Money

Aldous Huxley

Every person who knows how to read has it in their power to magnify themselves, to multiply the ways in which they exist, to make life full, significant, and interesting.

Free Hadi Heidari

Renowned cartoonist Hadi Heidari who contributes to several reformist newspapers and heads the website Persian cartoon (www.haditoons.com) was arrested in the capital Tehran on the evening of 22 October. He was among several people arrested while taking part in a religious ceremony in honour of political prisoners, held at the home of Shehaboldin Tabatabai, one of the prisoners close to the reformist party, Participation. Some of them were released the following day but around a dozen others, including Heidari, were moved to Evin prison.
Heidari was cultural editor of the banned daily Etemad-e Melli. Editor of the newspaper, Mohammad Ghochani, a member of its editorial staff, Fayaz Zahed, and website editor, Mohammad Davari, are all still in prison.

From FECO

Bob meets Karl

Muthaqafateyia

Violence

Torture in Sudan - Facts and testimonies

Author: El Nadim Centre for Rehabilitation of Victims of Violence
Keywords: torture; sudan; refugees; human rights; UNHCR; testimonies; africa; south of sudan; civil war
Publisher: El Nadim Centre for Rehabilitation of Victims of Violence
Year: 2005
Language: English
Book contributor: El Nadim Centre for Rehabilitation of Victims of Violence
Collection: opensource

Description:
Over the last ten years hundreds of Sudanese torture victims have reached out to El-nadim center. This figure represents only the ones that succeeded in escaping from the clutches of those who imprisoned and tortured them, leaving behind others.

No one knows how many victims exist and perhaps no one ever will. Some have become martyrs, some could not get away and a few, are still struggling. Their stories accumulated over the years, bringing some testimonies that vary and others that are relatively alike. But all contain the same viciousness and extreme cruelty.

We could see, quite literally, what we had previously read in both local and international reports asserting that the Sudanese government has reached a level of such brutality that has never occurred before in modern Sudanese history. Torture in Sudan is, today, more widespread than ever before, and not just because it embraces a wider area than previously, but also because of the random infliction of this inhumane torture.

Everybody is at risk. Whether you are a political activist or not, a member of the opposition or an uninvolved civilian, whether you are alone or part of a group is irrelevant.

We document in this book, amongst other things, the testimonies of these victims.

We are working towards the day when the criminals who tortured them are held accountable for their actions, and punished for the suffering they inflicted. Though no punishment will compensate the lives that were lost it will be a triumph for their souls, a triumph for humanity as a whole, in hope of one day living in a better world.

http://www.archive.org/details/TortureInSudan-FactsAndTestimonies

Censorship

Definitions of Censorship

The term "censorship" comes from The Latin, censere "to give as one's opinion, to assess." The Roman censors were magistrates who took the census count and served as assessors and inspectors of morals and conduct.

In contrast to that straightforward definition from Roman times, contemporary usage offers no agreed-upon definition of the term or when to use it. Indeed, even whether the word itself applies to a given controversy in the arts is often vigorously contested.

Here are excerpts of definitions of "censorship" from U.S. organizations and publications with varying views. They are not intended as any composite mega-definition of the term, only as indications of the variety of approaches to this concept.


Censor: One who supervises conduct and morals: as a) an official who examines materials (as publications or films) for objectionable matter; b) an official (as in time of war) who reads communications (as letters) and deletes material considered harmful to the interests of his organization. Censorship: The institution, system or practice of censoring; the actions or practices of censors; esp : censorial control exercised repressively.
--Merriam Webster's Collegiate Dictionary
Censorship: The use of the state and other legal or official means to restrict speech.
--Culture Wars, Documents from the Recent Controversies in the Arts, edited by Richard Boltons

In general, censorship of books is a supervision of the press in order to prevent any abuse of it. In this sense, every lawful authority, whose duty it is to protect its subjects from the ravages of a pernicious press, has the right of exercising censorship of books.
--The Catholic Encyclopedia (a publication of the Catholic Church)

What Is Censorship? Censorship is the suppression of ideas and information that certain persons -- individuals, groups or government officials -- find objectionable or dangerous. It is no more complicated than someone saying, "Don't let anyone read this book, or buy that magazine, or view that film, because I object to it!" Censors try to use the power of the state to impose their view of what is truthful and appropriate, or offensive and objectionable, on everyone else. Censors pressure public institutions, like libraries, to suppress and remove from public access information they judge inappropriate or dangerous, so that no one else has the chance to read or view the material and make up their own minds about it. The censor wants to prejudge materials for everyone.

For the ALA, technically censorship means the "The Removal of material from open access by government authority." The ALA also distinguishes various levels of incidents in respect to materials in a library which may or may not lead to censorship: Inquiry, Expression of Concern, Complaint, Attack, and Censorship.
--The American Library Association

The word "censorship" means "prior restraint" of First Amendment rights by government.
--Morality in Media (Morality in Media is "a national, not-for-profit, interfaith organization established in 1962 to combat obscenity and uphold decency standards in the media.")


Censorship
1. The denial of freedom of speech or freedom of the press.
2. The review of books, movies, etc., to prohibit publication and distribution, usually for reasons of morality or state security.
--Oran's Dictionary of Law

Censorship: official restriction of any expression believed to threaten the political, social, or moral order.
--Encyclopedia.Com

Censorship - the prevention of publication, transmission, or exhibition of material considered undesirable for the general public to possess or be exposed to.
--Fast Times' Political Dictionary (Fast Times is "a nonpartisan publication on contemporary world affairs & media with no political, ideological, or religious affiliation of any kind.")


Censorship: the cyclical suppression, banning, expurgation, or editing by an individual, institution, group or government that enforce or influence its decision against members of the public -- of any written or pictorial materials which that individual, institution, group or government deems obscene and "utterly" without redeeming social value," as determined by "contemporary community standards."
--Chuck Stone, Professor of Journalism and Mass Communication, University of North Carolina

Censorship is a word of many meanings. In its broadest sense it refers to suppression of information, ideas, or artistic expression by anyone, whether government officials, church authorities, private pressure groups, or speakers, writers, and artists themselves. It may take place at any point in time, whether before an utterance occurs, prior to its widespread circulation, or by punishment of communicators after dissemination of their messages, so as to deter others from like expression. In its narrower, more legalistic sense, censorship means only the prevention by official government action of the circulation of messages already produced. Thus writers who "censor" themselves before putting words on paper, for fear of failing to sell their work, are not engaging in censorship in this narrower sense, nor are those who boycott sponsors of disliked television shows.
--Academic American Encyclopedia

Censorship: supervision and control of the information and ideas circulated within a society. In modern times, censorship refers to the examination of media including books, periodicals, plays, motion pictures, and television and radio programs for the purpose of altering or suppressing parts thought to be offensive. The offensive material may be considered immoral or obscene, heretical or blasphemous, seditious or treasonable, or injurious to the national security.
--Encarta Encyclopedia

From BPS

Target

Idea of God

"The idea of God was not a lie but a device of the unconscious which needed to be decoded by psychology. A personal god was nothing more than an exalted father-figure: desire for such a deity sprang from infantile yearnings for a powerful, prote...ctive father, for justice and fairness and for life to go on forever. God is simply a projection of these desires, feared and worshipped by human beings out of an abiding sense of helplessness. Religion belonged to the infancy of the human race; it had been a necessary stage in the transition from childhood to maturity. It had promoted ethical values which were essential to society. Now that humanity had come of age, however, it should be left behind."
Sigmund Freud from A History of God

Racism by Ayn Rand

(An article published in the September, 1963 issue of The Objectivist Newsletter
and included as a chapter in the book, The Virtue of Selfishness )

"A genius is a genius, regardless of the number of morons who belong to the same race -- and a moron is a moron, regardless of the number of geniuses who share his racial origin."

Racism is the lowest, most crudely primitive form of collectivism. It is the notion of ascribing moral, social or political significance to a man's genetic lineage -- the notion that a man's intellectual and characterological traits are produced and transmitted by his internal body chemistry. Which means, in practice, that a man is to be judged, not by his own character and actions, but by the characters and actions of a collective of ancestors.

Racism claims that the content of a man's mind (not his cognitive apparatus, but its content) is inherited; that a man's convictions, values and character are determined before he is born, by physical forces beyond his control. This is the caveman's version of the doctrine of innate ideas -- or of inherited knowledge -- which has been thoroughly refuted by philosophy and science. Racism is a doctrine of, by and for brutes. It is a barnyard or stock-farm version of collectivism, appropriate to a mentality that differentiates between various breeds of anmials, but not between animals and men.

Like every form of determinism, racism invalidates the specific attribute which distinguishes man from all other living species: his rational faculty. Racism negates two aspects of man's life: reason and choice, or mind and morality, replacing them with chemical predestination.

The respectable family that supports worthless relatives or covers up their crimes in order to "protect the family name" (as if the moral stature of one man could be damaged by the actions of another) -- the bum who boasts that his great-grandfather was an empire-builder, or the small-town spinster who boasts that her maternal great-uncle was a state senator and her third-cousin gave a concert at Carnegie Hall (as if the achievements of one man could rub off on the mediocrity of another) -- the parents who search genealogical trees in order to evaluate their prospective sons-in-law -- the celebrity who starts his autobiography with a detailed account of his family history -- all these are samples of racism, the atavvistic manifestations of a doctrine whose full expression is the tribal warfare of prehistorical savages, the wholesale slaughter of Nazi Germany, the atrocities of today's so-called "newly-emerging nations."

The theory that holds "good blood" and "bad blood" as a moral-intellectual criterion, can lead to nothing but torrents of blood in practice. Brute force is the only avenue of action open to men who regard themselves as mindless aggregates of chemicals.

Modern racists attempt to prove the superiority or inferiority of a given race by the historical achievements of some of its members. The frequent historical spectacle of a great innovator who, in his lifetime, is jeered, denounced, obstructed, persecuted by his countrymen, and then, a few years after his death, is enshrined in a national monument and hailed as a proof of greatness of the German (or French or Italian or Cambodian) race -- is as revolting a spectacle of collectivist expropriation, perpetrated by racists, as any expropriation of material wealth perpetrated by communists.

Just as there is no such thing as a collective or racial mind, so there is no such thing as a collective or racial achievement. There are only individual minds and individual achievements -- and a culture is not the anonymous product of undifferentiated masses, but the sum of the intellectual achievements of individual men.

Even if it were proved -- which it is not -- that the incidence of men of potentially superior brain power is greater among the members of certain races than among the members of others, it would still tell us nothing about any given individual and it would be irrelevant to one's judgment of him. A genius is a genius, regardless of the number of morons who belong to the same race -- and a moron is a moron, regardless of the number of geniuses who share his racial origin. It is hard to say which is the more outrageous injustice: the claim of Southern racists that a Negro genius should be treated as inferior because his race has "produced" some brutes -- or the claim of a German brute to the status of a superior because his race has "produced" Goethe, Schiller and Brahms.

These are not two different claims, of course, but two applications of the same basic premise. The question of whether one alleges the superiority or the inferiority of any given race is irrelevant; racism has only one psychological root: the racist's sense of his own inferiority.

Like every other form of collectivism, racism is a quest for the unearned. It is a quest for automatic knowlege -- for an automatic evaluation of men's characters that bypasses the responsibility of exercising rational or moral judgment -- and, above all, a quest for an automatic self-esteem (or pseudo-self-esteem).

To ascribe one's virtues to one's racial origin, is to confess that one has no knowledge of the process by which virtues are acquired and, most often, that one has failed to acquire them. The overwhelming majority of racists are men who have earned no sense of personal identity, who can claim no individual achievement or distinction, and who seek the illusion of a "tribal self-esteem" by alleging the inferiority of some other tribe. Observe the hysterical intensity of the Southern racists; observe also that racism is much more prevalent among the poor white trash than among their intellectual betters.

Historically, racism has always risen or fallen with the rise or fall of collectivism. Collectivism holds that the individual has no rights, that his life and work belong to the group (to "society," to the tribe, the state, the nation) and that the group may sacrifice him at its own whim to its own interests. The only way to implement a doctrine of that kind is by means of brute force -- and statism has always been the poltical corollary of collectivism.

The absolute state is merely an institutionalized form of gang rule, regardless of which particular gang seizes power. And -- since there is no rational justification for such rule, since none has ever been or can ever be offered -- the mystique of racism is a crucial elemeent in every variant of the absolute state. The relationship is reciprocal: statism rises out of prehistorical tribal warfare, out of the notion that the men of one tribe are the natural prey for the men of another -- and establishes its own internal sub-categories of racism, a system of castes determined by a man's birth, such as inherited titles of nobility or inherited serfdom.

The racism of Nazi Germany -- where men had to fill questionnaires about their ancestry for generations back, in order to prove their "Aryan" descent -- has its counterpart in Soviet Russia, where men had to fill similar questionnaires to show that their ancestors had owned no property and thus to prove their "proletarian" descent. The Soviet ideology rest on the notion that men can be conditioned to communism genetically -- that is, that a few generations conditionned by dictatorship will transmit communist ideology to their descendants, who will be communists at birth. The persecution of racial minorities in Soviet Russia, according to the racial descent and whim of any given commissar, is a matter of record; anti-semitism is particularly prevalent -- only the official pogroms are now called "political purges."

There is only one antidote to racism: the philosophy of individualism and its politico-economic corollary, laissez-faire capitalism.

Individualism regards man -- every man -- as an independent, sovereign entity who possesses an inalienable right to his own life, a right derived from his nature as a rational being. Individualism holds that a civilized society, or any form of association, cooperation or peaceful co-existence among men, can be achieved only on the basis of the recognition of individual rights -- and that a group, as such, has no rights other than the individual rights of its members. (See my articles "Man's Rights" and "Collectivized 'Rights'" in the April and June, 1963, issues of this NEWSLETTER [or Chapters 12 and 13 of the book].)

It is not a man's ancestors or relatives or genes or body chemistry that count in a free market, but only one human attribute: productive ability. It is by his own individual ability and ambition that capitalism judges a man and rewards him accordingly.

No political system can establish universal rationality by law (or by force). But capitalism is the only system that functions in a way which rewards rationality and penalizes all forms of irrationality, including racism.

A fully free, capitalist system has not yet existed anywhere. But what is enormously significant is the correlation of racism and political controls in the semi-free economies of the 19th century. Racial and/or religious persecutions of minorities stood in inverse ratio to the degree of a country's freedom. Racism was strongest in the more controlled economies, such as Russia and Germany -- and weakest in England, the then freest country of Europe.

It is capitalism that gave mankind its first steps toward freedom and a rational way of life. It is capitalism that broke through national and racial barriers, by means of free trade. It is capitalism that abolished serfdom and slavery in all the civilized countries of the world. It is the capitalist North that destroyed the slavery of the agrarian-feudal South in the United States.

Such was the trend of mankind for the brief span of some hundred and fifty years. The spectacular results and achievements of that trend need no restatement here.

The rise of collectivism reversed that trend.

When men began to be indoctrinated once more with the notion that the individual possesses no rights, that supremacy, moral authority and unlimited power belong to the group, and that a man has no significance outside his group -- the inevitable consequence was that men bbegan to gravitate toward some group or another, in self-protection, in bewilderment and in subconscious terror. The simplest collective to join, the easiest one to identify -- particularly for people of limited intellligence -- the least demanding form of "belonging" and of "togetherness" is: race.

It is thus that the theoreticians of collectivism, the "humanitarian" advocates of a "benevolent" absolute state, have led to the rebirth and the new, virulent growth of racism in the 20th century.

In its great era of capitalism, the United States was the freest country on earth -- and the best refutation of racist theories. Men of all races came here, some from obscure, culturally undistinguished countries, and accomplished feats of productive ability which would have remained stillborn in their control-ridden native lands. Men of racial groups that had been slaughtering one another for centuries, learned to live together in harmony and peaceful cooperation. America had been called "the melting pot," with good reason. But few people realized that America did not melt men into the gray conformity of a collective: she united them by means of protecting their right to individuality.

The major victims of such race prejudice as did exist in America were the Negroes. It was a problem originated and perpetuated by the non-capitalist South, though not confined to its boundaries. The persecution of Negroes in the South was and is truly disgraceful. But in the rest of the country, so long as men were free, even that problem was slowly giving way under the pressure of enlightenment and of the white men's own economic interests.

Today, that problem is growing worse -- and so is every form of racism. America has become race-conscious in a manner reminiscent of the worst days in the most backward countries of 19th century Europe. The cause is the same: the growth of collectivism and statism.

[ ... ]

The existence of such pressure groups and of their political lobbies is openly and cynically acknowledged today. The pretense at any political philosophy, any principles, ideals or long-range goals is fast disappearing from our scene -- and it is all but admitted that this country is now floating without direction, at the mercy of a blind, short-range power-game played by various statist gangs, each intent on getting hold of a legislative gun for any special advantage of the immediate moment.

In the absence of any coherent political philosophy, every economic group has been acting as its own destroyer, selling out its future for some momentary privilege. The policy of the businessmen has, for some time, been the most suicidal one in this respect. But it has been surpassed by the current policy of the Negro leaders.

So long as the Negro leaders were fighting against government-enforced discrimination -- right, justice and morality were on their side. But that is not what they are fighting any longer. The confusions and contradictions surrounding the issue of racism have now reached an incredible climax.

It is time to clarify the principles involved.

The policy of the Southern states toward Negroes was and is a shameful contradiction of this country's basic principles. Racial discrimination, imposed and enforced by law, is so blatantly inexcusable an infringement of individual rights that the racist statutes of the South should have been declared unconstitutional long ago.

The Southern racists' claim of "states' rights" is a contradiction in terms: there can be no such thing as the "right" of some men to violate the rights of others. The constitutional concept of "states' rights" pertains to the division of power between local and national authorities, and serves to protect the states from the Federal government; it does not grant to a state government an unlimited, arbitrary power over its citizens or the privilege of abrogating the citizens' individual rights.

It is true that the Federal government has used the racial issue to enlarge its own power and to set a precedent of encroachment upon the legitimate rights of the states, in an unnecessary and unconstitutional manner. But this merely means that both governments are wrong; it does not excuse the policy of the Southern racists.

One of the worst contradictions, in this context, is the stand of many so-called "conservatives" (not confined exclusively to the South) who claim to be defenders of freedom, of capitalism, of property rights, of the Constitution, yet who advocate racism at the same time. They do not seem to possess enough concern with principles to realize tht they are cutting the ground from under their own feet. Men who deny individual rights cannot claim, defend or uphold any rights whatsoever. It is such alleged champions of capitalism who are helping to discredit and destroy it.

The "liberals" are guilty of the same contradiction, but in a different form. They advocate the sacrifice of all individual rights to unlimited majority rule -- yet posture as defenders of the rights of minorities. But the smallest minority on earth is the individual. Those who deny individual rights cannot claim to be defenders of minorities.

This accumulation of contradictions, of short-sighted pragmatism, of cynical contempt for principles, of outrageous irrationality, has now reached its climax in the new demands of the Negro leaders.

Instead of fighting against racial discrimination, they are demanding that racial discrimination be legalized and enforced. Instead of fighting against racism, they are demanding the establishment of racial quotas. Instead of fighting for "color-blindness" in social and economic issues, they are proclaiming that "color-blindness" is evil and that "color" should be made a primary consideration. Instead of fighting for equal rights, they are demanding special race privileges.

[ ... ]

Racial quotas have been one of the worst evils of racist regimes. There were racial quotas in the universities of Czarist Russia, in the population of Russia's major cities, etc. One of the accusations against the racists in this country is that some schools practice a secret system of racial quotas. It was regarded as a victory for justice when employment questionnaires ceased to inquire about an applicant's race or religion.

Today, it is not an oppressor, but an oppressed minority that is demanding the establishment of racial quotas. (!)

[ ... ]

It does not merely demand special privileges on racial grounds -- it demands that white men be penalized for the sins of their ancestors. It demands that a white laborer be refused a job because his grandfather may have practiced racial discrimination. But perhaps his grandfather had not practiced it. Or perhaps his grandfather had not even lived in this country. Since these questions are not to be considered, it means that that white laborer is to be charged with collective racial guilt, the guilt consisting merely of the color of his skin.

But that is the principle of the worst Southern racist who charges all Negroes with collective racial guilt for any crime committed by an individual Negro, and who treats them all as inferiors on the ground that their ancestors were savages.

The only comment one can make about demands of that kind is, "By what right? -- By what code? -- By what standard?"

That absurdly evil policy is destroying the moral base of the Negroes' fight. Their case rested on the principle of individual rights. If they demand the violation of the rights of others, they negate and forfeit their own. Then the same answer applies to them as to the Southern racists: there can be no such thing as a "right" of some men to violate the rights of others.

[ ... ]

No man, neither Negro nor white, has any claim to the property of another man. A man's rights are not violated by a private individual's refusal to deal with him. Racism is an evil, irrational and morally contemptible doctrine -- but doctrines cannot be forbidden or prescribed by law. Just as we have to protect a communist's freedom of speech, even though his doctrines are evil, so we have to protect a racist's right to the use and disposal of his own property. Private racism is not a legal, but a moral issue -- and can be fought only by private means, such as economic boycott or social ostracism.

[ ... ]

It is an ironic demonstration of the philosophical insanity and the consequently suicidal trend of our age, that the men who need the protection of individual rights most urgently -- the Negroes -- are now in the vanguard of the destruction of these rights.

[ ... ]

In conclusion, I shall quote from an astonishing editorial in The N. Y. Times of August 4 [1963] -- astonishing because ideas of this nature are not typical of our age:
"But the question must be not whether a group recognizable in color, features or culture has its rights as a group. No, the question is whether any American individual, regardless of color, features or culture, is deprived of his rights as an American. If the individual has all the rights and privileges due him under the laws and the Constitution, we need not worry about groups and masses -- those do not, in fact, exist, except as figures of speech."


"I'm not generally proud to be British. It strikes me as absurd either to claim some sort of credit for an accident of birth, or to assume that the culture one is brought up in is ipso facto the best available to anyone. Nation is usually alien. I've said it before and I'll say it again: when someone says 'we', I feel like a 'them'."
Guy Herbert

"The crude primitivism of supposedly respectable establishments to engage in 'reverse discrimination' or 'affirmative action' in order to allegedly 'make up for' the sins of people other than those they actually wind up 'punishing' for them, is racism squared, or moral depravity at its worst. It says, in effect, not only that 'two wrongs make a right,' but that racism is okay so long as it's 'our' racism. It is really an acknowledgment that, even if they tried, they wouldn't know how to internalize and institutionalize pure character-consciousness or merit-consciousness, let alone how to demonstrate to the world that it can be done. It is an abject admission of their guilt, real or imagined, and a hope that you, by your silence, share in it, or at least, tacitly condone it."
Rick Gaber

"The less justified a man is in claiming excellence for his own self, the more ready he is to claim all excellence for his nation, his religion, his race or his holy cause."
Eric Hoffer

["Du bist nichts, dein Volk ist alles" ("You are
nothing, your race is everything.") Adolf Hitler]

"... So here we get the two essentials of Nazism: the rejection of reason and the mind in favor of the worship of brute emotion, and the elevation of the collective over the individual. What, then, distinguishes the ideas of the modern intellectuals from the philosophy of the Nazis? The addition of an altruist twist. The Nazis were certainly pro-self-sacrifice, because they advocated (and enforced) the sacrifice of the individual self to the collective aggrandizement of the race. But the modern intellectuals declare that they are even more altruistic because they want to sacrifice our own race to other races."
Robert Tracinski

"If anyone insists that racism is valid, that the content of one's mind is frozen in place by the circumstances of his birth, then the only appropriate response is to say, 'Speak for yourself, buddy. Unless you're some sort of non-human, you must be speaking for yourself, and since you must regard those thoughts you just uttered as predetermined by your ancestors, you therefore couldn't possibly know or care if they're true or not just like a mindless robot programmed to make noises. Therefore, no one should take what you say any more seriously than robot noises, since your denying the human ability to do independent thinking and discriminate truth from falsehood means only that you have denied it for yourself. So I will take your word for it, and ignore you. As for me, I have found to be untrue many things my parents and ancestors believed, and I had no trouble rejecting those things. So at least I know damn well -- and from first-hand personal experience -- that human beings most certainly are capable of doing that.' "
Rick Gaber

"The core of racism is the notion that the individual is meaningless and that membership in the collective -- the race -- is the source of his identity and value. ... The notion of 'diversity' entails exactly the same premises as racism -- that one's ideas are determined by one's race and that the source of an individual's identity is his ethnic heritage."
Peter Schwartz in "The Racism of 'Diversity

"Frankly, I'd be insulted if I were told the reason I was being hired was because of my ancestry. I would much rather work for someone like T.J. Rodgers, who is known to take time during meetings to tell his staff (which originated from almost every continent in the world) that they're there because they're the best at what they do, not because of whoever their ancestors were."
Rick Gaber

"Money dissolves skin colour on contact. The fact that Silicon Valley, the freest market in the world, has produced the United Colours of Geek proves it."
Dan Gardner

"Racism is a variant of collectivism, the doctrine that the individual is valueless [except] as an appendage of a group. One's 'race' is an evaluation based on nonessential attributes ... such as the dimensions of facial/physical features and the wavelengths of light reflected by pigmentation."
Gregory Gerig (emphasis added)

"The HUMAN 'race' has been in existence in its present form in only an infinitesimal amount of time, evolutionarily speaking. . Nonetheless, if everyone could trace his family tree back 70,000 years, let alone 700,000, he will find that the skin colors of his ancestors changed ten or twenty times, probably including every hue and tint you can imagine over and over again. Likewise for every variation of facial and body type. Therefore, other than the distinction between Cro-Magnon Man and the recently-extinct Neanderthal Man, there is no such thing as race. There are certainly such things as vastly different cultures, most manifesting dramatically distinct lifestyles and opportunities (or lack of such) for growth, advancement, fulfillment and happiness, but race? A thoroughly counter-productive, let alone unrealistic, concept."
Rick Gaber

"People often get racism mixed up with bigotry or prejudice. We need to get our terminology straightened out. We obviously have racial problems that need solving. The first step in solving a problem is to identify it. If we keep mis-identifying bigotry and prejudice as racism we’ll never make any headway" -- Neal Boortz, here
"You CAN NOT judge previous generations by today's standards. Today Mark Twain is called by many, a racist. By the standards of his time, he was a social liberal. Even Teddy Roosevelt was a social liberal at the time, but he accepted as fact that idea that Caucasians were inherently superior to all other races. That makes him a racist in the CORRECT definition of the term."
Neal Boortz

"Racism is a belief in the inherent superiority of one race over another."
Neal Boortz

Bigotry: definitions: # 1: the state of mind of a bigot # 2: acts or beliefs characteristic of a bigot
Bigot: definition # 1: a person obstinately or intolerantly devoted to his or her own opinions and prejudices
Prejudice: definition # 2 a (1) here: preconceived judgment or opinion
Prejudice, n. A vagrant opinion without visible means of support. (Ambrose Bierce, The Devil's Dictionary, c. 1911)
Discrimination: definition # 3 here : Treatment or consideration based on class or category rather than individual merit


"Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry and narrow-mindedness." -- Mark Twain
“I have a dream that my four children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.”
Martin Luther King

"You cannot cure racism with more racism."
Edwin A. Locke

And NOW, a college professor so fed up with the misuse of the term "racism" (as so often slung by certain humorless, self-righteous, perpetually-indignant people who go out of their way to shove their permanent shoulder chips in your face) that he's come up with his own brand-new, tongue-in-cheek definition of Racism .

Racism

Racism is the belief that a particular race is superior or inferior to another, that a person’s social and moral traits are predetermined by his or her inborn biological characteristics. Racial separatism is the belief, most of the time based on racism, that different races should remain segregated and apart from one another.

Racism has existed throughout human history. It may be defined as the hatred of one person by another -- or the belief that another person is less than human -- because of skin color, language, customs, place of birth or any factor that supposedly reveals the basic nature of that person. It has influenced wars, slavery, the formation of nations, and legal codes.

During the past 500-1000 years, racism on the part of Western powers toward non-Westerners has had a far more significant impact on history than any other form of racism (such as racism among Western groups or among Easterners, such as Asians, Africans, and others). The most notorious example of racism by the West has been slavery, particularly the enslavement of Africans in the New World (slavery itself dates back thousands of years). This enslavement was accomplished because of the racist belief that Black Africans were less fully human than white Europeans and their descendants.

This belief was not "automatic": that is, Africans were not originally considered inferior. When Portuguese sailors first explored Africa in the 15th and 16th centuries, they came upon empires and cities as advanced as their own, and they considered Africans to be serious rivals. Over time, though, as African civilizations failed to match the technological advances of Europe, and the major European powers began to plunder the continent and forcibly remove its inhabitants to work as slave laborers in new colonies across the Atlantic, Africans came to be seen as a deficient "species," as "savages." To an important extent, this view was necessary to justify the slave trade at a time when Western culture had begun to promote individual rights and human equality. The willingness of some Africans to sell other Africans to European slave traders also led to claims of savagery, based on the false belief that the "dark people" were all kinsmen, all part of one society - as opposed to many different, sometimes warring nations.

One important feature of racism, especially toward Blacks and immigrant groups, is clear in attitudes regarding slaves and slavery. Jews are usually seen by anti-Semites as subhuman but also superhuman: devilishly cunning, skilled, and powerful. Blacks and others are seen by racists as merely subhuman, more like beasts than men. If the focus of anti-Semitism is evil, the focus of racism is inferiority -- directed toward those who have sometimes been considered to lack even the ability to be evil (though in the 20th century, especially, victims of racism are often considered morally degraded).

In the second half of the 19th century, Darwinism, the decline of Christian belief, and growing immigration were all perceived by many white Westerners as a threat to their cultural control. European and, to a lesser degree, American scientists and philosophers devised a false racial "science" to "prove" the supremacy of non-Jewish whites. While the Nazi annihilation of Jews discredited most of these supposedly scientific efforts to elevate one race over another, small numbers of scientists and social scientists have continued throughout the 20th century to argue the inborn shortcomings of certain races, especially Blacks. At the same time, some public figures in the American Black community have championed the supremacy of their own race and the inferiority of whites - using nearly the identical language of white racists.


All of these arguments are based on a false understanding of race; in fact, contemporary scientists are not agreed on whether race is a valid way to classify people. What may seem to be significant "racial" differences to some people - skin color, hair, facial shape - are not of much scientific significance. In fact, genetic differences within a so-called race may be greater than those between races. One philosopher writes: "There are few genetic characteristics to be found in the population of England that are not found in similar proportions in Zaire or in China….those differences that most deeply affect us in our dealings with each other are not to any significant degree biologically determined."

From Ask.com

Magnetism

Bribery

My cartoon of today

Sudan

My cartoon of today in Ajrass Alhurria newspaper

Democratic Party Change in Sudan

Published in Ajras Alhurriya newspaper, 10-10-2009

Balance

Weapons of dictatorship and democracy

“The best weapon of a dictatorship is secrecy, but the best weapon of a democracy should be the weapon of openness”
Niels Bohr

the totalitarian state between securing authority and community

Published in Ajras Alhurria daily newspape.
http://www.ajrasalhurriya.net/ar/news_view_5900.html

Military-style democracy

Game

Abern Martin

Martin "Marty" Abern was born December 2, 1898 in Romania, the son of an ethnic Jewish peddler. The family emigrated to the United States in 1902, moving to Minneapolis the following year. The young man was radically inclined from an early age, joining the Socialist Party of America's youth section, the Young People's Socialist League in 1912, the Socialist Party itself in 1915, and the Industrial Workers of the World circa 1916. He seems to have been a member of the Communist Party of America at the time of its establishment in the fall of 1919 or shortly thereafter. He attended the University of Minnesota for two years but was expelled for his radical views in 1920. In November 1920, the US Department of Justice attempted to make Abern a test case for the deportation of alien radicals citing Communist Party membership as sole grounds for action.[1]

Abern was a delegate to the 2nd World Congress of the Young Communist International (YCI), held in Moscow in June 1921. He was on the governing National Executive Committee of the Young Workers League of America (YWL) from May 1922 and was reelected by the convention of that organization held the following year. Abern served as Secretary of the YWL from May 30, 1922 to October 19, 1922, resigning for reasons of health. Abern was a fraternal delegate of the YWL to the ill-fated 1922 Bridgman Convention of the Communist Party in August 1922 and served on a 3 man editorial committee of the YWL from that same fall. Abern also briefly was part of a 3 person Secretariat running the Young Workers League in the summer and fall of 1924 before being replaced as National Secretary on October 15 by John Williamson.

Abern also sat on the governing Central Executive Committee of the adult Communist Party (then known as the Workers Party of America) from 1923 to 1928, supporting the majority faction of Foster-Cannon-Lore during the bitter factional fighting that characterized the decade

Abern was expelled from the Workers (Communist) Party in 1928 for supporting Leon Trotsky and James P. Cannon. He was a founding member of the Communist League of America (CLA) in May 1928 and sat on the governing National Committee of that organization from 1931 to 1934. He was an ally of Max Shachtman against Cannon in the factional fighting of this period. Abern was also a founding member of Workers Party of the United States in 1934, formed when the CLA merged with A.J. Muste's Workers Party. He was a member of the National Committee of that organization from 1934 to 1936. In that year he and other Trotskyists entered the Socialist Party en masse, a brief interlude ending with their expulsion in 1937.

In 1938, Abern helped found the Socialist Workers Party (SWP) and he was on the National Committee of that organization from 1938 until 1940. The April 1940 convention of the SWP instructed the National Committee of the party to take disciplinary action against Abern, Shachtman, James Burnham, and their factional supporters if that group failed to abide by the decisions of the convention. In accordance with these instructions, the National Committee suspended Burnham, Shachtman, and Abern at its meeting of April 22, 1940, giving the members of this so-called "petty-bourgeois opposition" an opportunity to recant and return to the party. Burham left the radical movement at this time, while Abern joined Max Shachtman's in establishing a new organization called the Workers Party. The pair were expelled from the SWP by a Plenum Conference held in Chicago from Sept. 27 to 29, 1940.[2]

Abern continued to support Trotsky's unconditional defence of the Soviet Union and broke politically with Shachtman in 1940, but he remained in the Workers Party organization until his death in April 1949 at the age of 49.

Ludwig Feuerbach

“Feuerbach is the only one who has a serious, critical attitude to the Hegelian dialectic and who has made genuine discoveries in this field. He is in fact the true conqueror of the old philosophy”.
Marx, 1844


Ludwig Andreas von Feuerbach (July 28, 1804 – September 13, 1872) was a German philosopher and anthropologist. He was the fourth son of the eminent jurist Paul Johann Anselm Ritter von Feuerbach. His thought was influential in the development of Marxist dialectic.

Feuerbach matriculated in the University of Heidelberg with the intention of pursuing a career in the Church. Through the influence of Prof. Karl Daub he was led to an interest in the then predominant philosophy of Hegel and, in spite of his father's opposition, enrolled in the University of Berlin, in order to study under the master himself. After twenty two years, the Hegelian influence began to slacken. Feuerbach became associated with a group known as the Young Hegelians, alternately known as the Left Hegelians, who synthesized a radical offshoot of Hegelian philosophy, interpreting Hegel’s dialectic march of spirit through history to mean that existing Western culture and institutional forms—and, in particular, Christianity—would be superseded. "Theology," he wrote to a friend, "I can bring myself to study no more. I long to take nature to my heart, that nature before whose depth the faint-hearted theologian shrinks back; and with nature man, man in his entire quality." These words are a key to Feuerbach's development. He completed his education at Erlangen, at the Friedrich-Alexander-University, Erlangen-Nuremberg with the study of natural science.

His first book, published anonymously, Gedanken über Tod und Unsterblichkeit (1830), contains an attack on personal immortality and an advocacy of the Spinozistic immortality of reabsorption in nature. These principles, combined with his embarrassed manner of public speaking, debarred him from academic advancement. After some years of struggling, during which he published his Geschichte der neueren Philosophie (2 vols., 1833-1837, 2nd ed. 1844), and Abelard und Heloise (1834, 3rd ed. 1877), he married in 1837 and lived a rural existence at Bruckberg near Nuremberg, supported by his wife's share in a small porcelain factory.

In two works of this period, Pierre Bayle (1838) and Philosophie und Christentum (1839), which deal largely with theology, he held that he had proven "that Christianity has in fact long vanished not only from the reason but from the life of mankind, that it is nothing more than a fixed idea."

This attack is followed up in his most important work, Das Wesen des Christentums (1841), which was translated by George Eliot into English as The Essence of Christianity. "In the consciousness of the infinite, the conscious subject has for his object the infinity of his own nature."

Feuerbach's theme was a derivation of Hegel's speculative theology in which the Creation remains a part of the Creator, while the Creator remains greater than the Creation. When the student Feuerbach presented his own theory to professor Hegel, Hegel refused to reply positively to it.

In part I of his book Feuerbach developed what he calls the "true or anthropological essence of religion." Treating of God in his various aspects "as a being of the understanding," "as a moral being or law," "as love" and so on. Feuerbach talks of how man is equally a conscious being, more so than God because man has placed upon God the ability of understanding. Man contemplates many things and in doing so he becomes acquainted with himself. Feuerbach shows that in every aspect God corresponds to some feature or need of human nature. "If man is to find contentment in God," he claims, "he must find himself in God."

Thus God is nothing else than man: he is, so to speak, the outward projection of man's inward nature. This projection is dubbed as a chimaera by Feuerbach, that God and the idea of a higher being is dependent upon the aspect of benevolence. Feuerbach states that, “a God who is not benevolent, not just, not wise, is no God,” and continues to say that qualities are not suddenly denoted as divine because of their godly association. The qualities themselves are divine therefore making God divine, indicating that man is capable of understanding and applying meanings of divinity to religion and not that religion makes a man divine.

The force of this attraction to religion though, giving divinity to a figure like God, is explained by Feuerbach as God is a being that acts throughout man in all forms. God, “is the principle of [man's] salvation, of [man's] good dispositions and actions, consequently [man's] own good principle and nature.” It appeals to man to give qualities to the idol of their religion because without these qualities a figure such as God would become merely an object, its importance would become obsolete, there would no longer be a feeling of an existence for God. Therefore, Feuerbach says, when man removes all qualities from God, “God is no longer anything more to him than a negative being.” Additionally, because man is imaginative, God is given traits and there holds the appeal. God is a part of man through the invention of a God. Equally though, man is repulsed by God because, “God alone is the being who acts of himself.”

In part 2 he discusses the "false or theological essence of religion," i.e. the view which regards God as having a separate existence over against man. Hence arise various mistaken beliefs, such as the belief in revelation which he believes not only injures the moral sense, but also "poisons, nay destroys, the divinest feeling in man, the sense of truth," and the belief in sacraments such as the Lord's Supper, which is to him a piece of religious materialism of which "the necessary consequences are superstition and immorality."

Part 2 comes to a crux though by seemingly retracting previous statements. Feuerbach claims that God's only action is, “the moral and eternal salvation of man: thus man has in fact no other aim than himself,” because man's actions are placed upon God. Feuerbach also contradicts himself by claiming that man gives up his personality and places it upon God who in turn is a selfish being. This selfishness turns onto man and projects man to be wicked and corrupt, that they are, “incapable of good,” and it is only God that is good, “the Good Being.” In this way Feuerbach detracts from many of his earlier assertions while showing the alienation that takes place in man by worshipping God. Feuerbach affirms that goodness is, “personified as God,” turning God into an object because if God was anything but an object nothing would need to be personified on him. The aspect of objects having previously been discussed; in that man contemplates objects and that objects themselves give conception of what externalizes man. Therefore if God is good so then should be man because God is merely an externalization of man because God is an object. However religion would show that man is inherently corrupt. Feuerbach tries to lessen his inconsistency by asking if it were possible if, “I could perceive the beauty of a fine picture if my mind were aesthetically an absolute piece of perversion?” Through Feuerbach’s reasoning it would not be possible, but it is possible, and he later states that man is capable of finding beauty.

A caustic criticism of Feuerbach was delivered in 1844 by Max Stirner. In his book Der Einzige und sein Eigentum (The Ego and His Own) he attacked Feuerbach as inconsistent in his atheism. The pertinent portions of the books, Feuerbach's reply, and Stirner's counter-reply form an instructive polemics. (see External Links)

During the troubles of 1848-1849 Feuerbach's attack upon orthodoxy made him something of a hero with the revolutionary party; but he never threw himself into the political movement, and indeed had not the qualities of a popular leader. During the period of the Frankfurt Congress he had given public lectures on religion at Heidelberg. When the diet closed he withdrew to Bruckberg and occupied himself partly with scientific study, partly with the composition of his Theogonie (1857).

In 1860 he was compelled by the failure of the porcelain factory to leave Bruckberg, and he would have suffered the extremity of want but for the assistance of friends supplemented by a public subscription. His last book, Gottheit, Freiheit und Unsterblichkeit, appeared in 1866 (2nd ed., 1890). After a long period of decline, he died on September 13, 1872. He is buried in the same cemetery in Nuremberg (Johannis-Friedhof) as the artist Albrecht Dürer.

Essentially the thought of Feuerbach consisted in a new interpretation of religion's phenomena, giving an anthropological explanation. Following Schleiermacher’s theses, Feuerbach thought religion was principally a matter of feeling in its unrestricted subjectivity. So the feeling breaks through all the limits of understanding and manifests itself in several religious beliefs. But, beyond the feeling, is the fancy, the true maker of projections of "gods" and of the sacred in general.

Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels were strongly influenced by Feuerbach's atheism, though they criticised him for his inconsistent espousal of materialism.

Salvador Dalí

Salvador Domingo Felipe Jacinto Dalí i Domènech, 1st Marquis of Púbol (May 11, 1904 – January 23, 1989) was a Spanish Catalan surrealist painter born in Figueres.

Dalí was a skilled draftsman, best known for the striking and bizarre images in his surrealist work. His painterly skills are often attributed to the influence of Renaissance masters. His best-known work, The Persistence of Memory, was completed in 1931. Dalí's expansive artistic repertoire includes film, sculpture, and photography, in collaboration with a range of artists in a variety of media.

Dalí attributed his "love of everything that is gilded and excessive, my passion for luxury and my love of oriental clothes" to a self-styled "Arab lineage," claiming that his ancestors were descended from the Moors.

Dalí was highly imaginative, and also had an affinity for partaking in unusual and grandiose behavior, in order to draw attention to himself. This sometimes irked those who loved his art as much as it annoyed his critics, since his eccentric manner sometimes drew more public attention than his artwork.

Sad Dollar

José Saramago - Death without interruptions

From: poetrydispatch.wordpress.com
NOTES from the UNDERGROUND No. 196 - August 14, 2009


Some people spend their entire lives reading but never get beyond reading the words on the page, they don’t understand that the words are merely stepping stones placed across a fast-flowing river, and the reason they’re there is so that we can reach the farther shore, it’s the other side that matters.—J.S.

Let’s put it this way: There are times you come across a certain writer you want to keep entirely to yourself. He belongs to me. Speaks to me, nobody else. I’ve been keeping Saramago in a dark place on my bookshelves for years now. I’ve thought about presenting his work, discussing it with others, assigning his books in an occasional writing class situation. But never did. I’m certain many others know him. No doubt know his work better than I. But of all the readers and writers in my life, all the conversations and words exchanged through the years (granted I live in a rural outpost, far from hallowed halls of academia, the temple and temperature of New York publishing)—the Portuguese writer, Saramago, has never come up.

I haven’t told anybody else about him because…? Maybe I might dilute the essence of what he means or does for me. Maybe a voice within says: Go find your own Saramago. Which was much the way I felt when I first read Camus, Coetzee, Schulz, Handke, Hrabal… I don’t know whether this makes any sense or not. It’s not jealousy. Nobody else could possibly write like this. And no serious writer should ever want to write like another writer anyway, just learn from them. So that’s not an issue.

I don’t know whether I’m the only one who inhabits this terrain of craziness, possessiveness or not. It’s a mystery to me why I quietly return to the source of certain writers like Saramago…his words, his style, his philosophy, his themes, etc….always looking over my shoulder to be sure no one else is following.

Nor do I understand why suddenly I swing the doors open wide, turn on the lights, invite everyone in to meet my old friend—the one I’ve been hiding in the dark for so long.

Saramago was born in Portugal in 1922. He received the Nobel Prize for literature in 1998. He is sometimes compared to Kafka, Borges, Camus.

But he’s José Saramago. No one else. Here’s the opening to one of his novels,

DEATH WITHOUT INTERRUPTIONS:

THE FOLLOWING DAY, NO ONE DIED. THIS FACT, BEING absolutely contrary to life’s rules, provoked enormous and, in the circumstances, perfectly justifiable anxiety in people’s minds, for we have only to consider that in the entire forty volumes of universal history there is no mention, not even one exemplary case, of such a phenomenon ever having occurred, for a whole day to go by, with its generous allowance of twenty-four hours, diurnal and nocturnal, matutinal and vespertine, without one death from an illness, a fatal fall, or a successful suicide, not one, not a single one. Not even from a car accident, so frequent on festive occasions, when blithe irresponsibility and an excess of alcohol jockey for position on the roads to decide who will reach death first. New year’s eve had failed to leave behind it the usual calamitous trail of fatalities, as if old atropos with her great bared teeth had decided to put aside her shears for a day. There was, however, no shortage of blood. Bewildered, confused, distraught, struggling to control their feelings of nausea, the firemen extracted from the mangled remains wretched human bodies that, according to the mathematical logic of the collisions, should have been well and truly dead, but which, despite the seriousness of the injuries and lesions suffered, remained alive and were carried off to hospital, accompanied by the shrill sound of the ambulance sirens. None of these people would die along the way and all would disprove the most pessimistic of medical prognoses, There’s nothing to be done for the poor man, it’s not even worth operating, a complete waste of time, said the surgeon to the nurse as she was adjusting his mask. And the day before, there would probably have been no salvation for this particular patient, but one thing was clear, today, the victim refused to die. And what was happening here was happening throughout the country. Up until the very dot of midnight on the last day of the year there were people who died in full compliance with the rules, both those relating to the nub of the matter, i.e. the termination of life, and those relating to the many ways in which the aforementioned nub, with varying degrees of pomp and solemnity, chooses to mark the fatal moment…


So, there’s a little of the author in his own words– translated by Margaret Jull Costa. Here’s how the publisher describes the book:

ON THE FIRST DAY OF the new year, no one dies. This, of course, causes consternation among politicians, religious leaders, morticians, and doctors. Among the general public, on the other hand, there is celebration—flags are hung out on balconies, people dance in the streets. They have achieved the great goal of humanity: eternal life. Then reality hits home—families are left to care for the permanently dying, life-insurance policies become meaningless, and funeral parlors are reduced to arranging burials for pet dogs, cats, hamsters, and parrots. Death sits in her chilly apartment, where she lives alone with her scythe and filing cabinets, and contemplates her experiment: What if no one ever died again? What if she, death with a small ‘d’, became human and were to fall in love?

José Saramago

José de Sousa Saramago,born 16 November 1922) is a Nobel-laureate Portuguese novelist, playwright and journalist. His works, some of which can be seen as allegories, commonly present subversive perspectives on historic events, emphasizing the human factor. Saramago was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature in 1998. He founded the National Front for the Defense of Culture (Lisbon, 1992) with Freitas-Magalhães among others. He currently lives on Lanzarote in the Canary Islands, Spain.

Saramago was born into a family of landless peasants in Azinhaga, Portugal, a small village in the province of Ribatejo some hundred kilometers north-east of Lisbon. His parents were José de Sousa and Maria de Piedade. "Saramago," a wild herbaceous plant known in English as the wild radish, was his father's family's nickname, and was accidentally incorporated into his name upon registration of his birth. In 1924, Saramago's family moved to Lisbon, where his father started working as a policeman. A few months after the family moved to the capital, his brother Francisco, older by two years, died. Although Saramago was a good pupil, his parents were unable to afford to keep him in grammar school, and instead moved him to a technical school at age 12. After graduating, he worked as a car mechanic for two years. Later he worked as a translator, then as a journalist. He was assistant editor of the newspaper Diário de Notícias, a position he had to leave after the political events in 1975. After a period of working as a translator he was able to support himself as a writer. Saramago married Ilda Reis in 1944. Their only child, Violante, was born in 1947. Since 1988, Saramago has been married to the Spanish journalist Pilar del Río, who is the official translator of his books into Spanish.

José Saramago was in his mid-fifties before he won international acclaim; his publication of Baltasar and Blimunda brought him to the attention of an international readership. This novel won the Portuguese PEN Club Award. Saramago has been a member of the Portuguese Communist Party since 1969, as well as an atheist[2] and self-described pessimist. His views have aroused considerable controversy in Portugal, especially after the publication of The Gospel According to Jesus Christ. Members of the country's Catholic community were outraged by Saramago's representation of Jesus as a fallible human being. Portugal's conservative government would not allow Saramago's work to compete for the European Literary Prize, arguing that it offended the Catholic community. As a result, Saramago and his wife moved to Lanzarote, an island in the Canaries.

During the 2006 Lebanon War, he signed a statement together with Tariq Ali, John Berger, Noam Chomsky, Eduardo Galeano, Naomi Klein, Harold Pinter, Arundhati Roy and Howard Zinn, condemning what they characterize as "a long-term military, economic and geographic practice whose political aim is nothing less than the liquidation of the Palestinian nation". He stood unsuccessfully as a candidate for the European Parliament in the 2009 election.

Saramago’s novels often deal with fantastic scenarios, such as that in his 1986 novel, The Stone Raft, wherein the Iberian Peninsula breaks off from the rest of Europe and sails about the Atlantic Ocean. In his 1995 novel, Blindness, an entire unnamed country is stricken with a mysterious plague of “white blindness”. In his 1984 novel, The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis (which won the PEN Award and the Independent Foreign Fiction Award), Fernando Pessoa’s heteronym survives for a year after the poet himself dies. Additionally, his novel Death with Interruptions (also translated as Death at Intervals) centers around a country in which nobody dies over the course of seven months beginning on New Year's Day, and how the country reacts to the spiritual and political implications of the event.

Using such imaginative themes, Saramago addresses the most serious of subject matters with empathy for the human condition and for the isolation of contemporary urban life. His characters struggle with their need to connect with one another, form relations and bond as a community; and also with their need for individuality, and to find meaning and dignity outside of political and economic structures. Literary critic Harold Bloom considers Saramago the second greatest living novelist in the world, behind only Philip Roth, but roundly criticized his statements comparing the circumstances in the Palestinian territories to the Auschwitz concentration camp and his devotion to Stalinists.

Saramago's experimental style often features long sentences, at times more than a page long. He uses periods sparingly, choosing instead a loose flow of clauses joined by commas. Many of his paragraphs extend for pages without pausing for dialog, which Saramago chooses not to delimit by quotation marks; when the speaker changes, Saramago capitalizes the first letter of the new speaker's clause. In his novel Blindness, Saramago completely abandons the use of proper nouns instead choosing to refer to characters simply by some unique characteristic, an example of his use of style to enhance the recurring themes of identity and meaning found throughout his work.

Muammar al-Gaddafi

Muammar Abu Minyar al-Gaddafi1; also known simply as Colonel Gaddafi; born 7 June 1942) has been the de facto leader of Libya since a coup in 1969.

Although Gaddafi has held no public office or title since 1979, he is accorded the honorifics "Guide of the First of September Great Revolution of the Socialist People's Libyan Arab Jamahiriya" or "Brotherly Leader and Guide of the Revolution" in government statements and the official press. With the death of Omar Bongo of Gabon on 8 June 2009, he became the third longest serving of all current heads of state. He is also the longest-serving ruler of Libya since Ali Pasha Al Karamanli, who ruled between (1754-1795).

An alleged plot by Britain's secret intelligence service to assassinate Colonel Gaddafi, when rebels attacked Gaddafi's motorcade near the city of Sirte in February 1996, was described as "pure fantasy" by former foreign secretary Robin Cook, although the FCO later admitted: "We have never denied that we knew of plots against Gaddafi."

Edgar Allan Poe's The Raven

The Raven by Edgar Allan Poe

First published in 1845

Once upon a midnight dreary, while I pondered weak and weary,
Over many a quaint and curious volume of forgotten lore,
While I nodded, nearly napping, suddenly there came a tapping,
As of some one gently rapping, rapping at my chamber door.
`'Tis some visitor,' I muttered, `tapping at my chamber door -
Only this, and nothing more.'

Ah, distinctly I remember it was in the bleak December,
And each separate dying ember wrought its ghost upon the floor.
Eagerly I wished the morrow; - vainly I had sought to borrow
From my books surcease of sorrow - sorrow for the lost Lenore -
For the rare and radiant maiden whom the angels named Lenore -
Nameless here for evermore.

And the silken sad uncertain rustling of each purple curtain
Thrilled me - filled me with fantastic terrors never felt before;
So that now, to still the beating of my heart, I stood repeating
`'Tis some visitor entreating entrance at my chamber door -
Some late visitor entreating entrance at my chamber door; -
This it is, and nothing more,'

Presently my soul grew stronger; hesitating then no longer,
`Sir,' said I, `or Madam, truly your forgiveness I implore;
But the fact is I was napping, and so gently you came rapping,
And so faintly you came tapping, tapping at my chamber door,
That I scarce was sure I heard you' - here I opened wide the door; -
Darkness there, and nothing more.

Deep into that darkness peering, long I stood there wondering, fearing,
Doubting, dreaming dreams no mortal ever dared to dream before
But the silence was unbroken, and the darkness gave no token,
And the only word there spoken was the whispered word, `Lenore!'
This I whispered, and an echo murmured back the word, `Lenore!'
Merely this and nothing more.

Back into the chamber turning, all my soul within me burning,
Soon again I heard a tapping somewhat louder than before.
`Surely,' said I, `surely that is something at my window lattice;
Let me see then, what thereat is, and this mystery explore -
Let my heart be still a moment and this mystery explore; -
'Tis the wind and nothing more!'

Open here I flung the shutter, when, with many a flirt and flutter,
In there stepped a stately raven of the saintly days of yore.
Not the least obeisance made he; not a minute stopped or stayed he;
But, with mien of lord or lady, perched above my chamber door -
Perched upon a bust of Pallas just above my chamber door -
Perched, and sat, and nothing more.

Then this ebony bird beguiling my sad fancy into smiling,
By the grave and stern decorum of the countenance it wore,
`Though thy crest be shorn and shaven, thou,' I said, `art sure no craven.
Ghastly grim and ancient raven wandering from the nightly shore -
Tell me what thy lordly name is on the Night's Plutonian shore!'
Quoth the raven, `Nevermore.'

Much I marvelled this ungainly fowl to hear discourse so plainly,
Though its answer little meaning - little relevancy bore;
For we cannot help agreeing that no living human being
Ever yet was blessed with seeing bird above his chamber door -
Bird or beast above the sculptured bust above his chamber door,
With such name as `Nevermore.'

But the raven, sitting lonely on the placid bust, spoke only,
That one word, as if his soul in that one word he did outpour.
Nothing further then he uttered - not a feather then he fluttered -
Till I scarcely more than muttered `Other friends have flown before -
On the morrow he will leave me, as my hopes have flown before.'
Then the bird said, `Nevermore.'

Startled at the stillness broken by reply so aptly spoken,
`Doubtless,' said I, `what it utters is its only stock and store,
Caught from some unhappy master whom unmerciful disaster
Followed fast and followed faster till his songs one burden bore -
Till the dirges of his hope that melancholy burden bore
Of "Never-nevermore."'

But the raven still beguiling all my sad soul into smiling,
Straight I wheeled a cushioned seat in front of bird and bust and door;
Then, upon the velvet sinking, I betook myself to linking
Fancy unto fancy, thinking what this ominous bird of yore -
What this grim, ungainly, ghastly, gaunt, and ominous bird of yore
Meant in croaking `Nevermore.'

This I sat engaged in guessing, but no syllable expressing
To the fowl whose fiery eyes now burned into my bosom's core;
This and more I sat divining, with my head at ease reclining
On the cushion's velvet lining that the lamp-light gloated o'er,
But whose velvet violet lining with the lamp-light gloating o'er,
She shall press, ah, nevermore!

Then, methought, the air grew denser, perfumed from an unseen censer
Swung by Seraphim whose foot-falls tinkled on the tufted floor.
`Wretch,' I cried, `thy God hath lent thee - by these angels he has sent thee
Respite - respite and nepenthe from thy memories of Lenore!
Quaff, oh quaff this kind nepenthe, and forget this lost Lenore!'
Quoth the raven, `Nevermore.'

`Prophet!' said I, `thing of evil! - prophet still, if bird or devil! -
Whether tempter sent, or whether tempest tossed thee here ashore,
Desolate yet all undaunted, on this desert land enchanted -
On this home by horror haunted - tell me truly, I implore -
Is there - is there balm in Gilead? - tell me - tell me, I implore!'
Quoth the raven, `Nevermore.'

`Prophet!' said I, `thing of evil! - prophet still, if bird or devil!
By that Heaven that bends above us - by that God we both adore -
Tell this soul with sorrow laden if, within the distant Aidenn,
It shall clasp a sainted maiden whom the angels named Lenore -
Clasp a rare and radiant maiden, whom the angels named Lenore?'
Quoth the raven, `Nevermore.'

`Be that word our sign of parting, bird or fiend!' I shrieked upstarting -
`Get thee back into the tempest and the Night's Plutonian shore!
Leave no black plume as a token of that lie thy soul hath spoken!
Leave my loneliness unbroken! - quit the bust above my door!
Take thy beak from out my heart, and take thy form from off my door!'
Quoth the raven, `Nevermore.'

And the raven, never flitting, still is sitting, still is sitting
On the pallid bust of Pallas just above my chamber door;
And his eyes have all the seeming of a demon's that is dreaming,
And the lamp-light o'er him streaming throws his shadow on the floor;
And my soul from out that shadow that lies floating on the floor
Shall be lifted - nevermore!

Edgar Allan Poe

Edgar Allan Poe (January 19, 1809 – October 7, 1849) was an American writer, poet, editor and literary critic, considered part of the American Romantic Movement. Best known for his tales of mystery and the macabre, Poe was one of the earliest American practitioners of the short story and is considered the inventor of the detective-fiction genre. He is further credited with contributing to the emerging genre of science fiction. He was the first well-known American writer to try to earn a living through writing alone, resulting in a financially difficult life and career.

He was born as Edgar Poe in Boston, Massachusetts; his parents died when he was young. Poe was taken in by John and Frances Allan, of Richmond, Virginia, but they never formally adopted him. After spending a short period at the University of Virginia and briefly attempting a military career, Poe parted ways with the Allans. Poe's publishing career began humbly, with an anonymous collection of poems, Tamerlane and Other Poems (1827), credited only to "a Bostonian".

Poe switched his focus to prose and spent the next several years working for literary journals and periodicals, becoming known for his own style of literary criticism. His work forced him to move between several cities, including Baltimore, Philadelphia, and New York City. In Baltimore in 1835, he married Virginia Clemm, his 13-year-old cousin. In January 1845, Poe published his poem "The Raven" to instant success. His wife died of tuberculosis two years later. He began planning to produce his own journal, The Penn (later renamed The Stylus), though he died before it could be produced. On October 7, 1849, at age 40, Poe died in Baltimore; the cause of his death is unknown and has been variously attributed to alcohol, brain congestion, cholera, drugs, heart disease, rabies, suicide, tuberculosis, and other agents.

Poe and his works influenced literature in the United States and around the world, as well as in specialized fields, such as cosmology and cryptography. Poe and his work appear throughout popular culture in literature, music, films, and television. A number of his homes are dedicated museums today.

Shattered Dreams of Ali Osman Taha

By Hashim Badr Eldin, London
Published in Sudanray
www.sudanray.com

In 2006, Ali Osman Taha, the second man in Sudan dictatorship hierarchy, in a fit of anger, flew to Turkey and remained there for weeks on a self-exile, but mediators managed to bury the hatchet and brought him home. In the last couple of years, illness took its toll on him, but it is not the determinant factor in his second infinite departure.

For the last decade, he was the brain behind the regime; he ruled by proxy and everybody was at his disposal. However, like all “Islam-politic-users,” his ambition has no boundaries, he came from so little and become larger than life, but it’s all over now, so the story goes.

In most cultures, people who have ambitions and lack the means to realize them, look for the right people to uplift them; individuals who are willing to permit them to climb on their shoulders, like creeping plants on trees, for a quid pro quo.

Early in his life, he approached Dr. Hassan Turabi, a man who knows how to cease the moment and capture the spotlight; a lecturer with a record of academic brilliance, a lawyer turned politician and married into a pedigree of prestige and power.

Turabi needed young followers who would idolize him. Ali was a law student and needed a mentor and a role model. The needs were mutual. So he became his disciple. A loyal disciple, or so Turabi thought.

He learned from Turabi the Muslim brotherhood’s ways (the Nixon and Kissinger’s doctrine): that politics is open season (everything is permissible), the ends justify the means, and that truthfulness is foolishness and lying is a more effective strategy.

In the beginning, Ali was a liaison between Turabi and Bashir, Sudan cut-throat dictator. The trio that wreaked havoc across the globe. Their evil span from the US to Afghanistan, Algeria, Tunisia, the Philippines, Iraq, Kuwait, Somalia, Eritrea, Ethiopia, Chad, Kenya, Egypt and Uganda. Not to mention the internal mayhem they inflicted upon their own people from the South to the Nuba Mountains, the Blue Nile and their brutal suppression of army mutinies and civil disobedience and eventually, their masterpiece of atrocity - Darfur (some observers believe Turabi is on the rebels’ side).

The trio brings to mind Clint Eastwood classic movie “the Good, the Bad, and the Ugly”. Likewise, Ali, Turabi, and Bashir movie would be called “the Bad, the Ugly, and the Gruesome.”

Like his mentor, Ali is a professional actor; when the camera rolls, or when he meets foreign dignitaries it’s show time: he turns into a lean and soft-spoken man; ostentatious and meticulous in his diction; his facial features and all appearance reveal nothing of the brutal man he really is.

His arrogance is one of a kind, surpasses, by far, that of his mentor and his peers in the ruling elite and puts him in a class by himself. In a country with profound Sufi traditions, where humility is second nature—not a virtue—a cynic would wonder what personal deformity begets such an attitude.

A master of shenanigans, he knows how to lure his quarry into a minefield. In the 90s, he managed to get rid of the junta that made the June 30, 1989 coup that brought the National Islamic Front to power. Some ended up in graves; two are still in office but marginalized and powerless, and the rest (who are grateful to be alive) turned to raise their children and make a living.

His astounding feat was the ouster of his guru Dr. Turabi in 1999 that left the man going bananas. For Turabi it was the shock of his life, not only he fell from grace, but also he was betrayed by his own adopted son and his lucrative investment.

This time things are different, Bashir is paranoid and behaving like a wounded beast. He views Ali as a Trojan horse who would creep at midnight and open the castle gate. Therefore, Bashir brought in an old rival to Ali, Ghazi Attabani, and transferred all the vice president’s powers to him.

(Bashir jettisoned Attabani in September 2003 at the behest of Ali, so Ali could take charge of the negotiations with the SPLM in Kenya and secure his position as vice president in the interim period).

For Ali, calling the shots from behind the scene was just a stage on his endless ascension; it is inevitable that he craves for the driver seat. But there was a loop hole in his plan. He didn’t take the initiative and move for the kill. He waited for events to unfold by themselves and relied solely on pressures from the International Community and nothing of his own.

The international players who oversee the situation in Sudan had overestimated Ali’s power inside the security apparatus and the armed forces. They had anticipated him to take advantage of the shock that ensued by the mere announcement of Bashir’s arrest warrant by the International Criminal Court for crimes against humanity and make his move—put the nook around Bashir’s neck and ship him to Saudi Arabia where he would spend the rest of his life like Eddie Amin. Now the prey is startled and everything is in chaos.

Prior to his departure, Ali was threatened and verbally abused by Bashir’s clansmen in the security apparatus; they even hacked some Sudanese Internet websites and wrote obscenities about him. On the other hand, Salah Ghush, Chief of the security apparatus, and the other generals on whom he relied in the past have all abandoned him and moved to Bashir’s side. He was left alone in a hostile atmosphere.

On Monday June 15, 2009, Khartoum newspapers published a brief statement from the so-called president’s press office saying that Ali Osman Taha would go on vacation inside Sudan with his family, which would extend to a trip to Saudi Arabia for “omrra.”

A couple of days later, Ali Osman and his family boarded a jet on a trip to Saudi Arabia to do “omrra” (a religious ceremony that takes about an hour; but it has taken over a month now).

It’s rumored that he flew to Turkey and back to Saudi Arabia. He continues to meet foreign diplomats who are anxious about the situation in Sudan and the gloomy prospect of its disintegration. He’s demoralized but still breathing. In the past his drive was a lust for power, but now it is his bruised ego.

Bashir support for Chadian rebels resulted in a series of intrusions by Chad military, in hunt for rebels, inside Sudanese territory and culminated in last week sortie by Chad air force deep inside Darfur and exposed Bashir as a weak an indecisive general whose aggression is directed only towards his own people.

Khartoum military is in the spotlight; like all Middle Eastern militaries, it has evolved into an army equipped and trained to consolidate tyranny and defend a dictator against his own citizens. With Bashir embattled and on the robes, some officer might dare to take the initiative. There hangs the hope of Turabi and many Islam-politic-users’, but Ali has lost hope, so the story goes.

Victims in Jonglei

Published today in Ajras Alhurriya daily newspaper.

Bloody day in Sudan’s Jonglei, U.N. chief condemns violence

By Philip Thon Aleu

August 4, 2009 (BOR TOWN) — An unknown number of armed tribesmen from the Murle ethnic group raided a Lou Nuer village near Okobo country in Jonglei state over the weekend killing over 180 people and injuring some 31 others.


A Murle gunman moves with his rifle in a village. (Photo Source: Bor Globe)

The dawn raid on Lou territory comes months after bloody fighting broke out last February between the two tribes when some 753 people (300 Lou Nuer and 453 Murle) were killed in a revenge assault carried by the Lou Nuer against the Murle.

Again in April, Murle attacked Akobo killing over 300 people.

Akobo Commissioner Goi Jooyul Yol, appearing visibly shaken at a press conference in Bor Town on Monday morning, detailed that 100 women, 50 children and 11 SPLA soldiers are among the dead in Akobo.

"Of the 29 wounded, 3 are SPLA and the rest are civilians," he said.

"Dozens of children and women are still missing and most are believed to be either killed or abducted – by the attackers," he said adding that a "thorough" search by local authorities is underway, he added.

This evening, the commissioner revised his figures saying that the death toll has reached 185 with some 31 people injured. He further said that reports are still arriving.

Clashes between Murle and Nuer ethnic groups have become recurring this year. The UN mission in Sudan (UNMIS) last May deployed 120 military personnel in Akobo and Pibor to help Jonglei authorities to stabilize the situation.

The UN forces pulled out last week "failing short to making meaningful impact" there, the County leader said. SPLA has too, failed to control the situation.

Akobo Commissioner Jooyul called for the "immediate disarmament" of all communities in Jonglei "and particularly the Murle before next dry season in order to save lives."

"The people of Akobo are trying to survive by all means," the commissioner said. He complained that the food airlifted to Akobo by UN is insufficient and a fight for living in that "hostile environment" proved dangerous, the commissioner added.

The County leader calls for humanitarian assistance "without hindrance as the only viable solution to Akobo misery."

Earlier this year following the February and April violence outbreaks, some South Sudan officials claimed that the ruling National Congress Party (NCP) is behind the increasing of tribal fighting. Some have also accused the Sudan Armed Forces (SAF) of supplying weapons to the heavily armed Murle.

However, UNMIS Coordinator for Southern Sudan, David Gressly, last July stressed that cattle rustling, that he described as "traditional activity" in southern Sudan, could cause similar kinds of violence.

He also said the increasing violence in the region can be explained by the "lack of institutions of police, of courts, prisons, etc. and of the rule of law." "It is also due to a lack of infrastructure" he further added.

SHOOTING IN BOR TOWN

Akobo’s incident collided with Bor Town shooting where a mother was killed and her surviving 2 children abducted. In addition, two other children were abducted on Monday in Hai Machuor, a Bor town suburb near John Garang Institute where Sunday’s raiding occurred.

The attackers, for both cases, are believed to one of the groups of Murle tribesmen that attacked Lony village on July 29 and reportedly killing a couple and abducting a child.

UN CONDEMNATION

In New York the UN Secretary-General, Ban Ki-Moon said noting "with extreme concern" the 2 August attack in Akobo, and condemned the reported killing of civilian and SPLA soldiers.

Further, he has directed the UNMIS to "extend all possible assistance to those affected by this heinous act and work with local authorities to restore calm."

The Secretary General called upon the Government of Southern Sudan to bring to justice those responsible for these events and take the necessary measures to protect civilians across Southern Sudan.

(ST)

Mr. No in (Yes Era)

The Trail of (Pants) adjourned

Ms. Lubna Trail adjourned to the 7th of September to check (the validity of Lubna's Personal ID Card !) & Sudanese Riot Police attacked women whom Silently Protest and Demonstrate against Lubna's Trail and Sudanese Public Order Law !!! Join to the cuase of Lubna and support women and human rights, join to the cause in Facebook: http://apps.facebook.com/causes/314483/25264572?m=c4bb4f3c And be a fan of Lubna .............. From Sudan Tribune: August 4, 2009 (KHARTOUM) — A Sudanese court today postponed the trial of a female journalist accused of wearing “indecent” clothes as police beat women protesting in her support. Lubna Hussein, a journalist and at the time a public information officer at the UN Mission in Sudan (UNMIS), was arrested last month by Public Order Police (POP) with more than half a dozen girls and were charged with violating dress code under Article 152 of Sudanese law. The crime is punishable with up to 40 lashes and a fine of 250 Sudanese pounds ($100). Hussein, unlike most of the other girls, refused to admit the charge and asked to go to trial. However, her situation was complicated with the immunity she possesses being a UNMIS employee. The journalists said she waived her immunity rights and resigned from the UN. The judge today adjourned the session so that the court can receive opinion of the Sudanese foreign ministry on the whether her resignation automatically revokes her immunity at the date the incident happened. One of the defense lawyers Jalal al-Sayed argued before the court that she enjoyed immunity incident to her UN employment status, against Hussein’s wishes. Hussein emerged from the courtroom flashing the victory sign expressing dissatisfaction that the case was temporarily put on hold. “The court should not have delayed the trial,” she told journalists. “I am not afraid of flogging. ... It’s about changing the law,” Hussein told The Associated Press (AP). Hussein further said she would take the issue all the way to Sudan’s constitutional court if necessary, but that if the court rules against her and orders the flogging, she’s ready "to receive (even) 40,000 lashes" if that what it takes to abolish the law. The journalist was received by a crowd of around a 100 women, many wearing trousers, including prominent figures such as Rabah Al-Sadiq Al-Mahdi, daughter of former Sudanese prime minister, who waited outside the courtroom holding signs protesting the ‘indecency’ law provisions. But Sudanese police fired tear gas and beat the protestors as well as some of Hussein’s female lawyers including Manal Awad Khogali. The Sudanese media, subject to state censorship, are not covering the case of Hussein. However, today Sudan official news agency (SUNA) reported today on a forum held to discuss “public appearance” that discussed provocative dressing by women in a subtle reference to Hussein’s case. Rabie Abdel-Attie, a leading figure at the ruling National Congress Party (NCP) government, called the uproar over the case politically motivated and said only the constitutional court can decide to repeal the law. “There is no need for all that noise. There are clearly political motivations behind this thrust,” he said. The Sudan People Liberation Movement (SPLM) deputy Secretary General Yasir Arman accused POP of “taking advantage of the women they arrest and bargain with them for their honor and exploit their fear from their families. The POP has reportedly filed a police complaint and began proceedings to lift the immunity of Arman in order to try him before the court in light of his comments. U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon said he was "deeply concerned" about Hussein’s case and that flogging is a violation of international human rights standards. The case threatens to become an embarassment for Sudan amid growing international attention. An observor told Sudan Tribune from Khartoum that he expects the court to dismiss the charges on grounds of immunity as a "face saving" alternative to the government. (ST)

Police attack women protest in Khartoum

Democracy in Sudan

Published today in Ajras Alhurriya daily newspaper.

Che Nayer Guevara

To die under the flag of Vietnam, of Venezuela, of Guatemala, of Laos, of Guinea, of Colombia, of Bolivia, of Brazil-to name only a few scenes of today's armed struggle-would be equally glorious and desirable for an American, an Asian, an African, even a European.
Each spilt drop of blood, in any country under whose flag one has not been born, is an experience passed on to those who survive, to be added later to the liberation struggle of his own country. And each nation liberated is a phase won in the battle for the liberation of one's own country.
There are no boundaries in this struggle to the death. We cannot be indifferent to what happens anywhere in the world, for a victory by any country over imperialism is our victory; just as any country's defeat is a defeat for all of us.
Each time a country is freed, we say, it is a defeat for the world imperialist system, but we must agree that real liberation or breaking away from the imperialist system is not achieved by the mere act of proclaiming independence or winning an armed victory in a revolution. Freedom is achieved when imperialist economic domination over a people is brought to an end.
Arms cannot be regarded as merchandise in our world. They should be delivered to the peoples asking for them for use against the common enemy without any charge at all, and in quantities determined by the need and their availability.

Internationalism by Ernesto Che Guevara

Elections in Sudan

Published in Ajras Alhurriya, 2-8-2009.

John Garang (1945 - 2005)

Dr John Garang de Mabior (June 23, 1945 – July 30, 2005) was the First Vice President of Sudan and former leader of the rebel Sudan People's Liberation Army.

A member of the Dinka ethnic group, Garang was born into a poor family in Wanglei village in Bor, Sudan, in the upper Nile region of Sudan (currently Jonglei State). An orphan by the age of ten, he had his fees for school paid by a relative, going to schools in Wau and then Rumbek. In 1962 he joined the first Sudanese civil war, but because he was so young, the leaders encouraged him and others his age to seek an education. Because of the ongoing fighting, Garang was forced to attend his secondary education in Tanzania. After winning a scholarship, he went on to earn a B.A. in economics in 1969 from Grinnell College in Iowa, USA. He was known there for his bookishness. He was offered another scholarship to pursue graduate studies at the University of California, Berkeley, but chose to return to Tanzania and study East African agricultural economics as a Thomas J. Watson Fellow at the University of Dar es Salaam (UDS). At UDS, he was a member of the University Students' African Revolutionary Front. However, Garang soon decided to return to Sudan and join the rebels.[citation needed] There is much erroneous reporting that Garang met and befriended Yoweri Museveni, future president of Uganda, at this time; while both Garang and Museveni were students at UDS in the 1960s, they did not attend at the same time.

The civil war ended with the Addis Ababa agreement of 1972 and Garang, like many rebels, was absorbed into the Sudanese military. For eleven years, he was a career soldier and rose from the rank of captain to colonel after taking the Infantry Officers Advanced Course at Fort Benning, Georgia. During this period he took four years academic leave and received a master's degree in agricultural economics and a Ph.D. in economics at Iowa State University, after writing a thesis on the agricultural development of Southern Sudan. By 1983, Col. Garang was serving as senior instructor in the military academy in Wadi Sayedna 21 km from the centre of ( Omdurman)where he instructed the cadiets for more than 4 years and later he nominated to serve in the military researches department in the Army HQ in khartoum.

In 1983, Garang went to Bor, obstensibly to mediate with about 500 southern government soldiers in battalion 105 who were resisting being rotated to posts in the north. However, Garang was already part of a conspiracy among some officers in the Southern Command arranging for the defection of battalion 105 to the anti-government rebels. When the government attacked Bor in May and the battalion pulled out, Garang went by an alternate route to join them in the rebel stronghold in Ethiopia. By the end of July, Garang had brought over 3000 rebel soldiers under his control through the newly-created Sudan People's Liberation Army/Movement (SPLA/M), which was opposed to military rule and Islamic dominance of the country, and encouraged other army garrisons to mutiny against the Islamic law imposed on the country by the government. This action marked the commonly agreed upon beginning of the Second Sudanese Civil War, which resulted in one and half million deaths over twenty years of conflict. Although Garang was Christian and most of southern Sudan is non-Muslim (mostly animist), he did not initially focus on the religious aspects of the war.

The SPLA gained the backing of Libya, Uganda and Ethiopia. Garang and his army controlled a large part of the southern regions of the country, named New Sudan. He claimed his troops' courage comes from "the conviction that we are fighting a just cause. That is something North Sudan and its people don't have." Critics suggested financial motivations to his rebellion, noting that much of Sudan's oil wealth lies in the south of the country.

Garang refused to participate in the 1985 interim government or 1986 elections, remaining a rebel leader. However, the SPLA and government signed a peace agreement on 9 January 2005 in Nairobi, Kenya. On 9 July 2005, he was sworn in as vice-president, the second most powerful person in the country, following a ceremony in which he and President Omar al-Bashir signed a power-sharing constitution. He also became the administrative head of a southern Sudan with limited autonomy for the six years before a scheduled referendum of possible secession. No Christian or southerner had ever held such a high government post. Commenting after the ceremony, Garang stated, "I congratulate the Sudanese people, this is not my peace or the peace of al-Bashir, it is the peace of the Sudanese people."

The United States State Department argued that Garang's presence in the government would have helped solve the Darfur conflict in western Sudan, but others consider these claims "excessively optimistic".

In late July 2005, Garang died after the Ugandan presidential Mi-172 helicopter he was flying in crashed. He had been returning from a meeting in Rwakitura with long-time ally President Yoweri Museveni of Uganda. Sudanese state television initially reported that Garang's craft had landed safely, but Abdel Basset Sabdarat, the country's Information Minister, went on TV hours later to deny the report. Soon afterwards, a statement released by the office of Sudanese President Omar el-Bashir confirmed that a Ugandan presidential helicopter crashed into "a mountain range in southern Sudan because of poor visibility and this resulted in the death of Dr. John Garang DeMabior, six of his colleagues and seven Ugandan crew members." body was flown to New Site, a southern Sudanese settlement near the scene of the crash, where former rebel fighters and civilian supporters gathered to pay their respects to Garang. Garang's funeral took place on August 3 in Juba. His widow Rebecca Nyandeng De Mabior promised to continue his work stating "In our culture we say, if you kill the lion, you see what the lioness will do."

Menekse Cam

Menekse Cam my sister from Turkey.

DZA Tha Dissenter - Abadamak

كرماة الحدق، أسهمنا اللغوية تصيب عين الحقيقة
إصابات دقيقة
لعب بالكلمات، تشبيهات، واستعارات بليغة
تاركا دمى الراب التجاري في بحور شعري غريقة
هم وجواهرهم الرقيقة
في هوة سحيقة
أنا والملثم وجد كل منا طريقه الموعود
مثل جلجامش، أجوب الأرض بحثا عن الخلود
ثلثا إله، أقوى من على الوجود
نظرة بعيني فقط تزرع الرعب في أعتى الأسود
رافعا قبضتي عاليا كالفهود السود
لا هوفر ولا غيره سيمنعني من أن أسود الآن
وإن مت يوما فتأكد أني سأعود
قد لا يكون هذا في هيئة بشرية
ولا يهمني مادمت سأحتفظ بهذه الشهية
وهذه الرغبة في تدمير الفاشية
بكلمات أخرى، سأموت وأحيا لأشهد نهاية الشركاتية

scratched sample: vinnie paz
"I rap in arabic, so my message is just immaculate"

اتخذت الراب سلاحا ضد بناة السدود
وتماما كإبليس، أمام بشر أرفض السجود
لايعني هذا أني من رحمة ربي مطرود
لكن ظني وليس كله بإثم
أني ممن يحكمون بإسمه مرفوض
سمني أركماني، سأقف ضد الآلهة أنا الفاني
ضد كبير الكهنة، وأعوانه
سأدمرهم دون تواني
ولن تشرق للثيوقراطية شمس في زماني
أباداماك الى جنبي، دماك ستراق ان انت فكرت سلبي
روحي عقلي أم قلبي
وان تعترض دربي
فواقي الرصاص لن يفيدك الآن
فماأبصقه يحول كل مايلمسه إلى دخان
تحيط بي هالة من الأشعة لاتبدو للعيان
حارقة كل مايقترب مني، إنس كان أم جان
قوة بيان، كـ"ليس في الإمكان أبدع مما كان"
أي أني قد وصلت ذروة الثروة بالكلمات
ما يخرج من فكي ثورة، تغير ما فات وتعد لما هو آت
الكلام مؤقت لكن الفعل أبدي وموكد
بهذا الشعر المعقد، سأحرق سذاجتك المقدسة فتفقد

La Gioconda

Al Guerco Y Diamante Negro

My good amigo from Mexico and his cute dog Diamante Negro or Black Diamond!

Alexandru D. Xenopol

Alexandru Dimitrie Xenopol (March 23, 1847 – February 27, 1920) was a Romanian scholar, economist, philosopher, historian, professor, sociologist, and author. Among his many major accomplishments, he is credited with being the Romanian historian credited with authoring the first major synthesis of the history of the Romanian people.

Born in Iaşi, where he graduated high school, he went on to Vienna in 1870 to study law and then to Berlin, where he studied philosophy. In 1868, he made his debut in Convorbiri Literare with a series of studies on Romanian traditions and on Romanian institutions.

Cheat !

"Men cheat for the same reason that dogs lick their balls... because they can.”
Kim Cattrall

Michael Jackson is alive !

Capitalism !