Nikola Tesla - The Forgotten Wizard of Science - English

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PoiC9EtELGg

Nikola Tesla's scientific discoveries are a reminder that there are alternative ways of imagining and doing science. They also highlight the fact that the current fossil fuel based economy is not a result of some natural (and inevitable) development in the history of science and technology but was guided in this particular direction by materialistic greed.

Some suggest that because of Tesla's eccentric behavior and views it became easy for the likes of Thomas Edison and J. P. Morgan to defame him and sweep him under the carpet. Tesla's works remain classified and are perhaps still used in classified scientific and military projects.

Yah Bacha - By Ibn Insha - Urdu sub English

This presentation visualized in the context of Pakistan is based on a poem by Ibn Insha. I read somewhere that he wrote this poem after seeing an image of a starving child in Ethiopia in the 70s.



Violence comes in various forms - physical, symbolic, structural. This should imply that conscientious activists around the world cannot afford to focus on only one facet of injustice.

Poverty and hunger are forms of structural violence, largely resulting today from current international trade laws written by corporate greed.



Materialism is the underlying logic of the prevailing global injustice. Unfortunately, it seems that we - the non-corporate actors - are also implicated in this exploitation, with variable degrees however, knowingly or otherwise, because of self-absorbed excessive consumption, apathy, and lack of resistance against how our governments and corporations are exploiting people and resources around the world.



The above video addresses not only 'how' bad it is, but also 'why' is it that bad and what are some of the structural causes.

In the ultimate analysis, the root cause lies in materialism - a deep psychological force - that has become pervasive in our values, cultures, and institutions.

See a related post here: Miniature Earth.

American Radical - the Trials of Norman Finkelstein - English

American Radical - the Trials of Norman Finkelstein - English

Particularly interesting in this documentary was the lesser known emotional and personal side of Norman Finkelstein. The documentary covers his earlier work dissecting Joan Peters' zionist fabrication, "From Time Immemorial". It also looks at concerted propaganda and coercive tactics used by the Zionist organizations against him. More recently they led to his tenure rejection at DePaul University. Finkelstein continues to be a supporter of the two-state solution - I believe for its rhetorical and diplomatic value in the eyes of the international community. But realistically speaking this solution is no more viable. (See http://gazaawareness.blogspot.com/ for more on this line of argument.)

G-20 Protests - Police Attack Students at Univ. of Pittsburgh

Police used teargas pepper spray and rubber bullets against University of Pittsburgh students during the Pittsburgh G20 Summit. Many of the students were not part of any demonstration but bystanders curious to find a mass of armed riot police on their campus. The students were obviously not prepared for these kinds of actions... otherwise they would have come wrapped with the American flag and banners with constitutional provisions written on them. Still I doubt that they would have been covered with even a fraction of the frenzy with which the media covered the recent Iranian protests. The point is not the legitimacy of these protests and for that matter - as a comparison - the Iranian protests. Rather it is the hypocrisy of the media coverage and the selective implementation of freedom of expression by the powers that be.

On the Iranian protests check out Phil Wilayto's open letter to the anti-war movement published in the "Monthly Review" on July 8 2009:
http://www.monthlyreview.org/mrzine/wilayto080709.html

America's Secret War with Iran - Vanguard

Vanguard correspondent Mariana van Zeller travels to the Iraq-Iran border to investigate claims that the United States is supporting militant groups that are attacking Iran.

So far the Obama administration has made no meaningful change in the old American strategy of destabilizing the system in Iran through covert and overt means. Supporting the separatist militant groups in Kurdistan and Balochistan areas is one such front in which the US and Iran are face to face with each other. Turkey is also not happy with America because any support to PJAK also strengthens its sister PKK.

The Others - Native Americans, Arabs, Blacks, etc.

A related excerpt from Eqbal Ahmad's column, "Culture of Imperialism":

"Boundaries were drawn to deny our common humanity. An ideology of difference possessed the empires' intellectuals and administrators. They had a mania for classifying people and viewed each as a distinct, necessarily divisible entity. Easy intermingling of peoples was regarded as somehow unnatural. Edward Said points to how the English were astonished to find Muslims, Christians and Jews socializing as though they were not different species. So in the novel Tanered, one of Disraeli’s characters quips that 'Arabs are simply Jews on horseback, and all are orientals at heart.' The policy of divide and rule flowed easily from this sectarian outlook.

While the menace of miscegenation haunted imperial cultures and barriers of policy and social sanctions were erected to prevent it, complex mechanisms emerged to break the barriers to conquest and domination. There was the notion of mystery, as in the mysterious East, an invitation to exploration. Mysteries, after all, demand solution by enlightened, knowledgeable men. Or the idea of darkness, as in the dark continent to which one should bring light. Or the notion of empty lands which of course needed filling up. Or the veritable literature on identifiable, collective mind the Arab mind, Hindu mind, etc. that is still prevalent. All led to a set of common conclusions: they are not like us. They are different. Hence they can be treated differently, according to standards other than those that apply in civilized places. The outlook was so embedded in civilization that it traversed centuries. One finds strange bedfellows, separated in time and space. 'We must save Chile from the irresponsibility of its people', Henry Kissinger was reported to have said while proceeding to destabilize the elected government of Salvadore Allende. A century earlier Karl Marx had written: "They cannot represent themselves. They have to be represented." Third World dictators give precisely this argument to justify their tyranny. This culture is pervasive, it cuts across continents and penetrates our outlook by a variety of mediums. As I outline this talk in the flight from Islamabad to New York, Pakistan International Airlines shows Star Trek: First Contact. I snip at what looks like a high-tech, outer-space replay of an earlier voyage into an 'undiscovered' world. Commander Jean-Luc Picard plays a modern-day Cortes, leading the crew of the newly commissioned Enterprise E to war against the Borg "an insidious race", informs the PIA flier.

Those "half organic aliens" appear like Indians in the early Westerns mysteriously, ubiquitously and sometimes seductively. Violence flows freely as 'contact' is made. Fallen aliens are shot even as they beg for mercy. Captain Jean-Luc Picard and his crew commit quite a holocaust with an insouciance we are expected to appreciate only because they have vanquished an alien race mysterious, dangerous, seductive and, ultimately, vulnerable. The Borgs have no individual identity, only a collective one. Their defeat is deemed final only when their roots are destroyed, when their head which assures life's motion to the entire race is cut off. An idea redeems this "mission"; once contact has been made the world will change. Promises Captain Picard: "Poverty, disease, and war will end."

Star Trek is but a crude, popular expression of the culture of imperialism. This culture is not Western any more. Rather, it enjoys hegemony, it has become global. Note an irony: Pakistan International Airlines, which will not serve wine to passengers, happily serves up Captain Picard on its flights."

http://www.geocities.com/CollegePark/Library/9803/eqbal_ahmad/imperial.html

A critical point to note here is that Colonialism was not separate from the European project of the (so-called) Enlightenment. Colonialism was not contradictory to the liberal ideals of political rights and self-determination. The very ideals of European Enlightenment, anchored in the notions of uni-linear progress of history and civilizations, the emphasis on particular modes of thought and reason, the importance on individual rights and private property as the means of self-actualization, and the difference between the "modern" and "backward", implied that Europeans see themselves as "different," "superior," and "civilized" in comparison to other unfamiliar cultures and peoples. Both John Locke and John Stuart Mill, the champions of Liberalism, supported and rationalized the practice of colonialism through these ideals. To them it was a "progressive force" that would civilize the indigenous people (sounds very familiar, huh?!). That is the "White Man's Burden". These ideals were also incorporated into particular versions of Christianity that were brought to the Americas by the European settlers.

Professor Hamid Algar on Obama's Iran Policies - English

This lecture took place on 11 February 2009 at UC Berkeley on the occasion of the 30th anniversary of the Islamic Revolution in Iran. Hamid Algar has been a member of the University of California-Berkeley faculty since 1965. He is the biographer of Ayatollah Khomeini and ranks among world's leading historians of Islam. He teaches courses on Persian literature the history of Islam and Shiism and Sufism. He has written books and articles on each of these subjects including more than 100 articles in the Encyclopaedia Iranica.

Reconsider Columbus Day

Excerpts from Eqbal Ahmad's quite insightful article on this subject:

"The expansions which followed Christopher Columbus' s voyage to the Americas resulted in the destruction of great civilizations the Aztec, Inca, and Maya. The Indians of North America suffered a similar fate. Nearly all of God's creation including land and labour were turned into commodities in the capitalist sense of the word. People were kidnapped, bought, transported and sold. The demographic colour of continents changed with white settlers and black slaves displacing the brown natives in the Americas and the Caribbean.

A world system of unparalleled political, economic and cultural dimension, was created and continually reinforced by new technology. In the industrial age, the expansionist drive moved on to Asia and Africa most of which was colonized. At the start of the 20th century, nearly all of the world's non-Western peoples were under some form of Western domination, and remain hopelessly trapped in structures of extreme inequality which is not merely economic...

"While the menace of miscegenation haunted imperial cultures and barriers of policy and social sanctions were erected to prevent it, complex mechanisms emerged to break the barriers to conquest and domination. There was the notion of mystery, as in the mysterious East, an invitation to exploration. Mysteries, after all, demand solution by enlightened, knowledgeable men. Or the idea of darkness, as in the dark continent to which one should bring light. Or the notion of empty lands which of course needed filling up. Or the veritable literature on identifiable, collective mind the Arab mind, Hindu mind, etc. that is still prevalent. All led to a set of common conclusions: they are not like us. They are different. Hence they can be treated differently, according to standards other than those that apply in civilized places. The outlook was so embedded in civilization that it traversed centuries. One finds strange bedfellows, separated in time and space. 'We must save Chile from the irresponsibility of its people', Henry Kissinger was reported to have said while proceeding to destabilize the elected government of Salvadore Allende. A century earlier Karl Marx had written: "They cannot represent themselves. They have to be represented. " Third World dictators give precisely this argument to justify their tyranny. This culture is pervasive, it cuts across continents and penetrates our outlook by a variety of mediums. As I outline this talk in the flight from Islamabad to New York, Pakistan International Airlines shows Star Trek: First Contact. I snip at what looks like a high-tech, outer-space replay of an earlier voyage into an 'undiscovered' world. Commander Jean-Luc Picard plays a modern-day Cortes, leading the crew of the newly commissioned Enterprise E to war against the Borg "an insidious race", informs the PIA flier.

Those "half organic aliens" appear like Indians in the early Westerns mysteriously, ubiquitously and sometimes seductively. Violence flows freely as 'contact' is made. Fallen aliens are shot even as they beg for mercy. Captain Jean-Luc Picard and his crew commit quite a holocaust with an insouciance we are expected to appreciate only because they have vanquished an alien race mysterious, dangerous, seductive and, ultimately, vulnerable. The Borgs have no individual identity, only a collective one. Their defeat is deemed final only when their roots are destroyed, when their head which assures life's motion to the entire race is cut off. An idea redeems this "mission"; once contact has been made the world will change. Promises Captain Picard: "Poverty, disease, and war will end."

Star Trek is but a crude, popular expression of the culture of imperialism. This culture is not Western any more. Rather, it enjoys hegemony, it has become global. Note an irony: Pakistan International Airlines, which will not serve wine to passengers, happily serves up Captain Picard on its flights. "

Full Text: http://www.geocities.com/CollegePark/Library/9803/eqbal_ahmad/imperial.html

I should point that the use of the word "great" in the above article is probably relative, stressing that there were people and civilizations already inhabiting this place before Columbus - a lost sailor - came and "discovered" this land.

On a related note, see the following story:

Columbus Status Toppled in Venezuela, October 12, 2004
http://www.venezuelanalysis.com/news/734

Missing in Pakistan - Documentary - Urdu and English

Some thoughts from when this documentary first came out around November 2007:

A heartbreaking documentary by filmmaker and journalist Ziad Zafar on the disappeared people in Pakistan. Timely and to the point. Points to the two major factors that determine Pakistani politics - the American geo-strategic interests and the politico-economic interests of the military establishment.

Important to note that religious extremism and sectarianism in Pakistan have always been the function of these two factors. The American selfish interests in the region and the failure of political process since the establishment of Pakistan are the real causes behind religious extremism.

Busharrafs war on terror is failing. This war is itself a form of and a cause of growing terrorism in the region. Those individuals involved in militant organizations and terrorist activities should be brought to justice. But it should be done through given constitutional and criminal procedures instead of extra-judicial kidnappings and killings.

Because illegitimate and unpopular power has its own logic. It does not distinguish between one type of body from the other - one type of citizen from another - militant or otherwise - when it comes to the question of preserving itself. The history of dictatorships in Pakistan - military or democratic - provide plenty of examples where in the name of National Integrity, Development, Islamization, and more recently Curbing Islamic Extremism and War on Terror the state has suppressed dissent liberties and freedom of its citizens.

Notice the list of missing people at the end of the documentary. Recognize the backgrounds of people through their names. Are they only what the Pakistani state likes to call the Islamic Militants. Or the list also includes the Baloch, Muhajir, Pashtoon, Sunnis, Shias, Liberals, Human Rights Activists, and Journalists.