Queer Notes: Discrimination in Russia; Intersex in Germany; no prison for rape in Iowa; transition surgery in Iran; Lembembe murdered in Cameroon.
Africa
Chinua Achebe (1930-2013) and his legacy
May 16, 2013Achebe made a great statement of responsibility toward the future. His questions are only more significant because they resonate beyond the Africa of newly-won independence to a world struggling with the meaning of history and revolution.
Ex-Pope Benedict’s reactionary career
March 27, 2013World in View
by Gerry Emmett
Ex-Pope Benedict’s reactionary career
Pope Benedict XVI’s sudden resignation announcement on Feb. 11 took the world by surprise. It is the first time in almost 600 years that a Pope has decided to quit. He has announced that he will continue to live in the Vatican, bearing the title “Pope emeritus,” and [=>]
Jayne Cortez, poet
February 15, 2013The late Jayne Cortez was a major figure of the Black Arts Movement. She was a poet, musician and creative force unto herself. Born in Arizona, she was raised in Los Angeles’ Watts district. She married the great saxophonist Ornette Coleman in 1954.
Her work held “Free” at its center, its heart, as the great generation [=>]
France in Mali
February 11, 2013World in View
by Gerry Emmett
The long-simmering situation has exploded. French troops have begun attacking fundamentalist militias in northern Mali. It remains to be seen how effective French and African forces will be against the militias. Certainly many people want to be rid of the al-Qaeda-linked groups that have attacked women, destroyed historic Sufi Muslim [=>]
Mali on the brink
December 5, 2012The deep contradictions Mali has been experiencing are about to become even more intense. The Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) has agreed to send several thousand troops to join Malian troops in an operation to take back the northern part of Mali. The area has been primarily under fundamentalist, al-Qaeda-linked, Islamic rebel control [=>]
Queer Notes, September-October 2012
October 10, 2012by Suzanne Rose
Yaounde, Cameroon—Human rights leaders from Africa united to denounce “Gay Hate Day,” which took place on Aug. 21 in Cameroon, and the ongoing arrests of people suspected of being Gay. The Archbishop of Yaounde contributed to this homophobic backlash calling homosexuality “shameful” and “an affront to the family, enemy of women and [=>]
Solidarity with South Africa’s miners
October 2, 2012Photo by David M’Oto for News & Letters
Oakland, Calif.—On Aug. 24, 100 activists converged on Oscar Grant Plaza to express solidarity with the South African miners’ struggle in Marikana and outrage over the police slaughter of 34 striking workers at Lonmin Platinum Mine there. Signs read: “This Was Not An Aberration” and “Capitalism [=>]
Mali’s contradictions
August 4, 2012The fracturing of Mali and the demand for self-determination of the Tuareg people in the north continue (see May-June N&L), but with grave contradictions. The National Movement for the Liberation of Azawad (MNLA), the coalition that has fought for independence and a new country, Azawad, joined forces with Ansar Dine, a Tuareg-led militant Islamist group [=>]
Two Sudans in crisis
April 5, 2012World in View
Since South Sudan gained its independence in July 2011, multiple conflicts erupted between the two Sudans and within each country. Enormous human suffering resulted, with hundreds if not thousands of deaths, rapes, forced displacement and increasing hunger.
A central thread of the conflict is the struggle over oil. South Sudan has most of the [=>]
Readers’ Views, January-February 2012 (part 2)
February 19, 2012Readers’ Views (part 2)
FROM FUKUSHIMA TO NEW YORK
Shut Down Indian Point Now! is calling a press conference immediately prior to a New York State Assembly hearing to determine energy alternatives to the Indian Point plant in January. As the Fukushima, Japan, meltdown shows, nuclear power can never be made safe.
People are becoming increasingly aware [=>]
January-February 2012 issue of News & Letters now available on the web
January 29, 2012Lead
Protests began in September in Wukan, a village of 20,000 people in Guangdong province on the South China Sea, against seizure of more than 100 acres of Wukan’s common land to be sold to those with insider ties to the village Communist Party leadership. Village authorities escalated the conflict by identifying protest leaders and hauling [=>]
Climate change: Durban’s emptiness echoes Copenhagen’s disaster
December 7, 2011As yet another UN conference on climate change dissolves into meaninglessness (no surprise there), a barrage of news underscores the urgency of the problems that are being given little more than lip service. Examples:
New perils seen to even modest warming
Hotter, drier, meaner: Trends point to a planet increasingly hostile to agriculture
Carbon dioxide emissions show record [=>]
Kenya in Somalia
December 4, 2011by Gerry Emmett
Reportedly backed by French and U.S. air strikes, Kenyan troops entered south Somalia to attack positions of the Islamist al-Shabaab militia which controls much of the region. Somali Transitional Federal Government (TFG) forces and allied militias have also taken part. They aim to attack Kismayu, a coastal city controlled by al-Shabaab. Kenya [=>]
Wangari Maathai
November 30, 2011Wangari Maathai
“By planting trees, my colleagues in this grassroots movement and I planted ideas. The ideas, like the trees, grew.” —Wangari Maathai (1940-2011)
Dr. Wangari Maathai never forgot the power of ideas or individuals in grassroots movements. In her memoir, Unbowed, she wrote, “A tree…tells us that in order to aspire we [=>]
World in View: Malawi crackdown
September 20, 2011by Gerry Emmett
Protests against deteriorating economic conditions, fuel shortages and government repression were met with brutal force by authorities in Malawi on June 20-21. Police fired on large crowds in a number of cities, attacking with tear gas, and forcing protest leaders into hiding. At least 19 people were killed in two days of clashes [=>]
Somalia famine, climate and capitalism
September 18, 2011The famine in the Horn of Africa is finally getting attention, though it has been years in the making, now that shocking pictures of starving Somali children have become a regular feature on the nightly news. So far tens of thousands of people have died, half of them children under the age of five.
The suffering [=>]
New September-October 2011 issue of News & Letters now available online
September 10, 2011News & Letters, Vol. 56, No. 5
September-October 2011
Lead
Political spectacles cannot hide reality of deranged capitalism
At the end of a months-long political spectacle in Washington–manufactured over irrelevancies concerning what should have been a routine raising of the national debt limit before the Aug. 2 deadline–reality struck with a bombshell: the anemic “jobless” recovery in the U.S. [=>]
July -August 2011 Readers’ Views
September 2, 2011From the July-August 2011 issue of News & Letters:
Readers’ Views
Contents:
- AS REVOLUTION AND COUNTER-REVOLUTION TAKE WORLD STAGE
- CHINESE ART PROJECT
- HEALTHCARE IN 2011
- NEW RIGHT=OLD LEFT?
- FREEDOM RIDES, 50 YEARS AFTER
- WOMEN’S LIBERATION SPEAKS IN MANY VOICES
- BURMA AND NORTH KOREA
- FIGHTING FOR HUMAN RIGHTS
- VOICES FROM BEHIND THE BARS
AS REVOLUTION AND COUNTER-REVOLUTION TAKE WORLD STAGE
Congratulations on a fine May-June issue. Thanks especially for [=>]
South Africa: ‘No Land! No House! No Vote!’
June 7, 2011Editor’s note: Zimasa Lerumo is coordinator of Abahlali baseMjondolo-Western Cape Youth Project and involved in the “No Land! No House! No Vote!” campaign. Their campaign for South Africa’s 2011 elections declares: “No! to Capitalist Democracy. No! to ANC, DA, ID, COPE, UDM policies that lead to water cutoffs, electricity cutoffs, and forced evictions.” They will [=>]
Voices from the Inside Out: Remembering John Alan
May 18, 2011by Robert Taliaferro
John’s writings are strikingly poignant and timeless, with a prosody that is uniquely old-school. The body of his work is eloquently instructive and historically prescient.
In reading his columns we are challenged to look upon his words as more than philosophical constructs; there is a timelessness that reminds us that history–if left to its [=>]
May-June 2011 issue of News & Letters is available online
May 6, 2011News & Letters, Vol. 56, No. 3
May-June 2011
Draft for Marxist-Humanist Perspectives, 2011-2011
Revolution and counter-revolution take world stage
Revolution and counter-revolution have forced their way to the center stage of history. In Tunisia and Egypt, revolutions have opened tremendous possibilities and spread the fire of their passion all across the Arab world and from China to the [=>]
Egyptian women define the struggle
March 28, 2011For Egyptian women the oppression of the last decades was extreme. They could not report the harassment they experienced to anyone, and men face no consequences when they harass. Public spaces became very problematic for women: their very presence on the street was an opportunity for men to show their “manhood” by harassing them.
Despite a [=>]
World in View: Sudan at the crossroads of self-determination
March 8, 2011by Gerry Emmett
The final vote for southern Sudan’s independence from the north will be overwhelming. The days of referendum have been days of tears and memories along with happiness. Among the diaspora, people in line to vote echoed the words of one woman who said, “I’m casting my vote for the men and women who [=>]
Muslims protect Coptic Christians
February 23, 2011The Egyptian story of the human shield shone forth in January amid all the mayhem and murder that captured the news. Thousands of Muslims from all over Egypt stood guard as Coptic Christians worshiped during their Christmas mass or held candlelight vigils for the 21 Christians killed a week before by religious extremists. One Muslim [=>]
Condoms & corruption
February 20, 2011Woman as Reason
by Terry Moon
The Pope made quite a splash a few months ago with his comments in Peter Seewald’s book Light of the World, where he grudgingly accepted the use of condoms in extremely limited situations: “there may be a basis in the case of some individuals, as perhaps when a male prostitute uses a [=>]
Tunisia: a revolution
February 15, 2011World in View
by Gerry Emmett
Protests have exploded in Tunisia and Algeria. On Dec. 17, in the city of Sidi Bouzid in central Tunisia, 26-year-old street vendor Mohammad Bouazizi doused himself in gasoline and burned himself to death in a despairing protest at the confiscation of his unlicensed fruit and vegetable cart.
Then on Dec. 22 another [=>]
South African shack dwellers: ‘a new social movement’
February 14, 2011Editor’s note: S’bu Zikode of Abahlali baseMjondolo of Western Cape spoke recently in Oakland, Cal., on a U.S. tour about this movement within South Africa. Here are excerpts from his talk:
People are born and live in these shantytowns, at least 2.3 million of us. In 2005 Abahlali baseMjondolo, an organization representing 25,000 people, came together [=>]
Jan.-Feb. 2011 issue of News & Letters online
February 6, 2011When Egypt’s President Hosni Mubarak unleashed his plainclothes security agents and hired thugs against the freedom fighters in Tahrir Square Feb. 2, it was not only to support his shaken and discredited 30-year regime. He was serving the interests of all rulers, in the Middle East and beyond, that are terrified by the international wave [=>]
World food crisis, still
January 26, 2011The world food crisis, which was hot in 2008 and then subsided temporarily, is getting worse again. It was one of the factors in Tunisia’s revolution, along with recent revolts in Algeria. The piece below, published in the June-July 2008 issue of News & Letters, is still quite germane.
World food crisis stirs revolt
by Franklin Dmitryev
In [=>]
World in View: South Africa’s ‘Class Apartheid’
December 6, 2010South Africa’s ‘Class Apartheid’
Two decades after Nelson Mandela was freed from prison, South Africa has actually increased the apartheid-era race and class inequality. Neoliberal capitalist economic policies have resulted in massive unemployment and poverty that has been termed “class apartheid.” So extreme is the situation that the unemployment rate for Black youth has reached almost [=>]