UPDATE: A recent article in The Boston Review, titled God, The Army & PTSD by Tara McKelvey raises a number of important questions about the increasing use of Christian religious/spiritual material at military institutions, including the pop-psych mumbo-jumbo of Rick Warren’s The Purpose Driven Life by Pastor Rick Warren, to treat soldiers suffering from PTSD and other psychiatric problems. For example, it points out that:

When a 2006 Government Accountability Office report raised questions about whether soldiers were getting the psychiatric help they needed, an assistant secretary of defense disputed the report’s findings, pointing to the fact that soldiers were being referred to chaplains. During this time contracts for veterans’ services were increasingly parceled out to leaders of faith-based organizations rather than to secular ones, even though veterans’ advocates opposed any bias toward faith-based treatment and argued that replacing empirically proven, nonsectarian programs with faith-based ones was a mistake.

As one commentator points out in the responses to this piece:

Major Hasan would have been familiar with the conditions described in this essay. As psychiatrist at the Walter Reed Army Medical Center for the last five years he would have both treated patients for PTSD and have been familiar with the preference for faith based treatments described in this article.

We hear from Major Hasan’s family that he complained about religious harassment during his tenure at Walter Reed but we do not know specifics. It is reasonable to believe that his patients suffering from PTSD might not have liked being treated by a Muslim and almost certainly heard specific opinions about Islam and Muslims from those patients. The inevitable investigation into Major Hasan’s career will reveal the dynamic of those patient interactions.

This is, again, about asking human questions about a human, criminal act so that we may know meaningful and actionable facts and truths about such heinous acts. I raised this point in the main essay (see below) some weeks ago. Searching for the psychology of ‘Muslims’, as the learned Tunku Varadarajan wants to do, or exploring the pages of a religious text, while erasing daily and ordinary social, political and lived reality of an individual is a false, and frankly, racist approach. It seems to be particularly reserved for anyone who can be labeled ‘Muslim’. That word – ‘Muslim’ has now come to take on the meaning of a special species – devoid of individuality and history and to be seen only as a mob, mass, collectivity, blob and spiritually programmed pathology.

∞

It did not take long for overtly racist explanations to be offered. Before facts come fantasy, and before truth comes tabloid opinions masquerading as insight. And it arrived not in some radical, fringe magazine but in the pages of the international magazine Forbes by one of their regular contributors. (I of course ignore the determined Islamophobia of outlets like Fox News.)

Tunku Varadarajan wrote a piece for Forbes magazine on 11th November 2009, title Going Muslim where he argued that:

“Going postal” is a piquant American phrase that describes the phenomenon of violent rage in which a worker–archetypically a postal worker–”snaps” and guns down his colleagues.

As the enormity of the actions of Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan sinks in, we must ask whether we are confronting a new phenomenon of violent rage, one we might dub–disconcertingly–”Going Muslim.” This phrase would describe the turn of events where a seemingly integrated Muslim-American–a friendly donut vendor in New York, say, or an officer in the U.S. Army at Fort Hood–discards his apparent integration into American society and elects to vindicate his religion in an act of messianic violence against his fellow Americans. This would appear to be what happened in the case of Maj. Hasan.

Mr. Varadarajan is no clown – he is in fact a a professor at NYU’s Stern Business School and a fellow at Stanford’s Hoover Institution, and an executive editor for opinions at Forbes. Clearly a man of some learning and yet able to offer us this fine insight:

This is part of a larger–and too-hot-to-touch–American problem, which is the privileging of religion, and its frequent exemption from rules of normal discourse. Muslims may be more extreme because their religion is founded on bellicose conquest, a contempt for infidels and an obligation for piety that is more extensive than in other schemes.

Moving on to ask us a crucial question of whether:

But can the American swagger persist if many Americans come genuinely to view Muslims as Fifth Columnists? The integration compact depends on a broad trust that the immigrant’s desire to be American can happily co-exist with his other forms of racial/cultural/religious identity. Once that trust doesn’t exist, America faces a problem in need of urgent resolution.

∞

One doesn’t quite know where to begin to respond to what is without a doubt an overtly racist diatribe that takes the actions of an individual and paints it as that of a collectivity. That is after all the ideal description of racism: (noun) the belief that all members of a group posses characteristics or abilities (or pathologies) specific to that group. But then again, the learned professor is not alone in this and arrives as the inheritor of centuries of orientalist thought that can never quite reconcile itself to the individuality of the people it labels as Muslims. And he is not alone in America, or elsewhere.

But the learned professor raises specific points which I would like to examine perhaps a little more closely.

He says in this very article that ‘they’ [the Muslims] are more extreme because ‘their’ religion is …founded on bellicose conquest, a contempt for infidels and an obligation for piety that is more extensive than in other schemes.

Only sheer hubris combined with willful amnesia can allow this gentleman to offer us this explanation. Hubris as he sits as a citizen of a nation that is at this very moment in violent and repressive conquest of at least two once sovereign nations, and whose army has repeatedly insisted on a sheer contempt for the infidels it has found there and encouraged its soldiers to piety the likes of which can only make the foundations of our Republic weaker. The hundreds of thousands that have died since 2001 under the guns and arrogance of an overtly Christian/Evangelical administration that also led us to become instigators of war crimes, violators of international law and perpetrators of mass murder perhaps may not agree that it is Islam that is intrinsically programmed to encourage mass violence, conquest and/or piety.

(For those with short memories, see Micklethwait/Wooldridge’s The Right Nation, or Chris Hedges’ American Fascists or Michelle Goldberg’s Kingdom Coming or any number of others books on this issue)

I don’t think I have to elaborate on our occupations in Iraq and Afghanistan, so I will move to the next point – Islam’s unique contempt for infidels and its piety. Really? Is it that unique? Lets see.

In a fabulous piece written by the relentless Jeff Sharlet for Harpers Magazine title “Jesus Killed Mohammed: The Crusade For A Christian Military”, he points out that:

When Barack Obama moved into the Oval Office in January, he inherited a military not just drained by a two-front war overseas but fighting a third battle on the home front, a subtle civil war over its own soul. On one side are the majority of military personnel, professionals who regardless of their faith or lack thereof simply want to get their jobs done; on the other is a small but powerful movement of Christian soldiers concentrated in the officer corps.

What men such as these have fomented is a quiet coup within the armed forces: not of generals encroaching on civilian rule but of religious authority displacing the military’s once staunchly secular code. Not a conspiracy but a cultural transformation, achieved gradually through promotions and prayer meetings, with personal faith replacing protocol according to the best intentions of commanders who conflate God with country. They see themselves not as subversives but as spiritual warriors—“ambassadors for Christ in uniform,” according to Officers’ Christian Fellowship; “government paid missionaries,” according to Campus Crusade’s Military Ministry.

This is perhaps one of the scariest pieces of journalism I have read, reminding us of the infiltration of Christian fundamentalist ideology infesting the armed forces and its consequences for our operations abroad. Perhaps the learned professor would do well to read his words, including:

Within the fundamentalist front in the officer corps, the best organized group is Officers’ Christian Fellowship, with 15,000 members active at 80 percent of military bases and an annual growth rate, in recent years, of 3 percent. Founded during World War II, OCF was for most of its history concerned mainly with the spiritual lives of those who sought it out, but since 9/11 it has moved in a more militant direction. According to the group’s current executive director, retired Air Force Lieutenant General Bruce L. Fister, the “global war on terror”—to which Obama has committed 17,000 new troops in Afghanistan—is “a spiritual battle of the highest magnitude.” As jihad has come to connote violence, so spiritual war has moved closer to actual conflict, “continually confronting an implacable, powerful foe who hates us and eagerly seeks to destroy us,” declares “The Source of Combat Readiness,” an OCF Scripture study prepared on the eve of the Iraq War.

As we look across to our Israeli allies, we ironically (or perhaps not) find in fact the same problem there! In a scathing piece written by Christopher Hitchens called An Army of Extremists for Slate Magazine, he pointed out that:

Recent reports of atrocities committed by Israeli soldiers in the course of the intervention in Gaza have described the incitement of conscripts and reservists by military rabbis who characterized the battle as a holy war for the expulsion of non-Jews from Jewish land. The secular Israeli academic Dany Zamir, who first brought the testimony of shocked Israeli soldiers to light, has been quoted as if the influence of such extremist clerical teachings was something new. This is not the case.

And should one have thought that this was simply a rare exception, he goes on to remind us that:

Possibly you remember Dr. Baruch Goldstein, the man who in February 1994 unslung his weapon and killed more than two dozen worshippers at the mosque in Hebron. He had been a physician in the Israeli army and had first attracted attention by saying that he would refuse to treat non-Jews on the Sabbath. …[I]n the March 22 New York Times about the preachments of the Israeli army’s latest chief rabbi, a West Bank settler named Avichai Rontzski who also holds the rank of brigadier general. He has “said that the main reason for a Jewish doctor to treat a non-Jew on the Sabbath … is to avoid exposing Diaspora Jews to hatred.” Those of us who follow these things recognize that statement as one of the leading indicators of a truly determined racist and fundamentalist. Yet it comes not this time in the garb of a homicidal lone-wolf nut bag but in the full uniform and accoutrement of a general and a high priest.

And we can even look outside of the ‘immediate’ military structure, and find piety and a religious zeal for conquest raising its ugly head. In an article written by Jeremy Scahill titled Blackwater Founder Implicated in Murder we learn that:

A former Blackwater employee and an ex-US Marine who has worked as a security operative for the company have made a series of explosive allegations in sworn statements filed on August 3 in federal court in Virginia.The two men claim that the company’s owner, Erik Prince, may have murdered or facilitated the murder of individuals who were cooperating with federal authorities investigating the company. The former employee also alleges that Prince “views himself as a Christian crusader tasked with eliminating Muslims and the Islamic faith from the globe,” and that Prince’s companies “encouraged and rewarded the destruction of Iraqi life.”

In fact, the allegations read as follows:

To that end, Mr. Prince intentionally deployed to Iraq certain men who shared his vision of Christian supremacy, knowing and wanting these men to take every available opportunity to murder Iraqis. Many of these men used call signs based on the Knights of the Templar, the warriors who fought the Crusades.

Mr. Prince operated his companies in a manner that encouraged and rewarded the destruction of Iraqi life. For example, Mr. Prince’s executives would openly speak about going over to Iraq to “lay Hajiis out on cardboard.” Going to Iraq to shoot and kill Iraqis was viewed as a sport or game. Mr. Prince’s employees openly and consistently used racist and derogatory terms for Iraqis and other Arabs, such as “ragheads” or “hajiis.”

Again, perhaps the learned professor would like to peruse this material if for no other reason than to understand that zealotry, piety, and a desire for conquest is never the exclusive purvey of any one spiritual delusion, but reflects the world views of practically all of them.

But in particular, at this moment in time and history, at this juncture of modernity, if there is a rapid, rapacious, powerful and in fact in execution spiritual movement of conquest and a drive for excessive piety, it is more so in the hands of some of the most powerful military nations in the world. And none of them can claim an Islamic collective mindset.

I will say something about the learned professor’s incredibly racist mistake in assuming that the shooter was an immigrant – as he says The integration compact depends on a broad trust that the immigrant’s desire to be American can happily co-exist with his other forms of racial/cultural/religious identity. But in fact Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan is as pure an American as they come; born, raised, educated and trained in the United States of America. He wasn’t an immigrant professor, he was an American.

And he was an American inside a deeply Christianized, racist military structure that has become comfortable speaking about and of the Arab world and Muslims in the most derogatory, demeaning and racist terms. It has become so because its wars are against a people it sees as a mass, a mob, a group, a collective – A-rabs, Muslims, ragheads, hajjis. The latter term is used openly and gleerfully in even such mainstream Hollywood films such as Stop-Loss. (I am sure there are more, but Hollywood is not something I watch with interest or regularity.)

The army has has become so because it is the war that it is fighting and it is here that we refuse to ask the hard question; how much of Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan’s rage was against his fellow soldiers and the atmosphere at the base itself that allowed for a constant and unchecked language of hate and ridicule against an entire religion, people, culture and way of life? Were there, perhaps, white supremacists on the loose? Well, we will never know of course.

But I am sure that the learned professor doesn’t know either. What is dismaying is that he does not have the awareness to ask, but has instead chosen to give public vent to what can only be a deeply personal hatred against all Muslims claiming that it is only political correctness that is forcing America, and her Army, from taking the necessary, collective/racial profiling, actions that it should. He is angry that America suffers from a …privileging of religion, and its frequent exemption from rules of normal discourse.

Lets be clear, the learned professor is not complaining about America’s privileging of all religions, for after all it is not the insanity of the Christian Evangelicals that has bought him to this realization, but that the country is not collectively targeting Muslims! We have to remember that the same learned professor has been an outspoken advocate of racial profiling of Muslims in America,

But dear professor, viewing a crime as the act of an individual and not because of a pathology indigenous to an entire collectivity is less about being politically correct and more about being just and not being a racist. In fact, the determination to not reduce this to yet another all-too-easy Islam bashing exercise is a testament to America’s determination to return to the ways of the law and legality, and to move its society back to a point where it speaks not with generic hatred of an imaginary collectivity but with genuine desire to offer both justice and rights for individuals who commit crimes. It is one of the very set of values we always speak about and insist are what we are killing in places around the world for!

And it is a battle that we as American citizens have had to fight hard – to move past the infantile and retrograde desire to hate ‘all of them’ for the actions of a few, to lynch them for their color for example, and move towards the point where we can see individuals and individual responsibility and make them not only the recipients of retribution, but also the motivation for our respect for fundamental liberties and rights.

I do not know what led Maj. Hasan to do what he did. I can’t even begin to understand his motivations, and certainly not his actions. I remain dismayed to learn that he chose to justify his murders on the basis of his spiritual beliefs. Just as I have been dismayed to learn about Jewish extremists gloating about their murders on the basis of their beliefs, or Christian fanatics e.g. those in the US military I speak about earlier explaining their bloody rampages because of their ‘loving god’. Maybe he was just a mentally disturbed and ill person, as a recent NPR piece claims to have uncovered. Maybe he lost his way. I don’t know. I don’t claim to have an answer here.

My interest here is to question our learned professor. And wonder how we have arrived at a moment in time when such blatantly racist statements can make it to the pages of one of our most respected magazines, and then find hundreds who rush to defend his bigotry? Our continued insistence on seeing Muslims as a collective whole, tied at the psychological and moral level into one large blob, is quite flabbergasting and ultimately confusing.

Like a taint, a disease, a scar or a deformation, anyone, man, woman or child, even vaguely or deeply implicated by having been born, raised, educated, traveled to, interested in, curious about things Muslim has his entire identity and all its various other facets subsumed and erased by the label of being Muslim. And once that is established, the individual is safely dropped back into a mob, where only mob acts that are predictable and programmatic based on an formalized, systematized, idealized and perfectly synchronized response to instructions in text books or from the mouths of religious leaders can occur. LIke robots in a massive spiritual assembly line, anything that reeks of Islam can be expected to behave like a swarm, mindlessly following the dictates of their religious books, devoid of individuality, individual morality, judgment, discernment and comprehension.

I am diseased.

A few weeks ago another typically obtuse and brain dead New York Times journalist lamented the said state of affairs of the country of Pakistan where apparently her pop singers were not entertaining him sufficiently with songs against the Taliban. Adam B. Ellick was confused and upset about this and pointed out, in a piece called Pakistan Rock Rails Against The West, Not The Taliban that there is..

…a surge of bubble-gum stars who have become increasingly politicized. Some are churning out ambiguous, cheery lyrics urging their young fans to act against the nation’s woes. Others simply vilify the United States.

But while Mr. Ellick is writing pointless and frankly infantile pieces about the country and her pop stars, we can be grateful that other American journalists are stepping out to in fact conduct actual journalism.

So here comes a shocking, if not altogether surprising, report by Jeremy Scahill for The Nation that reveals the extensive involvement of Blackwater Security in military and security operations inside the country. All of this with the full collaboration and support of the Pakistani Government and military of course.

Posted on The Nation website, the extensive and detailed investigation was published in a piece called Blackwater’s Secret War In Pakistan and it is explicit in the shenanigans taking place there, and the lives that are being lost there:

A former senior executive at Blackwater confirmed the military intelligence source’s claim that the company is working in Pakistan for the CIA and JSOC, the premier counterterrorism and covert operations force within the military. He said that Blackwater is also working for the Pakistani government on a subcontract with an Islamabad-based security firm that puts US Blackwater operatives on the ground with Pakistani forces in counter-terrorism operations, including house raids and border interdictions, in the North-West Frontier Province and elsewhere in Pakistan. This arrangement, the former executive said, allows the Pakistani government to utilize former US Special Operations forces who now work for Blackwater while denying an official US military presence in the country. He also confirmed that Blackwater has a facility in Karachi and has personnel deployed elsewhere in Pakistan. The former executive spoke on condition of anonymity.

Scahill makes clear the extent to which this private security and mercenary firm has made inroads into Pakistani’s government and security establishments, and the deep collaborations between the Pakistanis and Blackwater in carrying out a second series o drone attacks, independent of the predator campaigns being run by the US military. They are also involved in planning targeted assassinations, “snatch and grabs” and other sensitive actions inside and outside the country of Pakistan. Oh, and they may be posing as USAID workers!

There is an interview with Jeremy Scahill on Amy Goodman’s DemocracyNow station – America’s last bastion of independent, non-corporate, take-it-to-the-throat-of-power journalism. You can listen to Scahill here:

As the New York Times and Mr. Ellick sit inside their comfortable Islamabad villas and listen to the radio, getting upset that the stupid Pakistanis don’t seem to understand that the only way to actually ‘understand’ or ’see’ their own country is through the myopic and policy eyes of the United States, The Nation has revealed facts and goings ons that only confirm the fears and paranoia’s of the nation’s people.

It will only further convince them that it is not the Taliban that is a serious or even a real threat to Pakistan, but in fact the rapacious (hundreds are being killed each month in this drone campaign) and covert operations that will undermine and tear apart the fabric of the country just so we Americans, for just a little bit longer, do not have to confront the colossal failure of our policies and strategies in Afghanistan.

Sing away boy!!

It’s easy to see what everyone will do to remember 26/11 – the idiots in the box will run “specials” ad nauseam and people will take out rallies and candlelit processions. But what about the terror that ensued after 26/11 – the pub attacks on women by the Sri Rama Sene? The quick blood of the Marathi manoos against fellow-citizens in Maharashtra? And what shall we do with all those luminaries named in the Liberhan Report?

Seriously, don’t we have to redefine what constitutes terrorism before we figure out who is a terrorist? 26/11, our very own desi version of 9/11, offers us just that opportunity – to make no distinctions in the war against terror. To unseat the terrorists in power, and to deal terrorism in every form a body blow.

26/11 is not an anniversary to remember terror. It’s an opportunity to never allow ourselves to be shamed by it, in any form.

Game?

In a message, Shaykh Mustafa (hufudo-Allah) sheds light that Mujahideen are not behind terrorist bomb blasts in Pakistan. He mentions in his message that it is American agencies and their friends who are behind massacre of Muslims in markets, bazaars and roadside to pump military aggression against Mujahideen and manipulate public opinion.

Related video:
A voice that does not get aired on Pakistan’s secular media

How many times can a man turn his head,

And pretend that he just doesn’t see

                                                            -Bob Dylan

A spectre is haunting the Indian ruling class-the spectre of Maoism. All powers have entered into a holy alliance to exorcise this spectre: P. Chidambram and Mohan Bhagwat, Manmohan Singh and Raman Singh, Budhhadev Bhattacharya and Tarun Vijay, N. Ram and Arnab Goswami. On various platforms, both national and international, our prime minister and home minister have been telling the world how it is the ‘biggest internal

Police atrocities in Lalgarh

threat’ facing the Indian nation. Corporate backed mainstream media houses have been penning down stories telling us about the trigger happy ways of the Maoists. What is surely left out quite intentionally in these stories is the context, or the socio-economic roots of the movement or even the innumerable atrocities committed by state backed militias in different parts of the country. Hundreds of villages have been evacuated in Chattisgarh alone and the mainstream media (barring a few exceptions) never found time to document it. Women of Chattisgarh are alleging rape by Salwa Judum men, but the courts in India refuse to listen. Only recently in September in Chattisgarh, the state personnel stabbed 19 people to death, raped the women, cut off the breasts of a 70 year old woman, cut off the fingers and tongue of a 2 year old kid. And precisely when the people retaliate on these forces, these mercenaries become national heroes overnight for the government. Police atrocities in Lalgarh crossed all limits, and the Central or the State Governement never found time to even acknowledge it. And the moment people rose up in rebellion, the Central Government wasted no time in cooperating with the state government in West Bengal to crush the movement. And who was it these forces crushing-its very own citizens, in fact the most impoverished ones, fighting against deprivation, destitution and for a life of dignity. However we have been told is that this is a fight against terrorism, and surely when it comes to terrorism it is blasphemous in our country to ask for any more details, it doesn’t matter if poverty is equated with terrorism.

War against ‘Terror’

In the last few days, the Indian government has deployed 100,000 troops in parts of central India, including Chattisgarh, Orissa and Jharkhand. Forces are being withdrawn from Jammu and Kashmir and the Northeast to join battalions of CRPF commandos, the ITBP, the CoBRA and the BSF. There is also talk of bringing in the Rashtriya Rifles – a battalion created specially for counter-insurgency work – and the purchase of bomb trucks, bomb blankets, bomb baskets, and sophisticated new weaponry. The Air Force has already been deployed and a full scale air operation is in the offing. There are reports that the operation in Jharkand has already started. There are also reports that the police and paramilitary forces have tortured people in Hardali village in Girdih district and Fatehpur village in Ranchi district. Indiscriminate arrests have also taken place. In short the Indian state has declared war against its most oppressed population. It is not a mere coincidence that the same region of Central India is highly rich in minerals, which can be sold to the highest bidders once the region is evacuated in the name of fighting the Maoists. Hundred of MoU’s have already been signed. All that stands between the politicians and this wealth are the tribals.

India was the one of the first countries to extend its hand of friendship to Sri Lanka in its recent genocidal war against Tamils. It also supported the rejection of a UN intervention by the Sri Lankan government this war. Home Minister P. Chidambram (former lawyer for Enron-the corporate involved in the biggest scam in the country and member of the board of directors of Vedanta, the multinational that is devastating the Niyamgari hills in Orissa) told us this was the perfect model to be adopted in India to fight the ‘Red menace’.  The reasons now seem pretty clear. The 5^th the Fifth Schedule of the Constitution grants tribals complete rights over their traditional land and forests and prohibits private companies from mining on their land. Once the area is evacuated, like the Sri Lankan model, which by the way Salwa Judum has already been doing for the past few years in Chattisgarh, the Fifth Schedule of the Constitution will not apply, and the land can easily be handed over to the multi-nationals. And we were told only the Maoists didn’t respect the Indian constitution!

The NEP and its Consequences

Under Manmohan Singh as the finance minister in the year 1991, India opened up its markets to corporate globalization under the guise of making the economy more ‘efficient’. The consequences have been disastrous to say the least. Foreign capital, collaborating with and dominating over Indian capital, has acquired a strategic role hold over the economy. More Indians are below the poverty line than ever before. Malnutrition around the country is worse than at the time of Independence. The Arjun Sengupta report revealed that 77% of the population lives under Rs. 20 a day. The new economic policy has attacked whatever little access the poor had to forests, lands, water resources, etc.  Lakhs of farmers have committed suicide, over a lakh in the small district of Vidarbha alone.

Farmer suicides in Andhra-Around 25 farmers committed suicide within a period of 50 days around August 2009

The state is pulling out of its responsibilities even in sectors like education, health care, etc. The country’s healthcare sector is one of the most privatized ones in the world, even worse than that of the US. The problem of displacement has intensified to a great level in this era of privatization and free market. However, at the same time through the non-payment of taxes, through a variety of subsidies and transfers, and through lucrative state support, corporate fortunes have been built up. This period has also seen the rise of a burgeoning middle class, more indifferent and insensitive than ever and aesthetically, culturally, socially, politically at an all time low, making the situation even more depressing. What we are witnessing in our country, to quote Arundhati Roy is the ‘most successful secessionist struggle ever waged in independent India — the secession of the middle and upper classes from the rest of the country.’ It is not a big surprise that our films, books and news channels also no longer speak about such issues. The priorities seem to have changed. In fact most of these purveyors of public opinion are funded by the same corporates who have brought the country to the brink of a civil war.

                The apologists of the ruling class who point to the 9% growth rate as an indicator of the benefits of the 1991 ‘reforms’ should realize that the only meaningful criteria of economic progress is whether increased national incomes are available to the people. When the efforts of the working people produce wealth for a non-working minority, when the working people are deprived of their rightful share in the increased national income, what takes place is not progress but more exploitation and deterioration of the people’s living conditions. In fact, absorption into the imperialist sector does not mean that there will be no growth or development, only that it would be highly exclusionary and uneven and would mean intensified exploitation and greater misery for the vast majority. Therefore the way forward is not continued development, but a revolutionary break with the entire capitalist system. As imperialism always consists of unequal and uneven development, revolution is not only a possibility but a must.

P.Chidambram who insists upon only a military solution to the entire ‘problem’, recently came up with a wider developmental plan. According to him, once the entire Maoist presence is ‘wiped/flushed’ out, he will go ahead with his ‘developmental’ plan which, he says, will bring employment to the area. However, the fact of the matter is that the entire fight is against such a development model-one that is undertaken by multinationals, is exclusionary and displaces ten times more people than it employs. What he is offering is not the solution, but the problem itself.

 Mode of Struggle

A lot of intellectuals, activists opposed to concept of armed struggle have pointed out that such a strategy has no place in a democracy. However there is an important need to question how democratic is ‘Indian democracy’? More than 90% of all independent candidates lost the current Lok Sabha elections, only underlining the fact that it is impossible to win an election without party support (which once again is funded by certain corporates). A democracy survives on certain institutions. However in the case of Indian society, in this era of free market, all these institutions, be it the press, judiciary, administration or even the civil society have been reduced to commodities to be sold to highest bidders. The class bias of Indian judiciary has also been quite well documented. The courts remain virtually inaccessible to a vast majority of is citizens. Even when they have been approached, the poor have got an unfavorable response, while at the same time powerful corporates have got highly favorable verdicts.  To cite a recent example in a case regarding urban slum dwellers the courts have gone to the extent of passing judgments which say “rewarding an encroacher on public land with a free alternate site is like giving a reward to a pickpocket.” At the same time a recent Supreme Court judgement, allowing the Vasant Kunj Mall to resume construction though it didn’t have the requisite clearances, said that the questions of corporations indulging in malpractice does not arise! According to Supreme Court lawyer Prashant Bhushan part of the reason for this “lies in the class structure of the Indian judiciary. The higher judiciary in India comes from the elite section of the society and has become a self appointing and self perpetuating oligarchy.” The state has also ignored virtually all non-violent resistance movements in the past be it in Bhopal or the ‘Narmada Bachao’ movement. The movement launched by the PCPA in Lalgarh against police atrocities, asking police forces to apologize for molesting women, was ruthlessly crushed. Various human rights activists who have spoken out against such policies have also been time and again targeted by the state. The case of Binayak Sen is well known who spent almost 2 years in prison only because the state felt it important to silence him for sometime to go ahead with its genocidal policies. Extra-judicial killings of political workers in some of these struggles are also a known phenomenon. The West Bengal government only last month arrested political activists who had been vocal in their ciriticism of the government. As economist Paul Sweezy points out ‘Third World countries that ally with the advanced capitalist countries are characterized by military or police state of one kind or another.’ India, under the garb of being the ‘world’s largest democracy’ is a police state in large parts of the country and is fast turning more authoritarian state with every passing day. The government uses draconian laws like AFSPA, UAPA, MCOCA, Official Secrets Act, Chattisgarh Public Security Act to silence all voices of dissent and to suppress people’s movements. It is impossible for the dominant classes to maintain high rates of exploitation without such coercion. At such a moment if people decide to pick up arms just because every other option has ended in despair, it is important on our part to realize the conditions that has led to such a situation. To sit in urban citadels and discredit the entire movement as a ‘terrorist movement’ will not just be wrong but also unethical. It will not only amount to supporting the status quo but will also legitimize the violence that is entrenched in the very structure of our so called ‘democracy’.   

What we are witnessing is a failure of democracy. A democracy is known by how it treats its most vulnerable sections. If the most vulnerable sections of the country look up to the Maoists and not the Indian state for help, does it not mean that the Maoists are democratic in their outlook and worldview than the Indian state. It is important to realize that the Maoist movement has certain socio-economic roots and has highlighted certain genuine people’s issues. The current counter-insurgency strategy planned by the Indian state will only lead to death of thousands. This war is being fought in our name and against our own people. It is important to resist this and to let the Manmohan-Chidambram-Budhhadev fascist clique know that this war might satisfy the interests of their corporate lobbies, bit is certainly not in the national interest.

(This article was first published in a slightly different form in Radiance Viewsweekly dated 14 November 2009)

Umar Khalid

It has always been those few who can see through the political correctness and hypocrisy of popular attitudes who are considered the most dangerous. — Robin Davis

Many Muslim leaders across India and the world have hailed US President Barack Obama’s speech to the Muslim world as “historic” and “a major breakthrough”. This response is not just premature but also flawed.

The speech was full of rhetoric and riddled with contradictions suited to safeguard American strategic interests. He begins his speech by asserting that “the sweeping change brought by modernity and globalisation led many Muslims to view the West as hostile to the traditions of Islam”. This is quite reminiscent of the famous George Bush speech: “Why do they hate us? Because they hate our freedoms!”

No, Dear President, there are other reasons for what fuels anti-Americanism among many Arab nations and in other parts of the world. It concerns what the American State has been doing in these nations for the past 50 years (either militarily or through economic sanctions). Things like the UN sanctions in Iraq which resulted in the death of half a million Iraqi children after the Kuwait invasion by Saddam Hussain), a US-backed coup to topple the democratically elected government of Prime Minister Mossadegh in 1953 in Iran (incidently he accepts this in the latter part of the speech!), are just a few of the many instances.

He terms the American occupation of Afghanistan a “humanitarian intervention” and “a war of necessity”. Well, the war in Afghanistan is part of the imperialist drive of the US to dominate the world’s two most important sources of oil and gas, the Persian Gulf and the Caspian Basin. The American invasion of Afghanistan has resulted in the death of more than 80,000 Afghan civilians. That’s quite a large number of human casualties which, rather than challenging the extremists, has further strengthened them because they represent the only section challenging the occupation. Also, the secular sections of the Afghan society have either been bought by the empire or roped into the NGO business. Besides, wasn’t it the Reagan administration that really backed the same “stirred up mullahs” to fight the Soviets during the late 1980’s in what was termed as a holy war? As Arundhati Roy asserts, “Justifying imperialism is like justifying something as bad as child abuse or rape.”

Coming to the Iraq invasion, Obama informs us that while America seeks no basis in Iraq, Iraqi society is better off without the tyranny of  Saddam Hussain. This is once again quite similar to another famous remark made by George W. Bush that “the world is a safer place without Saddam Hussain”. Obama makes no mention of the destruction caused by the American invasion– death of 1.2 million civilians, devastation of infrastructure, and millions being brought to the brink of starvation. Ironically, when Hussain was conducting his worst atrocities, he had the full support of the US (and the CIA) both financially and politically, both overtly and covertly.

On the Palestinian issue, he justifies the creation of Israel on account of the massacre of 6 million Jews during the first few decades
of the 20th century due to the barbaric wave of anti-Semitism. But then 12 million Congolese were also killed by the Belgian occupiers and America never demanded a separate state to ensure their safety. The creation of Israel was not because America was concerned about the treatment meted out to the Jews in Europe. In fact, it had shut its doors to the Jews when they were being massacred by Hitler’s troops.

The creation of Israel was to ensure the presence of an ally in the Middle East which has 2/3rds of the world’s oil reserves. Not a single Palestinian was responsible for what happened to the Jews in Europe, but still thousands of them were evicted, massacred to make way for Jewish settlers in 1948 in the bloodbath that followed the UN mandate for the creation of Israel when illogically and unfairly 55 per cent of the Palestinian land was given away to them. Hundreds of Palestinians were either wiped out or driven away, in one of the most cruel instances of ethnic cleansing of our times. 

Israel has gone on to occupy more land through wars far exceeding the UN mandate on account of its superior military strength. International laws, previous agreements and accords have been set aside as Israel has been waging a virtual genocide against people struggling to protect their lands. And every form of resistance to this illegal grabbing of land has been termed as terrorism or anti-Semitism by the Israeli and even more so by the western media.

Two State Solution: I do not call for the destruction of Israel and withdrawal of complete land to Palestine. What is needed is a two-state solution, something Obama also mentioned in his speech. Noam Chomsky has called it the only substantive thing in the entire speech. As Chomsky observes, “Obama while asking both sides to not see the conflict from only one side or the other has quite intelligently omitted the role of the third side in the conflict — that of the US. He did not even acknowledge its role let alone indicating that it should change.”  The US government has blocked along with Israel almost every UN resolution that sought a peaceful, equitable solution to the conflict.

While asking Hamas to abandon violence in its fight against Israel, he makes no mention of Israeli violence. The massacre in Gaza last December, that left 1,300 dead — half of them women and children, a massacre in which banned chemical substances like white phosphorous which induce genetic mutations and deformities were used, UN run schools were bombed — were not mentioned by the American president. 

In fact, after this naked display of State terror by Israel, Hamas has succeeded in convincing the Palestinians and sensible people across the world that armed resistance is not a choice but the only legitimate political option.

Obama and Middle East: Obama does not seem to support the idea of Iran developing nuclear weapons unless it confers to the responsibilities under the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. But is that not what Iran has been saying all along?

Coming to the question of a nuclear arms race, Chomsky once quipped that the US along with Israel has barred all attempts to prevent a nuclear arms race. The US remains the only country to have actually used nuclear weapons against civilians when it dropped bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

Another key issue Obama mentioned was that of democracy. To quote him, “We welcome all elected, peaceful governments, provided they govern with respect for all their people.” But, as it turns out, the US has always had a key role in suppressing the democratic aspirations of  many Middle East nations. The most notorious and unpopular of rulers in these countries have always had the complete support of US, be it the monarchs of Saudi Arabia, the Shahs of Iran or the sheikhs of Kuwait . The problem is that if you allow democracy to emerge in these countries they might elect governments that the US does not like.

As Tariq Ali points out, the only regimes Americans like working with are the ones that can guarantee the flow of oil at affordable rates.

Taking this rhetoric about human rights and democracy. Further, Obama informs us that America has always been the arch
defender of human rights in every part of the world. The United States, which Obama wants us to believe is the harbinger of peace in
the world, has been at war with one country or another since the last 50 years! South American countries like Chile, Guatemala, Nicaragua, Mexico, Cuba, etc have been avenues for covert and overt operations by the CIA. Besides, there is another set of countries which have had to suffer military interventions by the US like Vietnam which caused millions of human casualties, Somalia, Korea, Indonesia, Iraq.

We should also not forget the countries that have suffered due to the IMF and World Bank policies and UN sanctions – thousands of children died in Africa due to World Bank policies. Martin Luther King once called the American government as the “greatest purveyor of violence in the world”.  Out of all of the things said by the American president this one surely has the least basis in history. 

Gobalisation and the US: Another issue he talks about is globalisation and informs us that the face of globalisation is contradictory. This is perfectly  true but rather than talking about the real contradictions of the ‘development model’ under a globalised economy he intelligently moves on to other unimportant ones. By starting the whole modernity vs tradition debate he hides the real problems of globalization — the neo-liberal policies which privilege the rich and crush the working class, the peasantry and the poor. Besides, how did globalisation stop the massive crash of world capitalism? Or was it due to globalisation itself?

However, there are certain things on which I do agree with the American president. It is when he says that America was never at
war with Islam. This is completely true. These are wars for oil, wars for American strategic interests and wars for the ultimate
supremacy of the American empire. Islam as it turns out is just one of  the many instruments used effectively and cunningly in the war. I hope Barrack “Hussain” Obama does the least by acknowledging it.

first published in http://www.hardnewsmedia.com/2009/06/3011,, http://www.radianceweekly.com/163/3920/CIRCUMCISION-OR-ATTEMPT-TO-MURDER/2009-06-21/Obama-Speech/Story-Detail/The-Empire039s-New-King.html