7 Mar 2015

India's Daughter: Dealing With Reality

Shalu Nigam

The documentary `India's Daughter' made by Leslee Udwin about the rape that shook Delhi in December 2012 raised a lot of debate, outrage and furor in Parliament, in media and in general. The police filed a FIR and the broadcast of this documentary is banned in India. Statements were issued by groups in favour [1] and against [2] such ban. However, what is being overlooked amidst this debate is the reality of women's lives in India. A woman in India faces this patriarchal misogynist attitude every day – at home and at public spaces, through her entire life in different ways. The documentary pointed to this regressive attitude and subjugating culture that needs to be addressed. Prohibiting the documentary is futile as shying away from such questions that pertains to reality of women's live or living in denial that misogyny exists or closing eyes to realities is hardly helpful to bring about social transformation. The need is to strike at the roots and confront the sexist and patriarchal violent culture in a mature manner.
What does the documentary depicts?
The film uncovers the ugly reality of rape that shook the country in December 2012. The maker of the documentary interviewed the rapists, the defense lawyers, the parents of deceased woman Nirbhaya who was raped brutally, her tutor, the doctor who were involved in providing treatment to the woman, the psychiatrist, the gynecologist, the families of the rapists, the police, bystanders, Mrs Shiela Dixit, the members of Justice Verma Committee formulated immediately after the incident took place and also explanations given by a Professor from Oxford besides showing the anger of the protestors and the police response to such protest held after the rape. 
The film sketches the childhood of Nirbhaya, her dreams, her aspirations, her happiness, her brutal, heinous rape, her death and what happened after that. It also outlines the life of the rapists – the poverty situation they live in, their inhuman conditions and their lifestyle besides their horrific mental state.  There are progressive ideas expressed by her parents and Verma Committees' Members and there are repressive voices of the rapist and of the defense lawyers. Though it does not talk about the other many rape cases, nuances of issues relating to rape in India, evolution and implementation of the rape law, efforts made by the women's movement in India in seeking amendments within the law or highlighting the cause of sexual assault or statistics pertaining to rape cases yet the documentary depicted the reality of the rape, power, control, male domination, violence and what happened after that without sensationalizing it or glorifying the rapist. Rather it exposed the chauvinistic mindset – the attitude of rapists and the misogynist approach of defense lawyers. The film depicts `what does it means to be a woman' in a patriarchal society [3] . It clearly shows that rape is not an aberration rather it is a malaise that is deeply entrenched. More than reflecting on the Western views of Indian situation, the issues raised in the film compel the citizens of the country to think and consider if what is happening is really right or not and how this can be prevented.
What does the Documentary Convey?
The documentary conveys the significant message that the rape culture exists in the country; that in spite of rhetoric of equality and justice women are treated as chattels in the society.  This is depicted by the statement made by the defense lawyer as well as the rapist interviewed in the 59 minutes film. The articulation by the accused or the defense lawyers is something that has been on and off repeated by men and even some women in various ways at different levels and at diverse forums. The movie reflects on the sexist attitude that prevails in the Indian society that blames women for any violence; it attempts to point out at the collective psyche and approach towards violence against women. It also pointed out the hope to bring about change as expressed by Nirbhaya's parents. 
The documentary reveals the mind of rapists as well as the mind of `educated' men in the country. Though it does not show the announcements made by the religious or political leaders about their attitude relating to rape, it provides an insight into the psyche of the culprits as to why they think they have the right to rape a woman. It pointed out the reasons as to why rapists are not remorseful even if they know they are jailed and penalized for doing wrong. The documentary shed light on the rape crisis existing in the country. Such kind of documentaries may be used as a material to explain men and women relationship in the country as it demonstrates the manner in which the sexist mindset operates. It does not defame the country rather it highlights the fact that much more needs to be done to fulfill the goals of constitutional equality and justice. The film unmasks the illusions and tears apart the fabric of morality that has been used for ages to cover the core of violence against women. The message is clear and loud – forbid the mindset that promotes rape culture.
Does the content of documentary obstruct justice or prevent law?
Rape or discussions around it relating to prevalent patriarchal culture is not something new that has been highlighted for the first time in this country. Furious debates have taken place earlier after the Mathura's rape case in 80s, Bhanwari Devi's rape case, Rameeza Bi's case, Manorama's case, Aruna Shaunbaug's case, Soni Suri, and many other cases. In Mathura's rape case the open letter issued by the four eminent people which later resulted in the amendments in the rape law in 1983. In Bhanwari Devi's rape case the PIL was filed by the organization Vishakha when the criminal trial of Bhanwari Devi was pending before the lower courts. Similarly, in the aftermath of Nirbhaya case, Justice Verma Committee was constituted and on the recommendations made by the Committee the amendments were made to the criminal law dealing with rape. When this Justice Verma Committee was constituted, the matter of Nirbhaya rape was pending, when the protests took place after the incident, the Nirbhaya's matter was subjudiced and nothing has made a dent on the legal process. Currently, the matter relating to the appeal against the death penalty to the rapists in Nirbhaya's case is pending before the Supreme Court of India. However, it may be pointed out that the judiciary is mature enough to handle the case without biases and prejudices as it has been done earlier in this case and in other matters too.
Besides, women are being raped everyday in every nook and corner of India. Some of these cases came to limelight and there are many others which could not receive attention or are never reported. Also, there are high profile cases or otherwise cases which are tried by the court where evidences have been misplaced, two fingers test is used to monitor the virginity of women, police fails its duties in registering the cases or conducting investigations, witnesses have been threatened and trials have been hijacked and even courts have expressed their anguish over such cases as justice has been obstructed due to various reasons. The need therefore is to revamp the criminal justice system.
Further, the analysis of the documentary also indicates that struggle to justice is long. Penalizing the rapists in the Nirbhaya's case will not end the issue of sexual violence; the need is to look beyond a particular case into the perverted mindset and an ugly deeply entrenched thought process that legitimize such barbaric behavior towards women. It points out the gravity of the situation and indicates that banning a documentary will not end rape.
What is Outrageous and Should be Debated and Banned?
The attitude that `women are like flowers and men are like thrones' or `women are like diamonds, or food' is outrageous and needs to be debated;
the statement that `she should not have fought back' is despicable and should be disallowed;
the declaration that` our culture is best but there is no place for women' is disgraceful that needs to be questioned;
the position that women should do household work only is problematic and should be changed;
the chauvinistic depiction of masculinity is appalling which should be banned,
 the attitude that `the girl asks for it or deserves it' needs to be altered,
the regressive attitudes pertaining to morality, decency and character of women as daughters, wives or mothers need to be challenged,
the notion that women are the bearer of honour needs to be discussed;
the concept that women is to be blamed for all that happens with her needs to be stopped;
the approach that blame the women and hold them responsible needs to be debated;
the idea of `teaching her a lesson' needs to questioned and should be prevented;
shoving the larger socio-political issue behind the curtains of safety and protection of women needs to outlawed;
 the culture of impunity is harmful which should be forbidden;
the impression that `others are doing it so why can't we' needs to be prohibited;
the norms that legitimize men's right over women need to be raised and banned;
the mores that women should confirm to the diktats pronounced by men need to be looked into;
the misogynist statements given by several leaders, religious as well as political, and played on media repeatedly need to be stopped;
the culture that treats women as commodity in the guise of being treated as goddesses needs to be changed;
the society where women have no rights need to be modified and checked;
the need is to revamp the criminal justice system which fails to register many cases or could not provide speedy and fair justice in those cases which are reported;
the approach of banning the freedom of expression in itself is dreadful that needs to be transformed;
and above all rape itself should be banned; stop the rapists from raping anyone.
What can be done further?
Instead of banning the film and covering the issue of rape with the layers of legality or morality or wrapping it with the sugary coat of tolerance is not going to help. The acceptance of the fact that rape happens and needs to be stopped may facilitate the process of justice. The need is to address the structural causes of increasing violence against women. The need is to accept the reality instead of shying away from it or living in denial. Pushing the conversation about rape and related mindset under the carpet is not going to bring any change. Open discussions and healthy debates are required. There is a need to change the culture which blames women for violence – women's dress, her mobility, her action, a mindset that held women responsible to `protect' herself.  Symptomatic solutions which `protect' women like women's safety apps, restricting women's mobility, CCTV cameras, self defence classes for women, pepper spray are not going to help. Essential is to educate men and women against patriarchal culture and shame the chauvinistic exhibition of manliness and masculinity. The need is to involve men, shaming the culprits, understanding the patriarchal attitude and addressing the misogynistic culture in everyday life. Banning the documentary is no solution; the answer is to ban the rape culture which requires political will and commitment. Such kind of informative, educative media is a tool to understand the attitude of violence; it is an instrument to patriarchal and sexist approach and a mechanism to discuss debate and brainstorm the culture of violence against women.

Why The Rise Of Fascism Is Again The Issue

John Pilger

The recent 70th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz was a reminder of the great crime of fascism, whose Nazi iconography is embedded in our consciousness. Fascism is preserved as history, as flickering footage of goose-stepping blackshirts, their criminality terrible and clear. Yet in the same liberal societies, whose war-making elites urge us never to forget, the accelerating danger of a modern kind of fascism is suppressed; for it is their fascism.
“To initiate a war of aggression…,” said the Nuremberg Tribunal judges in 1946, “is not only an international crime, it is the supreme international crime, differing only from other war crimes in that it contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole.”
Had the Nazis not invaded Europe, Auschwitz and the Holocaust would not have happened. Had the United States and its satellites not initiated their war of aggression in Iraq in 2003, almost a million people would be alive today; and Islamic State, or ISIS, would not have us in thrall to its savagery. They are the progeny of modern fascism, weaned by the bombs, bloodbaths and lies that are the surreal theatre known as news.
Like the fascism of the 1930s and 1940s, big lies are delivered with the precision of a metronome: thanks to an omnipresent, repetitive media and its virulent censorship by omission. Take the catastrophe in Libya.
In 2011, Nato launched 9,700 “strike sorties” against Libya, of which more than a third were aimed at civilian targets. Uranium warheads were used; the cities of Misurata and Sirte were carpet-bombed. The Red Cross identified mass graves, and Unicef reported that “most [of the children killed] were under the age of ten”.
The public sodomising of the Libyan president Muammar Gaddafi with a “rebel” bayonet was greeted by the then US Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton, with the words: “We came, we saw, he died.” His murder, like the destruction of his country, was justified with a familiar big lie; he was planning “genocide” against his own people. “We knew… that if we waited one more day,” said President Obama, “Benghazi, a city the size of Charlotte, could suffer a massacre that would have reverberated across the region and stained the conscience of the world.”
This was the fabrication of Islamist militias facing defeat by Libyan government forces. They told Reuters there would be “a real bloodbath, a massacre like we saw in Rwanda”. Reported on March 14, 2011, the lie provided the first spark for Nato’s inferno, described by David Cameron as a “humanitarian intervention”.
Secretly supplied and trained by Britain’s SAS, many of the “rebels” would become ISIS, whose latest video offering shows the beheading of 21 Coptic Christian workers seized in Sirte, the city destroyed on their behalf by Nato bombers.
For Obama, David Cameron and then French President Nicolas Sarkozy, Gaddafi’s true crime was Libya’s economic independence and his declared intention to stop selling Africa’s greatest oil reserves in US dollars. The petrodollar is a pillar of American imperial power. Gaddafi audaciously planned to underwrite a common African currency backed by gold, establish an all-Africa bank and promote economic union among poor countries with prized resources. Whether or not this would happen, the very notion was intolerable to the US as it prepared to “enter” Africa and bribe African governments with military “partnerships”.
Following Nato’s attack under cover of a Security Council resolution, Obama, wrote Garikai Chengu, “confiscated $30 billion from Libya’s Central Bank, which Gaddafi had earmarked for the establishment of an African Central Bank and the African gold backed dinar currency”.
The “humanitarian war” against Libya drew on a model close to western liberal hearts, especially in the media. In 1999, Bill Clinton and Tony Blair sent Nato to bomb Serbia, because, they lied, the Serbs were committing “genocide” against ethnic Albanians in the secessionist province of Kosovo. David Scheffer, US ambassador-at-large for war crimes [sic], claimed that as many as “225,000 ethnic Albanian men aged between 14 and 59″ might have been murdered. Both Clinton and Blair evoked the Holocaust and “the spirit of the Second World War”. The West’s heroic allies were the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA), whose criminal record was set aside. The British Foreign Secretary, Robin Cook, told them to call him any time on his mobile phone.
With the Nato bombing over, and much of Serbia’s infrastructure in ruins, along with schools, hospitals, monasteries and the national TV station, international forensic teams descended upon Kosovo to exhume evidence of the “holocaust”. The FBI failed to find a single mass grave and went home. The Spanish forensic team did the same, its leader angrily denouncing “a semantic pirouette by the war propaganda machines”. A year later, a United Nations tribunal on Yugoslavia announced the final count of the dead in Kosovo: 2,788. This included combatants on both sides and Serbs and Roma murdered by the KLA. There was no genocide. The “holocaust” was a lie. The Nato attack had been fraudulent.
Behind the lie, there was serious purpose. Yugoslavia was a uniquely independent, multi-ethnic federation that had stood as a political and economic bridge in the Cold War. Most of its utilities and major manufacturing was publicly owned. This was not acceptable to the expanding European Community, especially newly united Germany, which had begun a drive east to capture its “natural market” in the Yugoslav provinces of Croatia and Slovenia. By the time the Europeans met at Maastricht in 1991 to lay their plans for the disastrous eurozone, a secret deal had been struck; Germany would recognise Croatia. Yugoslavia was doomed.
In Washington, the US saw that the struggling Yugoslav economy was denied World Bank loans. Nato, then an almost defunct Cold War relic, was reinvented as imperial enforcer. At a 1999 Kosovo “peace” conference in Rambouillet, in France, the Serbs were subjected to the enforcer’s duplicitous tactics. The Rambouillet accord included a secret Annex B, which the US delegation inserted on the last day. This demanded the military occupation of the whole of Yugoslavia – a country with bitter memories of the Nazi occupation – and the implementation of a “free-market economy” and the privatisation of all government assets. No sovereign state could sign this. Punishment followed swiftly; Nato bombs fell on a defenceless country. It was the precursor to the catastrophes in Afghanistan and Iraq, Syria and Libya, and Ukraine.
Since 1945, more than a third of the membership of the United Nations – 69 countries – have suffered some or all of the following at the hands of America’s modern fascism. They have been invaded, their governments overthrown, their popular movements suppressed, their elections subverted, their people bombed and their economies stripped of all protection, their societies subjected to a crippling siege known as “sanctions”. The British historian Mark Curtis estimates the death toll in the millions. In every case, a big lie was deployed.
“Tonight, for the first time since 9/11, our combat mission in Afghanistan is over.” These were opening words of Obama’s 2015 State of the Union address. In fact, some 10,000 troops and 20,000 military contractors (mercenaries) remain in Afghanistan on indefinite assignment. “The longest war in American history is coming to a responsible conclusion,” said Obama. In fact, more civilians were killed in Afghanistan in 2014 than in any year since the UN took records. The majority have been killed – civilians and soldiers – during Obama’s time as president.
The tragedy of Afghanistan rivals the epic crime in Indochina. In his lauded and much quoted book ‘The Grand Chessboard: American Primacy and Its Geostrategic Imperatives’, Zbigniew Brzezinski, the godfather of US policies from Afghanistan to the present day, writes that if America is to control Eurasia and dominate the world, it cannot sustain a popular democracy, because “the pursuit of power is not a goal that commands popular passion… Democracy is inimical to imperial mobilisation.” He is right. As WikiLeaks and Edward Snowden have revealed, a surveillance and police state is usurping democracy. In 1976, Brzezinski, then President Carter’s National Security Advisor, demonstrated his point by dealing a death blow to Afghanistan’s first and only democracy. Who knows this vital history?
In the 1960s, a popular revolution swept Afghanistan, the poorest country on earth, eventually overthrowing the vestiges of the aristocratic regime in 1978. The People’s Democratic Party of Afghanistan (PDPA) formed a government and declared a reform programme that included the abolition of feudalism, freedom for all religions, equal rights for women and social justice for the ethnic minorities. More than 13,000 political prisoners were freed and police files publicly burned.
The new government introduced free medical care for the poorest; peonage was abolished, a mass literacy programme was launched. For women, the gains were unheard of. By the late 1980s, half the university students were women, and women made up almost half of Afghanistan’s doctors, a third of civil servants and the majority of teachers. “Every girl,” recalled Saira Noorani, a female surgeon, “could go to high school and university. We could go where we wanted and wear what we liked. We used to go to cafes and the cinema to see the latest Indian film on a Friday and listen to the latest music. It all started to go wrong when the mujaheddin started winning. They used to kill teachers and burn schools. We were terrified. It was funny and sad to think these were the people the West supported.”
The PDPA government was backed by the Soviet Union, even though, as former Secretary of State Cyrus Vance later admitted, “there was no evidence of any Soviet complicity [in the revolution]”. Alarmed by the growing confidence of liberation movements throughout the world, Brzezinski decided that if Afghanistan was to succeed under the PDPA, its independence and progress would offer the “threat of a promising example”.
On July 3, 1979, the White House secretly authorised support for tribal “fundamentalist” groups known as the mujaheddin, a program that grew to over $500 million a year in U.S. arms and other assistance. The aim was the overthrow of Afghanistan’s first secular, reformist government. In August 1979, the US embassy in Kabul reported that “the United States’ larger interests… would be served by the demise of [the PDPA government], despite whatever setbacks this might mean for future social and economic reforms in Afghanistan.” The italics are mine.
The mujaheddin were the forebears of al-Qaeda and Islamic State. They included Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, who received tens of millions of dollars in cash from the CIA. Hekmatyar’s specialty was trafficking in opium and throwing acid in the faces of women who refused to wear the veil. Invited to London, he was lauded by Prime Minister Thatcher as a “freedom fighter”.
Such fanatics might have remained in their tribal world had Brzezinski not launched an international movement to promote Islamic fundamentalism in Central Asia and so undermine secular political liberation and “destabilise” the Soviet Union, creating, as he wrote in his autobiography, “a few stirred up Muslims”. His grand plan coincided with the ambitions of the Pakistani dictator, General Zia ul-Haq, to dominate the region. In 1986, the CIA and Pakistan’s intelligence agency, the ISI, began to recruit people from around the world to join the Afghan jihad. The Saudi multi-millionaire Osama bin Laden was one of them. Operatives who would eventually join the Taliban and al-Qaeda, were recruited at an Islamic college in Brooklyn, New York, and given paramilitary training at a CIA camp in Virginia. This was called “Operation Cyclone”. Its success was celebrated in 1996 when the last PDPA president of Afghanistan, Mohammed Najibullah – who had gone before the UN General Assembly to plead for help – was hanged from a streetlight by the Taliban.
The “blowback” of Operation Cyclone and its “few stirred up Muslims” was September 11, 2001. Operation Cyclone became the “war on terror”, in which countless men, women and children would lose their lives across the Muslim world, from Afghanistan to Iraq, Yemen, Somalia and Syria. The enforcer’s message was and remains: “You are with us or against us.”
The common thread in fascism, past and present, is mass murder. The American invasion of Vietnam had its “free fire zones”, “body counts” and “collateral damage”. In the province of Quang Ngai, where I reported from, many thousands of civilians (“gooks”) were murdered by the US; yet only one massacre, at My Lai, is remembered. In Laos and Cambodia, the greatest aerial bombardment in history produced an epoch of terror marked today by the spectacle of joined-up bomb craters which, from the air, resemble monstrous necklaces. The bombing gave Cambodia its own ISIS, led by Pol Pot.
Today, the world’s greatest single campaign of terror entails the execution of entire families, guests at weddings, mourners at funerals. These are Obama’s victims. According to the New York Times, Obama makes his selection from a CIA “kill list” presented to him every Tuesday in the White House Situation Room. He then decides, without a shred of legal justification, who will live and who will die. His execution weapon is the Hellfire missile carried by a pilotless aircraft known as a drone; these roast their victims and festoon the area with their remains. Each “hit” is registered on a faraway console screen as a “bugsplat”.
“For goose-steppers,” wrote the historian Norman Pollock, “substitute the seemingly more innocuous militarisation of the total culture. And for the bombastic leader, we have the reformer manque, blithely at work, planning and executing assassination, smiling all the while.”
Uniting fascism old and new is the cult of superiority. “I believe in American exceptionalism with every fibre of my being,” said Obama, evoking declarations of national fetishism from the 1930s. As the historian Alfred W. McCoy has pointed out, it was the Hitler devotee, Carl Schmitt, who said, “The sovereign is he who decides the exception.” This sums up Americanism, the world’s dominant ideology. That it remains unrecognised as a predatory ideology is the achievement of an equally unrecognised brainwashing. Insidious, undeclared, presented wittily as enlightenment on the march, its conceit insinuates western culture. I grew up on a cinematic diet of American glory, almost all of it a distortion. I had no idea that it was the Red Army that had destroyed most of the Nazi war machine, at a cost of as many as 13 million soldiers. By contrast, US losses, including in the Pacific, were 400,000. Hollywood reversed this.
The difference now is that cinema audiences are invited to wring their hands at the “tragedy” of American psychopaths having to kill people in distant places – just as the President himself kills them. The embodiment of Hollywood’s violence, the actor and director Clint Eastwood, was nominated for an Oscar this year for his movie, ‘American Sniper’, which is about a licensed murderer and nutcase. The New York Times described it as a “patriotic, pro-family picture which broke all attendance records in its opening days”.
There are no heroic movies about America’s embrace of fascism. During the Second World War, America (and Britain) went to war against Greeks who had fought heroically against Nazism and were resisting the rise of Greek fascism. In 1967, the CIA helped bring to power a fascist military junta in Athens – as it did in Brazil and most of Latin America. Germans and east Europeans who had colluded with Nazi aggression and crimes against humanity were given safe haven in the US; many were pampered and their talents rewarded. Wernher von Braun was the “father” of both the Nazi V-2 terror bomb and the US space programme.
In the 1990s, as former Soviet republics, eastern Europe and the Balkans became military outposts of Nato, the heirs to a Nazi movement in Ukraine were given their opportunity. Responsible for the deaths of thousands of Jews, Poles and Russians during the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union, Ukrainian fascism was rehabilitated and its “new wave” hailed by the enforcer as “nationalists”.
This reached its apogee in 2014 when the Obama administration splashed out $5 billion on a coup against the elected government. The shock troops were neo-Nazis known as the Right Sector and Svoboda. Their leaders include Oleh Tyahnybok, who has called for a purge of the “Moscow-Jewish mafia” and “other scum”, including gays, feminists and those on the political left.
These fascists are now integrated into the Kiev coup government. The first deputy speaker of the Ukrainian parliament, Andriy Parubiy, a leader of the governing party, is co-founder of Svoboda. On February 14, Parubiy announced he was flying to Washington get “the USA to give us highly precise modern weaponry”. If he succeeds, it will be seen as an act of war by Russia.
No western leader has spoken up about the revival of fascism in the heart of Europe – with the exception of Vladimir Putin, whose people lost 22 million to a Nazi invasion that came through the borderland of Ukraine. At the recent Munich Security Conference, Obama’s Assistant Secretary of State for European and Eurasian Affairs, Victoria Nuland, ranted abuse about European leaders for opposing the US arming of the Kiev regime. She referred to the German Defence Minister as “the minister for defeatism”. It was Nuland who masterminded the coup in Kiev. The wife of Robert D. Kagan, a leading “neo-con” luminary and co-founder of the extreme right wing Project for a New American Century, she was foreign policy advisor to Dick Cheney.
Nuland’s coup did not go to plan. Nato was prevented from seizing Russia’s historic, legitimate, warm-water naval base in Crimea. The mostly Russian population of Crimea – illegally annexed to Ukraine by Nikita Krushchev in 1954 – voted overwhelmingly to return to Russia, as they had done in the 1990s. The referendum was voluntary, popular and internationally observed. There was no invasion.
At the same time, the Kiev regime turned on the ethnic Russian population in the east with the ferocity of ethnic cleansing. Deploying neo-Nazi militias in the manner of the Waffen-SS, they bombed and laid to siege cities and towns. They used mass starvation as a weapon, cutting off electricity, freezing bank accounts, stopping social security and pensions. More than a million refugees fled across the border into Russia. In the western media, they became unpeople escaping “the violence” caused by the “Russian invasion”. The Nato commander, General Breedlove – whose name and actions might have been inspired by Stanley Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove – announced that 40,000 Russian troops were “massing”. In the age of forensic satellite evidence, he offered none.
These Russian-speaking and bilingual people of Ukraine – a third of the population – have long sought a federation that reflects the country’s ethnic diversity and is both autonomous and independent of Moscow. Most are not “separatists” but citizens who want to live securely in their homeland and oppose the power grab in Kiev. Their revolt and establishment of autonomous “states” are a reaction to Kiev’s attacks on them. Little of this has been explained to western audiences.
On May 2, 2014, in Odessa, 41 ethnic Russians were burned alive in the trade union headquarters with police standing by. The Right Sector leader Dmytro Yarosh hailed the massacre as “another bright day in our national history”. In the American and British media, this was reported as a “murky tragedy” resulting from “clashes” between “nationalists” (neo-Nazis) and “separatists” (people collecting signatures for a referendum on a federal Ukraine).
The New York Times buried the story, having dismissed as Russian propaganda warnings about the fascist and anti-Semitic policies of Washington’s new clients. The Wall Street Journal damned the victims – “Deadly Ukraine Fire Likely Sparked by Rebels, Government Says”. Obama congratulated the junta for its “restraint”.
If Putin can be provoked into coming to their aid, his pre-ordained “pariah” role in the West will justify the lie that Russia is invading Ukraine. On January 29, Ukraine’s top military commander, General Viktor Muzhemko, almost inadvertently dismissed the very basis for US and EU sanctions on Russia when he told a news conference emphatically: “The Ukrainian army is not fighting with the regular units of the Russian Army”. There were “individual citizens” who were members of “illegal armed groups”, but there was no Russian invasion. This was not news. Vadym Prystaiko, Kiev’s Deputy Foreign Minister, has called for “full scale war” with nuclear-armed Russia.
On February 21, US Senator James Inhofe, a Republican from Oklahoma, introduced a bill that would authorise American arms for the Kiev regime. In his Senate presentation, Inhofe used photographs he claimed were of Russian troops crossing into Ukraine, which have long been exposed as fakes. It was reminiscent of Ronald Reagan’s fake pictures of a Soviet installation in Nicaragua, and Colin Powell’s fake evidence to the UN of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.
The intensity of the smear campaign against Russia and the portrayal of its president as a pantomime villain is unlike anything I have known as a reporter. Robert Parry, one of America’s most distinguished investigative journalists, who revealed the Iran-Contra scandal, wrote recently, “No European government, since Adolf Hitler’s Germany, has seen fit to dispatch Nazi storm troopers to wage war on a domestic population, but the Kiev regime has and has done so knowingly. Yet across the West’s media/political spectrum, there has been a studious effort to cover up this reality even to the point of ignoring facts that have been well established… If you wonder how the world could stumble into world war three – much as it did into world war one a century ago – all you need to do is look at the madness over Ukraine that has proved impervious to facts or reason.”
In 1946, the Nuremberg Tribunal prosecutor said of the German media: “The use made by Nazi conspirators of psychological warfare is well known. Before each major aggression, with some few exceptions based on expediency, they initiated a press campaign calculated to weaken their victims and to prepare the German people psychologically for the attack… In the propaganda system of the Hitler State it was the daily press and the radio that were the most important weapons.” In the Guardian on February 2, Timothy Garton-Ash called, in effect, for a world war. “Putin must be stopped,” said the headline. “And sometimes only guns can stop guns.” He conceded that the threat of war might “nourish a Russian paranoia of encirclement”; but that was fine. He name-checked the military equipment needed for the job and advised his readers that “America has the best kit”.
In 2003, Garton-Ash, an Oxford professor, repeated the propaganda that led to the slaughter in Iraq. Saddam Hussein, he wrote, “has, as [Colin] Powell documented, stockpiled large quantities of horrifying chemical and biological weapons, and is hiding what remains of them. He is still trying to get nuclear ones.” He lauded Blair as a “Gladstonian, Christian liberal interventionist”. In 2006, he wrote, “Now we face the next big test of the West after Iraq: Iran.”
The outbursts – or as Garton-Ash prefers, his “tortured liberal ambivalence” – are not untypical of those in the transatlantic liberal elite who have struck a Faustian deal. The war criminal Blair is their lost leader. The Guardian, in which Garton-Ash’s piece appeared, published a full-page advertisement for an American Stealth bomber. On a menacing image of the Lockheed Martin monster were the words: “The F-35. GREAT For Britain”. This American “kit” will cost British taxpayers £1.3 billion, its F-model predecessors having slaughtered across the world. In tune with its advertiser, a Guardian editorial has demanded an increase in military spending.
Once again, there is serious purpose. The rulers of the world want Ukraine not only as a missile base; they want its economy. Kiev’s new Finance Minister, Nataliwe Jaresko, is a former senior US State Department official in charge of US overseas “investment”. She was hurriedly given Ukrainian citizenship. They want Ukraine for its abundant gas; Vice President Joe Biden’s son is on the board of Ukraine’s biggest oil, gas and fracking company. The manufacturers of GM seeds, companies such as the infamous Monsanto, want Ukraine’s rich farming soil.
Above all, they want Ukraine’s mighty neighbour, Russia. They want to Balkanise or dismember Russia and exploit the greatest source of natural gas on earth. As the Arctic ice melts, they want control of the Arctic Ocean and its energy riches, and Russia’s long Arctic land border. Their man in Moscow used to be Boris Yeltsin, a drunk, who handed his country’s economy to the West. His successor, Putin, has re-established Russia as a sovereign nation; that is his crime.
The responsibility of the rest of us is clear. It is to identify and expose the reckless lies of warmongers and never to collude with them. It is to re-awaken the great popular movements that brought a fragile civilisation to modern imperial states. Most important, it is to prevent the conquest of ourselves: our minds, our humanity, our self respect. If we remain silent, victory over us is assured, and a holocaust beckons.

How Did Syria Get Here?

David Swanson

Wars may be how Americans learn geography, but do they always learn the history of how the geography was shaped by wars? I've just read Syria: A History of the Last Hundred Years by John McHugo. It's very heavy on the wars, which is always a problem with how we tell history, since it convinces people that war is normal. But it also makes clear that war wasn't always normal in Syria.
Syria was shaped by and remains to this day outraged by the 1916 Sykes-Picot agreement (in which Britain and France divided up things that didn't belong to either of them), the 1917 Balfour Declaration (in which Britain promised Zionists land it didn't own known as Palestine or Southern Syria), and the 1920 San Remo Conference at which Britain, France, Italy, and Japan used rather arbitrary lines to create the French Mandate of Syria and Lebanon, the British Mandate of Palestine (including Jordan), and the British Mandate of Iraq.
Between 1918 and 1920, Syria attempted to set up a constitutional monarchy; and McHugo considers that effort to be the closest Syria has come to self-determination. Of course, that was ended by the San Remo Conference at which a bunch of foreigners sat in a villa in Italy and decided that France must save Syria from the Syrians.
So 1920 to 1946 was a period of French misrule and oppression and brutal violence. The French strategy of divide and rule resulted in the separation of Lebanon. The French interests, as McHugo tells it, seem to have been profits and special benefits for Christians. The French legal obligation for the "mandate" was to help Syria reach the point of being able to rule itself. But, of course, the French had very little interest in letting the Syrians rule themselves, the Syrians could hardly have ruled themselves worse than the French did, and the entire pretense was without any legal controls on or supervision of the French. So, the Syrian protests appealed to the Rights of Man but were met with violence. The protests included Muslims and Christians and Jews, but the French remained to protect minorities or at least to pretend to protect them while encouraging sectarian division.
On April 8, 1925, Lord Balfour visited Damascus where 10,000 protesters greeted him shouting "Down with the Balfour agreement!" The French had to escort him out of town. In the mid 1920s the French killed 6,000 rebel fighters and destroyed the homes of 100,000 people. In the 1930s the Syrians created protests, strikes, and boycotts of French-owned businesses. In 1936 four protesters were killed, and 20,000 people attended their funeral before launching a general strike. And still the French, like the British in India and the rest of their empire, remained.
Toward the end of World War II, France proposed to "end" their occupation of Syria without ending it, something like the current U.S. occupation of Afghanistan that has "ended" while it continues. In Lebanon, the French arrested the president and prime minister but were forced to free them after strikes and demonstrations in both Lebanon and Syria. The protests in Syria grew. France shelled Damascus killing possibly 400. The British came in. But in 1946 the French and the British left Syria, a nation where the people refused to cooperate with foreign rule.
Bad times, rather than good, lay ahead. The British and the future-Israelis stole Palestine, and a flood of refugees headed for Syria and Lebanon in 1947-1949, from which they have yet to return. And the (first?) Cold War began. In 1949, with Syria the only nation not to have signed an armistice with Israel and refusing to allow a Saudi oil pipeline to cross its land, a military coup was executed in Syria with CIA involvement -- predating 1953 Iran and 1954 Guatemala.
But the United States and Syria could not form an alliance because the United States was allied with Israel and opposed to rights for Palestinians. Syria got its first Soviet weapons in 1955. And the U.S. and Britain began a long-term and ongoing project of drawing up and revising plans to attack Syria. In 1967 Israel attacked and stole the Golan Heights which it has occupied illegally ever since. In 1973 Syria and Egypt attacked Israel but failed to take back the Golan Heights. Syria's interests in negotiations for many years to come would focus on the return of Palestinians to their land and the return of the Golan Heights to Syria. U.S. interests in peace negotiations during the Cold War were not in peace and stability but in winning nations to its side against the Soviet Union. The mid-1970s civil war in Lebanon added to Syria's problems. Peace talks for Syria effectively ended with the 1996 election of Netanyahu as prime minister of Israel.
From 1970 to 2000 Syria was ruled by Hafez al-Assad, from 2000 to the present by his son Bashar al-Assad. Syria supported the U.S. in Gulf War I. But in 2003 the U.S. proposed to attack Iraq and declared that all nations must be "with us or against us?" Syria could not declare itself "with the United States" while the suffering of Palestinians was on TV every night in Syria and the United States was not with Syria. In fact, the Pentagon in 2001 had Syria on a list of seven countries it planned to "take out."
The chaos, violence, destitution, sectarian division, rage, and weaponry that flooded the region with the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003 impacted Syria and of course led to the creation of groups like ISIS. The Arab Spring in Syria turned violent. Sectarian rivalries, the growing demand for water and resources, the arms and fighters supplied by regional and global rivalries brought Syria into a living hell. Over 200,000 have died, over 3 million have left the country, six and a half million are internally displaced, 4.6 million are living where fighting is ongoing. If this were a natural disaster, a focus on humanitarian aid would gain some interest, and at the very least the U.S. government would not be focused on adding more wind or waves. But this is not a natural disaster. It is, among other things, a proxy war in a region heavily armed by the United States, with Russia on the side of the Syrian government.
In 2013 public pressure helped prevent a massive U.S. bombing campaign on Syria, but the weapons and trainers kept flowing and no real alternative was pursued. In 2013 Israel gave a company a license to explore for gas and oil on the Golan Heights. By 2014 Western "experts" were talking about the war needing to "run its course," while the U.S. attacked certain Syrian rebels while arming others who sometimes surrendered the weapons to those the U.S. was attacking and who were also being funded by wealthy Gulf U.S. allies and fueled by fighters created out of the infernos the United States had brought to Iraq, Libya, Pakistan, Yemen, Afghanistan, etc., and who were also being attacked by Iran which the United States also opposes. By 2015, "experts" were talking about "partitioning" Syria, which brings us full circle.
Drawing lines on a map can teach you geography. It cannot cause people to lose attachments to people and places they love and live with. Arming and attacking regions of the globe can sell weapons and candidates. It cannot bring peace or stability. Blaming ancient hatreds and religions can win applause and provide a sense of superiority. It cannot explain the mass slaughter, the division, and the devastation that are in large part imported to a region cursed with natural resources desired by and vicinity to crusaders whose new holy grail is the so-called responsibility to protect but who'd rather not mention who they actually feel responsible to and what they're actually protecting.

Greece Injured By EU

Andre Vltchek

Greece is hurting. On the streets of Athens, people look melancholy, depressed, sad.
Weather keeps changing: it is raining, suddenly close to a freezing point, then sunny again. What does not change is misery on the streets of the capital: bundles and improvised beds of homeless people, beggars waving accusative banners and slogans, abandoned buildings taken over by squatters.
Athens in 2015 reminds me of Buenos Aires in 2002, or Moscow of 1998.
In 1998, in the city of Novosibirsk, I witnessed former Soviet scientists, selling books from their personal libraries in the underpasses and at the entrances to metro. At the beginning of new millennia, thousands of Argentinean middle class families, consisting of adults and children, ended up living on the streets, thrown out, evicted from their own homes.
Greece is now also in a deep slump. Unofficially, at least 30% of the population is unemployed. Wages shrank dramatically; people who used to bring home 2.500 euro a month are now often barely surviving on 800 euro. Like ghosts, without any direction, thousands of people are sitting on public benches or moving through the city, aimlessly.
In Argentina, Russia and Greece, the crises were triggered by neoliberalism, and by market-fundamentalism. For years, both Menem and Yeltsin were busy destroying social state and Communism in their respective countries. ‘Advised’ by Western economists and political handlers, Argentina and Russia got used to treating their own people like some experimental animals in a Friedrich von Hayek economic lab. Results were awful. Economies collapsed, debts mounting, and millions of human lives were shattered.
Peter Koenig, Swiss financial expert and economist, blames the destruction of countries like Russia, Argentina and Greece, squarely on neoliberalism:
“To begin with, let’s be clear, neoliberalism is a criminal, murderous plague that knows no mercy. Neoliberalism is the root of (almost) all evil of the 21st Century. Neoliberalism is the cause for most current wars, conflicts and civil strife around the globe. Neoliberalism is the expression of abject greed for accumulation of resources by a few, for which tens of millions of people have to die. Neoliberalism and its feudal banking system, led by Wall Street and its intricate network of international finance, steals public infrastructure, public safety nets – public investments paid for by nations’ citizens – robs nations of their resources (labor, physical resources above-and underground) – by avid schemes of privatization, justified under the pretext of ‘structural reforms’ to ‘salvage’ poor but often resources-rich countries from bankruptcy.”
What ultimately saved both Argentina and Russia were their decisive changes of direction – pulling out of the ‘system’, defaulting on their colossal debts, and putting, once again, welfare of their people above the interests of banks and international capital.
In both Argentina and Russia, governments yielded to the sentiments of their people – sentiments that grew strongly anti-Western, and antagonistic to the Empire.
***
In Greece, there is anger against the West, against capitalism and the Empire, but in many ways, Greece is still part of the West.
I spoke to dozens of people in Athens. Unlike in Istanbul, where young and educated people are monitoring with passion new developments in revolutionary Latin American countries, the references of most Greeks do not go further than Germany and France.
Greece is injured by Europe, but it is shockingly Eurocentric.
I met a group of people that consists of left wing intellectuals. Its members grew up in Czechoslovakia where their families were exiled, during those years of brutal US-sponsored military dictatorship imposed on Greece. Now they are naturally supporting Greek Communists, and hoping that Greece will be able to pull out of the Eurozone, even to exit European Union.
But they feel that Greek leftists, like themselves, are isolated; that they cannot count on almost any support from abroad. In Greece, there is almost no comprehension of the new anti-Western winds blowing all over the world. When I mentioned powerful alliances that are being forged by China, Russia and Latin America, I was told that I am talking about a different universe, totally unknown in Greece.
“One of the recent conditions imposed by Troika is that Greece would not borrow money anywhere outside Europe”, explained Boutsiadis Georgios. “They would do anything imaginable to keep Greece dependent on the European Union. Their biggest fear is that Greece would begin negotiating with Russians or Chinese, or both; that it would be successfully rescued by these countries.”
***
We are driving towards a coastal town Nea Makri, and Mr. Boutsiadis Georgios is recounting injustices Greece is facing:
“People do realize what is going on, but they feel helpless. EU keeps coming up with new conditions, which are clearly serving its own interests and are certainly damaging to Greece. Now they tell us: ‘you have to sell your state companies, including those in energy and transportation sector.’ Sell it to whom? Sell it to them, to the companies in the West? Even as it is now, country is hardly producing anything, anymore…”
I ask why doesn’t Greece leave Eurozone, rapidly and voluntarily. I ask the same question, on many different occasions: in Athens and on the islands. The answer is always identical: “Many people are afraid that re-introduction of drachma would mean devaluation and collapse of people’s savings.”
Thousands of kilometers away, former World Bank economist, and now prolific critic of neoliberalism, Peter Koenig, fully supports return of the Greek currency – drachma. He continues his attack against the system, reacting to fears expressed by the Greek citizens:
“How can they still respect the troika? Still want to stay in the Euro? Devaluation (probably between 30% and 50% to be in a favorable [for Greece] negotiating position) would be much better for Greece as a whole. Granted, imports would become more expensive and less available – but that is a small sacrifice for recovery from an otherwise unrecoverable situation. And I mean it – UNRECOVERABLE – perhaps for generations to come. On the other hand, Greece would become much more competitive internationally; a drastically improved export position, attracting more tourism, earning more foreign exchange liquidity – now they have practically none – and gradually being able to turn their positive trade balance into credit liquidity to stimulate local business for local consumption – creating employment, rebuilding a social network – public health services and public education, public pensions and unemployment benefits – all gradual, of course; but it would happen; logically. That is the beauty of the principle “local production for local consumption” – Argentina is a living example.”
***
On Salamina Island, I speak to an Iraqi refugee, who is now working for European Union as an interpreter:
“People say that nothing will change. But they actually like their new, fiery Prime Minister. It all feels very indecisive here. Between them they say: ‘if someone took our money, then why do we have to suffer from those austerity measures? Some people want drachma; others don’t, thinking that euro is ‘much safer’. Many people left the country – for the US, Australia, Germany. I have friends who left, and I have many friends who lost their jobs. Those who are retired can hardly make ends meet.”
As we speak in a local cafe, people begin forming a small circle around us. Those who speak English are chipping in their thoughts. A man in his late 70’s begins speaking French, then we settle on our broken German:
“Here, we are mainly blaming German banks. And as they are squeezing us, we are recalling the WWII. Greece got never compensated for what Germany did to it. Germany destroyed our country, 70 years ago. We are drawing parallels now: People say: “let’s calculate how much we own them now, and how much they own us?”
Others recall the US support for the Greek military junta. In this case, too, damages were never calculated, and no compensation paid.
The conversation gets fiery. Wine begins to flow.
“Where are you from?” They ask.
“I was born in Russia”, I say.
“Where in Russia?”
“In St. Petersburg… In Leningrad”, I say.
“In Leningrad!” elderly lady shouts. “We like Leningrad more than St. Petersburg.” I definitely like it more, too.
But all this is just emotional. People are injured, scared, and angry. They react spontaneously. Voting a Communist Prime Minister into office is mostly their rebellion, their protest, not necessarily a sign of their ideology.
With my new friends, I try to discuss Latin America and China, but some of them reply with the stereotypical rhetoric carried of the Western mass media.
I search for glimpses of internationalism, of Communism as we know it in Cuba or Venezuela, but it is clearly not there.
***
Peter Koenig has offered several ways forward:
“Greece has various options. Tsipras-Varoufakis must know them. Perhaps they keep them hidden away until “the last ditch” moment. To begin with, they could have imposed and still can impose strict capital transfer controls, to avoid the outflow of precious capital from Greek oligarchs, capital that eventually is missing for rebuilding Greece’s economy and would need to be replaced by new debt. Although, this is basically against EU’s rule of free transfer of capital, Greece as a sovereign country, can roll back its EU vassal status, take back its sovereignty and do what every reasonable central bank would do in Greece’s situation – impose capital transfer restrictions. After all, the Euro is also – and still is – Greece’s currency.”
“The EU has no interest whatsoever in a Greek exit. In fact, they are afraid of a Grexit, not only because of a potential default on the Greek debt, but it could open a floodgate for other southern European countries in distress to follow the Greek example. That would be the end of the Euro as we know it. It might be the final blow to the dollar-euro house of cards, house of casino money.”
“Greece’s debt today stands at 175 % of her economic output. The best – and only decent and socially as well as economically viable option – is exiting the Eurozone by her own decision. Greece would be declared bankrupt. The Anglo-Saxon rating agencies would be quick in downgrading Greece financially to ‘junk’. The financial markets would shun her. No more money, but utmost pressure to repay what they can. Greece would be in the enviable position of negotiating debt repayment at HER own terms – à la Argentina in 2001.”
“Finally – or perhaps refreshingly – Greece could look east, to the Russia-China alliance. Their assistance under much more reasonable conditions is virtually assured. – Why insisting on following a defunct predatory system, when there are new promising development potentials looming on the horizon?”
***
On the seashore, in a small fishing village, with former Greek exiles, I discuss the past, particularly Lucas Papademos.
They show me old story from The Telegraph, published in 2011 and titled “Goldman Sachs rules the world”:
“The new president of the European Central Bank, Mario Draghi, Italy’s new prime minister, Mario Monti, and the new Greek prime minister Lucas Papademos all reportedly have the US investment bank as a common denominator… Papademos was involved in Greece’s transition from the drachma to the euro. One of the things that made this transition possible was, of course, a gross exaggeration of the health of Greece’s finances – aided and abetted by advisers from Goldman Sachs who showed Greece how to conceal its debts using complicated financial instruments called swaps.”
“Papademos worked for Goldman Sachs as an advisor”, I am being told. “Then he left, and became Governor of Bank of Greece. He applied for loans; burdened Greece with huge ones… in 2002 Papademos became the Vice President at the European Central Bank. His bosses were Wim Duisenberg, and then Jean-Claude Trichet! That was from 2002 to 2010. And in 2010 it was back to Greece – he served as an economic advisor to Greek Prime Minister George Papandreou. Do you see the cycle?”
“German banks landed Greece money. It was all planned…”
We are having more goat cheese, and more wine.
After a while, my friends begin asking me about BRICS. In Greece, it is an unknown territory.
China is also an unknown territory, even Russia. There is actually great sympathy towards Russia, in Greece. But it is an abstract, strictly emotional sympathy.
Like the rest of the continent, Greece is too Eurocentric and too unfamiliar with the rest of the non-Western world. Its media and its education system made it this way.
Greece is in a cage; it is a hostage. The door is actually open. But the country is scared to walk out and face the world. It still prefers to suffer from familiar tyrants, than to encounter the unknown.

When Will The Good Times (Achhe Din) Come For Women In India?

Shobha Shukla

While stone statues of the female form (Saraswati, Lakshmi, Durga/Kali) are worshipped in temples and religious rituals, a large number of those made of flesh and blood face violence on the streets and in homes, and encounter discrimination throughout their lives that begins at (or even before) birth, and continues during childhood, adolescence and adulthood.

A girl child is often treated differently from her male sibling in terms of nutrition, health care and education, especially in families with limited financial resources—with the insufficient means allocated unevenly in favour of the male offspring. Under the existing cultural and social norms, a married woman in India is no longer considered to be part of her parents’ family and has to translocate from her parental home to live with her husband's family after marriage —moving from the subjugation of her father/brother to that of her husband.
What is it to be a woman in India?
For Dr Pooja Ramakant, an endocrine surgeon, it is quite challenging to be a woman in India. 'She has to grow up fighting for rights, which are rightfully hers. A woman needs to be become very strong to realize that her life is her own and not of others who keep advising her what is right and what is not. Once a woman breaks all these stupid bonds of society then only can she start living in earnest.'
Manisha, a homemaker, is saddened by the fact that an Indian woman is expected to sacrifice her happiness to keep others happy (sab ki khushi key liye apni khushi kurban karti hain).
Pallavi, who works in the corporate sector, is ‘fed up with discrimination at the workplace— it is tough to be a woman in workplaces earmarked as men’s territory. It is terrible to be in India working with men who do not heed/value your opinion just because you are a woman. In the corporate world you tend to lose out on promotions and appreciations if you cannot join your partners for cigarette breaks and crack obscene jokes with them. If we have more female managers and a strong women’s leadership in companies things are bound to improve.’
Then again, even though, according to Smriti, ‘a woman is the heart of the family and drives society’, Ritu rues that women in India are continuously under the scanner; judged for their actions by others; and expected to prove their worth (as defined by society).
India is a signatory to the Convention for the Elimination of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW) and the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC) and was represented at the 2013 session of the Commission on the Status of Women (CSW), where governments committed to ending all forms of violence against women. Yet, despite pro-women laws that support gender equality and aim at ending discrimination, violence against women is not only increasing but also becoming more and more brutal and targeting even girls as young as 5 years (or even younger in age). As if the poor sex ratio of 940 females per 1000 males (as per 2011 census) was not enough, the National Crime Records Bureau reports that on an average 92 women are raped in India every day. There is also a large disparity in male literacy rate (82%) and female literacy rate (65%).
The World Economic Forum's 2014 Gender Gap Index has ranked India a poor 114 (13 spots below its ranking of 101 in 2013) out of 142 countries in removing gender-based disparities in the field of education; health and equal pay for equal work. Its rank is lowest among the BRICS nations and it is also one of the 20 worst performing countries on female labour force participation, estimated earned income, literacy rate and sex ratio at birth indicators.
The High Level Committee on Status of Women that presented its first copy of the Preliminary Report in February 2015, identified Violence Against Women, Declining Sex Ratio and Economic Disempowerment of Women as three key burning issues which require immediate attention and action by the Indian government.
Linked! Masculinity, gender violence and son-preference
Masculinity, Intimate Partner Violence and Son Preference in India – a study done by the International Center for Research on Women, establishes a link between masculinity, gender violence and a preference for sons, which represents the most powerful manifestation of gender inequality. The study found that the average Indian man is “convinced that masculinity is about acting tough, freely exercising his privilege to lay down the rules in personal relationships and controlling women. Men’s controlling behavior and gender inequitable attitudes strongly determine their preference for sons over daughters as well as their proclivity for violence towards an intimate partner – both of which are manifestations of gender inequality”.
52% of the women surveyed had experienced violence during their lifetime, and 60% of the male respondents had acted violently against their wife or partner. An overwhelming majority of men (76%) and women (81%) considered it very important to have at least one son in their family. Also 50% of the men and women were unaware of the Pre-Conception and Pre-Natal Diagnostic Techniques (PCPNDT) law, which prohibits prenatal sex determination for non-medical reasons.
How can we reverse these trends?
Roy votes for a thorough, transparent, respectful sex education from kindergarten through high school and junior college, in an age-sensitive way. He also calls for genuine respect for women and girls at home, in schools, in the workplace, and everywhere else, with men leading by example.
Sumita would like the government to ensure safe public transport, streets with proper lighting and surveillance cameras to make Indian roads safer for women travellers/commuters. At a societal level, she wants people to be more permissible on sex outside of marriage. ‘As age of marriage increases, people must have the opportunity to form consensual sexual relationships without fear of being judged/labelled promiscuous’.
Anushi endorses safe travelling options and fast track courts for dealing with cases involving crime against women. And as for society—“Stop degrading women in films, stop showing women as objects in advertisements, stop domestic violence of any kind and show both boys and girls from an early age in the family itself that females are to be respected. Oh there is a lot for the society to mend its ways”.
George feels it is high time we stop being lenient on rapists and eve teasers—“They should be given harsher punishments as mere fines will not help. Also it should be made mandatory for girls to learn some form of self-defense in schools. Government should also have special packages for families with the girl child. It will definitely make a difference if every man has a daughter. I have a daughter, hence whenever I hear about crimes against women I feel angry and upset and also more committed towards gender equality”.
'Make It Happen': IWD 2015
Accountability in our work and respect for humanity would go a long way in improving the status of women in India according to Dr Pooja Ramakant. The theme for International Women's Day 2015 is ‘Make It Happen' by encouraging effective action for gender equality. This year, the celebrations also highlight the Beijing Declaration and Platform for Action, a historic roadmap, signed by 189 governments 20 years ago, that sets the agenda for realizing women’s rights, and envisions a world where every woman and girl can exercise her choices, and live in societies free from violence and discrimination. Let us heed the clarion call of UN Women’s Beijing+20 campaign—‘Empowering Women, Empowering Humanity: Picture it!’
Working on changing norms of gender equality during childhood is critical. It is essential to carry out reflective learning programmes on gender equality to reach young boys early in their lives, and to bring men and women together to create spaces where traditional gender roles are confronted and challenged.
Unless we break the social construct of lauding beautiful women and macho men; unless we denormalize the ‘girls will be girls and boys will be boys’ attitude; unless we stop gifting kitchen sets and Barbie dolls to girls and cricket bats and toy guns to boys; unless, we as parents, do not give preferential treatment to the boys (even subconsciously) that makes them feel that their needs as males have preference over those of their sisters; and unless we address the neglected issue of ‘shame’ that is, more often than not, at the root of all types of violence and crime, the good times will never come.
Boys and men have to be seen not only as part of the problem but also part of the solution in reducing the perpetuation of traditional masculinity that abets violence against women. I read these beautiful lines somewhere: ‘While we raise our girls to be powerful and independent, can we also raise our sons to be kind, meek, and compassionate?’ It is high time that we start bringing up our children (sons and daughters alike) to be independent, strong, compassionate, tolerant and loving human beings.

The Capitalist Origins Of The Oppression Of African Women

Garikai Chengu

Sunday marks International Women's Day, which was founded in 1908 by the Socialist party of America in order to promote the struggle for women's equality. Unbeknown to many, for the vast majority of human history, which took place in Africa, women have been equal if not superior to men.
The world's first civilizations arose from the spiritual, economic and social efforts of African women and African women in turn went on to lead those Matriarchal societies.
Matriarchy in ancient Africa was not a mirror image of patriarchy today, as it was not based on appropriation and violence. The rituals and culture of matriarchy did not celebrate violence; rather, they had a lot to do with fecundity, exchange and redistribution.
Early man was unaware of the link between intercourse and birth, therefore it was thought that new life was created by the woman alone. This belief created the first concept of God as a caring, compassionate, generous, all loving and all powerful Mother, which is the basis of the African matriarchal ideology. 
Historian Cheikh Anta Diop illustrates how as early as 10,000 BC women in Africa pioneered organized cultivation, thereby creating the pre-conditions for surplus, wealth and trade. African women are responsible for the greatest invention for the well being of human kind, namely, food security. It is the practice of organized agriculture that made population expansion, food surpluses and the emergence civilization possible.
Pre-capitalist matriarchal civilizations in Africa included the Nigerian Zazzau, Sudanese Kandake,  Angolan Nzinga, and Ashanti of Ghana, to name but a few. The quintessential African matriarchal system was most evident and most enduring in black Ancient Egypt.  
Women in Ancient Egypt owned and had complete control over both movable and immovable property such as real estate in 3000 BC. As late as the 1960s, this right could not be claimed by women in some parts of the United States. 
A closer look at ancient Egyptian papyrus' reveals that society was strictly matrilineal and inheritance and descent was through the female line. The Egyptian woman enjoyed the same legal and economic rights as the Egyptian man, and the proof of this is reflected in Egyptian art and historical inscriptions. Egypt was an unequal society but the inequality was based much more upon differences in the social classes, rather than differences in gender.  
From ancient legal documents, we know that women were able to manage and dispose of private property, including: land, portable goods, servants, slaves, livestock, and financial instruments such as endowments and annuities. A woman could administer all her property independently and according to her free will and in several excavated cemeteries the richest tombs were those of women.
The independence and leadership roles of ancient Egyptian women are part of an African cultural pattern that began millennia ago and continued into recent times, until Europeans brought capitalism and Christianity to Africa.
In the 1860s, the colonial explorer Dr. David Livingstone wrote of meeting female chiefs in the Congo, and in most of the monarchical systems of traditional Africa there were either one or two women of the highest rank who occupied a position on a par with that of the king or complementary to it.
Professor of Ancient African History, Barbara Lesko illustrates how anthropologists who have studied African history and records of early travelers and missionaries tell us "everywhere in Africa that one scrapes the surface one finds ethno-historical data on the authority once shared by women."
Under colonial misrule, black women suffered double-edged discrimination and dis-empowerment both as women and as black people.
It is difficult for many people to accept that racial discrimination and antagonism, which is such a pervasive phenomenon in the world today, has not been a permanent historical feature of humanity. In fact, the very notion of "race" and the ideology and practice of racism is a relatively modern concept.
For instance, historians recount how the Romans and Greeks attached no particular stigma to the colour of a person's skin and there were no theories about the inferiority of darker skin. Slavery in ancient societies was not defined by color, but primarily by military fortune: conquered peoples, irrespective of their color, were enslaved.
Just before colonisation, African women were largely equal to men. The significant value of African women's productive labour in producing and processing food created and maintained their rights in domestic, political, cultural, economic, religious and social spheres, among others.Because women were central to production in these pre-class societies, systematic inequality between the sexes was nonexistent, and elder women in particular enjoyed relatively high status. 
With the creation of the capitalist colonial economy, the marginalization of women came in several ways:
Firstly, the advent of title deeds, made men the sole owners of land. Consequently, as women lost access and control of land, they became increasingly economically dependent on men. This in turn led to an intensification of domestic patriarchy, reinforced by colonial social institutions.
Secondly, as colonialism continued to entrench itself on African soil, the perceived importance of women's agricultural contribution to the household was greatly reduced, as their vital role in food production was overshadowed by the more lucrative male-dominated cash crop cultivation for the international market. Prior to colonialism, women dominated trade. Markets were not governed by pure profit values; but rather, by the basic need to exchange, redistribute and socialize. Traditional African economic systems were not capitalist in nature.
Thirdly, colonialism brought with it Christianity and a masculine fundamentalism, which is now prevalent across Africa today. The imported patriarchal religion does not allow women to play the leading roles they have in the indigenous African religion.
In Ancient African religions it is not only God who is female, but also the main guardian spirits and sacred principles. Rosalind Jeffries, a historian, documents the concept of the Supreme Mother.  In a paper entitled, “The Image of Woman in African Cave Art”, she shows how African Creation stories focused on the Primordial Mother, creating woman first, then man.
Christianity brought the monogamous nuclear family unit to Africa. Its sole purpose was to pass on private property, in the form of inheritance, from one generation of men to the next. Under capitalism, the modern family unit is founded on concealed, domestic slavery of the wife; and, the modern capitalist society is a compound made up of many individual families as its molecules. 
A glance at the dictionary will reveal that the word family, has rather telling Latin origins. Famulus literally means domestic slave; and familia, which is also the Italian word for family, signified the total number of slaves belonging to one man. Karl Marx lays it bare: "The modern family contains in germ not only slavery (servitus) but also serfdom, since from the beginning it is related to agricultural services. It contains in miniature all the contradictions which later extend throughout society and its state."
Finally, the introduction of wage labour affected women by uprooting men from villages to work in urban areas, causing profound, negative economic impacts on women. Colonial authorities routinely used native African males to impose taxes on women, thereby entrenching male dominance in the Native's psyche. After all, colonialists brought to Africa the concept of the Victorian woman: a woman who should stay in the private domain and leave "real work" to the men. Due to the Victorian concept of women held by all colonialists, African women were excluded from the new political and administrative system, whose sole purpose was to extract raw materials and labour from the colony.
Colonialism replaced the role and status of the pre-colonial, African woman with a landless and disenfranchised domestic slave.
The United Nations Development Program notes that nowadays, African women perform sixty-six percent of the world's work, produce fifty percent of the food, but earn only ten percent of the income and own only one percent of the property.
The greatest threat towards the African woman's glorious future is her ignorance of her glorious past. Armed with knowledge, Africans must now fight to restore women to a position of respect and of economic freedom that exceeds that which she enjoyed before colonialism. 

Germany's Balancing Act

William T. Hathaway

Angela Merkel, Germany's conservative chancellor, is steering a cautious course between two conflicting pressures. On the one hand she must convince the German people to pay -- with their taxes and their lives -- for NATO's Mideast wars. This is no easy task because the sufferings of two world wars have left them with an aversion to military adventures. To motivate them to battle, she and the rest of the establishment are demonizing Muslim fundamentalists as mad-dog murderers who must be stopped before they destroy us. They manipulate German guilt feelings about past atrocities by proclaiming they now have a humanitarian obligation to defeat these new Hitler-like fanatics who threaten the world.
On the other hand she doesn't want to stir up too much anti-immigrant sentiment. Four million Muslims live in Germany, five percent of the population. This high immigration is part of the ruling class's deal with their colleagues in the Muslim countries. Emigration of malcontents relieves internal pressure there, helping prevent social anger from building into revolutionary rage. The anger is an inevitable result of repressive polices that hold the working class in servitude, a necessary condition for high profits. The West also provides these regimes with equipment, finances, and training of military and police there to keep dissent in check.
Immigration provides cheap labor and more consumers here. But it also causes problems. Many malcontents have now seen both sides of the deal and are fighting to defeat it however and wherever they can. The media call this terrorism, the malcontents call it war with the only weapons they have. The Western right wing exploits their attacks in order to drum up xenophobic nationalism. The rulers distance themselves from that because it's a barrier to neoliberal globalization, but they can't sound too pro-immigration because they need right-wing votes. Merkel and other Western leaders are seeking a course through an increasingly polarized environment, trying to maintain balance in a wobbly, unstable system: capitalism.