universe of their own design, a theatrical arena that magnifies the stature of its occupants and multiplies their energy. But the towns are no more than pinpricks on the surface of the globe, none of them visible without the aid of a zoom focus. They are still massively surrounded by an invincible wilderness that mockingly dwarfs their pretensions. And so they remain for another four or five thousands years...until we are no more than two centuries from our own time.

Then in the closing moment of the film (we must watch closely now to catch sight of this) we notice a curious change in the scene below us. It begins in the midlands of Britain, a tiny island off the western edge of the Eurasian land mass. Gray and black dots issuing smoke like strange, smoldering sores break out on the surface of the planet. The dots spread across western Europe, leap the ocean to North America, then to the other continents. They quickly increase in umber and in size, becoming ugly dark blemishes. Focusing in more closely, we can see heaps of slag and rubble forming around them like weltering flesh. We see the smoke thicken into man-made clouds that block out the sky.Rivulets of oil waste and noxious fluids issue from these fuming sites, draining into nearby lakes and streams.

We are watching the rise and spread of the first industrial towns -- only a few at first, but growing haphazardly in size and number. From them, railways of steel, highways of asphalt and concrete fan out to connect one with another until over sprawling sectors of landscape there is a vibrant network of racing vehicle that carries the urban rhythm over the countryside. Soon the sky is filled with the traffic of aircraft; great ships ply the seas, converging upon the cities with cargoes from distant lands. We see one more thing, and that perhaps the most ominous. By the thousands, then by the millions, people leave the countryside to stream into the cities as if they were hypnotically drawn by the hammering temp of this new way of life. As the cities swell in size, they begin to take up a prodigious amount of open space; they dilate through stages of gargantuan growth -- from metropolis to megalopolis to conurbation that stretch across continents, spreading one urban stain into another.

Gaia has been stricken with City Pox

City Pox of the Nile Delta. The bright dots are the urban centres.

What we experience in our time in a thousand forms of discomfort, unsightfulness, disease originates in this sudden, spreading rash of industrial cities. "Sudden" means within two centuries, since the first mill owns sprang up in England in the 1780s. Even so, in England, the cradle of industrialism, the population did not become predominantly urban until 1850; in the United States not until 1910. We are talking about the last eye-blink in the history of life on Earth. Yet within that mere instant of geological time, industrial culture has become an urban empire who power spans oceans and continents.

For that matter, it is not enough to diagnose City Pox by the mere territorial size of cities. We must imagine the appetite for resources and political control that spreads out like so many invisible filaments from the urban centers, claiming the forests, the buried mineral deposits, the pools of oil, the deep aquifers, the most distant sources of energy. The cities own everything, govern everything, consume everything. Their pipelines and electrical power-grids cross mountains, jungles, tundra; their satellites patrol the frontiers of empty space. The subtle web of their communications wraps the planet in an electronic skin. Their artifacts rest on the surface of the moon and nearby planets. The wilderness has become their playground, recreational space for weary tourists. Wildlife survive by their sufferance upon reservations, as do the few remaining traditional societies. The culture of cities has become the planet's only culture, all others lingering on as curiosities preserved for scholarly study, or, as in the case of the Muslim fundamentalist insurgents, fighting a losing rear guard action. In the prescience of the urbanites, only the vermin and the microbes thrive and multiply.

Now, in just the last few frames before our film rushes to its end, we see the megalopolitan pockmarks on the planet's surface swirl and pull of their omnivorous metabolism. They suck in the riches of the Earth and spew them back in the running streams of merchandise and debris. W can see nothing below us but a vista of parasitic urban agglomeration that eat and eat at the substance of the planet, returning more garbage than the world's natural cycles can clean away.

City Pox may be approaching its terminal stage.

From Theodore Roszak's Voice of the Earth

Antiracist soldier

La Rage

La Rage (The Rage) by French female rap artist Keny Arkana. Released in 2006, La Rage refers to global politics and the 2005 riots in the banlieues (ghettos) of Paris which spread to other cities in France:

chanting, swearing, spitting, pushing, punching and flowers

Chomsky on capitalism

"If this system is so bad, why hasn't there been greater movements to challenge it?"

"....When you say is the system 'so bad', I don't even know what that means. Slave societies went on for centuries and centuries without any challenge. Did that justify it? If you really want to be serious about it, the slave owners were giving arguments rather like yours. Take George Fitzhugh who was the leading spokesperson for slave owners in the south. And the time when it was becoming a serious issue, around the 1840s, he had pretty powerful arguments for slavery. What he was saying is: look the reason you northerners are against slavery is because you are anti-Negro racists. We are not racists. We think that you should take care of your subjects, so we treat them nicely, and we even do that on economic grounds because they are our capital. [!!]

To make an anachronistic analogy, if I buy a car, and you rent a car, and somebody comes a year later to look at the two cars, which car is going to be in better shape? Mine, because I own it so I am going to take care of it, not yours because you rent it, you can throw it away and get another one. That's exactly Fitzhugh's argument: we own people, you just rent them so therefore we take care of them. We treat them well; we respect them. They are our capital, besides we have human relations with them. We are pre-capitalist, we still have human relations. You just treat them as tools, under wage slavery, and they are much worst of. SO we are the ones who are moral, you are immoral.

Einstein on class

I regard class differences as contrary to justice and, in the last resort, based on force. ~Einstein

I don't have a hard time maintaining composure. I feel very relaxed, but parallel to my passivity is a burning desire for something different. I wonder if I am the problem with the world.


God, if only the first Leftists sat on the right of the president's chair instead, #communism wouldn't have a bad reputation with the devil