Just over one year ago, around 1 million out of 1.9 million Berliners voted to expropriate corporate landlords owning 3000 apartments or more, writes Sibylle Kaczorek, affecting around 240,000 properties in the German capital.
This post was originally published on Green Left.
Earlier, Putin had warned that he would use nuclear weapons to defend Russian territory after annexing four regions of Ukraine last month
ICRC responds to Volodymyr Zelenskiy criticism, saying it being refused entry to notorious Olenivka prison
The International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) has gone public with its frustration at being refused entry to a notorious Russian prisoner of war camp after scathing criticism from Volodymyr Zelenskiy.
In his daily evening address, Ukraine’s president accused the ICRC of a lack of leadership, suggesting that officials were picking up their salaries without doing their jobs.
Continue reading…This post was originally published on Human rights | The Guardian.
This post was originally published on The Asian Age | Home.
An indifferent Australian government has looked on as legal due process for Julian Assange has been trashed. Stuart Rees reports on Nils Melzer‘s new book The Trial of Julian Assange.
This post was originally published on Green Left.
Hundreds of thousands rallied across Britain calling on the government to address the cost of living crisis. Susan Price reports.
This post was originally published on Green Left.
The wholesale, indiscriminate retention of telecommunications data continues to excite legislators and law enforcement in Europe and elsewhere, despite legal challenges, reports Binoy Kampmark.
This post was originally published on Green Left.
The sabotage of the two Nord Stream pipelines leaves Europeans certain to be much poorer and colder this winter, and was an act of international vandalism on an almost unimaginable scale. The attacks severed Russian gas supplies to Europe and caused the release of enormous quantities of methane gas, the prime offender in global warming.
This is why no one is going to take responsibility for the crime – and most likely no one will ever be found definitively culpable.
Nonetheless, the level of difficulty and sophistication in setting off blasts at three separate locations on the Nord Stream 1 and 2 pipelines overwhelmingly suggests a state actor, or actors, was behind it.
Western coverage of the attacks has been decidedly muted, given that this hostile assault on the globe’s energy infrastructure is unprecedented – overshadowing even the 9/11 attacks.
The reason why there appears to be so little enthusiasm to explore this catastrophic event in detail – beyond pointing a finger in Russia’s direction – is not difficult to deduce.
It is hard to think of a single reason why Moscow would wish to destroy its own energy pipelines, valued at $20 billion, or allow in seawater, possibly corroding them irreversibly.
The attacks deprive Russia of its main gas supply lines to Europe – and with it, vital future revenues – while leaving the field open to competitors.
Moscow loses its only significant leverage over Germany, its main buyer in Europe and at the heart of the European project, when it needs such leverage most, as it faces down concerted efforts by the United States and Europe to drive Russian soldiers out of Ukraine.
Even any possible temporary advantage Moscow might have gained by demonstrating its ruthlessness and might to Europe could have been achieved just as effectively by simply turning off the spigot to stop supplies.
Media taboo
This week, distinguished economist Jeffrey Sachs was invited on Bloomberg TV to talk about the pipeline attacks. He broke a taboo among Western elites by citing evidence suggesting that the US, rather than Russia, was the prime suspect.
Professor Jeffrey Sachs [Columbia] on Bloomberg causing chaos saying US was most likely involved in Nordstream leaks according to data & other experts
“even reporters tell me …. privately of course …” and that we are on a pretty dangerous path to a nuclear conflict pic.twitter.com/U6FsC2tdp6
— detty (@0ddette) October 3, 2022
Western media like the Associated Press have tried to foreclose such a line of thinking by calling it a “baseless conspiracy theory” and Russian “disinformation”. But, as Sachs pointed out, there are good reasons to suspect the US above Russia.
There is, for example, the threat to Russia made by US president Joe Biden back in early February, that “there will be no longer a Nord Stream 2” were Ukraine to be invaded. Questioned by a reporter about how that would be possible, Biden asserted: “I promise you, we will be able to do that.”
Biden was not speaking out of turn or off the cuff. At the same time, Victoria Nuland, a senior diplomat in the Biden administration, issued Russia much the same warning, telling reporters: “If Russia invades Ukraine, one way or another, Nord Stream 2 will not move forward.”
Victoria Nuland: “If Russia invades Ukraine, one way or another, Nord Stream 2 will not move forward”
Also this is the same Victoria Nuland who said fuck the EU, and she sure did it to you Germany.#NordStream2 #Nordstream #Nordstream1pic.twitter.com/GGMzrSbwT7
— Syrian Girl
(@Partisangirl) September 28, 2022
That is the same Nuland who was intimately involved back in 2014 in behind-the-scenes maneuvers by the US to help overthrow an elected Ukrainian government that led to the installation of one hostile to Moscow. It was that coup that triggered a combustible mix of outcomes – Kyiv’s increasing flirtation with NATO, as well as a civil war in the east between Ukrainian ultra-nationalists and ethnic Russian communities – that provided the chief rationale for President Vladimir Putin’s later invasion.
And for those still puzzled by what motive the US might have for perpetrating such an outrage, Nuland’s boss helpfully offered an answer last Friday. Secretary of State Anthony Blinken described the destruction of the Nord Stream pipelines, and the consequent environmental catastrophe, as offering “tremendous strategic opportunity for the years to come”.
Blinken set out a little too clearly the “cui bono” – “who profits?” – argument, suggesting that Biden and Nuland’s earlier remarks were not just empty, pre-invasion posturing by the White House.
Blinken celebrated the fact that Europe would be deprived of Russian gas for the foreseeable future and, with it, Putin’s leverage over Germany and other European states. Before the blasts, the danger for Washington had been that Moscow might be able to advance favorable negotiations over Ukraine rather than perpetuate a war Biden’s defense secretary, Lloyd Austin, has already stated is designed to “weaken” Russia at least as much as liberate Ukraine.
Or, as Blinken phrased it, the attacks were “a tremendous opportunity once and for all to remove the dependence on Russian energy, and thus to take away from Vladimir Putin the weaponization of energy as a means of advancing his imperial designs.”
Though Blinken did not mention it, it was also a “tremendous opportunity” to make Europe far more dependent on the US for its gas supplies, shipped by sea at much greater cost to Europe than through Russia’s pipelines. American energy firms may well be the biggest beneficiaries from the explosions.
Meddling in Ukraine
US hostility towards Russian economic ties with Europe is not new. Long before Russia’s invasion, Washington had been quite openly seeking ways to block the Nord Stream pipelines.
One of Blinken’s recent predecessors, Condoleezza Rice, expressed the Washington consensus way back in 2014 – at the same time as Nuland was recorded secretly meddling in Ukraine, discussing who should be installed as president in place of the elected Ukrainian government that was about to be ousted in a coup.
Speaking to German TV, Rice said the Russian economy was vulnerable to sanctions because 80% of its exports were energy-related. Proving how wrong-headed American foreign policy predictions often are, she asserted confidently: “People say the Europeans will run out of energy. Well, the Russians will run out of cash before the Europeans run out of energy.”
Breaking Europe’s reliance on Russian energy was, in Rice’s words, “one of the few instruments we have… Over the long term, you simply want to change the structure of energy dependence.”
She added: “You [Germany] want to depend more on the North American energy platform, the tremendous bounty of oil and gas that we’re finding in North America. You want to have pipelines that don’t go through Ukraine and Russia.”
Now, the sabotage of Nord Stream 1 and 2 has achieved a major US foreign-policy goal overnight.
It has also preempted the pressure building in Germany, through mass protests and mounting business opposition, that might have seen Berlin reverse course on European sanctions on Russia and revive gas supplies – a shift that would have undermined Washington’s goal of “weakening” Putin. Now, the protests are redundant. German politicians cannot cave in to popular demands when there is no pipeline through which they can supply their population with Russian gas.
‘Thank you, USA’
One can hardly be surprised that European leaders are publicly blaming Russia for the pipeline attacks. After all, Europe falls under the US security umbrella and Russia has been designated by Washington as Official Enemy No 1.
But almost certainly, major European capitals are drawing different conclusions in private. Like Sachs, their officials are examining the circumstantial evidence, considering the statements of self-incrimination from Biden and other officials, and weighing the “cui bono” arguments.
And like Sachs, they are most likely inferring that the prime suspect in this case is the US – or, at the very least, that Washington authorized an ally to act on its behalf. Just as no European leader would dare to publicly accuse the US of carrying out the attacks, none would dare stage such an attack without first getting the nod from Washington.
That was evidently the view of Radek Sikorski, the former foreign and defence minister of Poland, who tweeted a “Thank you, USA” with an image of the bubbling seas where one pipeline was ruptured.
Sikorski, it should be noted, is as well-connected in Washington as he is in Poland, a European state bitterly hostile to Moscow as well as its pipelines. His wife, Anne Applebaum, is a staff writer at The Atlantic magazine and an influential figure in US policy circles who has long advocated for NATO and EU expansion into Eastern Europe and Ukraine.
Sikorski hurriedly took down the tweet after it went viral.
But if Washington is the chief suspect in blowing up the pipelines, how should Europe read its relations with the US in the light of that deduction? And what does such sabotage indicate to Europe’s leaders about how Washington might perceive the stakes in Europe? The answers are not pretty.
Demand for fealty
If the US was behind the attacks, it suggests not only that Washington is taking the Ukraine war into new, more dangerous territory, ready to risk drawing Moscow into a round of tit-for-tats that could quickly escalate into a nuclear confrontation. It also suggests that ties between the US and Europe have entered a decisive new stage, too.
Or put another way, Washington would have done more than move out of the shadows, turning its proxy war in Ukraine into a more direct, hot war with Russia. It would indicate that the US is willing to turn the whole of Europe into a battlefield, and bully, betray and potentially sacrifice the continent’s population as cruelly as it has traditionally treated weak allies in the Global South.
In that regard, the pipeline ruptures are most likely interpreted by European leaders as a signal: that they should not dare to consider formulating their own independent foreign policy, or contemplate defying Washington. The attacks indicate that the US requires absolute fealty, that Europe must prostrate itself before Washington and accept whatever dictates it imposes.
That would amount to a dramatic reversal of the Marshall Plan, Washington’s ambitious funding of the rebuilding of Western Europe after the Second World War, chiefly as a way to restore the market for rapidly expanding US industries.
By contrast, this act of sabotage strangles Europe economically, driving it into recession, deepening its debt and making it a slave to US energy supplies. Effectively, the Biden administration would have moved from offering European elites juicy carrots to now wielding a very large stick at them.
Pitiless aggression
For those reasons, European leaders may be unwilling to contemplate that their ally across the Atlantic could behave in such a cruel manner against them. The implications are more than unsettling.
The conclusion European leaders would be left to draw is that the only justification for such pitiless aggression is that the US is maneuvering to avoid the collapse of its post-war global dominance, the end of its military and economic empire.
The destruction of the pipelines would have to be understood as an act of desperation: a last-ditch preemption by Washington of the loss of its hegemony as Russia, China and others find common cause to challenge the American behemoth, and a ferocious blow against Europe to hammer home the message that it must not stray from the fold.
At the same time, it would shine a different, clearer light on the events that have been unfolding in and around Ukraine in recent years:
None of these developments can be stripped out of a realistic assessment of why Russia responded by invading Ukraine.
Europeans have been persuaded that they must give unflinching moral and military support to Ukraine because it is the last rampart defending their homeland from a merciless Russian imperialism.
But the attack on the pipelines hints at a more complex story, one in which European publics need to stop fixing their gaze exclusively at Russia, and turn round to understand what has been happening behind their backs.
The post Can Europe Afford to Turn a Blind Eye to Evidence of a US Role in Pipeline Blasts? first appeared on Dissident Voice.This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.
Measures include creation of census and national DNA bank to help locate and identify remains
Five decades after the death of General Franco, and three years after the Spanish dictator’s remains were finally removed from his hulking mausoleum outside Madrid, the country’s senate has approved legislation intended to bring “justice, reparation and dignity” to the victims of the civil war and subsequent dictatorship.
On Wednesday afternoon, the upper house of Spain’s parliament passed the socialist-led government’s Democratic Memory law, with 128 votes in favour, 113 against, and 18 abstentions.
Continue reading…This post was originally published on Human rights | The Guardian.
The European far right are seeking to capitalise on the crises resulting from Russia’s war on Ukraine to mobilise support, argue Malik Miah and Barry Sheppard.
This post was originally published on Green Left.
It should now be quite clear to any reasonable person that the Biden administration is hell-bent on destroying Russia and will risk nuclear war in doing so. It has already started World War III with its use of Ukraine to light the final match. The problem is that reasonable people are in very short supply, and, as Ray McGovern recently wrote in “Brainwashed for War with Russia,” the Biden administration and their media lackeys
… will have no trouble rallying Americans for the widest war in 77 years, starting in Ukraine, and maybe spreading to China …. Most Americans are just as taken in by the media as they were 20 years ago, when they were told there were weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. They simply took it on faith. Nor did the guilty media express remorse – or a modicum of embarrassment.
Many good writers – all of whom are banned from mainstream media – have made clear why the corporate media propaganda about the US/NATO war against Russia via Ukraine is false and egregiously dangerous. The government of the U.S.A. is led by morons in the demonic grip of the “The U.S. Should Rule the World” ideology. It is nothing new.
I don’t wish to debate the facts, for that is a fool’s game created to suggest there is something to debate. For the evidence is clear, except to the public in the grip of propaganda-induced ignorance or those elites who never learned from the ancient Greek goddess Nemesis that dark Furies will destroy those who in their hubris push the limits. The Biden administration has already done that, while President Biden mutters inanities as if he were a mafia boss wandering the streets in his pajamas and slippers. The recent sabotaging of Nord Stream 2 is another example of the treacherous road we are traveling, as Diana Johnstone makes clear in her recent article, “Omerta in the Gangster War.”
For years, the U.S.- run NATO has moved military forces and bases into countries encircling Russia. This includes weapons that can very quickly be converted to nuclear use. This, as I’ve pointed out before, is tantamount to Russia doing the same in Mexico and Canada, and let’s add Cuba as well. We know what the U.S. response would be, but when President Putin and his government objected and said this is a betrayal of previous agreements, he was dismissed as if he were a child making things up.
In 2014, when the U.S. engineered a coup in Ukraine, bringing into power neo-Nazi elements, and Russia protested this coup on its western border, Washington mocked such concerns. Every time Russia has complained about such provocative moves, the U.S. has dismissed them as inconsequential.
For years the U.S. has supported the Ukrainian killing of the Russian speaking peoples of eastern Ukraine, and finally, when Ukraine had amassed forces to invade the Donbass region, the Russian government had had enough and sent troops into the region to defend this area. Thus the hypocritical West played at outrage that what they had created was finally backfiring. Russia was cast as the guilty party for invading Ukraine. And now a full-fledged U.S. war against Russia is out in the open and it will become more dangerous as it continues. Nuclear annihilation becomes a very real possibility as the Biden administration continues to push the envelope.
There will be no end to the war in Ukraine because the U.S. is intent on doing everything in its power to try to bring Russia to its knees. It is madness on its face, but then insane people are in charge. In this process, everyone is expendable, friends, foes, and anyone who stands in its way, including the U.S.’s supposed European allies whose leaders seem intent on destroying their own countries.
Perhaps ironically – but I think not, as a knowledge of history confirms – the volte-face of the American liberal class with its promotion of the new Cold War, censorship, the CIA, and FBI and the so-called progressive Democratic politicians in the U.S congress, including Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, embracing and voting for war with Russia via Ukraine, should be no great surprise. These people, and their Republican counterparts, with rare exceptions here and there, live on desolation row and flip when so ordered. But “nobody has to think too much about Desolation Row,” in Dylan’s words, because it’s the social disease we inhabit, and like fish in water, many know nothing else.
On a similar note, Ray McGovern has also recently reminded those who pay attention to him that The New York Times, as is its tradition, is promoting the U.S. war against Russia just as it did with the Vietnam War in the 1960s. Little changes is his theme, no apologies are ever offered, and the readers of the most famous American newspaper and CIA conduit are asked to swallow daily doses of propaganda that are so egregiously obvious that only children would be fooled. Sadly, the United States has become a country of children, Babes in Toyland who never realize that at the end of the plot the gun is reversed and is aimed at them. And it’s not funny.
A century ago in the years before World War I, American progressive intellectuals, as Stuart Ewen writes in PR: A Social History of Spin:
… had espoused the Enlightenment dictum that people – at least middle-class people – were essentially rational, capable of evaluating information and then making intelligent decisions. In the context of the CPI [the U.S, Committee on Public Information, a large propaganda apparatus set up in April 1917 by President Woodrow Wilson to sell the American entry into the war against Germany as necessary to ‘Make the World Safe for Democracy,’ whose members included Edward Bernays, the propagandist and so-called father of public relations] ‘public opinion’ became something to be mobilized and managed; the ‘public mind’ was now seen as an entity to be manufactured, not reasoned with.
Faith in reason was abandoned in favor of psychological manipulation of emotion and the use of unreason – the “night mind” – which became the template for future propaganda and the application of psychological techniques, a forerunner of the CIA’s MKUltra and Operation Mockingbird. As the crackdown on dissent increased with passage of the 1917 Espionage Act (under which Julian Assange is falsely charged today) and then the Sedition Act in 1918, many so-called progressives embraced the authoritarian imposition of state controls on dissent, just as they do today. An important exception was Randolph Bourne, who in 1917 castigated these turncoats in his blistering essay, “War and the Intellectuals.” “Socialists, college professors, publicists, new-republicans, [and] practitioners of literature,” he wrote, “had assumed the iniquitous task of ‘riveting the war mind on a hundred million of the world’s people.’” Today such people debate whether they should be called liberal or progressive. I say, call them warmongers of the lowest order.
I remember when I was an impressionable child and television had only a few channels. This was in the years between the Korean War and the one against Vietnam. There was a movie that was repeated on television regularly: Yankee Doodle Dandy, starring the amazing performer Jimmy Cagney as George M. Cohan, the Irish-American composer/lyricist/playwright, who, in the years before WW I was known as the man who owned Broadway and whose statue stands in Times Square in New York City.
Child that I was, I saw the film many times and was mesmerized. My emotions rose with every viewing. My heart strings vibrated to the tunes of “Over There” and “You’re a Grand Old Flag.” I marched proudly to WW I with Cagney/Cohan. This was a movie that appeared in 1942 to promote the WW II war effort by using the lies about WW I to do it. But, oh, what fun! And the stirring songs – fodder for a child. And this was before the CIA completely owned Hollywood.
Yet I grew up. I am no longer a child. I have studied and seen through the propaganda of The New York Times, CNN, the Washington Post, Fox News, The Guardian, Hollywood, etc.
Many of those I know have not. They believe in the unbelievable. They still live in what Jim Garrison called the “Doll’s House” and accept what Harold Pinter termed “a vast tapestry of lies.” Pinter said in his 2005 Nobel address what has not changed an iota since about the U.S.’s murderous foreign policy:
It never happened. Nothing ever happened. Even while it was happening it wasn’t happening. It didn’t matter. It was of no interest. The crimes of the United States have been systematic, constant, vicious, remorseless, but very few people have actually talked about them. You have to hand it to America. It has exercised a quite clinical manipulation of power worldwide while masquerading as a force for universal good. It’s a brilliant, even witty, highly successful act of hypnosis.
When I was a child, I was hypnotized by Yankee Doodle Dandy.
I’ve grown a bit. McGovern and Pinter are right; little has changed – Vietnam, WW I, Iraq, Syria, Afghanistan, Yugoslavia, Somalia, Iran, Nicaragua, El Salvador, Libya, China, etc. And, of course, Russia, always Russia, at whose heart the weapons are always aimed, fiendish Russia that must be destroyed to make the world safe for the predators that pose as lovers of democracy and international law.
When President Kennedy, deeply chastened by the Cuban Missile Crisis of October 1962, spoke about real peace and democracy at American University on June 10, 1963, he was the last American leader to recognize that international relations had to undergo a radical change, especially in the nuclear age. Demonizing other countries had to give way to dialogue and mutual respect. He said:
What kind of peace do I mean? What kind of peace do we seek? Not a Pax Americana enforced on the world by American weapons of war. Not the peace of the grave or the security of the slave. I am talking about genuine peace, the kind of peace that makes life on earth worth living, the kind that enables men and nations to grow and to hope and to build a better life for their children–not merely peace for Americans but peace for all men and women–not merely peace in our time but peace for all time.
Five months later the CIA made sure his voice was stilled. Such sentiments have been verboten ever since.
Only children still believe the America propaganda and its war machine.
This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.
This post was originally published on The Asian Age | Home.
1—Stayers and movers
In the media and politics, we hear constantly about the problem of assimilation. How will “migrants” assimilate to our culture? How do we encourage people who have moved here to adapt to our way of life? How do we encourage “refugees” to become part of the local culture?
One problem with these anxieties is that they presume there is a unified identity within certain borders. If we wonder how migrants will adapt to German culture, we presume that “German culture” is a real referent, that there is something that unifies the eighty-three million people in Germany.
But culture is the intersection of many different forms of social meaning, including religion, race, language or dialect, gender, sexuality, profession, class, life experience, trauma, sports interests, hobbies, skills, and addictions. These social codes create an overlapping network of meanings that cannot be reduced to a single “culture”. So which one should newcomers adapt to?
By presuming a single unifying culture, we also assume that something unifies everyone who moves to a particular place. The words “immigrant” and “native” or “local” help to produce this confusion, as they assign an absolute identity to movement.
But what do these words really say about people? “Immigrants” are people who move to a place where they were not before, and “emigrants” leave the place they have lived in, while the “native population” or “local citizens” stay in place. So, rather than these ideological and tainted words, we propose a much more neutral distinction: movers and stayers. Those who move are called movers, those who stay are called stayers.
In European languages other than English, this distinction also works. For example:
Spanish: instead of inmigrante and el pueblo, movedores and quedadores.
Italian: instead of immigrata/o and cittadina/o, spostatore/i and rimanetore/i
Swedish: instead of invandrare and lokalbefolkningen, flyttare and stännare.
2—Social life
The terms stayers and movers help us to understand that these are not permanent conditions of people’s identities, but things that people do, and have always done.
People have always moved, always packed up their things and tried to find a better life. In Europe, until the early twentieth century there was no such thing as immigration law or border restrictions. People moved wherever they could find work and a way to live, which was necessary to both the movers and the stayers, since the movers needed jobs and housing, and the stayers needed employees, colleagues, residents, and houses to be built.
Since then, however, we have begun to believe the fantasy that there is a pure population to protect and a completely different population arriving. Included in that fantasy are other fantasies: that the stayers have always been here and been unaffected by movement; that borders and cultural identities are permanent and unchanging; that a “local culture” is developed by the people already inside it rather than the people moving into it; that there are such things as “bad” and “good” movers and that the stayers have to discern between these two groups.
Many of the movers to Europe, moreover, are not moving away from conditions that they created. Their need to move away was created by European movers. Since the fifteenth century, Europeans have moved through colonization, extracting value from other places, and leaving them not only without the value they produce, but also dependent on the system of value-production which is called capitalism.
In one sense, the terms stayers and movers take away the different types of agency involved in moving between places. People going on holiday, people fleeing war and persecution, people seeking what they consider a better life, people taking a temporary job position, people travelling for travelling’s sake—all of them are movers in various ways.
Having a single term for all the people who move in these different ways risks simplifying the different ways that stayers have to adapt to each of these situations. Of course, backpackers and refugees are not the same kind of mover. However, having different terms for each kind of movement creates different legal frameworks for each, and once someone (and their particular form of movement) is recognized in the law, their movement becomes a condition that defines them. “Refugee” becomes the ontological ground of the person in movement.
Denise Ferreira da Silva speaks about the law as the collective agency given the specific task of reducing complexity. The law necessarily universalizes, creating a simple symbolic order in which one stimulus always equals one decision. In the history of European colonialism, for example, the social wound of enslavement is imposed on African people, and that wound becomes a symbol of enslavement: being black means being exchangeable as a commodity. The wound appears as skin colour, and by the law it is assigned the symbolic order of race. The law then responds to racial difference, repeating the scene of enslavement constantly by affirming the symbolic code of black equals slave.
Developing the thinking of Hortense Spillers and Saidiya Hartman, Ferreira da Silva maintains that what happens simultaneously, alongside this legal reduction, is the social life of those people who are reduced to simplified symbols by the law. Those people sustain ways of surviving despite the law.
It is this capacity to produce social ways of being despite the appropriation of social meaning by the law that makes the lives of movers so important to everyone, whether stayers or movers. It is also what makes legal recognition undesirable, since legal recognition only means that movers can represent themselves within the reductive framework of the law.
That is why, despite its problems and its own reductionism, we propose only two terms to encapsulate every form of movement: movers and stayers. With these terms, the law will not be able to distinguish forms of movement, and so the regulating power of the state will not be able to reduce the complexity of movement’s meaning and the survival of ways of life that it maintains.
3—Integration
In liberal politics, what is pursued is not usually assimilation but rather integration. Integration allows the private maintenance of a mover-culture, while publicly becoming part of the stayer-culture, whereas assimilation assumes a loss of mover-culture.
Integrated Muslims in Europe are those who go to the pub but drink a soft drink. Integrated refugees are those who never mention their new country’s historical, economic, and political involvement in the war they fled. To be an integrated mover is to exist on the borderline between performances of home: allowing enough remnants of a mover-culture that stayers remember they are different, but not so many remnants that stayers have to change.
One of us set up a Bangladeshi restaurant, but no one came for dinner. They changed the sign to “Indian” restaurant, and it was full. The performance of movers’ home is allowed as long as it is the expected performance prescribed by the stayers.
In this example, two problems occur simultaneously in the minds of stayers: they presume that all movers are absolutely different to the stayers, and that all movers are absolutely alike.
Firstly, the logic of integration believes in the same definition of culture as assimilation: that there are coherent unifying identities among groups of people which are exclusive to that group, distinguishing all its members from the members of another group. It presumes that a neat separation exists between Muslim and Christian cultures, and that this separation can be maintained.
Secondly, it similarly assumes that cultures are not formed necessarily through the nonexistence of the boundaries between them. The many ways of being Muslim are constructed in response and interplay with the many ways of being Christian, and vice versa.
What is misunderstood by integrationist stayers is that “home” is not the demarcation of a boundary. Home is not the walls and closures of the architecture that surrounds you. That is the definition of the house, of the nation, or archetypally in Ancient Roman law—of the city as distinct from the forest.
“Home” is quite the opposite. It is the relations that form on the boundary between “mine” and “yours”. It is the place that is always given meaning by the presence of an other. It is the site that is always given away, so given away that all it reveals is the impossibility of giving it away: there was never anything to give away, because all it ever meant was this shared moment at the boundary of possession.
My home means my four siblings sharing a tiny space and passing food to each other. My home means the smell of burning oil before the eggs are fried. My home means the tears and laughter of my nieces and nephews. My home means the slight burn of the rug as we kneel for morning prayers. My home means the friends who always know where to find me, where the spare key is hidden, where to stay when they need a place to stay.
4—Fantasies of similitude
There is a profound illusion in European societies that stayers are unified in their similitude and movers are unified in their difference. This illusion produces the discourse of assimilation, setting up a whole national infrastructure to turn movers into convincing performers of the stayers’ identity. In Sweden, a huge amount of money and effort is put into the SFI school system, which stands for Svenskundervisning för invandrare, meaning Swedish language teaching for immigrants.
“Immigrants” (“invandrare” in Swedish), including refugees, have to attend these schools full-time in order to learn Swedish. The problem, however, is that speaking the language is not equivalent to being part of the culture. Swedes are infamously reserved. At the end of one of these year-long SFI language courses, one of us was told by the Swedish teacher (who was a mover, too): “Well done, you have now learnt a language that you will never be able to practice because Swedes will never speak to you.”
It does not matter if you learn the language because the fantasy that there is a unifying Swedishness and a unifying foreignness is stronger than the performance of words. Assimilation is a scam.
Even if there was such a thing as a meaningful cultural similarity that connected all the stayers of a particular place, and a meaningful cultural difference that connected all the movers arriving there, the notion that this divide could be transcended is illusory, since the very idea of that difference is rooted in the notion of independent cultures. If cultures develop independently of each other, and what produces a strong culture is its separation from the influence of movers, then adaption within a single generation is a fantasy. The idea of assimilation is impossible even from within the logic of assimilation.
5—Education programme
What if assimilation is all a misunderstanding? What if there was never any identity to protect? What if the fault lay with the stayers who presume that there is anything to adapt to?
Fred Moten says that sympathy is normally understood as the ability to see someone else reflected in ourselves. To feel sympathy, I have to see myself in the other and the other in me. Which means that to feel sympathy I first have to separate myself from the other. I have to establish an absolute difference between us, in order to then imagine a closing of that difference in our mutual reflection.
But this presumes that there is a border to suffering, that my pain is separated from the world, and that nothing connects my sadness with everyone else’s. It presumes that my suffering is fundamentally disconnected from yours.
What we should realize instead, Moten says, is that sympathy is the sharing of a general pain. Sympathy is the understanding that there is no unifying self to protect, that I am not a singular being who can be closed off from the general feeling of the world. I am the unique performance of a particular response to general conditions. I am one example of how to bear and live with a general pain.
When we feel sympathy, the boundary that we are crossing is this: from the fantasy of our individual separation to the awareness of our sharing of a general pain.
This general pain is displayed in the movers by the fact of having moved. That movement is their sharing of a general pain. In the place they move to, the sharing of a general pain must be opened by the stayers, since, by having stayed, they have not yet shared that general pain of movement.
How do the stayers share a general pain with the movers? What we propose is the inverse of the Swedish SFI system. Instead of Svenskundervisning för invandrare (Swedish language teaching for immigrants), we propose MO.LE.S: Mover Learning for Stayers.
These MOLES will be schools where stayers can learn about movers and exchange experiences. The teachers of these schools will be movers, and the students will be stayers. However, not all movers have to teach at these schools. It is open to those who want to take on the job, which will be paid at the rate of the national living wage. No mover is obliged to take on the responsibility of teaching the stayers about movement.
What will be taught and learnt in the MOLES is not the illusion of a permanent condition. The mover-teachers will not be mover-teachers forever, and if the stayers decide to move then they stop being stayers. What will be worked on, instead, is the possibility of performance. The movers and stayers will together develop an understanding of each other’s way of making social meaning.
Through this MOLES system, many social changes will result. 1. The stayers’ way of making meaning will change, constantly developing a new kind of stayer-society. 2. The movers will become stayers as they stay in that place, working as mover-teachers until they consider themselves stayers, or until they move again. 3. The legal framework that responds differently to different kinds of movers will be unable to keep certain movers in prisons (in the UK euphemistically called “detention centres”, making it sound more like a short stay during a school break), or force certain movers to the place they moved from, or reward certain movers with tax cuts or access to properties and passports.
6—Whose work is this?
This manifesto is written as a provocation to elicit questioning of received ideas around assimilation and integration. What we do not have—what is both not yet developed and not desirable—is a set of policies that proposes precise legal action. What we propose is the destruction of the logic of policy. We propose a mode of questioning that never ends, that is always pursuing contradiction and incommensurability, not looking for universalizable laws that withdraw people’s ability to plan and form meaningful social lives by asserting sovereign authority.
In order to achieve constant questioning, we have to also question ourselves. One question we ask ourselves in response to the Anti-Assimilationist Manifesto is: whose work is it to educate the stayers? The movers have already had to move, and then, rather than getting settled and making the conditions for a changed life, they are obliged to teach stayers about the numerous practices of movers. But is it the duty of the movers to undertake this work?
7—Manifesto
As anti-assimilationists, we call for the replacement of the discourse of “immigration” with the terms movers and stayers.
As anti-assimilationists, we call for the abolition of schools and learning centres that attempt to subsume the practices of movers into the illusory culture of the stayers.
As anti-assimilationists, we call for the creation of schools for Mover Learning for Stayers, where movers teach stayers how to adapt to the many ways of making social meaning that movers bring to the places where they move.
As anti-assimilationists, we call for the end to the legal distinction between forms of movement that reduce movers to permanent conditions, calculating their punishment or reward for moving based on these ideological presumptions.
The post Anti-Assimilationist Manifesto: The Movers and the Stayers of Europe first appeared on Dissident Voice.This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.
Council of Europe report criticises lack of convictions over trafficking for labour exploitation
Ireland must step up its efforts to fight human trafficking, a group of experts at the Council of Europe has said, after a report expressing concern about the number of prosecutions and convictions relating to the issue.
The Group of Experts on Action against Trafficking in Human Beings (Greta) found the number of presumed trafficking victims in Ireland fell from 103 in 2017 to 44 in 2021.
Continue reading…This post was originally published on Human rights | The Guardian.
Anti*Capitalist Resistance editorial board member Dave Kellaway analyses the result of Italy’s election.
This post was originally published on Green Left.
Our seas are being ravaged by exploitation for corporate profit, creating a social, economic and ecological crisis that threatens the very life support system of the Earth, writes Guy Standing.
This post was originally published on Green Left.
When Russian president Vladimir Putin announced that 300,000 reservists would be called up to bolster the war effort, spontaneous protests and planned actions took place in more than 30 cities across the country, reports Dick Nichols.
This post was originally published on Green Left.
A pro-fascist government has returned to power in the Italian elections, for the first time since Benito Mussolini was deposed in 1943, reports Daniel Castelli.
This post was originally published on Green Left.
Ukraine is almost certain to slip into hyperinflation if Russia’s war continues beyond the next few months, reports Renfrey Clarke.
This post was originally published on Green Left.
Demonstrators call for greater support from west and help communicating with outside world
The EU and the US are considering further sanctions against Iran over the attempt to suppress demonstrations and strikes in universities over the death of 22-year-old Mahsa Amini in a police detention centre.
Josep Borrell, the EU foreign policy chief, condemned Iran’s disproportionate use of force and said all options would be on the table at the next meeting of EU foreign affairs ministers. The main options are helping to prevent the internet being shut by Iran, and further economic sanctions.
Continue reading…This post was originally published on Human rights | The Guardian.
Council of Europe report highlighted need to enhance equality rights for intersex children in particular
Europe’s top human rights watchdog has urged Greece to take action against the “serious forms” of discrimination and intolerance faced by the country’s LGBTIQ+ community, especially children in schools.
Equality rights for intersex people often subject to sex “normalising” surgery at a young age must also be enhanced, according to a report released on Thursday by the Council of Europe.
Continue reading…This post was originally published on Human rights | The Guardian.
Human Rights Watch says failure to enforce laws worsens health impact at centres, amid steep rise in EU and UK waste exports
Children as young as nine are working in plastic waste recycling centres in Turkey, putting them at risk of serious and lifelong health conditions, according to Human Rights Watch.
Workers including children, and people living in homes located “dangerously close” to the centres, told researchers they were suffering from respiratory problems, severe headaches and skin ailments.
Continue reading…This post was originally published on Human rights | The Guardian.
Couple sought redress from European court of human rights after libel case against detective was overturned
The parents of Madeleine McCann have lost their European court of human rights challenge to the Portuguese supreme court’s decision to throw out their libel case against a former detective who implicated them in their daughter’s disappearance.
Kate and Gerry McCann sued Gonçalo Amaral, who led the botched police search for Madeleine in 2007, over statements he made in a book, documentary and newspaper interview alleging that they were involved in Madeleine’s disappearance.
The Swedish Social Democrats lost government and the country will now be led by conservatives reliant on the right-wing, xenophobic Sweden Democrats for support, reports Kjell Östberg.
This post was originally published on Green Left.
In the face of police persecution, activists have been fighting for years to end the US military’s use of Shannon Airport, writes Vijay Prashad.
This post was originally published on Green Left.
This post was originally published on The Asian Age | Home.
NGOs want investigation into border counter-terrorism operation that allegedly ended up bombing suspected smugglers
Two international NGOs have asked French prosecutors and the UN to investigate the French state’s involvement in Egypt allegedly committing crimes against humanity in a secret military operation on the Egyptian-Libyan border.
A 2021 leak appeared to show how French officers complained they were being asked to facilitate Egyptian airstrikes, codenamed Operation Sirli, on the Egyptian-Libyan border, even though the original counter-terrorism purpose had been subverted by the Egyptian military into taking out vehicles containing nothing more than contraband. Dozens are estimated to have been killed or injured.
Continue reading…This post was originally published on Human rights | The Guardian.
Families argued detention in Syria exposed the two women and their children to inhumane treatment
The European court of human rights has condemned France over its refusal to repatriate French women who travelled to Syria with their partners to join Islamic State and are currently being held with their children at Kurdish-run prison camps.
The ruling will be studied closely by other countries who still have citizens detained in camps in north-eastern Syria, including the UK.
Continue reading…This post was originally published on Human rights | The Guardian.
This post was originally published on The Asian Age | Home.
