United in Hate

by Ben R. Furman
FrontPage, Feb. 26, 2009

United In Hate: The Left’s Romance With Tyranny and Terror is a book that examines the seamy underbelly of the radical Left which considers Western society and its values an anathema. Dr. Jamie Glazov (jglazov@rogers.com), the Editor of FrontPage Magazine, methodically details the causational factors that have lead modern Leftists to adhere to the death and destruction mantra of tyrannical Islamic Jihadists.

The Twin Towers are destroyed, 2973 people die in the attack and the radical Left cheers; the war in Iraq is won and the Left expels a disgusted sigh; totalitarian thugs kill innocent millions that the Left justifies as a “cleansing” required to forge a utopian society; suicidal Jihadists shred shoppers in malls with nail bombs and are excused by the Left as door-matted victims striking back at their oppressors; women are vilified, stoned, mutilated and killed by radical Muslims as Leftist feminists remain silent, save here in America where they rail mightily against a country club that’s denied membership to a female executive.

What draws Leftists moth-like toward the annihilating fires of unbridled totalitarianism, or drives them to slavishly worship at the feet of dictators that kick them to the curb when they are considered no longer useful?

Why does the Left cleave to a radical Islamic terrorism that vows to destroy all non-believers, including them?

Dr. Glazov answers these and other “head scratching” questions in a court-ready presentation of the Left’s mindset that will make forensic psychologists proud.

The Left’s hatred and rejection of Western civilization, its freedoms and values, begins with an acute sense of alienation from it, and unable to “fit in” the Left believes radical societal change, regardless of the consequences, is necessary.

After all it’s the West’s fault that the Left has no sense of purpose or direction. Although the Left vehemently argues against this premise, its words and actions prove Dr. Glazov’s case.

The ideological descendents of the communist/progressive Left that spent its capital hoping the West would lose the Cold War to the Soviet Union are today’s leftist core.

Based on their hatred for the United States, the Left has forged a symbiotic relationship with radical Islam, whose hatred for America equals theirs. Both make it clear that they consider Western civilization evil and unworthy of preservation. Violent revolution is the Left’s path to change; the Jihadists’ follow the path of war and annilation.

Some might think Dr. Glazov has taken a wrong turn in his analysis of the radical Left’s agenda and beliefs. If so, they should read the scurrilous quotes of Michael Moore extolling the virtues of the “Iraqi freedom fighters,” or Ward Churchill’s and Jeremiah Wright’s crowing after 9/11 that “America’s chickens have come home to roost.” Or, they should examine the genuflexing before the world’s tyrants by the likes of Jimmy Carter, Sean Penn and Tom Hayden. Dr. Glazov’s take on the radical Left is correct and as sharp as a tightly focused laser.

Should the book cause even one radical Leftist to re-examine his or her contorted beliefs and return from the “dark side,” Dr. Glazov’s efforts will be a resounding success. A great thought provoking read!

It may be recalled that West Bengal's Transport Minister, Subhas Chakraborty, a member of the CPI(M), had stated that the 9/11 terrorist strike in USA had made him happy.

Towards an Inclusive Society

New India Foundation organises the Fifth New India Foundation Lecture.

Professor Andre Beteille will speak on "Towards an Inclusive Society".

Date: 6th March 2009

Venue: Vidya Mandir, Moira Street, Kolkata

Time: 6 30 pm.

Capitalism's Death Wish?

by Sylvain Lapoix
Marianne, 15 February 2008

translated from French by Leslie Thatcher, t r u t h o u t

Born of the meeting of economists Gilles Dostaler and Bernard Maris, Capitalism and Death Wish (published in French by Albin Michel) synthesizes Freud and Keynes's conclusions concerning the modern economy based on accumulation, destruction ... and the pleasure they provide! A brilliant work on the profoundly human drives behind the crisis.

Who remembers that in his famous General Theory of Employment, John Maynard Keynes recommended "euthanizing rentiers"? Published in 1936 on the inferno of the economic crisis, the British economist's book found a surprising echo several years earlier in Freud's Civilization and Its Discontents: capitalism is a neurosis of a society that, from accumulation through uncontrolled risks inevitably followed by crises, takes pleasure in its own destruction. Like Nero playing the lyre while Rome burned. Like bankers leaving for luxurious vacations during the financial crisis.

Anal Stage Excrement and Capitalism's Money

Historian of ideas Gilles Dostaler and economist and editorialist Bernard Maris met in the interstices of these readings of the father of psychoanalysis and the pope of the new economy. Fruit of their combined research, Capitalism and Death Wish plunges into the roots of the mechanisms that make capitalism a system that incessantly seeks its own destruction. Invoking the Freudian concept of the death wish, the authors explain this taste for risk, for the accumulation of money culminating in a consumer society that burns through everything it touches (according to the principle of "consumerism"), in which everything is sacrificed to the "pleasure principle," at the expense of the "reality principle," contradicting the Freudian principle of rationality, "Civilization is repression."

However, as Dostaler and Maris explain, the genius of civilization is its diversion of the death wish to "productive" ends. The utility of what is produced is of no great moment, as long as it is produced in exponential quantities allowing the growth of capital in the form of money. When these mountains of gold that sleep in safes melt, bankers and the whole economy panic to reconstitute them, in the name of that "morbid desire of liquidity" Keynes depicted with a psychologist's stroke and which has in the meantime become a cliché of the economic crisis.

This urge to amass is the anal stage Freud theorized, during which the baby hopes to satisfy his mother by producing the only thing he knows how to produce: excrement. For the two scientists, this motto is not too strong: money is shit!

Can We Transcend This System?

Written with curiosity and erudition, the book explores the basis of the theories as much as it does the history that saw their birth: there one discovers Keynes, the translator of Freud, and Freud, avid for economic knowledge. Numerous references echo Freud's disciples (such as Ferenczi), including Freudian Marxists (among whom Marcuse figures) and even the Christian philosopher of civilizational violence, René Girard.

Yet the authors remain skeptical: in the face of these systemic crises, of the human and ecological damage wrought by the economy, are people capable of learning the lesson and changing course? The issue is not to restructure capitalism, they conclude. "It is to know whether we can transcend a system based on infinite accumulation and unlimited destruction of nature." On this point, Keynes glimpsed a civilization of honest people living on culture, wine, and sharing. Pessimistic Freud imagined an unending cycle of repeated destruction. After half a century of economic thought, perhaps it's time to find an answer!

Out of the darkness

by Bhaswati Chakravorty
The Telegraph, Calcutta, 17 February 2009

An unwed teenage girl in a village decides to keep her baby

Some people may consider it a good thing that of pregnant girls between the ages of 15 and 19 in West Bengal, 8.2 per cent might have spontaneous abortions, and 3.7 per cent may have stillborn children. Between the ages of 12 and 19, the rate of maternal deaths is 3.8 per thousand births. All this gets rid of unpleasant problems, and eliminates the baggage a man might be unlucky enough to acquire for a bit of fun. The record above is for the period between 1970 and 2000, but there is little to indicate that things have changed. To be an unwed teenage mother is undesirable anywhere; in West Bengal it can be nightmarish.

But, again, here the girl might be married. In 2005, 45.9 per cent of girls were married before they were 18; later studies, focused on villages or blocks, consistently found the average age of marriage of girls in rural areas to be 14 or 15. So most teenage pregnancies that come to term, however damaging to both mother and child, are presumably within wedlock. It is impossible to avoid speculation in making these inferences, because records are often sketchy or vague, teased out of a suffocating silence that envelops the subject of premarital pregnancy. What does happen when an unmarried girl has a baby?

Thirteen-year-old Ratna was reportedly sexually assaulted by her landlord’s 26-year-old son in a village not far from Calcutta. She lives there with her brother and mother, who is a domestic worker travelling to and from the city every day. Threatened by the alleged aggressor, Ratna remained silent about the violence and, later, about the fact that she was pregnant. The story came out only when her mother discovered her condition. She immediately turned to a locally influential person, a former panchayat leader, for salish, that is, public mediation, counsel and decision.

The tone of people’s responses to Ratna’s predicament was set at this first moment of ‘coming out’. The wise men of the village put their heads together to ensure that she and her unborn baby became quietly invisible: they advised her mother to withdraw the case against a cash payment from the landlord, abort the foetus and move away from the village. The two last directions were death-dealing in different ways. Ratna was too advanced in pregnancy for abortion. And moving base would mean that her mother would lose her jobs in the city. Above all, the first direction made clear that, for the village heads, keeping the existing social and sexual power structures in place was far more important than seeking justice for the life-changing violence that had been done to a poor woman’s young daughter.

The smooth disposal of the problem that they had anticipated was ruptured by the unexpected decision of the mother and daughter to fight back. The women were fortunate to have on their side an NGO that took up their cause when Ratna said she wanted to punish her alleged aggressor. Cases were filed with the police, and the landlord’s son was arrested. While the first NGO provided Ratna with support, protection and medical help, including regular check-ups at a hospital, an allied NGO took over the responsibility of conducting her case in the courts.

But apart from a caring neighbour, the entire village was up in arms. The indifference and cruelty towards women that seem to have become characteristic of village elders throughout West Bengal were indirectly reflected in the reaction of the landlord’s family. When money did not work, they offered Ratna marriage to their son. Marriage to accused or convicted violators is increasingly being seen as a happy solution in India: it saves the men from prison. That this is not only adding to the indignity of a violated woman, but also condemning her to a life of insecurity, hatred and fear is of no account. Not just the neighbours but even the police feel outraged when the victim refuses this celebratory way out. Ratna refused.

And then she had her baby. It was not clear at first whether she was mature enough to make decisions about her own future and her baby’s. Yet she would not let the baby go. She repudiated all suggestions about giving him for adoption, conceding only that he might be kept in a home or shelter where she could visit him. This was an entirely different issue from that of alleged rape, a deeply disturbing issue of rights. Another NGO stepped in to assess her state of mind. After a thorough examination, it found her, although depressed, not only mentally stable, but “motivated” about her own and the baby’s future and “determined” not to marry the alleged aggressor. Possibly without knowing it, she was saying, in effect, that the shame of the violation was not hers, but the baby was hers, and she loved him.

Ultimately, it is the lucent justness of the principles that her stand represents, together with the fact that she is still a minor, that society has to deal with. The crux is Ratna’s extreme youth; neither the law nor medicine nor right-thinking individuals and groups can approve of minor mothers. It is another matter that her pregnancy was so advanced, and the NGOs did the best they could under those circumstances.

At home with the baby, she is fighting tremendous hostility every minute of the day. Neighbours complain of her unfitness as a mother as soon as the baby cries, she is finding it increasingly difficult to buy food and milk, the landlords, whose rent her mother is still paying, have stopped their access to the local tap and pond, and she was actually beaten up by men of the landlord’s family. The police, unable to understand why she will not marry the boy, do not feel helpful. Apparent well-wishers are suggesting that mother and daughter move away for the sake of Ratna’s well-being.

In the eyes of the community, Ratna is the criminal. The little chit of a girl, educated only up to Class V, has exercised her will. After her initial silence, fear, and possibly, bewilderment as she was being carried along a stream of consequences, Ratna asserted her will — and her rights — in two fundamental areas of her wounded young life: she wanted to punish her alleged aggressor, and she wanted to keep her child as her own. Neither her age, nor her lack of education and resources was a bar to that.

What would have happened to Ratna without the NGOs that came to her help? How many girls like her are being silently destroyed by the cowardly cruelty of a community that ruthlessly suppresses justice for women behind the veneer of peaceful solutions and conventional wisdom? Even the doctor at the city hospital, where Ratna was brought in a critical state after a bad fall when close to full term, refused to deliver the baby because she was not going to deal with “filthy things”. Ratna had to be transferred to another hospital for the delivery.

When we demand education for women, are we, the educated ones, sure that as a community and a society, we are ready to accommodate the will, the intelligence, and the understanding of self and of rights that education will unleash among those who have been conveniently silent so far? We cannot even tolerate a barely educated teenager’s determination not to marry her alleged violator and keep her baby. The word ‘education’ comes from a root that means ‘to lead out of’. The urgently needed process of ensuring education for everyone must be matched with our ability to open ourselves up to fundamental changes in thinking. Else, when all the Ratnas are led out of the darkness in their thousands, where will we hide our faces?

Locked Out and Locked Up

by Henry A. Giroux, t r u t h o u t | Perspective
17 February 2009

Youth Missing in Action from Obama's Stimulus Plan

Already imperiled before the recent economic meltdown, the quality of life for many young people appears even more fragile in the United States in this time of political, economic and social crisis. A great deal has been written critically about both the conditions that enabled the free market to operate without accountability in the interests of the rich and how it has produced a theater of cruelty that has created enormous suffering for millions of hard-working, decent human beings. Yet, at the same time, there is a thunderous silence on the part of many critics and academics regarding the ongoing insecurity and injustice experienced by young people in this country, which is now being intensified as a result of the state's increasing resort to repression and punitive social policies. The current concerns about the effects of poverty, homelessness, economic injustice and galloping unemployment rates and Obama's plans to rectify them almost completely ignore the effects of these problems on young people in the United States, especially poor whites and youth of color.

Increasingly, children seem to have no standing in the public sphere as citizens and as such are denied any sense of entitlement and agency. Children have fewer rights than almost any other group, and fewer institutions protecting these rights. Consequently, their voices and needs are almost completely absent from the debates, policies and legislative practices that are constructed in terms of their needs. This is not to suggest that adults do not care about youth, but most of those concerns are framed within the realm of the private sphere of the family and can be seen most clearly in the moral panics mobilized around drugs, truancy and kids killing each other. The response to such events, tellingly, is more "get tough on crime policy," never an analysis of the systemic failure to provide safety and security for children through improved social provisions. In public life, however, children seem absent from any discourse about the future and the responsibilities this implies for adult society. Rather, children appear as objects, defined through the debasing language of advertising and consumerism. If not being represented as a symbol of fashion or hailed as a hot niche, youth are often portrayed as a problem, a danger to adult society or, even worse, irrelevant to the future.

This merging of the neoliberal state in which kids appear as commodities or a source of profits and the punishing state, which harkens back to the old days of racial apartheid in its ongoing race to incarcerate, was made quite visible in a recent shocking account of two judges in Pennsylvania who took bribes as part of a scheme to fill up privately run juvenile detention centers with as many youths as possible, regardless of how minor the infraction they committed. One victim, Hillary Transue, appeared before one of the "kickback" judges for "building a spoof MySpace page mocking the assistant principal at her high school."[1] A top student who had never been in trouble, she anticipated a stern lecture from the judge for her impropriety. Instead, he sentenced her "to three months at a juvenile detention center on a charge of harassment." It has been estimated that the two judges, Mark A. Ciavarella Jr. and Michael T. Conahan, "made more than $2.6 million in kickbacks to send teenagers to two privately run youth detention centers" and that over 5,000 juveniles have gone to jail since the "scheme started in 2003. Many of them were first-time offenders and some remain in detention." While this incident received some mainstream news coverage, most of the response focused less on the suffering endured by the young victims than on the breach of professional ethics by the two judges. None of the coverage treated the incident as either symptomatic of the war being waged against youth marginalized by class and race or as an issue that the Obama administration should give priority to in reversing. In fact, just as there was almost no public outcry over a market-driven scheme to incarcerate youth to fill the pockets of corrupt judges, there was very little public anger over the millions slashed from the stimulus bill that would have directly benefited kids by investing in schools, Head Start and other youth-oriented programs. It seems that the real failure of post-partisan politics is its willingness to sacrifice young people in the interests of winning political votes.

Rendering poor minority youth as dangerous and a threat to society no longer requires allusions to biological inferiority; the invocation of cultural difference is enough to both racialize and demonize "difference without explicitly marking it,"[2] in the post-racial Obama era. This disparaging view of young people has promulgated the rise of a punishing and (in)security industry whose discourses, technologies and practices have become visible across a wide range of spaces and institutions, extending from schools to shopping malls to the juvenile criminal justice system.[3] As the protocols of governance become indistinguishable from military operations and crime-control missions, youth are more and more losing the protections, rights, security or compassion they deserve in a viable democracy. The model of policing that now governs all kinds of social behaviors constructs a narrow range of meaning through which young people define themselves. Moreover, the rhetoric and practice of policing, surveillance and punishment have little to do with the project of social investment and a great deal to do with increasing powerful modes of regulation, pacification and control - together comprising a "youth control complex" whose prominence in American society points to a state of affairs in which democracy has lost its claim and the claiming of democracy goes unheard. Rather than dreaming of a future bright with visions of possibility, young people, especially youth marginalized by race and color, face a coming-of-age crisis marked by mass incarceration and criminalization, one that is likely to be intensified in the midst of the global financial, housing and credit crisis spawned by neoliberal capitalism.

As Alex Koroknay-Palicz argues, "Powerful national forces such as the media, politicians and the medical community perpetuate the idea of youth as an inferior class of people responsible for society's ills and deserving of harsh penalties."[4] While such negative and demeaning views have had disastrous consequences for young people, under the reign of a punishing society and the deep structural racism of the criminal justice system, the situation for a growing number of young people and youth of color is getting much worse. The suffering and deprivation experienced by millions of children in the United States in 2008 - and bound to become worse in the midst of the current economic meltdown - not only testifies to a state of emergency and a burgeoning crisis regarding the health and welfare of many children, but also bears witness to - and indeed indicts - a model of market sovereignty and a mode of punitive governance that have failed both children and the promise of a substantive democracy. The Children's Defense Fund in its 2007 annual report offers a range of statistics that provide a despairing glimpse of the current crisis facing too many children in America. What is one to make of a society marked by the following conditions:

· Almost 13 million children in America live in poverty - 5.5 million in extreme poverty.

· 4.2 million children under the age of five live in poverty.

· 35.3 percent of black children, 28.0 percent of Latino children and 10.8 percent of white, non-Latino children live in poverty.

· There are 9.4 million uninsured children in America.

· Latino children are three times as likely, and black children are 70 percent more likely, to be uninsured than white children.

· Only 11 percent of black, 15 percent of Latino and 41 percent of white eighth graders perform at grade level in math.

· Each year 800,000 children spend time in foster care.

· On any given night, 200,000 children are homeless - one out every four of the homeless population.

· Every 36 seconds a child is abused or neglected - almost 900,000 children each year.

· Black males ages 15-19 are about eight times as likely as white males to be gun homicide victims.

· Although they represent 39 percent of the US juvenile population, minority youth represent 60 percent of committed juveniles.

· A black boy born in 2001 has a 1 in 3 chance of going to prison in his lifetime; a Latino boy has a 1 in 6 chance.

· Black juveniles are about four times as likely as their white peers to be incarcerated. Black youths are almost five times as likely and Latino youths about twice as likely to be incarcerated as white youths of drug offenses.[5]

As these figures suggest, the notion that children should be treated as a crucial social resource and represent for any healthy society important ethical and political considerations about the quality of public life, the allocation of social provisions and the role of the state as a guardian of public interests appears to be lost. Under the reign of the market-driven punishing state, a racialized criminal justice system, and a "financial Katrina" that is crippling the nation, the economic, political and educational situation for a growing number of poor young people and youth of color has gone from bad to worse. As families are being forced out of their homes because of record-high mortgage foreclosures and many businesses declare bankruptcy, tax revenues are declining and effecting cutbacks in state budgets, further weakening public schools and social services. The results in human suffering are tragic and can be measured in the growing ranks of poor and homeless students, the gutting of state social services, and the sharp drop in employment opportunities for teens and young people in their twenties.[6] Within these grave economic conditions, children disappear, often into bad schools, prisons, foster care and even into their graves. Under the rule of an unchecked market-driven society, the punishing state has no vocabulary or stake in the future of poor minority youth, and increasingly in youth in general. Instead of being viewed as impoverished, minority youth are seen as lazy and shiftless; instead of recognizing that many poor minority youth are badly served by failing schools, they are labeled as uneducable and pushed out of schools; instead of providing minority youth with decent work skills and jobs, they are either sent to prison or conscripted to fight in wars abroad; instead of being given decent health care and a place to live, they are placed in foster care or pushed into the swelling ranks of the homeless. Instead of addressing the very real dangers that young people face, the punishing society treats them as suspects and disposable populations, subjecting them to disciplinary practices that close down any hope they might have for a decent future.

All of the talk about a post-racial society in light of Obama's election is meaningless as long as young people of color are disproportionally criminalized at younger and younger ages, allowed to disappear into the growing ranks of the criminal justice system and increasingly viewed as a racial threat to society rather than as a crucial social, political and economic investment. Obama's message of hope and responsibility seems empty unless he addresses the plight of poor white youth and youth of color and the growing youth-control complex. The race to incarcerate - especially youth of color - is a holdover and reminder that the legacy of apartheid is still with us and can be found in a society that now puts almost as many police in its schools as it does teachers, views the juvenile justice system as a crucial element in shaping the future of young people, and supports a crime complex that models schools for poor kids after prisons.

[1] Ian Urbina and Sean D. Hamill, "Judges Plead Guilty in Scheme to Jail Youths for Profit," New York Times (February 13, 2009), p. A1, A20.

[2] Jean Comaroff and John Comaroff, "Reflections of Youth, From the Past to the Postcolony," Frontiers of Capital: Ethnographic Reflections on The New Economy," ed. Melissa S. Fisher and Greg Downey (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006), p. 267.

[3] Garland, "The Culture of Control;" and Jonathan Simon, "Governing Through Crime: How the War on Crime Transformed American Democracy and Created a Culture of Fear" (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007). See also Phil Scranton, "Power, Conflict and Criminalisation" (New York: Routledge, 2007).

[4] Alex Koroknay-Palicz, "Scapegoating of Youth," National Youth Rights Association (December 2001). Online: www.youthrights.org/scapegoat.php.

[5] Children's Defense Fund, 2007 Annual Report (Washington, DC: Children's Defense Fund, 2008). Online: www.childrensdefense.org/site/DocServer/CDF_annual_report_07.pdf?docID=8421.

[6] See Bob Herbert, "Head for the High Road," New York Times, (September 2, 2008), p. A25; Sam Dillon, "Hard Times Hitting Students and Schools," New York Times (September 1, 2008), p. A1, A9; and Erik Eckholm, "Working Poor and Young Hit Hard in Downturn," New York Times (November 9, 2008), p. A23.

Henry A. Giroux holds the Global TV Network chair in English and Cultural Studies at McMaster University in Canada. His most recent books include: Take Back Higher Education (co-authored with Susan Searls Giroux, 2006), The University in Chains: Confronting the Military-Industrial-Academic Complex (2007) and Against the Terror of Neoliberalism: Politics Beyond the Age of Greed (2008). His newest book, Youth in a Suspect Society: Beyond the Politics of Disposability, will be published by Palgrave Mcmillan in 2009.

Enjoy the music

Meditations

10 November is an important date for me. Something happened to me on that date, in 1993. And once again, on the last 10 November something, happened to me. In the intervening 15 years, much has happened, its been a long and difficult journey. But the final destination was indeed a fine one. Enough to efface any despair, depression, dismay, sadness, doubt, confusion, inertia, apathy.

Life is too precious to be destroyed by human folly. Good, Truth, Beauty - LOVE - cannot be extinguished and can only prevail.

Love is not something relating to the external world. It exists first in the inner world. And there it is perfect. Of course, the person feeling that perfect inner love cannot be divorced from the external world. S/he lives in it, but realises the perfection within himself or herself. The inner perfection is more real and rich than anything the external world can bring. But it also offers a promise and hope about the outer world.

Notwithstanding life, circumstances, people, failures - one can still be in a state of certainty, fullness, harmony within oneself. That does not mean a kind of smug stasis, but an equilibrium, a base from which to engage with reality, doing whatever can be done. One may not say, I am happy, for that is impossible when one lives in the daily grind of life and chosen to aspire for, value and desire various public, human ends. But one can learn how not to be unhappy.

Behind anger - lies LOVE. Anger presumes love and sits upon the labour of love. There is a perpetual hunger for love, that remains unrequited. Great love and compassion for all - feeds this hunger, and leads to the humanisation of the dehumanised.

Global melt-down